Bob Filner: “But I would like to also underline what the gentleman just said both manipulation of the market to increase the prices…”

“But I would like to also underline what the gentleman just said both manipulation of the market to increase the prices and also the incredible suffering in California and the West. Not only does that market control give them the ability to fix the prices, but, tragically, for the future it allows them to pick and choose which energy sources will be studied and given development, and they have chosen, because they cannot control it, not to allow research and development into solar, into wind power, into geothermal and all these other renewables, where we know a big part of the answer for our future energy needs lies, and yet we have had no interest in them because these companies, which control the price, control the research and development also and have refused to allow that to occur. So this Congress ought to be looking not only at, as the President, new production and et cetera of the fossil fuels, but the structure, the economic structure of the energy industry, which not only has fixed the prices, but has foreclosed or attempted to foreclose part of our future by not allowing the research and development that we so desperately need in these other areas.”