[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 90 (Tuesday, June 3, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H4862-H4868]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ENERGY IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.

[[Page H4863]]

  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, most Americans think that Members 
of Congress are somehow privileged and above the ordinary everyday 
concerns of the constituencies that we represent. I think all 434 of my 
House colleagues know that that's not true. By normal standards, we do 
get a very adequate salary, $162,500 a year, but out of that we have to 
pay our expenses of living in our districts and here in Washington, 
D.C. We have the same expenses that every other American family has.
  This morning, before I left to fly to Washington, DC, I opened our 
credit card bill. We have a MasterCard. And on that bill we put most of 
our gasoline expenses and our routine living expenses. And my wife, 
Terry, has been working very, very hard this year to minimize the 
amount of expenses on that credit card. And we've both made an effort 
to make sure we only put things that we have to put on the credit card. 
So the vast majority of our MasterCard is now for gasoline.
  And I just happened to look down the list of all the gasoline 
expenses from the early part of last month to right now, and it added 
up to over $600. Now, $600 is not an extraordinary amount, but a year 
ago that same amount of gasoline would have been about $300, maybe 
$350, and 2 or 3 years ago, it would have been about $150. And now it's 
over $600. And that's not taking any trips. That's not driving to see 
our families. That is my wife and my step-daughter and my day-to-day 
drive to work, drive to school, drive to the grocery store, do all the 
things that we do in everyday living in central Texas.
  Now, as I said earlier, I make a very adequate salary and my wife 
makes an adequate salary. And it pinches us, but we can afford it. But 
what if my wife and I were on an income of, say, $4,000 a month, 
$48,000 a year? Having to spend $600 a month for gasoline just to go 
back and forth to work and to go to school and to go to church and to 
go to the grocery store would be a real struggle.
  So we have a situation today where the new Democratic majority in the 
House has come in promising to bring energy prices down and a new 
commonsense plan for energy. Here we are, with approximately 5 months 
to go in this session of Congress, at least through the election in 
November, and energy prices are up almost 200 percent, gasoline prices, 
since the day that our Speaker, Mrs. Pelosi, took the gavel from Mr. 
Hastert.
  And the response to the higher energy prices, at least so far, has 
been, at best, symbolic. We passed a bill giving the right to sue OPEC. 
OPEC supplies about 40 percent right now of our energy, our oil, so 
we're going to sue OPEC if that bill were to become law.
  Several weeks ago we passed a bill suspending shipments of the 
Strategic Petroleum Reserve; that's about 60 to 70 thousand barrels of 
oil a day. There were great predictions that day that passage of that 
one bill would bring prices down $25 a barrel, and I think one Member 
said 50 cents a gallon. Well, the day the bill passed, oil prices went 
up almost $2 a barrel. And a week after that, they hit an all-time high 
of $135 a barrel. They have now come down a little bit, but they're 
still, I believe today's price is about $127 a barrel.
  So I think it's fair to ask my friends in the majority, where is our 
energy policy to really bring energy prices down for America? I'm not 
happy that in my little part of America I'm having to spend over $600 
this month when we pay our MasterCard bill just for gasoline. And if 
the projections are true, later this summer I may have to spend seven, 
eight, even nine hundred dollars a month just for basic transportation 
in Arlington, Texas.
  Most people think that we're helpless, that we can't do anything 
about these high energy prices, that they're almost like one of the Ten 
Commandments. Luckily, and hopefully, the truth is not that; we have 
tremendous energy resources in this country that have yet to be 
developed.
  We can do something about these energy prices, and we can do it with 
made-in-America energy. We've been debating whether we should drill up 
in Alaska and ANWR for the last 20 years. We actually passed a bill and 
sent it to the President that would have allowed that in 1996. The 
President at the time, President Clinton, vetoed that bill. Had he not 
vetoed that bill or had we been able to override his veto, projections 
are that ANWR would probably be producing in the neighborhood of two to 
three million barrels of oil per day right now. I say projections 
because you never know until you actually drill the wells and start to 
produce the oil. But there are huge oil reserves in ANWR. And the 
minimum assumption would be half a million barrels a day within 3 to 4 
years of the go-ahead to begin production. And that's just one oil 
field.
  If we want to go off the coast of California where we drilled the 
original offshore oil wells, where you still have oil seeps that 
naturally come to the surface, where you do have some producing 
platforms that were in existence prior to 1968, it's estimated that we 
probably have three to five billion barrels of oil available right 
there, and that we could produce another half a million to a million 
barrels just off the coast of California.
  If you want to go to the east coast, where we've done almost no 
exploration at all because of various moratoria, if the Gulf of Mexico 
is any indication, we probably have billions and billions of barrels of 
oil reserves and natural gas reserves off of that coast.
  We know that there is oil and gas off the coast of Florida that's not 
being drilled right now because of a moratorium. Interestingly, the 
communist Chinese are drilling off the coast of Florida through a lease 
arrangement with Mr. Castro and the Cuban dictatorship in Cuba. It 
would be ironic if the communist Chinese ended up getting more oil and 
gas off the coast of Florida than Americans do.
  If you don't want to drill offshore, what about onshore lower 48? We 
have probably two trillion--trillion is a thousand billion--we have two 
trillion barrels of shale oil reserves in Wyoming and Colorado. In the 
Energy Policy Act of 2005, we passed a procedure to inventory those and 
to do an expedited permitting process of the Minerals Management 
Service so that they could perhaps come into production, but on the 
floor of the House last year this Congress put a moratorium on 
implementing those rules. So we're putting our shale oil reserves off 
limits.
  So it comes as no surprise, if you look at all these areas where 
we've put the stop sign up, that oil production in the United States is 
going down. At our peek, we produced over 10 million barrels of oil per 
day in the United States of America. At one time we were the number one 
producer of oil in the world. That's down to a little less than six 
million barrels a day. We use the equivalent of nine to ten million 
barrels of oil per day just for mobility purposes. We're only producing 
in the neighborhood of six million barrels.
  We have tremendous energy reserves in this country. And if we want to 
bring these prices down, we don't have to look overseas to the Middle 
East, we don't have to beg OPEC, we don't have to sue OPEC, we do have 
to take our energy future into our own hands and begin to produce more 
American energy.
  It's more than just oil and gas, obviously. We have tremendous coal 
resources in the United States. We have somewhere between 250 and 400 
years of coal reserves. We've got lots of research being done to 
convert that coal to a liquid, a diesel-like fuel that we could use to 
fuel our transportation fleet.
  When we had the debate on the so-called energy bill last year in this 
Congress, the rules were set up so that no amendment on coal-to-liquids 
was made in order in the Energy and Commerce Committee, the committee 
of principal jurisdiction, nor in the Rules Committee, nor on the floor 
of the House of Representatives. So we passed an energy bill which I 
voted against because there really wasn't any energy in it. It had no 
coal in it. It certainly had no oil or gas drilling in it. It was 
basically a mandatory conservation bill.
  So my statement to the American people this evening, Mr. Speaker, is 
pretty straightforward. We've got tremendous energy resources in this 
great Nation of ours. We've got the ability, within a reasonably short 
period of time, and I would say that would be 2 to 4 years, maybe 2 to 
5 years, if we made a decision in this Congress to produce some of the 
energy reserves that we know we have, we could, in all probability, 
double the amount of oil

[[Page H4864]]

that we're producing right now. We could certainly increase it by three 
to four million barrels a day, if not double it. And if we did that, 
energy prices would come down.
  On the world market, oil is a fungible product, which means it can 
move anywhere, it's a commodity. We have the ability, worldwide, to 
produce on an average day around 85, 86 million barrels of oil. 
Unfortunately, the demand for oil is about 85 or 86 million barrels per 
day, give or take a million barrels or so. So we have a situation where 
you don't have a cushion, you don't have a capacity cushion. And the 
econometric models have shown that if you don't have about a 5 percent 
cushion, which would be about four or five million barrels a day, that 
price is going to tend to spike upwards. And that's what we have today.

                              {time}  2000

  Mr. BARTON of Texas. We have a demand-driven price because we do not 
have on the world markets enough cushion to dampen the speculation, so 
the American consumers are having to pay right now on average right at 
$4 a gallon. I don't know about you, Mr. Speaker, but I don't think 
American voters and the American citizens are going to be really happy 
if, in the face of these higher prices, our decision as a Congress is 
to just shake our fists and say we have the ability to sue the foreign 
cartel which we call OPEC.
  So I have the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce 
Committee. I have been working for the last 6 months with a group of 
Republicans both on and off the committee. Several weeks ago, we put in 
a package of 15 bills. These bills, taken together, would produce more 
American-made energy for American workers and energy consumers. They 
run the gamut. I'm not going to go through every bill right now, but we 
look at the oil and gas industry, the coal industry, the nuclear power 
industry, the alternative energy industry. You name it. We take a look 
at it, and do something to bring into play American-made resources for 
American energy consumption.
  I would encourage all of our Members of Congress to take a look at 
these bills. We are going to try to get them to the floor as quickly as 
possible. I certainly think that if we are naming post offices and are 
commending watermelon festivals and things of this sort that we 
certainly can find room to have some real energy bills on the floor and 
to have a debate and to, hopefully, pass those bills to the other body.
  At this point in time, Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to my good 
friend from Ohio, Congressman Latta. Congressman Latta comes from a 
distinguished family of congressmen. His father was the ranking 
Republican on the Budget Committee when I was a young pup. Our current 
Congressman Latta has come to Washington with the same common sense 
that his father exhibited 20 years ago.
  So I would yield as much time as he may consume to Mr. Latta of Ohio.
  Mr. LATTA. Well, I appreciate the gentleman from Texas yielding.
  I stand here tonight, coming back from Memorial Day break, and people 
back home, I think, know more about what is going on in this country 
than we do.
  Every place I went--we had meetings across our district--the folks 
all asked the same thing: When are you going to be doing something 
about energy in this country? Because we can't afford these prices at 
the gas pumps. They all said the same thing, what some of them have 
been saying down here. We have got to start developing our own energy 
sources in this country. We have got to start acting now.
  Why is it important to be acting now?
  You know, years back, we had the ability in this country to be able 
to make some mistakes and to correct them in 5 or 10 years, but we 
don't have that luxury anymore. That luxury now is gone. What is going 
on now is that the rest of the world is catching up to us.
  I just want to start with this chart, if I may. That is the harsh 
reality of what we have here. The United States consumes about 21 
percent of the world's energy right now with 300 million of the people. 
When you look at this chart and in looking at 2010, you see that India 
and China will almost be at a parity with the United States in 2010. In 
2015, energy usage in China and in India will exceed that of the United 
States. By 2020, China alone will be exceeding the energy usage of the 
United States. When you look at this graph, the United States' usage is 
very, very slowly going up, but if you look at the energy usage of 
China, it is skyrocketing straight up.
  What does that mean?
  People back home understand this, too. ``Energy'' means jobs. 
``Jobs'' mean people can make sure that they can have those different 
benefits that the honorable gentleman from Texas was talking about. You 
know, if you look at this as energy prices keep going up, what happens? 
Fuel prices go up. Food prices are going up because you've got to get 
the food to market. Then you have got to have heating. Then the 
question is what are those people going to do about going out and about 
buying those necessary goods and services for their families and also 
to help keep this economy moving. It's tough, and people back home 
understand it much better than we do. Congress has got to act, and they 
want it done now.
  The other thing is, as for acting right now, if we stood in the well 
of this House and they stood over in the Senate and we said that the 
United States has an energy policy right now for developing its own 
sources within this country alone, you'd see the world speculation go 
down on what it costs on the oil markets. We're not doing that and they 
know it, so they can keep raising that price on us. America can't be 
tied to Middle Eastern oil for any longer because it is costing us way 
too much money. We have to be able to control our own destiny in this 
country.
  What are we going to do about this?
  Well, to give you an idea of what's happening back home, I come from 
the ninth largest manufacturing district out of 435, so we depend on 
energy. In Ohio, 80 percent of the goods and services that are 
delivered in Ohio are delivered by truck. When you're looking at things 
being delivered by truck, of course they're using fuel. Their fuel 
costs are going up, so whatever they are delivering is costing Ohioans 
more and more dollars, and the same can be said across this great 
Nation.
  The same can be said when you talk about farms. There are farmers out 
in northwestern Ohio right now. They have been planting corn. They are 
out there, putting in soybeans. It's the same thing. Diesel prices are 
up. Fertilizer prices are up. Chemical prices are up. Why? Because 
they're all petroleum-based. So those costs are, unfortunately, going 
to have to be passed along to the people back home and across the 
country.
  Before we broke for Memorial Day, at one of our town hall meetings 
that we had, at the teletown hall, one of the questions that we posed 
was an informal poll. We said, ``What should we be doing? Should the 
United States be out, drilling in this country?'' Overwhelmingly, 6 to 
1 said that the United States must be drilling at this time so we can 
meet our own energy needs.
  If we don't meet those energy needs, what is going to be happening, 
especially with those jobs back home?
  At one of the float glass facilities in my district, their costs in 
the last 5 years have gone up from $10 million in energy costs to $30 
million in energy costs. Why is this significant? There are only 37 
float glass facilities left in the United States while there are, right 
now, 40 being built in China. So, if they can put cheaper people on 
these production lines with the price of the fuel, the countries around 
the world are going to do one thing. They are going to be buying those 
goods not from the United States but from China, and we are going to 
watch more and more of our facilities closing because of the costs of 
high energy in this country, and we can't afford that.
  What do we have to do?
  Well, I think there are several things we have to do in this country. 
One, I think we have to go out and develop our nuclear energy that we 
have at our disposal.
  What is the rest of the world doing?
  You know, a lot of people always have jokes about the French every so 
often. I come from the ancestry of the French. 70 to 80 percent of all 
energy in France is derived from nuclear energy. They are actually 
exporting energy into Europe from France. Russia currently has 31 
reactors in operation. It

[[Page H4865]]

is projected that 37 to 42 nuclear reactors that are currently or will 
be under construction are all scheduled to be in operation by 2020. 
Japan has 55 nuclear reactors in operation, and two or more are in 
construction right now.
  What is China doing on the nuclear side?
  Well, right now, in the next 25 to 30 years, it is pretty much, in 
looking at China, that they will be building at least 40 new nuclear 
power stations across that country. Right now, China has 21 nuclear 
reactors under construction or about to be under construction. They are 
moving ahead.
  What is India doing?
  India is the second leading country right now in the development of 
nuclear energy. India is building small nuclear reactor plants, and in 
the next 25 years, they will probably have 30 in operation. They are 
moving ahead.
  What is the United States doing?
  Well, the last nuclear power plant that was licensed in the United 
States was the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant in 1977. The last plant 
to go on line was in Tennessee in 1996. The last new licensed nuclear 
reactor to go on line was in 1996. We are way behind. Not only are we 
behind in getting these plants on line, but we are also behind in that 
there is only one place on Earth where a lot of these parts can be 
manufactured to get these plants on line, and that is in Japan. So, if 
the United States isn't out either building its own machinery that we 
have to have to run these nuclear power plants, we are in trouble 
because the rest of the world is already in line to get these plants 
built. So we have got to get moving, and we have got to get moving 
quickly. That's what the people back home know and what we talk and 
talk and talk about in Congress.
  Coal. The United States has about 24 percent of the world's coal. 
What are we doing with it? Well, on the majority's side, they don't 
want to do anything with coal. In Ohio, I can tell you a lot about 
coal. We, unfortunately, have what you call high-sulfur coal. So, in a 
lot of places, it is very, very expensive to have to go out and burn 
that coal because you have to put a lot of scrubbers on.
  Now, we have an individual in my district who has developed clean 
coal technology where you can burn this coal in a closed environment 
and produce methane. But, again, are we doing that in this country? No, 
we are not doing it. You know, when you talk to people out there in the 
scientific world as to how much coal we actually have in this country, 
some people say we might have 250 to 350 years of coal, and we're not 
doing anything with it. We have got to do something.

  The Chinese today are going to invest around $24 billion in clean 
coal technology while the United States sits. We have got to be doing 
something.
  Hydroelectric. You know, we all know that the Chinese are building 
their hydroelectric dam right now to produce more power. We're not 
doing it either. We're not doing anything.
  Drilling. That's where the American people really get it. They really 
got it when gasoline prices hit $3.50 a gallon, especially in my 
district. I think that was the breaking point for people in northwest 
Ohio. They say, ``Why aren't we doing something in this country?'' You 
know, we see these gas prices rising. I know, when I got home over the 
Memorial Day break, I should have filled up my gas in the car before I 
left that week because it was around $3.83 when I left Bowling Green. I 
got home that following Friday. It was $4.99 a gallon.
  People say, ``What are we doing in Congress?'' Again, nothing. As the 
gentleman from Texas alluded to in talking about ANWR, you're talking 
about only drilling at around 2,000 acres, which is only one-half of 1 
percent of an area. Nothing is being done. You know, it's estimated 
there are 9 to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil there, and we're 
not doing anything.
  We're not doing anything offshore. You know, the Chinese, as were 
alluded to a little earlier, and the other countries around the world 
are drilling offshore. They're drilling offshore in the United States, 
but we're not doing anything. It's time to act.
  Where I come from in northwest Ohio there was at one time one of the 
largest oil fields in the United States in the 1800s. They say there's 
probably as much oil out there today as there was then, but it's too 
costly to get it up. We ought to have credits out there for individuals 
and companies to go out there and get that oil and bring it up. We need 
to be doing that. We've got to get these prices down because, again, 
our jobs and our livelihoods and our country depend on action today.
  You know, if we got that oil here, the other problem we'd have is 
that we haven't been building refineries in this country. It's been 
about two-and-a-half decades since a refinery has been built in this 
country. It's time we got going. We've got to get this thing done now 
because we don't have time in the future to do it. If you look, as the 
energy usage is going up across the world, the United States is getting 
farther and farther behind everyone else. When they have energy and we 
don't, that's when we're going to be in big trouble.
  Now, I was a history major in college, and in reading our American 
history, of course of our great Industrial Age, we had all the natural 
resources. We had the coal that produced the power to make sure that we 
could make the product, which we were able to export around the world. 
Well, look at this chart, and you're going to see who is going to be 
able to do that in the future. We have got to be able to meet our 
needs, and we have got to meet them today. Time is running out.
  You know, the other scary thing about this is we send more and more 
of our energy overseas. One of the things we have to think about is who 
is owning our debt. Right now, $2.43 trillion is owned by foreign 
countries. The Chinese own about $487 billion of our debt, and we can't 
have that.
  I really appreciate the time the gentleman has allotted to me, and I 
yield back. Thank you.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I appreciate the gentleman from Ohio's 
insightful comments.
  As he has pointed out, it's not a lack of American energy; it's a 
lack of willpower on this floor to develop that energy. What we need is 
American-made energy for America's families and factories.
  To talk a little bit more about that, I want to recognize the 
distinguished conference secretary of the Republican Conference, the 
gentleman from Williamson County, Round Rock, Texas, Congressman 
Carter, for such time as he may consume.

                              {time}  2015

  Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman and my good friend for yielding and 
allowing me to talk on this. You know, having two Texans here, somebody 
is going to be saying, Well, there they are in Texas again, talking 
about energy. And we know something about it. But let me tell you about 
a couple of energy experts that I ran into when I held a little 
impromptu event of standing around a service station in my district and 
talking to the people at the pumps as they pulled up to buy gasoline 
and diesel.
  The first memorable energy expert that I remember was a lady that 
pulled up there and she had a baby, I would say about 2 years old, and 
then she had probably the age 6, 7, 8-year-old girl in the car who 
looked like she was on her way to her ballet lesson. I said, I wanted 
to ask your opinion on gasoline prices. This lady started crying. She 
said, I am a single mom. I have got three kids, two of which I have to 
transport to everything that they go to. I don't want to deprive my 
children of anything that they can go to, like their ballet lessons or 
their ball games. But I just don't know how I am going to be able to 
feed my family and be able to take my kids around, with the price of 
gasoline.
  That is an energy expert. This lady knows that the fact that we have 
failed in our energy policy in this country has caused her to have a 
harm imposed upon her family. There's not much you can say to that 
energy expert but I'm sorry, ma'am. We are trying.
  Then we have another energy expert that pulled up there, and he had a 
plumbing truck. And he was a family plumbing business in Georgetown, 
Texas. I asked him how he felt about the energy business. He said, 
Well, I will tell you what, partner. The price of plumbing in this part 
of Texas is going up, and it's going up in a big way. Me and my boys 
are running four trucks. And he said, I am telling you, the cost of 
fuel going up is killing us,

[[Page H4866]]

and we are going to pass it on to our customers, and the price of 
plumbing is going up. And he says, You know the old joke about plumbers 
charging more than lawyers? Well, I guarantee it's going to be that way 
from now on. I laughed and said, Yes, sir. I hear what you're saying. 
He said, I hope you hear what I am saying.
  I wanted to share that story with you because that story took place 
2\1/2\ years ago when gasoline hit $2.85 a gallon. That was that same 
2\1/2\ years ago when the Republicans were in the majority in the House 
of Representatives. When they took their shots, they were taking them 
at me, because the party that I belong to was the party in power and we 
were being heavily criticized for $2.85 a gallon gasoline.
  Fortunately, that gasoline went down some and it lightened up after a 
point in time, but the criticism continued about the price of gasoline. 
And in the last election, we had promises that there was a plan to 
bring down the price of gasoline, absolutely commonsense plan to bring 
down the price of gasoline. Well, since that promise, I think gasoline 
has gone up $1.65 a gallon. At least when I was home this last week, 
gasoline in my part of Texas was $3.95 a gallon. I understand now it's 
over $4 a gallon.
  I have to think back to that lady and those kids and that family 
plumber with his boys and their business and all those people who are 
having the services and are having the relationships with those people. 
Those were the kind of oil and gas and energy experts we ought to start 
listening to.
  There is a commonsense solution to our energy problem. I want to tell 
you that at the time that I was talking about previously, then-Chairman 
Barton had presented an energy plan that was excellent; that sought 
energy from all sources, including renewables, but certainly looked at 
the oil and gas resources, coal resources, atomic energy resources that 
are available to this country. Yet, that bill was killed by the 
Democrats in the Senate and got nowhere. We are now sitting here 
looking at a worse situation than that by almost two. And we are not 
getting anything done.
  As my colleague pointed out, while we are doing this, the Chinese 
Communists are drilling off the shores of Florida in Cuban waters. But 
we don't drill in those waters. Did you know that last year the oil and 
gas industry in the drilling process spilled one tablespoon of oil 
worldwide? One tablespoon. Yet, we are not willing to even take a look 
at seeking the resources that were there.
  When I was a kid, I guess I was in high school, they had an article 
in the Houston paper where they talked about the dwindling resources in 
the oil and gas business. My father worked for an oil company. So I was 
concerned. And I asked him about it and he told me, son, there's shale 
oil in the Rocky Mountains but it's too expensive to go get. When the 
price is right, we will be able to harvest trillions of barrels of oil 
from the mountain regions of our country. That oil is still there and 
the price is available now to where it's worth going after. We should 
seek the resources that will bring down the price. The American-made 
power is what our American citizens are asking us for. They are begging 
us for it.
  When you go home now, I guarantee you there's not a member of this 
House that if they went home and stayed home this last Memorial Day 
break, if they didn't have somebody ask them about the price of 
gasoline, they must have been deaf or slept through the whole period. 
Because they asked me at church, they asked me at the grocery store, 
they asked me at the service station, everybody that saw me, and they 
asked me everywhere I went, even at the hospital.
  So, you know, when you're sitting there realizing that the American 
family is now suffering and looking down the road and saying there is 
no relief in sight, it's time for us to wake up America, wake up this 
Congress. Let's do that bipartisan work that so many people are 
bragging about right now. Let's do it, and let's do it now.
  Let's do all the energy resources that are available to Americans. 
Let's don't be afraid of one or another industry. The American 
intelligence can make every one of these resources clean and available 
and nonpolluting to this country. We have proven it. Let's look off the 
coast of California and let's look off the coast of Florida and let's 
look in Alaska, let's go to known reserves, and let's take care of that 
lady and those three kids so that she has affordable gasoline so she 
can live her life in the kind of good, free manner that Americans and 
Texans want to live.
  I thank Mr. Barton, my good friend, for allowing me to come here and 
talk about this. I am no energy expert. I just know that the American 
people are. And they want energy that provides the ability to drive 
their automobiles and heat their homes and light our world and give us 
the prosperity of industry that will keep us going. If we have that, we 
will have done our job, and this is our job today.
  I thank you for yielding time.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I thank the gentleman from Round Rock.
  Mr. Speaker, can I inquire how much time we have remaining in our 
Special Order, please?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 20 minutes remaining.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Thank you. I would now like to yield such time 
as he may consume to Mr. Gingrey of Georgia, a physician, who, before 
he became a Member of Congress, was a baby doctor and delivered over 
5,000 American lives into our great Nation, and is concerned about 
their future and wants to make sure they have affordable energy.

  Dr. Gingrey.
  Mr. GINGREY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the distinguished 
ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, former chairman of 
the committee, for yielding time to me.
  My other colleague from Texas, our conference secretary, part of our 
leadership, my good friend, Judge Carter, just said that he is not an 
expert on energy. But he certainly is an expert on common sense. He got 
some of that expertise by talking to his constituents at that impromptu 
town hall meeting at the gas pump in Texas. That is where we get some 
of our knowledge from the people that we represent, and they are mad as 
heck and they are not going to take it any more.
  I am absolutely surprised, Mr. Speaker, shocked that this new 
Democratic majority is apparently not listening to what the American 
people are saying. Back in April of 2006, then-Minority Leader Nancy 
Pelosi released a statement saying, and I quote, ``Democrats have a 
plan to lower gas prices.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, here we are tonight, 
June 3, 2008, over 2 years after Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Pelosi now, 
announced that Democrats had this commonsense plan to help bring down 
skyrocketing gas prices. The average retail price of gasoline is $3.99 
for a gallon of regular. That is what I paid last night to fill up my 
car, a 25-gallon tank. It cost me almost $100.
  Mr. Speaker, this is something that the American people can no longer 
afford. I don't know what this comprehensive plan the Speaker had in 
mind when she spoke to us in January of 2007 for the very first time, I 
don't know what that comprehensive plan was, but I darn sure know what 
the results of the plan was. The result is gasoline prices at the pump 
for regular have gone up more than $1.65 a gallon. Some plan. The proof 
of the pudding indeed is in the eating.
  There are some things that I want to point out in regard to some of 
the plans that the Democrats have had in regard to lowering these gas 
prices and a nationwide average of $3.98 a gallon; in my district, 
$3.99. Here's some of the things that maybe they proposed to bring down 
the price of a gallon of regular gasoline. Sue OPEC? You save nothing. 
Launch the seventh investigation into price gougers? You save nothing. 
Launch the fourth investigation into speculators? You save nothing. 
Twenty billion dollars in new taxes on oil producers? Increasing the 
debt. Halt oil shipments to the strategic petroleum reserve? Maybe save 
a nickel a gallon.
  On the other hand, Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, the Republican plan to 
lower gas prices: Bring United States offshore oil drilling, ANWR, 
saving anywhere from 70 cents to $1.60 a gallon. Drilling in ANWR. My 
colleagues talked about that. Probably an additional 1\1/2\ million 
barrels of petroleum a day from that source.
  Bring United States deepwater oil on line. Out of the Outer 
Continental Shelf is what we are referring to. That

[[Page H4867]]

could save anywhere from 90 cents to $2.50 a gallon. Bring new oil 
refineries on line. Our good friend from Ohio, Representative Latta, 
pointed out that we haven't had a new oil refinery or a nuclear power 
plant license in this country in over 30 years. That could save 15 
cents to 45 cents a gallon. Cut earmarks to fund a gas tax holiday. 
That could save 18 cents a gallon. Again, we agree with the Democrats 
on this one. Halt the oil shipment to the strategic petroleum reserve, 
saving a nickel a gallon. Our plan, the Republican plan, my colleagues, 
in a very conservative way, would save at least $1.98 a gallon; $1.98 a 
gallon. The Democrat plan, at most, a nickel a gallon.
  Well, let me just tell you one thing that they did, the Democratic 
majority, Mr. Speaker, in their energy bill of 2007. There is a section 
in that bill, a section called 526. Basically, what it says is no 
agency of the Federal Government, no agency of the Federal Government 
can utilize a source of energy production that creates a bigger carbon 
footprint than conventional fuel, conventional gasoline and diesel 
fuel. They are absolutely not permitted to do that.
  Now I want, Mr. Speaker, and all of my colleagues, I want you to 
think about the consequence of that. The Federal Government on an 
annual basis utilizes something like 480,000 barrels of refined 
petroleum products; 480,000 barrels.

                              {time}  2030

  I am sorry, that is a day. I said annually. That is a day, 480,000 
barrels. And which branch of the Federal Government uses the most of 
that? Obviously, the Department of Defense. And which branch of the 
Department of Defense, which service branch, uses the most of that? The 
United States Air Force, flying the platforms that we have to maintain 
the security of this country. Almost 480,000 barrels. It is estimated, 
Mr. Speaker, that the Air Force will spend an additional $9 billion for 
that fuel in the year 2008, fiscal year 2008, because of these rapidly 
increasing prices of oil.
  Now, that bill though says they can't go out and utilize anything 
other than that liquid petroleum we all think about bubbling up out of 
the ground. Yet in this country, my friend from Texas referred to it, 
Representative Carter, is something called shale oil that his 
grandfather told him about.
  Shale oil, Mr. Speaker, is mainly in the West, in several Western 
States, and the total amount of additional petroleum that could be 
gotten from that shale oil is something like 3 trillion barrels of 
refined products. Yet we are not allowing the agencies of our Federal 
Government to utilize these sources.
  Tomorrow in the Science Committee, of which I am a member, the NASA 
Subcommittee will be marking up the reauthorization of NASA, the 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They do research on 
shale oil, on oil sands, another product that is very plentiful in 
Canada. A lot of oil could be gotten from that. They are doing that 
research. They are sharing that research with the Department of 
Defense, and yet they are not able to utilize any of that additional 
oil. The amount that we could get from shale oil is equivalent to the 
amount that we have probably utilized in the world over the last 100 
years. That is how much capacity we are talking about.
  Those are the sort of things we can do to bring down the price. I 
could go on and on, but the gentleman has been very generous with his 
time and I want to yield back to him. But we need a comprehensive plan 
that includes nuclear, that includes the use of these alternative 
sources of petroleum products, like oil sands and shale oil. And until 
we get together and do this on a bipartisan basis, the American public 
is going to continue to suffer.
  I yield back to the distinguished gentleman.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I thank the gentleman. I want to point out he 
needs to change his sign. He has his ``9'' upside down. If you subtract 
5 cents from $3.98, you get $3.94 or $3.93. You don't get $3.63. He has 
his ``6'' and ``9'' down there.
  Mr. GINGREY. I thank the gentleman for calling that to my attention. 
We will make that change.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I think you begin to get the point 
we are trying to put across this evening. America has got great energy 
resources. We are not using those resources right now. For various 
political reasons, we have put them off limits.
  We are not allowing any exploration or production in ANWR in Alaska. 
We are not allowing any exploration or production off the West Coast of 
the United States. We are not allowing any exploration or production 
off the East Coast of the United States. We are not allowing our shale 
oil resources to be developed in the interior of the United States. We 
are not developing our coal resources with the clean coal technology 
that the gentleman from Ohio spoke about. So we are a victim of self-
inflicted wounds in this country.
  I would like to say that it can't get any worse, but it can. I was 
just on a congressional delegation that visited Europe. We went to 
Slovenia and to Italy to interact with the European parliament and then 
toured some NATO bases in Italy. They are paying the equivalent of $9 a 
gallon for gasoline, $9. So even though we think $4 a gallon is way too 
high, there are other parts of the world that are paying double what we 
are paying.
  If our energy prices continue to go up, there will be consequences. 
General Motors just announced yesterday they are closing four of their 
automobile assembly plants in this country. Ford Motor Company, one of 
the icons of American industry, their stock is selling at almost an 
all-time low, at least a modern era all-time low. They just divested 
part of their company. They sold it to an Indian automobile company. 
The higher prices go, the more uncompetitive America is in world 
markets and the more Americans are thrown out of work. It is kind of a 
self-propelling cycle.
  We need to do something about it. The good news is that we can do 
something about it. We have the ability more than any other Nation in 
the world to produce our own energy for consumption here in the United 
States. American-made energy for American families and factories is a 
doable deal. It is not a pipe dream. But we have to start in this 
Congress.
  Now, we have a package of 15 energy bills that have been introduced 
at various times in this Congress. They are active. They have bill 
numbers. The Speaker of the House and the majority leader and the 
chairwoman of the Rules Committee and the chairman of the Energy and 
Commerce Committee and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee 
could schedule these bills for committee action, could schedule these 
bills for floor action and bring them to the floor.
  It wouldn't bother me a bit if the Speaker wanted to bring these to 
the floor under an open rule; let Members of both political parties go 
to the Rules Committee and have amendments made in order. Let's have a 
full, fair, open debate in committee, the Rules Committee and on the 
floor of the House of Representatives.
  Some of these bills would probably pass on a suspension calendar if 
they were brought to the floor. Some of the bills would be very 
controversial. The access bill, opening up ANWR, H.R. 6107, would be a 
close vote, no question about that, but I think a majority of the House 
of Representatives would vote in the affirmative to let us develop an 
energy resource that could have as much as 10 billion barrels of oil in 
it. On a daily basis that would be somewhere between 1 and 2 million 
barrels per day with existing technology, if we were to make the 
decision to let that go and to start producing it.
  We have a shale oil reserve bill. We have an alternative fuel for 
defense and aviation bill. Mr. Gingrey talked about that. We have a-
coal-to-liquids bill that is Mr. Shimkus' bill that has a Democrat 
sponsor, Mr. Boucher, the subcommittee chairman of the Energy and Air 
Quality Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee. We have a 
renewable fuel standard bill that would take the renewable fuel 
standard back to the 2005 Energy Policy Act. We have a bill to 
encourage new refineries, Congresswoman Heather Wilson's bill. We have 
a bill on speculation that was introduced by myself. We have a boutique 
fuels bill, H.R. 2493, introduced by our Republican whip, Mr. Blunt. We 
have a bill that provides for some tax provisions by Mr. Terry of 
Nebraska. We have some bills on nuclear energy. We have an Outer

[[Page H4868]]

Continental Shelf bill that has been introduced by Congresswoman Myrick 
of North Carolina.
  I could go on and on. The point I am trying to make is we have 
American energy resources that could be developed and I think should be 
developed. We are not hopeless, we are not helpless, but right now we 
have a majority that, for some reason, has decided that it is okay for 
American citizens to pay these high energy prices, and, as I said 
earlier, if we sit here on our hands and do nothing, the prices are 
going to go up and up and up, which is not a good thing for our 
economy.
  Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, we are planning a series of 
special orders. We are going to continue to try to educate the American 
people on the energy situation. But we are not just out here 
complaining and whining and bemoaning our fate. We have a positive 
solution that, if implemented and sent to the President and signed into 
law, would begin to bring immediate results in the terms of additional 
energy resources and lower energy prices.
  Let's work together. As Daniel Webster says in the saying above the 
Speaker's rostrum, let us develop the resources of our land, call forth 
its powers, build up its institutions, promote its great interests, and 
see whether we also in our day and our generation can do something that 
will be seemed worthy to be remembered by future generations.

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