Tom Harkin: “Again, what is missing is biofuels. While I will certainly vote for the motion to proceed because I think we should…”

“Again, what is missing is biofuels. While I will certainly vote for the motion to proceed because I think we should proceed to it, major changes need to be made in this bill before it can earn my support on final passage. Let me talk about what those changes are. First of all, I think it is very clear that we have to wean ourselves off of spending more and more of our taxpayers' dollars, consumer dollars, on imported oil. I think President Bush said that, and President Obama has said that, and it is not a partisan issue. It is a national security issue dealing very much with our economic security in this country. What is missing from the bill is a focus--any focus at all--on the one thing that over the last, say, 20 years has decreased our dependence on foreign oil; that is, the use of biofuels for transportation. Again, there have been a lot of alternatives proposed: natural gas, hydrogen, electric vehicles--all of which will be pursued in the future. But, quite frankly, the only thing right now and in the foreseeable future, the next 10, 15 years that will do anything to decrease our dependence on foreign oil is biofuels. There has been a remarkable success story with biofuels in this country. This chart shows what we have done--it shows production increasing from 1998 up until about 2010. We had a huge increase in the use of biofuels, so we are up to about 11 billion or 12 billion gallons a year.…”