The Obama administration has needlessly imposed a deep-water drilling ban in the Gulf of Mexico. And now it is defending the moratorium by saying a fund will be set up to help the thousands of employees who are forced out of work as a result.
British Petroleum, one of whose deep-water rigs exploded in April, causing an oil spill, is setting up the multimillion-dollar fund for affected rig workers.
That’s well and good, but it does not seem to occur to the administration that the workers want a weekly paycheck from holding down a steady job more than they want a handout while they are idled by an overreaching moratorium on drilling.
The Obama administration imposed the ban in June, but a federal judge struck it down. The administration then issued a new ban that was hardly different from the first, trying to get around the court’s ruling. The ban is blocking the approval of new permits for deep-water projects and has halted drilling at dozens of exploratory wells.
The government has admitted that more than 9,000 workers will be forced out of their jobs directly by the drilling ban, and 14,000 more jobs will be affected indirectly.
The BP spill was obviously serious, and sensible review and adjustment of policies and oversight on deep-water drilling are appropriate. But the overwhelming majority of the thousands of oil rigs in the Gulf are operating safely, while supplying many thousands of jobs and part of the energy our nation needs to keep moving. Major spills are, fortunately, extremely rare.
Particularly in a time when our country already has unemployment of almost 10 percent, it makes no sense to impose such a needlessly broad ban on Gulf drilling.