Energy Regulations

Floor Speech

Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, it has now been 99 days since the Deepwater Horizon drill rig caught fire and sank to the ocean floor. That incident--and the millions of barrels of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since it began--has made it absolutely clear that our Nation's offshore energy regulations need to be reformed. Even in a Congress as deeply and bitterly divided as this one, the fact that we are living through a terrible environmental disaster, caused at least in part by certain failures of the government, should be more than enough for us to work in good faith and reach consensus on a path forward.

For the past 3 months, that is exactly what the members of the Energy Committee have sought to develop. We have been working toward a responsible path that is acceptable to all--or at least most--of the Members of the Senate. We started by holding four major hearings on the gulf spill. This allowed us to build a record within the committee on everything from blowout preventers to certificates of financial responsibility. Our committee worked very hard on this. We spent countless hours working on legislation to repair the failed offshore regulatory system. We concluded our efforts last month, after all these series of hearings, and we unanimously passed legislation, S. 3516, the OCS Reform Act, out of committee unanimously. Around here nowadays, sometimes it is tough to get not only that real good committee work product but then to see that move through committee unanimously. It is not easy, and it is certainly not a perfect bill, but it was a fair and open process. I would like to think that our hard work within the committee and the negotiating that went on, and our very open markup and amendment process--what we did was the best of the Senate. It was an open and fair and a deliberative process. You would think that would go somewhere. But once that bill left committee, it became clear that some people cannot take yes for an answer, and that good committee product was not going to be advanced.

About the time we were marking up the MMS bill, we witnessed a deeply misguided effort to tie oilspill legislation to cap and trade. I think this was an attempt to literally convert one disaster into another. We were told that cap and trade was somehow or other going to end our dependence on oil and hold polluters accountable and prevent future spills. Then an analysis of cap and trade from the EPA itself showed that cap and trade would have almost no effect on our Nation's oil consumption--not now and not over the course of the next 40 years. After nearly 19 months of vote counting, I think the majority was forced to admit the obvious: There are not 50 votes, let alone 60, for cap and trade in the Senate.

What we now have before us is this coming together, or slapping together, of the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability

Act--the bill that members of the press and the lobbyists received before my staff on the Energy Committee. A draft came out last night around 10 o'clock. I am told it will be officially introduced sometime this morning.

Again, this is such a disappointment. Instead of an open and transparent process as we did through our committee, what should and what could have been a bipartisan bill was hashed out in secret, written behind closed doors with very few Members of the Senate, least of all Members from the Gulf States, allowed to provide any level of input.

Since its 409 pages of text were released late last night, we have not had time to thoroughly review it, to develop amendments, negotiate improvements, or even decide if it is worth supporting yet. We have instead been told the majority leader is unlikely to allow amendments to be considered--unlikely to allow any amendments to this just-cobbled-together bill.

I can only imagine it is because there are provisions that are contained in this bill to which he does not want to draw attention, much less talk about and vote on. The phrase, ``rush to judgment,'' is used a lot around here. I challenge my colleagues to find a more flagrant example of that than what we have in front of us with this bill.

We talk around here about why Congress's approval ratings are as low as they are. We are at about 11 percent right now. It is bills such as this--when people look at this and say, How did this come about, what happened to the committee bill--that makes cynics out of all of us, especially when we know there is a very serious problem that demands a quick and robust policy response.

Instead of working together to fix the problems, the majority leader's bill would undoubtedly create more problems. The Senate's process and our traditions have just been left in the ditch. Decisions have been made almost exclusively in secret behind closed doors. Republicans were shut out of the room. But, of course, we are going to be blamed for holding up the bill.

One has to ask the question, Does anyone honestly believe that we in the Senate can pass something by Friday or perhaps early next week that we did not even see the light of day on until this morning?

I suggest that from every procedural vantage point, it seems as if the majority's goal has been to drive a stake into the heart of anything that can attract Republican support. The staging of this bill has been choreographed to ensure partisan opposition so the majority can blame us for the problems they are making even worse, such as the job losses from the moratorium, the increase in reliance on foreign oil--which, of course, we know is coming--the injustice of Federal OCS revenues never reaching coastal States such as in Alaska and the gulf where they derive in the first place.

The Democratic caucus can try to pass this bill as introduced without
amendment and with almost no debate, but I suggest this will be nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory. Like the stimulus, like health care, like financial reforms, it will give folks something to talk about, but it will only worsen the problems it is meant to deal with.

Unfortunately, it will come at the expense of a far better bill, a bill that was introduced last week by the Republican leadership team. Let me talk a couple minutes about the bill that has been introduced.

It starts at the root of the problem--the already apparent shortcomings with offshore regulations and at the Minerals Management Service, MMS. It includes the OCS Reform Act that we moved through our committee, reported unanimously by all 23 members of the Senate Energy Committee. Permitting and best available commercial technology requirements are strengthened to enhance the safety and the integrity of offshore operations. We also codify a complete reorganization of MMS. We remove the President's offshore moratorium once new safety requirements have been met. We establish strict liability limits for each project based on a range of risk factors. There is a series of 13 different risk factors that would be relevant. We include a bipartisan commission to investigate what went wrong with Deepwater Horizon. And, finally, we right a longstanding wrong by returning a large share of production revenues to the coastal States.

It has been suggested in one of the Hill publications this morning--a Democratic staffer is quoted as saying this Republican package was hastily thrown together. I remind that Democratic staffer or others who are looking at this that almost all of what is contained in this Republican package was introduced 1 month ago today, as a matter of fact, in an oilspill compensation act I introduced. We include that with the component pieces of the OCS Reform Act that was passed unanimously by the committee. To suggest this has been somehow hastily cobbled together, one needs to go back and look at the fact that it has been out there for public review and scrutiny now for almost 1 month.

As much as I will push back against the decision to race to finish this bill, we must--we absolutely must--have more debate on these issues. The majority, with very commanding numbers in both Houses and control of the White House, may want to try to somehow blame Republicans for the thousands of lost jobs from Alabama to our State of Alaska as well as the administration's failure to protect and restore the gulf's offshore environment. But that strategy will fail.

We are offering a more responsible and dramatically less costly piece of legislation that truly deserves to be considered and passed by the full Senate.

I wish the majority would take that same path instead of deciding, judging from the development of the bill and its actual content, that it is time we give up on policy for the year and focus instead on just messaging.

We need to look at the terrible toll we all know is taking place as a result of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the obvious failure of our offshore regulatory system, and of the growing economic consequences of the administration's offshore moratorium.

It is absolutely crystal clear there is action that needs to be taken. There is policy that needs to be put in place to respond to the oilspill, the environmental devastation, the economic devastation, and the regulatory confusion that was in place. It is not time for the politics or partisan activities. It is not time to roll the dice with our Nation's energy policy. For the continued vitality of an entire region in the United States, it is imperative that we move beyond the message and we provide the policy and the legislative response that is so necessary and so needed.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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