Barbara Boxer: “I say to my friend, it is. It is short-term thinking. It is not good for this country. If you want to talk about…”

“I say to my friend, it is. It is short-term thinking. It is not good for this country. If you want to talk about patriotism, the most patriotic thing you can do, it seems to me, is drive a car that doesn't use all that foreign oil. It is very hard to get such a car, an American car particularly. It is interesting my friend raised this because he is right. The Senate was weak on this, shamefully weak. But we did not get any help from Vice President Cheney when, on June 18, 2001, he announced to General Motors executives that the Bush administration has no plans to pursue higher fuel efficiency standards. That set the tone. When this administration came in, many of us did say there were so many ties to energy, so many ties to oil companies, that we were very worried. But some of us thought maybe, because of that, the administration would bend over backwards to be fair, to lean on this issue. We were sorely disappointed. If one could sit down and really think it through, we are talking about a very unwise strategy on the part of this administration to not look ahead, to not plan for the future, to not care about your grandchildren or my grandchildren having the opportunity to see the beauty of this country; to not worry that much if the quality of the air goes down or the quality of the water; to convince yourself the environmental laws are a burden on industry. That is disproven and untrue. My friend talks about California. We have been the leader on environmental protection.…”