Political Quotes

“If the gentleman is prepared to close, I am prepared to close. Mr. DeFAZIO. I am prepared to close, and I yield myself such time as I my consume. The majority leader just put out some very impressive statistics on the possible potential off of the east and west coasts if we opened up these sensitive areas to mandatory leasing; but it's actually smaller than the known reserves under the leases the Federal Government has already let to oil companies, which they have thus far refused to develop: 5,484 leases, 30 million acres, 18 billion barrels of oil--his number was smaller than that--and 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. His number was smaller than that. So it's the premise that by mandatory leasing of these sensitive areas we're going to somehow have some sort of a boon to production as opposed to somehow incentivizing these oil companies not to sit on these leases forever. We have offered legislation previously from our side to require development of leases within a certain period of time, with escalating costs over time, and with the potential of turning those back and letting them be re-leased to companies that actually want to do the work. People say, Well, these oil companies won't just sit on it. Yeah, they'll sit on it. It's worth more every day. And they don't pay hardly anything to sit on it. Does anybody think the price of oil is going to be cheaper 5 years from now than it is today?…”