Click here to view the story on TheHill.com
 

Lift the ban, Mr. President (Rep. Doug Lamborn)

This week a federal judge backed up what I, and many others, have been saying about the Obama Moratorium on deepwater drilling — it was a knee-jerk reaction not based on sound science. In his 22-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman said that the Obama administration failed to provide adequate reasoning for the deepwater drilling moratorium. Feldman said the administration seems to assume that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger.

"An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country," Feldman wrote. He went on to say it did not appear that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar considered alternatives to a moratorium.

Nor does it appear that the secretary considered the impact this moratorium would have on the nation's economy and the hard-working families of the Gulf region. Offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico provides 30 percent of U.S. oil production. The oil-and-gas industry is the second largest source of revenue to the federal government at $13 billion annually and employs nearly 9.2 million people nationally and around 200,000 individuals in the Gulf of Mexico alone. We must not turn a disastrous environmental situation into an even greater economic disaster. Unfortunately, within hours of the federal court ruling, Secretary Salazar said he planned to reinstate a modified ban.

This administration has misled the public on the reasons for the ban. In congressional testimony earlier this month, Secretary Salazar referred to a "peer-reviewed" Department of Interior report to justify imposing the ban. However, engineering experts who had been commissioned by the Obama administration to review that report have charged that the proposed ban was added to the report after they reviewed it. They denounced the unauthorized findings of that report. Now the administration is intent on circumventing the judge's ruling.The only recourse appears to be an act of Congress. That is why I have co-sponsored H.R. 5519, introduced by Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), to lift President Obama's ban on deepwater drilling. It would require the Department of the Interior (DOI) to move forward with safe offshore oil-and-gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Congressman Doug Lamborn is ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources.