Reversing President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. MARKEY. I yield myself 5 minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are at a historic juncture in our country's history, as northern Africa and the Middle East explode. And what we have, of course, is a real instability in the oil marketplace, and we have to do something that fundamentally responds to that challenge.
In the first 3 months of this year, Exxon-Mobil made $10 billion off of the American consumer--in January, February, and March of this year. Shell reported that they had made $8 billion. BP reported that they had made $7 billion. So what are these companies asking for? These companies are now asking that we open up the beaches of California to drill for oil, we open up the beaches of Florida to drill for oil, we open up the beaches of New Jersey and New England to drill for oil.
I will tell you right now, in most of those places--actually, in all of those places, the only oil the people who live near those beaches want is the suntan oil that they use when they're out on those beaches. They don't want oil coming in the way it did in the Gulf of Mexico. And why are they concerned? They're concerned because the oil companies, exercising their power--and right now, those oil companies are centered down in the Gulf of Mexico--those companies have exercised their power to block any new safety reforms from being put in place that would protect against another catastrophic spill.
So the temerity of these oil companies is that they are coming out here today, and they're saying: No safety; no lessons learned from what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, devastating the beaches of the gulf. Now we want permission to drill off of the California coast, the Florida coast, the New England coast, the New Jersey coast without any new safety. And by the way, although we've made a fortune just in the last 3 months, with the skyrocketing prices that people who travel here to Washington--they've been coming down all of the highways towards our Capitol, watching the price of gasoline go up even as they are traveling, heading up to $4 and, in some places, $5 a gallon--they're saying that the Congress shouldn't take away their tax breaks. Don't even touch those tax breaks, the oil companies are saying. Cut Medicare for grandma. Exxon-Mobil and Shell, they are advocating cutting Medicare for grandma, to take that money and to give it to the oil companies as tax breaks to put on top--kind of like a cherry on top of the sundae--to put it on top of all of these profits that they are making off of the American consumer. That's what they're trying to do, and that's what this debate is all about.
So what we're saying as Democrats is, let's implement the safety recommendations to make sure that the drilling doesn't endanger the beaches of the east coast and the west coast the way they did in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil companies are coming in here, with the Republicans as their advocates, saying, Don't worry about it. Yes, we're going to block any safety measures from being put on the books, but that's our prerogative because we have the votes here. The Republicans are going to make sure that the votes are there to block any safety--we want to keep the tax breaks; the Republicans say fine. We don't want any new safety regulations; the Republicans say fine.
By the way, we don't even like the idea of this competition from wind and solar, so we would like to ask you, as the Republican majority, to cut the solar and wind budget by 70 percent--and they did it, believe it or not. It's 2011. We're watching the Middle East explode, and the Republicans cut wind and solar in the United States by 70 percent. Keep the tax breaks for the biggest oil companies, and ask grandma to take a lower Medicare benefit to pay for it all for the oil companies. This is 2011, ladies and gentlemen. This is a message. It is so dangerous for our country.
We have to oppose this bill because, first of all, they already have 60 million acres of American land--the size of Minnesota they already have to drill on, that they haven't drilled on yet, which has about 11 billion barrels of oil underneath it and an equivalent amount of natural gas. So vote ``no'' on this Republican bill. It's just a giveaway to Exxon-Mobil and Shell, and they're the last people in the world right now that need a handout.
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