Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1231, Reversing President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. I thank the gentleman.

So here's where we are. The Republicans--this is unbelievable--are blocking any legislation from passing that is going to have new safety rules for drilling off of the beaches of the United States 1 year after the BP spill. They're blocking any new safety legislation to make sure that the United States, which has four times the fatality rate of countries in Europe in drilling off our shores, has rules that are put on the books to make sure that those worst of all safety violators, these companies that drill off of our shores, have those new safety rules.

Number two, the Republicans are fighting any attempts to take away the $4 billion in tax breaks which the American consumer gives to the oil companies each year, even as the oil companies report ExxonMobil, $10 billion; Shell, $8 billion; BP, $7 billion; Chevron, $6 billion, et cetera, for the last 3 months. That's how much money they made. The Republicans think that's not enough money, even as people get tipped upside down and have money shaken out of their pockets at the gas pump. No, not enough money. They also need to give the oil companies tax breaks. That's the Republican perspective.

What else do they do? They also slash the renewable energy budget, the clean energy budget, by 70 percent. So you're a kid out there in America; you're in the sixth grade; you're looking to America for the 21st century.

Here's what the Republicans are doing:

They're slashing the solar and wind budget by 70 percent;

They are saying to the oil companies, you don't need any more safety off of the beaches to drill;

They're saying that your profits are not windfall profits, which, of course, they are in the oil industry.

But instead, here's what we're going to let you do:

We are going to let you drill off of the beaches of California for oil, off of the beaches of Florida for oil. We're going to let you drill off the beaches--3 miles off of the coast, by the way--off the beaches of Cape Cod, of Georges Bank. We're going to turn Georges Bank into ExxonMobil's Bank. We're going to turn, not shellfish into a product that we sell, but Shell Oil will be out there. That's the agenda for the Republican Party.

This is almost surreal that they want to take the tax breaks that the oil industry has, fight like the devil to protect them, even as they want to cut Medicare for Grandma and cut wind and solar as the energy sources for the future. It's almost like they think it's 1958 and gasoline is 28 cents a gallon and we're all cruising around pretending that we're not part of the rest of the world.

This debate today is kind of a microcosm of what's wrong with Republican policies. That before, I think; people want themselves to see oil rigs off of their beaches in California and North Carolina, in Massachusetts and Maine, the least I think that you owe these people is that you have new safety rules that reflect what happened. You have that BP commission report implemented. But you guys are just running ahead as though nothing has happened.

By the way, do you want to know what else is really wrong here? We know because of Goldman Sachs that this $20 to $30 a barrel of oil of increase in price over the last 11 weeks comes from speculators. What you're doing is you guys are trying to kneecap the speculator cops on the beat so that they're not even out there policing these speculators, and you're trying to reduce the budget for the speculator cops, the people who will be chasing down these speculators.

So it's all so ExxonMobil, it's all so Shell and BP and Chevron and ConocoPhillips--and, by the way, at least you're true to your colors. At least this is really what you believe in. You don't believe in wind and solar, so you're cutting that budget by 70 percent, and you want to open up the beaches as well for drilling in the States that don't want oil rigs off their beaches. I mean, my goodness, this is something that at least you should be able to respect.

You also disapprove the using of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a weapon to tell speculators, you could go bankrupt because we're going to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the 700 million barrels of oil that the U.S. has stored.

This is a very important debate to have. I'm glad we're having it today because this ``Drill, baby, drill'' just says, yeah, your policy is not all of the above; it's oil above all. Everything else gets defunded.

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