Bob Filner: “Some of our colleagues do watch us as we make these statements and talk about the situation in the West, and they say…”

“Some of our colleagues do watch us as we make these statements and talk about the situation in the West, and they say stop your whining. It is your own damn fault. If you did not have these environmental whackos in California and Oregon who stopped the building of power plants, you would not be in this situation. Now I would like to hear what the gentleman says to them, but I say that is the ridiculous argument. Number one, it was the private sector in the West that chose not to build power plants because they had calculated that they had a surplus. They miscalculated that, but that was a decision made in their economic interest, they thought, not because of any environmental regulations. I am going to soon announce in San Diego the building of a new power plant, hopefully about a thousand megawatts, built by a responsible citizen of San Diego who has built power plants all over the country and in fact has won environmental rewards for them. He is going to show that you can follow every environmental regulation that is there to protect us, every permitting policy, build a plant in a rather quick amount of time, and charge what would be the price under previously regulated rates, say a nickel a kilowatt, as opposed to the 40 cents, $1 or even $4 we have been charged. He is going to put a lie to the notion that it was environmental wackos who caused this.”