Obama ends oil-drilling off Florida. Cuba and Castro start drilling off Florida.

Flip-floppy positioning with offshore drilling continues as the administration has again closed major oil fields for drilling under the latest reiteration of the drilling moratorium that came out. From the New York Times…

“The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it had rescinded its decision to expand offshore oil exploration into the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic Coast because of weaknesses in federal regulation revealed by the BP oil spill.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that a moratorium on drilling would be in force in those areas for at least seven years, until stronger safety and environmental standards were in place. The move puts off limits millions of acres of the Outer Continental Shelf that hold potentially billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.”

That doesn’t do anything to stop Cuba and Castro from drilling just 65 miles off the coast of Florida. Just this past decade, Cuba decided to tap into their potential oil fields which are in the very same Gulf of Mexico that we share. After a successful find of oil in 2004, Castro has granted further access to their oil in a contract with Spanish oil company, Repsol. The new contract has Repsol bringing rigs off the coast of Florida as soon as the end of this year and oil production is to begin immediately. In order to tap into these fields, Repsol will be using a semi-submersible drilling rig that will be at 5,600 feet… greater than the depth of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which was also the same type of platform.

For comparison, the ill-fated cause of American oil production’s halt, Deepwater Horizon was located 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana and much further away from Florida. At the time of the disaster, it was drilling at a depth of approximately 5,000 feet when it erupted into the single greatest natural disaster in the Gulf(or the entire US-controlled water.) The Deepwater Horizon accident spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil. This was not the first spill of such a large magnitude in the Gulf however. There was a spill from a Mexican rig, Ixtoc I, in the Bay of Campeche in 1979 that totalled about 3 million barrels in a depth of 50 meters. Accidents happen, but you learn from them and move on… you don’t stop living or doing.

There are many reports as to what may have caused the disaster and much of it circulates around regulatory issues, but let’s get to the heart of the matter… it was a human error right onboard the platform itself. Without question, there were regulatory issues at play, combined with executive decisions for increased production, but the men aboard the rig became aware of a problem with the blowout preventer and tried to alert the chief on board. It was human error and all of the regulations in the world won’t stop that. However, a drilling moratorium may prevent American oil spills in the future but doesn’t stop oil from Cuban rigs hitting American shores the next time they have an accident either. I may have made a small argument for the moratorium, but my point here is that we can’t stop what could be the saving grace of our economy because some idiots made a bad decision at an executive level. Instead we carry on as usual(because we haven’t had disasters of that magnitude before) with an increased eye on safety and quality. We need to be allowed to make decisions at the point of the problem that will ensure further disasters from happening instead of making phone calls to a guy in an mahogany-walled office asking for his advice.

Meanwhile around the rest of the world’s oil fields, drilling continues. In fact off the coast of Brazil, they are drilling for oil at even greater depths than the Deepwater Horizon was drilling at. Of course, if oil spills from there, it won’t affect our shores. But it may affect our finances and I do mean government finances. In the aftermath of the BP oil spill, the Obama administration approved $2 billion to be sent to Brazil to help support their drilling operations knowing full well that it was intended for deepwater drilling beyond our depths here in the Gulf. The company responsible for the drilling is Petrobras which is a state run oil company and that act alone lends unquestionable credence to the idea of Obama partaking in global redistribution of funds, particularly American money.

Thanks to environmentalists and a lawsuit from 2007, Alaskan drilling was stopped. Now, the Obama administration has spread the coverage of a “No Drill Zone” to everywhere with the exception of the western corner of the Gulf. That means no drilling anywhere on American shores except off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the tiny sliver of Alabama.

We have one of the worlds largest supplies of (now)virtually untapped oil and natural gas commodities available in a time when the demand for those resources are immense. President Obama is stalling the production of one of our greatest natural resources and stalling our economy in the process. The world should be turning to us as a major oil producer. Look at the Middle East… they would have nothing and be nothing if it weren’t for oil. It is only for the fact that they sit on a massive oil field, and are willing to tap into it, that they are what they are today instead of a massive, barren desert still. Think I’m wrong? Look at Dubai.

Still think I’m wrong about what oil production can do for a country?

However, it is clear that these are not the aspirations of President Obama. He himself advocates against wealth. In his own words…

It is that attitude that can best be pointed to in order to understand how President Obama would have the idea of spreading the wealth around the world rather than concentrate it in the hands of those who work hard and make sacrifices while achieving success through determined decision making. The way that he would have it, the money would be concentrated at the government level in order to achieve the goals of their agenda… things like energy control based on a fruitless conspiracy created by disingenuous and corrupt scientists ”on the take”. That agenda would further fatten the pockets of the government through taxation while still redistributing the wealth around the world. The government can then expand on the idea of food control through legislation that consolidates regulation over farmers at the federal level again taking the money out of the people while building quite the portfolio of the ruling party.

The entire charade of the drilling moratorium was nothing other than a clever political ruse to try to earn popularity with the independent vote prior to the shellacking that the Democrats took in the last election. Why else would he impose a drilling moratorium with definitive exclusion for oil production at any depth and then relent shortly before the election… then follow that up with yet another moratorium after the election? When faced with a lawsuit that even the courts sided with the people on, President Obama persisted 3 different times at enforcing the shutdown of the oil field, yet magically opened it up prior to the election? He lost… so now everyone loses. Again! Ad infinitum…