[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
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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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