Offshore-oil plan should be capped - Please Read

[Kadie]

Offshore-oil plan should be capped

Wednesday, March 16, 2005


CALIFORNIA'S ELECTED representatives have fought off the threat of offshore-oil drilling for more than two decades, which is just one of the reasons why Tracy Republican Rep. Richard Pombo's latest misstep makes him look so hopelessly out of touch.

Pombo is the head of the House Resources Committee, which, as The Chronicle reported last week, is quietly circulating draft legislation to overturn bans on new offshore oil and gas drilling along wide swaths of the U. S. coastline. The measure would expand state control over energy development in coastal waters but also would eliminate blanket federal moratoriums on drilling extended by Congress since 1982.

Trade groups such as the American Gas Association and the Industrial Energy Consumers of America have been lobbying to get the draft legislation made law. Pombo's "stealth strategy,'' as environmentalists refer to it, involves potentially slipping the proposed legislation into a pending energy bill next month.

If that were to happen, then the measure conceivably could be approved without public comment. And similar to the effects offshore-oil drilling has often had on the nation's coastlines, that would be an unmitigated disaster.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/16/EDGBPBPDLN1.DTL