There is no excuse for this administration shielding information about Iraq and the fact that we have great difficulties there from the American people.

With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans.

The fact is that we cannot drill our way to independence. We cannot drill our way to freedom, and we cannot drill our way to create jobs in this country.

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all.

Things are difficult enough about Iraq without the Federal Government suppressing the truth about Iraq.

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.

Now is the time to scrub ideology out of the energy discussion, so we can make bi-partisan progress towards investing in a shared and better future.