On the recordJuly 23, 2014
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from the Dakotas for yielding the floor to me. Before he leaves, I wish to say something about what the Senator just said. In fact, I was sitting here listening to him. I am going to prove I was actually listening to his speech. I don't think we always do--sometimes I think we don't--but I did that because he was right on target. But my thought process went back to the 1970s. In the 1970s, OPEC and the Arab oil embargo basically held the United States of America hostage. I remember lines where we would wait for an hour and a half to get $10 worth of gasoline because we had a limited supply. Now we sit here in a country, some 40 years later, that has unlimited resources available to us if we will just take the political moves and the regulatory moves and the practical moves to exhibit our power and extract those resources. For example, the Keystone Pipeline that the Senator talked about--not a single molecule of carbon will be generated by bringing that petroleum underground through a pipeline from Canada to Houston. We will refine it more soundly and more environmentally than the Chinese would or anybody else would, and then we will have an almost infinite supply to take care of our own country internally and also use it as a part of our soft power around the world. The Senator is absolutely correct about Germany and about the Ukraine and about Russia.…





