Douglas Alexander: “the legislation that the Senator from Massachusetts described bears very little resemblance to the legislation I have…”

“the legislation that the Senator from Massachusetts described bears very little resemblance to the legislation I have been working on for the last couple of years with Senators Domenici and Bingaman and that 13 out of the 14 Senate conferees of both parties just approved. Let me say what I believe we did and then spend a minute, at the end of my 5 minutes, correcting a couple of things the Senator from Massachusetts said. Energy is not usually what we talk about at the dinner table, but it is today. For example, in Tennessee, if you are working at International Paper in Memphis or at Eastman Chemical in east Tennessee, you know that if the price of natural gas stays as high as it is today, the highest in the world, those jobs are going to move overseas. And those are thousands of jobs in Tennessee and millions of blue-collar jobs in America. If you are a farmer and you know that the natural gas price stays as high as it is today, you know you are going to have a big pay cut because of the cost of fertilizer. And if you are a homeowner, you know the bills are up. The first thing this legislation does is to take significant steps to stabilize the price of natural gas and hopefully bring it down. That is worth talking about at the dinner table. The second thing it does is to change the way we produce electricity so that it is by low-carbon and no-carbon means.…”