Jim Matheson: “the energy issue is clearly an issue that is on everyone's mind right now. I just this past week invited a number, a…”

“the energy issue is clearly an issue that is on everyone's mind right now. I just this past week invited a number, a cross section of individuals, to attend a meeting where we would discuss what was the appropriate role for the Federal Government with respect to energy policy. I had people who represented investor-run utilities. I had municipal utilities at the meeting, rural electric cooperative participants. We had large industrial consumers. We had low-income energy advocates. We had people from the State Regulatory Commission in Utah as well. I can tell my colleagues that if we need any other indication that this is a significant issue, everyone who we invited came to this meeting. It was a fascinating discussion, and what we talked about was the notion of a balanced approach, a balanced approach that incorporates a number of different solutions to what is an energy problem. Admittedly, this meeting tended to focus more on the electrical side of the equation than on the oil and the gasoline side, so my comments are going to focus more on that as well. But I would suggest that as we look at this energy issue, we really need to sequence time periods in which we are talking about what can we do, what can we do to put ourselves in a better position. In the short term, our options are rather limited. Clearly we have a supply and demand imbalance, and in the short term, you are not going to be building any new power plants very quickly.…”