Dave Barry Quotes

Drilling in the refuge will not solve America's energy problem. The Energy Department's own figures show that drilling would not change gas prices by more than a penny a gallon, and this would be 20 years from now.

We'll always need energy. We need to communicate, too, but we're not stuck with hand gestures and smoke signals. There are better ways to power our future than by digging fossil fuel from the ground and setting it on fire.

You know, if we're going to bring down the price of gas, you have to have three things. You have to have a big reserve, you have to have the ability to develop oil out of that reserve quickly, and you have to be able to produce oil at a relatively low cost.

Mr. Speaker, high natural gas prices and the summer spike in gasoline prices serve as a stark reminder that the path to energy independence is a long and arduous one.

The question of energy is an important one. The big issue is how to get it, how not to destroy the environment, and how to survive as a species. It's a big deal.

The reason gas prices are so high is because the oil is in Texas and Oklahoma and all the dipsticks are in Washington.

While some sit on the sidelines and fail to offer any practical solutions to address high gas prices now, the House is once again taking action to meet the energy needs of the American people.

Among the many important provisions in the energy bill are the creation of an estimated half million new jobs, increased oil production, blackout protection, controlling fertilizer costs by stabilizing natural gas prices and enacting new efficiency benchmarks.

In 1973, America imported 30 percent of its crude oil needs. Today, that number has doubled to more than 60 percent. Gas prices are as high as they are now in part because we've had no comprehensive national energy policy for the past few decades.

People worry that gas prices are high and how they are affecting their pocket book. But they want to know about renewable energy. People are really starting to question things, and that's made people look to the future in a positive way.

It's not an if - we're going to have to change. Oil is simply going to be gone.

Energy is one of the worst bottlenecks in the development of industry and the national economy

Historically, countries have made big energy shifts only when confronted with acute fossil-fuel crises: oil embargoes, debilitating pollution, or wars.

We can turn your bottles back into oil. We can burn it to make energy. Our we can put it in a landfill. There’s a green spectrum. And a cost spectrum. The most green is the most expensive.

The challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuel even as it becomes more abundant will make the old fights about energy conservation seem like child's play.

We cannot afford to burn the vast majority of known fossil fuel reserves.

Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not "relentless resource extraction."

We the people, so to speak, need to realize that if we can keep ourselves fed, we might get through this long dark tunnel of power down, and mitigate the consequences of CO2.

If you say the world is totally dependent on oil in many parts of the world, coal and certainly natural gas, we are fossil fuel, that is modernity, modernity has two elements: individualism and oil. Now to move toward a more enlightened sustainable world, we have to transform with lots of technology, with even differences in the way we see the world and how we live in the world. That's going to take decades.

Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time.

You can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on every continental shelf and atop every hill in America for that matter, and you still won't reverse the fact that our oil production is in permanent decline. We're just sopping up what's left, digging ourselves into a deeper hole.

Obama is a clown. You don't have to be a scientist to know that the President doesn't know what he's talking about when he says fossil fuels are the energy of the past. We have more oil than we need. We'll never run out of it. It's all we've got.

Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.

Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995.

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.