Joe Wilson: “My colleagues, I know my colleagues would disagree, but I think you understand my feeling for the place, and also my…”

“My colleagues, I know my colleagues would disagree, but I think you understand my feeling for the place, and also my knowledge that this is not an either/or question; that if we are smart about it, we can provide the energy that we need to live life the way we want to live it, without damaging the country that we love. I think that is the kind of policy we want to promote, which means we start with conservation. One of the things I thought was real interesting about the President's energy plan was some of the data that was in it. In fact, we do not take credit for how far we have come in the last 20 years in energy efficiency. This top line in this chart shows energy use at constant energy per dollar of gross domestic product, for how much we are producing in this country. We have gotten so much more efficient since 1972, which is the baseline year. We are using less energy per dollar of GDP. Now, part of that is we have a more information-based economy and so forth, but we are much more energy efficient now. A refrigerator, we had to buy a new one recently, thank goodness my husband was at home to get one, and the refrigerator we bought uses one-third less energy than the one that we bought in 1972 that it replaced. Our cars are more efficient and hold the promise of being even more efficient with hybrid vehicles, which will not restrict our power and our range of those vehicles. So we do wonderful things. We have made tremendous progress with conservation.”