Bingaman Reacts to President Bush's News Conference on Gasoline Prices

Press Release

Bingaman Reacts to President Bush's News Conference on Gasoline Prices

U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, today said President Bush's White House news conference gasoline prices represents a significant shift in the Bush administration's policy on offshore drilling.

At the news conference, Bush placed blame for high gas prices on Congress for, among other things, its unwillingness to open up areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling.

Bingaman pointed out, however, that the Bush administration in one of its first official acts on energy cut by 75 percent the size of an Outer Continental Shelf lease sale that had been proposed by President Clinton. With the stroke of a pen, the administration took off the table more than 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and over 1 billion barrels of oil.

"I think there's clearly a lot of election year politics in the president's remarks. The president made his position clear when he canceled most of a lease sale in Section 181 off the coast of Florida. There is still a moratorium on drilling that the president said he won't lift until Congress takes action," Bingaman said. "There's nothing stopping him from canceling his moratorium right now."

"The president's drumbeat that Congress is the problem is way off the mark," Bingaman added.

Bingaman said he agrees that more drilling can and should be done in the Outer Continental Shelf, as the president suggested. But he is very concerned about giving states the final say to block drilling in federal waters, as has also been suggested.

"I don't think it makes any sense to give individual states the power to prevent us from developing federal resources that are owned by all Americans," Bingaman said.

Finally, Bingaman said that he does not believe that opening the Outer Continental Shelf will do anything in the near term to affect gas prices at the pump.

"The biggest potential in the undeveloped Outer Continental Shelf appears to be natural gas, not crude oil, and we are years away from being able to bring that to market," Bingaman said.

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