Gulf resident Thomas Clements will snag a bit of mic time today when the members of the National Oil Spill Commission meet for the second day of their fifth round of hearings. The commissioners have scheduled a limited number of public comment periods, and Clements will be one of only seven people to testify.
This isn’t his first trip to the nation’s capital. In August, he came to Washington, D.C., to speak at a series of briefings on Capitol Hill. At that time, thanks to the deepwater drilling moratorium, Clements, who co-owns a small business that produces metal parts for oilfield equipment, had no income. Not quite three months later, Clements still lives on his savings — and business is down by 54 percent for the year.
“Right now, we’re living off savings and that’s it,” he said Monday on a conference call. “It’s everything we’ve saved up. We’ve worked our entire lives to get to this point. … We were supposed to be in the black this year. We’re definitely still in the red and, in the future, we’re not too sure what it looks like even though the moratorium is lifted.”
Until the Interior Department begins to issue permits at a higher rate, Clements said, his business prospects will remain uncertain. While the drilling moratorium technically applied only to deepwater drilling, the Interior Department’s permits for shallow water drilling slowed, too — by 53 percent. The department has yet to pick up the pace. It continues to issue 3.8 fewer shallow-water drilling permits a month than it did the year leading up to the oil spill. No new deepwater permits have been issued since May.
“If business doesn’t get back to the way it was,” Clements said, “the machines that we leased will have to go back to who we leased them from and we’ll have to close our doors and go back to working for somebody else and watch our American dream literally be taken away from us.”
Before that happens, however, Clements will do whatever he can to forestall it.
“The federal government is not in my American Dream,” he said. “To be up here [in Washington] is what I’m compelled to do because I need to let them know that. ‘You’re not in my American Dream. We’ve worked hard our entire lives and in order for us to move forward, you have to get out of the way.’”
Whether the commission will listen to Clements remains to be seen. Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, the group that organized Clements’ initial trip to Washington through the project Save U.S. Energy Jobs, is skeptical.
“The pattern I’m noticing is the commission is looking at issues beyond just the spill and I’m afraid that it is part of what I call the assault on affordable energy or the war on affordable energy,” he said. “I see them making recommendations to the administration to further curtail drilling activities in the outer continental shelf or at least have extra layers. … To me, this is part and parcel of [the administration’s energy policy agenda] and, unfortunately, real people get caught in the crossfires.”
Tina Korbe is a reporter in the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
