Thank you for your questions and I want to associate myself with your remarks in pushing for transparency.

This is an important set of topics. I want to thank you for holding this hearing, and in particular for your focus on shielding consumers and investors from fraud, abuse, and deception.

I therefore appreciate Secretary LaHood's strong commitment to safety and his interest in exploring innovative ways to reduce death and injury from impaired driving.

I wonder what kind of new thinking is going on within the Department to keep pushing this in terms of lowering those numbers.

I hope you can talk a little bit about that initiative, Secretary LaHood.

President Obama's stimulus plan is helpful but--as Secretary LaHood has pointed out--it will not be enough to meet all of our Nation's transportation challenges.

We must ensure that our National Surface Transportation Policy is guided by the need to promote economic growth while protecting public safety and the environment.

I hope that we move like our Governor, Governor Richardson, did to push commuter rail especially in the big areas.

I did not see anything on the Southwest.

The purpose of today's hearing is to look at the latest draft of the proposal that Senator Murkowski and I have put together to improve the availability of financing for deployment of clean energy and energy efficiency technologies.

The key question that we are here to discuss today is will those technologies see their commercial fruition here in the United States as well.

Yesterday, the President spoke at the National Academy of Sciences and recognized our country's proud heritage of scientific discovery and innovation that is embodied in that institution.

I hope the committee agrees. I hope you all join me in supporting her confirmation.

I am writing in strong support of President Obama's nomination of Mr. Michael L. Connor to become the next Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Not having the so-called management experience you can move in and really shake things up.

As you all know, the Congress put in place the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which has specific targets in it that we have been talking about today, this 55 percent in 2010 and then 100 percent in 2030.

Both bills would create a Federal energy efficiency resource standard that would be independent of the Renewable Electricity Standard.

We hope to learn more about the current efforts at the State level, where the EERS provisions have been enacted.