Don't Gain Via Hurricane Misery ; Storms No Reason to Eviscerate Oil Industry's Sensible Limits
Posted on: Thursday, 6 October 2005, 09:00 CDT
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita still damage America. With a little help from some friends in Washington, they could again wreak havoc on the environment.
House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., joined House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, in using hurricanes to scare Congress into approving measures that have been repeatedly proposed and defeated. These include opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; lifting a ban on offshore drilling in areas currently off-limits to energy companies; weakening environmental laws; and gutting requirements for state-of-the-art pollution controls whenever a power plant expands.
Pombo and Barton aren't alone. Congress is facing a flood of proposed hurricane-related environmental waivers as well as Gulf Coast requests for huge amounts of relief money. But scare tactics cannot be allowed to serve as cover for permanent environmental rollbacks.
Arctic drilling, for example, could not put new oil into the pipeline for a decade, and would only reduce dependence on other oil sources by 3 percent, which by then will have no effect. And oil's not even the pain-at-the-pump gasoline problem being used to push this bill -- that problem is rooted in the oil industry that wants the Arctic reward.
Even before this season's hurricanes, gasoline refineries were near or at production capacity. No new ones have been built for years. A couple of accidents and a couple of hurricanes later, a crippled industry can't produce enough gasoline to meet all the demand and prices are up -- but the problem isn't so much a lack of oil supplies as a lack of production capacity.
Pombo is leading a pro-exploitation charge and unconscionably using disaster as a weapon. This is a sop for industry and a slap at future generations.
Source: Buffalo News
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