I am against tying the merger to the rate deal. It is not doing anything to address the underlying, systemic problems in Maryland's utility market.

If you look not just at the headline rate but also at the underlying rates, you are seeing a gradual climb away from zero and that has to be seen positively.

America's natural gas companies have been fined over two-billion dollars in the last three years for manipulating natural gas markets. This clearly shows that we do not have an adequate regulatory framework over natural gas markets, and we feel there is market manipulation continuing today in the United States.

Oil companies are exploiting a tight supply-demand situation. They are piling on, making a bad situation worse.

I'm going to address the team and try to set down some parameters as to how we're going to deal with it, ... This is something now that we seriously have to take as another type of an issue, where there's a certain sense of where our privacy lies and where the boundaries lie, that we're going to have to address and we're going to have to be serious about it.

It's because of our failure to deal with this issue, the underlying cause of it, and the idea that if we scream loud enough at these other countries we're somehow going to get far better cooperation out of these nations,