James M. Jeffords: “I listen to this debate and at times it gets discouraging because I was around 27 years ago when the cars were lined up…”

“I listen to this debate and at times it gets discouraging because I was around 27 years ago when the cars were lined up trying to get gasoline and the people of this country were absolutely ballistic about the fact that we were hostage to the oil suppliers in the Middle East. We did some authorization in the hopes we would build an energy supply and this Nation would make it so that those kinds of situations would never occur again. Here we are, with the recognition of the volatility in the Middle East, again ignoring the possibility of moving forward to ensure we do not become subject to that kind of control by the Middle East. So I oppose very strongly the practical effect of Senator Kyl's amendment. The practical effect will be to remove all renewable energy production from this bill. It would strike the modest 10 percent provision in the underlying Daschle bill and leave us with effectively nothing. It would strike the 10 percent renewable energy standard, even though most recent studies by the Department of Energy estimate that a 10 percent national renewable energy standard would cause consumer energy prices to decline by almost $3 billion by the year 2020. It is hard to understand why we would not want to encourage clean energy, energy which causes our consumer costs to go down.”