Daily Inspiration Quote by Gale Norton

The line reads like a calm briefing, but it’s doing the rough work of political permission. Norton isn’t just describing an energy landscape; she’s laundering an expansion agenda through the language of pragmatism and public health. “Serious energy needs” frames the issue as urgent and nonnegotiable, a crisis posture that narrows the menu of acceptable objections. Once the stakes are set, “we are aware” signals managerial competence: the government as sober referee, not interested party.

Then comes the key move: natural gas as an “air quality” solution. The phrase “especially in demand” makes the market sound like an impartial jury reaching the obvious verdict. “Air quality benefits” is a carefully chosen, local and immediate promise: fewer smokestacks, less visible grime, less asthma talk on the evening news. It sidesteps the harder, longer horizon of climate impacts and the upstream messiness of drilling, leakage, and land disturbance. In the early 2000s, this was a winning frame: gas as the cleaner bridge away from coal, with environmental reassurance built in.

The statistic is the clincher. “90 percent of new power plants” turns policy into inevitability: if everyone is building gas, resisting it looks ideological, even anti-modern. It’s also a rhetorical outsourcing of responsibility. If the market is already headed there, regulators can present themselves as merely accommodating reality while smoothing the path for permitting and extraction. The subtext is clear: don’t ask whether we should build this; the country already has.