America's oceans are open for oil drilling! But why not Lake Michigan?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/huppke/ct-met-offshore-drilling-ban-trump-huppke-20180105-story.htmlInterior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in a statement Thursday he plans to open 90 percent of America’s outer continental shelf to exploration and development, which will help with “powering America and achieving American Energy Dominance.â€
As expected, a bunch of hippy-flippy crustacean cuddlers — along with a number of Democratic and Republican governors who are presumably in the pocket of Big Dolphin — pitched a fit over this plan, which would do away with Obama administration restrictions that were put in place after BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill seven years ago. (It was nothing tens of billions of dollars and the acceptance of a 60 percent reduction in dolphin reproduction rates couldn’t take care of.)
Those plankton panderers worry that offshore drilling around Alaska and in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico might cause environmental damage to sea life and shoreline ecosystems, just because massive, oily drilling apparatuses would be plunked down among sea life near shoreline ecosystems. How ridiculous.
Diane Hoskins, campaign director for a marine conservation group called Oceana, which is “Ocean†spelled wrong, told the Associated Press: “Americans have seen the devastation that comes from offshore drilling. Will we allow Florida's white beaches or the popular and pristine Outer Banks to share a similar fate?â€...
...A 2005 U.S. Geological Survey of the American portion of the Great Lakes found that beneath all that water there are 312 million barrels of oil and 5.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Yet there’s nothing in the Interior Department’s plan to undo the current ban on oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes....