Political Quotes

“when I joined the Navy during the Vietnam War, we had one destroyer in the Persian Gulf. And a few years later in the early 1970s, we had our very first embargo of oil, blockade of oil of the United States when OPEC, which today controls 42 percent of the oil resources, shut off the spigot. Shortly thereafter, in the Navy, we moved an aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf where it has remained ever since. Including during the war, the tanker war in the 1980s where we convoyed oil tankers back and forth, and as we did so and I did so, I just questioned all the time, Why are we doing this? Can't we act? I watched from the mid-1980s as the amount of oil imports from overseas increased from 27 percent to 60 percent today. We are en route to 70 percent by 2025. And $7 trillion we have lost due to these price disruptions and these price manipulations by those overseas. Do we expect the price to go down like it did after the 1970s? I'm not so sure, unless we take action. Because now we have China that just this past year passed us as the number one emitter of bad air emissions at 22 percent of all bad greenhouse emissions. This is a China that in the next decade wants an Ozzie and Harriet home for everyone in its populace. In one decade that will take as much energy that we have used as a world in the last two centuries. As I sit back, I believe that this bill is late. It should have been done before.”