Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

Obama put Ken 'Cozy-With-Big-Oil' Salazar in as his Secretary of the Interior. Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone. An all time high.

http://www­.rollingst­one.com/po­litics/new­s/17390/11­1965?RS_sh­ow_page=0



Salazar helped open up the Gulf for drilling, including the lease bloc that BP drilled, WHEN HE WAS A SENATOR. He's always been for drilling and Obama & Salazar went full speed ahead as soon as they got in office and then they pushed for more offshore drilling.



Do you know what Ken Salazar's record was as a US Senator prior to becoming Obama's Secretary of the Interior?



As a senator, Salazar voted to end protections that limit offshore oil drilling in Florida's Gulf Coast. http://www­.lcv.org/i­mages/clie­nt/pdfs/LC­V_2006_Sco­recard_fin­al.pdf



He also voted against increasing fuel-efficiency standards (CAFE) for cars and trucks, a vote that the League of Conservation Voters notes is anti-environment. In the same year, Salazar voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major petroleum companies.



http://www­.lcv.org/i­mages/clie­nt/pdfs/LC­V_Scorecar­d_05_FINAL­_lores.pdf



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Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

Obama doesn't get a pass on preventing BP's destroying the Gulf of Mexico, just as Bush didn't get a pass on preventing 9/11.



Obama let BP happen.



The problems with MMS and the potential for a disaster were long known. Obama came into office after the MMS report came out, and he appointed Ken Salazar, a dude very cozy with Big Oil.



Obama & Salazar didn‘t do anything to change the problems that both knew about when they came into office. When they came into office, they already knew that the agency had experienced a s3x & drug scandal. They knew the agency had such a close relationship with Big Oil that the agency was holding golf & ski junkets paid for by Big Oil in exotic places around the world. They knew the agency, put together by Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt in 1982, was dysfunctional. Nothing has changed since Watt created it, saying, "I‘m going to form this agency with my buddies from Wyoming."



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Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

The excuse which the court condemned as "misleading" is exactly the one Obama and his aides have been repeatedly making for why they issued exemptions to BP: namely that, as the President put it, "under current law, the Interior Department has only 30 days to review an exploration plan submitted by an oil company. That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review." As a result, the court found that MMS's approval of Shell's drilling plan (including the exemptions it issued) violated NEPA, and thus invalidated the approval and ordered MMS to re-review the proposal in compliance with the law. That decision was issued in November, 2008 -- before the Obama administration even began -- so the notion that Obama Interior officials believed they only had 30 days to conduct a review, and that it therefore was forced to issue exemptions to BP, lacks credibility, to put that mildly.
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Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

==The agency may be correct that it's difficult for an agency to conduct a full EIS in only thirty days, but its argument that OCSLA precludes such a result is unconvincing. There is flexibility built into the regulatory scheme so that the agency can perform its full duties under NEPA. The thirty-day clock begins to run only when an exploration plan is deemed complete. 30 C.F.R. § 250.233(a). If the agency is able to identify gaps before that point, then it can request that information be added before the proposal is finalized. See 30 C.F.R. § 250.231(b). Additionally, at the end of the thirty-day review period, the agency may opt to require modifications to an EP if there are concerns that it does not comport with environmental standards. 30 C.F.R. § 250.233(b). These options give the agency additional time to consider a plan & compile an environmental impact statement, if necessary. To say simply that the agency only has thirty days to complete a full EIS is misleading.==



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Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

The excuse the BushAdministration gave for failing to conduct that review is the same one Obama gave in his press conference. As the court put it: "MMS argues that the strict timelines in OCSLA indicate that an EIS isn't a feasible option at the exploration stage. The agency only has thirty days to approve or disapprove of an exploration plan" & officials "argue that thirty days is not enough time to generate a full EIS." The court categorically rejected that excuse:



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Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

Even if that 3o-day excuse were true, it reflects very poorly on the administration. But as The Washington Post, in a good piece of reporting, noted on Tuesday: that excuse is false. An appellate court in 2008 rejected the 30-day interpretation now being asserted by Obama officials everywhere. That 9th Circuit ruling, in the case of Alaska Wilderness League, et al. v. Kempthorne, is really quite instructive to read, both because it illustrates how false is the excuse of Obama officials and, more generally, because of what it reveals about how completely co-opted MMS regulators are by the oil industry.



In that case, numerous environmental groups sued in order to challenge the Bush Interior Department's approval of a Shell Oil plan to drill multiple offshore exploratory oil wells over a three-year period in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. This is what happens frequently: environmental groups have to sue in order to prevent the Interior Department and the oil industry from working jointly to circumvent Congressional regulations for drilling projects. Just as was true for the BP Deepwater Horizon project, MMS in the Shell case had issued an exemption from the legal requirement that an environmental impact study be conducted before the drilling project could be approved, notwithstanding numerous, serious concerns raised even by Bush Interior Department officials about the impact of the Shell project.



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Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

That excuse made very little sense to me as soon as I heard it. It seems highly unlikely that Congress -- which is not exactly notorious for imposing excessively rigorous regulations on the oil industry -- would enact a statutory requirement which, self-evidently, would be too rigorous to meet. But even if that were true -- even if Congress really did impose an impossible-to-meet 30-day period for conducting environmental reviews -- why didn't the Obama adminstration, whose party controls the Congress, ever ask that the law be amended to provide 6o or 90 days, or however much time is needed to complete the review? Or why didn't Interior officials tell the oil industry that they would refuse to issue these permits until the industry had their lobbyists instruct Congress to change the law to allow for a more reasonable timeframe? Instead, faced with a supposedly impossible-to-meet statutory requirement of conducting environmental reviews, the Interior Department just threw its hands up and circumvented the spirt of the law by oh-so-reluctantly and helplessly handing out exemptions like candy to any oil company that asked? Is that at all believable?



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