President Obama is doing the right thing by canceling a lease sale for offshore oil drilling about 50 miles from the Virginia coast.
The plan was suspect from the beginning. Obama surprised environmentalists by playing to Republicans and agreeing to the lease sale, which Gov. Bob McDonnell badly wanted to help his campaign dream of having the Old Dominion become “The energy capital of the East Coast.”
There were any number of problems with the plan. There are still no known commercially viable oil fields off the mid-Atlantic coast. Geology hints that natural gas is a possibility, but probably not oil. Fishing and tourism interests from North Carolina to New Jersey were skittish. Lastly, the Navy, a huge economic player in Virginia, said that more than half of the areas where drilling could happen were too close to combat training zones.
Even if there is oil off the coast, it would not be available until perhaps 2020 and would likely meet U.S. oil demand for a matter of weeks, not years. What needs to be done, as Obama says, is to work harder at finding renewable energy sources with fossil fuel as a temporary and transitional stopgap.
In the Virginia offshore case, Obama is torpedoing it because he hasn’t been able to find a solution to the BP and Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
This all makes Obama look bad, but it makes McDonnell look even worse. McDonnell’s short tenure has seen setback after setback, from the Confederate History Month gaffe to hiring Fred Malek, who once put together a list of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics at President Nixon’s behest, to head an important state panel on government streamlining.
Add to this Kenneth Cuccinelli, and you have a real mess.Speaking of him, it turns out that the University of Virginia will be fighting his civil investigative demands in the global warming research matter.
Not a bad day. And it’s time to take a hard look at the McDonnell Administration
Peter Galuszka
