Joe Barton
Joe Barton
Joe Linus Bartonis a Republican politician, representing Texas's 6th congressional districtin the U.S. House of Representatives since 1985, and a member of the Tea Party Caucus. The district includes Arlington, part of Fort Worth and several rural areas south of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Following the primary defeat of Ralph Hall, Barton became the dean of the Texas Congressional delegation...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth15 September 1949
CountryUnited States of America
I believe the earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons and I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth.
In 1981, there were 324 operating refineries in the boundaries of the United States. Today there are 148. Do the math. There are a lot of reasons for it, but one of the reasons is the law as it exists today, ... What company's board of directors in its right mind would want to go through this complicated process and tie up billions of dollars for years and years if they weren't certain whether this process would wrap up in a timely fashion?
There's no need to panic about this, ... On the other side, there's no reason for retailers to just jack up the price because everybody's concerned. We're going to move very quickly to stop that if we have the legal ability to do so without passing emergency legislation.
Why in the heck don't we have a policy in effect today, once we found out we don't?
We use 21 million barrels of oil a day, and only have the refining capacity for 16 million on a good day, ... And after Katrina and Rita, we haven't had many good days.
We cannot stop hurricanes, but we can mitigate some of these adverse impacts on our energy infrastructure and our economy that hurricanes can have. We need to tackle this problem for one simple reason: Our country needs more oil refineries because the people who work for a living need gasoline to get to work.
We could be drilling in Alaska right now; we could be drilling off the coasts of several other states, ... It would make a difference today if we were not as restrictive as we've been in the last 20 years about where we drill.
Supercookies are legal, but I don't think they should be.
People don't want Congress dictating what light fixtures they can use.
I think we should drill up in Alaska.
The constant abuse of online activity must stop.
I tell my environmental friends that they have won. Every issue we look at from an energy perspective is now also looked at from an environmental perspective.
CO2 is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term.
The president's package is a good package. We're going to work on a bipartisan basis.