[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 103 (Monday, June 25, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H7062-H7068]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE RIGHT TO LIFE, THE STEM CELL DEBATE, AND PEAK OIL
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hall of New York). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, in the few moments that we
have together this evening, I wanted to talk briefly about three
different subjects. The first one is a very timely one. It refers to a
Supreme Court decision that I think is a very momentous decision.
[[Page H7063]]
When our Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution, they thought that
they had implicitly placed in that Constitution all of the great
guarantees of freedom and individual rights that were needed for this
new Nation. But the ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before they
wondered if people would really understand that it was the people who
are to be preeminent in this new country, that there was to be a very
limited government, and it would truly be a government of the people,
by the people and for the people. Because they felt that what was very
implicit in the Constitution might need to be stated explicitly, they
developed 10 amendments, actually I think a dozen started through the
process and 10 of them made it through the process, and we call them
the Bill of Rights. They were adopted, of course, in 1791. And I think
that it's no accident that that first amendment addresses two of the
huge concerns they had from their past that should never blemish their
new country.
{time} 2000
The first of those dealt with what was a common practice in the
countries they came from, that is, it was a State religion that was
empowered by the State and supported by the State with revenues, taxes
from the people, and this church could and did persecute other
churches, and they wanted to make very sure that in this new country
that that wasn't going to be a problem. So they wrote the establishment
clause of the first amendment, which seems to me very clear language. A
lot of people have trouble reading this and understanding what it says.
I think the words say what they say. ``Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion.''
The government cannot establish a religion. ``Or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.'' No church religion and everybody free to practice
their religion as they please. Somehow we are interpreting that as
requiring that there not be any religion in the public place, which is
clearly not what they were concerned about. They wanted freedom of
religion, not freedom from religion, and, too often, we're interpreting
as freedom from religion.
But then the second part of this is equally important, and it
addresses a second major challenge that they saw in establishing this
new country. Because most of them came from a country where there was a
king or an emperor who claimed and was granted divine rights, and the
people had very few rights, only what the king chose to give them. Hard
for us to understand that. It is so foreign to us that the king or the
emperor should have divine rights. By that it means that the rights
came from God to the king or the emperor, and he would then give what
rights he wished to his subjects.
Abraham Lincoln understood four score and seven years after the
establishment of our country, that is after the establishment of the
Declaration of Independence, our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new Nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. That was very foreign to
them. It's very commonplace to us, and we read those words and don't
have any swell of pride or lump in our throat when we read them, as we
should.
But then they wrote that second part of the first amendment, which,
along with the second amendment, they believed would assure that never,
ever could the government persecute the people. In this first amendment
they said, ``or abridging the freedom of speech or the press or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the
government for a redress of grievances.''
Now, the speech that they clearly were most interested in preserving
was political speech, because that's the speech that made this country
different from all the other countries that our Founding Fathers came
from.
Tragically, it's just that political speech which was prohibited by
the Campaign Finance Reform Act that we passed, and there was a court
case, Right to Life, Wisconsin Group, broadcast ads before the 2004
race, in which they talked about issues. But they did mention the name
of a candidate, I believe.
I am so proud of the Supreme Court decision. I am a little distressed
that it was only 5-4. I would have thought that this would be such a
clear-cut case that it would be 9-0, but let's be thankful for 5-4
rather than 4-5.
I really like the position of the majority. The portion of the law in
question in this case states that labor unions and corporations,
including nonprofits, cannot use money from their general treasuries to
broadcast ads that run 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a
general election.
On a nonpresidential year, my primary is in September, which means it
is 60 days from November, so there can't be any ads during that time,
and no ads before the 30 days before the primary. I would submit that
very few people are thinking anything about an election 90 days before
it occurs.
So what this legislation did was essentially prohibit any education
before an election. The Supreme Court, in their ruling, created a
constitutional safe harbor for genuine issue ads. It stated that only
if the ad, and this is a direct quote, ``is susceptible of no
reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or
against a specific candidate,'' can the ad be prohibited during the
blackout period.
This is consistent with our philosophy in our country that we are
innocent until proven guilty. The ad has to explicitly ask you to vote
for or against a candidate. Mentioning his name, that's okay, if you
don't indicate specific guidance to vote for or against the candidate.
I am very pleased with this legislation. You know, we are 1 person
out of 22 in the world and we have a fourth of all the good things in
the world. I don't know if you have ever asked yourself the question,
how come we are so darn fortunate?
I think one of the reasons we have is the enormous respect we have
for the rights of the individual. There is no other country, there is
no other constitution that gives so many rights to the people, to the
individual.
I think that this has established a milieu, a climate, in which
creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish. I think that's one of the
reasons why we are this world superpower, with only less than 5 percent
of the people in the world. I think we put at risk who we are, and our
preeminence as this golden city on a hill, if we put at risk these very
precious individual rights and, prince among them, the right of speech.
So I am very pleased. I am very pleased with the Supreme Court
decision.
There is another thing which happened fairly recently last week,
about less than 10 of us, I guess, were called to the White House from
the Congress here, when the President gave his message on his veto of
the embryonic stem cell bill that would have necessitated the
destruction of embryos and the creation of embryonic stem cell lines.
What the President vetoed was S. 5, that's the Senate bill, and in
the House we simply voted on S. 5. When you do that, then there is no
question but what the two bills are the same, so you do not have to go
to conference. So it went immediately from the House vote to the
President's desk, where he vetoed it.
The Senate also passed S. 30, which is a very similar bill to our
House bill 322. It was called the HOPE Act in the Senate, and it got 70
votes out of their 100 senators. We have 130 cosponsors of our bill in
the House.
I hope that the House can do what the Senate did, and that is pass S.
30. If we pass S. 30, then it doesn't have to go to conference, and it
can go directly to the President's desk, and S. 30 is sufficiently
similar to our H.R. 322 that I can, with good conscience, support that
bill.
I want to spend a moment, and have the first slide, I want to spend a
few moments looking at embryonic stem cells so that when this comes to
the news we have a familiarity with this so that we can understand the
issues and what the President is talking about. We are talking about
stem cells, and this slide here points to three primary stem cells in
the body.
You see, we begin as two single cells, a single cell from the mother
and a single cell from the father. Each of them having only half of the
requisite number of chromosomes. They have a haploid number and the
total number is a diploid number, so these two halves come together
here in what we call the zygote, the two gametes come together to form
a zygote, and then that begins to divide, and each us began our life as
a single cell.
[[Page H7064]]
It divides, and we will have a chart a little later which will show a
number of the other steps in this division process. But here we wanted
to go very quickly to the gastro stage of the embryo where the three
germ layers, and that's the first time we have a germ layer, where the
three germ layers have developed, that's the ectoderm, the mesoderm and
the endoderm. As these Greek terms imply, the ectoderm is outside; the
meso, middle, is what's in the middle, and the endoderm is what lines
the inside.
Here in this chart it shows the major tissues that develop from these
three germ layers. It's very interesting that they retain their
individuality throughout your life. I believe that a cancer
metastasizes only to tissues of the same germ layer. So these
characteristics that are established very early in the development of
the embryo, a few hundred cells here by this time, this continues
throughout the life of the person.
The ectoderm produces primarily your skin and your nervous system.
The mesoderm produces most of your weight, it's the muscles and the
bones, blood and so forth. Endoderm is the tissues which line the gut,
lungs, in some our glands and so forth.
A unique, over there, a fourth category, the most unique germ cells,
these are the germ cells themselves. These are the gametes, the sperm
in the male and the ova in the female, from which the next generation
will be produced. These are produced, these germ layers producing these
things are resident in this very early embryo.
The next chart talks about several processes that you will hear a lot
about in this discussion, but it might be worth looking at them, this
is fertilization. In the fertilization process, the cells divide again
and again in the body. The sperm divides many, many times and they end
up as millions and millions of sperm. There are hundreds of the female
sex cell and millions of sperm.
The last division, or the near the last division is what we call a
miotic division, and the number of chromosomes are cut in half. After
that miotic division, you then have the egg cell with only half of the
needed chromosomes and the sperm with only half of the needed
chromosomes. When they are combined, that's called fertilization, and
that occurs, of course, to produce the zygote, which begin then to
divide over and over again and ultimately to differentiate, that is to
break down into these different kinds of cells, to differentiate into
all of the cell types of our body.
There is a lot of talk since Dolly about cloning, and here's a little
chart which looks at cloning. What you do in cloning is to take the
nucleus out of an egg cell, and then you put another nucleus by one of
two different routes, either by fusion or taking the nucleus out itself
and putting it into the egg.
If you had done that right, and you have tricked this nucleus you put
in there to believe that it is a zygote, and that requires a little
doing, then it goes on to divide, and now you have a, I guess it's an
asexual way of reproducing.
We now have done that with lots of animals and different kinds of
organisms. I saw two clones from the world's best Holstein cow, Zeta
was her name, request she had two clones which, interestingly enough,
didn't look like her mother and that's because the black and white
Holstein cows, only whether it is predominantly black or white is
determined by the genes. The actual spread of the pigment is not
genetically controlled, and so her two daughters, which were clones of
her, didn't look like her. Kind of interesting it, isn't it.
Parthenogenesis. Parthenogenesis occurs when there is no male sex
cell involved, and it occurs in some lower organisms. Parthenogenesis
is common, and it can be produced in others, in the frog, for example.
What happens is you stop the miotic division of the oocyte up here.
You stop that miotic division so there is a diploid number of cells
here. Then under appropriate circumstances, and usually in higher
organisms, it requires some artificial stimulation. It will go on to
develop a normal, adult, ultimately.
{time} 2015
The next chart shows this process as it occurs in the body. Now, what
we're talking about, when you're talking about cloning and embryonic
stem cells, this all happens in a Petri dish. But what we, that's in
vitro or in glass, as contrasted to in vivo or in life. And this is
what happens in the normal fertilization and development of an ovum.
The ovary has maturing cells in it and ordinarily, just one of those
ruptures every 30 days, every 28 days. Sometimes it will be more than
one, in which case you can end up with fraternal twins. But usually,
just one. They don't always, by the way, get picked up by, there's a
little funnel shaped end of the Fallopian tube here called the
infandibulum. They don't always get picked up by that, and sometimes
they just float out into the pelvic cavity.
And the sperm which are released in the uterus, in the vagina really,
and then they make it up through the cervix into the uterus, they make
their way all the way up the Fallopian tube, and some of them get out
into the body. And if the ovum has not made it into the Fallopian tube,
they may be fertilized out in the body, and we call that an ectopic
pregnancy, and that has to be interrupted because neither the fetus nor
the mother will make it if we let that continue.
But ordinarily, the fertilization occurs well up in the Fallopian
tube. Several days, you see the days here as it gross and divides into
two and four and eight cells and then on down until it finally
implants, what, 8, 9 days later before it implants. And some of the
birth control that we use simply prevents the implantation. The intra-
uterine devices that were common a number of years ago, that's what
they did. They simply prohibited the fertilized and several hundred
cell stage embryo from implanting in the uterus.
Now, what we're going to be talking about is this eight-cell stage.
That's about day 4 in the development of the embryo, and at that eight-
cell stage, that's the time when an in vitro fertilization, they choose
to take a cell from that. This is in a Petri dish remember, take a cell
from that. Sometimes they get two to do a pre-implantation genetic
diagnosis to make sure the baby's not going to have a genetic defect.
And then they implant the remaining cells. And several thousand times
we've had a perfectly normal baby from that.
The next chart simply shows in schematic form the development of
twins. And they can split, either at the two cell stage, or they can
split at the inter cell mass stage and we can get some indication of
when they split by how the babies present themselves, whether they
present themselves in a common amnion or in two different amnions.
I wanted to put this slide up here because what it says is that in
nature, you can take half the cells away from the early embryo,
sometimes a very early embryo, and each half grows into a perfectly
normal baby.
And back in 2000, when this was first being discussed, before the
President came out with his executive order, knowing this, and having
had a course in a former life in advanced embryology, I suggested that
we could ethically create true embryonic stem cell lines by using cells
from an early embryo which should not hurt the embryo, because half of
all the cells can be taken a way to produce identical twins, and each
half produces a perfectly normal identical twin.
The next chart simply shows a little more detail on this, and it
shows how the babies can be presented in separate chorionic sac or in a
common fused chorionic sac, depending upon the time in which they, and
they may share an amnion or not share an amnion, depending on the time
when they finally split.
The next chart shows us some of the techniques that are used to try
to get the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell, since the President
and a large number of citizens object to the destruction of one life,
the frozen embryo, with the hope that it will help another. And these
are the techniques that have been tried to produce the equivalent of an
embryonic stem cell. Reprogramming using embryonic stem cells and using
embryonic stem cell and donor cells, and you fuse them and the hybrid
cells, hopefully, will act like they were embryonic stem cells.
Or you could use differentiation using cell proteins. What is not
understood by many people is that all of the
[[Page H7065]]
genes are not in the nucleus. There are a number of control factors
that are in the cytoplasm. Indeed, they are really very important
because they determine when genes are turned on and when genes are
turned off. And each cell in your body has all of the genes there. And
a liver cell is very different than a kidney cell or a skin cell. And
that difference is determined by the control proteins out in the--some
of them are smaller than proteins, out in the cytoplasm called here
cell soup, for instance, which then turns on or turns off these genes
inside the nucleus.
Well, we can, hopefully, get this cell soup from embryonic stem cells
or something that behaves like an embryonic stem cell, which will then
make the donor cell believe that it is, in fact, an embryonic stem
cell, so maybe it will behave like an embryonic stem cell.
Then there's de-differentiation, using chemicals, antibodies or
specific proteins. You see, when it differentiates to produce the
individual germ layers, we have to de-differentiate it, bring it back
to its primordial state so that it will now behave more like an
embryonic stem cell. You can de-differentiate by using a lot of
chemicals and so forth. These may be harsh. You may end up killing the
little embryo. But if you do it right, you can trick these cells into
believing that there's something other than what they are, and they
then will behave as if they were an embryonic stem cell.
You've heard a lot of talk about some really good places to get cells
that have some of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells. There
are now umbilical cord blood banks, because of the belief that if you
freeze the cord blood, which is the blood from the infant, if you
freeze that cord blood, it may have in it cells that you can use in the
future to help in restorative medical processes or make body parts.
These are not true embryonic stem cells, but they're certainly better
than cells you get from somebody else. At least they're from that
person and they have, they're more closely aligned with embryonic stem
cells than if you simply got an adult body cell.
Then there's the bone marrow cells. And more recently you may have
heard a lot about amnionic fluid. The amnion is the fluid in which the
baby develops. He's very tiny. The embryo starts there. And obviously
some cells will be sloughed off of these embryos, and as those cells
will show up in the amniotic fluid, and so there's good opportunities
to get something that behaves something like embryonic stem cells
there.
The next chart shows, I think, four of the processes that were
included in the President's white paper from the President's Council on
Bio ethics. And altered nuclear transfer is one of those. This is kind
of a cloning where you've altered the nucleus, so that it can't be
truly said to be cloning, which is prohibited by law.
Altered nuclear transfers, oocyte assisted reprogramming, it's simply
using the oocyte and it's primarily the proteins, that factors out in
the cytoplasm which are doing this.
Embryo biopsy, and I have a chart in just a moment on that because
this is the process which I suggested in 2000.
And then a really, really interesting one, cells from dead. And boy,
put that in quotes because what we're talking about here are embryos
that are the equivalent of the brain dead person, from which we get
very good body parts. And there are embryos that will not go on to
divide. They will ultimately die, and that state can be ascertained,
and if they are not going to go on and divide, they will die. But they
still may have viable cells that could be used to establish embryonic
stem cell lines.
Obviously, some problems with this, you know. Who's to say that it's
really going to die? And then there's the question about, are you
really going to get a good stem cell line from a cell taken from an
about to die embryo. But this is one possibility, and there are some
strong proponents to this.
The next chart simply shows a quote from the white paper of the
President's Council on Bio Ethics. And it quotes me down here at the
bottom an asterisk, a similar idea was proposed by Representative
Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001. They said here, ``It
may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from
single cells extracted from early embryos and in ways that do not harm
the embryo. Thus biopsy.
But the initial success of the Verlinsky Group efforts at least
raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be
derived from single blastomeres removed from early human embryos
without apparently harming them.
Now, this statement was made before the British, and they pioneered
this, started doing the pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that I
mentioned a few minutes ago. They now have, in several thousand cases,
taken one, and sometimes they get a second cell, taken cells from the 8
cell stage embryo to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. If there
is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells. And as far as I
know, they always had a perfectly normal baby.
Now, the big surprise would be that the baby wasn't perfectly normal.
I've had people tell me, gee, it's eight cells, and you take two of
them away so it's only three-fourths of a person.
No, when you take half the cells away to from an early embryo to
produce identical twins, is each one of them only half a person? Ask
one. There are a lot of identical twins around. They'll just laugh at
the notion that they're half a person. Of course they are not.
So this, the medical profession now has run past us with this
technology. So we could today establish embryonic stem cell lines from
that second cell that they inadvertently take. And there have been
hundreds of those that are just discarded because they have no use for
them. Just one cell is all you need to do a pre-implantation genetic
diagnosis. And Verlinksy and Lanza, Lanza with a somewhat questionable
publication, but both of them have claimed that they can produce a stem
cell line from a single cell line.
Well, I thought I would spend these few minutes talking about this
because this is of current interest and the Senate will be shortly
trying to override the President's veto. They almost certainly will not
be able to do that. His veto will be sustained, and our hope is that S.
30 will then be brought up in the House so that we can sign that so it
gets to the President's desk. And I join those tens of millions of
people in our country who believe and hope that there ought to be some
really important contributions made to health care from embryonic stem
cell lines. And we don't need to harm or kill an embryo to get an
embryonic stem cell line. So we hope that S. 30 will be brought up to
the House and we pass that. And the President already indicated that he
will happily sign it.
Peak Oil
The next chart now begins a discussion I want to spend the rest of
our time on. And we have a number of charts here and again, I think
this is the 32nd or 33rd time I've come to the well to talk about this
subject. It wasn't cool to talk about energy and peak oil when I
started talking about this, what, nearly 2 years ago I guess. But now
it's common fodder for many discussions.
And this is an interesting little cartoon, and the fellow with his
humongous SUV. The demand is filling up at the pump. The supply, and
he's saying, just why is gas so expensive?
{time} 2030
One of my colleagues asked me what he should tell his constituents
when they ask him what can be done to reduce the price of gas? I told
him it is very simple. Just tell them to drive less. Not only will they
spend less on gas, but if they aren't using it, the supply and demand
will be more in sync and the prices will come down. I can assure you
that the prices will come down.
The next chart, it is this observation that Hyman Rickover referred
to 50 years ago, the 14th day of last month, when he gave a very
interesting talk to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. He
noted the enormous transformation, and they were then but 100 years
into the age of oil when he gave his talk. Now we are about 150 years
into the age of oil. But he noted the enormous transformation that this
energy had made in the development of civilization. And this is energy
here on the ordinate. It could just as well be population, by the way,
because as we were able to mobilize more energy, our
[[Page H7066]]
population went up. We were able to grow more food, and, therefore, we
could support more people. And if you could support more people, there
were kind of automatically more people to support.
Well, this is the little depiction here, only 400 years out of this
8,000 years of recorded history. And his observation was that in span
of human history, 8,000 years, the age of oil will be but a blip, about
300 years out of 8,000 years.
The Industrial Revolution, of course, started here with wood and then
coal. And it was already sputtering when we discovered gas and oil, and
then it took off, and population followed it. There is an interesting
quote from Hyman Rickover's article. I didn't bring it, but he thought
there would be 4 billion people in the world by the turn of the
century. There were, in fact, almost 7 billion people in the world by
the turn of the century. So even he had underestimated the contribution
that energy would make to the increase in population.
I want you to note something up here at the top of this curve. Notice
that if that little perturbation had not occurred there in about 1970,
the Arab oil embargo, and if that curve had kept going up, it would be
over the top of the chart a couple of times, wouldn't it? That curve
was rising very steeply.
As a matter of fact, if you look at that curve, in each decade during
this sharp rise, in each decade, the world used as much oil as had been
used in all of previous history. Now, think about that for a moment.
Had that continued, what that meant was that when we had used half of
all of the recoverable oil in the world, we would have how much more
time at current use rates? Ten years. Well, very fortunately, that
slowed down. There was a worldwide depression, recession, you may
remember, and we really learned how to become very much more efficient.
So we have slowed that growth rate down. But notice more recently how
rapidly that has been increasing. Largely because of the third world,
China and India, industrializing. I think the last year for which I saw
data, China increased their demand for energy 13 percent.
The next chart is a very interesting chart, and this depicts what the
world would look like if the size of the country was determined by how
much oil it had. A really distorted picture of the world, isn't it?
Look at Saudi Arabia there. Front and center, and you probably can't
read the small print over there, between a fifth and a fourth of all
the oil in the world. Now, I say that with a little trepidation because
we really don't know how much oil is there. We know what they tell us.
But you need to remember that most of these countries are OPEC, Iraq,
Kuwait, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. And for years the OPEC
countries were permitted to pump a certain percentage of their
reserves. So if you wanted to pump more oil, all you had to do was to
have more reserves. And since there wasn't anybody looking over your
shoulder, you could say you had whatever reserves you needed to have to
pump as much oil as you would like to pump to support your economy. And
that is true of most of these countries. Nobody looks inside, but this
is the best guess as to how much oil these countries have.
A very important recent book was written by Matt Simmons called
Twilight in the Desert. He questions that there is as much oil in Saudi
Arabia as we believe, and he believes they may already be peaking in
Saudi Arabia.
Talking about peaking, I just wanted to mention an article that
appeared above the fold in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, and
it was about the second largest oil field in the world. The largest
one, of course, is in Saudi Arabia. It is the giant Ghawar oil field
that is still running down, still produces 5 million barrels of oil a
day. The world produced 84 million, and it produces 5 million of that
from that one field. The second largest field was the Cantarell oil
field in Mexico. And it was named after a fisherman Cantarell, whose
nets kept getting fouled, and if his nets were fouled, they knew who
was at fault. There was only one oil field in Mexico, and that was
Pemex. So he would take his nets to be replaced and they finally said,
Where are you finding all that oil? And he said, Come, I will show you.
And it was kind of bubbling up out of the ocean. And they drilled
there, and for years it was the second-largest yielding field in the
world, 2 million barrels a day. In the last 2 years, it has dropped
down 10 percent a year. It is now 1.6 million barrels per day. So that
field has peaked.
Just look at how anemic the United States is compared to Saudi
Arabia. We would have fit in Saudi Arabia many times. We have 2 percent
of the known oil reserves, and Saudi Arabia has 22 percent. So we would
fit in there 11 times, and that is what it shows here.
Look at little Kuwait there that Saddam Hussein thought looked like a
little corner province of Iraq when he went to take it. They are, I
think, the fourth largest reserves. Iran is number two, Iraq is three,
and Kuwait is four. There is some question about whether Iraq and
Kuwait should reverse places.
Another interesting thing about this chart. Look at the pitifully
small amount of oil that India and China have. A third of the world's
population is over there in India and China, and they have a trifling
amount, between them they have less oil than the United States.
The next chart shows how much oil we have. We have 2 percent of the
known reserves in the world. We use 25 percent of the world's oil, and
we import about two-thirds of what we use. Some people think, and they
are right, this represents a huge national security risk.
Note that with only 2 percent of the world's oil, we pump 8 percent
of the world's oil. So we are really good at pumping oil. We ought to
be. We have more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the
world put together. And we are pumping our oil fields four times faster
than the rest of the world.
The next chart, and we could spend a long while on this chart and we
have only a very short time to look at it, but the gist of this chart
is available immediately when you look at it. The big bars here show
you when we found the oil. And the ordinate here shows how much we
found. And you will notice that we started finding it way back in the
1930s, a big slug of it in the 1940s and 1950s, and we really exploded
in the 1960s, didn't we? But from 1980 on down, though, there has been
less and less, and that is in spite of the fact that we have ever
better techniques for finding the oil, 3D-size, computer modeling, and
we have a pretty good idea of the geology of the world. And it is only
in unique geologic formations that you can expect to find gas and oil.
The solid black line here represents our consumption. It also
represents our production because there is no big puddle of oil
anywhere. We have used all we have produced; so this is a curve. We can
call it the consumption curve, but it is also the production curve
because we have used all we have produced. Notice since about 1980 we
have been consistently losing more than we found.
Again, this perturbation in the 1970s that you saw before. We have
been borrowing all this oil we used here that we didn't find. We
borrowed it from back here.
And what will the future look like? We can use enhanced oil recovery
and get it more quickly. But if we do, you can't pump it twice. If you
pump it now, you won't pump it later.
The next chart, and this was predicted by M. King Hubbert in 1956.
That is about here. M. King Hubbert predicted that the United States
would peak in oil production in 1970. That was a brash statement. We
were then king of oil, I think producing more oil than any other
country in the world, and I think we may have been the biggest exporter
of oil in the world. And he says in 14 years we are going to peak in
oil production.
Notice the little blip here on the down side of what is called
Hubbert's Peak. The next chart looks at the details of this, and we can
see why this perturbation.
What M. King Hubbert predicted, by the way, was the lower 48; that
is, Texas and the rest of the United States.
By the way, West Texas Intermediate is still the grade of oil,
although they aren't producing very much now. It is still the grade of
oil which you will see in the paper, West Texas Intermediate.
There are two other oil wells in the world now that may take over as
the benchmark. One of them is Brent, which is really an inferior oil.
It is heavier and sour. By ``sour'' we mean it
[[Page H7067]]
has a lot of sulfur in it that is hard to get out, and it is polluting
if you don't get it out. That used to be the North Sea oil that the
British produced, but now there are other oils that are grouped with
that. And then there is a third oil, which is the Asian oil benchmark.
And there is some argument now about which of those benchmarks we
should refer to as the price of oil. We have been referring to West
Texas Intermediate, which is a slight sweet crude, but there is not
very much of that now, and because of the demand, the Brent, which
always used to be lower in price, is now several dollars to $5 or $6
higher. So there is some and it would be interesting to watch what
happens if they sort this out.
But notice what caused this blip on the way down. It was the oil
found in Alaska that used to be a fourth of our production. It has now
dwindled down. And notice here the big finds in the Gulf of Mexico, and
you can hardly see a perturbation as we run down that slope.
The next chart is a chart which is used by one of the primary
organizations that believes that you don't need to worry about oil,
that it is going to be there for a long time. This is CERA, the
Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and they use this chart to try to
convince you, and I don't find it very convincing but I just will ask
you to look at it to see if you think it is convincing, that M. King
Hubbert really didn't know what he was talking about. The little yellow
symbols here are M. King Hubbert's predictions. The actual lower 48 are
the green ones, and they are telling you that these two curves are so
far apart that you should question the validity of M. King Hubbert's
analyses. They look pretty close together to me. And they also show the
total U.S. production, which is the Alaska production. And, of course,
that produces this little perturbation, slipping down the other side of
Hubbert's Peak.
This chart is a quote from one of four different agencies, groups
that have done studies on peak oil. This is the first one, and this is
the so-called Hirsch report and it was done by SAIC, Science
Applications International Corporation, a very prestigious science
organization paid for by the Department of Energy. And they produced a
big report with very serious language:
World oil peaking is going to happen. World production of
conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That
maximum is called the peak. A number of confident forecasters project
peaking within a decade. Others contend that it will occur later.
Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological
complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand
elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen but the time
is uncertain.
{time} 2045
``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge.'' And then they make this
statement, ``The world has never faced a problem like this. There is
nothing in history that we can rely on to help us through this without
massive mitigation, more than a decade before the fact. The problem
will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy
transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and
evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary,'' is his
statement.
The next chart is from a second of these studies, and there are a
couple of these that we will go through very quickly. The Army Corps of
Engineers did a study for the Army. And you can take their report and
put in U.S. or world wherever they put Army. And the Army is clearly a
microcosm of the United States and the United States is a microcosm of
the world. But they say essentially the same thing; peaking is either
present or eminent, with potentially devastating consequences.
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. And you
really need to emphasize each of those.
The next chart. I wanted to show you this one because this was
written just a couple of years ago. ``The current price of oil is in
the $45-$57 per barrel and it's expected to stay in that range for
several years.'' I think it's, what, $69 a barrel today? And after this
it went up to $78 a barrel, then fell back and is rising again. Oil
prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted prices
ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Were that to occur, by the
way, it would have disastrous effects on our economy.
The next chart is a schematic. And you can make this peak look steep
or flat. Here we've spread out the abscissa and compressed the
ordinate. But it's still a 2 percent growth, which doubles in 35 years,
four times bigger in 70 years, eight times bigger in 105 years. Albert
Einstein said that compound interest was the most powerful force in the
universe. Very few people understand the power of exponential growth.
It doubles in 35 years. That's the yellow shaded area. If, in fact, we
are here near the peak where the demand is a bit more than the supply,
which is why gas is $3 a gallon at the pump rather than $1, which it
was not all that long ago, in 35 years the demand will be double? And
if, in fact, we're peaking, the supply will be not more and maybe less
than the supply now.
The next chart is a very interesting one because it includes a couple
of predictions by CERA. There are two major organizations that I think
are kind of in denial, one of them is CERA and the other one is
ExxonMobil. All the other oil companies, watch their ads, they're
pretty much admitting that we're at peak oil. BP is Beyond Petroleum.
And Chevron has ads. It's very clear they believe that we've probably
reached or we're about to reach our maximum production of oil.
Here we are, common curve, you've seen this a number of times, a
stuttering in the 1970s and rising again. And they are predicting, and
we don't have time this evening to go over some very interesting
statistics. They're predicting we're going to find as much more oil as
all of the known reserves yet to be pumped. And if we found that much
more, in other words, if we go from the roughly two trillion barrels,
which most authorities believe was the amount of oil which was
recoverable, and we've recovered about half of that. If we went to
three, then that moves the peak out they say to 2016. I just want to
emphasize that for a moment. Even if we find as much more oil as all
the known reserves in the world today, we push the crisis point out
only 2016.
This chart further points out that if we use really aggressive
techniques to develop that oil, like pumping live steam down there and
sequestering CO2 down there, pumping seawater down there,
all the things we do to recover, we might recover a more quickly, which
would push the peak out, but then look what happens? You fall off a
cliff after that. You can't pump it twice; if you pump it now, you
won't pump it then.
The next chart is a really interesting one. This occurs in one of
their publications where they are saying there won't be any such thing
as peak oil. And look what they show. They say it will be an undulating
plateau. I won't argue. It's up and down. The price of oil is up and
down. The price of gas is up and down. But they say it will be an
undulating plateau. But notice, the undulating plateau falls off. There
clearly is a peak. If there is only roughly two trillion barrels, then
the peak is here. If we find another trillion barrels, that pushes the
peak out to here. And then they have some confidence, I don't know how
well-founded it is, that we're going to get a huge amount of oil from
unconventional sources. And when we have more time another evening,
we'll talk about the potentially huge amounts of oil that we can get
from things like our oil shales in the west and the Canadian tar sands.
This next quote is an interesting one from one of the giants in this
area. This is a quote from Laherrere, who says that ``The USGS estimate
implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for
which no evidence is presented. 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.'' I think
that he's right, that this is absolutely implausible.
The next chart is a quote from Hyman Rickover, as I mentioned earlier
in that very famous speech he gave just a little over 50 years ago now.
I suggest it's a good time to think soberly about our responsibility to
our decendants, those who will ring out the
[[Page H7068]]
fossil fuel age. I led a delegation of nine members to China; we spent
New Year's Eve in Shanghai. They began their discussion of energy by
talking about post-oil. Post-oil. Mr. Speaker, I wish our guys got it
as well as they.
We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal
consumption so as to provide a safe margin for the necessary
adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil
fuels. There will be a world without fossil fuels.
I have a few charts on conservation. California uses 65 as much
electricity as we use; hard to argue they don't live as well as we. The
next chart is a really interesting one. It shows the enormous potential
for saving energy with lighting. And the incandescant bulb, we use that
for brooding our chickens because 90 percent of all the energy is heat.
Fluorescents are very much more efficient. Same amount of light from
all of these, by the way. But look at the light emitting diodes, LEDs,
over there; very little heat produced. Get an LED flashlight, you will
forget when you put batteries in it, they just last and last.
The next chart is a really interesting one. I wish it were in living
color so it's a little sexier to look at. This shows how satisfied one
is with life compared to how much energy you use. Satisfaction with
life here, how much energy you use there. Obviously we are way out
there to the right. There we are, USA. But notice, there are 20-
something countries that are as happy or happier with life than we are
who use less energy than we. We don't need to use as much energy as we
use to feel good about life.
The next chart is a really interesting one. It shows us the huge
challenge that we have. And 85 percent of all of our energy comes from
fossil fuels, only 15 percent of it from something else. And a bit more
than half of that from nuclear. And 7 percent, and by the way, in 2000
our solar was 1 percent of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. It's been
growing rapidly. It may now be .5 percent. But that's still a tiny,
tiny percentage.
The next chart, I just want to look very quickly at something which
has been in the press recently. And I have a couple of articles here I
want to refer to very quickly. This is the energy that goes into
producing corn. And if you see down here, almost half the energy that
goes into producing corn comes from natural gas, and natural gas is a
fossil fuel. There was a study done by the National Academy of
Sciences, and then two of the authors there of that study wrote an
article for the Washington Post, and it was March 25 of this year. And
in both of these, in both the paper, and I have the paper here from the
National Academy of Sciences and here is the article that was in the
Washington Post. They point out that if we use all of our corn for
ethanol, all of it, and discounted it for the fossil fuel input, it
would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline, only about one-fourth, less
than one-fourth, one-fifth, they have 80 percent fossil fuel input.
They noted that you can save that much gas by tuning up your car and
putting air in the tires.
A lot of people today are focused on soybeans and diesel. They said,
and this is National Academy of Sciences, if we use all of our soybeans
for diesel, it would displace 6 percent of our diesel. And if you
discounted it for the fossil fuel input, and it's much more efficient
producing biodiesel from soybeans, that 6 percent shrinks to 2.9
percent. Well, both of these are trifling. And obviously we're not
going to turn all of our corn into ethanol and all of our soybeans into
diesel. But if we did, it would displace, what, 2.4 percent of our
gasoline and 2.9 percent of our soybeans. We have huge challenges.
And the next chart is really interesting. When people tell you, don't
worry about energy, we have all this coal, 250 years at current use
rate. It's true. Grow only 2 percent, remember that compound growth? It
shrinks to 75 years. Use some of it to convert it to gas of oil, you
have now shrunk to 50 years. And remember, in today's world there is no
way not to share your energy with the world because energy is bought
and sold on a world market. So if we share our 50 years with the world,
it's now 12\1/2\ years of coal energy, with only 2 percent growth in
the use of coal. Think about it for a moment.
The next chart, and we will come here to the floor again and we will
spend the whole time talking about this one, because we have a huge
challenge. I'm really very enthusiastic about challenges. There is no
exhilaration like the exileration of meeting and overcoming a big
challenge, and boy have we got one in this energy. We are the most
creative, innovative society in the world, and with proper motivation,
I think we can do it. But we need to understand the challenge before
us, and that's when I will come to the floor again. And we're going to
talk about all of these, the finite sources, the nuclear sources and
all of these renewables. What is realistic to expect to get from them?
Is there a silver bullet out there? I'll tell you now, except for one,
the only silver bullet out there is nuclear fusion. I don't see any
other silver bullet. And the chances of them getting nuclear fusion I
think are about the same as the chances of you solving your personal
economic problems by winning the lottery; great if it happens, but
don't mortgage the ranch, don't bet it on happening.
I would just like to end with a very interesting quote from Hyman
Rickover. ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of
political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated
in an ever smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which
controls the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give
thought to the problem of energy resources, 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.''
This, Admiral Rickover says, is a huge challenge for us today, with
only 2 percent of the known reserves, using 25 percent of the world's
oil and importing about two-thirds of what we use.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back with the promise that I will
come to the floor again and spend the whole time talking about the
enormous challenges we have and the satisfactions that we will achieve
as a nation when we do it, in spite of the difficulty.
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