[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 87 (Thursday, June 21, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H3447-H3449]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          ISSUES AFFECTING SOUTH DAKOTA AND THE UNITED STATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Rehberg). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune) 
is recognized for 14 minutes, the remainder of the leadership hour, as 
the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to visit about 
some of the issues that are impacting not only my State of South Dakota 
but the entire country.
  As most Members know, I represent the entire State of South Dakota, a 
State that consists of 77,000 square miles and about 750,000 people, 
which means there is a lot of real estate out there, and which makes us 
as a State very dependent upon energy.
  Our number one industry is agriculture, a very energy-intensive 
sector of the economy. We rely heavily upon travel in our State during 
the summer months. People come to the Black Hills and Mt. Rushmore and 
many other sites in South Dakota. In order to make sure that that 
tourism industry thrives and prospers, we have to have an affordable 
supply of gasoline.
  Of course, since people live in small towns, just to get back and 
forth to the doctor, to take advantage of many of the services that are 
provided in the more populated areas of my State, it requires sometimes 
driving great distances. So this energy crisis is a very real one.
  Mr. Speaker, I would simply say, as well, that as I have looked at 
the farm economy in the last few years, and we have seen how we have 
had this chronic cycle of depressed agricultural commodity prices, and 
we see now increasing energy costs and input costs going up, the 
bridge, the gap between what it takes to run an operation and what a 
farmer or rancher can derive from income in that farm or ranch 
operation, the gap continues to grow or widen. It is increasingly 
difficult for our producers to make a living on the land.
  This energy crisis, Mr. Speaker, I would argue has particular 
ramifications for areas like South Dakota and other rural areas across 
the country. In fact, last week at the elevator in South Dakota, one of 
the elevators I was looking at, the price for a bushel of corn was 
$1.45 a bushel. The price for gasoline in that same town was $1.59 a 
gallon, actually down about 20 cents from a couple of weeks previous. 
So they cannot even, as a farmer today, get for a bushel of corn what 
it costs to purchase a gallon of gasoline. There is something seriously 
wrong with that picture.
  Mr. Speaker, we are in the process right now of writing a new farm 
bill in the Committee on Agriculture in hopes that we will be able to 
have that on the floor sometime before the end of this year, so we can 
put in place a new program that will enable our producers to make 
decisions about their future, hopefully with a bill that provides more 
stability, more predictability, more certainty about what the incomes 
and the costs and everything else are going to be associated with 
agriculture as we move into the future.
  The one thing they cannot control is the cost of energy. Mr. Speaker, 
it is important that this Congress begin to focus and to zero in like a 
laser beam on this issue. It is our responsibility.
  We can argue, and we have, about who is at fault for this. Frankly, 
we have not had an energy policy in this country for the past 8 years. 
That is one of the things we have all talked about. Republicans blame 
Democrats and Democrats blame Republicans, but the fact of the matter 
is, this is not a Republican or a Democrat problem, this is an an 
American problem, an American challenge. We need to work together 
across political aisles to find a solution.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe that we have a good starting point. The 
President and his Commission on Energy came out with a report about a 
month ago. It is 170 pages or thereabouts long. It has 105

[[Page H3448]]

specific recommendations, many of which can be implemented by executive 
order, many of which are directives to agencies, and many of which 
require legislation by this Congress.
  I think this Congress has a responsibility, Mr. Speaker, to take this 
report, to take those recommendations for legislation, and to act upon 
them, because we do not have any alternative.
  The farmers and ranchers in South Dakota and the farmers and ranchers 
in Montana and North Dakota and all across the country, and the people 
who rely day in and day out upon energy, they do not have any choice or 
any alternative. They have to pay what they have to pay when they go 
get a gallon of gas. They have to pay whatever the utility company says 
it is going to cost them for electricity. There are people who are hurt 
and hurt deeply if we fail to act.
  Mr. Speaker, I would hope, as we begin to debate this issue over the 
course of the next several weeks and months, that we will focus on a 
couple of key issues. One of the things that has been said is that the 
President's proposal is short or lacks somehow in the area of 
conservation and emphasis on alternative sources of energy.

  If we read this carefully, nothing could be further from the truth. 
There are extensive incentives for alternative sources of energy. There 
is a great discussion on conservation, things we can all do to decrease 
the demand for energy in this country. Really, Mr. Speaker, we ought to 
be looking at one or two things. That is, what can we do that, one, 
will increase supply of energy, or two, decrease demand? The rest is 
conversation.
  But I believe we ought to be looking at what we can do in terms of 
legislative action, administrative action, that will increase supply or 
decrease demand for energy in this country so we can close the gap and 
lessen our dependence upon foreign sources of energy. We cannot afford 
as a nation to have Saddam Hussein dictating energy policy in America.
  The fact of the matter is that today we are even more dependent upon 
foreign sources of energy than we were 25, 30 years ago. Back in the 
early 1970s, at the time of the Arab oil embargo, the big discussion 
was that America is 35 percent dependent upon energy sources outside 
the United States. We talked about what a travesty that was and how 
something had to be done.
  Yet today, we are more than 50 percent dependent upon energy sources 
that come from outside the United States of America, primarily the OPEC 
nations. That trend will only continue. Twenty years from now, the 
expectation is that two-thirds of our entire oil supply will come from 
outside the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, we cannot afford to be in a situation where we are held 
hostage to countries around the world who have unstable political 
regimes and are very unreliable in terms of the supply that is coming 
into this country.
  I believe we have to look at what we can do to generate more supply. 
That means environmentally-friendly supply, looking for new sources of 
oil, doing it in a way with technology that will allow us to capture 
and get at those oil reserves in a way that protects the environment, 
that minimizes any disruption. I believe that technology exists, Mr. 
Speaker. It is our responsibility to take the steps that are necessary 
to access the domestic oil reserves that we have here in America.
  I also believe profoundly that we have to support alternative sources 
of energy. We have one in my State of South Dakota. It is corn. It is 
used to produce ethanol. We have an industry that is beginning to 
flourish, and with the President's recent action with respect to the 
California waiver, the Midwest has an opportunity to ramp up the supply 
of ethanol to meet the increasing and growing demand in this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not think it is just California, but we ought to 
have an energy strategy that puts in place a demand for ethanol all 
across this country, because it helps clean up the environment. It 
helps lessen our dependence upon foreign sources of energy. It helps 
support American agriculture.
  We have an economic crisis in agriculture today. We have an energy 
crisis in America. We can use renewable sources of energy to help meet 
the demand for energy. Mr. Speaker, I believe we need to put incentives 
in place through legislation that would encourage and stimulate more 
and more development of renewable sources of energy.
  How about wind? How about nuclear, things that we have not perhaps 
talked about in the past becoming more economical in the present? 
Technology continues to advance. We have opportunities that we did not 
fathom possible a few years ago. But we need to be looking at 
alternative sources of energy, and supporting and encouraging and 
providing incentives for their development and expansion.
  We need to be looking at what we can do to access the supplies of oil 
in this country and natural gas, doing it in an environmentally 
friendly way. Then, Mr. Speaker, of course we need to look at what we 
can do to lessen and to decrease the demand that we have for energy.
  All of us in our daily lives can make decisions that will help 
preserve those sources of energy and lessen and decrease the demand for 
them in this country. There is not a family, I daresay, across America 
who could not do a better job of becoming more efficient.
  We now have appliances that are more efficient and less energy-
intensive. We have opportunities to turn the lights off when we leave 
the room, or to turn the computer off. We are much more reliant and 
dependent upon energy today than we were 20 years ago.
  Look at the appliances in our very homes: microwaves, VCRs, DVDs, 
computers, all those things that perhaps 20, 25 years ago did not 
exist. Yet, we do not do a very good job of teaching the next 
generation about the importance of conservation of many of our natural 
resources.

  So as we begin this debate, Mr. Speaker, I hope we can take some of 
the partisan vitriol out of that debate, some of the political attacks 
and accusations that occur oftentimes here on the floor of this House, 
and have an honest dialogue about what we can do as a country to 
increase the supply of energy, to decrease the demand, and to diversify 
our energy mix so that we are less reliant upon fossil fuels, on 
hydrocarbons, and more dependent upon alternative sources of energy 
that come from wind, from some of our renewable sources like corn and 
biomass.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a crisis for America. It is something that 
becomes progressively worse over time if we do not act now. Yes, we 
need a short-term solution, but we need to put in place a long-term 
energy policy for America's future that recognizes the importance in a 
growing and expanding economy of having an affordable source of energy 
that powers our homes, powers our businesses, allows this economy to 
expand and grow and enhance and improve the quality of life for all 
Americans.
  I am anxious to engage in that debate. It matters profoundly to the 
future of American agriculture, to the people that I represent, in the 
great State of South Dakota and all across the country.
  Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues, as we begin this debate, to 
not engage in partisan blasting and bashing, but to take what I think 
is a very thoughtful and meaningful starting point, which is the 
President's energy proposal, and work from this to develop an energy 
policy, an energy strategy that will serve this country well, not only 
in the immediate future but in the long term future.
  It is critical to our children and to our grandchildren that we not 
deprive them of the opportunities that many of us have enjoyed because 
we do not have and have not put in place a coherent energy strategy and 
energy policy for America's future.
  Mr. Speaker, I look forward to that debate. I encourage my colleagues 
to work together in a bipartisan and cooperative way to put in place 
many of the incentives that are going to be necessary to see that we 
have alternative sources of energy into the future, and to talk 
honestly, not in emotion but in a science-based, factual way, about 
getting at those sources, those resources we have here domestically 
here in this country in a technologically and environmentally friendly 
way for America's future.

[[Page H3449]]



                          ____________________