John W. Olver: “we are witnessing the mother of all oil and gas power plays in this country. Big Oil and their allies are desperately…”

“we are witnessing the mother of all oil and gas power plays in this country. Big Oil and their allies are desperately trying to open every possible site for oil drilling before the Texas oil men, Bush and Cheney, leave the White House in January. Under the Bush-Cheney-McCain plan, were it to become law, every acre of the Outer Continental Shelf, 50 to 200 miles offshore, and all of our coastline would be open to leasing and drilling. You can bet your home that the most promising areas for oil production would be fully leased at the foolish, long-term, low-price policy now in effect, but that's all. There's no certainty that the newly leased areas would be producing a drop of oil 10 years out. Big Oil could simply bank their cheap long-term leases until the price of oil reaches $200 or even $500 per barrel. And we, the Congress and country, would be over the barrel. That, after all, has been the history. The claim has been made that opening the Outer Continental Shelf would unlock 86 billion barrels of known estimated reserves. Eighty-six billion barrels, by the way, would provide a dozen years of America's oil without using any foreign oil at all, but our Minerals Management Service estimates that 80 percent of those reserves lie in areas already open for leasing and for drilling.”