Ron Lewis: “Speaking of the Kyoto treaty, I was in China a few years ago. I was in Sian, China. The smog, coal, smoke in that city…”

“Speaking of the Kyoto treaty, I was in China a few years ago. I was in Sian, China. The smog, coal, smoke in that city was so bad that the people, the citizens of that city, had to wear like surgical masks. We could not see for the pollution. In the Kyoto treaty, it is my understanding that they were exempt from the environmental restraints that we would have been placing ourselves under. That did not make a lot of sense to me. We have done a good job in this country with technology, we have done some good things with our environment, and new technology and reasonable regulations can make increased consumption of our energy supplies possible and continue to decrease pollution. But there has to be, again, some common sense built into it. In Kentucky, I can use Kentucky as a good example, through clean coal technology, we use a lot of coal in our utilities, and we have the lowest or I think probably the second- or third-lowest rates for our electric utility bills of any State in the Nation. But through coal technology, we have really reduced emissions, and in fact, it is almost as clean now as the natural gas being used in other utility companies. So with clean coal technologies, we have been able to increase coal by 195 percent over the last 30 years, while cutting coal air emissions by one-third. So we have a 300-year supply of coal, and we have done the right things in being able to use that energy source, but no one wants to reward that.”