Gulf Restoration Network Doesn’t Care About People In South Louisiana
Last week, Sen. David Vitter put a hold on Dr. Scott Doney’s nomination to be the head scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Vitter’s hold was in retaliation for the bait-and-switch maneuver the Obama administration pulled on Louisiana’s other senator Mary Landrieu, who had placed a hold on OMB director Jacob Lew’s nomination as a response to the White House’s offshore drilling moratorium.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management head Michael Bromwich promised Landrieu, in return for her lifting her hold on Lew, that permits for offshore drilling would begin to accelerate, and meetings in Louisiana between Bromwich and oil and gas industry representatives would be forthcoming to hammer out a way to resurrect that industry after six months of government-imposed inactivity following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Landrieu lifted her hold, and the meetings were held, all right. And shortly following those, Interior imposed a requirement that an environmental study be done prior to each deepwater offshore drilling permit being approved - a requirement making it almost impossible to complete the permitting process in a cost-effective way.
Based on those circumstances, and a report by the Inspector General of the Department of Interior which concluded that the moratorium itself was essentially fraudulently presented as the product of review and approval by a panel of the nation’s top engineers when those engineers specifically disapproved a drilling moratorium as a response to the spill, Vitter announced his hold.
And Vitter also required that, in order to get his hold on Doney lifted, two figures the IG report names as players in generating the report announcing the moratorium – White House energy/climate czar Carol Browner and Department of Interior counsel Steve Black – be hauled in front of a Senate Small Business subcommittee hearing to testify about the creation of that moratorium report.
With us so far? To sum up, thousands of Louisiana jobs are on the line as a drilling moratorium disapproved by the nation’s top engineers, beaten in federal court and supposedly lifted by the White House, continues. Louisiana’s Democrat senator fought the moratorium with a hold on the OMB director’s nomination, and she was essentially tricked into lifting it. And now the state’s Republican senator has entered the fight with another hold and upped the stakes by seeking to hold the feet of Browner, who it appears ordered up the moratorium, to the fire in a Senate committee.
What we’re seeing is Louisiana’s senators attempting to fight Washington’s attempts to kill Louisiana livelihoods through political means.
You would think all Louisianans would be rooting for Vitter, like him or not, since our neighbors’ livelihoods and our economy (and ailing state budget, too) are at stake.
You’d think wrong.
There is such a thing as the Gulf Restoration Network. As you might imagine, it’s an environmentalist outfit, and as you might also imagine it’s in the midst of an end-of-year fundraising drive.
And the Gulf Restoration Network has a “campaign director” by the name of Aaron Viles, who is described on the organization’s website thusly:
Aaron leads several of our campaigns, including our effort to ensure sustainable fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, our work on global warming issues in the Gulf, and our campaign to protect important habitats, such as cypress forests throughout the Gulf. He has B.S. in Biology with an emphasis in Conservation, Ecology and Evolution from the University of Washington and worked for many years as a Campaign Director/Organizer for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Why should you care about a crunchy non-profit functionary transplanted from the Pacific Northwest? Because he’s in the news today spewing bile about Vitter’s hold on Doney.
“Senator Vitter flagging the administration’s use of science is about as credible as Congressman Bill Jefferson weighing in on ethics rules,” Viles said.
“From doubting the science of human-influenced global warming, to seeking earmarks for anti-evolution propaganda in classrooms, Senator Vitter has a long history of sacrificing science for naked political posturing. Add this effort to that list.”
Sounds a bit partisan, doesn’t it? After all, it’s not like Vitter has defeated Doney’s nomination. He’s just holding it up a little in an effort to get the administration to do what it pledged to do and to get some answers about Browner’s funny business in instituting the moratorium in the first place. That shouldn’t earn Vitter this kind of stinging rebuke.
But then when an organization’s website contains verbiage like “oil and oceans don’t mix,” it becomes patently obvious that the Gulf Restoration Network isn’t just some group looking to promote science and feed hungry turtles – they’re promoting junk science and seeking to keep Louisiana families hungry by grinding the oil and gas industry to a halt.
Nobody supports oil spills, and nobody suggests that BP’s business practices in advance of the Deepwater Horizon spill were proper. But the rest of the operators in the offshore oil business didn’t kill 11 employees and discharge millions of barrels of product into the Gulf. In fact, the overall record of safety among Gulf operators is pretty good – BP notwithstanding.
But while we can all agree that promoting safety and environmentally sound practices in the oil patch are important, shutting down oil drilling in the Gulf hurts real people and real families. By its attacks on Vitter for the sin of fighting the administration’s moratorium-turned-permitorium, Viles and his operation have shown themselves insensitive to the plight of hard-working folks throughout South Louisiana who are having a bleak holiday season already.
Lots of people who call themselves conservatives are either not, or have been suckered by this bunch. They are also well connected with the anarchists in New Orleans through First Church of Unitarian Universalists on the corner of Jefferson & Claiborne.
Scott, glad to see you’re on to these wackos. For years Viles and this organization have delivering a Luddite drumbeat that translates neatly into a post-Marxist view of the world and that worships at the significant man-made global warming altar. Concerning Louisiana, they’ve had something stupid to say about everything from building roads in national forests to coastal restoration to this issue. Good for you to call them out.
Luddite is the best adjective for them in a kind way.
I would imagine that they would rather depend on wood, water, wind and solar energy and have a life expectancy of 30 years, just like cavemen.
Dear McA,
Your article is very well written, and seems to be much more thoughtful than some I’ve seen. I tend to be very pro-environmental, and this moratorium issue is a bit complicated, but I try to keep my mind open to all sides. A couple of questions though… 1) Where was Vitter over the past years when so many big oil companies packed up their bags & took lots of good-paying jobs to Houston? 2) If you read Bob Marshall’s article in the Sunday paper, you’d see there’s certainly more than just one side to this issue… and I don’t think you can truthfully say Bob Marshall “doesn’t care about the people in South Louisiana. 3) With the rash of misplaced violence we’ve seen, it’s worrisome that one blogger congratulates you for being “on to the wackos” and another posts the specific corner location of a liberal church… Why the need to state the exact location? If you remember, it was a Unitarian church in Tennessee that had a “conservative” burst in and kills folks, stating “all liberals should be killed because they are ruining the country.”
Hey, I’m a liberal, I’m pro-environmentalist, and I believe in science and evolution… But I have voted for Republicans (as recently as this year), I try to get all sides, I try not to vilify the opposition too much, and I keep an open mind, something I hope we all can do better at… liberals & conservatives alike. We surely don’t want to end up like one of those countries that doesn’t share the American pluralistic view of freedom of expression and press. Best wishes to you & your family on the holidays!
That question may better be answered by people like Edwin Edwards and the Morials. Most of those office jobs departed New Orleans during the 80′s & 90′s. However, lots of good paying jobs have been created at Port Fourchon, Houma, Morgan City and New Iberia during that same time period. Also, the Lafayette Metro Area continued its expansion and growth with almost every oil company having an office in that area as well as a large service company presence.
Yes many environmentalists are whackos who exist on junk science, and there are juries gullible enough to believe them. Were you aware of that the two largest private backers of GloWarming were Enron & BP. Maybe BP should have spent more money on safety measures instead of feel good, “we are care” activities and solar panels.
Still hear nothing but crickets.
Well…
1. I’m not sure what Vitter’s role in the oil companies’ pullbacks to Houston could have been, since he was barely even a state legislator at the time the last of those relocations occurred. Those were a function of a contraction in the oil and gas industry given low oil prices from the mid-1980′s onward and the diminution of Gulf drilling throughout in the 1990′s thanks to Clinton’s EPA secretary and current Obama climate/energy tsarina Carol Browner squelching permits whenever possible (the offshore rig count dipped to a modern low of 499 rigs in 1999).
You’ll get nothing but crickets when supposed scientific minded statists are faced with the facts.
And 3. Your insinuation that there is some kind of outsized danger of conservative violence is unsupported by any evidence, bigoted and offensive. In fact, the reason the commenter mentioned the anarchist crowd at that church is the widely-discussed connection between that crowd and the Iron Rail Book Collective, which was responsible for orchestrating a demonstration outside Brennan’s Restaurant in April at a Bobby Jindal fundraiser which ultimately resulted in a violent outburst where several demonstrators savagely beat Jindal’s head fundraiser and her boyfriend and put both in the hospital. It’s quite rich for a lefty such as yourself to smear conservatives as violent when in fact your ideological brethren have persistently resorted to physical attacks over the course of the past year.
2. Didn’t read Marshall’s piece. If he suggests that eliminating the offshore oil & gas industry is a good idea then he absolutely doesn’t care about the people in South Louisiana, since if you’re not a college graduate the offshore rigs and the industries which support them are probably your best opportunity to earn a good living in this part of the state.
Who knew that Erin Brockovich could be a fraud? http://reason.com/blog/2010/12/13/erin-brockovich-town-shows-no