Energy: Obama’s surprising embrace of offshore oil drilling

“Surrender, then negotiate.” That, in a nutshell, is President Obama’s new approach to trying to get an energy policy through Congress, said Joe Conason in Salon.com. Obama announced last week that he would approve oil and gas drilling off previously closed portions of the Atlantic coast, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and off parts of Alaska. The decision to end a 30-year-old drilling embargo sets back the goal of weaning the nation off fossil fuels and jeopardizes marine life and beaches. Even worse, Obama handed over this concession before he got any reciprocal agreement from the Republican lawmakers he’ll need to pass his ambitious energy agenda, which calls for major limits on carbon emissions and billions invested in alternative energy. Didn’t Obama learn from the health-care debate that “premature abandonment of a principled position only encourages the opposition to demand still more”?

Liberals can’t believe he’s sold them out this way, said Eric Alterman in TheDailyBeast.com, but that’s because they still believe Obama is “one of them.” In fact, he has repeatedly proved otherwise, from his escalation of the Afghanistan war to his embrace of nuclear power. Once again, Democrats have been left hoping that “Obama has figured out something they haven’t.” Actually, he has, said Marc Ambinder in TheAtlantic.com. With this pre-emptive move to expand offshore drilling, Obama deprives Republicans of a “major talking point”—that Obama would sacrifice energy independence on the altar of environmental correctness. The underlying strategy here isn’t to appease Republicans; “it’s about perception, cover, and framing the debate.” And that’s smart politics, said John Heilemann in New York. Polls show that “more than 60 percent of the electorate” favor more domestic drilling. With this move, Obama is staking his claim to be the moderate, open-minded guy in the energy debate, and the reasonable center is where political battles are won.

It’s true—this is a political gambit, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. While our energy-starved nation is “grateful for small favors,” Obama’s decision to open some coastal areas to drilling omits the oil-rich Pacific coast, the Atlantic coast north of Delaware, and vast reserves near Alaska. The net effect is to put an estimated 13 billion barrels of oil and 41 trillion cubic feet of gas “under lock and key, in return for blessing a few leases.” Nobody should be fooled by Obama’s “head fake,” said Thomas Pyle in The Washington Times. The real agenda here is to pass a “cap and trade” plan on carbon emissions that would cost companies and consumers billions.

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If so, it’s a trade-off my fellow environmentalists should embrace, said Eric Smith in The Washington Post. The offshore platform has long been the green movement’s “symbol of environmental threat.” But because of technological advances and tighter regulation, the 4,000 offshore oil platforms have actually amassed an admirable safety record, with no catastrophic spills since 1969. The alternative to expanding domestic oil supplies is shipping more oil from overseas, and tankers have a greater risk of spills than oil rigs do. Still, said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Obama sounds incoherent by “channeling George W. Bush” while simultaneously calling for the country to wean itself off oil and other fossil fuels. Once again, the president is “seeking the middle way, trying to please everyone, while pleasing no one.”