Political Quotes

“This bill is missing a great opportunity where we have common ground on energy efficiency. Mr. Upton and Mr. Whitfield are great chairmen of the subcommittee and the standing committee and made an honest effort to try to include all of the possible things that we could do on energy efficiency, but we came up short. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy--and that is made up of a lot of private sector companies that are trying to meet the demand that their consumers, corporate consumers, and individuals have to get more bang for their energy dollar by using less and saving more--has said that this bill will not reduce energy consumption in the United States. It will increase it, at a cost of about $20 billion through 2040. Why are we doing that? Energy efficiency is the area where we agree. There is a lot of contentious debate about climate change; we are not going to resolve that today. But we have bipartisan agreement that we should use less energy. It is good for our customers, and it is good for the economy, and it is good for the environment. We came up short. Many of the costs in energy efficiency could be saved with building codes language, which Mr. McKinley, an engineer on the Republican side, introduced along with me. That is not in this bill. There was a number of other bipartisan amendments that could have been offered. One by Mr. Kinzinger, the Smart Building Acceleration Act, should be in the bill. One by Mr.…”