By Jason K. Chen, Climate Intern
cross-posted on the

Hearing: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, , 11/17/09

Hearing: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, , 11/19/09

Contrary to my expectations, the senate hearing on environmental stewardship policies related to offshore energy production only had to do with drilling; wind energy was completely left out of the discussion.

The witness panel was quite balanced by the presence of two representatives of oil companies and two representatives of environmental groups, the fifth witness being the Deputy Director of the Mineral Management Service. However, as far as I could tell, the witnesses as well as the senators were convinced of the fact that America still needs to drill. This is understandable because switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy will take time, but the length of time is the question that needs to be asked.

The representatives from the oil companies spent considerable time explaining how oil drilling is high tech and how the United States has the strictest standards when it comes to oil production. The representatives from the environmental groups reminded the senators that drilling is still dangerous and that our knowledge of the effects of drilling on the ocean is very limited. Everyone made their point, but I believe the oil companies came out on top; this was due not to their persuasion power, but to the existing opinions of the senators themselves.

Senator Landrieu of Louisiana was very critical of the environmental groups exaggerating the dangers of oil drilling. John Amos, the president of SkyTruth, tried to show that drilling is still dangerous by pointing out that an oil rig off the coast of Australia just recently had an accident. Senator Landrieu defended oil production by saying that the Australian oil rig’s design did not meet American standards implying that this accident would not have happened off the American coast. I don’t believe this is true. It was stated in the hearing that the cause of the accident was unknown, therefore, what actually did cause it might not necessarily have to do with whatever disqualified it from American standards.

A point that was not discussed was the negative effects of burning oil. Oil as a source of CO2 emissions might have been beyond the scope of that particular hearing, but it is definitely not beyond the scope of the general problem of drilling. In conclusion, I say that just because drilling is safer than ever, does not mean it’s ok.

Today’s ques­tion comes from Erika M:

I see yea, nay, no, aye as the way con­gress­men voted. What does aye mean?

Ah par­lia­men­tary pro­ce­dure. There’s no mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence be­tween Yea and Aye, and Nay and No. They both mean “I vote in favor” or “I vote against”. The dif­fer­ence is just a mat­ter of pro­ce­dure. The Con­sti­tu­tion ac­tu­al­ly re­quires “Yea” and “Nay” for votes on the pas­sage of bills (Ar­ti­cle I Sec­tion 7), and so the House and Sen­ate both do that for those par­tic­u­lar votes.

In fact, the Sen­ate uses Yea and Nay for all votes. Good for them for keep­ing things sim­ple. It’s an­oth­er story for the House.

There are two pe­cu­liar­i­ties of the House that make the an­swer to the ques­tion not so sim­ple. First, they use Aye and No for all voice votes, where con­gress­men just shout out their vote and the chair judges who won just by lis­ten­ing. (Any­one can sub­se­quent­ly de­mand that the votes be record­ed in­di­vid­u­al­ly, in which case a record­ed vote is used. In the Sen­ate, voice votes use Yea and Nay.)

The sec­ond pe­cu­liar­i­ty of the House is that it op­er­ates in two modes of pro­ce­dure, and that de­ter­mines which kind of vote is used for record­ed votes not on the pas­sage of bills (be­cause those are al­ways Yea and Nay). These final types of votes could be for amend­ments, mo­tions, etc. The first mode is nor­mal House floor de­bate, which uses Yea and Nay for record­ed votes, so you will see Aye and No for voice votes but Yea and Nay for record­ed votes. Yea and Nay are re­served for this mode of de­bate only. The sec­ond mode is when the House op­er­ates as if it were a com­mit­tee made up of ev­ery­one, called “The Com­mit­tee of the Whole on the State of the Union,” and in this mode Aye and No are used for record­ed votes as well as voice votes.

Some more de­tails are in House Rules, if you want to pour through the de­tails. It’s in Rules of the House, Rule XX, and House Prac­tice in the sec­tion Vot­ing.

Visitor WB asks:

I understand there are different Bills passed by congress regularly. Some with “H.R.”, “S”, H. Res” and other variations. My questions is this: What are the types of Bills and what does each designations stand for? Where is each Bill valid? Who is subject to that specific Bill? Read it all..

that House Republicans are explaining their views on the health care bill by linking people directly to the paragraphs in the bills they find important. I think that’s great. They may be using OpenCongress, but we invented that feature over here on GovTrack — OpenCongress is based on GovTrack — so we’ll take some pride and credit too.

Here’s what Donny wrote:

Here’s a great example of the kind of textually-informed conversations about bills we have been trying to encourage. Republicans in the House of Representatives are extracting chunks of legislative text from the OpenCongress health care bill page (), giving their take and opening them up for discussion. They’re using OpenCongress’ bill text permalinking tool to refer people back to the specific lines of text in the 1,990 page bill that they’re talking about.Check it out —

They’re using a service called that lets you “clip, share and discuss interesting things you read on the web.” It integrates with Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.

I just set up an account quickly and was able to leave a comment on one of

. Then I was able to easily . The whole process is open, transparent and social.

Having the links back to the exact portion of the bill under discussion make it engaging. It’s easy to be disingenuous about legislation by making a false claim and backing it up with a line of text taken out of context. That’s basically how the “death panel” myth was spread over the summer. But providing a link to the specific line within the bill invites people to look it up for themselves, read it in context and make their own judgement.

Anyways,

. They’re putting up several new posts per hour.