Jeff Duncan: “Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, we are simply trying to say that we hope to bring back some moderation and balance to…”

“Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, we are simply trying to say that we hope to bring back some moderation and balance to our environmental policies, instead of allowing environmental extremists to control all of these things. It is like I have seen cartoons showing hundreds of oil wells in that Arctic wildlife refuge. That is totally false, because today the technology is such, as the gentleman mentioned, that we could put one oil well and go out 4 and 5 miles in any direction, so the footprint on the land is hardly anything at all. They said the people who opposed the original Alaska pipeline, and thank goodness we have that or we would have been in trouble years ago, they said it would kill off the caribou. At that time they say there were between 5,000 and 6,000 caribou. Now there are over 30,000 caribou. So all of this can be done in an environmentally safe way. As I said earlier, the coastal plain, which is 1.5 million acres, and as I said, I have been there twice, and most of these people who are against this have never even been there, there is not a tree or bush up there. It is a frozen tundra, as they call it. As the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) said, it looks like a moonscape. I was up there in August. Both times I was there in August it was brown with little puddles of oil seeping up. Most of the year it is covered by snow and ice.”