“For years I have expressed significant concerns about offshore drilling in the Arctic. The federal administration should not enable new oil and gas drilling in these untouched areas that host such a fragile environment.” Jay Inslee, Governor, Washington State, March 31, 2015
“No future extraction [on public lands]. I agree with that.”
Hillary Clinton, Democratic Nominee for President,
Feb. 4, 2016
Who owns the West? Increasingly, it’s the US Federal Government, with the help of compliant state executives, and if you don’t mind, they’d prefer you got off their lawn.
Federal lands account for 24 percent of the country’s resource production. According to the Chamber of Commerce paper, a ban on future energy production would result in the loss of more than $11.3 billion per year in royalties (California alone would lose $591 million), 380,000 direct and indirect jobs, and $70 billion per year of gross domestic product.
Combine the increasing amount of land under federal control and the desire to remove it from resource production and you don’t have to be an economist to predict the results.
In July, the Washington Department of Ecology, directed by Governor Jay Inslee, petitioned….MORE
Major Arctic Oil Finds
