Joe Barton: “I would oppose the Capps amendment on the first part because of the open-ended nature of that particular procedural…”

“I would oppose the Capps amendment on the first part because of the open-ended nature of that particular procedural aspect of it. On the second part of the Capps amendment that deals with this inventory, you can make an argument, if we were self-sufficient in energy resources in this Nation and were not importing almost two-thirds of our oil, and we are now importing 10 percent of our natural gas, that one would not need to do an inventory because we had such abundance that we did not need to know what our energy resources were. But that is not the case. We are importing over 60 percent of our oil needs on a daily basis, and we are now importing over 10 percent of our natural gas needs. We simply cannot continue, in my opinion, the policy of only drilling where we have always been drilling. The inventory is not an open-ended change in current law so that we could go out and drill willy-nilly in all of these areas that we have put off limits, but it does say we can find out what is there. That is good public policy.”