I wonder if Charlie is feeling a little heat…

The gov’s words, via St Pete Times:

“Only when we are able to do so far enough from Florida’s coast, safe enough for our people, and clean enough for our beaches, should we even consider increasing our oil supply by drilling off Florida’s shore. Let me repeat: far enough, safe enough and clean enough.”

But allow me to pile on a little. Later-day drilling doesn’t sound so clean, not with all the crap they put in the water when they start to drill (before they get the first whiff of crude).

Again, from the St Pete Times (a different article):

Critics like Enid Sisskin of Gulf Coast Environmental Defense, a Pensacola group that has opposed offshore drilling for more than a decade, say they are not as concerned about oil spills as they are about what she calls “the routine, everyday, day-after-day pollution they dump in the water.”

When the rigs first drill into the ocean floor, the crews use fluids called “drilling muds” which include toxic substances including barium, chromium and arsenic. The EPA found that such discharges into the eastern gulf would “introduce significant quantities of contaminants to these relatively pristine waters.”

In 2002, the Mobile Press-Register tested grouper and other fish caught around Alabama’s offshore rigs. They contained so much mercury that they would not be acceptable for sale to the public under federal guidelines. The source: the drilling muds, which left mercury in the sea-bottom in concentrations as high as that found at Superfund sites.

It’s great the oil companies (and their well compensated representatives in government) say offshore drilling worries are “so thirty years ago,” but I don’t even need all my fingers to count back to 2002.

You want that grouper sandwich with or without mercury?