What will the impact of the moratorium on oil and gas leases mean for Louisiana? With Keystone XL on ice, what projects will environmentalists target next? Newell spoke to Dr Loren Scott to get some expert information - Scott is a Professor Emeritus at LSU and is President of Loren C. Scott & Associates.
“I was reading several articles over the weekend - these folks feel like they’re got the momentum,” Newell began. “There’s a multitude of projects that are early onset, some are midterm and some just close to being completed, all within the crosshairs, and these people are trying to shut them down.”
“Just think about the blows that the oil and gas industry has taken,” Scott said. “We've had the moratorium on drilling and leases on public lands and waters - that's really important. That last word is very important, because that includes virtually all of the Gulf of Mexico, there's a moratorium on lease sales from the Gulf waters. People really need to take a good look at who Biden has put up as the Interior Secretary, the person who's going to be over all these drilling, permits, all the lease sales and that sort of thing. Deb Haaland is a very scary person. She has called repeatedly for an all out fracking ban. She's a supporter of the Green New Deal, wants a total ban on all drilling on public lands and waters, wants to abolish the internal combustion engine. So she's kind of AOC on steroids, aimed right at the gas industry. This is not good news for Louisiana.”
“I don't want to get all wrapped up in conspiracies, but you don't hear any of this out of mainstream media, they aren’t talking about where some of the folks that he's picked for cabinet,” Newell said. “Some of them that I've seen are really scary. They are the ones that are going to be doing the operational work, turning the wrenches day in and day out and will have a significant influence in these organizations for the next four years.”
“Historically what has happened is that the Secretary of the Interior has delegated the authority to evaluate all drilling, permits, and lease sales and things like that to the career workers down in the Bureau of Safety and EnvironmentalEnforcement. But what the acting Secretary did is he said, we're not going to let those people make the final say - the final say is going to belong to one of nine political appointees. So basically what they did is they revoked the authority of these people. And now we have these nine political appointees, who've never looked probably at a drilling permit in their lives and have this kind of religious zeal about climate change. So that makes it even worse and even more tenuous going forward... not everything is bad with regard to the future of the government's code, but what's going on right now is, the United States is going to get hammered by this.”
“There's five, six major oil producing States that provide a lot to the economy,” Newell continued. “Transitioning and pivoting to clean energy - they talk about it as though it's an easy transition, to go from a fossil fuel economy to that economy. I can't wrap my head around that.”
“Well, I think that is a great myth,” Scott said. “The blows to the economy in the oil and gas sector are happening now. Any transition is going to take a long time. That's why I think you can just basically look at very slow growth, if any, in the U S economy once we get out of the COVID thing. because you're hammering a very important industry in the United States of America. The transition part is really a long term thing. And what we're doing, for example, this idea of doing away with the internal combustion engine - just kind of think through that for just a minute. Electric is going to be extremely hard on the poor in the middle-class because electric vehicles are very expensive. I mean, just the Chevy Volt costs somewhere around $47,000 - you can get two Toyota Corollas brand new for that. Powering them up is going to be a real problem. You can fill up your car in five minutes. It takes a couple of hours to recharge an older electric vehicle. What's that family vacation going to be like? The other thing that I think a lot of people have not thought about is how much we're going to have to scour our earth in order to get the minerals to build these batteries… people just haven't done the math.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
