Earth Equity News

Virginia's Top Official Pushing for Offshore Drilling. By Richard Simon, LA Times, February 8, 2010. "Virginia could become the first state on the Eastern Seaboard to open its coast to energy exploration since a decades-old federal drilling ban expired more than a year ago. The new Republican governor, Robert McDonnell, pledged to make Virginia the 'energy capital of the East Coast' at his swearing-in last month. The state's Democratic senators, Jim Webb and Mark R. Warner, are also urging the Obama administration to begin selling leases next year for drilling 50 miles offshore... 'Virginia is eager to get started,' McDonnell said in a letter to the Department of the Interior, portraying the drilling as a way to aid economic recovery and generate billions of dollars for the financially strapped state, including money for transportation improvements. 'We may have this potential bank account sitting out there,' said Gerry Scimeca, an aide to state Delegate Ron A. Villanueva, a Republican and the sponsor of a pro-drilling resolution approved Wednesday by the Virginia General Assembly on a 69-28 vote. The lease sale would be the first on the Atlantic coast since 1983. New drilling has been prohibited in much of the nation's coastal waters since the 1980s, largely in response to a devastating 1969 oil spill in California, off Santa Barbara. Congress let the ban lapse in late 2008 as high gasoline prices became a hot political issue."