"'John McCain is energy illiterate,' Simmons is saying. 'He's just witless about this stuff. As a lifelong Republican, I'm supporting Obama.' A dozen oil and gas men sitting around a conference table in Lafayette, La., chuckle nervously as he continues. 'McCain says, "Oh, we're going to wean ourselves off foreign oil in four years and build 45 nuclear plants by 2030." He doesn't have a clue.'"
"'What a hypocrite,' says Simmons, who supported McCain's rival Mitt Romney in the primary - no surprise given Simmons's history with the Romney family. 'Here's a man who for at least the past 15 years has strenuously, I mean strenuously, opposed offshore drilling. And now it's 'drill, drill, drill.' And he doesn't have any idea that we don't have any drilling rigs. Or that we don't have any idea of exactly where to drill.'"
Here's a few more quotes from a different site:
For the record, Simmons has been advocating more drilling off the coast of the United States since the early 1990s, but now he says that treating it as our salvation is misguided. "I'm not saying we shouldn't do it," says Simmons. "We should, and the sooner the better. But we shouldn't think that it'll have any impact for a decade or two." The exception, he says, is the reservoir in the hotly debated Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. "ANWR," he says, "is the only place that we could drill right now and it might actually make a difference in a year or two."
As for some other currently voguish sources of fuel coming to the rescue, he's dismissive. Oil shale? "Buck Rogers stuff. It just can't work." Ethanol? "It's a joke. The numbers just don't add up."Simmons believes that a radical change in the way we live is inevitable. "We should basically be going back to creating a village economy, so that we really reduce the energy intensity of how we live," he says. "We need bigtime conservation, not feel-good conservation.
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