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So, has Obama gone from a Half Flip to a Full Flop on the issue of offshore drilling? Not if you're basing the ruling on his position on election day.

Back in August 2008, he did clearly change his stance on the issue. This time, according to all the environmental advocates and experts we spoke with, his latest announcement isn't much of a departure from his rhetoric during the last part of the campaign and during his first year in the White House. As a result, we say there's been No Flip in Obama's latest stance on offshore drilling.

But as a result of the Obama decision, the Interior Department will spend several years conducting geologic and environmental studies along the rest of the southern and central Atlantic Seaboard. If a tract is deemed suitable for development, it is listed for sale in a competitive bidding system. The next lease sales — if any are authorized by the Interior Department — would not be held before 2012.

…. In many of the newly opened areas, drilling would begin only after the completion of geologic studies, environmental impact statements, court challenges and public lease sales. Much of the oil and gas may not be recoverable at current prices and may be prohibitively expensive even if oil prices spike as they did in the summer of 2008.

In fact, if anything, the policies announced by President Obama yesterday will actually decrease and delay future U.S. oil production. The President actually canceled four lease sales off the Alaska coast that were planned to begin producing oil within the next two years, delayed a planned lease off Virginia until at least 2012, and placed some areas off limits for at least seven years. Go back and look at President Obama’s actual announcement again: he only promised new exploration off the Atlantic coast. There is absolutely no guarantee that any new drilling will ever occur.

While the president should be commended for allowing oil and natural gas exploration and development in untouched water, the devil is in the details. Part of the administration’s proposal is regressive in that it cancels some lease sales that were already pending:

President Obama said in his announcement today that “This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly.” It should have been. Offshore drilling will create jobs and increase energy supplies without cost to the taxpayer. It will create revenues for financially strapped state governments and increase revenues for federal governments. Unfortunately, we won’t realize many of these benefits because this decision was more about getting “drilling” in the headlines than in our nation’s waters. The same could be said for the president’s nuclear push.

This is, effectively, home state pork for Conservadem Senators who are viewed as winnable votes on the energy bill.… Of course, … there is no guarantee at all that the Obama administration will actually get an energy bill out of this deal. Nonetheless, and leaving aside the political efficacy of this ploy, it is clearly a political move designed to make a bill more viable.

When a public figure reverses course, isn’t it worth a close look? Isn’t it counter-intuitive? When a public figure who is an ideologue suddenly reverses course…. Suddently that public figure makes an announcement that he favors offshore drilling, does that make sense to you? And of course, the media laps this up….

As usual the devil is in the details. Only in Washington, D.C., can you ban more areas to oil and gas exploration than you open up, delay the date of your new leases and claim you’re going to increase production.

“The President’s announcement today is a smokescreen. It will almost certainly delay any new offshore exploration until at least 2012 and include only a fraction of the offshore resources that the previous Administration included in its plan.

The Democrats’ “high gas price initiative” vs. the Republicans’ “better solution”

The president’s proposal is acceptable — as it stands. But it is not robust enough to be counted as an acceptable tradeoff for the kind of destructive energy rationing that has been a hallmark of his energy agenda thus far. If it is a prelude to carbon caps of the kind Obama has advocated, or to unilateral energy regulation by Obama’s EPA, then our suspicions will have been confirmed.

Obama tries – and succeeds at – triangulation lite
The price he paid in political terms was relatively small: Angry blowback from environmental activists who still support his overall climate change policy.

But the short-term benefits were large: By announcing the policy change, Obama defused a potentially potent Republican issue ahead of the summer gas spike and the fall midterms, while embracing major elements of the GOP’s “all of the above” energy approach to kick-start a stalled climate change bill.

The notion that windmills, solar panels, and biofuels can easily replace fossil fuels is a joke, and so is the idea that you can tax American industry and consumers to solve global warming, or even put a dent in it. Still, conservatives and other realists can be more generous toward environmentalists. Greens are good at pointing out potential problems and at pressuring government and industry to come up with solutions — sometimes even the right solutions.

Today the president said he’ll “consider potential areas for development in the mid and south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, while studying and protecting sensitive areas in the Arctic.” As the former governor of one of America’s largest energy-producing states, a state oil and gas commissioner, and chair of the nation’s Interstate Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, I’ve seen plenty of such studies. What we need is action — action that results in the job growth and revenue that a robust drilling policy could provide. And let’s not forget that while Interior Department bureaucrats continue to hold up actual offshore drilling from taking place, Russia is moving full steam ahead on Arctic drilling, and China, Russia, and Venezuela are buying leases off the coast of Cuba.

The administration’s sudden interest in offshore drilling is little more than political posturing designed to gain support for job-killing energy legislation soon to come down the pike. I’m confident that GOP senators will not take the bait.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar sent signals that the White House believes the controversial climate change regulatory system, which passed through the House last year, was unlikely to emerge from Senate talks on a compromise energy and climate bill.

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