[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]
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
____________________