Douglas Alexander: “late last night the Senate finished work on what I call the Clean Energy Act of 2005. For Americans who watch the…”

“late last night the Senate finished work on what I call the Clean Energy Act of 2005. For Americans who watch the legislative process, this is not likely to have been the front-page news, but it is by far one of most important things we have done in this Senate because it affects millions of Americans. Our final vote is on Tuesday. I anticipate it will be a strong, bipartisan vote in support, just as the work that was done here was strong and bipartisan. The first thing the bill will do, and most important, in my opinion, is to stabilize and lower natural gas prices. We hear a lot of talk about $60 a barrel oil. No one likes to pay high prices for gasoline at the pump. The bigger problem is the price of natural gas. In North Carolina and Tennessee, all across this country, there are millions of blue-collar workers who work in plants where the cost of natural gas is driving their jobs overseas. Natural gas used to be in this country the lowest price in the industrial world at a unit price of $2 or $3. Our economy was geared to it. Today it is at $7, and headed up. If you are working at the Eastman plant in Tennessee, where 10,000 or 11,000 people work, and 40 percent of the cost of your product is natural gas--because they make chemicals there; and you can buy natural gas at $7 here, and you can buy it at $5, $4 overseas--those jobs are going to be headed overseas if that keeps up for very long.…”