Political Quotes

“I rise today to introduce the Deepwater Drilling Royalty Prohibition Act. The purpose of this bill is to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to incentivize the dangerous and often dirty business of offshore drilling in deep waters. Over the past decades, Congress has established a number of royalty-relief programs to encourage domestic exploration and production in deep waters. This may have made sense in times when oil prices were too low to provide energy companies with an incentive to drill in difficult places, and before we were ready to deploy large-scale renewable energy production. But that is no longer the case. The events of the last weeks have shown that safety and response technologies are not sufficient in deep waters. I believe taxpayer-funded incentives should go to clean, renewable energy, not deepwater drilling for oil. The disastrous impacts of the leak from the Deepwater Horizon have shown that offshore drilling has enormous environmental and safety risks--particularly in deep waters. Eleven people died and 17 others were injured when the Deepwater Horizon caught fire.…”