WASHINGTON – Environmental activists hope to make opposition to offshore oil drilling a central theme of the 2016 campaign, spotlighting an issue that resonates throughout the nation’s most important swing state of Florida.
Sea Party 2016, an anti-drilling coalition formed earlier this year, has enlisted a broad range of advocates, including liberal environmental organizations and tea-party backed conservatives from coastal states. Coalition members say drilling off the U.S. coastline isn’t just bad for the environment, it’s bad for business, too.
“We want to make sure while everybody’s talking politics, they also understand that healthy coasts and seas make for healthy coastal economies,” said David Helvarg, executive director of the Blue Frontier Campaign, which advocates for marine conservation.
Helvarg helped form Sea Party 2016, which held a rally Wednesday near the U.S. Capitol.
State officials in Florida, with 663 miles of beaches and more than 1.1 million residents working in tourism, have worked for years to protect the state from the effects of oil drilling. But proposals in Washington to allow oil and gas exploration off Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts are testing the state’s resolve to remain drilling-free.
Last year, the Interior Department approved seismic testing — a precursor to drilling — off Florida’s Atlantic coast as far south as Cape Canaveral.
The Obama administration also has approved drilling leases off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. State officials worry Florida could be included in the next round.
Earlier this year, a group of Gulf Coast senators led by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy introduced a bill that would allow drilling within 50 miles of Florida’s Gulf Coast starting in 2017. The state’s existing buffer of 125 miles expires in 2022.
GOP Rep. Curt Clawson, who represents Southwest Florida, has co-sponsored legislation that would extend that moratorium until 2027. He told activists at Wednesday’s rally that cleaning up the Gulf is a personal issue for him because his parents often talked to him about it.
“When I decided to run (for Congress), one of the most important things I knew was that … I could use my influence — our influence — to further our cause for conservation of the Gulf, which includes stopping drilling in the Gulf,” he said standing in front of an 85-foot inflatable blue whale. “Fish don’t like oil spills and neither do I.”
Clawson isn’t the only Florida Republican in Congress fighting offshore drilling.
Rep. Tom Jolly is co-sponsoring the same measure Clawson is backing to extend the drilling moratorium in the Gulf. And Rep. Bill Posey has joined a coalition of Democrats sponsoring a bill that would impose a moratorium on seismic testing in the Atlantic until proper study has determined that the impact on fish, turtles and other aquatic life is “minimal.”
Clawson, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, said it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he — a former CEO and one of the most conservative members of the House — is championing environmental advocacy.
“There’s an intersection with economic health and growth,” Clawson said after the rally. “It’s an ecology issue, a lifestyle issue, and an economic issue. Destroying the Gulf is not good on any level.”
Contact Ledyard King at olking@gannett.com; Twitter: @ledgeking
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