Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I was not planning on coming here to speak on this, but I have to. Simply sitting back in my office and listening to this discussion, my feelings, and the time that I worked with the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), my feelings for him are of great affection and normally I am on the same side. And in fact, as it comes to the Payment in Lieu of Taxes issue, my heart is with him. However, when they come after the fossil research, we are in a situation right now, I happened to be in Kyoto last December, and everybody is jumping up and down and screaming to us that the sky is falling, that we have to come up with alternative methods and cleaner methods of providing energy. I thought that the Skaggs amendment was interesting, because we were talking just previous to this about the comparison of conservation to doing clean fossil fuel technology. And the fact of the matter is, in conservation we can only do so much. It takes energy to run the world. It takes energy to run industry, to run our everyday lives. With conservation, we can do a lot but we can only do so much. The question then is going to be where will this energy come from? Will it be from domestic production? We have got so much coal, and if we have the ability, the fact of the matter is, yes, we have spent a lot of money on fossil technology and we have not hit the home run yet, but we are getting closer and closer every day.”