Douglas Alexander: “I thank the Senator. So that narrows the differences considerably. Having acknowledged the good work done on the other…”

“I thank the Senator. So that narrows the differences considerably. Having acknowledged the good work done on the other side, I will also acknowledge the good work the President did. Only a President of whatever party can put something on the agenda the way a President can, and so it was exciting to all of us who cared about this issue and about the goals, which are to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to clean the air, which is what this does, to see President Bush, in his State of the Union Address, make a bold proposal to direct the Secretary of Energy to explore the possibility of a hydrogen economy and to develop the next generation of technology that would include hydrogen. What we are really talking about, as the Senator from North Dakota explained, is a completely new way of thinking and living our lives. I noticed the other day in our local newspaper in Tennessee there was a picture of a filling station in Iceland that opened. Iceland has a hydrogen filling station. The buses that operate in Iceland back up to that hydrogen filling station and instead of putting gasoline in their tanks, they put in hydrogen. They drive around on the hydrogen, and instead of emitting some carbon-based pollutant into the air, they emit only water, which is the product of that process.”