On the recordJuly 12, 2016
I am glad that my colleague from Florida brought up the Deepwater Horizon tragedy because it was 6 years ago this week, actually, after 87 terrible days of the worst oil spill in history, that the BP Deepwater Horizon's wellhead was finally capped. The toll of that disaster, as everyone knows, was horrific--11 workers killed, untold economic damage to communities around the Gulf of Mexico, and, of course, devastating and ongoing impacts on fish and wildlife. This is a good time for us to reflect and to discuss the role of the Federal Government in reviewing the environmental impacts of oil and gas development, not just in the Gulf of Mexico, but in a place where the environmental damage could be even worse if and when something went wrong, say, in the Arctic Ocean. My amendment would strike section 127 of the underlying bill. Doing that would allow the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to move forward with its proposed update of regulation on air quality control reporting and compliance. It would allow that proposed rule to serve its intended purpose, which is to bring decades-old rules on offshore air emissions into the 21st century. The BOEM, itself, is a new agency. It was born out of the response to the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, but it was also born out of an awareness that the old agency--the Minerals Management Service--was, frankly, too cozy with Big Oil, and that that is why that old agency never updated these old rules.…
