world, stop getting worse!

i wrote this about how the moratorium on deep drilling put in place after the BP oil spill was being challenged and i thought that there was probably no way in hell that it would be lifted.

but when i read the news yesterday i saw something horrific:

"The U.S. government will immediately appeal a U.S. judge's ruling on Tuesday against the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

yeah, that judge DID overturn the ban on deepwater drilling. he said his decision was based on the 'fact' that the department of the interior didn't really have a great reason for the moratorium, and that they "assume that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger."

um, that seems pretty fair to me actually, to assume that other mismanaged rigs might explode and create even more irreversible damage. the whole point of the ban was to avoid an apocalypse like situation in case of another explosion. there might only be a small chance it might happen, but if it did happen we would all be fuct. more fuct than we already are.

why? why, on the off-chance that this could happen again, would a judge rule to overturn a precautionary 6 month moratorium? it's only on deepwater drilling, and it only halts 33 exploratory wells. so really, it won't halt oil production.

so i was confused, kind of, until i received this article this morning : "judge who nixed obama's drilling ban has oil investments."

surprise, surprise.

guest blogger C wrote this about how BP was maybe positioned to make money from the spill on the recaptured oil, and this new judicial decision runs in the same vein.

the judge, Martin Feldman, (an appointee of ronald regean in 1983) owns stock in transocean ltd, the company that owned the deepwater horizon drilling rig.

it doesn't end there though, here's a list of his other investments:

"Ocean Energy, a Houston-based company, as well as Quicksilver Resources , Prospect Energy, Peabody Energy , Halliburton , Pengrowth Energy Trust , Atlas Energy Resources , Parker Drilling and others. Halliburton was also involved in the doomed Deepwater Horizon project."

while he isn't the only judge with investments in energy, many judges have recently sold their stock so that they can preside over the spill-related lawsuits or they've just outright disqualified themselves.

all of this in the face of another incident which caused more oil to pour into the ocean: "hundreds of thousands of gallons more oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday after an undersea robot bumped a venting system and forced BP to remove a cap that had been containing some of the crude."

like, maybe the industry SHOULD lose money. maybe the energy production system SHOULD be crippled for a little bit.

judge feldman was also recently appointed to a seven year term on the foreign intelligence surveillance court, a court that meets secretly to "consider government requests for wiretaps in national security cases."

i wonder, does judge feldman have investments in wiretap technology as well?

maybe i was overly hard on obama before. maybe he just didn't expect people to react to this spill with such acute greed and contemptible idiocy.