Drill Baby Drill

Motoring advocates around the nation cheered President Barack Obama’s reversal of a Reagan era moratorium on Atlantic and Florida Gulf Coast oil drilling yesterday. Read below for the background and Motolicious endorsement.

Background

In 1981, Congress voted to stop the sale of leases off the coast of Northern California. Republican president Ronald Reagan signed this initial drilling moratorium into law. In 1983, the moratoria on offshore leases were continued in Northern and Central California and were expanded to include Southern California, the Florida Gulf Coast, and the Georges Bank off the coast of New England. Subsequent bills extended the drilling moratorium through 1989. In 1990, President George H. Bush renewed the drilling ban another decade through executive order; President Clinton extended this through 2012. President George W. Bush (mostly) honored Clinton’s executive order — the Bush administration negotiated relinquishing oil leases off of the Florida panhandle while authorizing a small expansion of drilling off of the Central Gulf Coast.

Change We Can Believe In!

President Obama, who campaigned on a platform of Hope and Change, reversed nearly 30 years of Federal policy in yesterday’s announcement at Andrews Air Force Base. The changed policy opens up an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil for extraction, which at current rates of consumption is about a 1,000 day supply in the United States, or the equivalent of one election cycle.

Motorlicious heartily endorses drilling and exploration in the United States of America, as long as it’s in somebody else’s backyard.

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