The looming legal battles over the central issues in BP’s massive and presently unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have not yet begun to take shape. But Louisiana’s U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman apparently has already figured out — at least for himself — that the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on new deep-water drilling makes no sense. In his premature ruling on Tuesday striking down the temporary ban, he summarily determined that there is no link between the spill and its consequences and the “immense scope of the moratorium.”
Judge Feldman’s 22-page ruling, to be sure, is erudite, well annotated in case law, and encompassing in the breadth of the economic scope of the moratorium. But despite his findings, he does not address the broad core issue of safe operations on deep-water drilling rigs.
He acknowledged that agencies under the Department of Interior have authority over safety and public resource issues related to drilling and production in the Gulf. But his ruling seems far more concerned with the broad economic impact of the moratorium in his home region than with the efficacy of a moratorium on drilling while the administration studies the newly documented issues of environmental security and blow-out preventer reliability in the Gulf, and the regulatory infrastructure necessary to assure a spill-free industry.
Judge Feldman, for example, spent considerable time commenting on the economic and jobs values of the 3,600 “structures” (wells and drilling rigs) in the Gulf that supply 31 percent of domestic oil production and 11 percent of domestic marketed natural gas. These are indeed noteworthy and immense. But he seemed oblivious to the need to learn and apply the lessons of the BP blow-out to the 64 percent of drilling leases in the Gulf that are in water over 1,000 feet deep.
In fact, he said he was “unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings (in the moratorium memorandum) and the immense scope of the moratorium,” which he said is elemental to the Gulf’s economy and employees thousands of people directly and affects far greater numbers indirectly.