Cross posted from The Right Counterpoints - GoRight

This is yet another example of how the EPA under the Obama Administration has become an activist organization which is working against the interests of the United States.

Environmental activists within the Obama Administration have gained control of the Environment Protection Agency and are fast at work undermining the best interests of our country.  They are using the regulatory capacity of the EPA to advance their short-sighted agenda by driving off investments in our own energy self-sufficiency.

Energy in America: EPA Rules Force Shell to Abandon Oil Drilling Plans – FoxNews.com .

Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight.

Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining similar air permits for a drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico would take about 45 days. He’s especially frustrated over the appeal board’s suggestion that the Arctic drill would somehow be hazardous for the people who live in the area. “We think the issues were really not major,” Slaiby said, “and clearly not impactful for the communities we work in.”

Luckily there are people who recognize what is happening and are planning to take steps to minimize the on-going impact that these activists can have.

“It’s driving investment and production overseas,” said Alaska’s DNR Commissioner Dan Sullivan. “That doesn’t help the United States in any way, shape or form.”

The EPA did not return repeated calls and e-mails. The Environmental Appeals Board has four members: Edward Reich, Charles Sheehan, Kathie Stein and Anna Wolgast. All are registered Democrats and Kathie Stein was an activist attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. Members are appointed by the EPA administrator. Alaska’s Republican senator thinks it’s time to make some changes.

“EPA has demonstrated that they’re not competent to handle the process,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski . “So if they’re not competent to handle it, they need to get out of the way.”

Murkowski supported budget amendments that would have stripped the EPA of its oversight role in Arctic offshore drilling. The Interior Department issues air permits to oil companies working in the Gulf of Mexico .

We all want a clean environment and we all support taking the necessary steps to insure that operations are conducted as responsibly as possible.  But the radical positions of the EPA under the Obama Administration are not merely designed to protect the environment, they are also designed to prevent any progress towards achieving energy self-sufficiency for our nation.

They prefer to keep this country at the mercy of foreign interests and to insure that the United States can no longer be a shining beacon of hope across the world.  They do this because of their blind devotion to a socialist/communist ideal which has failed every time it has ever been tried in human history.

By bankrupting this country, by keeping this country dependent on foreign energy, and by hampering progress at every available avenue these ideologues hope to stifle the most successful engine for human progress that the world has ever seen.  Only in this way can they hope to plunge enough people into poverty so as to build a base of support for their own self-deluded visions of grandeur.