[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 143 (Wednesday, September 10, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H7993-H7994]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   ENERGY CRISES AFFECTING AMERICANS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Latta) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LATTA. Mr. Speaker, I represent one of the largest, if not the 
largest, ag districts in the State of Ohio. Also, according to the 
National Manufacturers Association, I represent one of the top 10 
manufacturing districts in the country. And over this August break that 
we had, I was across my district--north, south, east and west--having a 
lot of meetings with farmers and a lot of meetings with our 
manufacturers. And the word wasn't all that good. Farmers were telling 
me that on many a day they're burning between $800 and $1,000 a day for 
diesel. They're paying much higher costs for fertilizer and chemicals--
and in some cases these are up 3 to 3.5 times as much as they were 2 to 
3 years ago.
  Manufacturers: Not only the cost of shipping being up, but also the 
cost of the product that they had to produce with. They took me into 
the warehouses at the factories and they said, you know, a year ago, if 
you would have been here, this entire warehouse would have been full of 
the product that we needed to produce what we need to make our goods 
with. And today, it is only a quarter full. But that's the same price 
that we paid last year for this year, only a quarter. And it was an 
oil-based product. They've got a problem, because as that price keeps 
going up, they have to make tough decisions on manufacturing what 
they're going to do in Ohio.
  You know, we were talking about it just not affecting the farmers and 
manufacturers out there, but it also affects everyone. For the man and 
woman on the street, when it comes to thinking about their retirement 
and their future and putting their kids through college, they have to 
think, well, are we going to put that in the gas tank, in the oil tank 
for fuel this winter and not buy that new car or that new washing 
machine that might be produced in the northern part of Ohio?
  I was fortunate enough earlier this summer to go to ANWR with 10 
other Members. And we went up there, we saw Prudhoe Bay and what was 
being done there, and also looking at what was right across from the 
line of the river of ANWR. And ANWR, if you don't know, is the size of 
South Carolina, about 19 million acres. We're looking at an area that 
was set aside in 1980 of what they call section 1002 of about 1.5 
million acres of that. And when you get right down to it, all we're 
talking about in this whole debate, when we're talking about ANWR, is 
an area of about 2,000 acres. And that translates to about 3.5 square 
miles in size. But we've got to do it. Because what's happening right 
now is, when the Alaskan pipeline was at its height, it was carrying 
about 2.1 million barrels of oil a day.

                              {time}  2015

  Today it's carrying 700,000. We are losing about 15 percent capacity 
every year in that pipeline. When it gets down to 3,000 barrels a day, 
it will no longer be able to flow and bring that oil south. That's a 
real concern because right now we're importing 70 percent of the oil 
used in this country, 70 percent.
  So what we need to do is be able to take that oil that's over in 
ANWR, about 10.3 billion barrels, and we can put that 1 million barrels 
a day into that pipeline and bring it south.
  And why is that important? Well, it's important that we do things 
here in this country because right now we're talking about having 
potentially about 86 billion barrels offshore, we have about 2.1 
trillion barrels of oil shale, we're looking at around 420 trillion 
cubic feet of natural gas that's all off-limits right now. We also have 
24 percent of the world's coal reserves. We have that technology, and 
some of that was invented in my own district, to have clean coal 
technology. Because we don't have these surprises that we wake up to 
like we did today that the OPEC countries have decided to cut back on 
production by about 520,000 barrels of oil over the next 40 days. 
Immediately the price of crude went up. Immediately we saw that, after 
watching the price go up and up and up to about $147 a barrel, it was 
back under $100 a barrel just briefly. And it's time that this country 
take control of its

[[Page H7994]]

own destiny when it comes to energy, and that's why we need the all-of-
the-above strategy. That's nuclear, that's clean coal technology, 
that's making sure that we use hydroelectric, that we are producing, 
that we are making sure that we have oil and natural gas because we are 
going to need that oil, we're going to need that natural gas for the 
next 20 to 25 years.
  We also have to look at the alternatives because when we went to 
ANWR, we stopped in Colorado and saw what they were doing out there in 
the National Renewable Laboratory dealing with solar, wind, hydrogen, 
ethanol, and biodiesel, and that's interesting to me because it's all 
happening in my district, the Fifth Congressional District of Ohio.
  Mr. Speaker, it's time for us to act.

                          ____________________