The Times-Picayune has a piece today on a lawsuit filed in an attempt to stop the first permitted offshore exploration plan since the Obama deepwater moratorium, with the plaintiff roster containing some of the usual suspects – and in particular, one of the groups whose co-founder is now up for the president’s nomination as Commerce Secretary…

“We now know that numerous human errors occurred to cause the largest oil disaster in our country’s history,” said David Pettit, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of four groups filing the suit. “But we also know that there were a number of premeditated actions industry and government regulators should have taken to protect against a disaster of this magnitude. Those steps still are not fully realized.”

NRDC, which sprang from the tree-hugging brain of John Bryson – who we have discussed a couple of times here recently – is a frequent obstructor of oil exploration, and they engage in this obstructionism on purely ideological grounds. NRDC hates oil, coal and natural gas and wants, as Bryson has publicly stated, to eliminate their use within our lifetimes.

Among the moonbats waddling into court today are another group of time-honored favorites, the Southern Environmental Law Center – whose claim to fame was their victory in a 2007 Supreme Court case which is now being used by the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Despite the fact that Obama’s Interior Department demanded the oil industry come up with a containment system to keep long-term leaks like the one from the Macondo well after the Deepwater Horizon incident last year – and the industry came up with not just one but two such systems – the SELC came out with a laughable claim that because Shell is drilling deeper than BP did at Macondo there could be even more oil spilled at its wells…

“Finding that drilling in waters far deeper than the Deepwater Horizon site has no significant impact when we know how damaging last year’s spill was defies common sense and echoes the irresponsible attitudes that preceded the disaster,” said Catherine Wannamaker, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Defenders of Wildlife and the Centers for Biological Diversity, who are similarly-oriented moonbat organizations, also joined the suit. The latter group managed to put out one of the lines of the year…

“The approval of Shell’s drilling is a test case for how the government will oversee risky drilling in the Gulf. As this lawsuit shows, so far we’re unimpressed. The government says it’s doing a thorough review, but we simply don’t see how you can conclude that a potential spill of a billion gallons of oil is ‘insignificant,’” said Deirdre McDonnell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

They’re unimpressed.

These people spend their time bitching about salt creek tiger beetles and white-nose syndrome in bats. To impress them with any form of commerce is impossible, least of all offshore drilling. And because the Interior filing contains a written worst-case scenario that as much as 405,000 barrels (17 million gallons) of oil a day for up to 128 days, which could result in a spill of 45 million barrels (1.89 billion gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico – and the BP spill was about 200 million gallons – they automatically assume the risk of the spill is significant.

Well, Miz Deirdre, how LIKELY is the spill? And how long would it take to get a containment system to the site to put an end to it? Certainly the geniuses at CBD and NRDC and the rest of these loon-gaggles did their homework and put an objective analysis together before filing the lawsuit, right?

The point here is that these people are dangerously insane. And while they’re entitled to their day in court, they’re certainly NOT entitled to cabinet positions.

John Bryson is one of these people. His organization is in the process of attempting to stop American energy production, after he’s already been caught making public statements opposing the use of hydrocarbons for energy at all.

And Obama wants him as Commerce Secretary.

Is there any question why the American economy, suffering from this brand of leadership, is rapidly declining? And is there any question that Obama and his cabal of neo-communists will have to be removed from office before anything will change?