[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10948]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      SECOND DISASTER IN THE GULF

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Madam Speaker, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig 
exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, there was no plan to handle that 
disaster. The Federal Government was missing in action. Now the Feds 
have a moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling.
  The administration plan, based upon President Obama's speech last 
night, can be summed up quite well in the Los Angeles Times, and I 
quote, ``Obama's speech: There is a pipe spewing a gazillion gobs of 
oil into the gulf, so let's build more windmills.'' Yes, Madam Speaker, 
that seems to be the plan of the administration: Close down deepwater 
drilling and maybe build windmills.
  Why would we shut down this industry in the Gulf of Mexico? And what 
is the purpose of this plan? The moratorium is preventing drilling in 
the Gulf of Mexico for the next 6 months or even longer. When we have a 
plane crash, Madam Speaker, when people die, and that's a horrible 
thing, we don't close down the entire airline industry for 6 months. 
That wouldn't make sense.
  But shutting down the offshore drilling for 6 months or more is going 
to be the second disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. And it's expanding the 
economic destruction caused by this explosion and this oil spill. It 
will put 50,000 people or more out of work in the entire gulf region. 
It affects my State of Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi the most.

                              {time}  1715

  It's interesting. Although the oil spill affects Louisiana and 
Mississippi, Alabama, these are the States, along with Texas, who want 
to continue deepwater drilling because they know it's necessary for 
jobs, the economy, and making sure that America is independent of 
foreign oil.
  What is the reason for putting these workers out of business? Why has 
the Federal Government seen fit to eliminate these jobs? Actions have 
consequences, and in this case, inaction also has its consequences.
  Seventeen percent of the Nation's domestic crude oil comes from 
deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Now where is the country to 
obtain energy for the loss of this oil? There is no plan, no answer 
from the administration about this question. A 6-month moratorium will 
in effect send these expensive rigs to Brazil and Indonesia. It costs 
about $500,000 a day to operate one of these deepwater offshore 
drilling rigs.
  These rigs are not going to sit there and wait for the Federal 
Government to make a decision, and just like what happened in the 1970s 
and 1980s with the American manufacturing industry, when it left 
America, it has never returned. And these oil rigs in the deepwater, 
when they leave American waters, they will not return ever. They will 
find some other safe haven to drill for crude oil.
  The loss of our domestic source of oil in the Gulf of Mexico will 
make us further dependent on foreign oil. It means the United States 
will now have to import more oil from countries that don't like us, 
like the Middle East, like those good friends in Venezuela. It will 
increase the cost to all Americans, and that will increase tanker 
traffic bringing oil through the Gulf of Mexico. There is a greater 
risk from leakage of oil tankers than there is from any leakage from an 
offshore rig, but we will have to bring in at least 300 more tankers 
just to make up the 17 percent difference, and those tankers, of 
course, will bring foreign oil, not American oil, to the United States. 
We need to tap our own domestic sources of oil.
  It took 37 days for there to be an attempt to have the top-kill 
procedure. Why did it take so long to make this decision? We're still 
looking for the answer to that question.
  The majority of the pollution, Madam Speaker, is not the result of 
the explosion itself but the delay in handling the explosion and the 
containment thereof. In other words, there was no plan to contain the 
oil for at least 37 days, and then it was too late to try to contain 
the oil near the rig.
  Now the government is overreacting by saying our solution to the 
explosion, to the containment, to the pollution is: stop deepwater 
drilling, kill American jobs, kill the American energy industry. And 
that will have a disastrous effect on our country.
  We do need a plan for future disasters to include, who is in charge 
of this leak? Who is in charge of the containment? Who is in charge of 
the cleanup? And the only plan we have today is to shut down deepwater 
drilling, and now the administration is using this as a political ploy 
to implement more taxes on the American energy industry which will be 
called the cap-and-trade national energy tax. Of course, that is passed 
on to the American citizens.
  So a new crippling natural energy tax will result in regulations on 
carbon dioxide emissions, the very substance we as humans exhale, and 
it's unfortunate that the moratorium on the drilling has already caused 
devastating economy losses in the Gulf of Mexico, especially in my 
State.
  So we would ask that the Federal Government rescind its ban and allow 
deepwater drilling in a safe manner.
  And that's just the way it is.

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