On the recordOctober 23, 2013
I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is very destructive to a very good policy that was created by this House by the Committee on Natural Resources when, back in the late nineties, all of the Federal agencies and private sector came to Congress and said, We have a lot of conflicts of the sea. We need to start doing some planning in the ocean, like we have on land, so that we can get jobs done. We were losing all kinds of equipment to fisheries and mining operations. It was just a huge mess. No Federal agency knew what the other Federal agency was doing. It was all on public lands called the ``oceans,'' and the exploration of the oceans was very underserved. The underlying bill that this amendment attacks was created by the committee in order to create a commission made up, in fact, of people from Texas for the oil industry. One of the things they said is, Stop that conflict. Let's have smart ocean planning. Let's help use and conserve our finite resources and grow our ocean economy. This is the way to do it, but this amendment wipes it all back. It goes back to the Dark Ages. It goes back to the flat Earth opinion about ocean planning, which is: don't do it. The aquaculture industry, which is a $1.2 billion industry, has said this would be very destructive, that the Flores amendment would be a major setback for our industry.…
