Just about everyone in America not living in the city of Houston knows that local planning and zoning ordinances are a basic fact of life.

But what would happen if the federal government attempted to apply those same local rules to 1.76 billion acres offshore? Carving up our oceans as if they were city blocks – using the same system to prevent domestic energy exploration as the anti-development crowd uses to defeat the local Wal-Mart. Sounds outrageous, right?

If you thought the Department of the Interior was bad, wait until you get a load of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). An office run directly out of the White House, CEQ has teamed up with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to put forward a new “science-based” approach to regulating our nation’s oceans. The eggheads at NOAA call this thing “marine spatial planning.” All you need to know is that it will result in less access to less energy (and fishing, and tourism opportunities) along America’s outer continental shelf.

Thankfully, if news out of Washington, D.C. is any indication, our elected leaders on Capitol Hill aren’t letting this scam go unnoticed. Led by coastal state representatives and Alaska’s own Don Young, 69 members of the House (59 Republicans, 10 Democrats) sent a letter to CEQ head Nancy Sutley this week demanding an explanation for why they’re doing this, and a clarification on just how many jobs we expect to lose under a policy that bigfoots Interior on offshore management policy. From the AP:

Dozens of U.S. representatives sent a letter Monday to the head of the President’s Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force with concerns that the policy will block offshore energy development and cost jobs.

Sixty-nine House members, including Alaska Rep. Don Young, signed the letter in which they responded to the task force’s interim report released last month.

We’d be remiss here if we didn’t mention the role that NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco is playing in all this. Previously a big-time marine professor at Oregon State, Ms. Lubchenco has written extensively in the past about “our unsustainable use of resources,” the “explosive growth of the human population,” and the “social compact” that “exploiters” such as fishermen and other commercial interests violate daily.

So spare us the press release, please. There can be little doubt that the new NOAA administrator is using this plan to initiate massive changes in the way Americans access their energy offshore – despite what’s being said about the plan publicly.

Here’s an excerpt from the House letter that address these specific points:

We are particularly concerned about the Task Force’s impact on our nation’s ability to safely develop its own offshore energy, including oil, natural gas and renewable energy.  It is critical that the Task Force’s proposals do not inhibit energy activity offshore in domestic waters and undermine the Department of the Interior’s Five Year Leasing Program for offshore energy development.

So, where does any of this leave us today? Tough to say. The oceans plan was recently put up for public comment for a measly 30 days – roughly 210 days fewer than the Interior Department’s five-year energy plan was available to comment on by the American public. How did that comment period end up? CEQ won’t say. We wonder why that is.

Readers of this blog remember well the four-state barnstorming PR tour that Interior secretary Ken Salazar embarked upon earlier this year – at the time, justified as a means of ensuring “we have an open and transparent government” when it comes to implementing a new five-year energy plan.

Make no mistake, Mr. Salazar said: “These are not decisions that are going to be made behind closed doors.” So off he went: first to New Jersey, then to New Orleans, up to Alaska, and rounding out the circus in a city that loves it some Alaskan oil (even if it’s loath to admit it): San Francisco. At each stop, he heard from folks who support offshore energy exploration, folks who oppose it, and occasionally from some colorful birds as well – like the guy in Louisiana who called on the secretary to convene a national summit on (human) population control.

Malthusians aside, the events were supposed to lay the groundwork for a successful public comment period – one in which stakeholders of all shapes, sizes and interests would send in their comments to the secretary, and then wait for the secretary to tally them all up and announce just how the American people felt about expanded energy development here at home.

That’s how it was supposed to work. Unfortunately, more than a month after the comment period expired, we still don’t have so much as a shred of official information on how this thing actually went.

But as the Houston Chronicle reports today, that may be about to change – thanks to none other than former House speaker Newt Gingrich?! From the piece:

A conservative group today prodded the Obama administration to reveal the breakdown of roughly half a million public comments lodged on a Bush-era plan to open up broad offshore areas for oil and gas drilling.

The group, American Solutions, headed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, made the push in a Freedom of Information Act request to the federal government.

The sad thing, of course, is that the American people have to sue their own government to get the results of a PUBLIC COMMENT period. The happy thing? Turns out people over at Interior already have a pretty good sense how this thing turned out – and not many of them, apparently, know how to keep a secret.

According to one group, Consumer Energy Alliance, more than 325,000 pro-energy comments were delivered to Interior over the past five months. But how many letters in TOTAL were sent? Salazar had the good sense not to keep that data point a secret:  

The federal government has received more than 450,000 comments from the public regarding the development of a comprehensive offshore energy strategy for the Outer Continental Shelf, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced today.

325,000 positive comments out of a total of 450,000? That’s better than 2:1; heck, it’s actually closer to 3:1. Not to play conspiracy theorist here, but anyone think these totals might have anything to do with the radio silence emanating from the Interior office in Washington?

In any case, this FOIA request is just what the doctor asked for here – not only asking the secretary to tell us how the number shook out, but also requesting that he make public all the emails and memos that have been bouncing back and forth between Interior and MMS. Once we get our hands on those, maybe we’ll finally be able to tell, once and for all, whether this secretary is serious about promoting American energy security.

Until then, though, here we wait – thankful, I suppose, that “we have an open and transparent government” of which we can be eminently proud.

We’ll start off with the obligatory caveats that it’s “too early to tell for sure,” that “nothing official has been released yet,” and that “all we have to go on right now are back-of-the-envelope estimates” – but gotta tell you: It sure as hell looks like Interior received more comments in favor of new, responsible energy exploration than ones opposed to it.

We don’t have a lot to go on in right now, but according to Consumer Energy Alliance, a Houston-based group that advocates an “all of the above” approach to securing our energy future, it sure looks like we have them beat. From CEA’s release:

More than 325,000 American people sent letters to Interior secretary Ken Salazar over the past six months urging his agency to expand responsible access to critical energy resources offshore, and Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) helped deliver more than 150,000 of them. …

While the closure of this comment period marks a very early step in what is designed to be a long, deliberative process, the volume and intensity of public response on whether responsible offshore energy exploration should be part of our energy future suggests the status quo energy policies of the past will no longer be an option in the future. What we need now, and what these letters demand, is decisive action from this administration – not an effort to pocket veto these critical offshore energy resources.

Ok, so the good guys scored in excess of 325,000 – how about the other side? Turns out they’ve been working this one hard as well. This comes from Reuters:

The Alaska Wilderness League, along with about 20 other green groups, symbolically delivered comments to the department Monday from nearly 300,000 people opposing the proposed offshore leasing plan that would open much of the Arctic Ocean to drilling. … [The] group is pushing to halt all drilling in the Arctic Ocean until a comprehensive plan is developed to protect the area’s fragile ecosystems.

Earth to Alaska Wilderness League: Know this plan you spent millions of dollars to kill? The one you sent 300,000 letters in opposition to? Yes, well: It IS a comprehensive plan “to protect the area’s fragile ecosystems.” The five-year plan addresses lots more things than drilling, sweetheart. And maybe if you’d have read it, that would’ve become plain.

No need to cry over spilled rhetoric, we guess. Still, it’s worth noting that, despite all the press accounts out there suggesting that the greens ran up the score on the comment period, the reality of the situation appears to be this: They lost. We won. End of story. Hit the showers. And we won the previous comment period as well, fwiw – according to the Interior Department, opposition groups got crushed during the 2007-12 five-year plan process too. What was the carnage there? The final tally of four separate comment periods was 91,000 in favor, 32,000 opposed. That’s a 72 percent favorable rate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the story was the same for the first comment period held for the 2010-2015 plan. Interior conducted that one from August to October 2008. And the tally was 86,000 in support of new exploration, and 79,000 opposed.

More than 3800 miles separate Alaska’s North Slope from the state capital building in Richmond, Virginia. But the distance didn’t seem that far yesterday, as residents of the Old Dominion state were treated to an excellent op-ed piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the myriad ways in which Alaskan energy can be leveraged to power, fuel and fund the nation.

Written by Dave Harbour, the former head of the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, current director of CEA Alaska, and someone who has devoted much of his professional life to shining a spotlight on the potential of Alaskan energy, the pieces breaks it all down nice and simple for our friends in the mid-Atlantic. The message? Alaskan energy is real. It’s available. And it’s being completely ignored right now by our political leadership just 120 miles north in Washington, D.C. To wit:

Accounting for three-quarters of our nation’s coastlines, Alaska’s offshore resources exceed those in the Gulf of Mexico. With the giant Prudhoe Bay oilfield and infrastructure, Alaska also has an expert work force needed to produce its abundant resources. But for that to happen, the federal government must take action.

What action must the government take? Well, keep reading the piece and Mr. Harbour comes right out and tells you:

This problem came to a head earlier this year, when a federal court nullified the Interior Department’s current five-year plan, a strategy that included energy in Alaska’s North Aleutian Basin and Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Fortunately, all that’s needed to reinstate the five-year plan are a few technical changes. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar could quickly make those changes, and unleash a safe search for Alaska’s energy.

Fans of the site will remember that Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell suggested much the same remedy to the current stand-off over the Alaskan OCS in an Anchorage Daily-News op-ed that appeared in June. In that piece, the governor laid out the following plan for Interior secretary Ken Salazar

What can Secretary Salazar do? He can get the current five-year energy program working for Alaska and all of America again. To comply with the court’s ruling, no new field work need be completed nor any new data obtained. Instead, Interior can take a fresh look at “relative environmental sensitivity” through the lens of earlier, field-tested five-year plans.

Sounds pretty easy to us. What’s the reason for the hold up?