Nick Lampson: “Well, you're so very right. And the ideas are not necessarily Democratic and they're not necessarily Republican ideas…”

“Well, you're so very right. And the ideas are not necessarily Democratic and they're not necessarily Republican ideas, they are American ideas. We've got the knowledge. We've got the wherewithal. It's a matter of making sure that they have the opportunity to put that together. Too often, of late, we seem to have been pushing too many of our solutions to the political extremes, and we've got to find our way back toward the middle. And we think that this is a piece of legislation that does that. It recognizes that fossil fuels, much of what our colleagues earlier this evening were talking about as far as drilling activities, is not something that needs to be taken off the table. But at the same time, they can't tell us that the ideas that we're coming forward with are ideas that need to be taken off the table. We must look for diversity. We must look for balance. We must look to encourage those kids who built that solar car and had the great success no differently than the college student that I spent some time with today, and I drove his hybrid vehicle. It was a group of universities who competed against each other to see if they could take regular vehicles and convert them into significantly greater, increased energy-efficient vehicles. The one that I saw today happened to have been a hybrid diesel engine that was placed into a General Motors SUV. I drove the car. It gets in the mid-30 range of miles per gallon of fuel.”