Energy

Coburn on Obama energy policy: ‘Keep all the green incentives, but let’s take care of our own oil’ [VIDEO]

David Martosko Executive Editor
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Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn told The Daily Caller that President Obama’s energy policy should “keep all the green incentives, but let’s take care of our own oil.”

The two-term senator said that even if the president and other advocates of “green energy” are right about their climate-change-related fears, Americans should still be drilling for oil during the more than two decades it will take to bring alternative energies up to scale.

“Let’s say the climate scare people are totally right: It’s still going to take us 25 years to get there,” Coburn insisted. “So why keep sending $200 billion out of this country [every year] as we get there? Keep all the green incentives, but let’s take care of our own oil.”

Coburn slammed Obama for “an energy policy that says we’re going to continue to send two or three hundred billion dollars out of this country” annually, “when in fact we could be paying Americans to develop that energy.”

As long as fossil fuels are developed and traded, he said, Americans should rely as much as possible on domestic sources.

“You know, it doesn’t matter — the carbon dioxide coming from Iranian oil or Saudi oil is exactly the same as carbon dioxide coming from our oil,” Coburn said.

“So why leave ours in the ground and buy theirs?”

The rest of Sen. Coburn’s interview with TheDC’s Ginni Thomas will be online Monday morning, only at The Daily Caller. Yesterday TheDC published a video excerpt from the same interview in which Coburn said that “Harry Reid has done more to damage the Senate, I would say, than anybody — all the rest of them combined — in my lifetime.”

“The next election is more important to them than the country,” he said of Senate Democrats, “more important to them than the institution of the Senate. More important that they win, rather than protect and heal our country.”

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