I appreciate the numerous questions and comments many of you have posted about global warming and our nation's dependency on foreign oil. I have been concerned about energy and environmental issues for years. As Governor of Indiana, I headed the Brownsfields Redevelopment Project to clean up environmentally hazardous cites in urban centers and dramatically reduced air and water pollution while continuing to grow the economy.

In the Senate, I led a "green" school bus initiative to make school buses better for the environment and safer for our kids, introduced legislation to provide tax credits for gas station owners to covert more pumps to ethanol, supported tax credits for consumers who buy hybrids and other fuel-efficient vehicles, supported the reduction of greenhouse gases, and supported bills to decrease our nations dependency on foreign sources of oil.

Recently, the League of Conservation Voters released their 2006 National Environmental Scorecard and I was honored to have received a 100% rating. However, more work must be done to solve our nations dependency on fossil fuels which is increasingly both an environmental and national security problem. Unfortunately, President Bush has not been a leader on this important issue and his plan to reduce our imports of oil by 75% over the next 20 years are timid at best.

Concrete steps towards energy independence are long overdue and that's why just this past year I authored the Vehicle and Fuel Choices for American Security Act with a bipartisan group of Senators to reduce our dependence on oil by 7 million barrels a day in 20 years. To do this we would further the development and mass marketing of hybrid technologies, creating fuel-efficiency standards for trucks, and by providing incentives to retool factories for advanced alternative fuel technology while also increasing research and development for ethanol, which can be produced by farms right here in America's heartland.

This is a very important issue that we must confront to ensure our children's future and our country's security, and I am hopeful that when the new Congress convenes that we will be able to enact common sense environmental and energy legislation such as my Vehicle and Fuel Choices for American Security Act.

Thank you for welcoming me to the Gather.com community, your comments and questions were very insightful and I am glad that my post led to a healthy debate. I enjoyed this experience and I look forward to future postings here. I hope that many of you will take the time to send me additional questions and comments to my Gather.com account.

Thank you and have a good weekend-

Sen. Evan Bayh.

This answer is in response to the various people that commented about earmarks, pork barrel spending, and fiscal responsibility:

Reducing pork barrel spending is an important step towards restoring not only our fiscal sanity, but faith in our Democracy as well.

As a former Governor, I understand the importance of real fiscal responsibility and once vetoed a state budget because I didn't think it was fiscally sustainable and as a Senator I was one of only 15 Senators to vote against building the "Bridge to Nowhere."

Earlier this year, I joined a bipartisan group of senators to introduce the Pork Barrel Reduction Act to reduce opportunities for members to insert into bills special projects that are never voted on and to increase public oversight of wasteful spending.

As you may be aware, most pork barrel spending is currently added at the last minute in appropriations bills that are thousands of pages long. It is often the case with earmarks that politicians are able to slip in funding for projects that otherwise would not have gotten support.

The Pork Barrel Reduction Act would allow individual members to challenge pork-barrel projects by raising a "Point of Order", which would require a 60-vote approval for unauthorized earmarks. It would also give members more time to review conference reports so they be amended before they are sent to the President, require recipients of federal money to disclose any amount they spent on lobbyists, and give the media and public more time to study the bill for increased transparency in the process.

It is my hope that when the new Congress convenes in January that we will finally be able to get this important piece of legislation passed.

In response to the many questions on immigration, I believe that we need to strengthen security at our borders. It's not right for our country to have hundreds of thousands of undocumented people coming and going.

But we also need to find a way to deal with the 12 million people already in our country. That's close to double the population of my state - every man, woman, and child. We couldn't track these people down and expel them from the country if we wanted to.

We have to find a way, without rewarding violating the law, to bring them out of the shadows, through steps like imposing fines, conducting criminal background checks, paying back taxes, learning English, and those kinds of things.

A stronger border and some kind of regular status for the people already here are both in our country's national security interest.

Becky-

In July 2004, the 9/11 Commission made 41 recommendations to Congress. I joined with John McCain and others to turn these recommendations into law, but we immediately ran into bureaucracy and turf battles that hampered our efforts.

We made some progress, but much of the work remains dangerously unfinished.

When a report card came out last year rating our progress on the commission's recommendations, the government received 4 F's, 9 D's and no A's. Some of the most pressing unmet recommendations include screening all the cargo that comes into our ports, checking all luggage at airports, and creating one comprehensive terror watch list for passenger security.

When the new Congress starts in January, one of first priorities should be voting to aprrove the remaining recommendations. I called for exactly this while campaigning with House candidates in Indiana and throughout the country this fall.

Thanks for the question!

I want to thank all of you for welcoming me to the Gather community with
such open arms. I am pleased to see so many people active in our political
process. I look forward to continuing this dialogue on the future of our
Party and the direction of the country.

Several of you have asked me questions and I will do my best to respond in a
timely manner. If I do not get to your question, please feel free to send a
message to my Gather account and I will do my best to answer your questions.

Thank you and I look forward to reading the rest of your comments!



-Evan