Legion of Angels News Archive

WASHINGTON (CNN) – President Bush will announce Monday he is lifting an executive order banning offshore oil drilling, the White House said.

The move is largely symbolic because there is also a federal law banning offshore drilling.

Bush has been pushing Congress to repeal the law passed in 1981.

“There is no excuse for delay,” the president said in a Rose Garden statement last month.

“In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply here at home,” Bush said, adding that there is no more pressing issue for many Americans than gas prices.

Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, signed the executive order in 1990 banning offshore drilling.

The president plans to announce his decision at 1:30 p.m. in the Rose Garden.

The issue has gained prominence in the presidential race. Sen. John McCain recently announced he supported offshore oil drilling, reversing his previous stance.

Sen. Barack Obama wants to keep the ban in place.

Experts say offshore oil drilling would not have an immediate impact on oil prices because oil exploration takes years.

“If we were to drill today, realistically speaking, we should not expect a barrel of oil coming out of this new resource for three years, maybe even five years, so let’s not kid ourselves,” said Fadel Gheit, oil and gas analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. Equity Capital Markets Division.

But it almost certainly would be profitable.

Candida Scott, an oil industry researcher at Cambridge Research Associates, said oil needs to be priced at $60 a barrel or more to justify deep-shelf drilling. With oil now selling for $145 a barrel, companies are almost assured of profiting from offshore drilling, Scott said.

In his statement last month, Bush also renewed his demand that Congress allow drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, clear the way for more refineries and encourage efforts to recover oil from shale in areas such as the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

The White House estimates that there are 18 billion barrels of oil offshore that have not been exploited because of state bans, 10 billion to 12 billion in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Green River Basin.

Source — CNN

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, dismissing the recommendations of its top experts, rejected regulating the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming Friday, saying it would cripple the U.S. economy.

In a 588-page federal notice, the Environmental Protection Agency made no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people’s health or welfare, reversing an earlier conclusion at the insistence of the White House and officially kicking any decision on a solution to the next president and Congress.

The White House on Thursday rejected the EPA’s suggestion three weeks earlier that the 1970 Clean Air Act can be both workable and effective for addressing global climate change. The EPA said Friday that law is “ill-suited” for dealing with global warming.

“If our nation is truly serious about regulating greenhouse gases, the Clean Air Act is the wrong tool for the job,” EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told reporters. “It is really at the feet of Congress.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino said that President Bush is committed to further reductions but that there is a “right way and a wrong way to deal with climate change.”

The wrong way is “to sharply increase gasoline prices, home heating bills and the cost of energy for American businesses,” she said. “The right way, as the president has proposed, is to invest in new technologies.”

At the just concluded G-8 summit at Toyako, Japan, Bush and other world leaders called for a voluntary 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases worldwide by 2050 but offered no specifics on how to do it.

In a setback for Bush, the Supreme Court ruled last year that the government had the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant. Bush has consistently opposed doing that.

Congress hasn’t found the will to do much about the problem either. Supporters of regulating greenhouse gases could get only 48 votes in the 100-member Senate last month. The House has held several hearings on the problem but no votes on any bill addressing it. Both major presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, have endorsed variations of the approach rejected by the Senate.

In its voluminous document, the EPA laid out a buffet of options on how to reduce greenhouse gases from cars, ships, trains, power plants, factories and refineries. On Friday, Johnson called the proposals drafted by his staff as “putting a square peg into a round hole” and he said moving forward would be irresponsible.

“One point is clear: The potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land,” Johnson wrote in the document’s preface Friday.

Attorneys general from several states called the administration’s findings inadequate.

“While we appreciate the effort that EPA staff made in putting together today’s documents, the time has long passed for open-ended pondering — what we need now is action,” said Attorney General Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, which initiated the Supreme Court case.

The EPA said it had encountered resistance from the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Transportation departments, as well as the White House, that made it “impossible” to respond in a timely fashion to the Supreme Court decision.

“Our agencies have serious concerns with this suggestion because it does not fairly recognize the enormous — and, we believe, insurmountable — burdens, difficulties, and costs, and likely limited benefits, of using the Clean Air Act” to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the secretaries of the four agencies wrote to the White House on Wednesday.

Discussing the benefits from reducing greenhouse gases, the EPA said doing nothing more than increasing fuel efficiency standards under last year’s energy bill will reduce the harmful effects of global warming by $340 billion to $830 billion over the next three decades.

In a May draft of Friday’s notice, the EPA had put the benefits to society of further reducing greenhouse gases at $2 trillion.

Friday’s action caps months of often tense negotiations between EPA scientists and the White House over how to address global warming under the major federal air pollution law. It ended with the White House and other agencies citing “extraordinary circumstances” and refusing to review the draft forwarded in June by EPA scientists.

The document released Friday is much more cautious than a determination made in December by the agency that found greenhouse gases endangered welfare, and it also appears to counteract findings of drafts released in May and June that found the Clean Air Act could be an effective tool for reducing greenhouse gases.

“EPA’s approach to this has been completely thrown out by the White House, which is only attempting to stall any kind of cleanup,” said Frank O’Donnell,” president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental advocacy group. “It sounds like the Bush administration is trying to ignore the Supreme Court and to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Rep. Edward Markey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Global Warming, called the administration’s findings “the bureaucratic equivalent of saying that the dog ate your homework.”

“The White House has taken an earnest attempt by their own climate experts to respond to the Supreme Court’s mandate to address global warming pollution and turned it into a Frankenstein’s monster,” said Markey, D-Mass.

Industry groups still expressed concern Friday over some of the suggestions included in the document, which will be the basis for a future action rule under a new president more inclined to take tougher action to address global warming.

“Our point on this is that EPA has set forth a road map which literally throws the entire way which we manage the environment and economy in complete turmoil,” said Bill Kovacs, vice president of the Environment, Technology and Regulatory Affairs Division at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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On the Net:

EPA Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/pdf/anpr20080711.pdf

EPA Fact Sheet: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/anprfs.htm

Source — Yahoo!

WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court on Friday set back the White House’s efforts to keep the names of its visitors secret.

The three-member panel of judges threw out the government’s appeal in a case brought by a watchdog group trying to find out how often prominent religious conservatives visited the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence.

The Bush administration was appealing a federal judge’s decision last December that the government should gather the records the watchdog group wants.

Despite the ruling against the White House, public disclosure of visitor logs is by no means assured.

The Bush administration can still raise a variety of legal arguments in an attempt to keep the identities of White House visitors secret.

But appeals court Judge David Tatel said the document request from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is narrowly drawn and can be processed.

Handling CREW’s request would not require the president, Cheney or their staffs to sort through mountains of files, said Tatel.

The burden “should prove minimal,” he added.

The case now goes back to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who ruled that White House visitor logs are public documents subject to disclosure requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Bush administration argued that releasing those documents would trample on the president’s right to seek private, confidential advice.

White House calendars are not normally considered public, but Lamberth said logs maintained by the Secret Service are not covered by that exemption.

While Friday’s ruling was a loss for the Bush White House, the wait for the ruling delayed activity in the case for seven months, bringing the administration that much closer to the time when President Bush leaves office.

In the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal several years ago, the Secret Service acquiesced as the White House and Cheney’s office took control of the White House visitor records.

President Clinton’s political opponents made extensive use of 1990s Secret Service logs documenting White House visits by donors, fundraisers, pardon-seekers, and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Tatel, the judge who wrote the appeals court opinion, is a Clinton appointee. The other two members of the panel were Chief Judge David Sentelle, an appointee of President Reagan; and appeals judge Merrick Garland, a Clinton appointee.

CREW brought its lawsuit for the records against the Department of Homeland Security, of which the Secret Service is a part.

The appeals judges rejected the Bush administration’s reliance on a 2004 Supreme Court ruling that the judicial branch of government should hesitate before putting the president or vice president in the position of having to invoke specific privileges. The appeals court said it found that separation-of-powers argument unpersuasive in the current case.

In the 2004 ruling in favor of the Bush administration, Cheney himself was being sued for records of meetings between company executives and lobbyists and the vice president’s energy task force, which drafted a report highly supportive of the energy industry’s agenda.

Source — Yahoo!