Sen. Bill Nelson took to the Senate floor today vowing to fight any attempt by the administration to open up additional areas around Florida to offshore oil drilling.
“Drilling off of Florida’s neighboring states poses a real threat to our state’s environment and our multibillion-dollar tourism industry,” Nelson said. “That’s because a spill off the coast of Louisiana can end up on the beaches of Northwest Florida just like a spill off the coast of Virginia or South Carolina can affect the entire Atlantic coast.”
Nelson’s remarks come as the president is expected to sign an executive order Friday expanding offshore oil drilling.
“This announcement by the president will be like a big present for the oil companies,” Nelson said. “I hope the president thinks twice before putting Florida’s economy at such a risk. I hope he refrains from issuing this executive order, but if he doesn’t, this senator and a bipartisan delegation from Florida will fight this order.”
Below is a rush transcript of Nelson’s remarks, and here’s a link to watch video of his speech: https://youtu.be/EXb5ubQrxVE.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
Remarks on the Senate Floor
April 26, 2017
Sen. Nelson: Mr. President, I want to address the senate on the occasion of the solemn memorial of seven years since the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the resulting oil spill and the tragedy of killing a number of workers.
It was 11 men were killed. It fouled the sensitive Gulf ecosystem in ways that we still do not fully realize, and yet we are hearing today that the president is expected to issue an executive order that ignores the implications of that tragedy which was also the largest environmental disaster in US history by this new executive order blindly encouraging more drilling in very sensitive areas.
Mr. President, I can tell you that drilling off of Florida’s neighboring states poses a real threat to our state’s environment and our multibillion-dollar tourism industry, and that’s because a spill off the coast of Louisiana can end up on the beaches of northwest Florida just like a spill off the coast of Virginia or South Carolina can affect the entire Atlantic coast.
BP, as a result of the Deepwater Horizon, agreed to pay more than $20 billion in penalties to clean up the 2010 oil spill and repay Gulf residents for lost revenue.
But apparently that wasn’t enough if BP’s recent spill in Alaska is any other indication.
So we shouldn’t be surprised since oil companies and their friends have fought against any new safety standards or requirements. And still the president wants to open up additional waters to drilling despite the fact that we haven’t applied lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon.
It is certainly at a time when the United States has been able to find all new reserves of oil and gas onshore. So we are not in a time of shortage of discovery and reserves of oil, and especially what is being affected, our domestic energy market with the low price of natural gas since so much of it and the reserves are just tremendous here in the continental US.
The most visible change since the deep water horizon, the division of the Minerals and Management Service into the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, all of those changes made as a result to try to improve things after the BP spill, it doesn’t seem to have made any major improvements in oversight, and that’s according to a report issued by the GAO this last month.
So I’ve come to the floor to try to alert other senators about the importance of preserving the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It makes no sense to put Florida’s multibillion-dollar tourism-driven economy at risk.
And there’s something else at risk. The department of defense has stated numerous times — I have two letters from two Republicans, secretaries of defense, that says that drilling and oil related activities are incompatible with our military training and weapons testing. That is the area known as the Gulf training range. It’s the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida. It is the largest testing and training range for the United States military in the world.
Now in that Gulf training range is where the pilots for the F-22 are trained. That’s at Tyndall Air Force base. And it’s where the new F-35, the pilots are trained, by the way, not only for the United States, but also for many foreign nations that their countries have bought the f-35.
Of course that’s essential to our national security. And that’s just pilot training. That doesn’t speak of the testing over hundreds and hundreds of miles because it is restricted airspace of some of our most sophisticated weapons.
And, oh, by the way, when the US Navy Atlantic fleet shut down on our training in Puerto Rico and the island of Vieques, where do you think that a lot of that training came to? The navy still has to train, so they’ll send their squadrons down to Key West naval air station at Boca Chicas Key, and when those pilots and their F-18 Hornets lift off the runway within two minutes they’re out over the Gulf of Mexico in restricted airspace, so they don’t spend a lot of fuel and a lot of time to get there. And so that’s why a lot of our colleagues across the state of Florida, across the aisle — in other words, this is bipartisan — have weighed in with this administration urging continued protection for the largest military testing and training area in the world. Opposition to drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico is bipartisan. It’s the Senate and House — bipartisan. But so is our opposition to drilling off the Atlantic coast.
Now let me just distinguish between the two. Years ago, my then-republican colleague, Senator Mel Martinez, and I both authored in law an exemption until the year 2022 of any oil drilling off of the coast of Florida. It’s actually everything east of what is called the Military Mission Line, and it’s virtually the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida. And of course we did that for the reasons that I’ve already stated that’s in law up until 2022.
But the administration will be coming forth with another plan for the five-year period for oil drilling offshore for the years 2023 up through 2028. It is my hope that the words of this senator and the words of our bipartisan colleagues from the Florida delegation will convince the administration that it’s not wise to impede the military’s unnecessary training and testing area, not even to speak of the tremendous economic deprivation that will come as a result of an oil spill.
And just think back to the BP spill. Think back to the time when the beaches, the sugary white sands of Pensacola Beach, they, in fact, were completely covered with oil. That picture, a very notable picture, a contrast of the black oil on top of the white sand, that picture went around the world. The winds started blowing — this is the oil from the BP off Louisiana. The wind started to continue to blow it to the east. And so some of the oil got in Pensacola Bay. Some of the oil started to get into Choctawhatchee Bay. Some got on the beautiful beaches of Destin and Fort Walton Beach. The winds took it as far east as the Panama City beaches. There they received basically tar balls on the beach.
And then the winds reversed and started taking it back to the west. So none of the other beaches all the way down the coast of Florida, Clearwater, St. Petersburg on down to the beaches off Bradenton and off of Sarasota and Fort Myers and Naples and all the way down to Marco Island, none of those beaches received the oil because the wind didn’t keep blowing it that way.
But the entire west coast of Florida lost an entire tourist season because our guests, our visitors, the tourists, they didn’t come because they had seen those pictures. And they thought that oil was on all of our beaches.
Let me tell you how risky that had been. There is in the Gulf of Mexico something known as the loop current. It comes through the separation of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and the western end of Cuba. It goes up into the gulf and then it loops and comes south in the gulf. It hugs the Florida Keys. It becomes the Gulf Stream that hugs the east coast of Florida and about mid down the peninsula it starts to leave the coast, follows and parallels the east coast of the United States and eventually goes to northern Europe. That’s the Gulf Stream. Had that oil spill been blown south from Louisiana and the loop current had come enough north, that oil spill would have gotten in the loop current and it would have taken it down past the very fragile coral reefs of the Florida keys and right up the beaches of southeast Florida, a huge tourism business. And by the way, the Gulf Stream hugs the coast in some cases only a mile off of the beach.
Now, that’s the hard economic reality of what could happen to Florida’s tourism industry, not only on the west coast that it already did that season of the BP oil spill but what could happen on the east coast of Florida, too. So opposition to drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico is certainly bipartisan, but also is the opposition to drilling off of the Atlantic coast.
In the last Congress, members from both parties joined together to file a House companion to the legislation that this senator had filed that would prohibit seismic testing in the Atlantic off of Florida. The type of seismic air gun testing that companies wanted to use to search for oil and gas would threaten thousands of marine mammals and fish, including endangered species like the North American Right Whale.
The blast from seismic air guns can cause permanent hearing loss for whales and for dolphins which disrupts their feeding, calving, and their breeding. And in addition to the environmental damage that those surveys would cause, businesses up and down the Atlantic coast would also suffer from drilling activity.
Over 35,000 businesses and over 500,000 commercial fishing families have registered their opposition to o offshore drilling in the Atlantic. From fishermen to hotel owners to restaurateurs, coastal residents, and business owners understand it’s just too dangerous to risk the environment and economy that they depend on.
There is one unique industry off shore in the Florida east coast, and this was, we made the case, way back in the 1980’s when a secretary of the interior named James Watt decided that he was going to drill all the way from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, all the way south to Fort Pierce, Florida. This senator was a young congressman then and took this case on and what finally convinced the Appropriations Committee not to include any funds for the execution of, an offering of those leases was the simple fact that where we are launching our space shuttle then as well as our military rockets from Cape Canaveral, that you simply can’t have oil rigs out there and be dropping the first stages and the solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle.
Now as you know, the cape has come alive with activity, a love commercial rocketry as well as the mainstays for our military space program. And in a year and a half, NASA will launch the largest rocket ever, one-third more powerful than the Saturn V which was the rocket that took us to the moon. And that’s the beginning of the Mars program as we are going to Mars with humans. And so because of that space industry, whether it’s commercial or whether it’s civilian, NASA or whether it’s military, you simply can’t have oil rigs out there in the Atlantic where we are dropping the first stages of those rockets. This is common sense.
So when President Obama took the Atlantic coast off the table in 2017 to 2022, that five-year planning period in that offshore drilling plan, Floridians finally breathed a sigh of relief and they sighed, too, happily. If President Trump intends to open these areas up to drilling, his administration can receive and expect to receive a flood of opposition from the folks who knows what’s going to happen.
So it is this week, and here we are mid-week, it is this week that we’re expecting for the Trump administration to move forward with an executive order that would ignore the wishes of coastal communities.
Now, I want to say that the areas off of Florida in the east coast of the Atlantic are very sensitive, as I have just outlined. But there’s nothing to say that if you have a spill off of Georgia or South Carolina, that it can’t move south. And that starts the problem all over.
This announcement by the president will be like a big present for the oil companies who, by the way, in areas in the Gulf of Mexico that are rich with oil and there are in fact active leases, they’re not producing the oil. So why would you want to grant more leases in areas that is so important to preserve the nation’s economy as well as our military preparedness.
I hope the president thinks twice before putting Florida’s economy at such a risk. I hope he refrains from issuing this executive order, but if he doesn’t, this senator and a bipartisan delegation from Florida will fight this order.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.