Vernon Ehlers: “I am very pleased to join him and the gentleman from Utah in a discussion of the Republican energy plan, which is…”

“I am very pleased to join him and the gentleman from Utah in a discussion of the Republican energy plan, which is progressing nicely through the House of Representatives, and I hope we will be able to enact it fairly soon. I will be taking a totally different tack in discussing this. This is because of my background as a professor, a nuclear physicist, and also because I have done a fair amount of research on energy over the years. So I am going to deal with the long-term view, but also talk about some basic facts of energy. Part of the reason is that I listened to the previous hour of debate here in which the other party seemed to be implying that the Republicans do not know anything about energy or energy policy. Well, we have just heard from two speakers on the Republican side who know a great deal about energy policy, first about the situation in California, and secondly, about extraction of resources. I am going to talk about it from the standpoint of basic science and what we can learn from that and what we can and cannot do and how that impacts us in the future. I am also going to take a rather long-term view on some of these issues because we have to think long term on this.”