-Maurice Ferre
Candidate, United States Senate
My campaign took me to Central Florida on Saturday June 26, so instead of joining my fellow Miamians on South Beach, I showed up at 10:30 AM at Lori Wilson Park on Cocoa Beach for Hands Across the Sand.
Tony Sasso, Amy Tidd, members of the Sierra Club and Surfrider Foundation and hundreds of caring Americans held hands for ten minutes, joining thousands along other beaches in Florida with a simple, firm, clear message: NO, to offshore oil drilling; YES, to clean energy.
My wife Mercedes and I walked and listened to so many concerned Floridians: a retired couple from up-state New York and a visiting friend planning to also retire in Brevard County; a doctor who had just recently moved from Chicago and was worried about NASA downsizing. There were older people, young people, active professionals from Central Florida, and children playing in the sand. But there was one theme: The Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill and its impact on Florida: our beaches; our economy. They don’t want to fix up the regulations on deep water drilling; they don’t want any more drilling for oil, anywhere on U.S. waters. They want clean energy now. That means over a 20 year period, we must wean America from fossil fuel dependency.
On February 2010, before the BP oil spill disaster 40 miles from Louisiana’s coast, I wrote in opposition to oil drilling off Florida coasts.
In May and early June, I posted my Energy position paper (www.ferre2010.com).
A synopsis of that plan is:
The U.S. needs to go to a fossil free/clean energy future NOW. We need a short term energy plan (10 years) and a long term energy plan (20 years). On the short term we need to change all rubber tire vehicles in the U.S. to Liquid Natural Gas (LNG). As T. Boone Pickens says, there are over 13 million vehicles in the world moving on LNG, and the US and Canada have enough LNG to move us for the next 200 years. Did you know that the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas? We have natural gas reserves three times larger, measured in BTU’s , than Saudi Arabia has in petroleum. The carbon footprint of LNG is a fraction of gasoline’s and diesel, and with no OPEC price-fixing, LNG will be cheaper than those fuels. If we were to use this 100% American- produced LNG, our balance of payments deficit would be reduced at least $600 billion a year and we could go from almost 70% foreign oil dependency to zero. I am totally opposed to retrieving our natural gas through shale cracking. There is so much natural gas available in America, that we do not need to go to risky, unproven procedures that are environmentally disastrous.
In the long run, while we wait for cheap hydrogen, for a hydrogen engine and safe nuclear energy, the U.S. must become the leader in lithium, efficient storage batteries, cost effective wind power, photovoltaic sun produced electricity, and mini nuclear production of electricity. The U.S. needs a high voltage grid plan for the whole country (none exists today) and high tech production of biofuels, including biodiesel.
It isn’t that we don’t want safe drilling of oil, we want NO drilling of oil. We want to get away from oil. As for the commercials you may have seen about clean coal; there is no clean coal, we must also get away from coal.
This BP oil spill is an opportunity to do what our Presidents from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama have wanted to do: break our dependence on oil. Let’s do it. Let’s be bold and move into the future. That’s what Tony Sasso, Amy Tidd and all of us at Hands Across the Sand were thinking of that Saturday at beautiful Cocoa Beach. We all want a clean, healthy and balanced future for Florida and the USA.
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