Ed Markey: “This amendment would order the Secretary of the Interior to conduct oil and gas leasing offshore in Virginia. In the…”

“This amendment would order the Secretary of the Interior to conduct oil and gas leasing offshore in Virginia. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which was a lesson to all of us about the risks inherent in deepwater drilling, the Obama administration wisely canceled the proposed lease sale. The overwhelming majority of the Virginia lease sale area infringes on critical training areas for the United States Navy. The Department of Defense itself has concluded that over 78 percent of the lease sale area would occur in areas where military operations would be impeded by drilling structures and related activities. This area is already home to a number of critical military actions, including live ordnance tests, aircraft carrier qualifications, sensitive undersea and surface operations, and shipboard qualification tests. The military's continued activities in this area would torpedo drilling in most of this land. Of the remaining 22 percent of the lease area, the majority of the unrestricted waters available for leasing would occur in the main shipping channel for Norfolk and the Chesapeake Bay, as well as the main channel used by submarines. So in the end, drilling could only even conceivably occur in about 10 percent of the area that the majority is talking about off the Virginia coast. When this Congress still has not passed a single legislative reform to improve the safety of offshore drilling, this just doesn't seem like it's worth of risk.…”