Political Quotes

“I thank the majority leader for his courtesy, and I will continue. The fourth reason that we don't need to allow these production tax credits for wind to be renewed is that they have not created as many American jobs as expected. An American University study reported in 2009 that the first $1 billion of stimulus grants to wind went to foreign manufacturing companies. And what did we get in return for these billions of dollars of subsidies? A puny amount of unreliable electricity generated mostly at night when we don't use it. I mentioned a little earlier that our country is a big country. It uses lots of electricity. The Senator from Rhode Island was talking about the problems in India that are being caused by failure of the grid. We need large amounts of reliable baseload electricity to power this country. We're very fortunate that we have, through unconventional natural gas discoveries, found that we're going to have a lot of cheap natural gas in the United States, and we can make electricity from natural gas power plants at a low cost and with very little air pollution. Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity, and 20 percent of the total electricity generated in the U.S. It needs to be a part of our future energy mix. Coal should also be part of our energy future, as long as coal plants have pollution control equipment on them to reduce the sulfur, nitrogen and mercury.…”