Former Gov. Martin O'Malley criticized the Obama administration's plan to open a swath of the southeastern Atlantic seaboard to oil and gas drilling, writing in a New York Times op-Ed Moday that the proposal is "a big mistake."
O'Malley, who left office last month, called the plan released last week a "whiplash decision" to sell leases in federal waters from Virginia to Georgia. He wrote that a potential disaster would impact states far beyond them, and referenced the lingering effect of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"To allow drilling off the Atlantic Coast is to willfully forget Deepwater's awful lesson even as the economic, environmental and public health consequences continue to reverberate in communities along the gulf," O'Malley wrote. "If a disaster of Deepwater's scale occurred off the Chesapeake Bay, it would stretch from Richmond to Atlantic City. ... The 50-mile buffer the administration has proposed would be irrelevant. And unlike the gulf, the Chesapeake is a tidal estuary, meaning that oil would remain in the environment for decades."
In his two-terms, O'Malley, a Democrat weighing a bid for president, accumulated a record that places him among Maryland's greenest governors. While environmentalists praised him for convincing other states to join a climate change compact and boosting the amount of electricity derived from renewable sources, O'Malley also drew their scorn for proposing regulations that allow for natural gas fracturing.
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, O'Malley successor, declined through spokesmen last week to take a position on Obama's offshore drilling plan.