Mark Udall: “Mr. Speaker, I wanted to associate myself with the comments of my colleagues and in particular acknowledge the…”

“Mr. Speaker, I wanted to associate myself with the comments of my colleagues and in particular acknowledge the articulate and eloquent comments from the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As I think he pointed out, the geologists tell us we have probably something along the order of 6 months' supply in this area, and to me it would be a big mistake for that short-term supply of oil to trample an area that was described in such fashion. It is a trade-off that is not really acceptable, I think. What is acceptable? Well, if we look at what Vice President Gore has been talking about, what is acceptable is to throw ourselves into all of these opportunities that we have to develop different types of energy production methods that are really exciting technologies out there. One hundred years ago, when petroleum was discovered, there were only two or three obvious uses for it. What did we do as a country? What did we do as a society? We said let us invest in research and development. The Federal Government stepped in, and now we have almost countless uses for petroleum. In fact, some historians, I think, will tell us that we wasted it in our automobiles in the latter half of the 20th century. We have very promising technologies in solar, as demonstrated by phototechnologies. We have wind technologies where the price of kilowatts is coming down dramatically.”