Douglas Alexander: “So he has the longest lineage--his family does, I believe--of anyone in the territory we now call the United States of…”

“So he has the longest lineage--his family does, I believe--of anyone in the territory we now call the United States of America. He has made a terrific contribution on energy. I appreciate his remarks. We have come a long way in our work on energy over the last couple of years, and while we still have some important differences of opinion-- we saw some of those expressed today--they are differences of emphasis, important differences of emphasis. I don't want to minimize that. For my part, I see us moving toward a different way of thinking about how we produce energy in this country. We have gone from having the lowest natural gas prices in the world to the highest. Gasoline prices are too high. We see that despite all of our efforts to reduce our use of oil, we are still importing more oil than we should. So we need to do things differently. My formula for doing that is largely representative of the bill that was reported 21 to 1. First, conservation and efficiency. I heard the Senator talk about that. Second, new supplies of natural gas, as well as oil try to get the price of natural gas down for farmers, for homeowners, and for businesses. To do that, unfortunately, we will have to import liquefied natural gas for the next few years. Otherwise, we will be exporting jobs. We can either import some gas or export the jobs, one or the other--that is going to be our choice--so we have an adequate and substantial supply of low-cost American-produced clean energy.…”