[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 32 (Wednesday, February 29, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H1025-H1026]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            KEYSTONE UPDATE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Olson) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OLSON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to give the American people an update 
on the Keystone XL pipeline.
  Monday, President Obama took the first step to get out of the way and 
bring tar sands oil from Canada to my home, southeast Texas. It's the 
yellow pipeline line here on this chart.
  The administration agreed to build the first segment from Cushing, 
Oklahoma, right here, to southeast Texas, the Port of Houston and the 
Port of Port Arthur. In announcing the administration's changed 
position, White House spokesman Jay Carney said:

       Moving oil from the Midwest to the world-class, state-of-
     the-art refineries on the gulf coast will modernize our 
     infrastructure, create jobs, and encourage American 
     production.

  Amen.
  430 miles down, 1,223 to go. But there is no new oil with this 
pipeline being built. None. So, Houston, we still have a problem. And 
that problem is exploding prices for gasoline.
  Since the day President Obama took office--and he took office on 
January 20, 2009--since that time, gasoline prices have doubled, from 
$1.84 per gallon to over $3.70 per gallon. Doubled. This hits Texas 
families hard. If you have a pickup truck with a 24-gallon gas tank and 
fill it up every 2 weeks, that's a $90 increase in gas expenses per 
month. There goes the $1,000 every American got by the payroll tax cut 
extension, something we fought for 2 months here in Congress, just 
thrown away.
  In a speech in Miami, our President said there was ``no magic 
bullet'' to lower gas prices, and there's some truth to that statement. 
The President is limited in what he can do to lower gas prices, but 
there's a lot a President can do to increase gas prices. Unfortunately, 
President Obama's policies have put us on a path to the worst summer 
for gas prices in our country's history. We enter this summer with the 
highest gas prices in our country's history at this time of the year. 
They're only going to go up. And the President had a knee-jerk reaction 
to the Gulf of Mexico spill. He shut the gulf down for nearly a year. 
That's at least 10 American rigs that left the gulf for overseas, 
taking American energy with them, and American jobs.

                              {time}  1100

  He chose Hollywood elitists and radical environmentalists over 
American unions and the American people by putting the Keystone 
pipeline in limbo. And while a small portion of the 20,000 jobs the 
full pipeline would have created are going to be kept by this new 
decision--4,000 of them--we still have no new oil. Eighty thousand 
barrels a day flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline is not going to 
happen. We're just basically building another lane on the freeway.
  The most alarming thing to me is that the Obama administration has 
spent 3 years watching Iran export terror and develop their own nuclear 
weapons to destroy Israel. Now that the House and Senate, followed by 
the European Union, have imposed sanctions on Iran over their nuclear 
ambitions, the Iranians are threatening to shut down the Strait of 
Hormuz.
  This is a map of the Strait of Hormuz, and as a former naval aviator 
who deployed for 6 months to the region in 1994 and flew low-level 
missions through the strait, I can tell you that the Iranian threat to 
shut it down is real--very real. It's a narrow body of water, 30 miles 
wide at some points. It's worse because, as you can see, the sea lanes 
where the ships go through

[[Page H1026]]

and commerce goes through are very close to Iran. This island over 
here, Abu Musa, that is an Iranian military base.
  There is an old saying that ``a picture is worth a thousand words.'' 
And this is our President as a candidate in 2008 at a gas station in 
Indianapolis. What's missing? Action to support low gas prices at that 
time.
  I urge the President to listen to the American people and to fully 
approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Do it now, and put America back in 
business.

                          ____________________