Bait and switch: Interior Department auctions off shore oil leases, EPA says you can’t drill

First you take billions of dollars from an oil company for an offshore lease, then you come up with an absurd excuse to stop them from drilling.

icebreaker

If the Justice Department weren’t in on this scam, they’d be investigating the bait and switch tactics the Obama administration uses on the oil industry. First you take billions of dollars from an oil company for an offshore lease, then you come up with an absurd excuse to stop them from drilling.

Fox News explores the latest news in the Obama administration’s never ending quest for energy independence:

icebreaker
Could the EPA have come up with a goofier justification to stop the drilling?

Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight.

Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining similar air permits for a drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico would take about 45 days. He’s especially frustrated over the appeal board’s suggestion that the Arctic drill would somehow be hazardous for the people who live in the area. “We think the issues were really not major,” Slaiby said, “and clearly not impactful for the communities we work in.”

You won’t believe what the EPA is worried about. It said Shell didn’t factor emissions from an icebreaker into its calculation of the project’s greenhouse gas emissions and that those emissions could negatively impact the people living in the nearest village.

The nearest village has 245 residents and lies 70 miles from the proposed drilling site.

Meanwhile, we’re lending billions of dollars to Brazil to do deep water drilling and billions more to Colombia to build a state-of-the-art oil refinery. And, of course, we’re borrowing those billions from China.

Upon further consideration, we take it back. This isn’t bait and switch. It’s a giant check kiting scam.

Source: Fox News

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