[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 89 (Tuesday, June 15, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H4482-H4483]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ENERGY INDEPENDENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, this Nation has sent millions of good jobs 
to other countries over the last 30 or 40 years because of 
environmental rules, regulations, and red tape. This has hurt millions 
of poor and lower-income and working people by destroying jobs and 
driving up prices on everything.
  The BP oil spill in the Gulf is a terrible thing, and we need to do 
all we reasonably can to see that something like this does not happen 
again. However, some extremists want us to stop offshore oil production 
entirely. Talk about wrecking our economy. Talk about killing countless 
numbers of jobs. And all this at a time when our unemployment is far 
too high and underemployment is even higher.
  John Engler, the former Governor of Michigan, wrote a column 5 days 
ago in the Washington Times under the headline, ``Drilling Moratorium 
is a Jobs Moratorium.'' Governor Engler wrote, ``Our country cannot 
afford to use this accident as an excuse for an overbroad moratorium 
that stops progress to the detriment of our economic and national 
security. We do not need to choose between energy security and 
environmental safety. We need to continue to strive for both.''
  Charles Krauthammer, the TV commentator and columnist, is respected 
even by people with whom he disagrees as one of the smartest men in 
this city. He recently wrote a column asking why we were drilling in 
5,000 feet of water in the first place. He wrote, ``Environmental chic 
has driven us out there. Environmentalists have succeeded in rendering 
the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic Coast off limits to oil 
production. And, of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've 
had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.''
  Mr. Krauthammer is right. For many years, we have tried to allow 
drilling on about 2,000 or 3,000 acres of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. 
ANWR is 19.8 million acres, some 35 times the size of the Great Smoky 
Mountains National Park. The Smokies get over 9 million visitors a 
year, and people think it is huge. They cannot humanly comprehend how 
big ANWR is, yet it is home to only a couple hundred people in the 
village of Kaktovik and gets a couple of hundred visitors each year. 
Yet radical environmentalists, who almost always come from very wealthy 
or upper-income families, oppose oil production almost everyplace. They 
want gas to double or triple in cost so people will drive less. They 
can't relate to people who cannot afford gas that costs $7 or $8 or $10 
a gallon like it does in some other countries.
  Not only would shooting the cost of gas way up cause the loss of huge 
numbers of jobs, it would put the final nail in the coffins of many 
small towns and rural areas. People in rural areas generally have to 
drive longer distances to get to their jobs. Already, two-thirds of the 
counties in the U.S. are losing population. Yet, once again, radical 
environmentalists see nothing wrong with this. Most of them are city 
people, anyway. They probably think it would be good if everyone was 
forced to live in 25 or 30 urban areas, with the rest of the country 
left totally empty and people could be bused to a national park or 
wilderness area every couple of months, under government supervision, 
of course, so they would not harm the land.
  Everyone pays lip service to energy independence, but we already had 
84 percent of our U.S. oil off limits even before the President imposed 
this latest moratorium. Environmental radicals will say they, too, want 
energy independence. But, then, environmental groups oppose drilling 
for oil, cutting any trees, digging for any coal, or producing any 
natural gas because of the pipelines and the refineries. And, heaven 
forbid, they certainly don't want more nuclear power.
  The opposition varies from group to group and geographic location, 
but the environmentalists are always there to fight any kind of energy 
production except for solar and wind. But then some oppose the 
windmills, too. And solar energy, despite mega billions in government 
subsidies over the last 30

[[Page H4483]]

years, only produces one-seventh of 1 percent of our energy, and adding 
wind power only brings it up about 1 percent more.
  If we limit this Nation to wind and solar, we might as well just shut 
the country down economically. And all these young people with degrees 
who are working as waiters and waitresses or in other low-paying jobs 
can thank the environmentalists. I told my wife as we were eating out 
last Saturday night, the American people used to work in factories and 
eat out just occasionally. Now, most of the factories have gone to 
other countries and restaurants have replaced the factories as our 
biggest employers other than government.
  Now, a slight majority of our people get most of their income from 
Federal, State, or local government. When a country passes that 
threshold, it is on the way down. We need to wake up and realize that 
the worst polluters in the world have been the socialist and communist 
countries. And we need to realize that only a free market, free 
enterprise system can generate the money to do the good things for the 
environment that everybody wants done.
  Charles Krauthammer wrote in another column a few months ago that, 
``socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until 
it struck on a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The 
cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism 
to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly 
centralized power.''
  Once again, Mr. Krauthammer is right.
  We certainly need to clean up the BP oil spill, but we should not let 
misguided radicals shut down our economy and hurt many lower- and 
middle-income people in the process.

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