Source: OneNewsNow
A non-profit energy research organization is speaking out against the Obama administration for continuing a moratorium on deepwater, offshore oil drilling.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said last week that the moratorium on offshore drilling will continue until he feels comfortable that the risks associated with drilling have been reduced. But Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research calls the suspension "an assault on both common sense and energy security."
"The original moratorium was not only not necessary, it wasn't even legal. The federal courts have rejected it twice," Kish points out. "So the real sad thing about this is that this is having impacts on tens of thousands of families of those people who are being displaced from their jobs, who are proud to be doing what they normally do, which is going to work every day [and] producing energy for America to make us stronger so we don't have to depend on other parts of the world for our energy."
Speaking recently on American Family Radio's Today's Issues program, Sterling Burnett with the National Center for Policy Analysis said oil spills like the recent one in the Gulf of Mexico are rare. He also stated that in the decades of drilling, less than one-tenth of one percent of oil pumped offshore actually ended up in the water.
Kish agrees with Burnett, noting that those are the government's own statistics.