On the recordJanuary 21, 2015
let me talk a little bit this evening about amendment No. 77 that I filed. This is an amendment I filed to the bill that is pending that we are now on, what I would call the oil sands pipeline. It has been called a jobs bill, I know, on the other side. But, you know, the reality is, there are good construction jobs here. But as soon as the pipeline is built, the permanent jobs are really very small. What we need to do--my belief--in terms of energy, is work to where there are larger numbers of jobs. I do not know whether people know this, but the energy that is being added to the system now worldwide and in the United States is renewable energy. Sometimes it is wind, sometimes it is solar, to a lesser extent biofuels, biomass and things like that. But the renewable sector is growing. The new energy is growing. Some of this is rather dramatic in terms of the numbers and the size. That is the direction clearly we need to head, because we want to in the future be lessening our carbon footprint. There is absolutely no dispute that we need to be moving in that direction. That is where all the scientists are. We are even seeing today in the amendments that we have on the floor our friends across the aisle agreeing that we have got a real problem with climate change and that human beings are causing this and we need to address this. I applaud them stepping forward and saying that. How do you do this? How do you encourage more of the renewable forms of energy?…
