Political Quotes

“tonight a group of us here would like to talk about energy. We have heard a lot of discussion about energy. In fact now that gasoline prices have kind of dropped off, home heating prices have declined and things have sort of settled down, electric shortages in the West have not been happening for a few weeks, people say there is no crisis, it is just a lot of hype, a lot of smoke. I am not one who believes that, and I agree with President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This country needs a comprehensive energy policy. Let us look at the record and see the trends happening. Recent trends, everybody has concern that the dependency on oil was coming from parts of the world that do not care about us, OPEC nations. We are approaching the 60 percent factor. That is not a healthy thing for our country. Coal, there has been a very flat use of coal and a resistance to the new clean coal-use technologies. Coal use has been flat in this country, and maybe slightly declining. Then look at nuclear where the percentage is slowly dropping. There has been a moratorium on new nuclear uses ever since the problem that happened in Pennsylvania many years ago. There have been no new plants built or planned; and the interesting part is in a recent report from the Department of Energy, the problem with nuclear continuing is the resistance of relicensing of existing nuclear plants.”