Much to the chagrin of the left’s environmental base, Ken Salazar voiced Obama’s support for increased natural resource production in Alaska:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar came to Anchorage on Monday and said the Obama administration supports more oil drilling in Alaska, potentially including offshore Arctic development.

Salazar joined Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed for a meeting with Alaska business people and said the president’s feeling toward Arctic offshore drilling is “Let’s take a look at what’s up there and see what it is we can develop.”

It came with the standard try-to-please-everyone-speak that Presidents must use, showing concern for the unique challenges faced by drilling in the Artic Ocean. But the bottom line is Obama understands that this is something politically he must move forward with, as this is the low-hanging fruit in terms of sparking economic growth before the 2012 election. The support has come at a time when experts are increasingly discussing a potential “double-dip” recession and a continued stall in employment growth. Resource production is one area where the private sector really has “shovel ready” jobs, as it has added jobs throughout 2010-2011. Examples of specific projects in Alaska are here and here.

Increasing Alaskan drilling will also serve to prevent a shut-down of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline, which has been suffering from decreased production and could potentially shut down within the decade if production continues to decline. This would have severe negative effects on Alaskan GDP and employment, as Senator Lisa Murkowski notes:

Having stressed the horrifying effects that would potentially proceed if TAPS shut down, the senator suggested that Alaska’s greatest challenge today is to prevent the decommissioning of TAPS.

“TAPS is not just a pipeline, it’s our lifeline,” Lisa firmly remarked. “…Alaska’s oil production has declined by 36 percent since 2003, even as production in many parts of the Lower 48 has increased.”

The senator’s concerns not only stretched from this issue’s great impact on the state’s economic stability but also to the possible likelihood of North Dakota toppling Alaska from being the Nation’s second largest oil producing state next to Texas.

Sen. Murkowski believes that this is mainly caused by blockage of potential oil developers to gain access on Alaska’s federal lands while North Dakota welcome them with open arms. The result is gridlock for Alaska – boom for North Dakota, as what the senator said.

It seems likely that increased production in future years will prevent or delay a TAPS shut down. It also seems likely that Obama will not stand in the way of the KeystoneXL Pipeline delivering oil from Canada’s oil sands, despite strong opposition from wealthy actors.

The White House has finally realized that there is a close correlation between rising gas prices and dropping presidential popularity ratings, and so President Barack Obama has begun flailing around to try to deflect the blame.  Normally, I would sympathize with the President’s predicament.  Oil prices go up and down as a result of global supply and demand.  But in this case, I think the President deserves all the blame he’s going to get from the American people.

President Obama and his Administration have done everything they can to reduce domestic oil and natural gas production.  The Department of the Interior has cancelled leases on federal land in the West, delayed and denied permits necessary to start drilling on leases (which, remember, are awarded by competitive bid and have already been paid for), restored an executive moratorium on leasing most federal offshore areas, denied a permit to a lease off the Alaska coast for which Shell paid $2.2 billion and has already invested $4 billion, and placed a moratorium on new drilling in deep and shallow waters in the western Gulf of Mexico (the only major offshore oil field in the U. S.).  Since lifting the western Gulf moratorium earlier this year, Interior has been slow-walking the approval of drilling permits.  The President also steadfastly opposes opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration.

Although President Obama said in a recent speech that the U. S. was going to have to produce more oil, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration has projected that domestic oil production is going to decline significantly in the next few years as a result of Administration policies.  The dropoff would be much steeper were it not for the rapid expansion of production in the Bakken field in North Dakota and Montana.  The Obama Administration has not been able to slow production there because all the land is privately owned.

The fact is that if the Obama Administration reversed course and said from now on it’s going to be, “Drill, baby, drill,” the price of oil would drop immediately on world markets.  That’s because a great deal of the risk premium in current prices would be dissipated by the knowledge that major new production was going to be coming online in the next few years.

As Thompson Ayodele of the Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, a free market think tank in Nigeria, recently wrote in an op-ed, the United States is simply not doing its share to keep oil prices affordable for people around the world.  Instead of doing our share, President Obama this week asked Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production.  Last month while visiting Brazil, he said that he was glad Brazil was going to be able to supply more oil for America.  His conduct is simply shameful.

Shell announced today, for now, it must end a project to drill for oil off the coast of Northern Alaska, because of a decision made by an EPA appeals board to deny permits to acknowledge that Shell will meet air quality requirements. This is not part of ANWR.

Companies that drill for oil must go through extensive permitting processes and invest billions of dollars as payments for leasing the land, exploring for possible oil fields, equipment, etc. This is all done with the understanding that assuming they follow the letter of the law, there is a chance that this investment won’t be flushed down the toilet at the end of the tunnel. It appears that in this case Shell has followed procedure and that emissions will be below any standards required by the EPA:

The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.

“What the modeling showed was in communities like Kaktovik, Shell’s drilling would increase air pollution levels close to air quality standards,” said Eric Grafe, Earthjustice’s lead attorney on the case. Earthjustice was joined by Center for Biological Diversity and the Alaska Wilderness League in challenging the air permits.

Talk about moving the goalposts. They must have been really desperate to cancel this project given that this was the best straight-faced excuse they could muster. Not only do you have to be below the legally required emission limits but you must also not even be “close” to the limits, as defined by unelected officials, one of whom is a former attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Events like this are a prime example of why many in Congress want to strip authority from the EPA. Shell had reportedly invested over $4 billion in this project. When companies make investment decisions, consideration is given to whether or not bureaucrats can make arbitrary decisions to shut the project down halfway through a multi-year process. There are many other countries with natural resource reserves who do not subject economic activity to such unpredictable insanity, and in the eye of a corporation, after an event like this these locations begin to look more preferable to dealing with the United States.