Pete Domenici: “But I want to make sure those who are worried about America's energy crisis know a mere statement, whether it be verbal…”

“But I want to make sure those who are worried about America's energy crisis know a mere statement, whether it be verbal or written down on a piece of paper, that says we ought to achieve this doesn't achieve anything. Or we in the Senate think our goal should to be save 3.5 million barrels of oil and then say how proud we are that we are going to achieve this great goal; that doesn't do anything. All you have is, if you have a bunch of targets and goals and they are high and they are big, you can say: We are a better dreamer than the other side, because we have these great dreams about how much we should save and what our target should be. But think for a minute, what do they accomplish? The truth is, the underlying bill, for a change, saves on crude oil consumption and gasoline, because we have changed the CAFE standards permanently. As anybody in here remembers, every time we were talking about saving large quantities of gasoline, if we could just change the CAFE standards. Remember? Well, we changed them. The biggest way to save on gasoline is to change them. We changed them. We don't need a target in the bill that says we should save on gasoline. Maybe you should say by changing the CAFE standards, but the President can't change the CAFE standards. Only we can, and we did.”