There certainly should be a better way to help insure that another devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico does not happen again. And Federal District Judge Martin Feldman recognized that fact when he granted a preliminary injunction against the Obama administration’s moratorium on deepwater drilling Tuesday.
“An invalid agency decision to suspend drillling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present day aspect of availability of domestic energy in this country,” the judge’s decision read.
Hopefully, this will call for a compromise with the administration that will provide a method of protection from such a spill that will not destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of workers offshore and with associated industries inshore. The alternative would be if Obama appeals the decision which could take months to settle which would provide the same destruction to the economy as the moratorium.
The President said he will appeal even though most of the experts that had been called in to help determine whether or not a moratorium was needed disagreed with it. In other words, the moratorium decision was mostly political, not based on expert opinion.
There are times when compromise is necessary and this is one of them. If we can make the federal government get the lead out of its bones and hasten the adoption of necessary safeguards in deepwater drilling, we can avoid destroying a very valuable industry in our economy and help provide our country with the locally produced energy it needs at the present time.
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