By Melissa Dunson
mdunson@joplinglobe.com
U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., is calling for Congress to reconvene soon to consider a Republican-backed energy plan.
During a phone conference Thursday with Southwest Missouri reporters, Blunt said he sent letters to all the Democratic members of Congress this week, asking them to join Republican lawmakers in urging Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to reconvene Congress.
He said Congress officially adjourned at 11:23 a.m. Aug. 1, before the Republican members could present what Blunt calls the “Find More, Use Less” energy plan. Blunt said the majority of representatives left at that time, and the lights and microphones were turned off and the cameras shut off. But Blunt and several other representatives stayed to discuss the plan until 5 p.m. that day.
“They wouldn’t let us talk about what we wanted to in any kind of official way,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., was not available for comment Thursday, and efforts to reach U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., were not successful.
The energy plan Blunt is pushing combines increasing the access to America’s natural energy reserves, and rewarding conservation and those who branch out into alternative fuels
Points of the plan include:
n Opening ocean resources to offshore drilling.
n Opening the Arctic Coastal Plain to drilling. The coastal plain is the desert part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Blunt said, and is not as environmentally sensitive as some other areas.
n Providing tax incentives for businesses and families in purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles.
n Providing a monetary prize for developing an economically feasible 100-mile-per-gallon vehicle.
n Providing tax incentives for business people and homeowners to improve energy efficiency.
n Extending for 10 years the tax credit for alternative energy production, including wind and solar development. Those credits expired at the end of last year.
n Spurring development of alternative fuels through government contracting.
n Eliminating barriers to expanding production of nuclear power plants.
Blunt said he is convinced that some of the above measures that were voted down in the Senate in the past few years would pass now because public opinion has changed. He said that when he originally started speaking on deep-sea drilling and developing nuclear power, public opinion was 30 percent for and 70 percent against on each of those issues. Now, he said, those percentages have flipped.
Blunt said he thinks it would take only a couple of days to discuss and vote on the proposed energy plan if Congress would reconvene.
“We’d like to see (those bills) come back,” he said. “We think this time they’d end up on the president’s desk and offer some immediate relief to families.”
Area visits
U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt has visited the Joplin area several times this summer, meeting with different groups to gather stories on how high energy costs are affecting the average person. He has met with workers at Hampshire Pet Products in Joplin, with consumers at a Snak-Atak gas station in Joplin and with area public school superintendents during a meeting in Diamond.
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Blunt pushes energy plan
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