New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, just promised to organize a “citizens’ fleet” to block offshore drilling proposed by the Trump Administration. “I’m going to commission a citizen fleet to stop it just as Winston Churchill did at Dunkirk,” he said, recalling the heroic rescue of British and Allied troops from France in the early days of the Second World War.
Cuomo called Trump’s decision to permit offshore drilling “an unacceptable risk,” and said he would organize fishing and recreational vessels to stop it in a speech attacking the Administration’s environmental and energy policies.
The Administration’s policy would open 90 percent of U.S. offshore oil reserves to private development. It has attracted bipartisan opposition from most of the governors of the 22 states it would affect. In January, the Administration ruled out drilling for oil and gas off Florida after strong opposition from the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, who said, “My top priority is to ensure that Florida’s natural resources are protected.”
At the start of the Second World War, German advances had pushed British, French and other allied troops all the way west to a beachhead in Dunkirk, just across the English Channel in France. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to organize a fleet of civilian boats to rescue them. Over nine days in May and June, 1940, a fleet of 861 British small ships (including 243 that were sunk) rescued 338,226 allied troops and brought them back to England before the Germans moved in. Read more:
