Political Quotes

“I simply begin by thanking you, first, for your statement in the Chamber today, but also, more importantly, for the leadership that you, Senator Murkowski, and others have demonstrated to bring us to this point today. I cannot speak for the rest of my colleagues, but I am delighted we are in this Chamber and have begun the debate. It has been long delayed, but it is a most important debate on whether or not we are going to have an energy policy for this country of ours. At the end of the Vietnam war, as a young naval flight officer, I moved from California to Delaware to enroll in the University of Delaware Business School. One of my earliest memories of coming to Delaware is sitting in line, waiting to buy gas for my car. We were in the middle of an oil embargo, and at that time you could only buy gas every other day. We did not have an energy policy in the mid 1970s. We do not have one today. Twenty-eight years ago, some 30 percent of the oil we used in our country was imported. We had a trade balance that was pretty much even. There was not much of a deficit. Greenhouses at the time were something in which we grew plants. We did not worry about greenhouse gases and whether or not we would have a hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere. That was 28 years ago. Today, almost 60 percent of the oil we consume comes from other places around the globe.…”