A November decision by the federal judiciary’s San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unfortunately received little attention in the national media despite the fact it could well prove to be among the most damaging ever to America’s energy needs. Worse still is the fact this was only the latest in a long string of devastating Ninth Circuit decisions on energy issues. As the Institute for Energy Research’s Thomas Pyle recently explained on SFGate.com, the Ninth Circuit “took the extraordinary step of stopping congressionally approved, federally leased energy exploration in Alaska’s remote Beaufort Sea, citing the possibility that travel routes of bowhead whales may be diverted as a result of it. The upshot? The U.S. economy lost out on hundreds of thousands of new jobs and billions of barrels of new domestic energy supply. But at least we saved the whales from having to take a detour.”
Pyle further notes that the number of federal court suits filed by environmental and other liberal activist groups seeking to stop development of U.S. domestic energy resources has skyrocketed in recent years, zooming from 167 annually during the late 1990s to more than 1,100 every year since 2000. More than a few of these suits are financed in part by federal tax dollars, courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal grant programs that help finance environmental activism. Meanwhile, U.S. energy dependence upon OPEC states in the Middle East and international energy thugs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez grows.
It is not yet clear whether the incoming administration of Barack Obama will seek to reinstate the executive and legislative branch bans on energy exploration and production in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and other areas that had been off-limits since 1982. Bush declined to renew the executive branch ban, while Congress succumbed to massive public pressure and allowed the congressional ban to expire in September.
As 2008 closes, two things are certain on the energy issue. First, if Obama and Democratic congressional leaders don’t renew the OCS drilling ban, they will be condemned by environmental extremists. As unpleasant as that might be, though, it will be nothing compared to the political firestorm that reinstating the ban will incite among the millions of Americans who simply cannot afford a return of $4-per-gallon gas. Second, Congress must take whatever measures are needed to prevent federal courts like the Ninth Circuit from stopping development of domestic energy resources. Anything less than these two measures will be an abdication of responsibility.
