Politics Plus

Like everyone, I was shocked to hear this news.

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.

The proposal is to be announced by President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Wednesday, but administration officials agreed to preview the details on the condition that they not be identified.

The proposal is intended to reduce dependence on oil imports, generate revenue from the sale of offshore leases and help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation…

Inserted from <NY Times>

Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes covered this story well.

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Since this measure cannot put even a small dent in our dependence of foreign oil, it makes no sense from that perspective.  Therefore the reasons must be political, not economic.  I found an article that agrees with me on the motivations.

…There are only two explanations that make any sense to me. Both are searingly depressing.

The first is that the Administration is just terrible at bargaining on environmental policies. Rather than make trades, it prefers to make concessions first and then hope that good will and a sense of fair dealing leads its opponents – almost all Republicans but many fossil fuel Democrats – to reciprocate without even a discussion. There is no shortage of evidence for this, most recently being the billions of Federal nuclear loan guarantees for a nuclear plant in Georgia. The resulting electricity will be expensive, the nuclear waste has absolutely no place to go, and neither of the Georgia Republican senators will ever vote for anything remotely useful. Bad policy, bad politics.

The second is that the Administration is in fact willing to do deals – after all, they made deals worth hundreds of billions with the drug and hospital industries – but that this reflects a deal made to pass legislation already done and not something to be done in the future. There is only one piece of legislation that could possibly be – health care legislation.

Did the Administration buy votes from pro-drilling Democrats? Should we expect more bad news policies – policies that make no sense as policy or politics – to be announced in the future?… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

If Obama is being bipartisan in advance?  If so, didn’t he learn his lesson last time?  The most bipartisan thing the GOP is willing to do is to use a cattle pros with no off switch on Obama’s hind-parts.  I hope he’s too bright for that.

I think it far more likely that there is a deal in the offing.  I hope it’s worth it, but I can’t say.  If there is, Obama needs to provide the transparency he promised during his campaign and make it public.  Only then, can we discern whether or not the deal is a good one.  Until then, this fosters only suspicion, and that’s bad for Obama and the Democrats.