Political Quotes

“thank you. It is December 21. This is the shortest day of the year. On Alaska's North Slope today, it is pretty dark. The Sun went down, I was told, November 18 at 1:40 p.m. It is not going to rise again until January 23 at 1:01 p.m. Today's weather forecast on the North Slope is for it to be about 30 degrees below zero. Most of us would be hunkering down and hiding out from the cold and the dark. But right now Alaska's North Slope and the oil activities are humming because this is the time of year we do our work up there. And why do we do it? Do we do it because we like the cold, we like to be in the cold and in the dark? No. We do it because this is how we provide for the protections for the area. We explore and we work when the tundra is frozen. This is when we build the ice bridges. This is when we do the exploration. We do it because we care for the environment up there. It hurts to hear some of the discussion and some of the argument and some of the misinformation about how we in Alaska derive our resources, how we pull the oil from the ground up North. We have been providing about 20 percent of this Nation's domestic oil from Prudhoe Bay for the past 30 years, and we have been doing a good job of it. We have been providing not only for the environment, we have been providing the jobs, and we have been providing the revenues. We have been helping this country in an effort to keep our balance of payments from booming even more than they already are.…”