Addressing The Issues
Floor Speech
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Mr. BEGICH. Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Illinois, I was presiding for about a half hour. I was not planning on speaking. I know my staff right now is getting very nervous that I am speaking on the floor of the Senate without their knowledge, but I do want to say a couple things.
I say to the Senator, one, he is absolutely right on unemployment benefits and what we need to do in the next day or so. But I want to go back to his first comment. I was at the meeting yesterday with the President, and I sat next to Senator Alexander and heard the question on the oilspill issue. The comment from the Republican leader was that the President just brushed it aside. I am not here to defend the President. He can do his own job defending himself. But the point was, we were doing everything in a very bipartisan way on the oilspill.
Tomorrow we have another briefing with the Coast Guard. We had a briefing yesterday. There is a committee meeting I am supposed to be at right now on some liability issues around the Deepwater and what is going on with offshore. There are meetings all over this place.
I know the Republican leader was not at the meeting, so I am sure he got the information secondhand. But I was. It was not brushed off. I think all of us, I do not care what State we are from--I am from an oil and gas State--believe in the development of oil and gas, but we are all concerned about the problems down in the gulf and the tragedy and the 11 lives that were lost there. So we are 100 percent committed in this body in a bipartisan way.
What I found amazing--and the Senator's point was we can do more than one thing in this body. I believe I can. I know everyone around me and around my caucus believes that. So we are going to work on the oilspill. Absolutely we want to cap it. But that is going on now. They are 16,000 feet down on a second drill, a relief drill. They are about 1,000 feet away. We know that is being worked on.
But the reality is, we have to have a comprehensive energy plan in this country. The fact is, if we want to talk about jobs and job creation in the future, that is a huge potential for us.
This debate, when we get to it--I know some want to make it cap and tax, cap and trade, cap and cap, cap and something. But the reality is, this is about a comprehensive energy plan. This is about creating a plan that gets us more secure for our national security. I say to the Senator, he talked about the amount of money we spend overseas going to countries that do not like us. They spend that money against us. It is in our best interests to develop a comprehensive plan, not using the excuses that have gone around this place for the last 40 years. We need to get busy and do it for the consumer, do it for our national security, do it for our economic security, and do it for the future of job creation in this economy.
So if we want to talk about the oilspill, absolutely. We will work double-time on that. We are doing it from every end of the Capitol and all across this country. As a matter of fact, today another report came out. A multinational effort, a multicountry effort from around the world has come to our assistance in the gulf. But we also need to be dealing with a comprehensive energy plan.
In Alaska, we are doing it. By 2025 we intend to have 50 percent of our energy produced by renewable energy. Even though we are dependent on oil and gas for the economic viability of our State, we recognize the diversity that has to happen: In Kodiak, AK, 10 years ago, zero; today, almost 85 percent renewable energy. The largest Coast Guard station in this country is in Kodiak, AK, which will be run by renewable energy: biofuels, hydro, wind energy.
We have to be real about this issue. I understand the politics of November is coming. Everyone wants to be for something, against something so they can figure out what constituencies they win or lose in an election. The people who will lose if we do not get a comprehensive energy plan is the public. It does not matter if we are Democrat or Republican, Green Party, Independent. You name it. We are going to be affected because we will continue to import from foreign sources that do not like us. We will continue to put our country at risk from a national security perspective, and we will not recognize that we are now No. 2, No. 3 when it comes to energy technology and China is beating us.
That is unacceptable for this country to be No. 2 or No. 3 on this issue. We should be No. 1. For people to come down wanting to pigeon-hole this and claim we do not have the capacity in the Senate to do more than one thing is unbelievable. We will work double-time on the oilspill. But we must work double-time on developing an energy policy that moves us to better security for our country, our economic security, and to make sure we see the future. The future is a new energy economy that creates new jobs in this country.
So I was not planning to speak, I say to the Senator from Illinois, but he sparked me. I get agitated sometimes when this body--not the Senator, obviously, but the Republican leader--when they want to just do one thing. It is like when a person gets a meal on a plate, and one person just likes to eat the corn first, complete it all, and then they move to the next thing. We have the capacity to do many things in this Senate. We have spent 40 years--from the last major embargo in 1974--twiddling our thumbs and doing small, little, special interest legislation for energy. Now let's do the right legislation for the American people and do it right for our national security.
So I will stop on my rant. My staff is probably sweating bullets right now. They had no idea I was going to be down here doing this. I am off to a committee hearing.
I thank the Chair.
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