[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 59 (Tuesday, April 15, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H2271-H2272]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      ETHANOL HAS NOT SAVED US YET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It has been said by folks that 
Washington, DC., is the only place in America that is surrounded by 
reality because people here, especially in Congress, those people say, 
are in a Disney World atmosphere and don't know how the world really 
is.
  Probably the best example is what has taken place throughout our 
country in the area of gasoline prices. They are going up every day. 
Every day we come back to Congress, gasoline prices continue to rise. 
And there's a constant problem here. Retail operators who run those 
mom-and-pop independent gasoline stations are saying they're not even 
making a profit off of gasoline. They hope maybe they can make one cent 
a gallon. The way they make profit is selling lottery tickets and 
donuts, and the country continues to see higher and higher gasoline 
prices.
  It's a tremendous problem that we have to deal with. We have to come 
out of this Disney World atmosphere and solve the problem. Some say 
what is going to save us all is ethanol. Let's take all of the farmland 
in America, let's till it up, let's grow some corn, and let's make some 
of that unproven, unpredictable ethanol to burn in our vehicles.
  Of course, what we have done as a Nation by encouraging and 
subsidizing the special interest group of ethanol, we've raised the 
corn prices worldwide. In fact, they have tripled in the last 2 years. 
And because corn prices are going up, wheat prices are going up. And in 
the last 17 years, food prices in

[[Page H2272]]

the world are higher than they ever have been, all because the United 
States has seen this vision that ethanol is going to save us all.
  Several years ago, those who talked about ethanol that weren't for 
the concept of ethanol said ethanol is not going to be profitable 
unless gasoline gets to $4 a gallon. Four years ago, people in this 
House said, oh, that's never going to happen. The problem with ethanol 
is it takes a gallon and a third of fuel, diesel, to produce a gallon 
of ethanol. And only when gasoline gets to be $4 a gallon will ethanol 
be profitable for this country.
  In fact, it's driving up pollution. Science Magazine has stated, 
``After taking into account worldwide land-use changes, corn-based 
ethanol will increase greenhouse gases 93 percent compared to gasoline 
over a 30-year period.''
  In other words, the House was trying to be environmentally correct. 
We want to make sure we don't have pollution. Nobody wants pollution. 
Nobody wants greenhouse gases; but unproven, subsidized ethanol is 
going to raise worldwide greenhouse gases all because we're tilling up 
our farmland.
  I have here a map of the United States. Now we're also finding out 
where the Mississippi River dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, there is a 
dead zone, and there is a dead zone there for various reasons. But 
because we're plowing up all in the Midwest this farmland and making 
corn, which takes a lot of fertilizer, that fertilizer is going down 
the Mississippi River, and the dead zone at the mouth of the 
Mississippi River is getting bigger. ``Dead zone'' means exactly what 
it says: Nothing grows there and fish don't live there, all because of 
this concept of ethanol.
  So what are we doing about it? Well, first thing Congress did, we're 
going to punish those oil companies, those American oil companies, and 
we are going to tax them, raise the taxes on these oil companies, and 
that's what Congress did. Now it's a simple economic fact. You tax 
something, you get less of it. What does that mean? That means if you 
tax something, you're going to get less production. You're going to get 
less production of crude oil.
  Now, we don't drill off our own shores. We're the only Nation in the 
world that doesn't take care of ourselves with the natural resources 
that we have been given. The only place we drill offshore, Mr. Speaker, 
is right here in this blue zone off the State of Texas where I'm from, 
off the State of Louisiana and parts of Mississippi and Alabama. But 
you see in all of these areas that are red on this map, there is crude 
oil out there in the ocean, but we don't drill out there even though 
crude oil is there.
  In fact, we're going to see some new platforms out in the Gulf of 
Mexico, but they're not from America. Right here off the coast of 
Florida, right there at the tip, there is an oil site, but we're not 
drilling there because we don't drill offshore. So the next oil rig you 
will see out in the Gulf of Mexico will be built by the Cubans and the 
Chinese. They're drilling in areas that we ought to be drilling in 
because it has been said in this House we can't drill offshore safely. 
That is wrong.
  I live in the area that was hit by Katrina and Hurricane Rita, and 
when those two hurricanes came through that area, 700 offshore rigs 
were damaged or destroyed. But yet, we didn't hear one word about crude 
oil seepage from the Gulf of Mexico because it did not happen.
  We have the greatest technology in the world for drilling, and we can 
drill safely, we've proven that. We've drilled safely, and we will 
continue to drill safely.
  And that's just the way it is.

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