Lynn A. Westmoreland: “I want to just address a couple of things that have been brought up; use it or lose it, drill it or lose it. That is…”

“I want to just address a couple of things that have been brought up; use it or lose it, drill it or lose it. That is already the law. That's already the law. We have 68 million acres out of 2.5 billion. Now we talked about common sense, at least I talked about common sense, about what we are doing here. And, I'm sorry, I didn't have time to write down all of the dog bites. I noticed we were quoting all of the monkey bites. But what I will tell you as far as common sense goes, if you were an exploration company, if you were an oil company, would you drill where you knew that there was no oil? I would say no. But evidently the majority, the Democrats, believe that because you have 68 million acres of land, that you need to drill on it. Although 54 percent, 54 percent of the holes that were put in the ground for exploration between 2002 and 2007 were dry. So would you continue drilling on that 68 million acres out of 2.5 billion acres? I don't think so. I think that the American people with common sense would say, you know what, if there isn't oil there, why would you drill? Do you go to the hardware store to buy groceries? I don't think the average American goes down to the hardware store looking for Quaker oats. He goes to a grocery store. And so if you are going to be drilling for oil, the commonsense thing is that you would want to drill where oil is at.”