Jeff Van Drew: “I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership on this very important issue. Mr.…”

“I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership on this very important issue. Mr. Chairman, it would be hard to find a district that has been more of a petri dish for the experiments of the Office of Renewable Energy Programs at BOEM than mine. I live it every single day. Before I go on and talk about this, just from the heart, the projects that are coming up--fortunately, one of them, Orsted, some of you may have heard of it, has now left--have received billions of dollars of funding from the State and Federal Government. They, themselves, admit it would reduce our tourism industry, but they minimized it. The company itself said it would reduce it by approximately $1.1 billion only. It would kill our fishing industry. {time} 1230 It would really create very serious situations in our national defense and our national security. It would increase utility rates, again, according to the company itself, so it is probably much worse than the amount I previously stated; two to three to four times as much as we currently pay. It is a plan that would rely upon foreign countries to supply our energy. How stupid is that. It has been a painful process. Thank God we won the first step when this huge, multinational, Danish company decided they couldn't take it anymore. We had a movement in south Jersey at our shore. Our shore counts. We have a beautiful, clean, pristine environment. It was an organic movement. It was the people.…”