Last year, a bill in Congress aimed at placing millions of natural gas-fueled cars on America's roads stalled before it even got out of the driveway. But this year things will be different -- or so two members of the House of Representatives insist.
"The bill was introduced late in the session last year," Oklahoma Democrat Dan Boren recalled at a Washington press briefing this week. "And then came the Lehman thing" -- the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent turmoil that bounced almost every other national issue off Congress' plate.
A bill introduced Wednesday by Boren and Oklahoma Republican John Sullivan is a virtual copy of the one introduced last year by Illinois Democrat Rahm Emanuel -- now President Barack Obama's chief of staff.
Unlike Emanuel's effort, the Boren/Sullivan bill stands a much better chance of becoming law, or at least moving through the House bureaucracy, say Boren and Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson of Connecticut. Members of Congress "are lining up to be co-sponsors" of the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act (HR 1835), Larson said.
As of Wednesday morning, the bill had 13 co-sponsors.
Meanwhile, at Wednesday's newser, oilman T. Boone Pickens, a major NGV supporter, recalled meetings with presidential candidates Obama and John McCain prior to the November election and "both of them said the same thing to me at different times: 'We would like to go to batteries as quick as we can'."
"I said, 'You gotta understand, a battery won't move an 18-wheeler," he went on. "Both of them looked at me and said: 'It won't?'"
"No, it won't."
To the people in the press conference, Pickens said, "The only resource we have in America than can really reduce dependence on foreign oil is natural gas. Natural gas is 130-octane fuel. It does not require refining. It's cleaner, it's cheaper, it's ours and it's abundant."
Russia and Iran are leading the world in terms of switching over to natural gas for transportation, he said, adding: "It kinda makes you sick because they are going to use natural gas and sell us their oil."
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