Political Quotes

“I put the last chart up to show some of the accomplishments that we have achieved in the last 35-40 years especially in terms of increased energy efficiency. The top black line represents the energy use at constant 1972 GDP. How much GDP does one unit of energy achieve. What has happened is our actual energy use to achieve this greater GDP, which has almost doubled since 1979, is way down below what we have expected. That shows this country has been very aggressive in trying to achieve the greater economy. It takes 30 percent less energy to produce a dollar of GDP than it did in 1970. So we are moving ahead. That greater efficiency means less emissions. That greater efficiency means less energy use that is also compounding our problem right now. It is an appropriate time to discuss this issue of the Kyoto protocol when we are looking at high energy prices because if we were to follow that protocol and reduce our energy use back to the 1979 levels, we would have to ration the amount of home heating fuel and gasoline and coal; and the way to ration it would be dramatically increasing price or some kind of law that says you can use only so much.”