Political Quotes

“I was very impressed by the last speech, and I wish I could be as charitable about the underlying product or about the effort that we are making on the floor today. I do want to congratulate the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee for having given our Select Revenue Subcommittee the opportunity to explore through hearings what our tax policy should be at energy and policy, and I am hopeful that the day will come when those hearings will yield the results that we would hope. I am afraid today is not likely to be that day. The crisis we are facing is a real one. We are facing a rising global demand for energy of all sorts as the economies of China and India grow. We are seeing the phenomenon of peak oil playing out. Clearly, we are not going to see the growing reserves that we have enjoyed in the past, and increasingly many of the remaining reserves are being mediated by state-owned oil companies with ideological or nationalistic agendas. Our consumers, both our individual consumers and our corporate consumers, are facing the consequences of high prices, and yet we are imposing on our production artificial restrictions on new production. That is the wrong policy at a time like this. And we are facing aging energy infrastructure, whether it is a power grid that frankly is facing brownouts or refineries that are now at 92 percent of capacity.”