On the recordMay 31, 2012
The gentleman's amendment seeks to increase by $10 million the Department of Defense's investment in planning and design funds for the Energy Conservation Investment Program, which is certainly a worthwhile program. I accept the amendment, but I cannot stand idly by when I hear the gentleman refer to energy independence. There is no greater energy independence for America than a ``drill here and drill now'' for American energy resources. I proudly represent the west side of Houston. My neighbors, my friends, my colleagues are geophysicists and engineers who have kids in school and who play at the beach. I've grown up on the Galveston seawall while watching oil and gas rigs right off the shore. We can produce American oil and gas cleanly, safely, immediately, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, vast wealth for the Nation and making America energy independent in the short run and in the medium run. Clearly, we need to make investments in the future for alternative sources of energy, and I certainly agree with the gentleman from Oregon about the need to make investments looking out into the future. Rice University, which I also proudly represent, is doing extraordinary work in developing ways of using carbon nanostructures to transmit electricity ballistically so that we can transmit, store, and transport electricity in ways that were never possible before. That holds the promise of making America energy independent, but that's way down the road.…
