[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12518]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                   CONCERN FOR LACK OF ENERGY POLICY

  (Mr. BLUNT asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, I want to join my colleagues in expressing my 
concern for a lack of an energy policy in the country over the last 7 
years.
  Really, there are three areas that we should have been watching and 
three areas where we failed to take the necessary steps. We have not 
done what we should have done to maintain our relationships with the 
countries we buy oil from.
  At the same time, we have allowed our country to become more and more 
dependent on those countries. Somewhere between 56 and 58 percent of 
all our oil is now imported. We have done everything we could during 
that same period of time to discourage domestic supply, and we have not 
done anything to encourage alternative use.
  Now suddenly, at the end of 7 years of no policy, the Secretary of 
Energy says we were caught napping. Well, it seems to me the Secretary 
of Energy has been napping a lot. Whether it was involving our nuclear 
codes at Los Alamos or our dependence on foreign oil, we cannot afford 
to have an Energy Department napping. We need to look and see what 
happened at the same time we need to do everything we can to provide 
relief to the families that are being caught in this crisis right now.

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