Source Notes
Title:
Rep Don Young Urges Producing American Energy & Opening ANWR (YouTube, March 12, 2009)
Summary:
This source is a video featuring Congressman and Alaskan Representative Don Young at the podium in Washington, D.C. urging Congress to vote in favor of his bill, the American Energy Independence and Price Reduction Act (also known as the HR 6107 bill). If passed the bill would open the ANWR up to oil drilling, and generate roughly $200 billion to help finance the development of alternative energy resources in the future.
Topic:
Citizen source, expert and stakeholder
This source is a Youtube video.
Featured media type: multimedia video
Publication Information:
This video was taken from the floor of Congress and posted on Youtube on July 9, 2008.
Author:
There is no author specified for this source.
Location:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlfmvwxxgHM
Accessed:
I last accessed this link in the early morning of March 13, 2009.
Support:
Former President Bill Clinton (1993-2001)- vetoed an earlier form of the HR6107 bill on the grounds that it would take about ten years for the new legislation to take any kind of effect. According to Congressman Young, that was 13 years ago.
The U.S. Congress- has passed a form of the HR 6107 bill in the past, before it was vetoed and thrown out by President Clinton.
The Trans Alaskan Pipeline- an 800 mile-long, 48 inch in diameter pipe designed for the transportation of oil out of remote refuges in Alaska. The pipe was built in roughly three years.
Don Young uses these three forms of support to improve his argument in very different ways. First, statistics on the Trans Alaskan Pipeline give the impression that an addition line to the ANWR is entirely feasible in the near future. The fact that Congress has passed a bill very similar to the HR 6107 in the past shows that there is support for this legislation. Lastly, looking back on Clinton’s veto and seeing how entirely wrong his logic was definitely helps in dismantling the opposition to this bill.
Audience and Agenda:
The original intended audience for this speech by Congressman Young was entirely the rest of the members of Congress. However, through C-Span and YouTube this source has reached a much larger volume of people than Young likely had originally expected. At the time that I last viewed this video there had been 975,766 people who had watched it before me, and 226 of those people decided to respond on the message board. This is a relatively large amount of people considering this is not even taking into account the amount of people who saw it on C-Span (the location where YouTube was able to duplicate the post from). Young was likely very pleased with this, as it is obvious he feels that the opposition to his argument is ridiculous and needs to be exposed. Youtube is a constantly expanding website that features nearly every sort of video that one could imagine. Youtube reaches approximately 80.6 million people monthly on their site.
Usefulness:
This source was created in order to urge Congress to vote in favor of the HR 6107 bill, and poke holes in the arguments that oppose the passing of the HR 6107. In this video Young is making the assertion that the U.S. “No longer has the will to develop our resources,” and that in order to solve the problem of energy in the United States we need to “address the supply side of the issue.” Young believes that even though we need to move toward the use of alternative forms of energy, we rely so heavily on oil right now that it makes no sense to abandon the process of oil drilling. This argument relates well to my interview with Adrian Herrera, in which Herrera speaks of the amount of times that a bill on the ANWR has reached Congress only to fall on deaf ears.
Works cited:
- The Miller Center of Public Affairs- features biography of former President Bill Clinton.
http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/clinton
- The U.S. Congress-
- fairbanks-alaska.com- provides information on the Trans Alaskan Pipeline.
http://fairbanks-alaska.com/trans-alaska-pipeline.htm
- http://www.quantcast.com/- statistics on YouTube traffic.
http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com
