Don Young: “Well, Mr. and Mrs. America in the gallery, then. I can address somebody I hope. Mr. Speaker, I want to get back to the…”

“Well, Mr. and Mrs. America in the gallery, then. I can address somebody I hope. Mr. Speaker, I want to get back to the concept. Let us look at energy. Now, you cannot conserve your way into prosperity, nor can you conserve your way into independence with fuel or energy. And that is the suggestion of Al Gore, we are going to have conservation that will solve our problem. Not as our population increases. That is an impossibility. It is not correct. So I am suggesting we must think about where we find our oil and our gas. And we have it in Alaska. It can be done and has been done and is environmentally safe. We must allow this to happen for America. We must not allow the OPEC countries to control us, as they are doing now. They are the ones that are pulling the strings; they are the ones that raise the price of gasoline at the pump with the taxes that Al Gore added. They are the ones that make you pay more as you go to work or you take your young son to soccer or your daughter to piano lessons or vice versa. We as Americans have to have a policy. I believe our policy on energy has to be one of production, one of discovery and one of refining. I know I am going to introduce a bill the next session to give us an expedited process to build refineries. Because I have asked people, 'Why aren't you building refineries?' They say, 'We can't build refineries under the present delay factors of this administration.' That means we have to buy refined products from abroad.”