This week, President Obama did something I like. (I know, you're thinking, "Even a secret Kenyan Muslim Socialist gets on base every once in while.") Actually, there were two things I liked. One, I can hardly wait to visit Cuba. It'll be like going into a time machine -- only warmer. While I realize he had help from my favorite pope, I'm giving the president credit for not continuing to do the same thing we've been doing for 50 years and expecting a different result. You know, the definition of insanity.
The second thing was, Obama took offshore oil and gas drilling in Bristol Bay off the table for the foreseeable future, and maybe forever. Woot! If you noticed in the last election, more Alaskans voted to protect the salmon in Bristol Bay than voted for anything else, except for the minimum wage increase. It's one thing most Alaskans agree on. Salmon matter.
The decision prompted a few of our brilliant conservative minds to weigh in.
"He doesn't have jurisdiction," they protested. Um, yeah, he does. These are federal waters and he's the federal boss.
"This is tyranny," another cried. Would you recognize real tyranny if it bit you in the hiney? I think not.
"State's rights," they howled. What about the rights of the other 49 states to whom those waters also belong?
Here's why the president can, did and should be thanked for protecting our resource.
In 1988, after litigating for 92 years, the Interior Department held oil and gas lease sales in Bristol Bay. Less than a year later, the Exxon Valdez tanker delivered environmental and economic disaster to Alaska.
The oil spill got the attention of the world, but especially Alaska fishermen. While Exxon and Veco carried out their inept oil cleanup efforts, Alaskans started trying to figure out how to get back those Bristol Bay leases.
The Bristol Bay Protection Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives with bipartisan sponsorship. Nothing says, "Oh, we made a mistake" like paying almost $100 million to oil companies to re-purchase leases that should have never been offered, but that's what the federal government did.
Usually a backtrack like that stays somewhere in our collective memory, but apparently this one was lost on the Bush administration. In June 2007, the Interior Department approved a five-year plan for outer continental shelf oil and gas leasing. Who was to run that program? The Minerals Management Service. Yeah. You may know it as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, the name the service adopted after BP's deadly, gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For those who weren't paying attention back then, the regulators at MMS facilitated that disaster by operating it as essentially a subsidiary of the oil industry. According to a report by the department's inspector general, MMS employees were literally and figuratively in bed with the industry. Besides canoodling twixt the sheets and doing drugs with oil company executives, MMS employees were content to let the industry regulate itself.
So, not happy with a drunk, hungry, horny fox guarding the hen house, President Obama took Bristol Bay out of the federal leasing program in 2010.
In video remarks this week about his decision to take the 5.7 million acres off the auction block, he said Bristol Bay is "too precious for us to be putting out to the highest bidder." He explained to Americans who haven't been reached by Alaska's seafood marketing campaigns that this is a food issue. Bristol Bay provides 40 percent of the nation's seafood.
Once again, our Kenyan Muslim Socialist indulged his crazy impulse to follow a course of prudence and rationality. If only we had someone prepared to take the same approach to Pebble mine. What we've got instead are selfish, money-hungry, short-timers from the Pebble Partnership suing the federal government, which had seemed, after years of study and hearings, about to conclude that a massive gold and copper mine, with its giant lake of poison water, shouldn't be built on salmon-rearing headwaters of Bristol Bay.
Now, thanks to the foreign corporations underwriting Pebble, there's an injunction blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from protecting the land that feeds Bristol Bay. The judge will rule in the case sometime early next year.
Obama has acted to protect the waters of Bristol Bay. Now we just need to do the same onshore.
Shannyn Moore is a radio broadcaster.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.
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