Political Quotes

“just to look at a few of the spikes that were regional in the last few years. In 1999, the fuel oil, truck fuel price was, in the East, from about Pennsylvania up to New England and for most of the winter, trucking companies were calling me and going out of business because they could not compete with their competitors because their fuel prices had doubled. But they were regional problems. Then, in the year 2000, in Chicago and many areas that had the huge gasoline peaks and gasoline prices there and I think they were over $2 a gallon. Last winter, the changes, because of the problem the gentleman is having in California, and 95 percent of the new generation for electricity is natural gas. Historically in this country, we did not use natural gas for power generation. Maybe a little bit of peaking, but not regular power generation. It was basically saved for home fuel and for commercial industrial, as the easy, clean fuel. So now that we are major into using natural gas for power generation, we have spiked the price. Because last winter, gas prices in my part of the country were up 120 percent for home heating. Now, that took a lot of money out of spendable income. A lot of people have not talked too much about it, but last November and December in this country were the coldest Novembers and Decembers in history since they have been keeping track of temperatures. So they were not real cold temperatures, but they were cold every day of the month, each month.”