Offshore drilling would continue under most 2016 hopefuls

The Washington Examiner reached out to several candidates who hail from coastal states that would be most affected by drilling. All were asked the same questions: Whether they supported Arctic drilling, opening all of the Atlantic outer continental shelf or just part of it, allowing drilling off the Pacific coast, ending the moratorium in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, or banning offshore drilling altogether.

The Obama administration earlier this month gave conditional approval to Royal Dutch Shell to restart its Arctic drilling plans, a move that drew opposition from the president’s environmental allies. The White House also has proposed allowing drilling in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time since the 1980s, though it kept the Pacific Ocean and the eastern Gulf of Mexico off-limits.

The candidates’ responses — or lack thereof — hinted that the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. might not change course.

The issue is a matter of national significance. A May poll of South Carolina voters by Consumers Energy Alliance, a coalition of business and energy industry groups, showed 63 percent supported Arctic drilling compared with 32 percent who opposed it. Eighty-five percent of the Palmetto State voters polled said energy issues will play an important role in the 2016 election.

Likely Republican candidate Jeb Bush has taken a nuanced position on the issue. The former Florida governor in 1999 opposed Chevron’s plan to drill in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola Beach. But he reversed his stance in 2006 when he proposed including a 100-mile buffer from Jacksonville to Pensacola while opening new acreage in the central Gulf of Mexico.

A Politico Magazine story this month said that Bush now “opposes” offshore drilling. A spokeswoman for Bush said the article was a “misrepresentation” of Bush’s position.

“Expanding domestic energy production is key to ensuring America’s energy security, and with input from state leaders, we now have a chance to create a national energy plan to reform the leasing system to expand drilling in areas where it is safe,” the spokeswoman said of Bush’s stance.

The campaign for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, did not return a request for comment. But John Podesta, the chairman of her campaign and a former Obama climate adviser, has said climate change will be at the top of Clinton’s agenda.

Still, when she was New York’s junior senator, Clinton sided with Republicans and oil-patch Democrats in 2006 by voting for the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened an additional 8 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling. The bill, which was signed into law, also called for sending 37 percent of the revenue to Gulf states rather than the general Treasury.

There are, of course, candidates at each end of the spectrum. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent running as a Democrat, would block all offshore oil and gas development.

And Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced legislation last year that would give “deference” to coastal states to determine whether to approve drilling, though the bill kept some waters in the North Atlantic and the North Aleutians Basin near Alaska off limits. Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told the Examiner that the bill served as his energy platform.

It’s early in the race, so candidates are still sorting out their stances. But past positions and votes give little indication that White House hopefuls would stop offshore drilling altogether.

With environmental groups keen on making climate change a national issue and past GOP platforms resting on “drill, baby, drill” policies, the issue likely will be contentious heading into 2016. Even President Obama, largely applauded by environmental groups for his climate agenda, is taking heat on offshore drilling.

Environmental groups complained the president was kowtowing to oil and gas interests and throwing asunder his commitment to combat climate change with his Shell approval. Green groups want to block Arctic drilling because they say a spill in the fragile ecosystem would be difficult to clean up, and that accessing those hydrocarbons would deepen dependence on fossil fuels. Last week, protesters took to kayaks in a Seattle harbor to demonstrate against Shell’s Arctic-bound Polar Pioneer drilling rig.

Drilling opponents have said another disaster such as the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, in which 11 workers died and more than 4 million barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, is inevitable.

That’s the view former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley took in a February op-ed in the New York Times. The potential Democratic candidate slammed Obama’s draft five-year offshore drilling proposal that would put the Atlantic on the market for the first time since the 1980s, though it didn’t include the coast of Maryland.

“To allow drilling off the Atlantic Coast is to willfully forget Deepwater’s awful lesson even as the economic, environmental and public health consequences continue to reverberate in communities along the gulf,” O’Malley wrote. “If a disaster of Deepwater’s scale occurred off the Chesapeake Bay, it would stretch from Richmond to Atlantic City.”

The accident occurred when Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was vying for his Senate seat. At the time, he told the St. Petersburg Times that “offshore drilling is not going away, because America and the world depends heavily on petroleum products.” But Rubio voted against a 2012 transportation bill that would have been funded by opening offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific as well as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Rubio campaign did not return a request for comment.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s administration has gone to court to fight the use of seismic air guns to test for oil and gas deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, saying it would harm his state’s fisheries and marine mammals. While not denouncing offshore drilling, the Republican governor and possible presidential candidate said in 2011 that “it’s incumbent that we take all necessary measures to protect these treasures and to sustain our coastal communities and the diverse economies they support.”

But other East Coast candidates support drilling in the Atlantic. Jim Webb, the ex-Democratic senator for Virginia, has long supported offshore drilling because he sees it as an economic boon for the Old Dominion. He also criticized the six-month Gulf drilling moratorium Obama imposed after the BP spill, saying the president “over-reacted.”

Like many GOP candidates, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wants to enhance the states’ role in deciding whether to allow drilling off their shores. He has previously sponsored legislation enabling drilling between 10 and 50 miles off the Palmetto State’s coastline. The state also would receive 37.5 percent of the revenue, the same rate for Gulf states under the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is of the same mold. Mike Reed, the GOP governor’s spokesman, referred the Examiner to the energy plan Jindal released last year through his America Next nonprofit organization.

The plan called for a system “to allow states to opt-in to new energy exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf, with revenue-sharing for those states who decide to participate. States should be allowed to decide whether to utilize the energy resources located off their shores.”