Rush Holt

Oil spills don't recognize international boundaries.

However, China was not actually drilling off of Cuba and Mr. Cheney's claims were unfounded.

this was an accident waiting to happen and that other such accidents will occur unless the culture is changed.

What I hear is a continued failure on the part of the industry to acknowledge its responsibility for the negligence that caused deaths and untold environmental damage.

The Oil Spill Commission issued a lengthy report, hundreds of pages, that was a pretty strong indictment of the offshore drilling industry and regulation.

So rather than legislatively repeating the mistakes that led to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, we should pass broad reforms called for by the BP Commission so that offshore drilling industry can be the safest in the world.

Yet well over a year since the spill began, the Congress has still not enacted a single legislative reform.

Unfortunately, thus far the Majority has refused to take action on broader legislation that Ranking Member Markey and I have introduced, H.R. 501, to implement the Commission's recommendations.

According to the title of today's hearing, there is a ban on horizontal drilling on Federal lands imposed by this Administration. Not true.

I think it has come out quite clearly in the testimony today that oil prices are much more a function of what OPEC does than a function of the rate of issuing oil drilling permits.

The nuclear melting in Japan shows how perilous our dependence on nuclear power is.

We cannot look for simplistic solutions. We have to have a broader energy portfolio.

Uprisings in the Middle East show how perilous our dependence on petroleum is.

Members of Congress always like to think that we can turn short-term news stories into immediate political benefit.

It is really in tribute to, in memory of those who died that we want to insist on the highest standards...

There is nothing so American as our national parks. The fundamental idea behind the parks is that the country belongs to the people.

we should remind ourselves that Congress still has not yet enacted the reforms to improve the safety of offshore drilling.

Too few Americans know how much they depend on the work of the USGS.

As long as we continue to drill for gas and oil off our shores it is not a question of if, but when the next oil spill is going to happen.

Although the oil has stopped gushing into the Gulf, the crisis is far from over.

Our existing regulatory system is inefficient, plagued with loopholes for big oil companies.

OSHA, of course, is landmark legislation. I mean it was for decades after legislation about hiring and firing workers that we got around to protecting the workplace safety.

we went from a time of worker beware and no standards to voluntary compliance and rather weak sanctions so that OSHA compliance becomes a cost of doing business.

But if we want to make sure that were not demeaning the value of workers and their lives, criminal prosecution is something that we really should consider to make sure that workers are--you get the protection they deserve.

The budget before us... treat science considerably better than we have seen for some time.