Steven Holt: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, here we go again, considering legislation that is written as if…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, here we go again, considering legislation that is written as if the largest oil spill in U.S. waters did not occur. This is the third of the amnesia acts that we have seen offered in the last week. I say to my friend from California, no one is saying that we oppose this bill because we shouldn't drill, ever. But let's be smart. H.R. 1231 would force the Interior Department to open up vast swaths of the American coastline to drilling, including California and all of the Mid and North Atlantic. It is incomprehensible that the majority would take such a reckless radical step before we even know the full cost of the gulf spill. Let's be smart. This bill in particular represents something worse than the pre-spill mentality; it represents an alternative reality: facts evidently don't matter. Never mind the fact that, 1 year ago, 11 workers died in a Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. Never mind that about 60 died over the last decade. Never mind the fact that, prior to the gulf spill, offshore drilling in U.S. waters was four times more deadly than drilling of the same operations, the same kinds of operations by the same companies elsewhere in the world, even in the inhospitable territory of the North Sea. Never mind the fact that the Gulf of Mexico workforce suffered 1,550 injuries, 948 fires over the last decade.…”