Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I stand to strongly support this amendment. I think it is exactly as the chairman has suggested. It is bipartisan. It helps to solve a problem we have right now, and I applaud Senator Bennet who spoke earlier, and also Senator Ayotte from New Hampshire, who has joined with him to take a lead on this. They have worked with us. They have, again, by this amendment, I believe, offered a good opportunity to improve the underlying legislation. I think it is consistent with the underlying legislation. By the way, it is an amendment that makes sense because there is right now a disconnect between those who own commercial buildings and those who are tenants in those buildings. We have heard this around the country as we have talked about efficiency. It kind of gets the landlords and the tenants in sync with lowering energy costs. It is market driven. It is nonregulatory. It takes a ``best practices'' approach to address this issue. Owners and managers of large commercial buildings report that their tenants consume over 50 percent of the total energy in the structure, but again there is this disconnect because owners lease the space, but they do not pay the bills; therefore, there is often no motivation to cut energy costs by making the space more efficient. The owners do not have that incentive. The tenants do. They pay the bills. But they often have very limited choices in the design or the operation of the energy- consuming aspects of the structure they lease.…”