Pete Domenici: “Now, Senators today should have been--under anyone's understanding of the dilemma we are in with the price of oil…”

“Now, Senators today should have been--under anyone's understanding of the dilemma we are in with the price of oil scaring the American people to death, the amount of money we are sending out of our country to meet our energy needs, it is going to reach $600 billion a year. With the escalating price of crude oil, that is what it looks like next year. It will be what a full year will cost us, $600 billion. I would think with that in mind, there would be on the floor of the Senate some real proposals by the Democratic leadership and the majority party. Instead, what do we get? We get what I call a ``no-energy energy bill.'' It is a no-energy energy bill because it does not produce an ounce of energy; it raises the cost instead of lowering the cost of crude oil; it produces less rather than more crude oil. That is why there is nothing going on on the floor, because there is nothing exciting. The Democrats have offered nothing. We are begging them to try something. We are begging them to try something that would produce more American oil or oil substitutes. We know what they are. The distinguished Senator from Colorado knows what they are. We know that offshore, deepwater exploration around the shores of America could be put in effect by raising the moratorium, and we would have literally billions of reserves of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas readily made available.”