Obama administration postpones offshore drilling plans for Virginia

The Interior Department has decided to suspend plans for an oil and gas lease sale off Virginia's coast in the wake of the BP oil spill disaster in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

Interior's Minerals Management Service announced today that it would indefinitely postpone the public comment period and public hearings on the plans that were scheduled for Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland later this month.

An MMS spokesperson said the agency is postponing the hearings so information from the ongoing review of safety issues in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster can be "appropriately considered."

"This is an appropriate response from the federal agency that oversees our offshore resources, but the Gulf spill only confirms that MMS needs to go further and permanently bar drilling off Virginia's shore and elsewhere in the Atlantic," said Deborah Murray, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. "Virginia and the nation has too much to lose and too little to gain from drilling."

Murray noted that a spill even a fraction of the size of the one now spreading across the U.S. Gulf of Mexico would devastate the ecology and economy of the Virginia coast. She called on elected leaders to use the crisis as an opportunity to shift the country away from dirty fossil fuels and toward a more sustainable energy future.