Celebrating its "all of the above" energy policy, the Obama Administration's Interior Department just finished auctioning all of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
Well, technically it was all of the remaining oil in the Western Gulf of Mexico Planning Area. From the press release, my emphasis in bold:
as part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy to continue to expand safe and responsible domestic energy production, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold an oil and gas lease sale that will make more than 20 million offshore acres available, and represents all unleased areas in the Western Gulf of Mexico Planning Area.
The auction started at 9 AM Central this morning in the Louisiana Superdome, apparently without any sense of irony.
Attention is primarily focused on the Obama administration's order suspending BP from new government contracts due to its lack of business integrity, "standard practice when a criminal case raises responsibility questions about a company." (BP did not participate in this lease, tweets the Gulf Restoration Network.)
But attention should be focused on whether "all of the above" is sane policy, or whether all of the fossil fuel companies - from Exxon and Shell down to the smallest wildcatter - are engaging in criminal acts by altering the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere. The Obama administration's actions in selling every last drop of oil in the Western Gulf is thus a good head start on the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook: the United States may soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's leading exporter of fossil fuels, but at the cost of the end of human civilization as we know it.