Florida senator Bill Nelson (D.) is labeling himself as a career-long opponent to drilling off his state’s coast, but he briefly dropped his guard during former president Barack Obama’s first term.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The Trump administration on Thursday proposed opening nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, reversing protections in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific.
President Obama, using executive power, indefinitely banned offshore oil and gas drilling in wide areas of the Atlantic and Arctic waters just one day after he advised President-elect Donald Trump to not use executive orders while in office.
Conservative Democrat Hillary Clinton was heckled by environmentalists Thursday during a New Hampshire town hall event, and for good reason. The Los Angeles Times reports:
[T]he gathering grew contentious when a woman representing an environmental advocacy group pressed Clinton on whether she would support banning fossil fuel extraction on public lands, including the use of hydraulic fracturing, the controversial natural gas drilling technique commonly known as fracking.
Clinton had said in response to an initial yes-or-no question that she could not commit to such a ban until alternative sources of fuel were in place.
The Department of the Interior admitted to Congress on Thursday morning that it could process oil and natural gas drilling applications more efficiently than it does right now during a hearing on the administration’s management of federal property.
The Obama administration’s recently released five-year plan for offshore drilling leases has been met with sharp criticism from the oil and gas industry and Republicans, who say it continues a crippling moratorium on potential energy reserves on the West and East Coasts.
The Obama administration is taking an undeserved victory lap for increased U.S. production of oil, Republicans and proponents of expanded oil production say. The administration’s latest attempt to claim it is expanding oil production came from the Department of Interior. The agency recently announced a new program to streamline and automate permit applications for oil and gas drilling.
President Obama has said he wants to encourage more oil production in the United States, but his administration’s own policy statements appear to contradict that claim.
