Date: 2006-06-29
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I thank the gentleman from West Virginia for yielding. Mr. Chairman. there are many reasons to oppose this legislation. You can begin with the fiscal reasons. Just last week. we had the Republicans on the floor pleading for lineitem veto so the President could help them cut deficit spending and cut spending. The President now says he opposes the spending in this bill. but they are not going to take that into regard this week. They are going to go ahead and spend and going to go ahead and increase the deficit. So. apparently. they just cannot stop themselves from doing that. But a more important reason is this. It is because of the threat to the coast that this bill presents and the threat to the coast that is not necessary. If the rest of the Nation would just follow California. we banned offshore oil drilling a long time ago. but we also recognized that we had an obligation as a State to meet our energy needs and not be as dependent on others as we were at that time. What you now see is Californiais the mpst efficient energy user per capita in the country. But that is not enough. We are going to go beyond that. The Public Utilities Commission is putting in a conservation program and energy efficiency program that will end up being a positive payback for the consumers. They will save money at the end of the expenditures of about $2 billion. We will. in fact. increase the use of biofuels dramatically. The governor has asked for 180 million gallons of biofuels I think in 2010. and we are going to meet and exceed that level. So there are these alternatives that dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. and this is really where we ought to be going. This is a continuation of a philosophy that has gotten this Nation into so much trouble. and that is. while we use 25 percent of the worlds fossil fuel resources and we hold 3 percent of the reserve. that somehow we can drill ourselves out of that problem. It is a continuation of a policy that was in vogue and popular and maybe even rightheaded in 1950 and 1960. but everything we have learned since then tells us that we cannot continue in this direction. So we tried to believe that we could drill our way out of our problem in Alaska. and now we are going to some of those valuable coastlines and risking that coastline on the idea that. again. we can continue to drill our way out of it. Because the people of this Nation do not want it. this bill has a perverse set of financial incentives to States and localities to try to make money talk. as opposed to the people of that State. to try to get the political establishments to overwhelm the people who have spoken in the Carolinas and Florida and California and Oregon and Washington and elsewhere in the country against this policy. So now we are just going to see if we can bribe them into changing their mind. This is not about an energy policy. This is about an etiology. Finally. the other reason to do this is that this legislation drains money from every other State. money that would be available to the Federal Government for deficit reduction or for whatever purpose. and throws it into a couple of States that become the winners of this great offshore oil lottery. This House ought to reject it on budget grounds. on environmental grounds. on energy grounds and on simply a vision of the future.