I'm afraid that government statistics are just that. I've attached a few articles regarding permits below and in one of them you can see that permits issued previously were claimed in 2011. Kind of like unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when you don't count unemployed folks because they are "no longer looking for work." Only the government could issue a statistic saying the unemployment rate declined in a month when fewer people were employed than the month before, as was the case earlier this year. Moreover, fewer people are employed today than when Obama took office!
Here is an excerpt from an article written in mid-January of this year from this web site on oil leases (
http://rlch.org/news/federal-leasing-oi ... w-api-says )
"The Interior Department sold just over 600 new oil and gas leases on public lands in Western states in 2011, the lowest total in at least a quarter-century, according to a new report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.
While Interior reported issuing 1,461 leases last year in energy-producing states including Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, the majority of those leases were originally sold years ago and had been held up by legal challenges, the report says.
The Bureau of Land Management last year released about $50 million worth of backlogged leases in Wyoming after evaluating their impacts on sage grouse and other resources, the agency said.
The leases were tallied as "issued" in 2011, even though they may have been sold in previous years, API argued in a report accusing the Obama administration of restricting access to public lands.
In addition, BLM issued 3,851 new drilling permits in the five states in 2011, a slight dip below the 2009-2010 average but 40 percent below the final two years of the George W. Bush administration.
"Federal lands policies are slowing the development of vitally needed energy," said Kyle Isakower, API's vice president of regulatory and economic policy, in a statement. "This undermines America's energy security and deprives the nation of a much needed spur to job creation and economic growth."
And, here is excerpt regarding oil permits in the Gulf of Mexico from the end of February from this site (
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign- ... t-slowdown )
"Yesterday, I reported on Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal pointing out that during a late winter of skyrocketing gasoline prices, the president who keeps taking credit for increased domestic oil production has actually slowed the approval of leases and permits in the Gulf of Mexico to a crawl.
A report by Greater New Orleans Inc., an organization of businesses large and small in Southeast Louisiana, lays out how the Obama administration is approving only a fraction of the new permits, significantly less than preceding administrations in both deepwater projects and shallow water projects, that getting approval from Obama’s Department of Interior takes much longer than before he took office, and how Obama’s administration rejects a much higher percentage of proposals for drilling than before he took office."
You can find these stories all day long on the internet. Unfortunately, ABC, NBC and CBS can't find the time to report the facts. But they do have time to tout Obama's claims of increased oil production.
Alec