Political Quotes

“I want to thank the gentleman from Colorado, Cory Gardner, the sponsor of this legislation; and the gentleman from Kentucky, Ed Whitfield, the chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, for moving this legislation along. Madam Chair, the purpose of this bill is real simple. It is to streamline the permit process to allow us more domestic production of oil and gas. In this country, we consume about 19 million barrels a day of oil and we produce about 7 million, and the exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf has been delayed for years because of a broken bureaucracy. The regional EPA, they are going to approve exploration air permits, only to have them challenged again by EPA's Environmental Appeals Board. It has been a never-ending circuit of approvals, appeals and re-applications, and it has stalled exploration for nearly 5 years. So what does that mean? It means that these resources, which perhaps contain as much as 28 billion--yes, that's billion--barrels of oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, have been stalled. We know that if production is allowed here, safe production, we could produce perhaps as much as 1 million barrels a day from these sites, and it would add about 54,000 American jobs.…”