Bay 12 Games Forum

[The Keystone XL issue is] symbolic and it's not going to go away. They're all hanging on to it. So you know Bernie Sanders is getting lots of support from the most radical environmentalists because he's out there every day bashing the Keystone pipeline. And, you know, I'm not into it for that. I've been-- my view is I want to defend natural gas. I want to defend repairing and building the pipelines we need to fuel our economy. I want to defend fracking under the right circumstances. I want to defend, you know, new, modern [inaudible]. I want to defend this stuff. And you know, I'm already at odds with the most organized and wildest. They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, 'Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?' No. I won't promise that. Get a life, you know. So I want to get the right balance and that's what I'm [inaudible] about-- getting all the stakeholders together. Everybody's not going to get everything they want, that's not the way it's supposed to work in a democracy, but everybody needs to listen to each other.

    And we need to do-- you know, nuclear, talk about climate change -- nuclear is no greenhouse gas emissions. France has it for nearly 100% of their energy-- they've never had a problem. We've had two problems that people know about: Chernobyl, which was a disaster and [inaudible], and you know Three Mile. Right, those were the problems we had. We've come a long way from there.

    So I'm willing to defend and to really burrow in, I will say, you know, I don't support the Keystone pipeline because I don't think we need to do that. I think we need to repair, rebuild, take care of what we've got on the platter here. But I also think that the federal government has to be the partner. You can't do this. I mean whether it's a Fed discount window or a new fund, because it's not just pipelines. It's exploding sewer lines. It's broken water lines. It's all of the construction that is under our old cities. It's all falling apart. And so I want a major investment in fixing up what makes our cities work. Now, I don't want to leave the rural and suburban areas out, but the oldest -- going back to Abraham Lincoln -- but the oldest stuff in the ground is in our cities.