Greenpeace: Obama must shelve Arctic drilling plans, call for offshore moratorium

WASHINGTON – Following the announcement by President Obama that there will be no expansion of offshore drilling until investigations into the BP Deepwater Disaster are complete, Greenpeace Executive Director, Philip Radford made the following statement:

“The President’s announcement today, while a welcome first step, does not go nearly far enough. The only way to prevent human, economic and environmental tragedies like the BP Deepwater Disaster is to re-enact the moratorium on offshore drilling and to replace dirty dangerous fuels with clean energy.

On April 2nd, President Obama said: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.  They are technologically very advanced.”  Days later, the BP Deepwater Spill began.

One of the President’s first steps to start making the shift to clean energy should be to require that all new cars are manufactured with existing plug-in technologies that run at 100 miles per gallon by 2015. In addition, President Obama should shelve the plans to allow Shell to drill in the Arctic this summer. The Coast Guard calls a spill in the Arctic a ‘nightmare scenario’ due to the difficulties in cleaning spills in the Arctic.  If we cannot handle a spill in the Gulf of Mexico, imagine the impact even a small spill could have in the remote, pristine waters of the Arctic.