Mike Conaway: “Well, I thank my classmate from Georgia for hosting this hour tonight. We spend an awful lot of time at these…”

“Well, I thank my classmate from Georgia for hosting this hour tonight. We spend an awful lot of time at these microphones, both sides, basically talking past each other. Usually, the rhetoric is heated, and we don't listen. My experience is this is the worst 435 listeners on the face of the Earth because we are clearly more interested in hearing what I have got to say than listening to what you have got to say. It happens time and time and time again at these microphones, basically because we tend to polarize and take the absolute positions, knowing full well that the best path for America is somewhere in the middle. The best path for America includes working all the other alternatives and trying to develop those and trying to see as far over the horizon as we can for a day in which crude oil and natural gas will no longer be available, not by choice but by the fact it has all been used up. It is a finite resource. We should be conserving everywhere we get, not on an individual basis but collective as well. Yes, from our position, we should be exploring and developing and producing American resources; crude oil, natural gas, uranium, nuclear, oil shale, tar sands, the full gamut of these resources. So if we can actually spend some time and sit together and try to work out our differences, I think there is a solution here that is really best for America.”