[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 41 (Thursday, March 17, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H1973-H1977]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1640
                         AMERICAN ENERGY POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fleischmann). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Burton) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I wish every one of my colleagues 
and everybody in America would listen to this Special Order tonight, 
not because I want the attention, but I just think there are some facts 
that the American people ought to know and my colleagues ought to know 
about our dependence on energy from other parts of the world.
  It really bothers me that we continue to depend so much on our 
adversaries or people that aren't our friends rather than we do on 
ourselves. We could be energy independent within a relatively short 
period of time, and I am talking about 5 to 10 years, if we just did 
certain things. So tonight what I want to do is I want to point out to 
my colleagues and anybody else that might be paying attention where the 
energy is in America, what it is, and how difficult it would be to 
extract it.
  Now, right now, people that are paying attention in their offices 
know that we are paying $3.60 or more for a gallon of gasoline. Diesel 
fuel is over $4 a gallon. And my chief of staff went to the grocery 
store the other day, and he told me he bought two tomatoes and it cost 
$5. He bought one avocado and it cost $3.
  People are telling me there is no inflation. That is baloney. The 
cost of food is going up. The cost of gasoline is going up. The cost of 
everything is going up, and in large part it is going up because the 
cost of energy is rising very, very rapidly. And it need not be that 
way.
  I talked to a fellow the other day that came in to see me about new 
technologies, and he told me if we developed our coal shale, converted 
it into oil, we could lower the price per barrel of oil from $105 a 
barrel to $30 a barrel. Do you know what that would do to the price of 
gasoline if we were to do that? It would lower the price of gasoline 
from $3.60 down to about $1.40 or $1.30 a gallon. And what do you think 
that would do to the economy and what

[[Page H1974]]

would that do to lowering the prices of goods and services that we go 
all the way across the country in dealing with? Yet we are not doing 
anything.
  So I want to read tonight a little bit about where we are, what we 
could do, and what we can accomplish if we just start paying attention 
to what is here in the United States.
  The old adage goes that those who don't learn from history are going 
to make the same mistakes over and over again. And apart from creating 
what we call the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in this country, we 
haven't done anything over the last 30 years to become energy 
independent.
  Now, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a reserve we set up so that 
if we have an emergency, we will have some oil in the ground that we 
could use for energy purposes. And it goes for maybe 90 days, but 90 
days is not a very long time, and we could exhaust that in a very short 
period of time if we don't move toward energy independence.
  Right now on the northern tier of Africa, everybody that is paying 
attention knows we have got problems in Libya. We have problems in 
Egypt, problems in Tunisia, problems all along the Persian Gulf coast, 
Bahrain and the other countries, and we have got Iran there; and there 
is a real possibility that we could see a terrible problem occur there 
in the future which would minimize our ability to get oil from that 
part of the world.
  We get over 30 percent of our energy from countries in that region 
and other places in the world where people don't like us very much. And 
if that place goes up in smoke, the cost of energy, the cost of 
gasoline, the cost of everything that we have is going to skyrocket. So 
we have to do something about that.
  In 1972, we imported 28 percent of our oil and energy from outside 
this country. Do you know what it is today? It is 62 percent. So we 
said we are going to be energy independent. It was 28 percent in the 
seventies. We said we were going to be energy independent. A lot of 
people remember the long gas lines when OPEC tried to do us in. They 
remember people carrying gas cans to get 5 gallons of gas to get to 
work. They remember all that. But we didn't do anything but create the 
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is only a 90-day supply.
  So we imported 26 percent or thereabouts in the seventies, and today, 
instead of being energy independent, we are importing 62 percent. We 
are more dependent on Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and other parts of the 
world now than we were then by more than double, more than double our 
dependency on foreign oil.
  So today oil has gone up to over $105 a barrel. It may be down a 
little bit now. We are paying in many parts of the country close to $4 
for gasoline and over $4 a gallon for diesel fuel, which transports our 
goods and services across this country.
  Oil is the lifeblood of this country. It supplies more than 40 
percent of our energy needs and 99 percent of the fuel that we use in 
our cars and trucks. They talk about the new Volt automobile, electric 
car, that that is going to solve our problems. They talk about 
windmills that are going to solve our problems. They talk about nuclear 
energy, which is very problematic right now. They talk about all these 
other things, including solar energy. But all of that combined will not 
put a dent, not even a dent, in our energy needs. And as we know right 
now, 99 percent of the fuel that we need for our cars and trucks comes 
from oil, and our current energy demand is about 21.5 million barrels a 
day.
  What a lot of people don't realize is for every one penny that it 
costs more for gasoline, it increases the cost to consumers by $4 
million a day. So every time you go to the gas pump and you see the gas 
price has gone up a penny or a nickel or 10 cents, for each penny it is 
a $4 million hit on our economy each and every day.
  Now, there are a lot of things I want to talk about, but I won't have 
time to get into all of them tonight. But the thing that is very 
disconcerting to me is that we have the energy that we need right here.
  For instance, if you look at this chart, this is the oil production 
in this country. If we use the recoverable oil we have, the natural gas 
we have and the coal resources that we have, that is equivalent to 1.3 
trillion barrels of oil, 1.3 trillion. Now, when you realize we are 
using only about, what, 21 million barrels of oil a day, you can see we 
would have an almost inexhaustible supply of oil if we just used the 
resources that we have.
  Let me just give you some examples. In the Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge, we have about 10.4 billion barrels of oil, more than double the 
proven reserves of the entire State of Texas and almost half of the 
total crude reserves in the U.S., which is 22 billion barrels of oil. 
That is in ANWR alone, almost half of what we need. If we drilled in 
ANWR, we could increase our reserves by nearly 50 percent in that one 
area.
  President Clinton vetoed the ANWR energy production in 1995, and the 
United States could be today getting almost 1.5 million barrels of oil 
a day if we did that. But instead of moving toward energy independence, 
we continue to talk about it, but we don't do anything about it.
  Currently, the President of the United States will not allow us to 
get new permits to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico or off the 
continental shelf or in ANWR or anyplace else. We just aren't drilling, 
so we continue to import oil.
  Now, a lot of people don't realize this, but we spill more oil from 
the oil tankers that bring oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, we 
spill more oil each and every day than the oil that was spilled from 
that horrible tragedy that took place in the Gulf of Mexico. And yet we 
continue to import with these tankers, and we say it is an 
environmental problem because look at what happened in the Gulf of 
Mexico. That is an excuse to not drill in this country, because we are 
wasting energy by not getting it right here. And, as I said before, we 
are spilling more out of those tankers than we had in the Gulf of 
Mexico tragedy.
  So we ought to be drilling. And we could do it in an environmentally 
safe way if the government of the United States and our regulators made 
sure they watched these oil wells. The technology is there.
  Now, as I said before, we have 1.8 trillion barrels of oil and as 
much as 8 trillion barrels of oil if we use the deposits that we have 
in oil shale. Maybe I haven't said that yet, but we do have.
  Now, listen to this. I had a fellow come in to me the other day, and 
I may have mentioned it to some of the people earlier, and I sometimes 
get mixed up because we have covered this thing before, but he told me 
if we drilled here and used oil shale, we could reduce the cost of oil 
dramatically, dramatically, as much as 60 or 70 percent, and it would 
reduce overall costs of energy dramatically to our houses, our cars and 
our trucks which bring goods and services and food all across this 
country.
  Currently, the United States produces roughly 30 trillion cubic feet 
of natural gas every year, 30 trillion feet of natural gas every year. 
If we went after the Marcellus shale formation where they have 500 
trillion cubic feet of natural gas, we could more than double our 
domestic production of natural gas almost immediately, and we could use 
that natural gas to move our trucks.
  I had some of the leaders in the natural gas industry come to see me 
not too long ago, and they told me if we just converted our 18-wheelers 
that transport goods and services across this country and food, if we 
just converted those to natural gas, we could cut our dependency on 
foreign oil by 50 percent.

                              {time}  1650

  Just that one thing. Yet we're not drilling for that natural gas 
because the administration will not give the permits and move to 
utilize those resources that we have.
  The Obama administration, for whatever reason, I don't know if it's 
intentional or just because of ignorance, they're not using our 
resources and not exploring for our resources. It makes we wonder 
sometimes if the environmental extremists in this country don't want us 
to go back to horse and buggy and using wood to heat our houses. They 
wouldn't want wood to be used to heat our houses because obviously 
they're concerned about things like the spotted owl.
  But the fact of the matter is we in this country could reduce our 
cost of

[[Page H1975]]

living, could reduce our dependency on foreign oil. All we have to do 
is use our resources, but we need the administration to do what is 
necessary. And at a time when the world is on the precipice of some 
major wars, we need to move toward energy independence. If the Persian 
Gulf goes up in smoke, it's going to be disastrous for this economy. If 
Venezuela and President Chavez down there, who's a Communist dictator, 
if he decides not to let us have the oil that we've been buying from 
him, it will be tragic for this country.
  And he's working with Tehran. They have flights going back once every 
week--back and forth--and they're working together for things other 
than the good of the United States of America. And so we're dependent 
on people that don't like us, would like to see our free enterprise 
system and the freedoms we enjoy dissipate into nothing, and we're 
continuing to depend on them for foreign energy.
  The President has said it's a real danger to drill in the Gulf of 
Mexico; we want to protect the environment. Yet we just sent $1 billion 
down to Brazil so they could drill offshore. Now think about that. 
We're concerned about the environment, and yet we're sending billions 
of our taxpayers' dollars to a country like Brazil so they can do 
deepwater exploration for oil. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
  The administration--just to let people know what is going on in their 
offices--the administration canceled 77 onshore drilling leases in Utah 
just weeks after taking office. So we had 77 onshore, in the 
Continental United States, drilling leases in Utah that were going to 
be used to bring oil to the surface--and natural gas--and they stopped 
those weeks after they took office. And they later re-offered only 17 
of them. So we lost 60 potential areas of oil and gas.
  The administration has consistently delayed oil and shale development 
leases. The administration has repeatedly blocked development, as I 
said before, in places like the ANWR. And I've been up to Alaska. 
People talk about how it's going to hurt the environment up there and 
the bears and all the other animals. The ANWR is way out in the 
boondocks. It's not going to hurt a thing. People don't realize Alaska 
is 3\1/2\ times the size of Texas. There's only 500,000 people up 
there. There's tremendous oil and other natural gas resources up there, 
and we can't drill for them because of environmental concerns. It makes 
absolutely no sense. No sense whatsoever.
  America's reliance on oil and natural gas is going to continue for 
decades to come. There's no question about it. When the administration 
says we have to transition to other forms of energy--nuclear and solar 
and wind and hydro ways of getting energy--that's great. All of us want 
to do that. We all want a clean environment, but in the meantime we 
have to rely on fossil fuels because we're not going to be able to get 
where they want us to be by relying on these other sources of energy 
for at least 10, 15, 20 years.
  So what are we supposed to do in the meantime? I don't think we 
should continue to depend on foreign sources of energy. America's 
reliance on natural gas, as I said, is going to continue for decades to 
come; and trying to ignore that reality by arguing that it takes time 
for new fields to come online is simply passing the buck to the next 
generation.
  If we responded to the widespread outcry to drill 3 years ago, the 
last time oil and gasoline prices were over $3.50 a gallon, we would be 
that much closer to having additional supplies of domestic energy. But 
we aren't. We're importing 62 percent of our energy, and just a couple 
of decades ago it was only 26 or 28 percent.
  Expanding America's energy production will lower prices, create new 
jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and strengthen our national 
security and raise revenue to help tackle our historic $14 trillion in 
national debt.
  One of the things that I hope all young people in this country will 
realize and all the seniors will realize is that we're passing on to 
that young generation $14 trillion in debt. The debt has increased in 
the last 3 years by $4 trillion. From the beginning of the Republic to 
the last 3 or 4 years, we didn't come close to that kind of spending. 
Yet we increased the debt in 3 years by $4 trillion. ObamaCare is going 
to add a great deal more to that, in addition to rationing health care 
and all the other things that people have heard about.
  But the thing that concerns me the most is the standard of living 
that we have today and what we're passing on to the future generations. 
By not becoming energy independent, by running up these huge debts 
because we're coming up with these new programs that we can't afford, 
by creating a bigger bureaucracy in Washington, including 15,000 new 
IRS agents to implement the rules and regulations of things like 
ObamaCare, all those things are going to add to the debt and the 
quality of life that I've had and my parents had is going to 
deteriorate.
  I'm afraid we will pass on to our children and our grandchildren 
higher taxes, higher inflation, a lower standard of living because 
we're living way beyond our means today. Natural gas and coal shale and 
oil are ways that we can cut our dependence on foreign oil and reduce 
that dependency on government and lower the cost that we're incurring 
as far as our national debt is concerned.
  I don't know what we have to do to convince the administration. 
Sometimes I wonder if it's because they're not aware of the future, 
they're not aware of what is going on, or maybe they're just doing it 
on purpose because the President believes in more government control 
over various parts of our society.
  One-sixth of our society is health care; and that's been nationalized 
by the ObamaCare plan, which we're trying to repeal because that will 
create long lines to get to see a doctor and socialized medicine. 
That's all a result of more government control and more government 
spending and more national debt.
  Can you imagine what it would be like if we came back in 50 years--
and I probably won't be around then; I'm sure I won't--but we come back 
in 50 years and there's some young person struggling to get along and 
they say, Why in the world did our fathers and grandfathers leave this 
kind of a society for us? They lived so much better. The cost of living 
was lower. The cost of energy was lower. The cost of health care was 
lower. Everything was lower. They lived so much better than us. Why 
didn't they do something to make sure we had that quality of life? And 
the answer is simply: we're not doing it. We're opening up the 
government credit card, we're charging all this money, we're depending 
on other sources of energy from other countries, and the credit card 
just keeps gathering steam and gathering more debt and gathering more 
debt and gathering more debt.
  If my colleagues in their offices are paying attention right now and 
they said to their wives, We overspent last month by $5,000; what are 
we going to do, their wives and the wives of the people that might be 
paying attention would say, We've got to cut back on spending. We've 
got to budget our money. We can't live like this. We'll go bankrupt. 
And I tell you right now, America is in the same situation. We will go 
bankrupt. In fact, we are bankrupt, but we're printing money as fast as 
we can to keep from declaring bankruptcy.
  They talk about Social Security being insolvent in 15 or 20 years. If 
you go into the vaults and look at Social Security receipts, it's all a 
bunch of paper. They've used that money for other purposes. We're 
robbing Peter to pay Paul for Medicare and Social Security as we live 
today. So we just add to the debt and add to the liability that we 
leave to the future generations.
  So if I were talking to the President tonight, Mr. Speaker, I would 
say: Mr. President, if you love this country as much as we love this 
country, then take steps to do what's necessary to cut spending, to do 
away with a lot of these wasteful programs that aren't accomplishing 
anything, to make sure that we come up with a health care plan that 
does not create a dependency on government but on the private sector by 
doing tort reform and coming up with savings accounts that people can 
deduct from their taxes so that they can pay for a lot of their own 
health care needs. There's a whole bunch of things we can do without 
socialized medicine.
  So I would say: Mr. President, let's look at the other avenues. Let's 
reevaluate ObamaCare and come up with

[[Page H1976]]

a solution that's not going to put this country in red ink ad 
infinitum. And I would say, These new programs you're talking about are 
the programs that we've tried for years and years that have been 
nothing but a drain on taxpayers' dollars but haven't improved 
anything.
  Let me give you one example. I hate to digress from this energy 
issue, but I think it's important that we talk about this. If you look 
at the grade levels in our schools and high schools and our colleges 
across this country, you will find that the last 20 years, the grade 
levels have not gotten better. The quality of education has not gotten 
better.

                              {time}  1700

  If you look at the chart and see how much we're spending through the 
Department of Education at the Federal level, you'll find that we're 
spending billions and billions and billions of dollars, and they're not 
accomplishing a thing except for paying a lot of bureaucrats' salaries 
and sending money back to some of the unions that feel like they need 
that money to take care of their union members, and those union members 
continue to support people who want to keep that gravy train going.
  So there are things we can do. We could say let's leave education 
where it belongs, at the State and local levels, which is where it has 
always been, instead of spending all this money at the local level. Do 
away with the Department of Education. We could do that and save 
hundreds of billions of dollars, and that money could be passed on to 
debt reduction and to lower our dependence on the future generations of 
this country.
  I'd like to just end tonight, Mr. Speaker, by saying that, if you 
look at these charts, you'll see, first of all, we have--it's 
unbelievable--trillions and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in 
the United States. All these pink spaces here show where shale gas is 
in the lower 48 States, and it doesn't even include Alaska. Those 
trillions of cubic feet of natural gas could be brought out of the 
ground and used to take care of our energy needs to a very large 
degree.
  As a matter of fact--and let's put that chart up here--as to the coal 
shale that we have, they estimate that the amount of coal shale we have 
in this country would create 1.8 to 8 trillion barrels of oil--1.8 to 8 
trillion barrels of oil--right here in this country and that it would 
immediately reduce our dependency on foreign oil. If you think that the 
Saudis and the others wouldn't lower their prices per barrel very 
quickly if they thought we were producing that, you're just not paying 
attention, because if they saw that we were becoming energy 
independent, they would want to keep their market share, and they would 
lower their prices as quickly as possible.
  Then you talk about coal, itself. We have tremendous resources of 
coal--584.5 billion tons. Our reserves in coal at these blue places 
that you see on the map are 4 trillion tons of coal. Now, they say that 
that will hurt the environment. Well, we've got to make sure that we 
protect the environment, and that we've got scrubbers on the generating 
plants and all kinds of things that do protect the environment, but 
even if we had an environmental problem, we would still work to clean 
that up.
  Even if we had that, do we still want to be dependent for our 
existence, for the defense of this Nation, for the economy of this 
Nation on foreign sources of energy like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and 
others that don't like us and would love to see us go down? Go under?
  We need to use our resources, and the President is succumbing to 
pressure from radical environmentalists and others to not drill for 
these resources--natural gas, coal shale--that can be converted into 
oil, oil that we have onshore and offshore, and coal, itself.
  It is time that we realize that we can be energy independent. The 
future of America can be great. We can see this city, as Ronald Reagan 
said, in 20, 30, 40, 50 years as a shining city on a hill if we move 
toward energy independence. That one thing alone would help solve our 
economic problems. It's a defense issue as well as a national economic 
issue.
  So, like I said, if I were talking to the President tonight--and I 
presume, from time to time, the White House does watch what we're doing 
on the floor--I would say: Mr. President, if you love this country--and 
I believe you do--I would start doing what's necessary to move toward 
energy independence. You will be revered as a great President if you do 
that, and you'll probably get reelected. But if we continue with this 
huge deficit spending that, in large part, is caused by our dependence 
on foreign energy, then you run the risk of being a one-term President.

  So I think the President, being a patriotic citizen as I believe and 
hope he is, will take to heart what we're talking about in this body 
and become as close as possible to energy independence within the next 
3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 years. If he would do this, his legacy that will be 
left behind will be something that we'll all be proud of.
  If we don't do that, and if I were talking to the President, I would 
say: Your legacy will not be very bright, Mr. President. I don't think 
any President wants to leave behind for history that kind of a legacy.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I will just say that I hope that everybody 
has paid attention to this tonight, and I will be back on the floor to 
talk about this in the future.
  Mr. Speaker, I am told we have another colleague who wants to come 
over, so I'm not going to do my imitation of Al Jolson or tap dance, 
but I guess I could talk about the deficit a little longer.
  All right. Well, let's give you some facts and figures while my 
colleague is on his way over here. I was going to save this for my next 
Special Order, but we'll cover it right now.
  The total demand for coal reached 1.12 billion tons in 2008. Over 
half of our electricity is generated from coal, so you can imagine, if 
we don't do what's necessary to get coal out of the ground, we're going 
to become more dependent on foreign sources of energy.
  Nine out of every 10 tons of coal mined every year in the U.S. is 
used for domestic electricity. So, when they tell you we can't use coal 
anymore because of environmental concerns, well, what are we going to 
do?--because 9 out of every 10 tons of coal is used for electric 
generation.
  Each person in this country and everybody who is paying attention 
uses 3.7 tons of coal a year. So what are we going to do without it if 
we don't have it? Coal is the most affordable source of power fuel per 
million Btus historically, averaging less than a quarter of the price 
of gas and oil. There are approximately 600 coal-generating facilities 
generating 1.4 generating units in manufacturing utilities across this 
country, according to the U.S. Energy Information. Coal accounts for 32 
percent of U.S. total energy and 23 percent of total energy 
consumption.
  Now, that's all I want to talk about as to coal, but it's important 
that we realize that we are dependent on that source of energy and that 
we need to continue to use it until we come up with an alternative 
that's going to work and will be with us. Solar and wind and the other 
sources will replace that over time, but we are still going to need 
oil, coal, and gas for at least 10 or 15 or 20 years at the levels or 
at more than the levels that we're using today.
  May I inquire of the time remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Meehan). The gentleman has 32 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I can talk about anything, I guess, but I 
don't want to bore my colleagues back in their offices or bore anybody 
else who's paying attention to this other than to say these charts that 
we have here are things that everybody ought to be familiar with, and I 
will be happy to make these available to my colleagues.
  It shows that we have plenty of oil, coal, natural gas, and coal 
shale to take care of our energy needs within the next decade if we'd 
just get on with it.
  I am told everybody has gone home. Everybody is going back to their 
districts. It's kind of interesting that these issues that we're 
talking about here tonight are so important, and yet people are going 
back to their districts to talk to their constituents. I wish I had 
been able to talk to them before they left and give them copies of all 
these illustrations so that they could go to their town meetings and 
show the people of this country that we do have

[[Page H1977]]

the energy we need to be independent. I will try to do that next week, 
the next time we have a recess and they go back to their districts for 
their town meetings.

                              {time}  1710

  For those who are wondering why I'm standing down here, the rules of 
the House are that when we adjourn at night we have what's called 
Special Orders, and when we have Special Orders, each side gets 1 hour, 
and I'm taking the leadership hour on the Republican side. Each side 
gets 1 hour to discuss issues of relevance to the American people and 
to their colleagues. And then after that, each side gets a half an 
hour, and we go back and forth like that until we've used up 4 hours of 
time.
  So my colleague, Mr. Gohmert, who is on his way over here right now, 
is going to use, I presume, part of our first half-hour when he gets 
here, and I imagine Louie is going to be talking about constitutional 
law because he was a judge, and he will also be talking about the 
national debt and the legacy we're leaving behind for our kids. And so 
when Louie gets here, after I hit him in the nose for not being here on 
time, I will turn it over to him and let him talk about these issues.
  What are you laughing at? We have the staff up here, and I think 
they're getting a little giggly since we're here not talking about 
anything of relevance. Where is Louie? Coming from the Moon? I mean, 
we've got the press up there that's being entertained. Oh, it's St. 
Patrick's Day. You don't think he's been having a little green 
libation, do you?
  I guess I should digress and talk about some of the other issues 
facing this country. There are so many. But I don't want to get started 
on that and then have Louie come in and have to stop my discussion 
right in the middle of our talk. You need to write about this in the 
papers, folks.
  Well, there's a new movie out. You know, last night they had an Irish 
American function here in the Capitol, and they had some of those Irish 
dancers that were extraordinary. And I was watching television this 
morning, and they had Michael Flatley on, who's got a new movie that's 
coming out today about the Irish dancers, and I would urge all of my 
friends and neighbors to go see that movie if they like Irish dancing.
  Folks, I want you to know that Judge Louie Gohmert, with his green 
tie, has just arrived, and Louie, what are you going to talk about 
tonight?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. We're going to talk 
some about the CR. We're going to talk about government spending and 
what we ought to be doing.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Well, there you have it, folks. I was very 
psychic. I told you he would be talking about government spending and 
how we can get control of this budget.
  And so with that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________