The Obama administration released its draft five-year plan for oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf and for the first time it includes waters off the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the proposal is “a key part of the President’s efforts to support American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” But environmental advocates blasted it for putting coastal ecosystems and economies at risk.

“Commercial fishing, tourism and recreation economies would suffer from routine oil leaks as well as the looming risk of a Deepwater Horizon-like oil disaster stretching along the East Coast,” said Jacqueline Savitz, U.S. vice president of conservation group Oceana. “It’s not something people on the coast want to experience.”

A single Atlantic lease sale is proposed for a part of the mid-and South Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf. It calls for a 50-mile coastal buffer to minimize conflicts with other uses such as offshore wind development, commercial and recreational fishing, Department of Defense and NASA activities, and wildlife habitat.

The Administration proposes a total of 14 offshore lease sales from 2017 to 2022. Ten of those are in the Gulf of Mexico, already one of the world’s most productive basins and one hit hard ecologically by the BP oil disaster, other significant spills and chronic leaks. Three others are in the Arctic, where President Obama also withdrew areas from future leasing due to subsistence use by Alaska Natives and for their “unique and sensitive environ- mental resources.” The Eastern Gulf, where a congressional moratorium on drilling remains in place until 2022, was not included in the draft leasing proposal. Neither was the Pacific, with the administration citing Pacific Coast states’ long-standing opposition to offshore oil and gas development.

Lobbying for Drilling

But Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, North Carolina’s Pat McCrory and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley lobbied to open their coasts to drilling as members of the Outer Continental Shelf Governors Coalition (OCSGC), along with Alabama’s Robert Bentley, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, and Mississippi’s Phil Bryant. Texas Governor Rick Perry was also a member of the group but left office recently. All are Republicans except for McAuliffe, former chair of the Democratic National Committee. McCrory, a former Duke Energy executive whose gubernatorial campaigns have received over $229,000 in contributions from oil and gas interests, chairs the OCSGC. Last February, he and McAuliffe, Bentley, and Bryant met with Jewell in Washington, DC to ask her to endorse Atlantic drilling. The meeting was part of a three-year campaign by OCSGC to win Adminis- tration approval for expanded drilling, not only in the Atlantic, but also the Eastern Gulf and the Arctic.

Following the announcement proposing the Atlantic lease sale, McCrory released an OCSGC statement thanking Jewell for “taking a step in the right direction” but complaining that the 50-mile buffer “unnecessarily limits the opportunity for further examination of the resource potential” and that “other resource- rich areas remain under lock and key by the Obama administration.” McCrory’s statement on the Obama leasing proposal echoed the industry’s message that the plan to open up the Atlantic was a good step forward but that the president should have gone further.

The governors’ pro-drilling campaign had significant help from Big Oil. A recent Center for Public Integrity (CPI) investigation found that OCSGC has a close relationship with HBW Resources, an energy lobbying firm acting on behalf of the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), an oil industry-funded advocacy group.

CPI reviewed thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests and discovered that “much of the governors coalition work has been carried out by HBW Resources and CEA, a group that’s channeled millions in corporate funding to become a leading advocate at the state level for drilling.” CPI likens the governors’ coalition to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a controversial group that brings together conservative state lawmakers and private-sector representatives to draft business-friendly legislation. Both ALEC and the OCSGC “allow powerful corporate interests to gain a direct line to state policy makers not available to common citizens or other stakeholders,” CPI writes, “all under the banner of a generic advocacy organization.” In fact, CEA is actively involved in ALEC.

Z

Sue Sturgis is editorial director of the Institute for Southern Studies.