Frank Lautenberg: “the point I was making just a few minutes ago was that we ought not permit States to opt out of this moratorium, this…”

“the point I was making just a few minutes ago was that we ought not permit States to opt out of this moratorium, this prohibition against offshore drilling because what happens in a neighboring State, whether it is Delaware or Maryland or New York State or Connecticut or Massachusetts, affects what happens in my State very often. The same is true on the Pacific side of things. The same is true for the Gulf of Mexico. You cannot simply say: Let a State do the drilling. They may be more interested in the income than in the protection of the environment. But we are not. I can't emphasize strongly enough the importance of protecting the sensitive marine areas off the New Jersey coast and other coastal States. For more than two decades, both Democratic and Republican administrations have respected the moratorium on leasing and preleasing activities on the Outer Continental Shelf. But now we are talking about doing away with this protection. It would be foolish and shortsighted. One only needs to look at the list of accidents at sea and see what happened to neighboring States or neighboring communities not at all connected to the place where the accident happened. We just ought not permit it. The Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service estimated in the year 2000 that the waters off New Jersey might hold enough oil to supply the country with 10 days of oil. What does it mean in the scheme of things?…”