“For weeks and weeks, members of Congress have been talking about our need for a national energy policy.  We want a bill that brings American resources to market and puts American ingenuity into motion.

We got a bill that ends up being worse for offshore drilling than if we had just left things alone.

On September 30th at midnight, the ban on drilling in 96 percent of continental America’s offshore areas is set to expire.  The whole of our federal resources off the coast would be open for exploration and production – some 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  The leasing process could begin October 1st – and the resources we have locked away for years in favor of energy supplies bought at a premium price from foreign powers who hate us would finally be on their way to production.

But last week, the U.S. House of Representatives actually passed legislation to continue to keep 88 percent of those resources locked away from exploration.  Billions of barrels of American oil will remain off the market.  Natural gas that could heat every American home will stay off limits.  And in a way only Washington can spin it – Speaker Pelosi got credit for passing an energy bill.

She got loads of credit for silencing critics of drilling in the environmental community.  Why were they so quiet?  They got exactly what they wanted.  The legislation is rife with opt-in clauses for states who want to drill offshore and extra environmental hoops that developers of shale oil in the American West must jump through before starting work on that resource. 

The biggest affront to reason in this bill is the fact that there is no incentive for states to opt in to offshore production.  The benefits from the leases accrue only to the federal government.  The states making the choice whether or not to allow energy exploration off their shores have nothing to show for their decision.
 
Finally, nothing in this bill will protect leases for offshore drilling from environmentalist lawsuits.  When you hear rhetoric about energy companies not using the lands they have leases on today – more often than not one of these lawsuits is to blame.  

Friends, if we had done nothing at all America would have gotten a better result.  This was the Energy Bill to Nowhere.

In rural America, this effort is particularly outrageous.  We drive longer distances to work, to school, and on errands than anyone else in the country, the goods on our store shelves incur more shipping costs to get to us, and our economy is made up of energy-intensive agricultural and manufacturing sectors.  Finally, we don’t have alternatives to our cars and trucks.  There’s not a single subway in the Eighth Congressional District, and it’s hard to imagine a Southern Missouri family bicycling on its 30-mile morning commute to drop the kids at school before heading on in to work.

I can’t imagine anyone taking this “No-Energy” bill seriously – there is no nuclear power, no clean coal technologies, not even a single expansion of U.S. refining capacity to help bring more domestic fuels to market.  Most of all, I know that foreign countries, who use their own resources to become energy secure, don’t take the United States seriously. 

Selling foreign oil to America is so lucrative that countries throughout the Middle East are hard at work building a renewed electricity infrastructure.  What will they do with all of the oil they save?  Why, they will sell it to us, of course.”