Jeff Merkley

The increase in the allocation for renewable energy and energy efficiency is something that we have worked hard on on this committee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate all of your testimony and particularly getting to the nitty gritty of the allocations.

One of the questions that I think it is worth wrestling with is whether we should have a coherent national strategy to reduce our importation of oil.

The funds that flow overseas when we purchase energy, and those funds that go to Venezuela, that go to Saudi Arabia.

I think that will dramatically drive change.

Well, I want to really emphasize how much potential carbon dioxide savings are here.

If you will, to go at least 30 miles on electricity, that we would reduce 70 to 80 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by personal vehicles.

If we move to do two things, increase our use of plug-in vehicles and green up the electric grid... we will have very significant impacts.

I believe transportation is about 60 percent of the carbon dioxide, and personal vehicles are about a third of that.

Isn't that demanding? And we could actually bridge that entire factor with energy efficiency alone if we really applied ourselves to it, a strategy that actually pays us back.

Well, certainly I and many members of this committee would love to work with you as you dig deeper into those numbers and identify those barriers, how we might overcome them and go further in that effort.

We could achieve 17 percent reduction in our carbon dioxide through energy efficiency alone

It is a choice between a strong, secure energy independent America or a weaker, oil addicted America.

This bill is a choice of creating jobs for Americans or sending those jobs overseas.

It is a choice between investing a billion dollars a day in red, white and blue American-made energy or sending that billion dollars a day overseas.

This bill can be reduced to a series of fairly clear choices. It is a choice between clean air or dirty air.

Thank you. And that is an expectation that will continue into the future?

Well, I really want to compliment you and the Department for pushing forward with that portal.

I believe that that home mortgage interest deduction now costs about $100 billion a year.

I just note that it remains a concern for this Senator.

I think it's so important in health care reform that we have fairness for women across our entire Nation.

What they did not know is that their broker was being paid a separate fee off the books to steer them into a subprime.

Ordinary families went to their mortgage brokers. They saw on their spread sheets that they were paying their broker a certain amount of money.

That had a huge impact on the multiplication of the subprime switch.

There is no long-term benefit to China and Russia to having a nuclear-armed Iran.