2006 CT Senate Debate: on Energy & Oil

Joseph Lieberman: Cheney energy bill was imperfect but good for CT

LIEBERMAN : There you go again. You’ve been spending your money on commercials to criticize me for voting for that energy bill. Look, very rarely do you get a perfect bill. The tax credits for the energy industry in that big energy bill last year were bad. I said so. I am co-sponsoring legislation to try and repeal them. They were wrong. But I’ll tell you why I voted for the bill. But there were other parts of it that will save Connecticut electricity customers $800 million. Would you have voted against that? The other thing that it did is had the most substantial incentives for clean fuel, alternative fuel and fuel cells, which can create thousands of new jobs in the fuel cell industry in Connecticut, and I hope you would not have voted against that. But most of all, we’ve got to get energy independent.

Ned Lamont: Cheney energy bill keeps us dependent on foreign oil

Look what Jimmy Carter did 20 years ago. We doubled the fuel mileage standards of our automobiles. We greatly increased the fuel efficiency of our appliances, and the price of gasoline went down for the next 20 years. We got a little fat and happy and we started driving SUV’s again. But now is the time to deal with conservation in a serious way. And Sen. Lieberman’s support of the Dick Cheney energy bill was a mistake.