I would encourage you--encourage you--to go to Alaska and to hear the people.

I want to make sure that we have got this right and, again, that we are achieving the progress.

I think it would be extraordinarily important for you to hear directly from the men and women on the ground in their place as to what this means.

Well, and we need to find those efficiencies.

This subcommittee will have to make some tough choices about where to spend limited resources.

Good. I want a lot of hope.

Do you even have a measurable goal for conventional production of oil and gas on our public lands?

if you are trying to talk benefits here, again, if those that are willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into a project and have nothing to show for it and may be forced to walk away from this project, walk away from this…

Thanks to the leadership of Senator Murkowski and others who made the passage of the recent Helium Act possible.

Let me talk a little bit or let us have a discussion here about where we are with the contaminated lands...

Well, right now, the American taxpayer is getting 100 percent of nothing, and the tribes, the native corporations are not being benefited at all because there is no production.

So we would just need to create in Congress a goal for our conventional fuels on public lands.

Tell me how this does not violate the intent of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) and the no-more clause when you have in place a proposal like this.

the proposals that we have here in terms of limitations on opportunity for access are really quite extraordinary, proposing to place off limits most any form of development.

But the obligation is paramount as well.

But this is, again, an area where we need to be looking beyond those one-time monies that we received within the Helium Stewardship Act to better define how we are going to address the cost of this cleanup.

Our foreign dependence is difficult enough, but the concentration of that supply presents additional challenges.

I think we have a real problem on our hands as a result of our nation's borderline insidious reliance on mineral imports.

It is not hard to foresee a day of reckoning when this will become real for all of us.

I agree with you. We have got a lot of work to do, and I look forward to those conversations with you and your team.

I would like your commitment that you will work with me, you will work with the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) to really be involved to a personal extent and degree with some of these challenges that we are facing as they relate to…

I would ask that you not forget the smaller communities where we see--we see an addiction and a devastation truly just taking our communities, just wiping them out.

all anybody wanted to talk about was Russia's arctic push, and what were we going to do in that regard.

Some would suggest that we are just so far behind on this that we have no excuses.

the United States may be 40 years behind... depending on how you are talking to.