[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 146 (Monday, September 15, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H8051-H8052]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ENERGY INDEPENDENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Royce) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ROYCE. Madam Speaker, I am rising today to speak about the 
consequences of some 80 percent of oil reserves around the world now 
being controlled by a foreign cartel, a foreign cartel that works in 
concert with Russia. And if you take Russia into the mix, you now have 
over 90 percent of the oil reserves of the oil that's being pumped 
around the world controlled by this cartel, OPEC.
  Now, many of us remember when Aramco was nationalized, where the U.S. 
fields were seized in Saudi Arabia. And we remember when British 
Petroleum in Iran was nationalized by that government. Not too many 
years ago, Hugo Chavez seized the European oil companies, their 
derricks, off the coast of his country.
  This is a phenomenon that, as it has occurred, has allowed, according 
to our former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, the cartel to pick a price. And 
what he suggested some years ago to us in the Congress was that there 
was an attempt to set that price at $140 a barrel of oil. And, 
specifically, what the cartel did, what OPEC did, was to curtail 
production in order to drive up the price.
  Frankly, we need a long-term and a short-term solution to this 
problem. The long-term solution is to continue the investment in 
lithium-ion batteries that the market is driving and continue 
incentives for hybrids so that we reach the point where you can 
actually go 100 miles per gallon of gasoline used because the first 40 
miles that you would use to go to work typically or back will be off a 
battery. In other words, his argument is that long-term electricity is 
going to be the solution to this by converting the economy, which today 
95 percent of the transportation costs dealing with fuel are petroleum, 
converting that over to electricity.
  But that's 10 years out. And in the meantime, we have a short-term 
solution that we need in order to break this cartel's ability to hold 
that price as high as they hold it. And as the price began to dip down 
the last few weeks, you saw the cartel again doing what? Saying they 
were going to, again, curtail production in order to increase the price 
of gasoline. This represents, according to the former CIA Director, a 
$10 trillion transfer in wealth over the next 10 years out of this 
economy into their economy, billions of dollars every day going into 
their sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia or throughout the Persian 
Gulf and some of it also going into the madrassas, the special 
religious schools that they're setting up across Central Asia, across 
Africa, even in Europe, which, frankly, are radicalizing a younger 
generation.
  So how do we take some of the profit out of this? What we do, 
frankly, is we lift that moratorium on drilling. And our hope on the 
Republican side was that we might see a series of moratoriums which 
were put in place lifted.
  One which was put in place a little over a year ago was the 
moratorium on using oil shale from Wyoming and Utah and Colorado. We 
have more oil shale in this country by threefold in terms of what the 
Saudis have in reserves in the Persian Gulf. So with 2 trillion in oil 
shale reserves, frankly, we could do a lot. But there has been a 
moratorium put by those who do not want to burn fossil fuels.
  Then we have the moratorium on drilling offshore. We know that the 
Cubans are drilling off the coast of Florida; we're not allowed to 
drill off the coast in those waters.
  We know that in the Arctic we have Gazprom, which was nationalized, 
seized by the Russian government a few years ago. They're bringing 
their two biggest derricks up to the Arctic. They're going to drill, 
whereas we can't expand in Alaska, in the Arctic, and drill there on 
the U.S. side.
  So what we are witnessing is the fact that we have hamstrung our 
ability. Gasification, as the South Africans use a process to transfer 
coal into gasoline, a moratorium on that. Nuclear, well, France has 80 
percent of its grid supported by nuclear power. In my State, 
California, it's 12.5 percent, and there is no chance of getting more 
because of the restrictions and moratoriums. And, frankly, when a lease 
is let, there is a lawsuit that follows it instantaneously.
  So the question I have is why are we moving legislation which 
purports to lift only one of these moratoriums, which is the drilling 
offshore, but with it says that no State can take a percentage of the 
profits of that drilling to help its State budget? All that guarantees 
is that no State will allow drilling offshore. Right now if you're in 
the State of Louisiana and you have a certain area where drilling is 
occurring,

[[Page H8052]]

part of that goes back to the State of Louisiana.
  The fact is that this measure, this legislation, will prevent, will 
absolutely stop any State from going forward and allowing additional 
drilling. And that's what it's intended to do because the intention is 
not to have any energy produced in the United States, not to create 
jobs here, and not to help the inflation that, frankly, is being driven 
right now by these high energy prices. And I am very concerned about 
it.

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