I think God has blessed this country with enormous natural resources, and we should pursue all of the above. We should be developing oil, and gas, and coal, and nuclear, and wind, and solar, and ethanol, and biofuels. But, I don’t believe that Washington should be picking winners and losers.
Coal is a big deal here in Wyoming.
I do think – the metaphor I always use – it’s the role of intelligence community to stay down in the engine room and shovel that intelligence coal, and people on the bridge get to decide where to drive the ship and how fast and how to arrange all the deckchairs.
I worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange back when they used to write tickets. And I was just a runner. So a guy would write a ticket and I would run it, and it was endless. That was a hard job. And I dug tungsten… for a coal company in Wyoming one summer, and that was pretty miserable.
We have to slow down the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from coal burning, oil and eventually natural gas… And the best ways to do that are energy efficiency and a switch to renewables.
What I see are people who want affordable energy. They want strong environmental standards – they want a lot of things – but first and foremost they want affordable energy. And if you want affordable energy, you want oil, gas and coal.
