Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to introduce two energy efficiency amendments that I am offering for attachment to the Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill. I thank both of the bill's sponsors, the Senators from New Hampshire and Ohio, for their willingness to work with me and with our cosponsors on this bipartisan legislation. I also thank both the Senator from Oregon, who is the chairman of the energy committee, as well as the ranking member of the energy committee, the Senator from Alaska, for working with us as well. Obviously, I hope we will be able to work through the list of amendments to this legislation so that we can get votes on these bills. We have broad bipartisan support on both of these measures, so I wish to take a few minutes to introduce them and to briefly describe them. The first is an amendment regarding water heaters. It is actually the water heater efficiency amendment. Currently, a 2010 Department of Energy rule on water heaters effectively bans the manufacture of large electric water heaters beginning in 2015, which will greatly affect consumers in our rural areas and hurt the effectiveness of some of the demand-response rural electric programs. These demand-response rural electric programs are designed to use off-peak loads, which is both energy efficient and also generates big-time savings for consumers. So it is one of those win-win deals. But many of our rural areas are not serviced by natural gas.…”