Lame duck meets oiled duck

Lame duck President George Bush wants to give a parting gift to all of his buddies who have supported him all of these years (bailing out his failed ventures and then helping him become President  allowing him to make  the USofA do its own  arbusto in seven short years):

President Bush on Monday lifted an executive ban on offshore oil drilling and challenged Congress to follow suit, aiming to turn the enormous public frustration about gasoline prices into political leverage. Democratic lawmakers rejected Bush’s plan as a symbolic stunt.

With gas prices topping $4.10 a gallon nationally, Bush made his most assertive move to extend oil exploration, an energy priority of his presidency. By lifting the executive prohibition against coastal drilling, Bush rescinded a White House policy that his own father put in place in 1990.

Needless to say, the Institute for Energy Research (which is "Impartial and unbiased" and all about "Objective science") thinks this is a bitchin’ idea:

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) applauded President Bush’s decision to rescind the executive moratorium on outer continental shelf (OCS) energy production originally established by his father in 1990. After urging the president to exercise this authority and eliminate the ban more than a month ago, IER president Thomas Pyle issued the following statement:

“The president is eliminating one of the largest barriers standing in the way of new energy supplies, but the biggest one still remains, and it lies in the hands of the Congress,” Pyle said. “Fortunately, we appear to be nearing the end of nearly three decades of short-sighted, one-size-fits-all policies that restrict access to domestic supplies despite explosive global demand. The lack of a commonsense offshore energy policy has placed this country in economic and strategic peril. Ending these bans will send a strong signal to the rest of the world that America is finally getting serious about producing more of its own energy.”

Who is Thomas J. Pyle?

I’m glad you asked. The former aide to Tom DeLay had his moment in the sun (such as it was) back in the year 2000:

As we begin the second Bush administration, let’s take a moment to reflect upon one of the most historic episodes of the 2000 battle for the White House — the now-legendary "Brooks Brothers Riot" at the Miami-Dade County polling headquarters.

This was when dozens of "local protesters," actually mostly Republican House aides from Washington, chanted "Stop the fraud!" and "Let us in!" when the local election board tried to move the re-counting from an open conference room to a smaller space.

With help from their GOP colleagues and others, we identified some of these Republican heroes of yore in a photo of the event.

No. 1. Tom Pyle, who had worked for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), went private sector a few months later, getting a job as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.

Wait a minute. Koch Industries?

Koch was started in 1927 by Fred Koch, a charter member of the John Birch Society, with an oil delivery business in Texas. It quickly diversified into a number of other areas, but it amassed most of its fortune in the oil trading and refining.

Fred’s son, Charles G. Koch, founded the Cato Institute and has championed a strategy of ‘market-based management’ (MBM) in the business. Son David H. Koch ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980. Koch money flows thorugh Triad Management Services, an advisory service to conservative donors on groups and candidates to support.

[...]

Koch Industries is also a major polluter. During the 1990s, its faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a landmark penalty of $35 million from the Environmental Protection Agency. In Minnesota, it was fined an additional $8 million for discharging oil into streams. During the months leading up to the 2000 presidential elections, the company faced even more liability, in the form of a 97-count federal indictment charging it with concealing illegal releases of 91 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Well, as long as Pyle has experience in these matters I  don’t suppose anything could go wrong…

Bonus from IER website:

Objective science: Public policy, particularly in the environmental area, should be based on objective science, not emotion or improbable scenarios that invite wealth-reducing government activism, which often impairs society’s resilience to change.

Like getting the fossil fuel monkey off of our back.
That kind of change.