Steven Holt: “I thank my good friend from Virginia. I, too, want to pay tribute to the work that our colleague from Oregon has done…”

“I thank my good friend from Virginia. I, too, want to pay tribute to the work that our colleague from Oregon has done under the umbrella of liveability, having to do with transportation, housing, I mean, even such things as the location of post offices in town. There are so many things over the years that Mr. Blumenauer has worked on to try to make communities livable and sustainable-- sustainable in the way they produce and use energy, and livable in the sense of getting the best quality of life through our transportation decisions, our housing decisions. What is so heartbreaking about the catastrophe that is under way in the Gulf of Mexico right now is that it did not have to be. As I left to join you here on the floor, they were showing on one of the news networks fish flopping sadly, trying to get air, trying to get out of the oil, clearly doomed. We have seen the birds washing ashore. It did not have to happen. The oil spill is unprecedented in scale, but it is not unprecedented in kind, in our experience. In fact, I was talking with the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday, and she said, do you know how many oil spills we're dealing with essentially daily? Not on this scale, but it should be expected, it can be expected, in fact it must be expected that, if you drill, you will spill. As our colleague from Oregon was saying, for BP to go into this with no preparation whatsoever--I mean, they talk about they are a company that manages risk.…”