Guest “@#$@$%!!!” by David Middleton
Firstly, a quick review of the past year…
January 27, 2021:
Biden Hits ‘Pause’ On Oil And Gas Leasing On Public Lands And Waters
January 27, 2021
NATHAN ROTT, SCOTT DETROW, ALANA WISEIn an effort to slow the nation’s contribution to climate change, President Biden has signed an executive order to begin halting oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.
The much-anticipated move is one of several executive actions the president took on Wednesday to address the worsening climate crisis and the broader decline of the natural world, but it won’t come without pushback.
[…]
The oil and gas industry, hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, is expected to challenge the move, as are fossil-fuel rich Western states whose economies are closely linked to extractive industry on public lands.
Anticipating the move, Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas companies in many Western states, said: “We’ll be in court shortly thereafter.”
Fossil fuel extraction on federal lands generates billions of dollars in royalties and revenues for local and state economies. But it’s also responsible for nearly a quarter of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and the Biden administration appears to be serious about cutting the country’s outsized contribution to global warming.
[…]
Biden’s halt on new oil and gas leasing also does nothing to affect activities on private or state lands, where roughly 90% of the country’s oil and gas development occurs.
“The industry has a lot of leases in production, a lot of leases that have been issued, so it won’t have an immediate impact. But it will give an immediate opportunity for the administration to think about how we move forward,” said Nada Culver, the vice president of public lands at the National Audubon Society.
[…]
“Ending permitting would be extremely difficult,” said Rebecca Watson, who served as assistant secretary for lands and minerals management at the Department of the Interior under President George W. Bush. “You have sold a property right, a lease, so you’ve paid for a lease and then you can’t develop it. I think there would be lawsuits and, rightly so, over a move like that.”
A permanent leasing ban would also be subject to lawsuits, she said. Under the Mineral Leasing Act, the government is required to hold quarterly lease sales. The Biden administration could make fewer or all lands unavailable for leasing, but Watson thinks a court might find that illegal.
Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado who worked at Interior under the Clinton and Carter administrations, agrees that a permanent ban would run into more problems than a temporary pause. But he thinks the administration can make a big statement with its immediate actions.
[…]
NPR
June 16, 2021:
Biden’s oil lease ban lifted by federal judge
By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY AND ROBERT BURNSON on 6/16/2021WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) –A federal judge lifted the Biden administration’s temporary ban on new oil and gas leases on public lands and offshore waters.
In a victory for 13 states that filed the legal challenge in Louisiana, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty granted a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking President Joe Biden’s Jan. 27 executive order while the litigation continues.
[…]
The Interior Department said it’s reviewing the ruling and will comply with it.
The agency said it’s working on an interim report that will “outline next steps and recommendations for the department and Congress to improve stewardship of public lands and waters, create jobs and build a just and equitable energy future,” according to an emailed statement.
Doughty’s ruling requires the Interior Department to immediately restart its leasing program, even as the agency continues its review of the effects of drilling.
Doughty, appointed to the bench in 2018 by former President Donald Trump, ruled that Biden’s executive order violated federal laws governing oil and gas leasing. He also faulted the Biden administration for failing to offer “any rational explanation” for its pause.
[…]
World Oil
November 17, 2021:
OCS Sale 257 was held today. This was the first Gulf of Mexico lease sale since the current occupant of the White House illegally halted Federal lease sales a few days into his maladministration.
About 300 leases received bids, mostly deepwater tracts.
- Lease Sale Map – Bid Distribution (November 17, 2021): pdf file
- Active Leases and Bids Received Map (November 17, 2021): pdf file
- Blocks Receiving Bids (November 17, 2021)
Now, just this morning…
Federal Judge Annuls Massive Gulf Of Mexico Lease Sale
By Irina Slav – Jan 28, 2022A federal judge threw out the biggest oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico on the grounds that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management broke the environmental law—the National Environmental Policy Act—by failing to properly factor in the emission-related impact of the lease sale.
Ruling on a case brought against the Department of the Interior, the American Petroleum Institute, and the state of Louisiana, District Judge Rudolph Contreras sent the lease sale back to the Interior Department to decide what to do with it.
[…]
President Biden imposed a moratorium on drilling leases for federal lands as soon as he took office, but oil-producing states successfully challenged the moratorium in court, and the Interior Department was forced to proceed with the lease sale.
The tender brought in $192 million in winning bids for 307 tracts covering 1.7 million acres. The interest around the sale was significant in part due to the low carbon footprint of the crude extracted from these waters, compared to the higher footprint of foreign plays or U.S. onshore wells.
[…]
OilPrice.com
The Obama-appointed and incredibly corrupt Rudolph Contreras essentially directed the Interior Department to continue breaking the law. This is not the first time Contreras has unlawfully blocked a Federal lease sale.
Companies had argued to the court that vacating the lease sale would compromise the confidential bids that were submitted for the tracts, making their competitors aware of who was bidding on what, and for how much.
[…]
Any disruptions that revoking the lease sales might cause, he wrote, “do not outweigh the seriousness of the NEPA error in this case and the need for the agency to get it right.”
NY Times
While the Interior Department almost certainly won’t appeal this ruling – They wanted to lose. The American Petroleum Institute (API) joined the lawsuit as intervener-defendants and will almost certainly appeal.
Time for another SCOTUS slap-down!
He needs to get to those bridges sooner and jump up and down in the middle, to make sure they are safe.
So after all that, what is the ruling? I have no idea after reading this article.
Is drilling on Federal lands allowed to proceed ?
Yeah, I can’t figure that out, either. A lot of back and forth and overall craziness is reported here, but I couldn’t find any clear, definitive statements on the overall status of drilling and production on federal lands. Oh, well. Back to doing my own research.
Where leases were already active – thank you, President Trump! – work can continue. This crooked judge has only managed to stop any development in this particular round of new lease sales.
But look out…
Drilling on existing offshore Federal leases is proceeding.
So if I read it correctly, the lease sale was voided because the sale (run by Biden’s Department of the Interior) was run illegally.
Perhaps Secretary Deb Haaland should resign and go back to producing and canning Pueblo Salsa instead.
The judge voided it because the Interior Department failed to account for Scope 3 emissions – Which is not, nor has it ever been, a legal requirement.
Scope 3 emissions are the ultimate emissions from the ultimate consumption of the oil & gas. This is a number that is little more than a wild-ass guess. Furthermore, this won’t reduce Scope 3 emissions at all. It will just result in more Scope 3 emissions coming from Saudi, Iranian, Russian, etc oil.
The judge is still a sitting federal judge and was confirmed by Congress. So his ruling stands unless overturned by a superior level court.
An appeal of his ruling would have to be approved by the executive dept on behalf of the interior dept. Not much chance of that in a Biden administration that illegally halted lease sales.
That makes the Secretary of the Interior incompetent to run a lease sale as evidenced by the court ruling. She should resign.
you sound like you are speaking as a watermelon. Get rid of the person who had the nerve to run the auction knowing that the next appointee will never hold any more. how is it incompetant of a person to not factor in something that has never been required before and is a stalling tactic?
Ask democratic appointed and confirmed Federal Judge Contreras that question. It was his ruling.
Federal Judges only act on the legality of Federal law. Any other action by them is grounds for impeachment by the House of Representatives.
If that was the case, every Federal judge whose decision was overturned on appeal would be impeached.
The grounds for judicial impeachment are broad and unspecific.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII_S1_2_1_1/#:~:text=Article%20III%2C%20Section%201%3A&text=The%20Judges%2C%20both%20of%20the,during%20their%20Continuance%20in%20Office.
Bad behavior is whatever a majority of the House and supermajority of the Senate decide it is.
Incorrect.
The State of Louisiana and the API joined the lawsuit as intervener-defendants. They will almost certainly appeal the ruling. Interior would have either settled or not contested the lawsuit otherwise. Or a separate lawsuit will be filed by industry and the affected states to reinstate this lease sale.
Ultimately, the results of the sale will be reinstated. If this ruling is allowed to stand, these Enviromarxist terrorist organizations will use the same tactic to invalidate all past lease sales. However, unless this is expedited to SCOTS, the appeals will drag on for years or until 2025, when a Republican administration and Congress legislatively fixes this
Judge Contreras is the same crook that was texting with crook FBI agent Peter Strzok. He’s also the presiding FISA court judge under this regime right now.
It’s even worse than that… 😠🤬
We are already on track for $120 oil this summer. Let’s make it worse.
Brussels RE bureaucrats are making the same mistakes as Washington RE bureaucrats
The only beneficiaries are multi-billion companies that supply the wind and solar systems, and Utilities, which would sell oodles more high-priced electricity due to “electrify everything”. Everyone else gets screwed, while “fighting” climate change, a la Don-Quixote tilting at wind mills.
Historically, the EU has imported very minor quantity of LNG, because the prices are about 25 – 30% higher than pipeline gas bought from Russia under long-term contracts; that will always be the case, due to differences of technology.
Brussels EU environmentalist bureaucrats have urged EU countries not to sign long-term gas supply contracts with Russia, because it would set the wrong example regarding “weaning the EU off fossil fuels”. Just google, if you find this incredible.
As a result of EU bureaucrat lunatic decisions, EU spot prices for gas have become “volatile”, i.e., about 5 to 10 times long-term prices, because Russia reliably provides gas only under signed long-term contracts. This was known by Brussels, prior to its idiotic decisions.
If the EU gas, imported from Russia, would be converted to LNG, there would need to be a 40% increase in worldwide LNG carrier loads, as shown by elementary calculations.
Assume an average LNG carrier capacity at 170,000 m3, equivalent to 76,500 metric ton
Russian gas supply to the EU is about 200 billion m3/y
Additional LNG carrier loads would be 1,903/y, or 38 carrier loads/week, if Russian pipeline gas were replaced with LNG. See table
At present, Europe lacks the capacity to receive and gasify that many carrier loads.
In 2020, world LNG demand was 360 million metric ton, equivalent to 4,706 carrier loads. See URL
There would need to be an enormous, worldwide increase in LNG carrier loads of about (4706 + 1903)/4706 = 40.4%, if Russian gas to the EU were interrupted.
That would be a gigantic, additional strain on the world’s LNG system, which would send spot prices to unprecedented levels for many years.
NOTE: At present, there is a significant shortage of large-capacity LNG carriers
THE UKRAINE PLOT IS THICKENING WITH GERMANY AND FRANCE NO LONGER IN LOCKSTEP WITH US/UK-LED NATO
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-plot-is-thickening-with-germany-and-france-no-longer-in
Biden is on track to make Carter seem wise and competent.
Yup. Jimmy is smiling in relief.
Two Democrat presidents in a row have elevated Jimmy to third worst POTUS… 😄
Biteme will likely win the Triple Crown…
failing to properly factor in the emission-related impact
Ack.
How exactly is this done? Climastrology ouija board?
Of course. How else can it be done? Is there some other way to practise pseudo-science?
I’d like to know what this involves as well.
There seems to be an implication that there must be some (-ve) impact due to emissions, and somebody just needs to figure out how big that impact is.
Who gets to choose the ’emission-related impact’ expert?
Is there any credit given to the benefit gained from these emissions?
Contreras ruling will NOT stand on appeal. Reason is the leasing laws require NO consideration of resulting CO2 environmental impact, even tho he wishes they did. There is NO ‘NEPA error’.
This looks like another case of legislating from the bench.
‘looks’?
if it looks like a dog and barks like a dog, it “IS” a dog.
Even if it did require considering. Okay, I considered it. It’s BS
btw How does the judge reconcile with Biden’s stmt asking OPEC & Russia to produce more oil? Their Oil has different CO2 emissions 🙂
And it was an Obama appointed judge in Montana that delayed XL pipeline construction. Without the delay XL would have been completed by the time Biden took office And the USA could be receiving up to 830,000 bbls / day via XL.
The court decision is unlikely to reduce demand. If price increases demand will barely change. Importing the same amount of oil or refined products (same CO2 for extraction & refining), but they need further to travel & thus increases total CO2 emissions defeating the purpose of blocking the lease sale. Obviously science & logic were not the judges strong skills in this case.
It will have no effect on demand. Any effect on supply will be years down the road and minuscule… Unless these Enviromarxist terrorist organizations manage to successfully invalidate all past lease sales and force the second largest US oil producing region to shut in all production and dismantle all of the infrastructure.
Stall, delay, slow down and wear everybody down. They were unable to stop the lease auctions so will now be throwing roadblocks up to delay the process for as long as possible. Childish tantrums from what should be an adult regime.
A black robed totalitarian.
He swore an oath to impatially uphold the rule of law, and the Constitution. He lied.
Now the Biden MalAdministration can have it both ways.
Can we expect Brandon to crawl over to Vienna with hat in hand to beg OPEC+ for higher petroleum production?
Biden already did.
He’ll do it again, this time with a bigger hat.
This is what MA vs EPA has got us; HFM!!!
This no doubt flows from MA vs EPA; bad decision there by the SCOTUS.
Actually, it doesn’t, which is why Contreras will lose. Mass v EPA was about whether EPA can regulate CO2 as a ‘pollutant’. Thanks to a poorly worded CCA, SCOTUS said ‘if it decides to’
The US oilfield leasing laws are completely separate and ‘self contained’. Their sensible environmental considerations did NOT include CO2.
So, “bedrock environmental law” and CO2 in the same breath. Seems like it to me.
Oddly enough, the alleged overnight on the part of the Interior Department doesn’t exist in any law, bedrock or otherwise.
Spot on Rud. MA v EPA makes Contreras’ ruling even more laughable.
Hurricane Harvey barely missed the windmills on the Texas coast, you could see the wind damage start just to the east. Going to be interesting to see the offshore ones there, plenty of wind on average, highest going to be a bummer. Will the blades twist? Off?
Keep on Frakking, David!
As long as the gov’t. reserves the right to kick current mineral leaseholders out of their lease and sell the lease to the Russians, it should all work out. For somebody.
It worked for Hillary.
I thought that she was into uranium, not oil
They keep missing the most important point of all. They say “Fossil fuel extraction on federal lands generates billions of dollars in royalties and revenues for local and state economies. But it’s also responsible for nearly a quarter of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions”, but royalties and revenues are small fry and GHG emissions are about as irrelevant as you can get.
The big point which they all miss is that fossil fuels underline ALL jobs in ALL sectors of the economy. The major benefits of fossil fuels are not the direct benefits of (direct) employment, royalties and revenue. They are the indirect benefits of jobs support across the whole economy.
There’s a parallel in Bastiat’s window – the jobs you see versus the jobs you don’t see.
You are 100% correct Mike Jones.
All modern civilization depends on plentiful supply’s of energy at reasonable cost .
So many people that push the scam that CO2 will lead to runaway warming , that the world has to stop extracting and using fossil fuel , have never thought what it would be like to live with a deficit of energy .
A deficit of energy will lead to a deficit of food plus increasing costs to get the produce to market and wide spread unemployment .
All food delivered to cities requires energy and fossil fuel to manufacture fertilizers , fuel for transport , tractors and irrigators.
These people have no idea how their food is grown and arrives at the super market .
Energy is a basic necessity to feed the worlds billions and the cost increases that are coming because of higher fuel costs ,fertilizer costs ,freight and labour costs will mean much higher food costs around the world .
Unfortunately so many pushing this scam are politicians or in government jobs and universities with good salaries , insulated from the real world.
They think that they are going to save the world from what?
The worlds temperature rose Two tenths of a degree Celsius over the last ten years world wide . The error bars would have to be more than that .
Eh most of them are actually okay with a deficit of energy. They expect, us to have no energy so they can continue to use energy at the current levels. Thus “saving” us from the evils of CO2.
I hope they will “properly factor the emission-related impact of” the next subway or commuter rail construction project that they waste taxpayer money on.
You guys are aware of this graph right? To me, it looks like it strongly correlates with satellite temperature data. Does this not put a nail in the climate skeptic coffin?
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html
Just wondering because I am a skeptic too but this looks very convincing
I just want your rebuttal to this. If Co2 and temperature strongly correlate on the graphs, well then how can you refute it? Im confused because I’m not understand it fully that’s all.
Clearly there was something I’m not understanding. I came here looking for a possible explanation but all I am getting is a mockery of my lack of intelligence with this particular topic.
Intelligence includes STAYING ON TOPIC!
Oh, wait, WUWT never posts an article discussing the correlation or lack thereof between CO2 and temperature. Perfectly understandable that you therefore MUST bring it up here.
I’m sorry I just kind of freaked out a little bit and I just wanted an immediate answer and I figured that I would get that from here since it’s the most recent post
Doesn’t take much to freak you out.
Just who put you up to this? You don’t strike me as being smart enough to come up with such a stunt on your own.
Hi Walter – There is an important concept in science that correlation is not causation, in other words if two measures are both going up or down it doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other. You have to go past the correlation to the underlying causes in order to establish whether there really is a cause-and-effect and if so, which is the cause and which is the effect.
In the case of atmospheric CO2 and temperature, there is a well-known effect – documented as Henry’s Law – that a warmer ocean is less able to hold dissolved CO2 than a cooler ocean, so as oceans warm they release CO2 and this increases the atmospheric concentration of CO2. So a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature doesn’t prove that the increased CO2 causes the temperature to increase. We know that there is a relationship the other way round: increased global temperature causes an increase in atmospheric CO2.
Having said that, however, there’s a lot more going on in the climate, and this causal relationship from temperature to CO2 may be a lot less important than some other things. There is a lot of evidence that the increase in global temperature is caused by solar activity with long time-lags via the oceans. An easy bit of evidence to understand here is that the warming began about 300 years ago as the world came out of the Little Ice Age – long before and nothing whatsoever to do with man-made CO2. It is also very likely that the increase in atmospheric CO2 caused by warming oceans is rather less than the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last ~70 years caused by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels.
In summary, there is a lot happening in the climate, and causes and their effects are often misunderstood. In particular, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that any correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature indicates that increased CO2 is a cause of increased temperature.
The correlation between CO2 and temperature isn’t what “skeptics” doubt. They doubt that CO2 is, on balance, harmful (or, in the words of the EPA, a “pollutant.”)
So, here’s my favorite example of a benefit of recent climate change—a large drop in the strangest tornadoes.
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/f5torns.html
Note that in the last half of the 20th century, we had 50 F5 tornadoes. That’s an average of one a year.
In the 21st century, we’ve only had 9, and we’ve only had one in the last ten years. That’s a clearly significant trend downward—and a great benefit to the people who live in the affected areas.
As for how that trend could be caused by the climate effects of CO2, I can explain it, but only if you already understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I suggest looking at the videos of Tony Heller: https://www.youtube.com/c/TonyHeller/videos and Dr. Jon Robson: https://www.youtube.com/c/CDN_ClimateDN/videos
Strictly speaking, Walter’s question is not completely off topic. As David cited,
Responding to Walter’s question demonstrates that the judge has no basis for his rationalization.
The “NEPA error” would still there irrespective of what Walter posted.
The plaintiffs alleged that NEPA doesn’t quantify Scope 3 emissions. The Obama judge agreed with this absurdity.
Scope 3 emissions have never been quantified in NEPA. There’s no legal requirement to do so.
NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. Scope 1&2 emissions are those directly and indirectly from drilling and production. Scope 3 emissions are those from the final end use of the oil & gas.
The Obama Judge directed the Interior Department to redo the NEPA analysis, including Scope 3 emissions, before deciding on whether or not to comply with the 5th Circuit judge’s order to comply with the law requiring to hold lease sales.
The Obama and other Democrat judges are legislating and writing regulations from the bench based on their beliefs in the climate crisis hysteria.
Trump and most other Republican judges are ruling on the laws, as they exist.
Yes, I understand that there is no legal requirement to take NEPA into account. That is why I called his decision a ‘rationalization.’ However, any attempt to defend the rationalization becomes moot if his assumption about CO2 impact is shown to be false.
There is a legal requirement to take NEPA into account. There is no legal requirement to account for Scope 3 emissions except in the minds of people like Judge Contreras… Who happens to have the final word on this, unless his ruling is vacated.
Walter:
Hmm, let’s see: CO2 going up by ~2ppm per year. Global warming rate per UAH trend ~1.6 +/- 0.2 C per 100 years. Double the “pre industrial CO2” level of ~300 ppm = 600 ppm. So 200 ppm to go to get to doubling at 2 ppm/yr = 100 years. Effect of CO2 doubling central estimate 1.5C. So ya, it’s consistent and quite non-threatening. Not even the first coffin nail. Sorry, skepticism lives on.
David: You’re right of course. Sorry for feeding the troll. Just a reflex to those who think a correlation between two monotonically increasing time series proves cause and effect.
I’m a habitual troll-feeder. I’m trying to cut back. Whack-a-Troll can be fun, but very time consuming.
Has there ever been anyone who doubted that CO2 levels are rising?
Other than more or less rising most of the time, there is very little correlation between this chart and temperature records.
Regardless, correlation is not causation.
Please explain how temperatures rose from 1850 to 1950, while CO2 levels only rose 20ppm? Even the broken models don’t try to claim that this little CO2 increase would cause so much warming?
Please explain how for 20 years, from 1960 to about 1980, temperatures fell, while CO2 levels were rising rapidly.
Please explain the Medieval, Roman, Minoan and Egyptian warm periods, which all occurred with no changes in CO2 levels.
The problem comes when you realise that, although that particular temperature chart does appear to correlate (in parts) with CO2 increases, it doesn’t necessarily correlate with other temperature records.
Regular readers here are familiar with questionable adjustments of historical temperature records. The practice seems to be finding its way into CO2 measurements.
If you look at the table of CO2 values on the left side (use the slider) of the NOAA link provided by Walter, above, it shows the rate of increase in northern hemisphere declining from 2.54 PPM in 2019, to 2.36 PPM in 2020. Yet, NASA has stated that interannual variability masks small changes in anthro’ sources.
In 2021 no less an authority than Ralph Keeling wrote, “By mid 2020, fossil fuel emissions started to rebound from their low point in spring. The reduction was too brief to lead to a perceptible bend in the CO2 curve.” I should note that most of the decline (>17%) occurred during the seasonal ramp-up phase when the photo-synthesis sinks were dormant. Therefore, changes should have been evident if humans are largely responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2.
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/2021/05/03/why-covid-didnt-have-a-bigger-effect-on-co2-emissions/
Roy Spencer has similarly stated that the impact of the COVID lock-downs is not measurable.
Sky News wrote in October 2020, “A record drop in carbon emissions has been estimated this year due to worldwide lockdowns – but scientists have warned this will have no impact on the overall amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-why-scientists-have-warned-covid-lockdowns-will-not-stop-climate-change-12067396
I have demonstrated that the monthly MLO CO2 data, which resolves the distinct seasonal ramp-up and draw-down phases, produces graphs wherein the 2020 behavior is almost indistinguishable from 2019. And, 2020 was tied for the warmest year since the last major El Nino.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/06/11/contribution-of-anthropogenic-co2-emissions-to-changes-in-atmospheric-concentrations/
Walter: Correlation does not establish causation.
The CO2 even shows the hiatus a lot like the temperature hiatus that people are talking about.
Bot test: What is the subject of this post?
And warming after the glaciers started melting was caused by CO2 😉
I don’t see it! All I see are a series of decadal averages. Can you be more specific?
But if Biden et al continue doing that the oil industry will receive even higher prices and they’ll be doomed-
The Oil Industry Has a $US500 ($694) Billion Bubble Problem (gizmodo.com.au)
So clearly the industry has to be protected from obtaining more stranded assets and their dooming. That’s Greenonomix101.
The really funny thing is that ExxonMobil bid on 92 shallow water blocks, clearly with the intent to try to convert them to CCS leases.
OMG OMG OMG
Okay – that’s frickin’ hilarious! Made my day.
It’s probably a move to drive oil and gas companies into bankruptcy, so that the big three (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) can mop everything up dirt cheap.
Meanwhile, lawyers get fatter
“Same as it always was…”
At some point industry just needs to ignore the courts and the regulators.
An absurd idea.
No. A perfectly rational idea. Government is ignoring their laws and individual freedom. Sometimes it is necessary to ignore the government.
Practical? Will it work?
But certainly not absurd.
I can think of many times in history when ignoring the government was the solution.
Can’t you?
Civil disobedience is only an option for individuals or groups of individuals.
We can’t contract a rig and move onto an offshore lease just because we were high bidder and the government is unlawfully refusing to issue the lease.
Why not? You think China follows the rules?
You have to think outside the box.
There are several new islands in the South China Sea to prove my point.
China is a nation that flouts international law. They only get away with it because no other nation has been willing to go to war over this.
No drilling contractor would contract a rig to a company that didn’t own a lease or have approved permits to drill it. No corporation would even try to do this. The rig would be seized by the US Coast Guard and everyone involved would be arrested.
You just are not understanding my point. Just enjoy your life as a serf.
You’re not understanding that you don’t have a point.
I do have a point. I reject tge premise that government should gave a role in virtually anything.
Start there with freedom. No government should have any authority over the oceans.
Isn’t that what this blog is about? Government overreaching?
Explain how an oil company would blatantly defy the law and continue functioning.
There shouldn’t be a law to begin with.
Try making an alliance with a Cartel. They have politicians, law enforcement, and the military under their control.
A lawless society…
Just how well are those laws working out?
I’m not arguing for a lawless society but a less law more freedom one.
I don’t disagree with you here. We don’t need more laws. We need a government that both enforces and abides by the laws that we already have.
Are there times for this?
Yes. If not for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, it might be time to water the Tree of Liberty.
Is this the time for oil companies to arm drillships, run up the Jolly Roger and seize drilling locations in the Gulf of Mexico? No.
It’s time to legally challenge this absurd ruling.
Ah, so you did get it. Together we fight tyranny.
The underlying principle? Yes.
How it applies to the specific topic here? No.
I contend that if that BP oil rig wasn’t so far offshore in very deep water there would have been NO disaster.
It is government regulation pushing drilling into dangerous waters that is causing problems.
Government regulation means that companies spend more time and money trying to comply than actually using their own initiative to improve safety and lower costs.
I had a front row seat for the Shell Bolsa Chica wetlands project. All Shell wanted to do was shutdown the oil field and build homes in the area.
DECADES of government and Leftist Environmental Wacko interference ended with Shell developing an equestrian oriented VERY expensive subdivision in which after several years had ONE horse in it and ZERO housing for middle-class families. In fact, the only “families” that could afford those houses were rich, white empty nesters. Exactly the kind of people the Leftists hate.
In relation to the “specific topic”.
Government is NEVER the solution and always the problem. At best, government makes Leftist wackos FEEL good and costs everyone else more money.
Wrong from start to finish in every factual way possible.
We’re drilling in deeper waters due to the fact that the shelf is largely played out, technological advances enabled us to do so and we have discovered larger fields out there.
Macondo (Deepwater Horizon) was the result of “defining deviancy down,” procedurally similar to the Apollo 1 fire and Challenger disaster. Complacency enabled an escalating acceptance of small deviations from procedure, resulting in a disaster.
After BP walked away, LLOG developed the Macondo discovery…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/20/deepwater-horizon-epillog/
Because it was a big-@$$ discovery and they had the capability to do so.
So, if the shelf is played out, why are they trying to drill on it?
And if it is drilled out why were rigs on the shelf forced to shutdown?
And if it was so technologically advanced, why did it blow?
How are logic as common sense wrong?
Obviously, the government and science were the ones wrong.
Who accepted the deviations? Wouldn’t that be the government?
BP tried the deviations to reduce costs imposed by government.
Government treats businesses like the business wants to kill its customers.
There are still opportunities on the shelf. They are just dwindling. The large, impactful opportunities are in deepwater
The Macondo blowout occured because BP and Transocean made a lot of small mistakes they thought they could handle. Government regulars largely signed off on those procedures. People don’t improve with technology. The entire industry studied what went wrong there and refocused on preventing those sorts of mistakes. We did that before Obama instituted his unlawful drilling moratorium.
Wasn’t it a failure to use adequate “drilling mud” (concrete) to contain the pressure… and that lack of concrete had been directed from the top management to save time, and thus money?
On site drilling engineers had strongly advised against that strategy for safety reasons, but were overruled from the top?
It was a sequence of mistakes. Not so much directed from top management, but by BP’s company man on the rig and accepted by the Transocean rig manager.
Ultimately, the pay zone had not been properly isolated when they displaced the drilling mud in the riser when temporarily abandoning the well.
As you say, it’s the only blowout of its kind in the history of the Gulf… taken in that context, we moved forward and thank goodness we have, sans this judge’s ruling.
Appeal, and hope for the best.
All pro AGW models have been wrong.
And it was a totally avoidable disaster.
Realistically, the worst case scenario is that Interior redoes the NEPA analysis, including Scope 3 emissions. This will yield the same answer that they already have: The total GHG emissions will be less than if we imported the oil. Industry will then sue to reinstate the results of the sale and win. Ideally, we could force them to count the potential effects of CCS in the NEPA analysis.
The catastrophic versions of the AGW models have definitely proved to be very wrong… Unfortunately that won’t matter unless this is legislatively addressed to put the regulators back into their Constitutional box.
Them’s with the gold makes the rules! And, can afford to pay the armed law officers who enforce the rules.
I can think of some tax rebellions that were forcefully repressed.
And I can name one that succeeded.
I’m not advocating, but at some point in time, something has to give.
So judges and prosecutors can break the law, and certain organizations can assault, riot and steal and that’s OK. But, businesses and the public have little recourse except to find honest judges and prosecutors for redress. The word wack seems appropriate here.
Well something’s certainly broken – question is can it be fixed? A better question might be – is there the political will to fix it?
It’s a darn shame… we need all the oil we can get (the 75$ price level has been smashed).
WE have the oil (as does the rest of the world).
We just need to drill for it.
“Drill baby, drill.”
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
songs that made the hit parade
Guys like me we had it made
Those were the days
We can have those days, again.
This is just a temporary setback.