Statement by Sen. Cantwell on Bush Plan to Expand Oil and Gas Drilling on Public Lands
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The American people are enjoying their summer vacations, but the Bush Administration isn’t taking a vacation from plundering our public lands. The news that the Bureau of Land Management will reduce or eliminate barriers to oil and gas leasing on public lands is yet another example of the Administration’s unbalanced energy policy.
The Bush Administration is eager to open up environmentally sensitive areas to drilling - including places that may not even have the resources to make it economically feasible. But at the same time, the President opposes the most important project for increasing our energy supply in at least a generation: the Alaskan natural gas pipeline.
The single largest capital construction project in our nation's history, the pipeline would channel 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to the lower 48 and pump 400,000 jobs into our sagging economy. I urge President Bush to reconsider his decision.
We need an energy policy that spends less time looking at delicate ecosystems as places to plunder, and more time looking at our future.
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