David Thomas: “I think we need to take a little time to talk about the purpose of this bill. All we have heard, frankly, is criticism.…”

“I think we need to take a little time to talk about the purpose of this bill. All we have heard, frankly, is criticism. All we have heard is people being negative about the things that are there. The fact is, what we need in this Congress, and in this country, is a policy. We had a policy last year, you will recall, that had almost all the things about which the Senator from New Mexico talked. It did not pass. We do not have an energy policy with all those things he insists upon getting in there. We hear from the Senator from California about the problems that happened there. We need to go back and recollect some of the reasons they happened in California. That was because the State didn't allow for the development of energy, it didn't bring any transmission to get it into California, and they had some price controls on the retail but not on the wholesale. We need to go back and focus a little bit on what our real opportunity and obligation is here, and that is to have an energy policy, a policy that deals with conservation, that deals with alternative sources of energy, that deals with research, so we can continue to use the energy we have now, but which also focuses on domestic production. We can talk all we want about where we are going to be in the future, and I hope we are with more alternatives and more renewables, but the fact is we will not have those for several years.”