[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 142 (Tuesday, September 9, 2008)]
[House]
[Page H7860]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HIGH ENERGY PRICES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. Mr. Speaker, it's great to be back in the Chamber with 
the microphones on and with the lights fully ablaze and with our guests 
in the gallery and with cameras rolling.
  For the past 5 weeks, I along with 135 of my Republican House 
colleagues have been on the floor, talking to our guests in the 
Chamber, talking about the number one issue facing America today, which 
is high energy prices. It was a very good exchange and a chance to not 
only talk about energy and where we're at and where we need to go in 
the future but also to visit with many of our guests here in 
Washington, D.C.
  The major premises that we had when we left on the 1st of August are 
still true today. We have no comprehensive energy plan or policy. Even 
though gas prices might be stabilizing, they're stabilizing because the 
economy is going down. Eighty-four thousand jobs have been lost, all 
directly related to high energy costs. Think of it. In the aviation 
industry, in the transportation industry and in the automobile 
industry, those jobs have been lost because of high energy prices. So 
here is what we've been talking about over the past year.
  Here is the problem. The problem is, when President Bush came into 
office, the price of a barrel of crude oil was $23. Actually, when I 
came into office, it was $10 a barrel. When the Democrats came in in 
January, it was at $58. Today--and I update this daily--the price of a 
barrel of crude oil is $104.13.
  All we're trying to say here from our side of the aisle is this is 
not a good trend. This is not a direction in which we want to continue 
if we want to have a thriving economy, one that all of the people of 
our country can benefit from. I represent rural America. I represent 30 
counties of southern Illinois, and it's really those in the rural 
communities who have to drive long distances to get to work, to get to 
school, to access health care; there's no public transportation; 
they're working in the fields; they drive big trucks. They're the ones 
who are harmed, I think, exponentially greater than those in major 
metropolitan areas. So this is not a good trend.
  So what is the solution? One solution is to bring on more supply. On 
this chart, we identify some of those supply options that we have in 
this country that we fail to access, and I had a bigger chart earlier. 
One that we hear a lot about is the Outer Continental Shelf. We only 
drill and explore in 15 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf, and we 
don't want to just up that to, maybe, 30 percent, which are some of the 
proposals coming from the other side of the aisle. We want to open up 
the entire Outer Continental Shelf. We want all of the above. We want 
to open up the eastern gulf. We want to open up the eastern seaboard of 
the Atlantic. We want to look at what's on our west coast. We want to 
make sure that there are billions of barrels of oil and the trillions 
of cubic feet of natural gas we can find and that we can access so we 
can help bring on more supply, U.S. supply. When we do this, this is 
U.S. energy and this is U.S. jobs, which is what this country needs.
  Another resource that we have is coal. The United States has more 
coal reserves than any country on Earth today. In Illinois alone, we 
have 250 years worth of recoverable coal. We should access that for 
electricity. In Illinois, 70 percent of our electricity is by coal-
fired power plants. Nationally, as a whole, 50 percent of all 
electricity is generated by coal. We can take coal and turn it into 
liquid fuel, thus competing with gasoline, thus competing with diesel 
fuel, thus competing with aviation fuel by having a new commodity 
product to compete with crude oil. We can move to solar and wind. 
That's part of the solution. That is more supply. We can look at 
renewable fuels like biodiesel and ethanol--ethanol from corn, ethanol 
from cellulosic feedstocks.
  The big debate here is: What do you do with the Outer Continental 
Shelf? Here is a bigger chart. All of this red area is off limits by 
our design here in the House of Representatives. We have said annually 
for the past 30 years ``no'' to going after oil and gas in those areas. 
We are at a crisis time. This debate which will be on this floor is: Do 
we open up a little bit more or do we open up the whole thing? My 
position and that of the majority of people in my country is ``all of 
the above.''

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