John Kerry: “I want to finish what I am saying. We have very little time. We are going to have weeks to debate this when we come back…”

“I want to finish what I am saying. We have very little time. We are going to have weeks to debate this when we come back in January, and I look forward to that debate to a great extent because that is when we are going to help America view the possibility of alternatives. For instance, in Europe, they have diesel engines. Their cars get 60 miles to the gallon with a diesel engine. It is exactly as powerful as many of our cars. The cars can go as fast. If you want to break the speed limit with your 60-miles-per-gallon diesel, you can break the speed limit, but you get 60 miles doing it. We are going backwards. We used to get 27 miles per gallon. Now we are down to 22. We are doing worse than we were doing in 1973 when we said we would have to be energy independent. Mr. President, there is a long litany, all the way through the years, that world consumption of oil is about 70 million barrels a day. We produce 8 million barrels. The amount that we produce, even if we included additional oil from Alaska, will never be sufficient to impact the price of oil in the world market. So when my colleagues come to the Chamber and suggest we are going to somehow change the price or increase the supply on a long-term basis, that is not true, and I will document it. From 1972 to 1975, America produced more than 70 percent of our oil domestically. Oil prices climbed more than 400 percent when we produced it domestically.”