House Energy Action Team

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANDRY. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina. I thank him for speaking today on what I believe is one of the most important areas in this country for getting our economy back on track. And I want to share with him and the rest of you an email I received today.

Today I received an email that said, Jeff, my wife has finally convinced me to send you an email and update you on where I am in Louisiana. It says, I still have not returned to work, but it is looking like I may go to work in early August. And I'm going to be headed out to a particular block out in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico to do a P&A job, a plug and abandonment job.

So this isn't looking for additional oil and gas or producing more oil and gas. It's a plug and abandonment job.

He says, I'm not sure when we will actually get back to drilling or completing wells. This moratorium is beginning to impact me. I am fortunate that my company has kept me on since I'm a consultant, not an employee. But my income is down significantly, and my concerns about the future of the Gulf of Mexico has me looking elsewhere. I recently turned down an opportunity in Malaysia but may not turn it down again. At a time when our country is hurting, it is unbelievable that our leaders are putting more of us out of work, yet still giving money to other countries. The government spends. Spending and total unconcern for the working people of this country is wearing on us. It is also annoying to see that one of the first cuts in government spending is in education, but numerous other entitlement programs continue to keep money going towards them.

He is fed up. And the sad part, the sad part about this is that this is an American worker. And our government is basically saying, to him, a guy who has a trade, who is plying his trade, that you can no longer ply that trade in this country. If you want to continue to earn a living for your family, you need to go to another country. You need to go to Brazil or Malaysia or to Egypt and follow the rigs out of the Gulf of Mexico, out of this country, in order to keep your job.

Think about that. We are basically telling Americans right now that we don't like the job that you've been doing. Regardless of how dangerous it was and regardless of how many weeks away from your family offshore you spent, Christmases, Easters, that doesn't count. Your job isn't good enough for this country anymore. You need to go somewhere else to ply your trade.

That is just absurd when we have an opportunity in this country to do all the things that fix the economy. We can reduce the deficit, just like the gentleman from South Carolina said, we could, by increasing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and domestically, we could send an additional $1.7 billion, $1.7 billion, to the Treasury to reduce our deficit simply by increasing our drilling activity. We could increase employment. We all know we need it. The jobs numbers came out last week, 9.2 percent unemployment. We are not creating jobs. We can create jobs by drilling domestically.

And I'm not talking minimum wage jobs. There is not a person in the Gulf of Mexico on a drilling platform who makes minimum wage. Those jobs pay good money. So we can do that. We can reduce our deficit, and we can reduce unemployment.

Do you know what else we can do? We can lower the price of energy for Americans out there. Drilling domestically does all three. It creates jobs, reduces

the deficit, and decreases energy costs to Americans all over the country. It lowers the price at the pump. The President has already acknowledged that supply affects the market when he went out there and released millions of barrels--30 million barrels--out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It's the wrong reserve, Mr. President. The proper reserve is in the Gulf of Mexico, in Alaska and elsewhere in this country.

I thank the gentleman from South Carolina for giving me this time.

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