Monday: Another Important Deadline; here is how to easily comment!  Your OCS comment by Monday's deadline makes the legal record more supportive of reasonable OCS exploration for Alaska and the benefit of all Americans. A reasonable OCS program will help save Alaska's economy and protect America's economic recovery and national security.  Send us your comment and we will post it to make it Internet searchable!  -dh

Commentary:  Last week, the Obama Administration released its quarterly BOEMRE Ocean Science magazine (.pdf here – NGP Photo, BOEMRE Director Michael Bromwich).  It describes how it will provide more jobs for its environmental allies and increase obstacles to development.  The result is that oil and gas development will surely proceed at a slower rate while taxpayer funding of environmental scientists' (many of whom are 'activists' as we have seen in Alaska) political agendas and research demands will surely increase.  Some federal money is flowing to our own oil-dependent University of Alaska via grants while our own oil-dependent Alaska professors at recent hearings have urged the federal government to slow or stop oil and gas exploration and development until environmental researchers (i.e. they) have fully inventoried ecological resources embedded in Alaska's nearly endless coastal areas.  We are witnessing an effort to create full employment and economic security for a new paradigm: a powerful environmental/political cabal (video).  Do we exaggerate? Read page 4 of the newsletter and draw your own conclusion: 

"For the first time, we will have a Chief Environmental Officer, responsible for ensuring that environmental concerns are appropriately balanced in leasing and planning decisions and for helping set the scientific agenda relative to our oceans.  Another “first” is the creation of a new environmental enforcement  function  to  supplement our  ongoing   environmental compliance work. This new function will help strengthen the role of environmental review and analysis.  This growing workload, combined with the addition of new positions within the bureaus, calls for a significant number of new engineers and environmental scientists from multiple disciplines.  In light of these facts, we are expanding and strengthening our new bureaus by aggressively recruiting engineers, inspectors, and environmental scientists from universities and colleges recognized for excellence in those fields."
 
Note that the 'growing workload' described above results not from more permitting activity or more exploration and development, more jobs, more royalty revenue or less reliance on foreign imports–but on a self imposed priority of increasing the hiring of an environmental enforcement function that justifies, "aggressively recruiting engineers, inspectors and environmental scientists from universities…."    Also note the inconspicuous reference to setting, "…the scientific agenda relative to our oceans."  This is code word talk for how BOEMRE will be increasingly co-opted into supporting the White House Counsel on Environmental Quality's execution of Obama's Oceans Policy Executive Order, whose end game is restricting human use of oceans (and activities upstream into the heartland that affect the oceans) by creating a national 'zoning' process that will dramatically affect the future of the country and erode the freedom of our people.  
 
We've editorialized before on this wasteful, dangerous agenda.  If the Congress funds this outrage at a time when America should be cutting unnecessary spending, it will be converting a 'landlord and leasing and revenue producing' agency of the federal government into a mass production factory cranking out new battalions of highly paid environmental enforcers as revenue and job and wealth producing energy production from federal lands is outsourced more and more to oil and gas exporting nations.  -dh
 
P.S.  Congratulations Messrs. Obama, Salazar and Bromwich on doing a professional, surgical job at dismanteling wealth production, job creation, national security, America's way of life and a promising future for our children.  Shame on Congress if it does not interdict this domestic aggression before it captures all of the economic high ground in this insidious initiative against free enterprise and American prosperity.  (A modest reminder for why we stay motivated!)