Another Obama Sell Out to the Kochs and Big Oil

The hits keep right on coming from an Administration that makes Boss Tweed and Warren Harding look like Mother Theresa.

Hunt for oil and gas to begin off East Coast

By Laura Barron-Lopez, The Hill

07/18/14 01:47 PM EDT

The Obama administration opened up the Atlantic to oil and gas exploration for the first time in nearly four decades on Friday.

The announcement from Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) allows the use of air guns and sonic sensors to search off of the East Coast.

It is a major step toward allowing future drilling in the Atlantic, which has remained off-limits for over 30 years.

While the decision doesn’t guarantee that lease sales for drilling in Atlantic waters will be included in the Interior Department’s five-year plan for 2017-2022, it is a step in that direction.

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“For more than 30 years, the Atlantic coast has been off limits to offshore drilling. Today, our government appears to be folding to the pressure of Big Oil and its big money,” said OCEANA spokeswoman Claire Douglass.

Green groups say the tests could kill thousands of marine mammals, injuring dolphins and endangered whales.

The Natural Resources Defense Council called seismic testing the “gateway drug to offshore drilling.”

Choosing Big Oil over whales: Obama opens East Coast for offshore exploration

Lindsay Abrams, Salon

Friday, Jul 18, 2014 03:09 PM EST

Federal waters off the East Coast are officially open for oil exploration, the Obama administration announced Friday, meaning energy companies can begin surveying the Eastern Seaboard, from the coast of Delaware down to Florida, in preparation for potential drilling.

The most immediate concerns, to environmentalists, are the air guns and sonic sensors used to find the oil, which can harm endangered whales and other marine life, like fish and sea turtles. In its environmental impact study conducted ahead of the approval, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimated that more than 138,000 sea creatures could potentially be harmed by the activity, including nine north Atlantic right whales. Only 500 of the whales remain worldwide.

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And where there’s oil exploration, there usually ends up being oil drilling, to which coastal states, concerned about fisheries, tourism and the potential for spills, are largely opposed. Michael Jasny, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project, told Fuel Fix that seismic exploration is “a gateway drug to offshore drilling.” Fuel Fix has more on how the fossil fuel industry is exerting its influence:

Friday’s move also helps pave the way for possible drilling off the East Coast in the 2020s, by giving the industry a new chance to prove the oil and gas potential of the area right as the Obama administration is assembling a five-year plan for selling offshore energy leases beginning in late 2017.

Remember, this is not “Energy Independence” oil (though that would be bad enough in terms of climate change), this is “Export Oil” that Big Carbon sells overseas to line the pockets of their Executive Oligarchs.