Henry Waxman

Since last May, this committee has held four hearings on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and passed two separate bills to mandate approval of that pipeline, and yet the majority has never bothered to examine the impacts of tar sands…

The Republicans and the oil industry will use this opportunity to call for building the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The environmental harms from tar sands production have been minimized and will be solved by technology. In reality, the tar sands operations have vast and devastating effects on the land, water, air, and ecosystem.

More drilling, building a new tar sands pipeline or developing oil shale has not reduced gasoline prices in Canada and it won't in the United States either.

I think the President is on the right track.

With oil at such a high price, do we need to be giving out $4 billion in tax breaks for oil companies each year?

It makes just common sense. But this isn't the only example.

The Congress should be helping you and the President accomplish that goal. Instead, Republicans in Congress attack every proposal you and the President make.

If we produced more oil and OPEC decides to produce less, that won't help us; that will hurt us.

Well, the Republicans have said over and over again we just need more oil. If we had more oil, we wouldn't have this problem.

Yet rather than confront this challenge, the Republicans deny the science and they vote to block all action on climate change.

We have to also confront the enormous challenge of climate change, which threatens our economic strength, our national security, and the health of our citizens.

We have to invest in clean energy to diversify and reduce our energy use.

Energy economists tell us the Republican plan is not even 'remotely possible' to reduce the price of gasoline.

So when we hear Republicans saying, 'Produce more oil,' they are doing what the oil companies want, but it is not going to reduce the price of gasoline.

This is going to be expensive, and I suppose that the technology advances quickly and gets cheaper over time.

I think it is criminal that we are not doing it.

To say it is the President's policies is just poppycock, as far as I am concerned.

What they want from us and from the President is some vision and some leadership about the future.

What this Congress ought to be talking about is what we can do today for generations 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now.

Let us just quit this kind of talk and let us be real with the American people.

Let us just quit BS-ing the American people that there is some way to control the price of a barrel of oil.

Let us quit BS-ing the American people that there is some magic wand or some policy that Congress or any President, Democrat or Republican, can do to affect the price of a world priced commodity.

We don't control the price. We don't control the price.

The idea that our problem is insufficient oil production is a fantasy, and I believe it is a very dangerous fantasy.