Desperate feint on offshore drilling

Even if you’d like to drill, baby, drill, Wednesday’s announcement that the Bush administration intends to sell rights to oil and gas off Virginia’s coast is a remarkably spiteful move from a presidency in its final days.

The federal Minerals Management Service has put together a plan that is both a rip-off for Virginians — who get neither royalties, nor benefits, nor a choice — and which has little chance of actually being implemented.

Worse, this whole fight isn’t actually about Virginia, which experts say doesn’t have much energy off its beaches. The week’s cynical exercise is about getting a state — any state — to allow platforms, as a crucial step toward opening both America’s east and west coasts.

Virginia is being asked to go first because a few unemployed lawmakers claim we want to. And because federal officials seem willing to say or do just about anything to get things going before they’re forced from office.

To start with, the Bush administration has repeatedly misunderstood — at best — both Virginia’s desires and its intentions. In legislation, Richmond has asked the federal government to permit companies to find out how much natural gas is 50 miles or more beyond the beach, a position this page has endorsed. That’s a first, prudent step toward figuring out whether drilling would be a good deal for the commonwealth.

Washington wants to go much, much further, no matter what Virginia thinks. The federal plan released last week would permit drilling for oil and gas and take both decision-making and royalties away from the commonwealth, which would instead get all the risk.

For years now, a triumvirate of prominent Virginia Republicans — George Allen, Jim Gilmore, Thelma Drake — have lobbied Washington to make this move, even as all three were pushed from office.

Why the federal government would listen to three former lawmakers instead of current officeholders is anyone’s guess. The oil industry’s influence in the outgoing administration and with those lawmakers might be one possibility. In any case,

Washington sure isn’t paying any attention to Virginia’s needs, or to the desires of its biggest employers.

The map the MMS is using cheats Virginia of its rightful territory and was drawn by an agency that simply made up a way of deciding which part of the seabed belonged to which state. In typical bureaucratic fashion, employees bragged that the map would take an act of Congress to fix.

The Navy — which trains off Virginia’s coast — has expressed doubts about the wisdom of erecting platforms, though it has taken a softer line of late. During the Wednesday press conference, an official from the Wallops Island spaceport expressed “serious reservations” about drilling offshore, and NASA is on record saying that it might endanger missions.

Still, though, the MMS goes forward, despite opposition from the state in question, its lawmakers, its industry and its residents.

The one bright spot in all this is that it’s largely theater.

The presidency of Barack Obama is likely to arrive in office before anything irreversible can be done, particularly given Gov. Tim Kaine’s influence with him. It probably won’t be as reckless with the wishes and interests of Virginia as his predecessor was.

Drilling might one day be a good deal for Virginia, with the right royalty structure, the right map, and the right environmental regulations. Drilling, if it is to come off our coast, should be on the terms Virginians consent to, and after serious and sober study. The federal plan unveiled last week — dictated by faceless bureaucrats, in a rush out the door — is none of that.