[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 70 (Tuesday, May 1, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H4277-H4283]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            THE BIPARTISAN CAMPAIGN REFORM ACT AND PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Cohen). 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. Mr. Speaker, I want to spend the first few 
minutes this evening talking about oral arguments that were recently 
made before the Supreme Court. It was on the Wisconsin Right to Life, 
Incorporated, versus the Federal Election Commission.
  Now, it is not clear from that title what we are talking about. What 
we are really talking about is a test of the constitutionality of a 
clause in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that prohibits any issue 
advocacy advertising, electioneering they call it, 30 days before a 
primary and 60 days before a general election.
  Now, in the State of Maryland in a nonpresidential year, our primary 
is in September, and it is, as a matter of fact, less than 60 days 
before the general in November. So we are prohibited from issue 
advocacy ads 30 days before the primary, which are added immediately to 
the 60 days before the general. So for 90 days, 3 months, before the 
election, we cannot communicate with our constituents.
  I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that few people are seriously 
considering the next election 90 days before it occurs. So for all 
practical purposes, we in Maryland, and many other States like us that 
have primaries close to the general election, are almost completely 
prohibited from communicating with our constituents through issue 
advocacy ads.
  This is political speech, and what this Bipartisan Campaign Reform 
Act does is to deny political speech 30 days before a primary and 60 
days before a general election.
  I think to put this in context to see how really important this is, 
we need to go back to the founding of our country and to understand why 
our Founding Fathers came here.
  Most of them came for one or both of two reasons to escape tyrannies 
in the country that they lived in. One of these was the tyranny of the 
church. In the British Isles it was the Anglican Church, and on the 
continent it was the Roman Church. And in most of the country there was 
a state church. And these state churches, the Anglican Church in 
England and the Roman Church on the continent, could and did oppress 
other religions. So our Founding Fathers came here to escape that 
tyranny.
  They also came here to escape the tyranny of the crown. And it is 
incredible to us. We can't understand it because we live in a whole 
different culture. But almost every country from which our Founding 
Fathers came had a king or an emperor which claimed and was granted 
divine rights. What that said was that the rights came from God to the 
king and the king would give what rights he wished to his people. Some 
magnanimous rulers gave considerable rights to their people; others 
gave very few. So our Founding Fathers came here intent on escaping 
those two tyrannies.
  So it is no accident that after writing the Constitution in which it 
was very clear that this was to be a government of the people, by the 
people, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln said four score and 
seven years later, and that the government was to reflect the wishes of 
the people, that the people through collective government would govern 
themselves. That was really quite implicit in the Constitution because 
article I, section 8 of the Constitution gave very few rights to the 
Federal Government.
  But the ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before they wondered 
if people would really understand that what they wanted was a very 
limited Federal Government and that they wanted most of the rights to 
belong to the people. So it is no accident, I think, that in that first 
amendment, which they wrote, that they addressed both of these 
tyrannies. From the very beginning, they wanted to make it crystal 
clear that we were to have freedom of religion, and they say it very 
simply, that they wanted to avoid what they came from, what they came 
here to escape, and that was an established religion, a religion 
established by the government. So they said very simply ``Congress 
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.''
  I don't know why we have trouble understanding that, Mr. Speaker. It 
is just plain English. It has nothing to do with a wall of separation 
between Church and State. Indeed, our Founding Fathers were deeply 
religious people, and they believed that we should have religious 
people running our government. President Adams said that our 
Constitution was written for a religious people which serves the 
purposes of no other. So it is no surprise that in the first amendment 
they addressed both tyrannies actually. ``Congress shall make no law 
respecting an establishment of religion.'' Don't establish any State 
religion. And, furthermore, let everybody worship freely. They said 
``or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''
  And then they addressed the tyranny of the crown. And I have here an 
article that was written by James Bopp, who was the primary person to 
argue this case before the Supreme Court. He said that the American 
government was to be an act of self government by the people and the 
first amendment was to ensure the people's participation in their own 
government by protecting the four indispensable democratic freedoms of 
speech, press, assembly, and petitioning the government. Thus the first 
amendment was intended to deprive the government of the power to 
silence criticism of official actions, which is precisely what this 
well-intentioned but, unfortunately, otherwise directed Bipartisan 
Campaign Reform Act does. It limits the criticism of the people who are 
making our laws, of anybody in the government or anybody running for 
government.
  The first amendment says it this way: ``or abridging the freedom of 
speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to 
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.''
  Mr. Speaker, this is a very important case before the Supreme Court. 
It is just not an issue of political speech, which, by the way, was the 
speech that our Founding Fathers most wanted to protect. And how ironic 
that a law that

[[Page H4278]]

concerns elections is a law which strikes down the very speech freedom 
that our Founding Fathers most wanted to protect.
  But this is significant beyond that, Mr. Speaker, because if our 
Congress can deny this right to the American people, what else can it 
deny? We are a great, free country, 1 person out of 22 in the world and 
we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. How did we get 
here? I think it is very instructive to ask that question and to have 
it answered for my satisfaction. You may come to different conclusions. 
But I think there are two major reasons that we are this very unique 
country, this 1 person out of 22 in the world, less than 5 percent of 
the world's population that has a fourth of all the good things in the 
world. And I think that both of the reasons that we are this great, 
free country are addressed in this first amendment. Our Founding 
Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table when they wrote 
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the 
amendments, and I think they were right. And I think we put at risk who 
we are when we deny the religious role in the establishment of our 
country.

                              {time}  2045

  And the 10 commandments are coming down from the court house walls. 
Nativity scenes appear less and less frequently in public places. And 
we are now, of all things, going to debate whether it's okay to say 
``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Mr. Speaker, I 
reread the Declaration of Independence recently, I think it is well to 
read that every so often, and I noted that God is mentioned four or 
five times there. I wonder if our courts might declare the Declaration 
of Independence unconstitutional.
  There is, on a lighter side, a really great clause here. I have no 
idea what the king had done, but I think that there could be no better 
description of our regulatory agencies, and I don't know how our 
Founding Fathers could have been so prophetic in describing our 
regulatory agencies; this is what they said, Mr. Speaker. ``He has 
erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers 
to harass our people and eat out their substance.'' They had a way with 
words, didn't they? And I think that there could be no more concise 
definition of the unfortunate frequent application of our regulatory 
agencies and their limitation of the rights of the American people.
  Well, I would encourage Americans everywhere to listen, to watch for 
the report of the Supreme Court. They promise to hand down their 
decision sometime before the end of the court's term in June. This is a 
very important decision, it goes beyond just this case of ``Washington 
right to life.'' Just what was that case? The right to life people were 
sending out educational information. And unfortunately, one of the 
Senators was running, and since always right to life, abortion and so 
forth are issues in political campaigns, the FEC decided that this was 
prohibited advertising, although I don't think that either Senator was 
even mentioned in the advertising. And so the right to life committee 
there, I think very appropriately, has decided to make this a Supreme 
Court test.
  Indeed, when this law was passed many people thought that it was 
unconstitutional. The President thought that it was unconstitutional 
and said so, that the court would strike down this provision. Indeed, I 
think those who wrote the law thought that this provision was probably 
unconstitutional because they put into the law language that said that 
if any one part of the law was struck down, that the rest of the law 
was still applicable. That appears in very little of our legislation. 
It's an indication, I think, that they felt that this part of their 
legislation was on pretty shaky constitutional ground.
  So I would encourage you to watch this. This is a very important 
decision, not just for this case, but I think that that will be read 
very broadly as an indication of how much power does the Congress have 
to infringe on our constitutionally--our God-given liberties, by the 
way. These came from God, they didn't come from our Constitution. All 
the Constitution seeks to do is to make sure that the government can't 
take them away from us.
  I want to spend our remaining time, Mr. Speaker, talking about a 
subject that was highlighted today in the ACORE, the American Council 
on Renewable Energy, ``The Outlook on Renewable Energy in America.'' 
And there are several recent articles that deal with this. There was a 
very interesting exchange between T. Boone Pickens and Steve Forbes. T. 
Boone Pickens believes that the world has reached its maximum capacity 
for producing oil; that try as hard as we wish, the oil-producing 
countries will not be able to increase their production of oil, and 
this phenomenon is called peak oil. And T. Boone Pickens said several 
weeks ago that he believes the world has reached peak oil. Steve Forbes 
took exception with that and indicated that he believed that the 
marketplace could take care of this. And if it didn't find more oil, it 
would find alternatives to oil so there would be no decrement in our 
growth when we're growing at roughly 2 percent a year in energy use. By 
the way, that 2 percent a year may not sound like much, but that 
doubles in 35 years, it's 4 times bigger in 70 years and it's 8 times 
bigger in 105 years. Now the world will still be here in 105 years, and 
my great, great grandchildren will still be alive in 105 years. I don't 
have the foggiest notion where we would get 8 times the energy compared 
to the energy that we are using now. So clearly that is not a world we 
should look forward to. T. Boone Pickens had an interesting discussion 
with Steve Forbes; and if you use those two names on a Google search, 
you will pull up their conversation.
  There are many people who seem to worship the marketplace, they 
believe that it is both omniscient and omnipotent, it is all wise and 
all powerful. I point out to them that there are some things that even 
God can't do; God can't make a square circle, and the marketplace can't 
make oil where there is not oil. And the marketplace cannot provide 
alternatives to oil faster than technology will permit us to do that.
  There is an interesting article, and this one appeared on March 25 in 
the Washington Post. This was really an interesting article. It says, 
``Corn Can't Solve Our Problem.'' Corn, of course, is the source of 
ethanol, which is an alternative renewable energy. And the article 
pointed out that if we took all of our corn ground, every bit of it, no 
tortillas for Mexicans and no food for pigs and cows and chickens and 
no cornbread for us, all of our corn is made into ethanol, that if you 
discounted that for the fossil fuel input, which they said was 80 
percent. By the way, there are some scientists who believe that we use 
more energy in producing ethanol from corn than we get out of the 
ethanol. I generally use 75 percent in my discussions, this article 
said 80 percent. But if you discount the ethanol you produce by 80 
percent, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. Now, that's 
making all of our corn into ethanol. It would displace, after you 
discounted it for the fossil fuel input, because you are just burning 
fossil fuel in another form if you don't do that, if you discounted for 
fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline.
  The authors of the article pointed out something very interesting. 
They said if you are really interested in saving gasoline, you could 
save that much gasoline by tuning up your car and putting enough air in 
your tires. And I heard nobody who disputed that. So if we use all of 
our corn for ethanol, you could save as much gasoline by simply tuning 
up your car and putting air in the tires.

  Then on April 5 there was another very interesting article that 
related to these renewables, and this was an article in the Wall Street 
Journal, upper right, very important, above the fold. It says, ``A 
Dying Giant: Mexico Tries to Save a Big Fading Oil Field.'' 
``Canterell's Drop Off Faster Than Expected, Turning to Technology'' is 
the title of the article. Canterell was the name of a Mexican fisherman 
who kept getting his nets fouled in crude oil, and he would take these 
nets to Pemex, and he knew who was at fault because there was only one 
oil company in Mexico, and said look what you did to my net, and they 
would give him a new net. And he came in so frequently they finally 
said, gee, we didn't think we were spilling that much oil. And they 
asked

[[Page H4279]]

him, where is this oil coming from? And he says, come and I will show 
you. And so he took them and showed them oil kind of bubbling up out of 
the ocean and they drilled there. This was named after him, the 
Canterell oil field. It was the second largest one in the world. The 
largest one in the world is the Ghawar oil field, the granddaddy of all 
oil fields, producing still, down from what it was at its peak, still 
producing 5 million barrels of oil a day. Canterell, until 2 years ago, 
produced 2 million barrels a day. In the last 2 years, it has dropped 
off 20 percent in production. Thus, the article, upper right in the 
Wall Street Journal on April 5.
  Obviously, if we don't have oil, we're going to have to find 
alternatives, so this relates to the subject of this conference today 
on alternative renewable energy.
  And then May 1, there is an article about Hugo Chavez ``aims to 
weaken the U.S.,'' it says, ``China to get preference with oil from 
projects now under state control.'' And he was celebrating his 
nationalization of the fields of four companies. I think that maybe all 
the oil now in Venezuela has been nationalized.
  In addition to nationalized oil, he made the point that he was going 
to make China, with whom he is partnering, a preferred customer for his 
oil, and it would be shipped there rather than the United States. And 
his aim is to hurt the United States.
  This pending critical shortage of oil has resulted in a common cause 
by five groups in this country. The ``peak oil'' group is just one of 
the groups that have common cause. And I wanted to spend just a moment 
talking about these people of common cause, all of whom want to move 
from fossil fuels to renewables, for different reasons.
  The first group are those who are concerned about national security. 
A letter was sent by Boyden Gray and 29 others, Jim Woolsey, a number 
of retired four star admirals and generals to the President, this was a 
couple of years ago, saying, ``Mr. President, the fact that we have 
less than 2 percent of oil in the world and we use 25 percent of the 
world's oil and we import about two-thirds of what we use is a totally 
unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something 
about that.''
  The next slide is on this same subject, and this is a statement by 
Condoleezza Rice, a very interesting statement. ``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.'' Concerned About National Security. So this is one of the 
groups that has common cause, Concerned About National Security.
  The next chart shows a second group. This group has a lot of 
visibility now. Al Gore came here to the House 2 or 3 weeks ago and 
testified before our Science Committee. This is the group that believes 
that greenhouse emissions, primarily CO2 produced by burning 
these fossil fuels which were sequestered away, some believe as much as 
millions of years ago when the sun shone on subtropical seas, as in the 
North Sea, in ANWR, in Prudo Bay, very different world then. And the 
algae-like organisms grew and dropped to the bottom and silt came in 
and the tectonic plates opened up, this is the conjecture of how we got 
our gas and oil. And this was moved down to a depth where there was the 
right temperature, the right pressure with a rock dome over the top to 
contain the gas, which is why you don't find gas and oil everywhere; 
that with time this then was converted into gas and the volatiles, of 
course, were oil. Well, these are the climate change, the global 
warming people who really want to move from fossil fuels to the 
renewables. Because when you are using a renewable, you release the 
same amount of CO2 perhaps, but that's the CO2 
that was sequestered in the spring. If you're burning this in the fall, 
you are releasing the CO2 that was sequestered in the spring 
and summer while the plant was growing, so there is no net increase, 
it's simply recycling of the CO2. So this is the second 
group that has common cause.
  A third group that has common cause are the peak oil people. And this 
is a classic name here, Hubbert. In 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted 
that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970. That was 
considered to be totally ridiculous. The United States was then king of 
oil, producing I think more oil than any other, and exporting a lot of 
oil at that time. And just as he predicted, in 1970 we peaked in oil 
production, and we've been going downhill ever since.
  The red curve here, by the way, is the Soviet Union. They kind of 
fell apart when they came unglued and now they are going to have a 
second small peak. And a little later we will have a chart which shows 
you relatively the amount of oil which each of the major oil-producing 
countries in the world has.
  We have two bills, and my next slide is one of those. This is a bill 
which our office has filed. This is to support Federal research 
development demonstration and commercial application activities to 
enable the development of self-powered farms. Our rationale is that if 
a farm can't be energy independent, we face a very grim future.

                              {time}  2100

  This is because as fossil fuels become less and less available, we 
have to move more and more to alternative fuels. Many of those are 
going to be produced on the farm, so if the farm can't be energy 
independent, we are going to have some tough times ahead. So this bill 
challenges our American farmers to become independent, and there will 
be prizes for doing that.
  The second one is a broad act, America's Energy for America's Future, 
the bipartisan DRIVE Act as it is called, the acronym, Dependence 
Reduction Through Innovation in Vehicles and Energy Act, H.R. 60. So 
there are a number of bills before Congress. These are two important 
ones.
  What I want to do now is to go through three reports that we have 
had, the first one in February of 2005, the second one in September of 
2005 and the third one just released in February of 2007. These reports 
all say, and I have a few slides from each of these so you can see, Mr. 
Speaker, that they were delivering the same message to the American 
people. Paraphrasing what they said, each of these studies concluded 
that peaking of oil is imminent, if not present, with potentially 
devastating consequences.
  Let's look at the first slide. This is from the Hirsch Report. The 
first of these reports, February of 2005, is the Peaking of Oil 
Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. This is by the 
very big, prestigious SAIC, Science Applications International 
Corporation, and Robert Hirsch was the project leader, so this is 
frequently referred to as the Hirsch Report.
  These are some quotes from that report. They said that ``the peaking 
of world oil production presents the United States especially and the 
world generally with an unprecedented risk management problem.'' 
Unprecedented. That ``the economic, social and political costs will be 
unprecedented.''
  Another authority in this area, Kenneth Deffeyes, says that ``the 
least bad outcome of oil peaking will be a deep worldwide recession 
that may make the thirties look like good times.'' Then he goes on to 
say, ``If you don't like that, try the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: 
War, famine, pestilence and death.''
  A second chart here from the Hirsch Report, and I will just read the 
highlighted part here, ``oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' 
they say. And then they make the statement ``the world has never faced 
a problem like this.'' There is no precedent in history to guide us. 
Unprecedented. ``The world has never faced a problem like this.''
  The next chart is another quote from the Hirsch Report. ``We cannot 
conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to 
accelerate normal replacement schedules.''
  What they are talking about, any program that would provide energy 
from other sources to make up for the energy that won't be there once 
we have reached peak oil production, and the world's demand for energy 
keeps going up at about 2 percent, doubles in 35 years, four times 
bigger in 70 years.
  The next chart shows us we are not going to drill our way out of 
this. This is a very interesting chart. When the Reagan Administration 
came in, we knew that M. King Hubbert was right. We were already 10 
years down the other side in 1980, it peaked in 1970. Ten

[[Page H4280]]

years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and we knew something was 
wrong.
  What the administration proposed, and this was my second favorite 
president, by the way, but he was wrong in this. What the 
administration proposed was to incent the American oil producers to go 
out and drill for oil. So we gave them some tax incentives. This is 
what the drilling was, and, boy, did they drill. But notice, the more 
they drilled, the less oil they got, because we went from positive, 
producing a bit more than we needed, to negative, not producing as 
much. If the oil is not there, drilling won't find it.
  By the way, we really drill for oil in our country. We have drilled 
more wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together. 
In spite of drilling all those oil wells, currently I think 530,000 
operating wells, 4,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico, more than four 
times as many as all the wells in Saudi Arabia, in spite of that, we 
have not reversed the prediction of M. King Hubbert that our country 
would peak in 1970, and then it was down, down, down.
  The next chart is a schematic which I think depicts the situation and 
where we are. This is a 2 percent growth here. By the way, you can make 
this very steep, we simply compress the abscissa, or make it very 
shallow, this has a long scale on the abscissa. But it doubles in 35 
years. This has been following a roughly 2 percent increase in use. 
Obviously, up until today we have been able to produce as much oil as 
we are using. It costs more because there are some tentative shortages. 
That is why the price of oil has gone up.
  So once we get near the peak and the demand keeps going up and the 
production is leveling off, that yellow area represents a gap between 
the amount of oil which is available, the green part of the curve, and 
the amount of oil we would like to use, which is this ever-increasing 2 
percent growth rate.
  Many people believe that what we ought to do is to fill that gap. I 
don't think, Mr. Speaker, we can fill the gap, and I don't think it 
would be productive to try to fill the gap, because there is only so 
many options out there for filling the gap.
  I have 10 children, 15 grandchildren, and 2 great grandchildren. 
Wouldn't it be nice if I left them a little energy? Which is why I 
don't vote to drill in ANWR and I don't vote to drill offshore until 
they convince me that the energy they get from those projects is going 
to be invested in alternatives. Because we have known for 27 years, 
since 1980, we have known that M. King Hubbert was right about the 
United States. We peaked in 1970. Down, down, down since then. He 
predicted that the world would be peaking about now.
  I ask you, Mr. Speaker, if he was right about the United States, 
which is clearly a microcosm of the world, why shouldn't he be right 
about the world and why shouldn't we be doing something about that?
  Well, in their report, I think unwisely, the Hirsch Report looked at 
ways of filling the gap. The next chart shows a stylized approach at 
filling the gap.
  What it shows is when you decide to start doing these things, you 
won't get anything for quite a while. We have, what, about 3\1/2\ years 
before you get anything. So you have to anticipate the need before you 
start.
  Notice that enhanced oil recovery, coal to liquid, heavy oil, gas to 
liquid, these are all finite resources. They won't last all that long. 
The only renewable one, the only one that will continue there is 
efficient vehicles. So they now are trying to fill the gap with clearly 
finite resources. There is only so much oil. If you get it there, it 
won't be there later. There is only so much coal. If you liquify it 
now, you won't liquify it tomorrow. There is only so much heavy oil. If 
you use it now, you won't be using it later.
  The second chart from the Hirsch Report shows something very 
interesting, and we don't have time this evening to look at all of the 
information on this chart. But they are making an assumption here, 
which this is repeated from the Energy Information Agency, this is not 
what the Hirsch Report is predicting, by the way. They are repeating 
information from the Energy Information Agency. And somehow the Energy 
Information Agency, which stands not quite alone, but near live alone 
in this view, believes that we will find as much more oil as all the 
oil that now exists which is recoverable.
  If we find that much oil, it will simply push peaking out to 2016. 
This chart was in 2000, and if we didn't find any more oil, it was 
going to peak then and start down, which is about what M. King Hubbert 
had predicted.
  By the way, conventional oil probably peaked about then, but we are 
now getting a lot of oil from things like the Canadian tar sands, the 
heavy oils, the heavy sour oils and so forth. So we are now getting a 
fair amount of oil from what is called unconventional oil sources. But 
the conventional oil probably has already peaked.
  They show another very interesting thing here, that if you use 
enhanced oil recovery and get it more quickly, you may move the peak 
out, what, about 20 years. But notice what happens after that. You 
can't pump it later if you pumped it now, and look how it falls off 
after they have used enhanced oil recovery to get it sooner.
  The next chart is a very interesting one. This is projections by the 
Energy Information Agency. There is a lot we could talk about on these 
charts, because they are using data from the USGS and the USGS was 
using a frequency thing, which somehow gets translated to P here. I 
guess if you don't write clearly, F can look like a P. I have no idea 
how they got from frequency to P.
  They say that we have three possibilities for the amount of oil that 
we are going to find in the future. The P is for probability. They say 
that there is the 95 percent probability. They say the mean is the 50 
percent probability, if in fact it is probability. Obviously if it is 
95 percent probable, it is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent 
probable. But they somehow take these frequency figures that USGS used, 
and what they did with frequency was simply make a lot of assumptions 
and they ran models from these assumptions and they ran these things 
many times and they got different numbers. So the frequency indicates 
the number of times that they predicted that quantity of oil. So this 
has to do only with their simulations and not with reality in the 
field.
  But somehow Energy Information Agency translated the F to P and to 95 
percent probability, 50 percent probability, which they said was the 
mean. Now, if it is a frequency thing, the 50 percent thing could be 
the mean, but in probabilities it doesn't make any sense.
  They were predicting in, what, a little bit before 2000, that if it 
followed the 95 percent probability, you would get that much oil. If 
you followed the 50 percent probability, it would follow this line, 
which they said was the most probable. And the 5 percent probability 
would follow this line.
  What they didn't do, of course, was to include the other half. When 
you see the path of a hurricane it is a pretty narrow for today. 
Tomorrow it will be uncertain, because we are uncertain about it. The 
50 percent has another line which goes down here and the 5 percent 
another line that goes down here. Really a big funnel. If you are only 
5 percent certain what the future is going to be, obviously it is a big 
range that you are looking at.
  But look at what the actual data points follow. The actual data 
points follow, as you would expect them to, follow the 95 percent 
probability, because that is what 95 percent probability means. It is 
more probable than 50 percent probability.
  The next chart shows, and this again is from the Hirsch Report, we 
are going to go over two more of these reports quickly. This is the 
Hirsch Report. They here have listed the projections of some of the 
world's experts on when we would reach peak oil.
  Notice this first group, 2007, 2009, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2010, then 
2010 to 2020, and then a couple of them, one no visible peak and then 
CERA and Shell say it would be after 2020 or 2025 or after.
  The next chart shows a very interesting chart produced by Cambridge 
Research Associates. This is the CERA, Cambridge Energy Research 
Associates. They produced this chart to try to convince the reader that 
they shouldn't have any confidence in the predictions of M. King 
Hubbert. Let's look at this.
  The total U.S. production is the red. The green is the actual lower 
48, which, by the way, is what M. King Hubbert

[[Page H4281]]

predicted. He didn't have in his prediction any oil from Alaska or any 
oil from the Gulf of Mexico. He was looking just at the lower 48. And 
the yellow ones here are Hubbert's lower 48 prediction.
  He said that it would follow a curve like this, and the lower 48 
actually followed a curve as shown by the green squares there, and CERA 
says that proves that M. King Hubbert was wrong and you shouldn't have 
any confidence in it. I think the average person looking at that says, 
gee, those green ones are pretty darn close to the yellow ones and he 
may a pretty good prediction, didn't he?
  Now why did the red ones deviate from it? That is because we found a 
bunch of oil in Prudo Bay. A fourth of our total oil production came 
from Prudo Bay. So there was a little kick here in it. But notice, 
down, down, down after that. There was just a blip in the slide down 
the other side of Hubbert's Peak produced by this huge oil find in 
Prudo Bay from which a fourth of our oil has come from the last number 
of years. And you can't even see there the contribution of that fabled 
oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico which is now being pumped by about 
4,000 wells.
  The next chart is a chart by CERA, and they put this in an article in 
which they said that this whole peak oil notion was a farce and them 
are debunking it. But, boy, when I looked at that chart, it looks like 
it has a peak to me. It goes up and it goes down. And they said it is 
going to be an undulating plateau.

                              {time}  2115

  By the way, they now are predicting, using the USGS figures, that we 
are going to find as much oil as all the oil that exists which is 
recoverable in the world.
  Leherrere says that this is absolutely implausible considering all 
the advances we have had in discovery of oil, computer modeling and 3-D 
seismic and so forth.
  If we don't find that extra oil, and you can make up your mind 
whether you think we are going to find it or not, we would have been 
peaking about here. Boy, that is about now, isn't it.
  If we find much more oil, we will be peaking later. They have an 
enormous amount of oil from unconventional there. Maybe, maybe not. We 
are getting a million barrels a day from the Canadian tar sands. That 
is a part of the 84-85 million barrels a day that we are burning, a 
little more than 1 percent. And that is not sustainable because they 
are using huge amounts of energy from natural gas which will run out. 
The vein will shortly be ducking under a big overlay so they will have 
to develop it in situ rather than shovel it out with a shovel that 
shovels 100 tons, they dump it in a truck that holds 400 tons, and they 
take it and cook it to get this real heavy, stiff oil out. When it 
flows, they then mix it with a volatile so it will keep flowing in the 
pipelines. They know it is not sustainable, and they are going to run 
out of natural gas. They are thinking about building a nuclear power 
plant; and, furthermore, shortly they will need to develop in situ and 
they have no idea how to do that.
  Now we are going to look at some charts from the second study. All 
three of these studies are saying essentially the same thing: The 
peaking is either present or imminent with potentially devastating 
consequences if we don't do something about it.
  The question everybody needs to be asking is why aren't we doing 
anything meaningful about this? We are barely nibbling at the margins 
of the problem, and this is a huge problem.
  The U.S. Corps of Engineers, experts Colin Campbell, Jean LaHerrere, 
Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and 
Albert Bartlett, who is no relative of mine, and I wish I had some of 
his genes. If you do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and energy, 
you will pull up the most fascinating one-hour lecture I have ever 
heard. He has given it over 1,600 times. It is honed to perfection. You 
will be fascinated by it. Please pull it up and read that article.
  They have all estimated that a peak in oil production will occur 
around 2005. This is concurred with by the CEOs of several companies.
  The next chart is another one from the Corps of Engineers, and they 
are quoting Jean Leherrere. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold 
increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence 
is presented. This is his quote. ``Such an improvement in performance 
is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technological 
achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide 
search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining 
prospects.''
  This is a repeat of the chart that we just looked at. It shows the 
peaking currently if we don't find this additional oil, and it shows 
that if we find as much more oil as all of the oil we have found now, 
that the peak is pushed out to only 2030 or so. It is most unlikely 
that will happen.
  Another chart from the Corps of Engineers study, this is the second 
of these big studies, let me just refer to the underlying part. ``A 
careful review of all of the estimates leads to the conclusion that 
world oil production may peak within a few short years after which it 
will decline. Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world 
oil demand and price cycles will cease.'' With limited supply, the 
price of oil will go who knows where.
  The next chart, again from the Corps of Engineers study, ``Oil is the 
most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no 
other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, 
transportability, versatility and cost. The qualities that enabled oil 
to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the 
industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant 
today as they were then.''
  Just a word about the quality of this oil. One barrel of oil has the 
energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. You pay just a little 
over $100 for it refined. You are hiring the equivalent of a person 
working for you for a whole year for less than $10. If you have some 
trouble getting your mind around that, imagine how far that gallon of 
gasoline or diesel, still cheaper, by the way at $3 a gallon than water 
in the grocery store, how far that takes your car or your SUV.
  I drive a Prius. A gallon takes me about 50 miles. How long would it 
take me to pull my Prius 50 miles? I can't pull it unless it is on the 
level, and then I work really hard and go very slowly. If it is uphill, 
I couldn't do it without a come-along and hooking it to the guardrail 
or a tree or something and inching it up the hill. How long would it 
take me to pull my Prius that 50 miles that a gallon takes me.
  Another way of looking at the quality of fossil fuels is to recognize 
that if a strong man works hard all day, you can get more work out of 
an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. That may 
be humbling to recognize that we are worth less than 25 cents a day in 
terms of fossil fuel energy; but that is why they say in this report, 
``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic 
qualities.''
  My next chart, this is a fairly recent article and they say, ``The 
current price of oil is in the $45-57 per barrel range.'' It is now 
$64, $65, $66. ``It is expected to stay in that range for several 
years.'' It didn't, it went up to $78. It has now dropped. There was a 
fear factor that looks like it was about $18 because it pretty quickly 
dropped from $78 to $60 when the fear factor went away.
  Oil prices may go significantly higher and some have predicted $180 a 
barrel in a few years. This is from the Corps of Engineers study, and 
they are a very credible organization.

  Now I am going to move to a third study, a GAO study. I asked for 
this study because I wanted to see if it corroborated the conclusions 
drawn by the other two studies. This one came out in February 2007, and 
it was embargoed for 30 days and then it came out a month or so ago. 
``Crude oil. Uncertainty about future oil supply makes it important to 
develop a strategy for addressing a peak and decline in oil 
production.''
  This is their curve for Hubbert's peak, peaking about 1970. This is 
the increased production from Prudhoe Bay, but down, down, down. Now we 
are at about half of the oil we were producing in 1970. That is in 
spite of the fact that we have drilled more oil wells than all of the 
rest of the world put together.
  The next chart is very interesting. This chart has only the top 10. 
We are

[[Page H4282]]

not in the top 10. This lists the top 10 companies on the basis of oil 
production and reserves. Here it is on the basis of production and 
reserves.
  Our big oil companies, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, you see 
those names on the pumps, they produce this much. They don't even 
appear in the top 10 over here. They don't have any meaningful oil 
reserves. They are pumping somebody else's oil. The top 10 reserves 
over here are Luke Oil, 2 percent, and then all of the rest of the top 
10 are guess where, Saudi Aramco, National Iranian, Iraq National, 
Kuwait, Venezuela, Dubai, and so forth. Libya, Nigeria.
  The next chart shows the same kind of data in a pie chart. Some 
people like to look at pie charts. This is the world oil reserves, OPEC 
and non-OPEC nations.
  Now we have blown up the OPEC nations here to see who owns most of 
the oil. Obviously Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela and so forth 
contain the oil there. By the way, Saudi Arabia is not included in that 
pie chart because it is so big it stands alone.
  The next chart shows pictorially what these have shown in these 
little pie charts. This is what the world would look like, the world 
according to oil, and this is what the geography of the world would 
look like if the nation had square miles relative to the amount of oil 
it has. If the amount of oil determined the size of a country, this is 
what our world would look like.
  Boy, look at Saudi Arabia. It dominates everything. The United 
States, we are squeezed over here, but we are in good shape compared to 
India. Look at India with a billion people and China with 1.3 billion. 
Boy, are they dependent on somebody else's oil.
  Russia, a huge oil exporter, but they don't have that much oil 
compared to the Middle East countries. This is very sobering. What it 
shows is that most of the oil in the world, and the President said it 
very well in his State of the Union message, most of the oil in the 
world is controlled by countries that don't even like us. Just look at 
the names of these countries, and you can figure that out.
  Venezuela dwarfs us. They have several times as much oil as we have. 
Alaska, that is pretty big, a half or third of what we have in the 
lower 48.
  The next chart, this is from a very interesting speech that I hope to 
spend an hour talking about next week here on the floor. It was given 
50 years ago by Hyman Rickover in 1957. He said some really fascinating 
things in that speech.
  Mr. Speaker, you will be amazed at how prophetic Hyman Rickover was. 
He is the father of our nuclear submarine. We generally think of him in 
that venue, but he was wise beyond his time relative to energy. You 
will be amazed at the predictions and observations he made.
  ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political 
power.'' Boy, look at where the political power is going to be if 
political power is relative to the amount of enery you have. Just think 
of that last chart that we looked at.
  ``Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources 
will become dominant.'' I read that and I thought of China who is now 
going around the world buying oil wherever they can find it for sale. 
In terms of the economies of buying oil, whoever has the dollars today 
buys it and it doesn't matter who owns it. That may change in the 
future. That may be a very true statement in the future.
  ``If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have,'' and we 
obviously didn't do that. I have made the observation that when we 
found that incredible wealth in the ground, we should have stopped as a 
culture and asked: What can we do with this to get the most good for 
the most people for the longest time? That is clearly not what we did.
  With no more responsibility than the hog who found the feed room door 
open or the kids who found the cookie jar, we just pigged out. We want 
to continue doing that. The call now is to drill, drill, drill.
  As I mentioned earlier, I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids, and 2 great-
grandkids. I am going to leave them an incredible debt. Not with my 
votes. Look at them, and I didn't do it. But am I also going to leave 
them a world largely devoid of easily accessible energy, which is why, 
again, I don't vote to drill in ANWR and offshore.
  ``If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare 
well for the necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant 
position for our own country.''
  We haven't done that.

                              {time}  2130

  Because we have not done that, we now have a real challenge. By the 
way, I have no doubt that the American people, with proper leadership, 
which I do not see a whole lot of for the moment, can meet this 
challenge. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world.
  A couple of real quick charts here because our time is running out.
  This chart looks at proven oil reserves by investment risk, and about 
a third of this pie chart; there is no investment because it is not 
allowed by the companies that own it. Then there is high investment 
risk. In some of the other countries, you make an investment risk like 
Hugo Chavez just did. They take the facilities away from you and 
nationalize them. There is a tiny piece of the pie chart here that has 
a low investment risk.
  The next one looks at political risk, how unstable are these 
countries, what is the political risk. Boy, more than a third of it 
high risk, nearly a third of it minimum risk. So you look at these two 
risks, and that really means that we need to look carefully at the 
future.
  Next chart, and this is an interesting one. This is a prediction of 
when we will peak. Now, several authorities here do not have any idea 
exactly when, but they said it could occur as early as this and maybe 
as late as that, but all of these have occurred before 2020. All of 
these have occurred before 2020. Very few believe that peaking could 
not occur before 2020.
  The next chart, and I wish we had more time to look at this because 
this is a fascinating chart. This chart shows the discovery of oil. 
These bar graphs are the discovery. Obviously you add up all those 
bars, you will get the total amount of oil that we have found. You will 
get the same thing if you put a smooth curve over there. The area under 
the curve will equal the oil we have found.
  The solid black line here is the oil we have used. Now, obviously up 
until about 1980 we were finding more than we use, but since then, we 
have been borrowing from what we found and we are now peaking.
  And what will the future look like? They are predicting here we will 
find it not smooth like that, but on average that much, less and less. 
Most experts believe, by the way, we have found about 95 percent of all 
the oil we will find.
  What will the future look like? We can change a little of the detail, 
but we cannot pump what is not there. If you use enhanced oil recovery, 
you may extend this out a little bit and it will drop off very quickly, 
as you saw on that chart.
  The next chart is one which I really think is very productive to look 
at, and Hyman Rickover mentions this. In 8,000 years of recorded 
history, and we have here only the last 400 or so years of recorded 
history, roughly 400 years, but in 8,000 years of recorded history, the 
age of oil will occupy about 300 years. We have been about 150 years 
into the age of oil. Hyman Rickover in his speech of 50 years ago said 
that we are about 100 years in what will be called a golden age, and 
clearly it has been a golden age.
  World population, if we put it on this chart, exploded at just about 
that rate, and if we reach peak oil, it will drop off the other side as 
quick as we have gone up. Notice what happened in the 1970s, Arab oil 
shock, more efficiency. If that had not happened, by the way, we would 
be in even more trouble today because up until the Carter years we had 
used as much oil every decade as we had used in all of previous 
history. That means if we had used half the oil, which is I think where 
we are now, you would have 10 years at current use rate.
  Well, what do we do? I would just like to note in the remaining 
minutes that we have here, that I believe America is up to this 
challenge. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration in meeting a 
big problem and overcoming it, and properly motivated, we are the most 
creative, innovative society in the world.

[[Page H4283]]

  I said there were five groups early on. I mentioned only two of them. 
The two other groups that have common cause in moving to alternatives, 
one of those is the environmentalists that believe that our air is 
polluted enough; why would you want to burn more fossil fuels and 
pollute it more. The other is a group who is longing for a return to 
dominance in manufacturing. We are very creative. We could become a 
major exporter of the technology for exploiting these renewable 
alternative sources.
  So there are these five groups. I do not want to argue with whether 
we have global warming or not because what they want to do for global 
warming is exactly what we need to do for peak oil. It is exactly what 
we need to do for national security. It is exactly what we need to do 
to clean up our air. It is exactly what we need to do to have some 
manufacturing superiority again. So these five groups have common 
cause.
  We need to buy time by an aggressive conservation program. We need to 
use it wisely, to invest the time and energy in renewables that will 
pay off. The benefits, of course, I have indicated. We will now be a 
major exporting country again.
  The last chart, and I am sorry we do not have time to look at this 
more, but we are very much, and I will close with this, like the young 
couple that has gotten a big inheritance. Fifteen percent of what they 
spend they earn, 85 percent is from the inheritance, and it is going to 
run out. Fifteen percent of what we use, more than half of that nuclear 
power, is renewables. The 85 percent is fossil fuels which will not 
last. So the big challenge is the challenge the young couple has. 
Obviously in the future they are going to have to either spend less or 
earn more, and that is exactly the challenge we have.
  Last chart, and I really want to look at this one in the moments we 
have here. It is not like we are going to be living in a world that is 
not comfortable. Interesting chart here, it shows on the ordinate how 
satisfied you are with life. On the abscissa, it shows the amount of 
energy you consume. We are way out there in the far right. We use more 
energy per capita than anybody else in the world. But notice, all these 
countries, 20 some of them that use less energy than we, which are 
happier with their station in life than we are. You do not need to use 
the amount of energy we use to be happy.
  We have a really challenging future. I think we are up to it with 
proper leadership.

                          ____________________