Judge Blocks Obama’s Offshore Drilling Moratorium
Nicolas Loris /
President Obama’s ban on offshore drilling has come under heavy fire. The industries directly and indirectly affected by the offshore moratorium made their voice heard that they oppose the president’s moratorium, and just yesterday Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued in an amicus brief that “The drilling moratorium imposed by [the government] will only compound the State’s problems, effectively turning an environmental disaster into an economic catastrophe for the State.” Today, federal judge Martin L.C. Feldman issued an injunction that would block the White House’s offshore drilling ban. Feldman wrote,
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster. What seems clear is that the federal government has been pressed by what happened on the Deepwater Horizon into an otherwise sweeping confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a universal threat of irreparable harm.”
While the effects on the price of gasoline from a drilling ban would be marginal, the economic effects felt by the Gulf would dump salt into the wound of a region coping with not just the spill but the recession in general. The American Petroleum Institute forecasts that if the drilling ban continues, more than 120,000 jobs could be lost in the Gulf Coast and key resources abandoned or moved elsewhere.