Political Footballs Everywhere

An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle today awards the paper's first, but, they promise, not their last, "Shameless Award" to Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist. It's hard to know how they made this decision, there being so many choices just shouting for acclaim of this nature right now. Dr. Frist, though, is adeptly making lemonade out of the monstrous lemon that Hurricane Katrina left in the Gulf, using the shutting down of so many oil refineries and drilling platforms as an excuse to pimp for the coming vote on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This would diversify U.S. locations for obtaining crude oil, as we now see that the very enormity of operations in the Gulf makes the supply of oil from that area vulnerable to "weather events."

Drilling in the ANWR has been folded into a federal spending bill that will prevent it from being filibustered, and thus prevented from passing, as has happened several times previously. The Senate Energy committee was scheduled to meet September 14 to vote on language for the federal budget that would raise an estimated $2.4 billion from leasing tracts in ANWR to energy companies for oil exploration. This meeting has been indefinitely postponed, as the crafting of the budget bill has been delayed for at least a couple of weeks. The Republican Congress also is hoping to include drilling in banned Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) waters off Florida and other states. Currently, federal offshore drilling is allowed only in Alaska, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. A lot of natural gas and oil lie under parts of the OCS, but it has up til now been off-limits to drilling.

Energy prices are already soaring in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, giving industry another opportunity to try to gain access to off-shore resources. A coalition of more than 100 corporations and trade groups (big-hearted folk like BASF Corp and Dow Chemical Co) is lobbying Republican leaders to allow drilling in all off-limits waters. States like Florida that depend on revenue from tourists coming to the trademark beaches and blue waters are opposed to offshore drilling, but ve haf vays to make them change their tune about that: The offshore drilling measure would likely give states the right to opt out of the existing ban in exchange for a cut of drilling royalties that energy companies will pay. This is known as baksheesh in some other places, I think. Anyone who has ever spent time on the coasts of Louisiana and Texas knows that offshore drilling and oil refineries don't make for pretty postcard pictures.

So, Frist gets the first post-Katrina Shameless Award, and I do feel that the entire body of Republicans in Congress deserves to share it with him. Maybe he could have the trophy, they could get letters for their sweaters. This whole thing smells less like teen spirit than like sheer opportunism. As Richard Charter, co-chair of an environmental group called the National OCS Coalition said today: "This is not the time to be grabbing the political football out of the wreckage of the hurricane. This is an opportunistic effort to resurrect the parts of the energy bill that were too controversial to be passed before."

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