"GOP claim about Chinese oil drilling off Cuba is untrue"

Posted By: Russell
Date: 6/11/08 5:28p.m.

Report: outside forum guidelines

[As usual, click the link for the entire article. I'm not sure how it matters who Cuba allows to explore in its offshore territory. Speaking as a sailor, I just want all the platforms in the gulf well lit. ] WASHINGTON — As Congress has debated energy policy over the past several days, an unusual argument keeps surfacing in support of drilling off the U.S. coastline and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Why, ask some Republicans, should the United States be thwarted from drilling in its own territory when just 50 miles off the Florida coastline the Chinese government is drilling for oil under Cuban leases? Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR. "China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon's research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight. ...