Senator Mel Martinez vows to fight a proposal to drill for oil and natural gas off Florida’s coast. Here is his press release:

March 13, 2007 – Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) today issued the following statement in response to the announcement of a new effort to open oil and natural gas drilling off of Florida’s coastline. Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Larry Craig (R-ID) have announced legislation to open offshore drilling as close as 45 miles to Florida’s coast, including Cuban waters for U.S. competition.

Senator Martinez said:  “This is bad policy. It attacks Florida’s protections, it violates the embargo with Cuba, and it would put drilling rigs in the Gulf military training area. This proposal goes back on everything the Congress dealt with last year – everything we did to create a long-term buffer for Florida. I will fight this proposal every step of the way.”

The bad policy is Martinez’s ‘not in my back yard’ policy. Florida uses oil and natural gas so why shouldn’t it bear it’s share of the burden of producing it? There’s a lot of talk about becoming less dependent on oil from the middle-eastern countries but very little action.

How many people want an embargo with Cuba to stand in the way of less expensive fuel? Does Martinez think that relations with Cuba are more important than the availability of energy?

The “Gulf military training area” is not a critical issue. The military can continue most of the training and testing exercises in the presence of oil rigs and move the others farther into the Gulf. Anyway, the Air Force wants to move much of the testing now done at Eglin AFB to California.

Most of those who oppose off-shore drilling say that it will spoil the beautiful coastline. They talk about the chance of oil spills and the ugly, polluting industry that supports the drilling and processes the oil and gas from the off-shore wells. They want you to believe that all the tourists that now visit Florida will immediately leave and never return if we allow the oil and gas industry to come in. This is just a smokescreen for their real agenda: thwarting all new industrialization in general and energy production in particular. I say ‘energy production in particular’ because it supports other industries.

Florida also discourages on-shore drilling. An exploration company is planning to drill a well here in Northwest Florida about 25 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. A company representative told me that they have encountered a lot of roadblocks in the state permitting process. He said that process has become one of the major expenses in exploring for new oil and gas fields in Florida.

(Full disclosure: I have a very small financial interest in the proposed inland well. My only interest in the off-shore drilling is to keep oil and gas available at the lowest possible prices.)