From the Washington Post:
The White House vowed Friday that no expansion of offshore oil drilling will take place until investigations are completed into a rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which is sending thousands of gallons of crude oil lapping toward Louisiana’s shores.
With the edge of the massive spill reaching the gulf coastline late Thursday, according to wire services, the crisis is threatening to eclipse the Exxon Valdez as the nation’s worst environmental disaster in decades.
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Senior White House adviser David Axelrod pledged that President Obama’s plans to end a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling would be put on hold until the cause of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig is known.
“What the president has said — all he has said — is he’s not gonna continue the moratorium on drilling. But he hasn’t — no additional drilling has been authorized and none will [be] until we find out what happened here and whether there was something unique and preventable here,” Axelrod said on “Good Morning America.” Axelrod defended the Obama administration’s response to the disaster, saying the Coast Guard was on the scene “almost immediately” to begin overseeing the response.
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