Political Quotes

“I wish to start out thanking my colleague from South Dakota. He has been a very reasoned voice on this issue, and he has brought forward some ideas that I believe are the right approach to dealing with ethanol. If you think about it, about 50 percent of our oil is now imported from another part of the world. The more dramatic piece of that is that oftentimes the importation of that oil comes from parts of the world that do not share our philosophy, do not share our view of the world, are not democracies, and do everything they can to, in effect, fight against what we believe in. So not only are we dependent on foreign oil, we are dependent on a source of foreign oil that oftentimes is contrary to the values and beliefs of American citizens. One of these days, I think we are going to learn the lesson of that dependency, and we are going to alter our course. We are going to do a whole host of things that make sense: more drilling, more exploration, more nuclear power plants, as Senator Lamar Alexander has advocated for, and just everything on the list. It is all a piece of the puzzle. A piece of that puzzle is also renewable fuels. It could be biodiesel, it could be ethanol, it could be cellulosic ethanol, which I championed when I was Secretary of Agriculture. Again, I think it is going to be a whole host of things. Ten or twenty years ago, if I were on the Senate floor making those statements, many would have looked at me and said: Well, Mike, that is just a pipedream.…”