Earl Blumenauer: “Thank you. I appreciate the tone of my friend, the gentleman from Hawaii, but I think it is time for us, instead of…”

“Thank you. I appreciate the tone of my friend, the gentleman from Hawaii, but I think it is time for us, instead of having a collection of proposals that are basically an attractive grab bag politically engineered that has some attractive provisions, there is a provision in there that is very attractive to me that deals with rural education. I think it is important that, instead, we deal with this in a thoughtful, comprehensive fashion that doesn't entail the costs of hundreds of billions of dollars off the top, that doesn't have a lop- sided process in favor of drilling pristine areas and biased against protection, making it harder to protect. There are technical items in here about calculation of oil shale royalties. These are provisions nobody in the House of Representatives fully understands. That bears more scrutiny. The notion of allowing oil equipment to remain out there in the ocean and not being removed under current law is not necessarily of an environmentally benign era. Environmentalists are very concerned. I would reject this politically engineered energy grab bag and work together on a policy that is safe, economical and will happen sooner.”