[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 67 (Wednesday, May 16, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H2259-H2265]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 CONCERN OVER ENERGY POLICY IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the very patient gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight because people all over this 
Nation are concerned because they see their utility bills going way up 
with gas prices possibly heading to $3 a gallon, according to many 
articles. All of this is happening at a time that other prices are 
going up. Our economy has been slowing for almost a year now, the 
dot.coms have taken a dive, and many major corporations have laid off 
thousands of people.

                              {time}  1930

  These things are happening. Utility bills are going up; gas prices 
are going up because of years of environmental extremism and actions by 
the administration of former President Clinton all coming home to 
roost.
  For years now, we have had groups of environmental extremists all 
over this country protesting and stopping or delaying for years anytime 
anyone tried to drill for any oil, dig for any coal, cut any trees, or 
produce any natural gas. This has helped extremely big business, which 
has financed many of these groups, because it has driven thousands of 
small and now even medium-sized businesses out of existence or forced 
them to merge. In the late 1970s, I am told we had 157 small-coal 
companies in east Tennessee. Now there are none. Federal mining 
regulators opened an office in Knoxville, and the regulators and the 
environmentalists drove all of the coal companies out of business. The 
same thing has happened to small logging companies all over this 
country. I have read and heard that many small communities have been 
devastated.
  Today, in the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, we 
heard testimony about a proposal for 400 pages of new regulations by 
the EPA on the runoff from animal feeding operations. All of the 
witnesses told us that this would drive many more small farmers out of 
business and lead to much more concentration by the big giants in the 
agriculture industry. Those on the left are always telling us they are 
for the little guy; but when they create this big government that

[[Page H2260]]

comes down with all of these rules and regulations and red tape, it 
first drives out the small guys, and then it gets the medium-sized 
people, and it ends up destroying jobs and driving up prices. And who 
ends up getting hurt? The lower-income and the working people and the 
middle-income people of this country.
  We are going to talk tonight, Mr. Speaker, about its effect on 
several different industries; and I am pleased to be joined here 
tonight by one of my best friends here in the House and one of the most 
respected Members of Congress, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis). 
I would like to yield to him at this time for any opening comments that 
he wishes to make.
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding.
  The gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is totally correct, Mr. 
Speaker. We have an energy crisis in this country today because for the 
most part it is self-imposed because of the extreme views of some 
people in this country about the environment.
  Now, of course, no one is opposed to clean air, clean water, safe 
working conditions. We all want those things. But there has to be some 
common sense applied when we deal in these areas. We need some good 
scientific data; we need cost analyses, risk assessment, due process 
built into what we do concerning our environment and how it relates to 
our economy and to our energy.
  As the gentleman just stated, this has cost our economy, it has cost 
the working people in this country thousands upon thousands of jobs. 
Since 1990, as a matter of fact, more than 100,000 jobs have been lost 
due to lower domestic oil and gas exploration and production. And then 
we can multiply that probably several times over when we look at all of 
the other industries, the timber industry, the coal industry. If we 
look at what has happened, we certainly, I think, have seen a self-
imposed energy crisis; and it now is affecting our economy, costing 
more jobs. Every time someone pulls up to a gas pump today and they see 
$2 per gallon gas and every time they get their electric bill and every 
time they get their gas bill or home heating oil bill, that has an 
effect on our economy and on the ability of my constituents and 
citizens across this land on the bottom line, how are they going to 
make ends meet.
  I yield back to my friend.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Let me just say this. 
What we are talking about here tonight is the hope that we can get some 
balance and moderation brought back into our environmental policies.
  I voted for the toughest clean air law in the world, and I voted for 
the toughest clean water law in the world, and I voted to require 
double hulls on oil tankers and for higher grazing fees on our Federal 
lands and the Tongas Timber Reform Act, and so many environmental laws 
I probably could not even count them all, and I am sure the gentleman 
from Kentucky has as well. But some of these groups keep having to 
raise the bar and are demanding more and more and more, or their 
contributions dry up. So I really think that all of this is about 
money.
  One of the subcommittees on which I serve is the Subcommittee on 
Forests, and I was told by the staff of that subcommittee that in the 
mid-1980s, Congress passed a law saying that we would not cut more than 
80 percent of the new growth in the national forests, and the 
environmentalists wanted that law. Today, we are cutting less than one-
seventh of the new growth, less than 14 percent of the new growth, and 
that at a time when the amount of forest land in this country has been 
going way up. Yes, I said, way up.
  I have been reading, and I am almost through with Bill Bryson's very 
fine book called ``A Walk in the Woods,'' about hiking the Appalachian 
Trail. At one point in the book he mentions that New England in 1850 
was only 30 percent forest and 70 percent open farmland. Today he 
writes, New England is 70 percent in forest land. In my own State of 
Tennessee, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, in 1950 it was 36 
percent forests. Now 50 percent of Tennessee is now made up of forests. 
Yet left-wing environmentalists have so successfully brainwashed many 
young people and children that I am sure if I went into any school and 
asked them if the number of trees had gone way up or way down in the 
last 50 or 100 or even 150 years, almost all of the children would say 
way down, when the truth is exactly the opposite.
  The Subcommittee on Forests in early 1998 had a hearing in which we 
were told that 39 million acres of forest land in the western part of 
the country was in immediate danger of catastrophic forest fires, 
because when we cut less than 3 billion board feet, and to somebody who 
does not know anything about it, 3 billion board feet probably sounds 
like a lot, but as I said earlier, that is less than one-seventh of the 
new growth in our national forests, much less what is already there. 
But we are cutting less than half of the dead and dying trees.
  So those dead trees which we cannot even get to to remove, once 
again, because of the extremism that we have had in some of these 
environmental policies, the fuel buildup on the floor of the forest has 
led to this great danger of forest fires, and we were warned about that 
in our subcommittee by our subcommittee in early 1998 and again in 
2000. So then what happened? Last summer we saw 7 million acres out 
West burn, $10 billion worth of damage. Yet, if the gentleman from 
Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) or I went into one of our national forests and 
burned or cut down one tree, we would probably be arrested.
  So what happens when we will not let anybody cut any trees? The price 
of lumber goes up, houses cost more, furniture costs more, every 
product made of paper costs more; and once again, as I mentioned 
earlier, we devastate these logging communities. So what happens? We 
destroy jobs; we drive up prices. And who do we hurt? The poor and the 
lower-income and the middle-income people.
  I remember a few years ago reading that the average member of the 
Sierra Club has an income of more than four times higher than the 
average American. Maybe some of these rich people in the Sierra Club 
are not hurt if gas prices go to $3 a gallon or if the utility bills 
are doubled or if the prices go up on timber and everything else; but a 
lot of middle-income, millions of middle-income and lower-income people 
are hurt when all of those jobs are destroyed and the prices go up on 
everything.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield back to my friend for any comments 
he wishes to make at this time.
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding. As the gentleman from Tennessee just mentioned, why are we in 
this mess? What has caused this energy crisis? What has caused the 
problems dealing with our timberland?
  Well, it is because there are those who have stood in the way of 
progress in this country and they have stood in the way of doing the 
right thing in defending some extreme point of view.
  When we look at the energy crisis that we are facing today, the 
question is, How did we get into this mess? Well, number one, there 
have been no major oil refineries built in 30 years. There are 36 
refineries that have been shut down since 1992. The refineries that we 
have now are operating at the highest level that they probably can, but 
current gasoline inventories are below the average level. What we have 
cannot create enough gasoline. It is a matter of the law of supply and 
demand. There is not enough supply for the demand in this country 
today.
  In 1992, our U.S. oil production, or since 1992, our U.S. oil 
production is down 17 percent, but our consumption is up 14 percent. 
And nearly 60 percent of our oil is imported.
  So here we are. We are dependent on foreign oil. We cannot get enough 
oil, and if we were able to get enough oil at this point, we do not 
have the refinery capacity to produce the gasoline. So it does not take 
too much reasoning to figure out the problem we are in here. We just do 
not have enough supply for the demand, and it is hurting our Nation. It 
is causing some real problems. As the gentleman just said, it is 
hurting the people that our workers, our middle class, our poor, 
because they depend on the ability for low-priced fuel. We are going to 
see more problems.
  What is the answer? I guess that is the question, What is the answer? 
Well, we have a great supply of oil in Alaska. We have great supplies 
of oil off of our shores; and with the technology that

[[Page H2261]]

we have today, we have the technology to go in and get those oil 
reserves without hurting the environment.
  Mr. Speaker, this is the problem. We have come a long way since the 
1970s in producing technology that protects the environment, but allows 
us to have the energy resources we need to keep our economy moving in 
the right direction. But there are those that are extreme, the extreme 
environmentalists. They do not want to use the technologies. They do 
not want to do anything. They want to make sure that not one renewable 
resource like a tree is touched; they do not want to go in the 
direction of common sense. They want to stake out these extreme 
positions and stand there.
  The sad part about it, there are many here in Washington that want to 
support that extreme point of view, and they do not want to do what we 
have to do, and that is go after the resources we have and use those 
resources, the oil, the coal, and the natural gas. I yield back to the 
gentleman.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I think the gentleman 
is exactly right. When we cut fewer and fewer trees, we destroy jobs 
and we drive up prices, as I said, for homes and furniture and every 
type of paper product. When we restrict and cut back and eliminate coal 
companies and coal production, we drive up utility bills and drive up 
costs for businesses that have to be passed on to the consumer for 
every type of product, and we destroy more jobs.
  When we close half of the oil refineries, as we have done since 1980, 
and we sign, as President Clinton did, orders to not allow oil drilling 
in Alaska, and 80 percent of our offshore capabilities, we drive up the 
price for oil and gas and destroy more jobs. When we sign, as President 
Clinton did just before he left office, an order locking up 213 
trillion cubic feet of natural gas, we drive up utility bills and 
destroy prices. For anyone who wants more information on this lockup of 
natural gas, they can read last month's Consumers' Research Magazine 
and the article by Rider from USA Today in which he said that President 
Clinton locked up 213 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Mr. Speaker, 
then what happens? People's utility bills all over the country go way 
up.
  I have the mayor of Engelwood, Tennessee, a small town in my 
district, who comes to me and tells me that he has senior citizens who 
are having to choose between eating or paying their utility bills. Once 
again, I say who we hurt with this environmental extremism is not these 
wealthy environmentalists; but we hurt the poor and the lower-income 
and the working people because we destroy jobs and drive up prices, and 
it hurts those lower-income people, and now even middle-income people 
who are becoming very concerned about how these bills are going up.

                              {time}  1945

  But the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) mentioned the oil 
situation.
  Last September 25, long before the current administration came in, 
the Washington Post National Weekly Edition had a cover story headline 
which said, ``Will rising oil prices kill the boom?''
  I can tell the Members that Aviation Daily reported last December 
that 12 airlines went into bankruptcy last year, mainly due to higher-
than-expected oil prices. The Air Transport Association told me, and I 
chaired for the last 6 years the Subcommittee on Aviation so this was 
of special interest to me, they told me that each one penny interest in 
jet fuel cost the industry as a whole $200 million. So if oil prices go 
up, airline tickets have to go up. Then more people are forced onto our 
much less safe highways, the trucking industry is hurt, agriculture is 
hurt, and almost everything is hurt. Then, as the Washington Post asked 
on its cover, ``Will rising oil prices kill the boom?''
  As the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) said, and I think he has 
some additional information, we have all of this oil. We have so much 
oil. I heard one radio report saying oil is the second most plentiful 
liquid today, after salt water, and we have hundreds of years of 
supplies if we did not have these extreme groups keeping us from 
getting to it.
  Vice President Cheney gave us a briefing this morning. He said that 
today well over half of our oil is having to be imported, and that by 
the year 2020, it is going to be two-thirds of our oil, and we are 
going to be even more subject to being held hostage by OPEC and some of 
these other foreign countries.
  Now, the U.S. Geologic Survey tells us that we have I think it is 16 
billion barrels of oil in one little tiny place, on the coastal plain 
of Alaska. I can tell the Members, I have been up there twice. I have 
been twice to Prudhoe Bay.
  The first time was about 6 years ago, and I had a man in the 
Anchorage Airport who I told where I was going, and he said, well, if 
you see anything up there taller than 2 feet, it was put there 
yesterday by a man.
  Some of these groups show this false, almost Nazi-like propaganda 
showing trees and mountains and so forth. The Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge is 19.8 million acres. It is so big we almost cannot comprehend 
it. It is 35 times the size of the Great Smokies, a big part of which 
are in my district.
  We have between 9 million and 10 million visitors a year to the Great 
Smokies. Time Magazine reported a couple of months ago that last year 
the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had 1,000 visitors, because 
there are no roads or paths, and it is dangerous for most people to go 
up there.
  We could drill on about 2,000 acres out of that 19.8 million acres 
and potentially get up to 16 billion barrels of oil, which is equal to 
30 years of Saudi oil. We could do it in an environmentally safe way. 
Yet, we cannot do it. The votes are not there because of environmental 
extremists who put out all this false propaganda, so people see their 
gas prices going up and potentially going up much higher.
  I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) because he has 
more information about the ANWR.
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman knows, the 
information that is put out by some of these extreme groups says that 
this is pristine forest and a beautiful landscape, and it is the last 
great frontier.
  I have a picture of the area that would be drilled. Like the 
gentleman said, it is 2,000 acres. It would be about the size of Dulles 
Airport where the drilling would take place. With the technology that 
we have today, there would be no harm done to the environment. Here is 
a picture of that pristine, beautiful landscape. It looks like the 
moon. There is nothing there. It is amazing.
  If we look at some of these other areas, yes, they are beautiful 
landscapes, but this is the coastal plain, ANWR, where the drilling 
would be done. I think there has been some false information put out 
about what that area looks like and the damage that would be done to 
wildlife.
  The efforts that would be put in place there to get that 30-year 
supply of oil would certainly, with the technology we have today, would 
certainly do no harm to that environment.
  What would this mean to American workers if we go after that oil, if 
we start to work on our own domestic supplies for energy? I was reading 
in the Washington Times yesterday that the energy plan that the 
President is talking about would call for building between 1,300 and 
1,900 new power plants and spending $150 billion on new pipelines and 
transmission facilities, creating millions of jobs for carpenters plus 
energy, electrical, and construction and operation and maintenance 
workers all over this land. It would create a lot of jobs to get us 
back, really, to where we need to go for our energy supply in this 
country.
  But if we do not, if we do not go after what we have that God has 
blessed this Nation with, then there are going to be a lot more jobs 
lost because of this extreme view. And I think, yes, here in Congress 
we should, in a bipartisan way, come together and work for the good of 
the American people and not let this be a political football.
  But there are already those, our friends across the aisle, that are 
saying the way out of this mess would be to conserve our energy. Well, 
we would have a tough time conserving our way out of our energy crisis 
at this point, especially when we are about 1,900 utility power plants 
behind, we are depending on 60 percent of our oil from foreign sources, 
and we still do not have

[[Page H2262]]

enough. We do not have enough refineries.
  Yes, we can do some more conservation, but the bottom line is, we 
have to go after the supply to meet the demand for this country and 
meet the needs of our economy for the 21st century.
  Mr. DUNCAN. I thank the gentleman, once again, he is exactly right on 
target.
  Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, we are simply trying to say that we 
hope to bring back some moderation and balance to our environmental 
policies, instead of allowing environmental extremists to control all 
of these things.
  It is like I have seen cartoons showing hundreds of oil wells in that 
Arctic wildlife refuge. That is totally false, because today the 
technology is such, as the gentleman mentioned, that we could put one 
oil well and go out 4 and 5 miles in any direction, so the footprint on 
the land is hardly anything at all.
  They said the people who opposed the original Alaska pipeline, and 
thank goodness we have that or we would have been in trouble years ago, 
they said it would kill off the caribou. At that time they say there 
were between 5,000 and 6,000 caribou. Now there are over 30,000 
caribou. So all of this can be done in an environmentally safe way.
  As I said earlier, the coastal plain, which is 1.5 million acres, and 
as I said, I have been there twice, and most of these people who are 
against this have never even been there, there is not a tree or bush up 
there. It is a frozen tundra, as they call it. As the gentleman from 
Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) said, it looks like a moonscape.
  I was up there in August. Both times I was there in August it was 
brown with little puddles of oil seeping up. Most of the year it is 
covered by snow and ice. Yet, these groups show these pictures of the 
mountains and trees where nobody has ever advocated drilling for oil.
  As I said earlier, I have noticed over the years that most of these 
extreme environmentalists seem to come from wealthy or very upper-
income families. As I said before, maybe they are not hurt if utility 
bills double or gas prices go way up, but millions of people are hurt 
and millions more are going to be hurt even worse if we do not start 
getting some order, moderation, and balance back into our environmental 
policies.
  The Sierra Club and some of these other environmental groups have 
gone so far to the left now they make even socialists look 
conservative. Some of these radical environmentalists, some proudly 
call themselves ecoterrorists, seem to want to shut this country down 
economically.
  They seem not to realize that the worst pollution in the world has 
occurred in the Communist and socialist nations because their economies 
do not generate enough income to do the good things for the environment 
that all of us want to do, so they protest any time anyone wants to dig 
for any coal or drill for any oil or cut any trees or produce any 
natural gas.
  Then these coal companies and timber companies and oil refineries and 
small natural gas producers that are run out of business can no longer 
hire accountants and salespeople and lawyers and blue collar workers, 
and people wonder why their college graduate children or grandchildren 
cannot find jobs, cannot find good jobs and have to work in 
restaurants, as many college students are working today, and why they 
have to go to graduate school.
  Mr. Speaker, this is really all about money. Environmental groups 
have to continually tell us how bad everything is or their 
contributions will dry up. Many of their contributions, as I have said, 
come from extremely big businesses, which are really the only ones 
which benefit when all of these small- and medium-sized businesses are 
forced out of business or forced to merge.
  Also, they are big enough to get the huge Federal contracts with 
obscene markups to do the environmental cleanup that is demanded by the 
same groups that they fund.
  It is amazing, I think, when these liberals and left-wingers and 
environmental extremists claim to be the friend of the little guy, 
because they are the best friends that extremely big business has. But 
almost everything they do ends up hurting the poor and lower-income 
people, and very small businesses and small farms. Jobs are destroyed 
and prices go up. More and more jobs are forced to go to other 
countries.
  Some groups, of course, receive contributions from foreign oil 
companies and people connected to OPEC or foreign shipping companies. 
There are many large foreign companies, and even some large U.S. 
companies that benefit greatly and make huge money if we have to import 
more oil, or more of other products, for that matter. It is all about 
money.
  That is what the Kyoto agreement is all about, for instance, because 
the U.S. relied on a free enterprise-free market economy with small 
government until recent years. The U.S. now purchases 25 percent of the 
world's goods, though we have just slightly over 4 percent of the 
world's population. Many countries are jealous of this, and believe 
they could take more of our jobs and income if we had to reduce our 
energy use by 30 percent, as the Kyoto agreement would require.
  The Kyoto agreement excludes such large polluters as Mexico and China 
and more than 125 other countries. This treaty would devastate our 
economy, and we should all praise President Bush for not caving in to 
the demands of extremists and going along with such a potentially 
harmful agreement.
  Some people who support the Kyoto agreement and oppose any type of 
coal or oil or lumber or natural gas production in this country know 
that their policies would be very harmful to the U.S. economically, and 
yet they do these things anyway.
  I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) for any comments 
he wishes to make.
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Speaking of the Kyoto treaty, I was in China a 
few years ago. I was in Sian, China. The smog, coal, smoke in that city 
was so bad that the people, the citizens of that city, had to wear like 
surgical masks. We could not see for the pollution. In the Kyoto 
treaty, it is my understanding that they were exempt from the 
environmental restraints that we would have been placing ourselves 
under. That did not make a lot of sense to me.
  We have done a good job in this country with technology, we have done 
some good things with our environment, and new technology and 
reasonable regulations can make increased consumption of our energy 
supplies possible and continue to decrease pollution. But there has to 
be, again, some common sense built into it.
  In Kentucky, I can use Kentucky as a good example, through clean coal 
technology, we use a lot of coal in our utilities, and we have the 
lowest or I think probably the second- or third-lowest rates for our 
electric utility bills of any State in the Nation. But through coal 
technology, we have really reduced emissions, and in fact, it is almost 
as clean now as the natural gas being used in other utility companies.
  So with clean coal technologies, we have been able to increase coal 
by 195 percent over the last 30 years, while cutting coal air emissions 
by one-third. So we have a 300-year supply of coal, and we have done 
the right things in being able to use that energy source, but no one 
wants to reward that. They want to take it even to a greater extreme 
and say, basically, no coal, no oil; we are going to have to move on to 
some alternative energy sources that will not meet the demand that we 
have today.
  Again, it comes back to getting rid of the extremism and getting into 
a scientific-based commonsense approach to how we are going to deal 
with our energy supply in this country.

                              {time}  2000

  We are blessed and we need to use those blessings to benefit our 
population here in this country. I think it is certainly time that we 
start looking at the handwriting on the wall and today start turning 
the situation around.
  I think you can compare the situation in Kentucky and California. We 
have new power plants coming online. We have the energy. We have low-
cost energy, so we could do that across this country, but we have to 
start.
  Mr. Speaker, 1,300 or 1,900 new power plants over the next 20 years 
to just get us to the supply we are going to need in order to provide 
the electricity for this country, if anything, stands in our way and 
that does not make sense. We are hurting our economy, and we are

[[Page H2263]]

hurting the working people in this country.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and he is exactly 
right. I mentioned the briefing that Vice President Cheney gave us this 
morning. We were not given all the details, but President Bush, among 
other things, I am told, is going to announce in his energy plan 
tomorrow $2 billion for clean coal technology.
  The President is not going to announce any tax breaks for big oil 
companies or big gas companies, but he is going to advocate tax breaks 
or incentives for alternative energy sources and for renewable energy 
sources. Yet he still will be attacked on it, I am sure.
  The gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) mentioned the Kyoto 
agreement. The global climate information project said that, quote, So 
while the U.S. cuts energy use by more than 30 percent, most U.N. 
countries get a free ride. Because U.S. energy prices will rise, 
American products could be more expensive at home and less competitive 
overseas. That will slow down our economic growth and cost American 
jobs, all for a treaty that will produce little or no environmental 
benefit.
  One thing it would do for sure is speed up the transfer of wealth and 
jobs from this Nation to underdeveloped countries.
  I can tell you unless you can reduce your standard of living by 30 
percent overnight, which very few people in this country would want to 
do, and no one should want to do, no one should have to do because we 
do not have to, if we can just get a little moderation and balance back 
into our environmental policies instead of following the extremist 
groups that have power far beyond their numbers.
  As I mentioned earlier, some of these people I think know that this 
Kyoto agreement would devastate our economy, and yet they do not 
believe they should think of themselves as Americans first and 
foremost, but they should consider themselves as citizens of the world.
  They think things like national borders and patriotism are old-
fashioned anachronisms totally out of date and out of place in our 
sophisticated, globalized world economy of today.
  I know Strobe Talbott who roomed with former President Clinton in 
Oxford and who was one of his main advisors. He wrote this: He said 
within the next 100 years, nationhood as we know it will be obsolete. 
All States will recognize a single global authority.
  He may be right, but I certainly hope not.
  I want to read to you what nationally syndicated columnist Georgie 
Anne Geyer wrote recently about those individuals and multinational 
corporations that she referred to as globalizers. First, they came and 
took away Main Street and all that meant in terms of the individual and 
the community and of small businesses who supported the Fourth of July 
parades, the Girl Scouts and the old folks home. Finally, they took 
away American industries and corporations. They could have headquarters 
anywhere in the world. They were proud not to belong to any archaic 
nation-state. Who, after all, really believed anymore? This, always 
said with such a patronizing smile in such old things. In between, they 
managed to denigrate patriotism, citizenship, environmental 
protectionism, labor, including child labor, human rights protection, 
and all that made for an American society.
  As I said earlier, these extreme policies that we have been going to 
have hurt for many years and are hurting now the small companies, and 
now even the medium-sized companies and driving them out of business 
and hurting what I do not like to refer to as the little guy, but that 
is the most accurate way you can portray it.
  I have always heard that what happens in California is soon headed to 
the rest of the Nation. We better hope not, because people in 
California wonder why their utility bills have gone up so much. And 
once again, these environmental extremists have made sure that no power 
plants were built in many years there.
  So while demand was going up, capacity was not keeping up. The 
brownouts and blackouts of recent weeks were inevitable.
  The national news a few weeks ago showed scenes of California farmers 
dumping out huge amounts of milk because processing plants had to shut 
down because of lack of power. So people all over the country will see 
milk prices go higher.

  As I said repeatedly tonight, we just need to get some balance and 
moderation back into some of these policies so we do not drive up the 
prices and hurt the poor and the lower-income and the working people of 
this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis).
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding to me. Here are the people who are being hurt by these high 
energy prices. The gentleman just mentioned the dairy farmers in 
California having to pour the milk out because they cannot run their 
operation, keep the milk without the electricity. But farmers are doing 
their spring planning, an expense that they have to bear for diesel 
fuel and for gasoline. Those costs are really cutting into, really, a 
very much shrinking margin that they have to deal with anyway.
  In fact, most of our farmers today, with the prices of grain, are 
fighting a losing battle. Then when you add these fuel prices on top of 
that, it is just a disaster for them.
  The gentleman mentioned the low-income people. They cannot possibly 
afford these high energy costs, yet back when this started to happen in 
the winter, when the costs of heating oil and the costs of natural gas 
to heat their homes, some people were getting these enormous bills, 
they could not even afford to make their house payments because of the 
fuel bills that they were having to come up with.
  Of course, we all know about the $2-per-gallon gasoline. That is 
projected to get worse through the summer. This just is not fair. It is 
not right because of a small group that have had their way for the last 
30 years. Now they have put us in a situation where our people, the 
citizens of this country, are not being able to enjoy the fruits of 
their labor.
  The economy has been running in a magnificent way, but it is in 
danger of putting the brakes on the success that we have seen for the 
last, goodness, 20 years in this country of prospering and growth in 
our economy in ways that we may not have ever imagined.
  But now we are facing a situation where we could have some problems. 
We do not have to. We have the resources, and we have the supply, so we 
need to go after it. Yes, there are going to be some long-term efforts 
that we are going to have to make, but there are some things that we 
can do now.
  We can start to remove some of the regulations that are causing some 
problems in getting our energy sources.
  Mr. DUNCAN. The gentleman is exactly right, and that is the sad 
thing. We have plenty of oil, plenty of coal, plenty of natural gas, 
plenty of timber; as I said, much more timber than we had 50 or even 
100 years ago. We have got plentiful supplies.
  As the gentleman said, God has blessed this Nation greatly, and yet 
to stop everything and shut this country down economically just would 
devastate, first, the poorest people in this country. Yet some of these 
people who know that it would shut us down and would harm us greatly 
economically, they feel justified at times because of a misguided 
belief that we are all destroying the world because of global warming.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to just mention that for a moment. I have a 
report of Sallie Baliunas, who is a senior staff astrophysicist at the 
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy director of the 
Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1991, Discover Magazine profiled her as 
one of America's outstanding women scientists.
  She received her master's and Ph.D. degrees in astrophysics from 
Harvard University. She put out a very detailed report. I would be glad 
to provide copies of it to any Member who wishes, or staff member who 
needs it, but she says this global warming scare assumes that human 
emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the dominant 
driving force in recent and probably future climate changes.
  Yet surface temperature records indicate that the world is warmed 
only about 0.5 degrees centigrade during the last 100 years, roughly 
half of the amount predicted by the computer models on which warming 
scenarios are

[[Page H2264]]

 based. Moreover, at least half the warming observed during the 20th 
century occurred before 1940, while most of the increase in greenhouse 
gas concentrations occurred after 1940.
  That suggests that of the observed warming, mankind is responsible 
for only about one-tenth or two-tenths of a degree. It further suggests 
that future temperature increases due to industrial activity during the 
next century are likely to be extremely modest.
  I could come here tonight armed with all kinds of reports that say 
the exact same thing, and even that the very, very small amount of 
global warming that has occurred has actually helped us increase crop 
production and helped alleviate starvation in many parts of the world.

  The gentleman started off earlier tonight and said we need to have 
some sound science behind some of these policies. We have not had that, 
and we have not had cost-benefit analysis on some of these things, so 
we have ended up following many policies that have been very costly and 
very harmful to this country.
  Once again, as I say, maybe they have helped a few extremely big 
businesses, because much of their competition has been driven out of 
existence; but it should be of great concern to all Americans, 
particularly those who are concerned and upset about these higher 
utility bills and higher gas bills and higher prices on everything 
else, because all of this is hitting at a time when it is becoming more 
and more difficult for many middle-income people to meet some of these 
bills.
  I have said before that extremely big government really only helps 
extremely big business and the bureaucrats who work for the government. 
Extremely big government is really good at only one thing. That is 
wiping out the middle class.
  Mr. Speaker, I can tell my colleagues that every place in the world 
where the people have allowed their governments to get too big, the 
middle class has been wiped out, and you end up with a few elitists at 
the top and a huge underclass.
  The great thing about the United States of America is that we have 
kept our government relatively small in comparison to other countries, 
and therefore we have had few people at the top and few at the bottom 
and a huge middle class.
  I also can tell my colleagues, you can never satisfy government's 
appetite for money or land. If we gave every agency and department up 
here twice what we are giving them, they would be happy for maybe a few 
weeks or a few months, but then they would come back to us crying about 
a shortfall in funding.
  I also want to mention something about government's appetite for 
land, because that ties into private property. It certainly ties into 
these economic problems. But I will yield to the gentleman from 
Kentucky (Mr. Lewis).
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, I would love to know the numbers. How many jobs have 
been lost? How many jobs has this movement cost the workers in this 
country? How many automobile workers? How many construction workers? 
How many miners? How many timber workers? How many laborers have lost 
jobs because of this very extreme position on the environment? It has 
to be thousands upon thousands, upon thousands of jobs that have been 
lost.
  More are going to be lost if this energy crisis takes our economy in 
the wrong direction. I think with what we are seeing today with the 
slowdown, it is a direct result of this energy crisis, of the costs of 
energy. You cannot have $2-a-gallon gasoline and the costs of oil and 
the costs of natural gas without it affecting the economy.
  I think that we are seeing a direct result of the energy costs. How 
many more jobs will it cost? It is the working people that are going to 
be hurt. It is those folks that get up every day and go out to work and 
they have to provide for their families. They pull up to the gas 
station and, gosh, there is $2-a-gallon gasoline, and it could be 
getting worse.

                              {time}  2015

  I think this is what is happening because of this self-imposed energy 
crisis. But this can be turned around. Yes, there is no short-term 
solution. But in the long-term, this can be turned around, and it can 
provide a lot of employment for a lot of people in this country.
  So I think we certainly have to be good stewards. We have to use good 
science. We have to make sure that we continue on the path of keeping 
our environment clean and sound. But we have the technology to be able 
to use our resources and to make sure that the people in this country 
are able to live their lives to the best that they can live. To have 
anything at this point to stand in the way of that, I think, would be a 
tragedy, especially when there was no real need for it to happen.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I could not agree with the gentleman from 
Kentucky more. He is exactly right. Last year, we had the largest or 
biggest trade deficit in our history. I think it was $350 billion. 
Every leading economist tells us that we lose conservatively 20,000 
jobs per billion, which means we lost 7 million jobs to other countries 
last year; and much of it was because of these extreme policies that we 
have been following in recent years that have forced more companies to 
go to other countries and take some of our best jobs.
  Once again, as I said earlier, then I have many parents and 
grandparents coming to me bringing their college-age kids, good-looking 
kids with good grades, but they cannot find the good jobs that used to 
be out there. So they end up, even while they work on master's degrees 
or something, and then they are still going to have trouble finding 
these jobs.
  I know last year The Washington Times had a big story about the glut 
of Ph.D.s that we have, and so many people even with the advanced 
degrees are having trouble finding jobs.
  But there is one last thing that I want to get into because it has 
been a great concern of mine for the last 2 or 3 years. Private 
property is one of the foundation stones of our prosperity. Once again, 
some of these extreme environmental groups want the government to take 
over all of the land.
  There is something called the Wildlands Project that I read about in 
The Washington Post that would require 50 percent of the land now in 
private ownership to be taken over by the government. If people do not 
think that theirs will ever be taken over by the government, they 
should look around at every place in this country and all the land that 
has been taken over. It has happened all around my area of east 
Tennessee.
  I can tell my colleagues that today the Federal Government owns or 
controls over 30 percent of the land in this country. State and local 
governments and quasi-governmental agencies control or own another 20 
percent. So half the land is in some type of public ownership.
  Then government keeps placing more and more restrictions on what can 
be done with the land that remains in private hands. In fact, I was 
told by the Home Builders Association a few years ago that, if the 
wetlands regulations were strictly enforced, over 60 percent of the 
developable land that is out there right now would be off limits. So 
what does that do? That drives up the prices for homes. So we have 
young families that, in past years would have been able to afford a 
home, now they cannot afford a very important part of the American 
dream.
  What happens, too, people developed subdivisions in the 1950s and 
1960s with big yards. Now developers, the land costs are so high 
because so little land can be developed that they have to put homes on 
quarter-acre lots or one-third acre lots. They have to jam more and 
more people into closer and closer quarters, and so people get this 
crowded feeling. It really adds to this urban sprawl problem that these 
environmental extremists are always attacking. Yes, they are the very 
ones that are causing it.
  I can tell my colleagues, private property, while most people do not 
think about it, it is one of the main things that helped create the 
prosperity of this country. It is one of the great foundation stones, 
knowledge of our freedom, but of the prosperity that we have had in 
this country.
  Any one who does not understand this, I wish they would read a book 
called The Noblest Triumph, Property and Prosperity Through the Ages by

[[Page H2265]]

Tom Bethell. The whole book is important, but a couple of brief 
excerpts. He wrote, ``Leon Trotsky, a leading Communist, long ago 
pointed out that where there is no private ownership, individuals can 
be bent to the will of the state under threat of starvation. The Nobel 
Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has said that `You cannot have 
a free society without private property' . . . Recent immigrants have 
been delighted to find that you can buy property in the United States 
without paying bribes.
  ``The call for secure property rights in Third World countries today 
is not an attempt to help the rich. It is not the property of those who 
have access to Swiss bank accounts that needs to be protected. It is 
the small and insecure possessions of the poor.
  ``This key point was well understood (by) Pope Leo XIII (who) wrote 
that the 'fundamental principle of Socialism, which would make all 
possessions public property, is to be utterly rejected because it 
injures the very ones whom it seeks to help.' ''
  What we have been saying all night here tonight is some of these 
liberals and left wingers claim to be the friend of the little guy, yet 
all of these things that they do end up hurting the small businesses 
and the small farmers and the little guy most of all.
  Over the years, when private property has been taken by government, 
it most often has been taken from lower- and middle-income people and 
from poor or small farmers. So it is like all these industrial parks 
that are created. We do not need any more industrial parks in this 
country. We take land from poor farmers and then turn it over to these 
big multinational corporations for free or very reduced costs.
  Then when we have all of these Federal projects, agencies in my area, 
for instance, have taken twice the amount of land that they needed to 
take for their project. It has been a very sad thing to see. But if we 
allow more and more land to be taken, then we are going to ultimately 
destroy the freedom that we have in this country and the prosperity 
that we have in this country. It will be a sad day if we continue to 
allow that to happen.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis) for 
any final comments that he wishes to make.
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding to me. There has been a lot of polling data over the years; 
and the question is, would you prefer clean water as opposed to more 
oil exploration or clean air as opposed to more increased utility power 
companies? When one asks that question, of course we all want clean 
air. We all want clean water. We all want safe working conditions.
  But the question should have been asked, do you want to be able to 
have your automobile? Do you want to be able to have reasonable prices 
for your energy? Do you want to have the living standards and 
conditions that you are used to? Do you want running water in your 
home? Do you want to be able to flip a switch and get the lights to 
come on? The American people want that.
  I think as we are seeing in California today, they are in danger of 
losing the ability to flip a switch and have their electricity. They 
are in danger of having hot water because they do not have their hot 
water tanks generating heat.
  So there is going to be some dire consequences to the extreme 
position that these environmentalists have taken over the last many 
years and put the American people in a very tough situation if this 
continues.
  That is why we need to start turning it around now. Yes, continue to 
work very hard to use the technology and to create new technologies to 
make sure that, yes, when we explore and when we drill for oil, that 
the environment is protected; yes, that when we use coal, that it is 
burned cleanly and efficiently so that the environment is protected 
like it is being done now, natural gas, so forth.
  Yes, we want those things. But these extremists, they have a Walden 
Pond mentality. They want to go out by Walden Pond and give up all, 
evidently, the conveniences that our forefathers have provided for us, 
that my father worked hard to provide for his family and on back. They 
want, for some reason, to think that that is evil to be able to have 
the standard of living that we have today because it is going to 
destroy planet Earth.
  Well, the reality is that we are not going to destroy planet Earth. 
We do have the technology. We do have the opportunities to provide the 
energy resources that the people of this country need and do it in the 
right way, the environmentally correct way. But get rid of the 
extremism and make sure that we are not going to sacrifice the workers 
of this country and their jobs and take away from their families.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, let me just say very quickly in summing up. 
One example that I wanted to mention was President Bush has been hit 
real hard on the arsenic in the water, yet one water district in 
Illinois said, if we went to those unrealistic standards that former 
President Clinton advocated, their water bills would have to go up $72 
a month.
  So what we are saying is we need some balance and moderation brought 
back into our environmental policies. We cannot keep going along with 
wealthy environmental extremists who are not hurt when water bills go 
up $40 or $50 a month or gas prices go up to $3 a gallon or utility 
bills double. But millions of people throughout this country are hurt 
if we have to do all of that.
  We do not need to shut this country down economically and continue to 
hurt worse the poor and the lower-income and the working people and the 
middle-income in this country by forcing more jobs to leave to go to 
other countries and forcing people to reduce their standard of living 
by at least a third, as some of these policies would mean, because it 
is totally unnecessary. Then we would not be able to do the good things 
for the environment that we all want to do.
  So we just need some balance and moderation brought back into these 
environmental policies.
  I thank the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Lewis), my friend, for 
taking time out from his busy schedule to be with me here tonight to 
discuss these very important issues.

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