In New Orleans, U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman overturned the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling projects (PDF of decision here). In the process, he slapped down Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s justifications for imposing the ban:
After reviewing the Secretary?s Report, the Moratorium Memorandum, and the Notice to Lessees, the Court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium. The Report, invoked by the Secretary, describes the offshore oil industry in the Gulf and offers many compelling recommendations to improve safety. But it offers no time line for implementation, though many of the proposed changes are represented to be implemented immediately. The Report patently lacks any analysis of the asserted fear of threat of
irreparable injury or safety hazards posed by the thirty-three
permitted rigs also reached by the moratorium. It is incident-specific and driven: Deepwater Horizon and BP only. None others.
In Feldman’s words, the moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious.”
It’s not the first time Salazar has been a bit, er, slippery about energy drilling. When he was a U.S. senator in Colorado, he (along with two Democratic House members from Colorado, Mark Udall and Salazar’s brother John) erected a host of procedural barriers to natural gas drilling in one of the richest, mostly untapped reservoirs of fossil fuels in the West: the Roan Plateau.
Federal energy and environmental officials spent more than seven years developing the most comprehensive drilling plan in the nation’s history, and the Salazars and Udall did all they could to stop it. (See editorial coverage I was behind here and here.)
Even after taking over at Interior, Salazar reversed a host of terrestrial energy production plans approved by the Bush White House, for reasons a lot less compelling than the Deepwater Horizon spill.
This time, an aggrieved party sued — and the rule of law prevailed, at least for now. We’ll see if Feldman’s decision withstands the Obama adminstration’s appeal.
