2012 Iowa Caucus: Rick Santorum talks energy, Keystone XL in Ottumwa - Video and Transcript

Rick Santorum discussed energy policy, the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and his views on the environmental movement at a December 31, 2011 New Years Eve rally in Ottumwa, held just days before the January 3, 2012 Iowa Caucus.

Transcript of Rick Santorum's remarks:

We need an energy policy that not only from a national security point of view, but for creating jobs and keeping energy prices down to help manufacturers and other businesses compete.

One regulation the Obama administration just put in place is a regulation that according to the utility industry will require 60 coal fired power plants to be shut down over the next few years.

Now I know they want to get to 20 percent green energy by 2020, I just didn’t think they’d get there by cutting out fossil fuel energy, but that’s what they’re doing.

So we'd repeal that regulation and try to have a program – we’ll put together a program that, again, eliminates subsidies for all energy and says we need a market place, but we need availability of places to get our energy, which means Alaska, offshore, deep water. That means building pipelines.

Alright, I get a kick out of this Keystone XL debate.

Oh, we have this critical aquifer that we have to worry about.

Has anyone looked at the number of pipelines that go through that aquifer now?

I mean, you can’t even see the aquifer if you look at a schematic of how many pipelines are there.

This is just, again, pandering to radical environmentalists who don’t want energy production, who don’t want us to burn more carbon.

It has nothing to do with a pipeline.

It has to do with an ideology.

A religion of its own that’s being pushed on the American public.

 Video of Rick Santorum's remarks:

In Iowa, Rick Santorum talks coal, water pollution - Video, Transcript

Rick Santorum fielded a voter’s question about water pollution at a December 31, 2011 New Years Eve rally in Ottumwa, Iowa. Here’s video and transcript documenting what the former Senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 Republican presidential candidate had to say on the issue:

Voter: I’m concerned with a candidate who has some kind of an environmental policy.

60 miles east of here is a town in Middletown, Iowa, we have an army ammunitions plant that manufactured nuclear weapons and large ammunition, and 207 test wells out of 208 there are contaminated with ground pollution.

An 18-month environmental cleanup has now turned into a cleanup that’s supposed to last until 1946 and could be ongoing from that.

I’m curious what we’re going to do, because we only have so much water, and that water has to take care of all us.

And I’m concerned we’re already at the point of too little too late.

What are we going to do protect our water resources in this country?

Rick Santorum: I must admit, one of the things I learned in politics a long time ago, when you don’t know the answer to a question, you admit it and you don’t keep talking and prove to people you don’t know the answer.

I don’t that specific, this is the first I’ve heard of this situation and I apologize, so I can’t really comment on what’s happening there.

I can say that one of things I’m proud of, I happened to have worked on a bill in 2006 that broke a logjam between, not Democrats and Republicans, but the East and the West having to do with reclamation of abandoned coal mines, and the tremendous amounts of groundwater and other pollution that was coming from these abandoned mines.

Most of the coal mining as you know is now done in the Western states and the way that abandoned mine reclamation is funded, it’s based, it’s funded on a tax on coal from the state from which it comes.

Well obviously most of the abandoned mines are not in the West, they’re in the East.

And yet, all the tax revenue now is being raised in the West, and so, of course the Western producers didn’t want to send their money East, they wanted to use it to clean up their own situation or enhance the environment in that area, and that was a logjam for a long, long time.

But I worked with Mike Enzi and the Senator from Wyoming and we put together a comprehensive bill that now we unlock that monies and now a lot of that Western revenue is going to come and cleanup a tremendous amount of water in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and other place there was a lot of coal mining, which there is not as much today.

So if you’re looking for someone with a record of being able to work not just across party lines, but across national lines to get things done, we were able to do that.