Political Quotes

“I have two different amendments that are coming to the floor. One deals with the Energy bill. One of them deals with the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This bill does a permanent extension of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. My question on that has been this: The money that is being allocated for the Land and Water Conservation Fund to be able to purchase properties--are we also allocating money to be able to actually maintain those properties? Currently, in the current existence of this bill, there is some money allocated to it in some future way, but I have a simple request: As much money as we allocate to dealing with purchasing new properties, we should also focus in on maintaining what we already have because we have billions of dollars in maintenance backlog. Right now one of the worst conservation things that can happen in many parts of the country to land is actually put it into Federal trusts because it is not being taken care of once it actually goes into the Federal trust. But that is not the prime issue I want to talk about right now. Oklahoma is truly an ``all of the above'' energy State. Oil, gas, coal, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar--we actually use all of those platforms in a very diverse energy economy. A tremendous amount of wind energy is produced in Oklahoma, used in Oklahoma, and exported to other States around us. It is a very important energy source for us.…”