HAZLETON – Standing in front of a Hazleton neighborhood that won national and state awards for energy efficiency, last week, U.S. Congressional candidate Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta laid out a plan for energy independence.

Republican Barletta, challenging Democrat incumbent Paul Kanjorski, is making the rounds of the 11th district, promoting the plan.  One of his stops, Tuesday, was at a gas station near the busy Marshalls Creek area.

“Recently, we’ve heard a lot of politicians say that Americans need to end their dependence on foreign sources of energy. As the price of a gallon of gasoline climbs above four dollars a gallon, no statement is truer – and no statement on the subject is more overused. We do need to end our dependence on foreign energy sources,” Barletta said. “The America I know is smart and resourceful. The America I know would find its own solutions – both through technological breakthroughs and through new sources of fuel here on our own soil.”

Barletta’s plan for energy includes:

• Finding local solutions, like promoting the use of clean coal technology, which would ease the energy crunch, add jobs, and boost the local economy;
• Using other local and regional resources, like the wind that flows over the Pocono Mountains and the sun that warms fields in Columbia County;
• Developing cellulosic ethanol, a type of grain ethanol that comes from the parts of plants that humans cannot digest, so its use won’t jeopardize the national food supply.
  “Even more importantly, many of the things that are used to make cellulosic ethanol are considered garbage, so they’re just thrown out. There’s little current market for it. But if we were able to convert those products into cellulosic ethanol, it might provide as much as 30 percent of the current fuel consumption in the United States – and it would reduce the amount of garbage going into our landfills,” Barletta said. “Simply put – every time a lumber yard would make a 2-by-4, or a mill would make a sheet of paper, the stuff left over could be converted to cellulosic ethanol. Every time you’d put a newspaper or an envelope in a recycle bin, or put your grass clippings and leaves on the curb for pick-up, you could be contributing to the cellulosic ethanol cycle.
  “We could get most of our fuel from the Midwest, not the Middle East.”
• Drilling and exploring for new oil – right here, right now.
  “We need to loosen, in some commonsense way, the restrictions that keep us from exploring for our own natural resources,” Barletta said. “The Outer Continental Shelf of the United States alone has an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. But because 85 percent of our off-shore oil is off-limits due to governmental restrictions, the United States becomes more and more dependent on foreign oil.”
• Build more refineries to process oil.

Barletta claims Kanjorski has done nothing to help the United States become energy independent.