Douglas Alexander: “we are talking today about whether to find out how much natural gas we have offshore. Let me try to put that in personal…”

“we are talking today about whether to find out how much natural gas we have offshore. Let me try to put that in personal terms. In the mountains of east Tennessee, we have a company, Tennessee Eastman. Mr. President, 10,000, 12,000 jobs are there. They have been good-paying jobs for several generations. They make chemicals at Eastman Chemical. Their raw material is natural gas. The cost of that gas has gone from the lowest in the world to the highest in the world. If it stays that way, those jobs will not be in Tennessee; they will be moving overseas. There are 1 million blue-collar manufacturing jobs in America in the chemical industry that depend on natural gas for a raw material. We must lower the price of natural gas. We can do it by conservation. That is in the Domenici-Bingaman bill we are considering. We can do it by nuclear power, which we need to accelerate. Support for that is in the Domenici bill. We can do it someday, we hope, by coal gasification. But right now we have $7 gas, the highest in the industrial world, we are building all our new powerplants for natural gas, and we are refusing to find out how much natural gas we have offshore to supply more and reduce the price. So we have farmers who are taking a pay cut, homeowners who cannot heat and cool their homes, we have blue-collar workers across this country who are going to have their jobs shifted overseas, and what we are saying is we do not even want to know how much gas we have.…”