Tom McClintock

Eliminating Federal red tape and excessive litigation is, indeed, the only path to create healthy forests, jobs, and abundant water and power supplies.

The result is now clear and undeniable: economically devastated communities, closed timber mills, unemployed families, overgrown forests, overdrawn watersheds, jeopardized transmission lines, rampant disease and pestilence and increasingly…

Eliminating Federal Red Tape and Excessive Litigation is indeed the only path to Create Healthy Forests, Jobs and Abundant Water and Power Supplies.

When this Administration took office, this industry was poised to produce more American energy than we had at any time in our past.

This Administration has sharply reduced the acreage available for offshore leasing. It has increased the length of the regulatory process.

I mean, can people honestly say that our Nation is more energy-independent today than it was four years ago? I think not.

If we had confined our development to areas of known reserves back in those days, we would have run out of oil.

But pardon me, but the oil companies make money by producing lots of oil. They produce lots of oil because they go out and look for it and they find it.

Because that is about the only area that you are allowing American enterprise to develop. And that is an outrage.

There is no possible way anyone in his right mind would actually pay for this.

They are extremely concerned with the impact that the Chu memo policies will have on consumer electricity rates.

This has nothing to do with science or with the economies. It has everything to do with a religious fervor on the radical left.

Is this not an ideological preference by elements on the radical left for wind and solar electricity above all other sources, regardless of the costs, and the costs are considerable?

You have to hide the actual cost of this from consumers, and at the same time, you have to artificially increase the price of conventional electricity supplies that are vastly less expensive.

I find the vision of this Administration dreary and depressing.

This is a battle of two very different visions.

So would it be fair to say that cutting the payroll tax without reducing the obligations that the payroll tax pays for is simply playing a shell game over which taxes are going to pay for those obligations?

We have to ask ourselves what were those policies? The Bush administration increased spending by over 2 percent, over 2.5 percent of GDP.

Perhaps the reason the ranking member does not remember those days as vividly is because they did not last very long, and those policies produced one of the great economic expansions in our nation's history.

A year ago, we had one economist after another coming before this committee warning us that the federal government needs to get its finances in order in the next three to five years to avoid a fiscal meltdown that would dwarf the 2008…

The testimony that we--the Subcommittee has received goes far beyond that, and points to the regulatory excesses that are actively blocking these projects, even when they are funded.

I take a little exception to your comment about comparing the fish, the wild fish versus hatchery fish, to children born at home versus the hospital.

Clearly, we need to make the same kind of investments that our parents and our grandparents made in the 20th century.

It is the government's responsibility to alleviate and prevent that shortage.

There is truly enough water for everyone and we can meet both our agriculture and municipal usages.