The Clear Act if you want to look at it, elicited this response from the American Petroleum Institute;
“The House bill passed today will kill jobs, threaten our fragile economic recovery and place our energy security at risk. This is an anti-jobs, anti-consumer and anti-energy bill. Instead of addressing the risks of offshore development by improving safety and establishing a robust system for covering the costs of possible future accidents, this bill effectively bans development and sends thousands of workers in offshore communities to the unemployment lines.
“The unlimited liability provisions will drive the vast majority of American companies out of U.S. waters because they will not be able to obtain insurance coverage. Those remaining will be subject to huge cost hikes, reducing energy production, economic growth, American jobs and government revenues.
“While the House recognized that the deepwater moratorium is a jobs killer, we need real action and call on the administration to lift the moratorium to allow our people to get back to work. The inability to develop in the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico, whether through an explicit moratorium or through policies that create a de-facto moratorium, will cost more than 175,000 jobs a year, the majority of them in already hard-hit Gulf Coast communities.
“Americans want and deserve improvements in offshore safety and this can be accomplished without putting thousands of people out of work and increasing the nation’s reliance on foreign sources of energy.”
Since I'm on vacation, I will leave it to you guys to draw the conclusions on capital flight.
3 comments:
The lifting of liability limits is basically the government refusing to subsidize the cleanup for petroleum company's disasters. Granted, the EPA should let these companies do what they need to do to clean up their own messes, instead of bogging everything down in rules...but adding insurance to the price of gas is mostly going to put the cost where it should be.
This is a major blow to the US economy.It is bad enough that US already bans offshore drilling on the East and West. Until recently, most people just assumed the Gulf of Mexico was the only US coast line containing oil. Throw in the ANWR Reserve in Alaska, and you have major resources not being utilized in the US.
Oh well, I guess the service economy will have to do the heavy lifting.
Hey everyone, lets go eat hamburgers and talk to our lawyers.
Here's a thought...How about letting them drill in 500' of water instead of forcing them to drill in 5000'.
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