Bingaman on Surging Oil Prices
February 20, 2008
02:32 PM
"Today’s record-setting close for oil illustrates our energy vulnerabilities. Right now, we depend on everything going right, and when there is a refinery outage or the threat of cutbacks abroad, our prices go up. Congress took some meaningful steps to get out of this rut last year when we required, for the first time in 32 years, that fuel economy standards for cars and trucks go up.
"There is still a lot left to do in energy policy. We need to be sure energy markets are functioning well and aren’t being driven by manipulation or excessive speculation. We need to manage our nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a more sophisticated way. And we need to make sure that we strike the right long-term balance between protecting the environment and producing new energy domestically, whether our production is from traditional sources of oil and gas or from new alternatives such as biofuels."
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