Panel Backs Offshore Drilling
The Sacramento Bee is reporting that the House Resources Committee approved, by a 27-16 margin, a bill that would allow “to end long-standing moratoriums that have prevented opening new areas off the coast of California & other states to natural gas development.”
“This legislation will lead to increased & more diverse U.S. energy supplies to prevent disruptions and to bring future price relief,” said committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Tracy. But Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, blasted the legislation as an exploitation of the Katrina disaster “that fails to make any headway in the desperately needed area of energy efficiency.”
Representative Miller is simply wrong about this issue.
The energy bill that the president signed into law last month had strong conservation measures in it. To codify those measures into this bill would simply be repetitive. This also points out the different perspectives bewteen Republicans & Democrats on this issue. Republicans agree that conservation is a useful tool in this situation, but that conservation alone won’t get us out of the situation that we’re in.
In my opinion, this is an “all of the above” type situation, not a “this, not that” situation.
“We believe there is not going to be any undermining of the environment,” Abercrombie added. But Speer said the process of finding natural gas is no different than for oil. Both involve seismic exploration with underwater explosions that are disruptive & dangerous to whales & other sea life. In addition, she said, drilling produces mud spoils & other rock cuttings that often are dumped untreated into surrounding waters.
Quite frankly, it’s very possible to extract natural gas from underneath the ocean’s floor in a way that doesn’t endager the ocean’s ecosystems. Secondly, if it’s a matter of putting a higher priority on “whales and other sea life” or on increasing natural gas production, I’ll vote for increasing natural gas production.
Cross-posted at BoxerWatch
September 30th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
The arguments put forth by extreme environmentalist that drilling will harm sea life and create undesirable waste in ocean floor is worth examining. I guess we need to keep oceans pristine and off limits to all offshore energy production while the everyday poor working American pays $3.00-4.00 for gasoline and sees his heating bills go up 75-100 percent. Lets also keep Alaska pristine so us poor working slobs can watch on Discovery channel/animal planet scenes of caribu and a tiny minority(.001%)of elitist wealthy environmentalists happlily romping over the unspolied tundra.
October 10th, 2005 at 9:43 am
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