Drill, Baby, Drill

From the Washington Examiner
Interior Department bureaucrats bury 2-1 public support for more off-shore drilling in comments on proposed rule
by Mark Tapscott

Remember the "Drill More, Drill Now" flap in the summer of 2007 over the expiration of legislative and executive branch bans on off-shore drilling for oil in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)?

Gas was selling at $4 and more per gallon across the country and big majorities of the public were demanding that the government get out of the way of producing more energy supplies from America's vast untapped domestic natural resources like the OCS.

President Bush left office after allowing the executive branch ban to expire. And the democratic majority in Congress failed to renew the legislative ban that had been included every year for two decades.

But then last year along came the U.S. Department of Interior, led by President Obama's Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, the former Colorado Democratic senator, with a rule-making proposal to open up the OCS. Such proposed rules typically require a public comment period of 90 days, and those comments must be analyzed by federal officials, compiled and published.

The comment period for the proposed Interior OCS rule ended months ago, but Salazar has rebuffed all requests for information about the results, saying the comments had not yet been fully analyzed and compiled.

Now, thanks to Americans for Solutions for Winning the Future, the advocacy group formed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, what is likely to be the real reason for Salazar's foot-dragging is known - the comments favor by about a 2-1 margin opening up the OCS for new exploration and drilling.

Read more here.