Energy and using food for fuel were the highlights of a town hall meeting in Pratt Monday with Sen. Sam Brownback during his all Kansas county tour.
Brownback favors developing clean burning coal plants, develop more wind generators with tax credits, building nuclear power plants, have environmentally sound oil drilling and clean burning coal plants.
“Coal is the cheapest base power we’ve got in this country,” Brownback said.
He wants to develop methods to extract oil from oil shale deposits in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. The oil shale deposits in those three states equals the oil in Saudi Arabia, Brownback said.
He also wants to develop flex fuel vehicles that can burn a variety of mixtures of fuel. He wants flex fuel available in 50 percent of all vehicles by 2012. It would cost $100 more to make a vehicle flex fuel capable.
“I think we can get this done. I want it,” Brownback said.
Brownback said that using crops for fuel could greatly benefit the farming industry. If 10 percent of the U.S. fuel market comes from agriculture it would double the size of the agriculture industry.
He also said there is a lot people don’t understand about using crops for fuel and the legislature needs to get the information to the people so we can make progress in getting America more fuel independent.
“We’ve go to get into he fight with facts and figures,” Brownback said.
On immigration, Brownback said it was a complex issue. Of all the illegal immigrants in the county now some 40 percent of them enter legally. The county allows 50,000 alien agriculture workers in each year but the county needs 500,000.
The country is building a wall now that he feels will help curb some of the illegals coming into the country but the feeling he gets is it is the illegal issue not immigration that concerns the country.
“Most Americans aren’t opposed to immigration. They are opposed to illegal immigration,” he said.
Pratt, Kan. —
