[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 116 (Tuesday, July 15, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H6567-H6573]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ENERGY PRODUCTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized this 
evening to address you here on the floor of the United States 
Representatives, the world's most deliberative body and the one that's 
supposed to be the most representative of people.
  We are here tonight, a lot of Americans, yourself included and myself 
included, also, have heard from this group of gentlemen who have spent 
the last hour talking about energy. We are looking at gas prices that 
are $4.08, $4.10, $4.11.
  We are looking at gas prices by my data that shows that the gas was 
$2.33 a gallon when Speaker Pelosi took the gavel here about the 3rd 
day in January of last year. We have watched gas go from $2.33 to $4.10 
or $4.11.
  That chart that I saw earlier that showed the gas prices and what 
they were when the Republicans took control of Congress and how we held 
that increase in gas prices down, but when the Speaker of the House 
took the position that we were going to have lower gas prices and an 
effective energy policy, we are still waiting. We are still wondering 
what that was.
  I do know that there has been a lot of noise from this side of the 
aisle about windfall profit taxes. I do know there has been a lot of 
noise about looking into the speculators on the hedge funds, on the 
futures markets. There has been a lot of noise about alleging that oil 
and gas-generating producing companies, are dishonestly or deceptively 
making unjust profits, that Exxon has made $10 billion a quarter 
totaling $40 billion a year. People on your side of the aisle seem to 
they think that we should go back and slap an after-the-fact tax on 
companies that are pouring energy into this marketplace.
  I remember, one of the more senior United States senators making a 
public statement here a couple of months ago, that 85 percent of the 
oil on our market actually comes from countries that are sovereign 
countries that have nationalized their oil industries. So the oil 
belongs to countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, countries 
where it's not private companies, but it's countries that own 85 
percent of the oil that is imported into this country.
  It's not the fault of Exxon, it's no fault of Chevron, it's not the 
fault of a lot of our good American companies that we have. It's a 
number of circumstances all put together, but the sovereign nations 
that have nationalized their oil industries, that are marketing it to 
us, have a lot bigger share of this. They can control and get together 
and do control, under OPEC, the supply of the oil. The demand is going 
to be in proportion to that that is necessary and in proportion to the 
price. Supply and demand is going to control the price of this oil.
  Another component that is not discussed very much--and I don't know 
that it was mentioned in the previous hour--is our weak dollar. Our 
dollar has declined significantly in value, especially since about the 
2003, 2004 era. The more the dollar declines, the more dollars it takes 
to buy oil from foreign countries. So if 85 percent of the oil that's 
available in this marketplace come from foreign countries, owned by 
foreign countries, and we have to send U.S. currency there in order to 
purchase that oil, and we get this imbalance of trade, this imbalance 
that is someplace in the neighborhood of $700 billion a year--not all 
of it oil by any means--the weak dollar contributes to the cost of our 
gas.
  I don't want the public to lose sight that the weak dollar 
contributes to the high cost of all of our commodities here in this 
country. For example, if you do the calculation on what it would take 
to dial the value of our dollar back to what it was to shore up the 
value of the dollar to those values of 2003, 2004 era, that's about 35 
percent of the purchasing power that has drifted away as the value of 
dollar declines.
  We bring it back to that level in proportion to the commodities that 
we are looking at today. We would see about 35 percent come out of the 
price of gasoline.
  Let me just say off the top of my head, my calculus would be been 
this, that if you have $4.10 gas and 35 percent of that is a weaker 
dollar, if we could shore up the value of the dollar, gas will get 
dialed back down to around maybe $2.65 to $2.70 in that area. I am for 
doing that, but in the meantime, while we are doing that, we also 
understand that the demand for fuel worldwide has gone up.
  It stayed fairly flat here in the United States, hardly increased at 
all. But in China it has increased by a third, 32 percent increase in 
the demand for gasoline in China, for example.
  It has gone up as well in India. We lose sight of the fact that the 
increase

[[Page H6568]]

in the imported gasoline for China, for this year, has gone up 2,000 
percent this year if you annualize the numbers up to the last reporting 
date, which I think was maybe the end of May of this year. You set it 
up and annualize as running at a 2,000 percent increase in the amount 
of gas that the Chinese are importing. When they do that, that puts a 
lot of demand on our availability of gas to come into the United 
States.
  We burn about 142 billions gallons of gasoline in this country. We 
produced last year about 9 billion gallons of ethanol to go in and 
supplement that overall gas consumption that we have. That has helped 
keep the price of gas down.

                              {time}  2200

  There has been a powerful argument. I should say it this way: It's an 
argument that has been made by powerful people, and it seems to be 
compelling to folks who aren't critical thinkers or who aren't willing 
to go back and gather some information themselves to analyze the 
situation. This argument is that using corn for ethanol has made food 
prices higher.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, the world doesn't seem to have access to the 
balance of information. They go places like to the University of 
California-Berkeley or to Cornell University to get their information 
on ethanol. I would submit that, if you wanted to learn something about 
ethanol, if you wanted to learn something about corn-based ethanol, you 
ought to go to corn country where we actually make the stuff. We know a 
lot about it there. We've invested our capital in it for a number of 
years. We've come a long way, and we know a lot more about the cost of 
producing ethanol and what it takes to do that than does a scientist or 
a professor or someone with an agenda at the University of California-
Berkeley.
  It works like this: The study that was released by Berkeley and 
Cornell University made the statement that it takes more energy to 
produce ethanol than you get out of it. The gentleman from Maryland has 
been on the floor of this Congress a number of times to make his 
argument in agreement with them, and I consistently disagree.
  I disagree for this reason, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the 
calculation of Berkeley and of Cornell University goes back and 
calculates all of the energy it takes, not just to raise the crop of 
corn--first, if it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than the 
energy you get out of it, you would think they'd be talking about how 
much energy it takes to convert corn into ethanol. They are not talking 
about how much energy it takes to convert corn into ethanol. When they 
say it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it, 
they're taking the energy that it takes to turn corn into ethanol and 
the energy it takes to go to the field to raise a crop of corn that 
gets converted into ethanol and the energy it takes to manufacture the 
tractor and the combine and the planter and the disc and the cultivator 
if you use it and the sprayer and, I presume, the truck to haul it to 
town.
  I read through this 62- or 63-page report that analyzed and that 
added up all of the components of the energy that's required to produce 
a gallon of ethanol. When you get to the point where they're hauling 
iron ore out of the mine in Hibbing, Minnesota--they didn't 
specifically say that, but this gets stretched out to those limits, Mr. 
Speaker--and when you think that your imagination has gone as far as it 
possibly can and when the scientists who claim that their study proves 
that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it, 
then I see in their study that they charge 4,000 calories, which 
represent X number of Btus, for each farmworker per day, that being, 
presumably, a reasonable diet to keep the farmworker with enough energy 
to be able to go out there and raise that crop of corn, which gets 
converted into energy.
  Now, when they go so far as to add up the calories that the 
farmworker eats, I think we ought to know what kind of a study this is. 
When they go so far as to add up the energy that it takes to mine the 
ore and to sail it across Lake Superior and to turn it into cast-iron 
and steel, enough to convert all of the energy that it takes to paint 
the tractor and to haul it out to the farm and the energy it takes to 
put in the tank, I think you know that we're going to make those 
tractors anyway and that we're going to farm those fields anyway.
  We've done that for a long time, and no one has gone back and charged 
the energy and has gotten the energy you got for the food you ate or 
has charged that against what it took to manufacture the tractor or the 
farm machine or the truck that it took to haul the grain. That is not a 
balanced proposal.
  In arguing that it takes more energy to produce ethanol because it 
takes energy to produce the tractor that goes to the field and that it 
takes energy to feed the farmworker, if that's the logic that we're 
using, Mr. Speaker, then I'll submit this: The same logic needs to 
apply to crude oil and to turning crude oil into gasoline in the 
fashion that we have for decades.
  It works like this: If you're going to charge the energy that it 
takes to make the tractor against the corn we converted into ethanol, 
then you also have to calculate the energy that it takes to manufacture 
the drill rig, to power the drill rig. You've got to charge the 
roughneckers on that oil rig 4,000 calories a day just like you do the 
farmworkers.
  By the way, we're defending a lot of oil fields around the world 
because we have to have that oil for our national interests, and so 
we've got to have also all of the energy that it takes to cast the iron 
that is used in the anchor for the battleship and for the carrier and 
for the Humvees and for the bulletproof vests and for the M-16s, the F-
4s and the F-16s and for all of the components that are necessary to 
keep our military in play in places in the world that are a long way 
from home.
  By the way, if it takes 4,000 calories to pay a farmworker to sit on 
a tractor and ride in air conditioning through the field--and we've 
gotten to that technology, and I'm grateful for that--we ought to be 
able to provide at least 4,000 calories to the marine who has to go in 
and root out terrorists in Fallujah.
  So, if you add all of that up, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that it 
takes a lot more energy to convert crude oil into gasoline than it does 
to convert corn into ethanol. Btu for Btu. That proposal, that 
approach, is not a logical one. It's not a rational approach. It is a 
specious and facetious report that seeks to undermine the credibility 
of ethanol.
  So here is the real number. This is Argonne National Laboratory of 
Chicago. We'll start like this:
  You have a barrel of crude oil sitting at the gates of the refinery 
in Texas, and you run that crude oil in, and you convert out of that a 
Btu of crude oil into gasoline--one British Thermal Unit. We'll be 
measuring our energy in Btus here tonight, Mr. Speaker.
  When you take crude oil and convert it into energy and a Btu in the 
form of gasoline, that 1 Btu has already consumed 1.3 Btus just in 
converting the crude oil into gas. It takes a lot of energy to crack 
gas out of crude oil and to convert it into gasoline that we can use in 
our vehicles.
  Now, with a barrel of crude oil at the refinery in Texas, to produce 
1 Btu of energy, it has already consumed more than it is. It consumes 
1.3 Btus for every Btu of energy in gasoline than it produces.
  If you go to, let's just say, Iowa and you set a bushel of corn at 
the gates of the ethanol plant in Iowa and if you convert that corn 
into ethanol to get 1 Btu in the form of corn-based ethanol, it takes 
.67 Btus of energy. These are numbers that come from Argonne Lab in 
Chicago.
  You can boil it down to this: It takes .67 Btus of energy to get 1 
Btu out when you have corn at the ethanol plant, and it comes out in 
the form of ethanol. It takes 1.3 Btus to get gasoline out of crude 
oil, to get 1 Btu of gasoline out of crude oil. So equivalent: Btu to 
Btu, it takes just a shade less than twice as much energy to convert 
crude oil into gasoline as it does to convert corn into ethanol. That's 
the laboratory fact, and we're getting better at it. Perhaps the honest 
answer today is that it's all the way up 2 to 1--twice as much energy 
to convert crude oil into gas as it takes to convert corn into ethanol.

  So the energy component of this is the false argument for those 
people who side with Berkeley and with Cornell University. They cannot 
sustain that kind of argument in the laboratory with corn matched up 
against

[[Page H6569]]

crude oil. They can only make the argument if they add this thing up 
all the way to the iron ore, and that is a false comparison, but if 
they're going to make a false comparison, they need to make a 
corresponding false comparison and add up the energy that it takes to 
make the battleship, the carrier, the F-16, and all of that that it 
takes to defend the oil fields that send oil to us.
  Now, with that being part of the logic, part of the argument is also 
that which comes out of Wall Street and out of The Wall Street Journal 
and out of the New York Times. It's funny. You know, the further away 
you get from a cornfield and the further away you get from an ethanol 
plant, the further away they get from the truth. Here are the things 
that we know in the heart of the renewable fuels country.
  By the way, Mr. Speaker, I would submit to you that, as to the 
renewable fuels country that I represent, the western third of Iowa, 5, 
6, 7 years ago, we didn't have a lot going on for a renewable fuels 
industry. Today in the 5th District of Iowa, in the western third of 
the State, when you add up the ethanol from corn and the biodiesel that 
comes from, let me say, animal fats and soybean oil mostly and when you 
add also to that the wind energy--those are all renewable energies--we 
produce more renewable energy than any other congressional district in 
America. We rank in ethanol production, in biodiesel production and in 
the wind generation of electricity. Those three items outstrip any 
other congressional district in America. So we know a little bit about 
renewable energy where I come from.
  The concern, the argument, that comes from The Wall Street Journal 
and from the New York Times and from the east coast people who are as 
far away as you can get from the cornfields but who have no lack of 
self-confidence when it comes to this argument--and I'm happy to debate 
it with them, Mr. Speaker. In any form and at any time we can make this 
work, I'd happily stand up and take on all of the smartest people they 
can generate, but we're going to go back to facts when they debate with 
me.
  It works like this: This corn that we've raised for years and years, 
this gift of the new world, actually, is hybrid corn that has been 
designed in the laboratories by good companies that help get us through 
droughts to increase the yield, having good seed corn companies that 
will go on record, that will say their design, their improved hybrids, 
will be increasing yields 3 to 4 percent per year as far out as one can 
predict.
  When I was a kid, our corn was 80 bushel per acre. Now a pretty good 
crop is 200 bushel per acre. They think that we're going to see a 3 to 
4 percent increase per year until corn goes to 300 bushel per acre. So 
think of that difference, Mr. Speaker. From the time I was a little 
guy, growing up, 80-bushel corn was an okay crop. 100 bushel corn was a 
bin buster crop. We've gone past 200 bushel today and are looking on 
our way to 300 bushel per acre.
  That's because we're getting a lot better at the things we're doing. 
We've got better hybrids to work with. We're placing our fertilizer 
more precisely. We've got better wheat control. We've got some GMOs. We 
have roundup-ready corn and roundup-ready soybeans. A lot of design and 
engineering has gone into these crops that has increased their yield 
and has provided for the genetic resistance to pests and also to the 
resistance of certain herbicides so that we can kill the weeds, so that 
we can grow the crops and so that we can do so in an environmentally 
friendly fashion. It's better for our water. It's better for our air. 
It just isn't so good for bugs, and it isn't so good for weeds.
  We do those things with increased corn production and with increased 
soybean production in our part of the country. Yet we're faced with 
this argument that comes out of a long ways distance from the 
cornfield, which is Wall Street, which says, well, food versus fuel is 
really the argument, that we're taking food and we're converting it to 
fuel, and for that reason, food prices are going up.
  Well, first of all, we have for millennia--for thousands and 
thousands of years--since the first real farmer planted a crop--and 
I'll suggest that that probably was a cavewoman and not a caveman. A 
caveman was likely out, doing hunting and gathering. A cavewoman must 
have recognized that some of those seeds that got dumped outside the 
cave predicted what was going to grow there. So she said why don't I 
just save some of these seeds and plant them in the ground. Then maybe 
I'll be able to actually put my own crop in.
  When they started to do that, that was the beginning of agriculture, 
and from there on out, it has always been about food and fiber. From 
the beginning of production agriculture or of subsistence agriculture, 
it has been about food and fiber. You raised the food up out of the 
crops, and the fiber that came from that was used for rope, for 
clothing, for bedding, for things of that nature. So that has gone on 
for thousands of years. We raised crops for food. We raised crops for 
fiber. Of course, one of those fiber crops would be cotton.
  Yet, today, we've taken it to another level. We've got food, fiber 
and fuel. The three F's of agriculture today are food, fiber and fuel. 
Food versus fuel is not the argument they would have you believe is 
coming out of Wall Street, and it works like this: For the 2007 crop, 
during that period of time, food inflated--appreciated in cost--by 4.9 
percent. Energy prices went up 18 percent. As to the 4.9 percent of 
that food, much of the cost of the food's going up is the energy that 
it takes to deliver it and to process it. Inflation comes because we 
know that high energy costs go into everything that we have and into 
every part of our economy. It takes energy to do everything. It takes 
energy to produce. It takes energy to deliver. It takes energy to 
process. So, as those costs go up, so does the cost of food go up 18 
percent.
  So the wizards of Wall Street say, well, food went up, so therefore, 
the cost of that is because, if we'd had those 3.2 billion bushels of 
corn into the food market, that would have been a lot of corn on 
somebody's plate to eat, and it would have kept the food prices down.
  Well, the first thing is that's all field corn, and I don't know 
anybody who sits down to a plateful and loves it; although, if you 
catch it just right, you can eat it on the cob, and it's not so bad. 
After that, it's livestock feed, and yes, we process that corn into 300 
different products or so. That's pretty specialized processing for some 
of the things. Corn oil, sweetener, things like that, and corn starch 
are some of the things we do. As to those forks and knives, if you put 
them in your coffee down in the Longworth cafeteria and they melt and 
go rubbery on you, I believe those are also made out of corn, they tell 
me, and we can do them better than that by the way. Those are some of 
the things we do with corn.
  One of the things we don't do with corn is set an ear of field corn 
on one's plate and eat it. In fact, you don't make cornflakes out of 
it, and you don't make corn chips out of it.

                              {time}  2215

  Most of that corn is livestock feed. And it has a component in it 
that's starch, and it has a component in it that's oil and has a 
component in it that's protein. And the value of this corn as we break 
it down, it works out like this. Some of the oil has a high value to 
it, but poultry and hogs can't digest that higher oil product so well. 
Cattle seem to do okay. And yet the world has an over supply of starch, 
and it has a shortage of protein.
  And so we take the corn, and we grind the corn up and process it into 
ethanol and we process the starch into ethanol, and we bring the 
protein back; and the protein comes back in the form of DDGs, or dried 
distillers grains is what that stands for, and we have wet mash in a 
number of different varieties and some high-protein varieties. We have 
a series of higher quality byproducts of ethanol production.
  But to keep it simple, there is dried distillers grain. And the dried 
distillers grain is the protein. The starch has been converted into 
ethanol. Much of that starch would have passed through the animal and 
have been wasted had we fed it. But most of the protein is retained in 
the process. We feed it back to livestock.
  And however pessimistic you want to be, Mr. Speaker, when you take a 
bushel of corn and convert it into three bushels of ethanol, or excuse 
me, three gallons of ethanol, that bushel of corn will have at least 
half of its value of

[[Page H6570]]

feed left over in the form of protein that goes back to livestock and 
the value of it is actually a little higher.
  So a bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds, and you can split that 
into thirds. About a third of it goes off in the starches that are 
converted into ethanol, about a third of it goes off in the form of 
CO2, carbon dioxide--and a lot of that is wasted if you feed 
the corn anyway--and about a third of that is retained in dried 
distillers grain which goes back on the truck and back out to the feed 
lot and fed to livestock which converts it into protein that we can 
use, Mr. Speaker.
  So if you go to an ethanol plant and stand there and watch what is 
happening, there will be trucks coming in that are dumping off corn. 
And they will come in and unload that corn; some of them will turn 
right back around, pull back underneath in the next bay and load 
themselves completely up with dried distillers grain and go out to the 
feed lot and dump that load off out there, and that goes out to feed 
cattle. We don't lose that grain in the fashion that Wall Street thinks 
we do.
  So however you cut it, you have to add back in half, at least, and 
that's a conservative number, Mr. Speaker.
  So here is how it works for the 2007 crop. Food prices went up 4.9 
percent. Fuel prices went up 18 percent. They would have gone up more 
if we hadn't have put 9 billion gallons of ethanol on the market. So if 
the fuel prices had gone up, I believe they would have driven food 
prices up even higher. And to think that because we took corn off the 
market to make ethanol, that that deprives someone of a meal, it didn't 
happen. It didn't happen in a single instance in America or across the 
world for that matter, Mr. Speaker.
  Additionally, last year, 2007, we raised more corn than ever before, 
13.1 billion bushels of corn. That's a lot of corn, Mr. Speaker. And we 
export more corn than ever before, 2.5 billion bushels of corn. Not 
only do we export more than ever before, but we converted more into 
ethanol than ever before. We used 3.2 bushels of corn for that.
  So if you have got your calculator out, and you are thinking how this 
works--and a lot of us can figure this in our head or do so with a 
pencil and a cardboard box--13.1 billion bushels of corn, minus 2.5 
billion was exported, more than ever before I would remind you again, 
minus 3.2 billion bushels that went into ethanol production, and then 
but about half of that gets added back in because we didn't lose the 
feed value of all of that corn. So that's 1.6. Do a plus on 1.6 billion 
bushels of corn, that it goes back as a feed value. And now you should 
be at, Mr. Speaker, if you're wide awake and alert and paying 
attention, that you're at 9.0 billion bushels of corn available for the 
domestic consumption in the United States.
  Now, what does that mean? Well, the answer, to put it in proportion, 
is that if you average the rest of the years in the decade, the average 
bushels that were available for domestic consumption in the United 
States, and that's the same math I have done, total production minus 
export, minus conversion to ethanol, to get you to that number the 
average bushels that are available for domestic consumption in the 
United States, that comes out to be 7.4 billion bushels. That's an 
average year. That's an average year in the last decade and the most 
representative we have, Mr. Speaker. But we had available to the 
domestic supply 9.0 billion bushels.
  So that's 1.6 billion bushels more than we normally have for domestic 
supply of corn. And that says to me that high corn prices in this 
country aren't solely attributable to ethanol, and it says to me that 
it isn't really a food-versus-fuel argument. It says to me there are 
other factors out there such as the increase in world demand of 
gasoline, diesel fuel, and other hydrocarbons that come from petroleum 
products. It also says to me the weak dollar has made a difference, 
that the Chinese and their demand has gone up by 32 percent, and the 
Indian demand has gone up dramatically, and the Chinese import has 
increased 2,000 percent this year.
  We also should understand that there are countries in the world that 
subsidize the gas purchases, China being one of them. There are 
multiple countries in the world that subsidize gas for people. So 
they're buying the value of that gas down. If they can do that, because 
they hold a lot of dollars maybe, maybe their currency buys a lot, 
whatever is their motivation, we're not subsidizing gas here in the 
United States. We're taxing it. We're taxing gas in the United States 
for a number of reasons.
  But in my State, the gas tax is over 20 cents a gallon. It's been 
that way for a long time. The Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon. 
And I look at this floor and the people on it and those who hold the 
gavels to chair the committees, and it's astonishing to the people in 
my part of the country that there wouldn't be enough pressure coming 
from your constituents to get you to finally crack and allow us to 
drill to get access to places like ANWR, the Outer Continental Shelf, 
the BLM lands in the United States.
  Why does not that pressure come from your constituents, let us just 
say Mr. Rangel in New York. Mr. Rangel, why don't your constituents 
rise up and demand cheaper gas? I ask that question. And you can tell 
me, but let me try to answer, and I will be happy to yield to you if 
you like. But I think the answer is this. Your constituents ride the 
subway. Your subway is mass transit. Your mass transit is subsidized by 
the gas tax that my constituents pay. So when they're paying $4.10 a 
gallon for tax, 20-some cents for state tax on that, 18.4 cents for 
Federal tax, 17 percent of the Federal gas tax dollar goes to 
subsidized mass transit which subsidizes your subway riders, those 
people who are riding around in the subterranean tunnels in New York 
City. They get a cheap ride, my constituents pay the price.
  My constituents are mad. They're tired of $4.10 gas. Your 
constituents are riding on the backs of mine. That's why you're not 
hearing from them.
  You can go right down here to South Capitol, Mr. Speaker, and climb 
on the Metro, and for $1.25 you can get a ride out to Falls Church. But 
17 percent of the gas tax dollar that's paid for by my constituents and 
the people that don't have a subway and don't of a Metro and don't have 
an L and don't have a San Francisco cable car, 17 percent of that, 
their money, their gas tax money, goes to subsidize the cable car in 
San Francisco, the subway in New York, the L in Chicago, and the Metro 
here in Washington, D.C.
  That's why you're not hearing the pressure, Mr. Rangel. I'm hearing 
it. I have been hearing it for a long time. I have been feeling the 
pressure when I write the checks. I don't have to wait for my 
constituents to tell me.
  It's about time your constituents rose up and said, Let's solve this 
problem because the economy in the United States will ultimately 
collapse if we're going to be sending our money overseas and let them 
hold us hostage for the oil that they have. And yet the answer that the 
majority party has is don't drill now, don't drill anywhere, don't 
allow any of this energy to come up out from underneath our very feet.
  The natural gas in this country is massive. I have many times come to 
the floor and said there are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out 
there, much of it on the Outer Continental Shelf, much of it we've not 
been not able to explore, and we don't know how much is there. But 
known reserves. I said 406 trillion cubic feet, and I saw a chart today 
that took us up to 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas still with 
massive areas uncharted, unknown. That's just the known reserves.
  Natural gas is a big chunk of the energy that we burn in America, Mr. 
Speaker. And here is an example of the percentage.
  This is our energy production. All of the different kinds of energy 
that we produce and consume here in the United States, there's the 
natural gas component. Now this is the 365-degree pie chart that's all 
the Btus, Mr. Speaker, that we use. It includes electricity, gasoline, 
diesel fuel, coal, all of the sources of British thermal units. And of 
the energy we produce in America, the natural gas component is right 
here, 27.46 percent, a big old chunk of the energy we use.
  Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania, John Peterson has come down here on 
this floor and repeatedly said natural gas is the mother's milk of 
manufacturing in America. It's the mother's milk of fertilizer. Ninety 
percent of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer, which is 
essential to grow everything, is right

[[Page H6571]]

here in the cost of natural gas. Yet because we refuse to develop our 
natural gas, prices have soared here in the United States and we've 
essentially lost our fertilizer industry; and they go to places like 
Trinidad, Tobago, where they have cheap, cheap natural gas. And that is 
driving the industry.
  But also it allows for people like Hugo Chavez to hold us hostage. 
And a lot of that fertilizer comes from Russia.
  But here in the United States, we've got the natural gas to do this, 
but the pressure on this natural gas is getting great because the 
Greens--and that means the ``green people'' that come up with some of 
these partial formulas; they can't think the whole thing through or 
refuse to, Mr. Speaker--but their idea is that the carbon, the 
greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon emissions from burning natural gas 
are less than they are from burning coal.
  Here is our measure on coal: 32.54 percent of the energy produced in 
America is coal, 27.46 percent is natural gas.
  So to give you a sense on how the Greens think, Mr. Speaker, it would 
be this: There is a coal-fired generating plant that provides the 
electricity for our Capitol complex here in the center of Washington 
D.C. Seems as though the Speaker of the House somehow has control or 
authority over how they manage that generating plant. I would think it 
would be the experts that do that, but obviously it's not. And I come 
to find out a month or so ago that the Speaker of the House, Nancy 
Pelosi, Democrat from San Francisco, San Francisco attitudes and ideas 
and ideals, issued some kind of an order that converted the power-
generating plant that was fired by coal and operated effectively and 
efficiently, over to natural gas under the belief that there are fewer 
greenhouse gasses emitted by natural gas.
  Now that may be true, but natural gas is a lot more expensive to 
generate electricity out of than coal.
  So she converted from an economic-generating system to an uneconomic-
generating system, and she tapped into the supply for my fertilizer. 
When you use natural gas to create, to produce more generating plants, 
you're taking that natural gas away from fertilizer. You're taking your 
natural gas away from manufacturing. You have tapped in to and you have 
siphoned off the mother's milk for the economy in this country to 
convert it to producing electricity.
  The State of Florida--and I'm happy to see that a good number of the 
Florida delegation has decided that they think a little differently 
about drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf today. But a couple of 
years ago, the report I saw was that there were 33 generating plants 
planned for construction in Florida and that 28 of those 33 were to be 
natural gas fired; natural gas fired in a State that has all of that 
natural gas surrounding the Peninsula but is not willing to allow us to 
go down and tap into that natural gas.
  Some of them are changing their position because they understand the 
security of this country is tied up in energy and the cost of energy, 
and if we keep shipping our wealth out, it won't matter pretty soon. We 
will be unable to function as an economy and the rest of the world will 
catch up and sweep us up.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, the natural gas here, which I think is an 
inappropriate use to be increasing the use of natural gas to generate 
electricity, instead, the Speaker converted the coal-fired plant here, 
which was at least economical, to a natural gas fired plant, and then 
insisted that the Capitol complex be carbon neutral.

                              {time}  2230

  And so in order to get carbon neutral, the idea is you're supposed 
to, if you can't get neutral on your own, then provide incentives so 
others can contribute. And so the order was to the management and 
administration of the Capitol complex here to go buy some carbon 
credits on the board of trade in Chicago.
  Now, I've forgotten what they call these carbon credits. There's a 
certain trading mechanism there on the board in Chicago that will allow 
people to go in and buy and sell carbon credits. And so the taxpayers 
of the United States spent $89,000 buying up some carbon credits on the 
board in Chicago.
  Some of those carbon credits--the number would be about $14,500--went 
to a coal-fired generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa, and that coal-
fired generating plant was to experiment with burning switchgrass to 
generate electricity, as opposed to burning coal. The idea is that, 
when you burn switchgrass, you use the plant to sequester the carbon, 
pulls the carbon dioxide out of the air, turns it into cellulose in the 
form of carbon. You harvest the switchgrass, haul it into the coal-
fired generating plant, dump it into an incinerator, heat it up and use 
that heat to generate the steam that it takes to spin the turbine that 
generates the electricity. That's the deal with switchgrass.
  Well, the $14,500 check off that board apparently, according to the 
news at least, went to the plant in Chillicothe, Iowa, and they had 
already scrapped their plan to burn switchgrass. So it didn't change 
anybody's behavior in the positive, but it did help a little bit I 
suppose minimize the pain of experimenting with that.
  $14,500 of that $89,000 also went to one of the Dakotas, and it's 
easy to mix them up, but I'm going to say I believe it was South 
Dakota. In any case, it was Farmers Union, and they distributed that 
money to no-till farmers. And the report is that they didn't change 
anybody's behavior, that some of them were to going to no-till farm 
anyway. Some of them had already no-till farming, but it helped out a 
little bit on the bottom line.
  Now, this idea that we can trade carbon credits and not have any way 
to go back and audit and be able to measure, first, whether it changed 
anybody's behavior or whether you rewarded somebody for behavior that 
they had already adopted for some other reason, now I've got neighbors 
that are no-till farmers. About a third of the land around me is no-
tilled. I wish it were more, and those that have been no-tilling for 
years are good leaders, and they will sequester some carbon in the 
soils, and I think that's a scientific fact, Mr. Speaker.
  But it's also a fact that if they change their mind on no-till, and 
they want to go out and open that field up and farm it in a more 
conventional fashion, in a very short while, a few years at the 
maximum, all the carbon that's been sequestered is released into the 
atmosphere anyway. And so what was the point in paying them to 
sequester the carbon if you couldn't be sure that you could retain it 
there?
  This has gotten pretty silly in America, Mr. Speaker. It's gotten so 
silly that when I pick up my chain saw and go out and trim the trees, 
we call that harvesting sequestered carbon where I live. And when I 
climb on the lawn mower and go out and cut the grass, we call that 
harvesting sequestered carbon. And so if I'm going to harvest that 
sequestered carbon, I wonder if I shouldn't get a credit for it here, 
and I would be willing to take that credit, if the Speaker would want 
to send me a check for it, and I'd contribute that back to the 
taxpayers that paid for it.
  This is a silly, silly thing going on, and I can tell you that none 
of this thinking would have originated in the Midwest of the United 
States of America. It's got to come from the left coast and sometimes 
it comes from the east coast, but this is the kind of thinking that you 
run into in places like San Francisco and Berkeley and Boston. This is 
this kind of myopic thinking that can't think it through, can't get to 
the end, can't paint the picture of what America would look like if we 
gave them all their way.
  So I'm not thrilled to see the direction that this is going, Mr. 
Speaker, but before I lose track, I want to make this point real well 
for everyone who is paying attention.
  These are the components of our energy production. I call this is the 
energy pie, Mr. Speaker. Natural gas, 27.46 percent; coal, 32.54 
percent. This is our nuclear, nuclear energy at 11.66 percent of the 
overall production. I wish that were a lot higher. Here's your 
hydroelectric power, 3.41 percent. Now, these tiny little slivers, 
things that we think actually matter and one day hopefully some of them 
grow so that they do, geothermal, little less than a half percent, .49 
percent, not much; wind, .44 percent. Got a lot of that around me, and 
I'm happy that we have it. It's not a very big piece of our production 
pie, however. Solar power, .11 percent and can't even see that

[[Page H6572]]

there. It's just a line. Fuel from ethanol, .76 percent. As much as we 
produce, 9 billion gallons of ethanol is still only three-quarters of a 
percent of the overall production pie chart.
  Biodiesel, .09 percent, tiny little sliver. Biomass growing, 4.12 
percent. Some of that biomass is growing because we're palletizing 
waste and because we're palletizing wood products, for example. So we 
have people that have biomass furnaces. Well, I don't know how good 
that is from a greenhouse gas standpoint, Mr. Speaker, but biomass is a 
larger piece than one would think it is, 4.12 percent.
  Motor gasoline, this is the gasoline that's produced in the United 
States of America. That's 8.29 percent of the overall production chart 
that we have.
  Diesel fuel and heating oil together is the red piece, that's 4.2 
percent. Kerosene and jet fuel together, 1.57 percent. You'd think that 
would be a little more, too.
  And then the other petroleum products, that would be things like our 
real heavy oils like asphalt and products like that, that's 4.86 
percent, a bigger piece than you might think.
  This is what we produce, Mr. Speaker, in the form of energy, and now 
if it were also what we consumed, that would be a good picture. But 
here's a picture of what we consume, and the outside circle is the 
piece of our energy consumption. The inside circle is our energy 
production, Mr. Speaker. It's set up like this so that we can take a 
look at this and quickly see the difference between production and 
consumption.
  The outside picture, the energy consumption, works out to be that, of 
all the energy we consume, natural gas is 23.3 percent of that. Coal is 
22.4 percent. You can see that some of these things like coal we 
produce a big chunk of what we consume, in fact probably all of it. 
Nuclear, we produce what we consume, but it's 8.29 percent of the 
overall energy consumption. Compare it to the lower chart, where our 
production is 11.66 percent, and shows you just almost proportionally 
what happens when you go from the production chart to the consumption 
chart.
  You can go all the way on around, and rather than pound that all in, 
the situation is this. We're producing 8.29 percent of the gasoline. 
8.29 percent is the percentage of the overall production, but of our 
overall consumption, gas is 17.44 percent.
  Bottom line works out to be this. Energy production, Mr. Speaker, is 
72.1 quadrillion Btus of energy, 72.1. Now, quadrillion, that's 15 
zeros behind there. It's a big number. But in proportion to this other 
number, we all understand it. We're consuming 101.4 quadrillion Btus.
  The energy consumption pie is bigger than the energy production pie, 
Mr. Speaker, and that is the issue that we're dealing with, and we need 
to grow every one of these components. We need more domestically 
produced natural gas. We need more petroleum so that we can produce 
more gasoline, more diesel fuel, more kerosene and jet fuel, more other 
petroleum products that we have, and we need to produce more coal, 
clean-burning coal. Coal's cheap, we have a lot of it, and nuclear, I 
mentioned.
  The French and their electrical generation production, 78 percent is 
nuclear. Now, you can look across the world for all time and measure up 
the safest forms of energy of electrical production, and it's going to 
come down to nuclear is just about safer than anything else. We think 
that it's dangerous because of Chernobyl. We don't generate electricity 
with plants designed like Chernobyl. We do it the opposite. It is much, 
much safer in this country than it was there. Three Mile Island, turns 
out that it actually wasn't the kind of a situation that they had us 
thinking it was.
  And so right now, electrical generation production on nuclear is the 
safest we can do. It's the most environmentally friendly that we can 
do, and there is no reason that we can't be in production, building 
more and more nuclear-generating plants. There is one that's under 
construction in South Carolina, and hopefully, they will be able to 
streamline the regulatory process.
  But we've been tied up for more than a generation by people that are 
opposed to nuclear-generating plants. Even though they didn't have the 
science behind them, they still tied it up. They still filed lawsuits. 
They created movements, and these movements are movements that aren't 
based sometimes on fact but based on emotion.
  And we've seen Europe do some things that we thought was pretty silly 
because it's tied up in emotion. One of those is to oppose genetically 
modified organisms, GMOs. So the corn and the beans that we produce 
here, the roundup ready I talked about, the beans going up and the 
weeds dying out, that's not a product that they want to take on over 
there. So their production has not kept up as ours has, but yet somehow 
they figured out that if they needed electricity and they need to be 
able to run their air conditioners and their heaters and turn on their 
lights and do all of those other things that electricity does, in order 
to do so they've had to generate their electricity with nuclear. 
They're ahead of us in that capacity. We need to grow the nuclear power 
here.
  I would grow the hydroelectric power. In fact, I could find some 
places to store up some of that power and reservoirs that would protect 
some parts of Iowa from flooding in the future. And yet, we haven't 
built big dams in this country in a long time because 
environmentalists, Mr. Speaker, stand in the way. Environmentalists 
stand in the way of building more nuclear plants.
  Environmentalists stand in the way of producing more coal-fired 
generating plants. Some people think we'll never build another new 
coal-fired generating plant because environmentalists stand in the way.
  When it comes to natural gas, environmentalists stand in the way, not 
in the way of burning the gas but in the way of drilling for it and in 
the way of distributing it and laying out pipelines so we can get it 
collected. And you look around at kerosene jet fuel, other petroleum 
products, environmentalists stand in the way.
  What are they willing to allow us to do? Well, take nuclear off the 
table, take coal off the table, take development of natural gas off the 
table. All these petroleum products here, they're all off the table. 
Motor gasoline is off the table. What's left? Biomass, and if they 
caught you burning wood in your furnace they would think that added too 
much to greenhouse gas, Mr. Speaker, so they would take your wood-
burning fireplace off the table.
  So what's left? Well, let's see, fuel from ethanol? Oh, no, that's 
food versus fuel, we can't do that. That goes off the table.
  Solar, well, solar, .08 percent, maybe just maybe. It's a real thin 
line there. You can't even see the wedge. Maybe they'd let us put up 
some more solar panels. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, Mr. 
Speaker, if they'd let us do that.
  Biodiesel, no, I know that's food versus fuel. Either soybean oil or 
animal fat, so somebody can eat or drink it or do something else with 
it.
  Wind, oh, yeah, they'd let us build more wind. Of course, it takes a 
lot of energy to produce those generators, and maybe if we would let 
them use the same formula that they used to add up the energy that it 
takes to produce ethanol, it might turn out that it takes more energy 
for a wind charger than to get out of the wind.

                              {time}  2245

  But I don't think those folks at Berkley and Cornell have actually 
dug into that to figure out how much energy that is at this point. So 
maybe, just maybe, we can tap a little energy from wind, a little 
energy from solar, and it looks to me like we're pretty much out, 
except for maybe geothermal, but, you know, it takes a little energy to 
produce that, too.
  So if I just take the things that are off the table out of here and 
add up the consumption on those that may still be on the table, we have 
solar at .08, we have wind at .31, so that's .39 geothermal at .35, so 
you end up with .74--I think that will be the number--.74 of a percent. 
Not quite three-quarters of 1 percent of all of the energy that we 
consume in America is the only that would be acceptable to the 
environmentalists that stand in the way. .74 percent of our energy that 
we consume is not objectionable to them, Mr. Speaker.
  And the number probably changes a little bit down here out of our 
production, but the point remains, it wouldn't

[[Page H6573]]

change more than--you get down to about 1 percent of the max. The point 
remains. These are people that think that our people can get along 
without energy.
  Now, how can that be? What kind of a world would you be looking at? I 
mean, are these folks that live down next to the equator maybe? I 
remember Jimmy Carter sitting there saying, well, this Nation isn't 
going to be able to cut it anymore. Our future is minimized 
dramatically. We aren't going to be able to have gasoline to put in our 
cars. And we're going to have to be willing to accept a lower quality 
of life and a lower standard of living. But what you need to do if 
you're a patriot American is to buy yourself a cardigan sweater and put 
that on and button it up and sit in the chair and turn your thermostat 
down to 60. Now, that might work in Georgia--I don't actually think it 
works all the time in Georgia. It will work most of the time in 
southern Florida--maybe even all the time in southern Florida. It 
doesn't work much of the time in northern Iowa or Minnesota or Montana. 
It doesn't work most of the time in the northern half of the United 
States. But it worked for Jimmy Carter, put on a sweater, turn your 
thermostat down to 60.
  So what's the future for this country if we can't find the will to 
expand all of these sources of energy as opposed to making a dinky 
little argument about less than 1 percent of the energy production we 
have as if somehow that's going to solve our problem.
  And we saw T. Boone Pickens come on television in the last few days 
and say, ``I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one problem we 
can't drill our way out of.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, that may be true, but 
this is one problem that we can't get out of without drilling either, 
and T. Boone Pickens needs to hear that.
  Part of the solution is, develop the energy that we have, expand the 
size of this overall energy production pie. And let's be realistic. If 
you're only supporting three-quarters of 1 percent of the overall 
sources of energy that we have, what are you going to do with the 
people until you can get to the point where you can--you think you can 
really expand that three-quarters of 1 percent into 101.4 quadrillion 
Btus? Do the math on that. Do the math on that and tell me how you come 
back with that, you brainiacs that are believing that this country can 
get along without energy.
  So what does energy do? It lights our homes; it heats our homes. It 
fuels our vehicles. It powers the cable car in San Francisco. It 
provides our manufacturing energy. It keeps the wheels of this economy 
moving. And without energy, turn out the lights, pull the keys out of 
the car, pull the keys out of the boat and the camper, lock up our 
factories, lock up our offices, go back, and you can't even light the 
candle because that would put greenhouse gases up into the air and then 
you would have to buy a carbon credit from maybe somebody that's going 
to burn switch grass or do no-till farming in the Dakotas somewhere, 
Mr. Speaker.
  I'm not going to be willing to accept the idea that we can't have a 
comprehensive energy plan. And I'm not going to be willing to accept 
the idea that the people that produce that energy are somehow 
capitalizing on the people here in the United States. It is supply and 
demand. I'm not going to be willing to accept the idea that there is a 
lot of margin in the futures markets and that somehow the traders have 
driven this up and it's an inflated price. Because when you buy in the 
futures, every time you go long somebody has to go short. That's the 
way it works, Mr. Speaker.
  And last week we had witnesses before the Ag Committee that testified 
that they thought that a pretty respectable percentage of the high cost 
in gasoline comes from the people that are trading in the futures 
market--now, I'm not one of them. And we heard from Mr. Van Hollen of 
Maryland who said, when asked the question, how much margin is in 
there? He said, Well, I don't know. I don't know how much is there, but 
I know we've got to squeeze it out drop by drop. And you go to his 
left, and there was Ms. DeLauro, who I asked if she believed in the 
free enterprise system. And she convinced me that we have two different 
concepts of what the supply and demand is and the free market system 
is.
  And then you move to her left and you have the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Stupak) who, breathtakingly, wrote in his written 
testimony and repeated it in his oral testimony that supply and demand 
doesn't affect the price of gold. If gold is a commodity, the value of 
it is a speculators' commodity, so it's no longer affected by supply 
and demand and that we don't use it industrially. So over the weekend I 
looked over there at that gold dome, that's the Iowa Capitol, and it 
looks to me like that's an industrial use. And I looked down at my 
wedding ring, and maybe that's a jewelry/commercial industrial use. 
This gold is not coming back on the market. Supply and demand affects 
the price of gold as much today as it did when Adam Smith wrote about 
the Spanish galleons going down to Central America and hauling back 
those galleons loads of gold. They dumped that on the market in Europe 
and the price of gold plummeted because they took the price of labor 
out of it by actually stealing it from the Central Americans, Native 
Americans.
  Breathtakingly argued that supply and demand doesn't affect the price 
of gold, and that oil is now a commodity like gold and it's not 
affected by supply and demand either. I simply can't argue with that 
way of thinking, I'll just say that supply and demand affects the price 
of everything. It's our free market system. If it doesn't, then it's 
government controlled, and then its volume will be rationed, Mr. 
Speaker.
  And so of all the things we need to do, we need to grow the size of 
the energy pie, grow our production--this is our production--grow it 
out to the limits of our consumption, grow a little more if we can. 
Let's export a little energy and take some cash back. Let's shore up 
the dollar. Let's fix our balance of trade. Let's continue to close 
this deal; we've won the war in Iraq, and now let's finish the deal 
there. We've chased al Qaeda back through into Pakistan and 
Afghanistan. We're going to have to go there and mop it up, that's 
right. Casualties in Afghanistan have, of a matter, exceeded that of 
Iraq, and the troops in Afghanistan are far less than they are in Iraq. 
So proportionally it's more risky to serve in Afghanistan today than it 
is in Iraq.
  Let's do all that. Let's seal the border. Let's end birthright 
citizenship. Let's shut off the jobs magnet. Let's get this country 
moving again. Let's improve the average annual productivity of our 
citizens, and let's improve their quality of life at the same time. And 
let's, Mr. Speaker, go back and anchor ourselves in those timeless 
values that are the pillars of American exceptionalism, they're in the 
Bill of Rights, they're in our history, they're in the Federalist 
Papers, and the central pillar is the rule of law.
  We are a Nation that is the leader and the readout for western 
civilization. And one of our core values is we came from the Age of 
Reason in Greece, let's make sure we maintain our reason here. Let's 
make sure that we can maintain our ability to deductively reason, think 
our way through, and ask the American people to be critical thinkers. 
And let them be critical of us when they are logical, and let's respond 
to them with facts and logic, not political campaign rhetoric. Let's 
fix this energy problem and move forward together.

                          ____________________