In its last weeks in office, the shrub's administration is starting to make it happen by quietly starting the process of exploration and drilling off the coast of Virginia.
The move means that President Barack Obama and brand new interior secretary nominee Ken Salazar -- a Democratic senator from Colorado -- will have to jump feet-first into the decades-old debate over offshore oil drilling. It's an issue where the two disagreed at one point.
Wait. Virginia?
The state is ground zero for the drilling debate because of possible reserves off the coast and what energy experts see as a friendlier government than elsewhere.
The U.S. Interior Department has completed the first step, closing a public comment period on the proposal to lease 2.9 million acres of ocean to natural gas and oil companies. The pie-shaped area begins 50 miles off Virginia's coast, straight out from Virginia Beach on the south and across from Virginia's boundary on the Delmarva peninsula to the north.
"The East Coast really has not been looked at for 30 years," said Randall Luthi, who heads up the drilling plan as director of Interior's Minerals Management Service.
"Our best guess is that area could contain about 130 million barrels of oil and 1.14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," he said.
Such an oil find would be small compared with the estimated 40 billion barrels in the Gulf Coast. The natural gas is more substantial. But both are symbolic of a rare window of opportunity for the energy industry.
A two-fold ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling ended in just the past two months.
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They are still trying to keep on fucking us, folks!
This has got to stop - and with enough force and suddenness to give them all the most severe case of whip-lash that it is possible to get!
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