Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to join my colleague from Iowa, who has been a great leader over the years on the issue of biofuels, in trying to transition our country away from the dangerous dependence we have on foreign oil and over the years has worked to put in place policies that have helped build an industry literally from the ground up. The ethanol industry, in its inception many years ago, sort of started with just a few farmers getting together. Today they are producing about 13 billion gallons of ethanol. It represents 10 percent of our entire fuel supply. There is not any other fuel in the country that provides the alternative to traditional gasoline ethanol does. That is the result of a lot of investment, a lot of hard work by a lot of people over the years. It has also been as a result of a dependance upon what has been fairly stable public policy. Now there is a debate about whether that public policy ought to change. That certainly is a debate we can have. I do not wish to get into the merits of the individual elements of ethanol policy because obviously people are going to disagree about that. But I am going to point out that we put this policy in place in December of last year. In December of last year, we told this industry, which represents--these are 204 American-owned plants. These are American companies that employ almost 500,000--indirectly or directly-- American jobs and American workers in this country.…”