Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank my colleague, and I wish to congratulate her on her leadership on this issue. We clearly have had a very extensive debate in our caucus on this. There are varying views, and I have thought a lot about it. I have had 120,000 California constituents write and call, of which about 93 percent are strongly opposed. I would say to the chairman of the committee that one of the things that interested me from reading these constituent letters was really how informed individuals were about this pipeline. Let me lay out some of the environmental concerns. You have heard this, but perhaps you haven't heard it in entirely this way. The Keystone Pipeline was proposed to accommodate increased extraction of oil from the tar sands of Alberta. These tar sands cover an area of 54,000 square miles. That is roughly the size of New York, so it is huge. I first came upon this by reading a March 2009 issue of National Geographic, and in that they showed part of the desecration to the land--forests down, tar sands. It looked like a Moon face. A huge portion of these deposits can only be accessed through open-pit surface mining, which destroys natural forests and bogs. Then the oil sands are mixed with heated water, chemicals are added, and it is driven up with steam in order to separate it from the sand. These methods are costly, they are energy-intensive, they are carbon-intensive, and they leave behind a significant amount of toxic waste.…”