Ed Whitfield: “We certainly want to thank the gentlelady from New York for introducing this amendment. To answer the question about how…”

“We certainly want to thank the gentlelady from New York for introducing this amendment. To answer the question about how is this bill going to help oil prices and provide more oil for the marketplace, obviously it can't do it overnight. But the reason that we're here is because it has taken EPA 5 years and they still have not even rendered a decision on a simple exploratory drill permit request, which is not even a long-term activity. It's simply to explore to determine is oil there and can we use it. Now, in America we're using around 20 million barrels of oil a day, and the vast majority of that is being imported into the U.S. from other sources. And so all we're attempting to do in this bill--we're not changing any aspect of the Clean Air Act, we're not changing mobile source rules, stationary source rules, national ambient air quality standards. We're not changing that. We're not changing the Environmental Appeals Board from hearing appeals on any other permit other than an exploratory permit, and that's all this bill does. And we want to do it because we're trying to find additional oil in America, and we know we have it. And we also know that if we have more oil, obviously we can't get it produced tomorrow. We've been trying 5 years just to get the permit, and we don't have that yet. But we want any company to have the ability to go out and drill and to get an expedited answer from EPA. We're not even directing EPA to approve the permit.…”