Mr. Miller: I thank the gentleman from West Virginia for yielding.

Mr. Speaker and members of the House, there are many reasons to oppose this legislation.

You can begin with the fiscal reasons. Just last week, we had the Republicans on the floor pleading for a line-item veto so the president could help them cut deficit spending and cut spending.

The president now says he opposes the spending in this bill, but they're not going to take that into regard this week. They're going to go ahead and spend, they're going to go ahead and increase the deficit. so apparently they just can't stop themselves from doing that.

But a more important reason is this -- is because of the threat to the coasts that this bill presents and the threat to the coasts that is not necessary. if the rest of the nation would just follow -- you know, we banned offshore drilling a long time ago, but we also recognize that we had an obligation as a state to meet our energy needs and not to be as dependent on others as we were at that time. And what you now see is California is the most efficient energy user per capita in the country, but that's not enough.

We're going to go beyond that. The public utilities commission is putting in a conservation program, an energy efficient program that will end up being a positive payback for the consumers.

They will save money at the end of the expenditures of that $2 billion. We will, in fact, increase -- we will increase the use of biofuels dramatically. The governor's asked for 180 million gallons of biofuels I think in 2010. And we're going to meet and exceed that level.

So there are these alternatives that dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. And that's really where we ought to be going. This is a continuation of a philosophy that has gotten this nation into so much trouble, and that is why we use 25% of the world's fossil fuel resources and we hold 3% of the reserves, that somehow we can drill ourselves out of that problem.

It's a continuation of a policy that was in vogue and popular and maybe even right-headed in 1950 and 1960, but everything we've learned since then tells us we cannot continue in this direction.

So we tried to believe we could drill our way out of our problem in Alaska and now we're going to some of the most valuable coastline and risking that coastline on the idea that again we can continue to drill our way out of it.

And because the people of this nation don't want it, this bill has a percent verse set of financial incentives -- a perverse set of financial incentives to states and localities to try to make money talk as opposed to the people of that state, to try to get the political establishments to overwhelm the people who have spoken in the Carolinas and Florida and California and Oregon and Washington and elsewhere in this country against this policy.

So now we're just going to see if we can bribe them to changing their mind. this isn't about an energy policy, this is about an ideology.

Finally, the other reason not to do this is this drains money in every state, money available for deficit reduction or for whatever purpose and draws it into a couple of states that become the winners of this great offshore oil lottery. And this house ought to reject it on budget grounds, on environmental grounds, on energy grounds, and on simply a vision of the future.