Political Quotes

“It doesn't have to be. This is not a difficult process. Now, since I signed the pledge, the question is how do we do this? Well, we know how we do it. These red areas on this map is called the Outer Continental Shelf, OCS. You hear it talked about on this floor a lot. These areas, which is the West Coast, all the West Coast, all of the East Coast, and the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico, are off limits, off limits. We can't research it, we can't investigate it, we definitely can't find and produce oil and gas. And we know there's billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and we don't have access to it because of our policies in this, on this, in this building on an appropriation bill, not even an authorization bill. And we're going to get a chance to get appropriation bills on the floor, and we're going to raise this issue when this bill comes to the floor, and we're going to challenge our friends on the other side to say, you know what? It's time. This is too much. We need to open up the OCS, the Outer Continental Shelf. What's another solution? Well, I live in the State of Illinois, and geologically, the State of Illinois is, if you go down far enough, it's a big, huge field of coal. It's called the Illinois Coal Basin. We have as much energy, BTU, British Thermal Units of energy as Saudi Arabia has of oil.”