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I want to put this in perspective, Mr. Chairman, before I have to yield
back my time. This accident as far as we know is releasing 5,000
barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico. It has been doing so for
approximately three weeks so that’s a little bit over 100,000 barrels.
The largest spill in the Gulf of Mexico to date was a spill off the
coast of Mexico. It produced 90,000 barrels a day for nine months,
90,000 barrels per day for nine months. Exxon-Valdez was a tanker that
ran aground in Alaska, that was a supertanker that was three to four
hundred thousand barrels of oil. So far this spill has produced a
little over a hundred thousand barrels. Now that in and of itself is a
significant spill and it is a non-trivial incident, but it is nowhere
near yet the order of magnitude of other accidents that have happened
around the world.
There is a natural seepage in the oceans around the United States on an annual basis of four million barrels a year.
There is an annual seepage worldwide of over forty million barrels of oil per year.
So this, while it is an accident that is non-trivial, it is not of the
catastrophic consequences that some in the mainstream media have made
it out to be. [full C-Span video]
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