Political Quotes

“The point is this: We already know where there is oil to drill in this country. The oil companies already own the leases where they could drill for that oil. They're making a conscious decision, for a variety of reasons, not to drill for oil in places where they're already permitted to do so. Lastly, on refineries, people will say, ``Well, let's build more refineries.'' Well, we have half the number of refineries today that we had 30 years ago because the companies have shut them down, and the refineries that we do still have are operating, as the gentleman said, at 85 percent capacity. So what is the point of spending the time and the effort to build more refineries, and what is the point of spending the money if the refineries that we have aren't even operating at near full capacity? There are other ways we could spend our time. There are other ways we could spend our resources. There are other ways we could spend our money. So what, I think, every Member of our side of the aisle agrees on is we have a crisis regarding gas prices in this country right now. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. We're paying over $4 a gallon. It's going to continue to go up in the foreseeable future. We have to make a decision. We've arrived at a crisis point. We have a decision to make. There are no short-term solutions. Now, we can put a Band-Aid on it and do the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which we did, which is going to have some impact. It's not a long-term solution.”