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Congress to vote on drilling ban
by Dave Keating | August 17, 2008 at 11:30 pm | 81 views | 1 comment | 2 recommendations
House speaker Nancy Pelosi has dropped her opposition to a vote on offshore oil exploration, reversing a position that Democrats have held staunchly for many years. Offshore drilling will now be considered as part of a broader energy package to be voted on next month.
Nearly 40 years after some 80,000 barrels of oil washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara and launched a move to ban offshore drilling Congress is heading toward a vote to end that moratorium.
For a generation of Democratic politicians, the notion of opening protected sites to drilling was toxic. But with soaring gas prices, public opinion is shifting toward anything that promises relief at the pump and congressional politics is moving with it.
In a shift on Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the House will take up comprehensive energy legislation next month that includes partially lifting the 1981 ban on offshore drilling.
“It will consider opening portions of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling, with appropriate safeguards, and without taxpayer subsidies to Big Oil,” she said in the weekly Democratic radio address on Saturday.
On Friday, Senate majority leader Harry Reid said that the Senate will also examine lifting the ban, which now covers all but central and western portions of the Gulf of Mexico and some parts of Alaska.
August 17, 2008 at 11:30 pm by Dave Keating, 81 views, 1 comment
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 08:57 on August 18th, 2008
Oil leasing in ANWR should begin soon, while there is still some lifetime left in the TransAlaska Oil Pipeline. Otherwise a new pipeline would be required and that would run the cost of developing ANWR oil much higher.