Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) on Wednesday offered a motion on the House floor that directed conferees on the national energy bill to strike provisions calling for the federal government to inventory oil and natural gas resources in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), and to respond to appeals of state permitting decisions under the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) within a compressed time frame. The House postponed a vote on the motion until next Wednesday.

Conference committee negotiators “[are] trying to run roughshod over the will of the House,” which purged the OCS inventory proposal from the energy bill passed in April, and which reached a “bipartisan compromise to impose reasonable time frames” for the secretary of the Department of Commerce to decide appeals under the CZMA, Capps said.

The provision supporting an OCS inventory has surfaced in the draft conference report on the energy bill, even though neither the House nor the Senate energy measures included language to this effect. The report also adopts the Senate language that would set a much stricter deadline for the Commerce secretary to rule on CZMA appeals than was recommended in the House bill — 270 days from the time an appeal is published in the Federal Register. The energy industry favors the Senate’s more compressed time table for CZMA appeal rulings, but Capps claims it would weaken state’s coastal zone protection laws.

Capps and other House lawmakers from coastal states are widely opposed to any inventory of OCS resources, calling it “just the first step” towards overturning the congressional and presidential moratoria, which have banned drilling off the West, East and Florida coasts for more than a decade. The inventory is “merely the tip of an iceberg” to “force open the doors to massive exploration” in these offshore areas, said Rep. Robert Etheridge (D-NC).

But the energy conference report calls for only an offshore resource inventory to be conducted, countered Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX). “It does not say it [the moratorium] should be lifted…We owe it to the nation to know what our resources are.” Pressed as to why the OCS inventory provision was even in the conference report, Barton said, “when it [the energy bill] got to conference, somebody had a better idea. A light bulb went on.”

Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) asked House lawmakers whether they were “scared” to learn the results of an inventory. “You’re foolish if you don’t want to take a peak” at the level of oil and gas resources in the OCS.

“Don’t tell me in New Jersey what you want to do with our coastline,” shot back Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), an avowed opponent of offshore drilling.

During the debate Wednesday, Capps submitted a bipartisan letter that was signed by 100 members of Congress who backed the removal of the OCS inventory provision from the final energy bill. Rep. Peter Deutsch (D-FL) offered a letter from 24 members of the Florida delegation urging Congress to strike the inventory proposal.

In a related development, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called on Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to expunge the OCS inventory provisions from the final comprehensive energy bill that is being negotiated on Capitol Hill.

“Allowing this inventory would violate the spirit of the moratoria, and I am concerned it would encourage drilling activities” offshore Florida, he wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader William Frist (R-TN), Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

In addition, Bush pointed out that the Interior Department published an estimate of the oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico in July. So an inventory of the resources in that region would be “duplicative and unnecessary,” he said.

“I ask for your help in preserving Florida’s unique marine resources and urge you to protect Florida’s coastline by ensuring that the OCS inventory language is not included in the final energy bill.”

On Capitol Hill, the measure appears to have drawn strong support from Republicans, and is not opposed by the chief Senate Democratic negotiator on the conference committee, Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. Bingaman is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Even President Bush, who during his 2000 campaign assured Floridians that drilling would not occur off their coasts, appears to have softened his stance somewhat. In a statement of policy on the national energy bill last month, the Bush administration seemed to “embrace” the inventory as a way to increase production of “traditional energy resources on the Outer Continental Shelf,” said Bill Wicker, a Democratic spokesman for the Senate energy panel.

The most vocal opponents to the inventory measure have been the Florida and California delegations in the House and Senate, as well as lawmakers representing East Coast states, particularly New Jersey and North Carolina.

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