[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 22 (Tuesday, February 6, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H1264-H1269]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Jackson-Lee of Texas). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, there are three different 
groups in our country and indeed worldwide at least for some of these 
issues that have common cause in campaigning for a reduction in the use 
of fossil fuels. These three groups come from very different 
perspectives, but as you will see from our discussions this evening 
they really do have common cause. Because to solve the problems that 
brings them to this dialogue, all three of these groups are advocating 
essentially the same thing. That is, a reduction in our use of fossil 
fuels.
  The first of these groups is a very large group which has genuine 
concern about national security interests. Probably 2 years ago now, or 
nearly that, 30 of our prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, McFarland, Jim 
Woolsey and 27 others, some of them senior retired military people, 
wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that in 
our country we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of world oil 
and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, importing almost two-thirds 
of what we use, represents a totally unacceptable national security 
risk.
  The President himself recognized this in his State of the Union a 
year ago when he noted that we get some of this oil from countries, as 
he said, that don't even like us very much. That is a bit of an 
understatement for some of those countries.
  The next chart shows a recognition of this on the part of our 
Secretary of State. This was April 5 of last year. We do have to do 
something about the energy problem.
  I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as 
Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will 
use the word, ``warping'' diplomacy around the world. We have simply 
got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the 
all-out rush for energy supply.
  I am sure that in her head she had a mental picture of this really 
interesting map of the world. This shows what our world would look like 
if the size of each country was determined by its reserves of oil. And 
you can see how in America right here, tiny on this map of the world, 
we represent about less than 5 percent of the people of the world and 
we have only about 2 percent of the oil in the world, but we are using 
25 percent of the oil.
  Look how small we are. We would fit many times in Saudi Arabia. We 
are about the size of Qatar here. We would fit four times in Kuwait, if 
the size of Kuwait, if the land mass of Kuwait was relative to how much 
oil they have.
  Russia up there, they are a big exporter now, but they can be a big 
exporter because they aren't using anywhere near as much as we have. 
You see Russia is two or three times as large as we are.
  Well, that large community in our country which is genuinely 
concerned about national security interests understands our problems 
that come from this distribution of oil. Many of these oil reserves are 
in countries that, what we call the royal families. They are really 
dictatorships, aren't they? And Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and 
Saudi Arabia. And then in Iran, that is run as a theocracy pretty much 
totally controlled by the Mullahs. And here we have Venezuela, a 
Communist state.
  The President very wisely said in that State of the Union message a 
year ago that we are getting oil, many of the reserves are in countries 
that don't even like us very much.
  Now, fortunately, our imported oil doesn't come from the mix as we 
see it here, because we are getting oil where it is cheaper to ship it 
and so forth. So a lot of our oil comes from Canada. They are pretty 
tiny in terms of total reserves, but there aren't many people there, so 
they are an exporter. We get oil from Mexico, and we get oil from 
Venezuela simply because of economics. It is just cheaper to ship it 
the short distances around the world.
  So this is one group that has common cause in wanting to reduce our 
consumption of fossil fuels, particularly oil, because we are so 
dependent on the rest of the world which, as Condoleezza Rice says, 
presents a very real national security problem.
  A second group that is interested in reducing our use of these fossil 
fuels, particularly oil, is the group that believes that, whereas the 
United States reached its maximum production of oil in 1970, that the 
world is about to approach that point now. And if you aren't concerned 
about national security risks and if you aren't concerned about climate 
change, which is going to be the third one that we talk about, you 
would really be concerned about oil if you recognized that there is not 
going to be enough of it in the future. It is going to be a real 
economic problem.
  What we have here, it says here, the United States production Hubbert 
versus Actual. This is a report from CERA, the Cambridge Energy 
Research Associates, who were trying to point out that M. King Hubbert 
was not very accurate in his prediction of what the United States would 
do, and therefore you shouldn't take him very seriously when he 
predicted the world would be peaking about now.
  The average person looking at this would say that they were kind of 
nitpicking, because this is the Hubbert's Lower 48 Projection, this 
yellow line here, and the red is the actual. And of course added to the 
Lower 48 was our big discovery in Dead Horse and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, 
and our oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, I think that these 
two curves here run pretty darned close together; and for that growing 
community of people that have a genuine concern about the availability 
of oil in the future, this chart has real meaning.
  I might look at the next chart here before we move to those who are 
concerned about climate change. This is a chart which presents the 
challenge that we face from what is called peak oil, and these bars 
here represent the discoveries of oil. You note that the big 
discoveries were back in the 1960s and 1970s; and ever since 1980, on 
average, the discoveries have been reducing, going down, down, down.
  Now, anyone who has had any math and charting and so forth in school

[[Page H1265]]

knows that if you draw a smooth curve over this, the area under the 
curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have found. 
Indeed, each of these represents a reservoir of oil. If you add up all 
these little bars, why you have the total; and that is what you do when 
you smooth them out. You, in effect, add them all up.
  The solid dark line here represents the amount of oil that we have 
been using. We started out really rich, didn't we? We found this much 
oil, and we are just using this tiny bit down here.

                              {time}  1715

  It looked like oil was going to be forever. When would it run out? 
Look at how little we are using and how much there is out there.
  But now look what happened. We continued to use more and more as the 
industrial revolution grew and as our population grew and we found more 
ways to use energy to make our lives comfortable. The use continued to 
grow and grow, but the discovery started falling off.
  In 1965 or so, they started falling off, down, down, down, and that 
is in spite of ever better techniques for finding oil, computer 
modeling, 3-D seismic and so forth. We now have a pretty good idea of 
what the geology of the world looks like, and we will find gas and oil 
in only very unique geological formations. Maybe a little later this 
evening we will have a little chance to talk about those so you have 
some expectation of what we might find in the future.
  Here we are now, and this is about 2007, and we have been using more 
oil ever since about 1980 than we have been finding. Of course, we have 
had lots of reserve, and we have been eating up that reserve now, until 
we have taken some of this to fill in this space.
  Now you look to the future, and what does the future look like? We 
have some options of what the future looks like. One of the options we 
do not have, though, is pumping oil we have not found. So unless you 
think we are going to find more oil than this chart indicates, and of 
course it will not be a smooth, down curve like that. It will be up and 
down but generally it will be down most people recognize. Well, we can 
use all sorts of enhanced oil recovery techniques and pump it sooner, 
and you may get a little more from those enhanced recovery techniques, 
but you cannot pump what you have not found.
  So this shows you very graphically. If you had only one graph to look 
at to help you understand what we are facing in terms of peak oil, this 
would be the graph. So you understand now why this second group is 
really concerned about our use of fossil fuels, particularly oil, 
because it is very probable that the world is going to reach its 
maximum production of oil, maybe has already, but if not now, very 
soon, and the demand for oil, which has been going up at a roughly 2 
percent per year growth is going to continue. So it is going to be an 
ever increasing difference between the available oil and the demand for 
oil.
  Of course, when that happens, of course when demand exceeds supply, 
price goes up, and we have seen oil prices go up relatively few years 
ago from $10 a barrel to $60 a barrel now. It was just a few months ago 
$78 a barrel. Kind of fear factor in that way, it went away, and it 
dropped very quickly $18 a barrel. But very volatile market, up and 
down $1 or more a day. Another fear factor, it could jump another $18.
  The next chart I have here is one that shows the concerns that this 
third group has, and that is those who are concerned about climate 
change. I have something I want to read here. This chart comes from 
this document by the way, ``Stern Review: The Economics of Climate 
Change.'' It says here, ``The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: 
climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an 
urgent global response.
  ``Climate change is global in its causes and consequences, and 
international collective action will be critical in driving an 
effective, efficient and equitable response on the scale required.''
  This international cooperation reminds me of a visit we just made. I 
came back just about a month ago from China. Nine of us, nine Members 
of Congress went over and the primary reason of the trip was to talk to 
them about energy. I was surprised and pleased when they began their 
discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Gee, I says, they get 
it. Somehow a civilization that was a golden civilization when my Fore 
Fathers were barbarians running around Europe has a longer view of 
things than we seem to have. We have trouble seeing beyond the next 
quarterly report in our industry. We have real trouble here seeing 
beyond the next election. But they are looking post-oil they say. They 
recognize that there will be a post-oil period.
  A thousand years of recorded history, we have been in the age of oil 
about 100, 150 years. If it is half gone and if it follows a bell 
curve, as it did in our country and it probably will in the world, you 
have probably got another 100, 150 years of oil, with ever increasing 
costs and ever decreasing amounts as we get the oil, which is harder 
and harder to get.
  Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics. It is the 
greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen. The benefits of 
strong, early action on climate change outweigh the costs they say.
  So this is a little chart that shows where these gases come from. 
Just a moment of explanation as to why the use of oil and so forth 
produces climate change.
  When you go out into your car this evening, if you go out, if it is 
parked outside and the sun is shining in, and if you go out before 
dark, your car will be very much warmer inside than it is outside, and 
we call that the greenhouse effect. What happens is the light from the 
sun comes in in a very broad wavelength spectrum from very long waves 
to very short waves, and they go easily through your car, most of them 
through the car window, and then that sun heats up the material inside 
your car, and that reradiates in the infrared. Well, the glass is 
relatively impervious to infrared so it simply reflects it back, and 
that is called the greenhouse effect, and your car then gets warmer and 
warmer. You see it especially on a summer day when it may be 80 outside 
and 120 inside your car which is why you should not leave your children 
and animals inside the car when you leave it.
  Well, there are gases in the atmosphere that essentially do the same 
thing as the glass in your automobile. You may remember riding in the 
airplane and you are very comfortable sitting in there at 38, 40,000 
feet and the pilot tells you it is minus 40 degrees centigrade outside. 
That is really cold. The reason you could be so warm down here and you 
are so cold up here is the reflection of all this heat which is 
radiated back from the earth, long infrared rays, and they are 
reflected back. One of the things that reflects them back are gases up 
in the atmosphere. There a number of those gases, methane, and carbon 
dioxide is one of the major ones.
  Of course, carbon dioxide, absolutely essential for plant life, and 
they are so efficient. Our oxygen is about 21 percent. We can do with 
maybe half of that. If you are at 18,000 feet, that is all you have got 
because of the atmospheric pressure there. But these plants make due on 
.04 percent. Do you not wish you could be as efficient as these plants? 
You could get by on the top of Mt. Everest very easily. You would not 
need to pressurize the cockpit in the aircraft you are riding in.
  What stunned me in this report was when I read that our earth now is 
only 5 degrees centigrade, that is 9 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than it 
was in the last ice age. Wow, what a huge change in climate, a 
relatively small change in temperature makes, just 9 degrees cooler 
Fahrenheit, and we had glaciers that came down to southeast Ohio. They 
came down that far, scooping up the dirt and from it you can see where 
it melted and left the mounds of gravel and dirt there where they came 
down that far.
  Well, I am very pleased to be joined by one of the Nation's leading 
voices and authorities on climate change, my colleague, also from the 
great State of Maryland, Congressman Gilchrest.

  Mr. GILCHREST. I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) for 
yielding and for having this time we can discuss these issues of 
energy, its ramifications to national security, the environment and to 
the economy. I would like to reiterate some of the comments that 
Congressman Bartlett has made as far as energy use, and it is

[[Page H1266]]

a single issue, energy use, the ramifications of our energy use now is 
to our economy, to our national security and to our environment.
  Our energy use is dependent on fossil fuel, and our whole economy 
then is dependent on fossil fuel. Our national security to a great 
extent is the ramifications of national security are as a result of 
where we get our fossil fuel sources from throughout the world, and 
fossil fuel burning has a pretty big impact on the environment. So our 
energy policy affects our economy, affects our national security and 
affects our environment.
  Each of these, because it is fossil fuel, because like Mr. Bartlett 
said, two-thirds of our energy sources for oil come from foreign 
sources, that makes our economy fragile. That makes our national 
security much more difficult, and the ramifications to our environment 
is that it degrades our environment.
  What I would like to discuss here is the legacy of oil to our 
environment, and the environment, in particular, is our climate. The 
air, sea and land, upon which life exists on the planet depends to a 
great extent on the atmosphere, and the atmosphere, in order to support 
life as we know it, as Mr. Bartlett described, has a certain heat 
balance to it in order for life to exist.
  That heat balance that we talk about is the greenhouse effect which 
keeps the planet and its heat at a certain temperature in order for us 
to live, vegetation to grow, life in the sea to exist and life on the 
land.
  The greenhouse effect is as a result of the chemistry of the 
atmosphere and the chemistry of the atmosphere, whether it is carbon, 
whether it is methane, whether it is oxygen or whether it is water 
vapor, does hold the heat of the sun's rays enough for us to have life 
the way we know it, the greenhouse effect.
  The greenhouse effect has had huge fluctuations over the eons of time 
that the earth has existed. We have ice ages, we have warming trends. 
So throughout earth's history we have had a natural range of 
fluctuation to the temperature, to CO2, to other greenhouse 
gases. That is a natural range. No huge rapid fluctuations in that 
natural range of chemicals that make up the atmosphere to hold on to 
the greenhouse effect.
  The question is, when we debate this issue in Congress or in other 
political situations, are humans impacting the climate? Are humans the 
cause of a warming trend?
  Well, let us take a look at that. Right now, is there a warming 
trend? I would say that every single scientist in the United States, 
throughout the planet who is a meteorologist or an atmospheric chemist 
or anybody in that scientific community, every single one of them will 
say that, yes, we are in a warming trend and we have been in a warming 
trend for the past 10,000 years.
  If you could go back 10,000 years using ice cores drilled into the 
glaciers in Greenland or the Antarctic, then you could see that 10,000 
years ago, as Mr. Bartlett mentioned earlier, the temperature of the 
planet was about 5 degrees centigrade cooler than it is now, and the 
value assessment of that is evaluated by the makeup of the chemistry of 
the atmosphere 10,000 years ago.
  One of those elements in the atmosphere was carbon dioxide. If you 
look at carbon dioxide, you would see that 10,000 years ago, there was 
about 180 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.
  Now let us come ahead almost 10,000 years to 1890 or 1900 and you 
evaluate CO2 in the atmosphere at that point. You would see 
that in 10,000 years, you increased the amount of CO2 in the 
atmosphere from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million. It took 
the earth in its natural range of fluctuation 10,000 years to increase 
100 parts per million of CO2.
  Now, let us project the next 100 years, which is essentially the 
industrial age. We have increased another 100 parts per million. We are 
now at 380 parts per million. So what took the natural forces in a 
natural range of fluctuation over a period of 10,000 years to increase 
100 parts per million, in the industrial age we have done it in 100 
years.
  Now some people will say that has nothing to do with human activity, 
that is volcanoes, that is the natural decaying of matters, that is 
nature producing that 100 parts per million. The answer to that is 
this. You can distinguish between the kind of CO2 that comes 
from volcanoes or forest fires or other natural sources from burning 
fossil fuel. Every human being has their own DNA marker.

                              {time}  1730

  You can tell one human being from another human being by their DNA. 
Carbon dioxide has a DNA; it has a marker. It is a radioactive isotope, 
so you can determine where this CO2 in the atmosphere comes 
from. Is it coming from your automobile, or is it coming from a volcano 
in southeast Asia, or is it coming from a forest fire in California or 
Brazil?
  The radioactive isotopes are markers for CO2. It is very 
easily discerned that an extreme increase in CO2 has come 
from human activity. What do we see as a result?
  We see warmer air temperatures and warmer sea temperatures. What are 
some of the results of that? Sea water is warming; the atmosphere is 
warming. Fuel for hurricanes is warm air and warm sea water. So we are 
seeing a fairly dramatic increase in stronger hurricanes.
  What are some of the other implications of increasing temperatures as 
a result of burning fossil fuel, human activity? That is sea level 
rise.
  Sea level rise from the melting of the Arctic ice, Arctic glacier 
such as Greenland and the Antarctic has the potential, in this century, 
to raise sea levels by 3 feet. What will that do to New York or 
Baltimore or Miami or all the other low-lying communities throughout 
the world, the Thames River in London? Sea level rise would flood the 
City of London. Coastal erosion, coastal communities. The insurance 
industry in the United States, as a result of climate change, global 
warming and potential increasing violent storms and sea level rise, and 
the insurance companies in the United States are beginning to stop 
their homeowners insurance coverage for these communities at risk along 
the gulf and Atlantic Coast. The insurance companies of the United 
States and Lloyd's of London, the only reinsurance company that I know 
of in the world that is continuing to cover these homeowners, have 
doubled, tripled and quadrupled their premiums to look at the risk.
  The other problem with increasing CO2 and other greenhouse 
gases is what it does to the actual chemical make-up of our oceans. Our 
oceans have a certain balance in their Ph. It is just a little bit 
above 7, and it has been that way for aeons of time. How long have the 
sharks been in the ocean? You hear on shows in television that sharks 
have been around for millions of years. Other creatures on our planet 
have been around for millions of years.
  Some of the best habitat in the world for ocean creatures are coral 
reefs. Increasing CO2 into the atmosphere and the world's 
oceans have absorbed fully half of the CO2 that we have put 
into the atmosphere. The result of that, the legacy of oil, burning 
fossil fuel, is it makes the oceans more acidic. Ocean chemistry would 
change, be more acidic and more corrosive. It could destroy the vast 
resources we get from coral reefs by destroying the very fabric of the 
beginning of the ecology of the world's oceans.
  Warmer temperatures we have already begun to see cause more forest 
fires, more infestations, more problems with agriculture. Weather 
patterns become more violent in some places. They become more 
unpredictable. The storm cycles are more violent and unpredictable. 
Shifting vegetation zones, we have already talked about sea level rise, 
habitat loss.
  The Arctic ice cap at the top of the world in the last 50 years has 
lost 40 percent of its ice volume, 40 percent. The list of dramatic 
ramifications of not addressing one of the problems of the legacy of 
oil and our dependence on it is climate change, is global warming.
  What are some of the answers to this? Well, Mr. Bartlett has made 
some comments about this, but we have a bill on the Senate side, on the 
House side. Mr. Bartlett is a cosponsor. John Olver from Massachusetts 
is a cosponsor. A number of our colleagues have gotten on this bill to 
try to understand the nature of this problem, at least part of our 
dependence on fossil fuel, which is global warming, climate change.

[[Page H1267]]

  We think the debate is over. The debate is over because the science 
is clear that human activity is causing the climate to change and all 
those other problems or ramifications of increasing carbon dioxide in 
the atmosphere. We need to take action now to stop global warming. We 
subject our economy, our national security, our way of life to great 
risk and catastrophic harm. We have a bipartisan bill that will reduce 
the Nation's greenhouse gas emissions substantially and in a timely 
fashion.
  We have a series of Fortune 500 companies from Alcoa to BP to 
Caterpillar to Duke Energy to DuPont to a number of environmental 
groups that support the Federal Government making a goal of reducing 
greenhouse gases by the year 2050 to 70 percent below 1990 levels, 
creating a regulatory structure to do that.
  Then these companies that I just read say that the market can resolve 
the issue. It would create a cap and trade program with large tax 
incentives to unleash the ingenuity of the American free marketplace to 
capture the technology, which will make us much more economically 
viable to use efficiency, technological advances, alternative fuels. 
This will reduce over a period of decades not only our dependence on 
fossil fuel from foreign sources, not only improve our economy, not 
only improve our national security situation with the rest of the 
world, but drastically begin to improve our environment. The U.S. can 
take the lead in finding solutions to this seemingly intractable 
problem.
  The Federal Government sets a goal with the regulatory structure, the 
market produces the results, and human ingenuity, once again, solves 
some of the problems. I want to thank Congressman Bartlett for the time 
and for his enormous interest in this issue and his skill and 
expertise.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I want to thank my colleague very much for 
joining us here. Congressman Gilchrest mentioned market forces. They 
are, indeed, very powerful. They have served us very well in this 
country. They have provided for us the highest quality of life of any 
place in the world. But market forces are limited. They cannot do what 
they cannot do.
  As I noted somewhat humorously, there are even some things that God 
cannot do. God can't make a square circle, for instance. The market 
forces are very powerful. As long as there are unlimited forces, market 
forces will work. I remember mentioning to one of our very high 
government officials the problem of limited oil supply in the future. 
The response was, gee, I guess the market will take care of that.
  I guess when oil gets more expensive, we will use less of it, and 
then we will find alternatives. That is true. When oil prices get 
higher, we will use less of it, and we will look for alternatives.
  But when you look at the potential for exploiting these alternatives, 
you see that a large amount of time and energy must be invested in 
these alternatives before they yield any meaningful amount of 
replacement for the fossil fuels, which are so abundant and so energy 
rich.
  Let me give you just one little example of some of the unintended 
consequences of trying to do this. This is a big push to make ethanol 
from corn in our country. We have noted that the Brazilians are making 
ethanol from sugar cane, and they now don't have to import any oil. We 
would like to emulate them and make enough ethanol from corn that we 
will not have to import oil. That, by the way, is the impossible dream. 
That will not happen.
  With the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are now making, 
and there aren't very many E-85 pumps or blends of ethanol in gasoline 
in this part of the country, there are in the Midwest, but with the 
relatively small amount of ethanol that we are making, the demand for 
corn raised the price of corn from $2.11 a bushel in September to $4.08 
in December. That is causing a huge problem for our people that raise 
animals.
  We are having a meeting in a few days with a number of our dairy 
people from Maryland. Unless milk goes up to more, I think it is about 
$14 per 100, now it needs to be at least $18 before they can break 
even.
  With this kind of a price for food for their animals, they will go 
bankrupt. So the relatively small demand for corn to make the 
relatively small amount of ethanol that we are making now has 
essentially doubled the price of corn.
  What this does is to reflect the enormous amount of energy that is in 
these fossil fuels. There they are really energy dense. This chart 
shows something about what has happened to our world as a result of the 
incredible energy density in these fossil fuels.
  Hyman Rickover, and let me get a copy of his paper, it was not really 
a paper, it was a talk that he gave to a group of physicians 50 years 
ago. The anniversary of that will be May 14 of this year, and that was 
at a banquet of the annual scientific assembly of the Minnesota State 
Medical Association. This talk had nothing to do with medicine. He 
apologized for that at the beginning of his talk. But he thought that 
the physicians might enjoy some diversion.
  He was talking about the enormous fossil energy in these fuels. Hyman 
Rickover, of course, is the father of our nuclear submarine. I had no 
idea that he had given this talk. It just appeared in the Energy 
Bulletin December 2 of last year, 2006. So it has only been out in the 
general public for these couple of months.
  I noted this the other night that we need to hear this again, because 
this is just so revealing as to what this energy has done for us. With 
high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Does the 
enormous fossil fuel energy in this country which we control feed 
machines which makes each of us a master of an army of mechanical 
slaves? Now at that time we didn't import any, so he could say we 
controlled it. Now we import almost two-thirds of what we use.
  Another writer has indicated the incredible amount of energy in 
fossil fuels in oil. Let me give you the analogies he uses, and then I 
will read the ones that Hyman Rickover gave in that speech 50 years 
ago. One barrel of oil produces the energy equivalent of 12 men working 
all year for you.
  If you figure the price that you could hire a man, the equivalent a 
man to work for you, by buying $10 of fossil fuel, of oil, it will work 
a full year for you. Now let me read what Hyman Rickover said 50 years 
ago and more so today. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts 
continuously, \1/20\ of a horse power. That is 24/7. You can do a 
little better than that when you are working, but you have to eat, 
sleep, so forth.
  Machines, therefore, furnish every American and industrial worker 
with energy equivalent to that of 244 men. Wow. How many man-months of 
work without any energy from fossil fuels would it have taken to build 
your automobile?
  While at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road and his 
family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive 
engineer, he says, controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men. 
Each jet pilot of 700,000 men.
  You know, thinking of that jet pilot in that plane up there just the 
other day, and I look at those contrails and sometimes they are the 
only cloud-like things in the sky, it finally occurred to me the 
dynamics of this CO2 thing that Congressman Gilchrest was 
talking about, carbon; and that is what is in these fuels, is largely 
carbon and hydrogen.
  Carbon has a molecular weight of 12, and hydrogen has a molecular 
weight of 1. It is the lightest element in the universe. When you burn 
this carbon, it combines with oxygen, one molecule of carbon with two 
molecules of oxygen. Oxygen weighs 16. So what that says is, 
Congressman Gilchrest, that if you weigh the gasoline that goes in your 
car, you produce three times that weight in carbon dioxide. That is 
incredible.
  Now, all of that carbon dioxide was taken out of the atmosphere a 
very long time ago. I didn't know, as a little boy, where oil came 
from; but I did know where coal came from, because we had a coal 
furnace in our house, and I would have to break those big lumps of 
coal. We bought it just as it came out of the mine.

                              {time}  1745

  When I would break a lump of coal open, there would be a fern leaf. 
Nobody had to tell me where coal came from. I knew very well where it 
came from. It came from plants that grew a

[[Page H1268]]

very long time ago, they fell over under pressure and in time and they 
became coal.
  So we were releasing incredible amounts of carbon dioxide, which is a 
greenhouse gas, which will change the acidity of the ocean. Fortunately 
carbon dioxide is very soluble in water. But it still changes the pH of 
the water because it forms a very weak acid, carbonic acid, when it 
gets in the water.
  Truly, the humblest American, Admiral Rickover says, enjoys the 
services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and 
live better than most ancient kings. In retrospect and despite wars, 
revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by, that was 1950, 
that is right here, the 100 years just gone by, may well seem like a 
Golden Age.
  And what this chart shows here is the history of the world, energy 
wise, for only about 400 years out of that 8,000 years that Admiral 
Rickover talks about. And the industrial revolution began with wood, 
the brown curve here, and it did not produce very many quadrillion BtUs 
of energy, and then coal, and boy did the economy grow with coal and 
trains and so forth. But then look what happened. It exploded when we 
found gas and oil. And that is because gas and oil are so easy to 
change into compounds that we can readily get energy from.
  And they are much more adaptable and flexible than coal. Although you 
can get gas and oil from coal. Hitler had to do that when we cut off 
his oil supplies, and under embargoes South Africa had to do that. We 
may be turning to that again shortly.
  As I mentioned, Madam Speaker, there are three groups that really 
have common cause in talking about the use of these fossil fuels. One 
is that very large and growing group of people, including our Secretary 
of State, who are concerned that our growing dependence on foreign oil 
is a very serious national security risk.
  Well, what do we do? We obviously need to use less of it. The 
President says we are hooked on it, we need to use less of it. And we 
can use less of it two ways. One. We can simply conserve and be more 
efficient. And we have done some of that. We can do a great deal more 
of that.
  The second thing that we can do is to get energy from alternatives. 
As this chart shows, and as Dr. Rickover mentioned, there will come a 
time when the world will be getting less and less energy from fossil 
fuels, and finally at some point in history down the road, we will be 
getting essentially no energy from fossil fuels, because obviously they 
are not infinite in their supply and they will not last forever.
  In 8,000 years of recorded history, the Age of Oil will represent but 
a blip in terms of energy production, a pretty big blip. But we are 
probably about halfway through the age of oil. In another 100, 150 
years if M. King Hubbert is correct and we are now at the peak, and it 
will be tailing off and going down the other side of what is commonly 
called Hubbert's Peak, oil will be ever more difficult to get and ever 
more costly.
  In another 100, 150 years we will have transition to renewables, we 
will be steady-state, having used up the coal we have, having gotten 
all of the energy we can from these unconventional oil sources, like 
the tar sands of Canada and the oil shales of the United States.
  The next chart looks at what obviously we need to be about. And that 
is addressing this problem. Now, whether you believe that we need to 
reduce our use of fossil fuels because it is a national security 
problem, whether you believe we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels 
because it is causing climate change, or whether you believe we need to 
reduce the use of fossil fuels because they are just not going to be 
there in the quantities that we are using today in the future, you 
still must do the same things.
  Well, the first thing that you need to do is to buy some time. We 
now, knowing that we should have known at least by 1980 that we were 
going to be here today, because we were already 10 years down the other 
side of our Hubbert's Peak in this country, and M. King Hubbert had 
already predicted that the world would be peaking about now.
  For these last 27 years, we should have been addressing this problem 
and investing energy and time in alternatives. Unfortunately, we in 
large measure have not done that. And so today we are faced with a 
problem. We have no excess oil, no excess oil energy to invest in 
alternatives. If there were any excess it would not be $55, $60 a 
barrel. And we have essentially run out of time.
  Now, we can buy some time and free up some oil with an aggressive 
program in conservation. And you really can do that. Europe is using 
half the energy that we use. It would be hard to argue that they do not 
live as comfortably as we do. The average Californian uses 65 percent 
of the electricity that we use. And there are 50 some of those in our 
Congress. I doubt that any would agree that they live less well than we 
do, and they still use a lot less energy than we use.
  What we need to do then is use it wisely. What will we do with this 
energy that we freed up and the time that we have bought by this 
aggressive conservation program? We have to invest that wisely in 
alternatives.
  Now whichever of these camps that you come from, whether it is the 
climate change camp, or the camp that is concerned that we are too 
dependent on foreign oils, that is going to be a big national security 
risk, or whether you believe that we need to move from fossil fuels to 
alternatives simply because there are going to be less and less, and 
more and more expensive fossil fuels in the future, you still want to 
do essentially the same thing.
  Enormous benefits can accrue from this. Congressman Gilchrest 
mentioned the enormous creativity and entrepreneurship of our people. 
We put a man on the moon in less than a decade. When you realize where 
we started from, that was a really big feat. We can do this. We were 
challenged to do that.
  Today, the average American does not know that oil is probably 
limited in its future supply. They probably are unaware, today is an 
interesting day to talk about the potential for global warming, because 
it is the coldest day that we have had this winter. But I understand it 
is 20 degree above normal in Alaska and 20 degrees above normal today 
in Russia.
  I just wanted to make a comment about some of the potentially 
unexpected consequences of this climate change. If you look at a globe, 
you will see that England is way up there, about mid Canada. And I had 
to stop for a refueling flight in Ireland. That really is the Emerald 
Isle, it is so green. And that has a climate like, what, South 
Carolina. How can you have a climate like South Carolina at a latitude 
of central Canada?
  The reason for that is a huge conveyor belt that carries heat from 
the tropics to the British Isles and Europe. And that huge conveyor 
belt is called the Gulf Stream. And the Gulf Stream picks up heat in 
the Gulf area near the equator, and it then carries that like a giant 
conveyor belt up to the British Isles and Europe.
  They have a very moderate climate compared to what they would have in 
the absence of the Gulf Stream. Now, water is not piling up up there 
around Europe and England, so it is obvious that if it flows up there 
and carries that heat up there, it has got to come back.
  It comes back by going down. And why does it go down? We will talk 
about that in just a moment. Then it comes back flowing in just a large 
as volume and just as fast, it comes back to the lower part of this big 
conveyor belt. Again in the tropics, picking up more heat, and 
continues this transfer of heat to the British Isles and England.
  Well, a very interesting thing is happening to this conveyor belt. 
The waters as they flow north, they are warm. And the sun shines on 
them, and water evaporates. And when the water evaporates, it leaves 
the salt there. And that makes the water more salty and heavier. And of 
course that is what produces the rains that then drops in our mountains 
and produces the indirect solar energy from the waterfalls that we use 
the turbines in to produce electricity.
  Well, two things are happening. A major one is the fact that the 
polar ice cap is melting. And a lot of that fresh water, water without 
saline in it, very light compared to this heavy water, it is in 
addition to the general global warming of the oceans, it is the effect 
of this polar ice cap melting. And

[[Page H1269]]

strangely the melting of the polar ice cap may so dilute the waters in 
the Gulf Stream that they do not become dense enough to drop down to 
continue this conveyor belt on back down to the tropics.
  The Gulf Stream could stop. If the Gulf Stream slows down 
appreciably, or if it stopped, the climate in the British Isles and in 
Europe would be very, very different than it is today.
  Now, if we were in Siberia talking about global warming and so forth, 
we may have a very different view of it. It might be hard to convince 
me that a little global warming might not be good if I lived in 
Siberia. But noting that just this 9-degree Fahrenheit, 5 degrees 
Centigrade change from the Ice Age has produced the incredible climate 
changes that we see from that time to this, you see the potential for 
really devastating climate changes as a result of very modest changes 
in temperature. Congressman Gilchrest.
  Mr. GILCHREST. If the gentleman would yield just for a second on the 
issue of the Gulf Stream and the conveyer belt. As Mr. Bartlett 
described the conveyor belt, it is part of this whole system of the 
climate that we are used to, because it creates this heat balance that 
humans over the last thousands of years have become used to in North 
America and especially Europe and England.
  Mr. Bartlett talked about Ireland being just about on the same 
latitude as northern Labrador, but has a much warmer climate. That is 
partly based on the fact that ocean currents bring warm air to that 
particular region.
  With global warming, the ice cap on Greenland, which is about 600,000 
square miles. The ice cap about 20 years ago was melting at a rate of 
about 20 cubic miles on an annual basis. About 5 years ago, it was 
melting at the rate of about 50 some cubic miles.
  Today, it is 80 cubic miles of free water flowing into the northern 
part of the north Atlantic Ocean, putting what Mr. Bartlett described, 
more fresh water, less likely to sink or drop and create the pump that 
drives the conveyor belt.
  So the unexpected climate changes, instead of the potential for a 
much warmer climate in Europe, especially northern Europe, there is a 
slight chance because of global warming that you could have a much 
colder climate in northern Europe, the British Isles as a result of the 
fresh water pouring into the north Atlantic from the melting of the 
glaciers to stop this conveyor belt from functioning, the 
unpredictability of this climate change as a result of our dependance 
on foreign sources of oil and burning fossil fuel.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, Congressman Gilchrest and I 
have both been twice to Antarctica. One of those trips we made 
together. We are on the Science Committee. We have a large experiment 
station down there right at the pole. When you go to Antarctica, that 
is a continent that nobody owns. I think Argentina claims they own it, 
and Russia claims they own it, but nobody honors those statements. It 
is an international area.
  It has got ice piled nearly 2 miles high. So high and so heavy that 
it has actually pushed the continent down a little bit under it. 90 
percent of all the world's ice is in Antarctica, and 70 percent of all 
the world's fresh water. You take our Great Lakes and all of the 
relatively thin ice at the North Pole and Greenland, that is relatively 
thin compared to nearly 2 miles in Antarctica.
  So we have 90 percent of the ice down there and 70 percent of the 
fresh water. And Congressman Gilchrest mentioned that the oceans would 
rise maybe 3 feet with the melting of the glacial cap in Greenland and 
so forth and in the Arctic. If all of the ice melted, that would take a 
very long time, that is not going to happen tomorrow because there is a 
whole lot of it there.
  But if all of the ice melted in Antarctica, I am told that the oceans 
would rise 200 feet.

                              {time}  1800

  Now, that would really, really change our world because I don't know 
what percent of our population lives within 200 feet altitude of the 
ocean. I suspect it is more than 50 percent, if you look around the 
world of the people that live at less than 200 feet altitude.
  Now, there is an interesting ocean current that goes around 
Antarctica, talking about ocean currents and their affect on climates, 
that is the circumpolar current. And what it does is it keeps the, like 
our gulf stream, it will either let the cold air down if it is further 
south or keep it from coming down if it is further north. This 
circumpolar stream around the Pole keeps the northern, down there, of 
course, it is northern waters that are warm, it keeps the northern 
waters from coming down into Antarctica. And if something happened that 
stopped that circumpolar stream, the Antarctica polar ice cap might 
melt much more quickly than we anticipate that it might melt.
  As an indication of how much these ocean currents affect climate, 
about 5 years ago, I guess it was, an iceberg broke off down in 
Antarctica, which was the size of Delaware. And in spite of the 
circumpolar current, some northern warm waters do get through it and 
down there to temper the climate a little, and that usually melts the 
sea ice enough so that they could get a boat in that is full of diesel 
file to McMurdo, which is where the main station is. You fly from there 
to the Pole. And because that big iceberg the size of Delaware blocked 
the flow of this water that year, and that was 4 years ago, it was so 
cold there that the sea ice didn't melt, and the closest they could 
get, with the help, by the way, of a Russian ice-breaker, the closest 
they could get was 3 miles out, so they laid a hose 3 miles across the 
ice to fill their tanks at McMurdo.
  By the way, Congressman, one of the things that amazed me there, when 
I was down there the sun was shining all day long and the wind blew 
incessantly. I didn't see any solar panels down there, and I didn't see 
any wind machines down there. In the summer down there, in their 
summer, our winter, they could clearly make all of their energy from 
the wind and from solar. It just reflects the President's wise 
observation that we are hooked on oil. We are so hooked on oil that we 
are really quite irrational in our use of it. You had a comment?
  Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Bartlett and I have been down there twice, the 
first time I went was probably about 10 years ago, and the supply ship 
to get to McMurdo station had to break ice. I believe it was about 12 
miles from open water to McMurdo. And then after the ice shelf or that 
huge chunk of the glacier broke off about the size of Delaware, it was 
close to 30-something miles that they had to break that ice from open 
water all the way to McMurdo station. So a few degrees, a few changes 
have some pretty significant dramatic events.
  On just a lighter note, on one of those trips, I can't remember which 
one it was, we went to watch the penguins. The first time I was in the 
Antarctic they didn't have that far to go to get to open water. The 
Adelie penguins, the second time, as a result of the increasing ice 
because it was blocked, had to go miles and miles and miles, and 
unfortunately it really reduced the population of those Adelie penguins 
in that part of the Ross ice shelf.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. They have a very interesting rookery down 
there; we enjoyed seeing it. Both times I was down we went out to the 
rookery to see the penguins. The big Emperor penguins, they didn't like 
us; they waddled off. And they scoot along on their bellies when they 
are moving fast, by the way, rather than marching.
  I am very pleased to have been joined by Congressman Gilchrest. And 
again I want to emphasize that we have three groups that have a common 
cause: those that are concerned about oil and national security, those 
that are concerned about the excessive use of fossil fuels and the 
climate change that may very well result from that, and those of us, 
and I am with all of those groups actually, but I am particularly 
concerned about the fact that we may muddle through the national 
security thing and somehow God may save us from the global warming, but 
nothing is going to save us if there really is a limited supply of oil.
  So, I am very pleased to be joined by my colleague, and I join all of 
those in these three camps. We really do have common cause. Please join 
and help us do the right thing.

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