06/29/2010
Mike Soraghan, E&E reporter
Environmental and liberal groups announced today that they have collected more than 400,000 signatures urging President Obama to reverse his plan to allow drilling in new offshore areas.
“The American public does not want more drills and spills,” said Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington office of Environment America, at a Capitol Hill news conference. “If anything, they want more windmills.”
Aurilio stood in a hearing room with cardboard boxes that bore the names of the eight environmental groups that circulated petitions against the expansion of drilling. Among them were Environment America, Greenpeace, Oceana, MoveOn.org and the Sierra Club. She was joined by Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club and three Democratic House members, Kathy Castor of Florida, John Garamendi of California and Frank Pallone of New Jersey.
“The American people are way ahead of the U.S. Congress on this issue,” Castor said at the event. “We’ve got to fight through Big Oil’s PR campaign. They downplay the risks. They contribute to campaigns.”
The oil industry says the environmental campaign does not prove any groundswell of opposition to offshore drilling.
“Hundreds of thousands of Americans have said they are in favor of offshore drilling,” said Cathy Landry, spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute. “And even after the spill, polls indicate the majority of Americans support expanded development.”
The comments solicited by environmental groups were submitted to the Interior Department as part of the process of evaluating the Obama administration’s offshore drilling policy, embodied in a five-year plan released in March. The deadline for comments for this stage of the process is tomorrow.
In releasing the five-year plan, Obama announced what he called an “expansion” of offshore drilling, proposing new drilling off the coasts of Alaska, Florida and Virginia. Most of those proposals have been scaled back, but the environmental groups want Obama to turn more fully away from drilling (E&E Daily, March 31).
As he tried to assert his control over spill response and policy in late May, Obama delayed the proposed oil lease sale off the coast of Virginia and suspended two planned exploration projects by Royal Dutch Shell PLC off the coast of Alaska. He also declared a moratorium that was later lifted by a federal judge (E&E Daily, May 28).
That still allows preliminary exploration activities along the southern Atlantic Coast and could allow the Virginia and Alaska drilling projects to restart in the next five-year plan. The petitions sought to block those possibilities. Each group’s wording was somewhat different, but each stated that new drilling should be stopped.
Special thanks to Richard Charter.