South Carolina Republicans vote against offshore drilling ban
US Rep. Joe Cunningham, D-S.C., wrote bill
US Rep. Joe Cunningham, D-S.C., wrote bill
Rep. Jeff Duncan is offering a new energy proposal, calling the bill that would ban offshore drilling in the Atlantic “misguided.”
“U.S. energy exploration and production lowers electric costs for consumers, provides good paying jobs, safeguards national security, and keeps our country as a global energy leader,” Duncan said in a statement after his Wednesday vote against Rep. Joe Cunningham’s bill, which would prohibit the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management from offering any tract of the Atlantic for oil and gas leasing over the next decade.
The bill passed the House in a vote largely along party lines, including five South Carolina Republicans against it, Cunningham, a Charleston Democrat, for it and Rep. Jim Clyburn, another South Carolina Democrat, not voting.
A spokesman for Republican Rep. William Timmons, of Greenville, released a statement to WYFF News 4.
“The Congressman has serious concerns about the potential threats to our state’s tourist economy posed by offshore drilling, but needs more information about the available resources in order to make an informed decision,” it read.
Duncan’s bill
The same day the bill passed, Duncan and five other Republicans introduced the American Energy First Act.
Duncan is the only of the six on the who represents a state on the Atlantic Ocean’s coast.
Rep. Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, wrote the bill. The other four represent landlocked states.
“If we don’t capitalize on domestic production, we’re going to have to import that energy from somewhere else,” Duncan said in his statement “What’s the alternative? Reliance on foreign sources of energy from nations like Russia.”
A coastal divide on Wednesday’s vote
Cunningham represents South Carolina’s coast in the Lowcountry. Rep. Tom Rice represents the rest of the northern half of the coast.
Rice, a Republican, voted against the ban.
“I am opposed to offshore drilling and seismic testing in South Carolina and I will continue to support legislation that prohibits these activities off of our coast,” Rice said in his own statement after the vote. “This legislation goes unreasonably far by instituting a federal government mandated permanent moratorium on offshore development across the country, blatantly disregarding states’ established role in this process.
“Coastal South Carolinians deserve real solutions to this issue, not legislation so extreme and so flawed that President Trump has already promised a veto.”
Rice has a history of backing his position up.
He sent a letter to the DOI secretary “opposing South Carolina’s inclusion in the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2019-2024.”
Rice supported a budget amendment that prevented issuing permits for seismic exploration in the Atlantic during the current fiscal year.
He was one of 19 Republicans to vote in favor of the budget amendment for the Department of the Interior.
He submitted his own budget amendment preventing money from going to seismic testing, exploration and other oil and gas related activities off of South Carolina’s coast and co-sponsored another limiting activity in the Atlantic.
Rice also co-sponsored an offshore drilling bill Duncan introduced in March 2013 that was not a ban on drilling.
The South Carolina Offshore Drilling Act of 2013 aimed to get DOI to focus on areas off South Carolina’s coast that “have the most geologically promising energy resources.”
Later in 2013, Rice voted in favor of the Offshore Energy and Jobs Act.
It specifically directed President Barack Obama to conduct new Outer Continental Shelf sales in South Carolina, along with Virginia and California.