Political calculations influenced Obama’s stance on offshore drilling

In late March, President Obama announced that his administration would open up areas of the U.S. coastline -- along the Eastern Seaboard specifically -- to offshore drilling. His decision instituted some ideas from the oil-friendly George W. Bush administration (though, unlike his predecessor, Obama didn't favor opening up protected lands in Alaska up for drilling).

Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry was thrilled at the news, while many environmentalists and East Coast residents were apprehensive.

At a town hall event in early April, when a man from Charlotte, N.C., raised the specter of environmental damage in connection with the administration's expanded drilling plans, Obama rushed to allay such worries. "It turns out, by the way, the oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," he said. "They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the rigs."

Well, so much for that.

Days later, the Deepwater Horizon would explode in a ball of fire -- and the rest, as they say, is history. In the wake of the devastating BP spill, Obama would do an about-face and issue a sweeping moratorium on drilling in deep water, so as to extensively review the industry and the regulatory protocols that governed it.

As it turns out, the Obama White House hadn't done its due diligence before floating the plan to open up the Atlantic coastline to drilling, according to a report by the Washington Post's Michael Leahy and Juliet Eilperin. They write that "fundamental questions weren't pursued because top administration officials generally accepted the conventional view of the industry's safety record. They were focused on the environmental issues -- how drilling and a possible spill would affect sensitive habitats -- and not on the engineering risks of exploration." The two reporters arrived at this assessment, they say, after "dozens of interviews with people directly involved" with formulating the proposal.

Leahy and Eilperin also report that Capitol Hill politicking helped shape the administration's priorities on drilling policy. At the time, passing a climate-change bill was a main Obama objective and the White House believed that the expansion of drilling would provide the basis for a "grand bargain" that would help them pick up Republican support for the climate bill. In the words of Leahy and Eilperin, "a climate-change bill was the holy grail" for Obama.

Obama had tapped South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham as an influential Republican ally to push for the grand bargain. And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was also keen to help deliver on the plan. As the Post reports, word quickly spread around Capitol Hill that Obama was "dangling expanded drilling in return for Republican support on the climate-change legislation." Many Democrats -- such as Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Robert Menendez of New Jersey -- were unhappy about the compromise.

"You've lost a vote for climate change," Menendez told Salazar in a voicemail message the day before the plan for drilling expansion was announced.

Of course, the BP oil disaster changed everything -- and on Tuesday, with the midterm elections just around the corner, the Obama administration announced that it was lifting its moratorium on deepwater drilling. Any hopes for a bipartisan climate change bill are good and dead at the moment.

Meanwhile, oil companies, which had their exploration ambitions scaled back by the BP spill and the moratorium, are moving full speed ahead to open exploration someplace else: Iraq.

(Photo: Getty Images)