Rigged For Failure

A year ago, three oil rigs fled the Gulf of Mexico for better opportunities abroad. Now, it's 10. Make no mistake, the toll is rising on a business environment marked by the Obama administration's uncertainty. It's a sorry spectacle when rigs, the mighty instruments for extracting oil and gas from miles under the sea floor, are quietly pulling away from U.S. coasts for better business environments oceans away — namely the Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Egypt and Brazil. "When you have companies that would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or in some cases billions of dollars, they need certainty," Louisiana Oil & Gas Association President Don Briggs told BigGovernment.com. "We don't have that now, and I don't expect we will anytime soon." The massive planning, capital, project management and luck required to produce energy are uncertain enough. The climate of government caprice makes it even worse. The 2010 BP oil spill proved Obama's anti-energy production talk was more than rhetoric — it was policy...more