WASHINGTON (AP) — Sources say the Trump administration is moving to vastly expand offshore drilling from the Atlantic to the Arctic oceans, including opening up federal waters off the coast of California for the first time in more than three decades.
The new five-year drilling plan could also open new areas of oil and gas exploration off the East Coast in places from Georgia to Maine, where drilling has been blocked for decades.
The Interior Department is set to announce the plan Thursday. Two sources described the plan on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it before its release.
It’s the most expansive offshore drilling proposal in decades and comes in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order in April encouraging more drilling rights in federal waters.
The mantra of the EPA and Dept of Interior under Trump continues to be:
“Screw the environment, full speed ahead!”
Clean-up crews should gather up all of the sludge from the next inevitable spill and dump it on the lawns of Mar-a-Lago.
Hopefully, energy economics will render this move meaningless.
Hmm. Drilling off California, the Arctic, East coast from Georgia to Maine.
I can’t imagine why Florida would be left out of these plans.
P.S. Can this administration get any worse? Just wait 24 hours.
That’s my hope too. Oil economics are weird tho. The tax code changes only made them weirder.
Excerpt:
By now, it’s no secret that the sweeping tax reform package approved by Congress last week includes a bunch of provisions that help the oil and gas industry. As the Washington Post reported, cutting the corporate income tax rate alone will likely add $1 billion to the profits of U.S. oil and gas exploration and production firms. Oil refining companies stand to do even better, according to one analyst who estimated that those companies’ earnings per share will increase by an average of 23 percent. The tax bill also opens up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the largest wildlife refuge in America.
But there’s also something to be said about what the tax bill didn’t change: the billions of dollars in permanent, century-old tax subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. According to Oil Change International, the U.S. federal government provides a combined $14.7 billion in various annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, the vast majority of which remained untouched in the tax bill. And while the majority of those subsidies favor the oil and gas industry, 20 percent go toward incentivizing coal consumption and production. What’s more, the effective tax rate for coal—which is less than 1 percent—stays the same. In other words, the government still sacrifices billions in revenue every year to prop up coal, an industry that most energy analysts agree is dying.
And the first lawsuits will be filed in 5 . .4 . .3 . .2 . .