[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 149 (Thursday, November 1, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H7707-H7709]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
UNITED STATES INCREASING DEPENDENCY ON IMPORTED PETROLEUM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, as we complete our commemoration this
evening of our dear colleague Congressman Jerry Solomon of New York, I
am reminded that his patriotism and his devotion to duty inspired us
all, and as we confront this latest test of America's will and position
in the world and what is just for all people, I am reminded of a book
that I have been rereading called Sacred Rage that puts in context some
of the forces that are arrayed against the United States and our
interests now and the entire issue of terrorism and its roots.
In that book by Robin Wright, much is discussed, including some of
the religious fervor that has been promoted and directed against the
people of the United States, some of the hatred of U.S. policies in the
Middle East that are at the basis of some of the antipathy toward our
country and our people, but also the economic underpinnings of the
unrest in the Middle East and Central Asia and how directly it is tied
to petroleum and oil.
This evening I am going to spend a little bit of time talking about
that because, as the American people understand better some of the
underpinnings of the terror, we can get a clearer sense of new
directions to set in order to build a more peaceful world for the
future.
This evening I wanted to talk about the United States' increasing
dependency on imported fuel and petroleum, and I have two charts here
that describe it very clearly.
This is a chart dating back to the mid-1980s and each year showing an
increase in the amount of imported oil that comes into our country, and
in spite of conservation efforts, in spite of
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other things that we have done, more miles per gallons and so forth, we
have become more and more dependent on imports of petroleum to drive
this economy.
We imported 1.2 billion barrels of oil in 1982, but last year, 3.3
billion barrels, and so we have nearly tripled in the last 20 years our
dependency on imported petroleum. Serious work on alternative fuels has
been largely ignored, while billions of dollars in tax subsidies and
profits have accrued to the oil industry.
The second chart that I have gives a sense of our entire petroleum
usage in this country, which is the red set of bars here, and this is
just the last decade from 1992 to the present showing that the number
has been rising slowly, the usage has been rising slowly in total
petroleum consumption, but the yellow bar underneath shows how much is
imported of that total, and my colleagues can see that our total
consumption is going up but the amount of imported fuel is going up as
a larger share of that. In each single year of the 1990s and last year,
it has gone up to now almost half of total usage in this country, and
over half of what is imported comes from the Middle East.
Last year, the United States imported more than 3.3 billion barrels
of crude oil, and our largest supplier, Saudi Arabia, actually sold us
over 557 million barrels. America's addiction to imported oil threatens
our freedom of action. It saps the lifeblood from our economy, and
truly, it distorts our foreign policy goals.
What an irony of modern history that while our country's bombs fall
on Iraq's no fly zone, our Nation continues to purchase an estimated
$15 billion worth of Iraqi crude annually. That is really something to
think about.
America's addiction to imported oil threatens our freedom of action
without question. A couple of decades ago when President Jimmy Carter
warned about America's growing energy dependence on the outside world,
our Nation responded by creating the Department of Energy with the goal
of putting America on a course to be more self-sufficient.
Conservation saved millions of barrels per day, and more fuel
efficient cars stemmed the growing usage of oil, but truly, Americans
were never really committed to being energy independent, and we fell
asleep as to the risks, again as these charts attest. We are more
dependent now on imported oil than at any time in our history.
Half the oil, as I mentioned, that we consume is imported, and half
of that comes from OPEC, from the OPEC cartel. We spend $86 billion on
our oil habit every year, and in the meantime, those dollars are
foregone for domestic investment opportunities in alternative fuels for
America's independence such as biodiesel, ethanol, clean coal, the
range of alternatives that exists if we but had the will to apply them.
The United States Department of Energy itself has warned us that
dependence on foreign oil has cost our economy deeply. Price
manipulation, if you think about it, by the OPEC cartel from 1979 to
1991 cost our economy over $4 trillion. One of the earlier speakers
this evening talked about September 11, and in some places in our
country the price per gallon going up to over $4 a gallon. Think about
the price manipulation that my colleagues might have seen in their own
communities, in their own towns and think about all those dollars and
how much wiser it would have been had we invested those here at home in
domestic production.
America's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, has been
heavily influenced by the extraction and removal of oil, and in fact,
oil has become a distorting proxy for our foreign policy. It clouds it.
It creates a situation where we cannot see politically clearly enough
in that region of the world. We ought to remove it as a proxy for our
foreign policy, and we ought to make a commitment to do it.
Becoming energy self-sufficient here at home makes global economic
sense, too, because over the next 15 years the world oil reserves will
begin diminishing. They have reached their peak in terms of
availability on the face of the globe, and prices will rise even higher
with each barrel pumped. There is no more opportune time for our Nation
to get serious.
Putting America on a sound energy footing will require national
leadership, and it will require the active involvement of our Federal
Government and our State governments. The goal should be to make each
State in our Union energy independent to the greatest extent possible
and eliminate Federal requirements that discourage alternative fuels.
If you look at our defense budget, just the cost of maintaining the
oil supply lines from the Middle East at a minimum costs us over $50
billion a year, $50 billion a year. That has to do with military
emplacements that have been stationed in that part of the world, ships
that patrol, planes that fly, et cetera. Imagine if we could be
investing that kind of money here at home to make ourselves energy
self-sufficient.
The State of Minnesota, and I just returned from there, is leading
the way in new ethanol producing plants that are also creating new
value added for our depressed world countryside. The Federal Government
really needs to take a look at Minnesota, and every other governor
should take a look at Minnesota. They are doing so much to encourage
the use of renewable fuels, and I sort of felt as I went through
Minnesota and I looked at these various farmer co-ops that were
producing this ethanol, I thought I was seeing a modern day incarnation
of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison. They are tinkering around and
finding an answer and applying it in that great State.
In addition to those kind of efforts, I have introduced other
legislation that will deal with America's long-term energy dependence.
One piece of legislation would expand and rename what we call the
Strategic Petroleum Reserve and rename it the Strategic Fuels Reserve
to allow that reserve to also access ethanol and biodiesel, not just
crude oil and petroleum. The biofuels initiative would authorize the
Secretary of Agriculture to provide loans for production distribution,
development and storage of biofuels beyond the Strategic Petroleum
Reserve.
These fuels provide the American farmer with new market
opportunities, and their mass production could provide the rural areas
of this Nation with the economic infusion of jobs and investment that
has been dreamed about but has not occurred for generations. With a
bill that has been introduced in the other body by Senator Richard
Lugar of Indiana, it is my great hope that for the first time we can
look at this biofuels initiative and make it a central pillar in new
agriculture legislation that will clear this year for our great Nation.
If you think about commodity crises and their levels today, it is
clear that more can and should be done to utilize those domestic
surpluses to produce new fuels for this economy. Economic security is
provided by the increased utilization of renewable biofuels and would
provide significant economic benefits.
According to our own Department of Agriculture, a sustained annual
market of 100 million gallons of just biodiesel would result in a $170
million increase in income to farmers, and that is a very small
increase.
Ethanol, biodiesel and other alternative fuels also provide us with
environmental security. Biodiesel contains no sulfur or aromatics
associated with air pollution, and the use of biodiesel provides a 78.5
percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions compared to petroleum
diesel, and when burned in a conventional engine, provides substantial
reduction in unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and particulate
matter.
For too long we have been uncreative and cynical about the
opportunities that alternative energy sources provide us. Some day, not
so far from now, the oil reserves will be tapped dry. Alternative
energy sources like ethanol, biodiesel, solar energy, wind power,
geothermal, fuel cells, clean coal and hybrids will provide us with new
opportunities to become more energy independent and to determine our
own destiny, not be forced to shape the foreign policy and economic
domestic policy of this Nation based on imported petroleum.
I have been active on this issue for quite a while. Last year, as I
mentioned, during the appropriations committee markup, we had an
amendment which would have increased the appropriated amount for
renewable energy
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programs by $106 million. It failed in committee, but an amendment I
cosponsored with former Congressman Matt Salmon increased that funding
by an additional $40 million.
We just have to be vigilant, and if one looks at the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve, which I referenced a little bit earlier in my
remarks tonight, if we think about that reserve, it should hold about
700 million barrels of crude. It only has 545 million barrels today,
sufficient to push the United States from wild price swings for a
period of approximately 53 days. None of the fuel in that reserve is
biobased. In fact, 92 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has
been purchased from foreign sources; 41.9 percent from Mexico; 24
percent from the United Kingdom; and over a fifth from the Middle East,
the OPEC-producing Nations.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve should also include the development
of alternatives to our Nation's reliance on petroleum.
{time} 2215
Every single part of our government should be asking the question,
how can we move America toward a more independent future? How can we
make our economy more secure in the years ahead?
This is a primary source of instability. Since the economically
damaging Arab oil embargoes of 1973 and 1974 and 1979, to the current
recession which was precipitated by rising oil prices that began in
1999, the economic stability of the United States has too often in
modern history been shaken by economic forces outside our borders. How
long is it going to take us to wise up?
Legislation here should shift our dependence away from foreign
petroleum as our primary energy source to alternative renewable
domestic fuels. Currently the United States annually consumes about 164
billion gallons of vehicle fuels and 5.6 billion gallons of heating
oil. In 2000, 52.9 percent of these fuels were imported. That means
every time you go to the gas station and you fill your tank with
gasoline, half of what you pay goes offshore to one of those oil cartel
interests. Does that make you feel good? Would you not rather be
investing those dollars in this country?
Since 1983, the United States importation of petroleum and its
derivatives has nearly tripled, rising from 1.25 billion barrels in
1983 to a level of 3.3 billion barrels in the Year 2000.
If we think about the benefits of continued development and
utilization of ethanol and biodiesel, they involve energy security for
our country, economic security based on independence that we grow and
process here at home, and environmental security.
In terms of the Middle East and the situation we are now facing with
Enduring Freedom, there is absolutely no question that every single one
of those Gulf oil states, their economies are propped up by the dollars
that come from inside this economy. Now, we cannot cut them off
tomorrow, it would create a terribly disruptive situation in that part
of the world. But it is high time that the United States thought very
hard about how it is going to live up to the promise of our founders,
and that is our own new Declaration of Independence, recognizing how
our independence is being subscribed by forces that perhaps because of
inertia we have let overwhelm us, but now, particularly at this time in
our history, to be wise enough and to have enough foresight and enough
determination to wean ourselves off of this dangerous dependence on
imported petroleum.
To think that we have major military presence in the Middle East, not
because of Enduring Freedom, that has come on recently, but major
military presence to patrol those oil lanes and to make sure that that
product gets to our shores, should cause every single American to think
very hard. What does that mean to our children's future? What does it
mean to the independence of this country?
Think about the fact that $50 billion to $100 billion of taxes paid
every year by the people of this country go directly into our defense
budget to support the petroleum industry, which is largely now every
year more and more an imported product into this market. Would it not
be wiser to spend those dollars here at home, using our ingenuity,
using our promise, using our hopes for a better future, and investing
every single dime here at home where it would create ripple effects
into our economy and cut our very dangerous dependence on imported
petroleum?
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank those who have listened this evening. I
think that this is absolutely the most important economic issue that
faces us as we try to move toward peace and resolution of the very
serious threat that is facing our country from the Middle East. But
unless one understands this piece of the equation, one will never be
able to understand how to lead us to a more secure and independent
future.
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