The judge’s opinion on the moratorium contained this discussion of the government’s use of a report by experts on offshore drilling:

Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness, the Summary also states that

“the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” As the plaintiffs, and the experts themselves, pointedly observe, this statement was misleading. The experts charge it was a “misrepresentation.” It was factually incorrect. Although the experts agreed with the safety recommendations contained in the body of the main Report, five of the National Academy experts and three of the other experts have publicly stated that they “do not agree with the six month blanket moratorium” on floating drilling. They envisioned a more limited kind of moratorium, but a blanket moratorium was added after their final review, they complain, and was never agreed to by them. A factor that might cause some apprehension about the probity of the process that led to the Report.

The draft reviewed by the experts, for example, recommended a six-month moratorium on exploratory wells deeper than 1000 feet (not 500 feet) to allow for implementation of suggested safety measures.

The Report makes no effort to explicitly justify the moratorium: it does not discuss any irreparable harm that would warrant a suspension of operations, it does not explain how long it would take to implement the recommended safety measures. The Report does generalize that “[w]hile technological progress has enabled the pursuit of deeper oil and gas deposits in deeper water, the risks associated with operating in water depths in excess of 1,000 feet are significantly more complex than in shallow water.”76 Evaluate the ethics of the Secretary of Interior regarding the representations of what the experts concluded. p-635