Got Drilling Rights In The Gulf

So the Gulf of Mexico is filling up with oil. At this instant animals of all types are seeing their oily demise, their oil soaked carcasses filling the area probably with an ungodly stench to go with the morally reprehensible environmental stench. But that is just one little problem among many.

And that is not the end of it

Much more is on the way, oil is here to stay.

Mother Jones: License To Drill

In recent weeks, the government has quietly approved the sale of more than 400 new leases for vast swaths of the Gulf of Mexico. And these contracts—which mark the first step in the drilling process—were subjected to the same slapdash environmental oversight that failed to prevent the BP catastrophe.


...it was Obama's Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, who gave the go-ahead for the sale of Lease 213—6,800 tracts covering 36 million acres off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in November 2009. The sale—which was held on March 17 this year in the New Orleans Superdome—attracted $1.3 billion in bids. Since then, the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) has approved the sale of 448 of those tracts, 198 of them in deepwater, which is defined as more than 656 feet below the sea. BP is the proud new leaser of 13 of those tracts.