Political Quotes

“I find this amendment interesting. These 36 leases are suspended. They are not active. This language only deals with 1 year, if my information is correct, so it says no money in this budget could be spent. From my understanding of the oil and gas business--and I come from where it started in Pennsylvania, I live 5 miles from the first oil well--is that really this legislation is of no value, or is somewhat meaningless, because you could not facilitate in 12 months what it would take to get these leases active, and so it prohibits activity for the next 12 months. But I would like to speak a moment on the bigger issue. Coming from an oil patch, I want to share with you what nature does. The hills in Pennsylvania where oil was first discovered, and we did not know much about production, they had gushers, it comes spurting out of the ground. There are pictures of a place that is now called Oil Creek State Park where there was nothing growing. Every tree was dead. Every blade of grass was dead. The streams were polluted. The hills were washing away every time you would get a rainstorm. Today, that is a mature oak forest. It is a State park. It is beautiful. The springs are clean. The streams are natural habitat for brook trout, as good as it gets. It was totally destroyed 100 and some years ago when oil was discovered, but nature has healed it. Back then, we did not know how to produce oil.”