On the recordFebruary 3, 2016
I am delighted to join the two Senators from Maine--Senator Collins and Senator Angus King--in this dialogue, as well as Senator Klobuchar. I believe a few other Senators may join us. Senator Collins has been a great leader in advancing the debate or the conversation recognizing the carbon benefits of biomass. Her State and of course Senator King's State is so much like Oregon. If you fold the map of the United States in the middle and put east and west on top of each other, Oregon and Maine end up closely associated. We have similar coastlines. We have shellfish industries. We have timber industries. We have salmon runs. We having similar initiative systems and our largest cities are named Portland. I know that when I had the pleasure to visit Maine--and I went there with my wife and children to visit friends from many walks of our two lives, my wife's life and my life--we went from town to town visiting these friends who moved to Maine. We picked up a newspaper, and we felt like we were right at home in Oregon. The same initiatives were being done at that time in the State as we had on the front page back home. This issue of biomass is close to our hearts in the forests of the Northeast and in the forests of the Northwest. When I first came to the Senate and the conversation was going forward about renewable energy, Senator Dorgan from North Dakota--now retired--said that his home State was the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.…





