Jeff Bingaman: “I wish to speak for a few minutes about gasoline prices, which my colleague from Utah talked about a few minutes ago…”

“I wish to speak for a few minutes about gasoline prices, which my colleague from Utah talked about a few minutes ago, also about domestic oil and gas production, and also about access to federally owned oil and gas resources. These are issues that have been raised by numerous Senators on this Transportation bill. They are issues of critical importance to our country's economy, to national security, and to resource management. I have been increasingly concerned that the issues we are debating and the facts that are being put out there are often not the true facts. There is widespread misunderstanding of what needs to be done to deal with this set of issues, in my opinion. Let me start with the issue that is most important to most Americans; that is, the price of gasoline at the pump--the price of oil and then, of course, the price of gasoline. We need to understand clearly what is causing these prices, and we need to be direct with our constituents about what is causing these prices. Let me state as clearly as I can what I believe is really without dispute among experts; that is, we do not face cycles of high gasoline prices in the United States because of a lack of domestic production, and we do not face these cycles of high gasoline prices because of the lack of access to Federal resources or because of some environmental regulation that is getting in the way of us obtaining cheap gasoline.…”