Tom Harkin: “I strongly oppose both the amendment offered by Senators Feinstein and Coburn and the one offered by Senator McCain that…”

“I strongly oppose both the amendment offered by Senators Feinstein and Coburn and the one offered by Senator McCain that we will be voting on in a couple of hours. My message today is very simple: This assault on America's ethanol industry is both misguided and undeserved. This is truly a homegrown industry built on the investment and labor of many thousands of Americans providing a product that helps us with one of our most pressing national issues--our dependency on imported oil. Yet here we are debating amendments that I think clearly tell the industry: You aren't important, you don't matter, and you don't have the support of the American people. I think that is not only the wrong message but a misguided message to be sending, and I will tell you why. We have been struggling with our dependency on oil for almost 40 years. One of our strategies over that period of time has been to develop and commercialize biofuels. I am proud to have been involved from the beginning and I continue to this day to be a strong advocate for renewable biofuels produced from domestic feedstocks. We started working on this, as I said, over 30 years ago. It has been a long campaign, but it has been a remarkably successful campaign when you think about it. It took about 20 years for ethanol to get to the point of contributing just a few percent to our gasoline supply.…”