Ed Markey: “I thank you. This amendment would require a study to investigate potential economic impacts from a variety of risks that…”

“I thank you. This amendment would require a study to investigate potential economic impacts from a variety of risks that oil development in the Outer Continental Shelf poses to local tourism and fishing economies in Florida. Well, we actually had a real-world study for 87 days during the BP spill. As we saw in 2010, with the BP oil spill, oil can wreak havoc on a coastal community, meaning a disaster for tourism and fishing, seafood industries. These disasters can and do happen, putting hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars at stake. It is important for the public to know the risks associated with allowing oil companies to drill off of our coast. But we should be protecting our beaches in Florida and California and New Jersey and Massachusetts, not just requiring a study of how huge a disaster a spill would be for these States. We should be protecting the lives and the livelihoods of the people of the gulf by taking the lessons of the BP spill and turning them into new laws. But nearly 2 years after the BP spill began, this Congress has not enacted a single new law to improve the safety of offshore drilling. That is indefensible when the BP Commission found that we have a fatally flawed rate of accidents and fatalities in our country. Compared to the rest of the world, ours is four times higher than that in Europe, that is, the fatalities on our oil rigs. So that's the issue. We have yet to increase the fines because only we can do that here in Congress.…”