Bill Clinton: “We're going to have to come up with another approach. The reason I liked the Btu tax is that it promoted the development…”

“We're going to have to come up with another approach. The reason I liked the Btu tax is that it promoted the development of American clean energy: natural gas, geothermal, methane, ethanol, solar energy, all kinds of things which would have led to big investments in the West particularly to try to develop the technologies. But there was so much misinformation and such an effective spe- cial interest campaign carried out against the Btu tax that it was killed. We just had no way to save it. I will say this in response to the gas tax question: The fuel tax now being considered is a smaller amount per gallon than the Btu tax was. But Nevada would have gotten the benefit of having a greater economic incentive to develop geothermal and alternative sources of energy. I haven't given up on that, but I can't do everything in this bill. In order to get on to energy policy, control of health care costs, which is a huge economic issue for America, welfare reform, all these other issues, we've got to pass the economic plan first. Federal Employees”