[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 38 (Thursday, March 8, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1502-S1504]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GASOLINE PRICES
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I come to the floor to express my concerns
on behalf of the 26 million constituents I have in Texas about the
rising gas prices and the administration's failure to take reasonable
and rational and practical steps to help ease the pain Americans are
feeling at the gas pump.
Just think about it. We know unemployment is unacceptably high and
intractable, notwithstanding our private sector economy's best efforts
to grow and to create jobs. So we know people are out of work. We know
many of them are unable to pay their mortgages and are literally losing
their homes to foreclosure. Those who are fortunate enough to have jobs
are experiencing higher prices when it comes to food, when it comes to
health care, notwithstanding the passage of the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act, of which the President said the average family
would save $2,500 in health care premiums. Last year alone, there was
almost a double-digit increase in the cost of health care for most
American families.
Now, to add insult to injury, we have higher gas prices, which are
crowding out other spending and lowering the standard of living for
American families who are struggling with the slow economic recovery we
are experiencing.
The average price of gasoline in the United States has more than
doubled since the week of the inauguration of President Obama in
January 2009. In January 2009 a gallon of regular gas was $1.89. Today
it averages $3.79 a gallon. The Associated Press reports that the
average American household spent $4,155 filling up at the pump in 2011.
That is the annual cost of gasoline for a typical U.S. household.
I remember arguments--passionate arguments--about the payroll tax
holiday and the President holding press conference after press
conference saying, if we would just pass the payroll tax holiday, then
families would have $40 more a month spending money in their pockets.
Well, higher gas prices have wiped that out and more.
Gasoline costs now amount to 8.4 percent of the median household
income--8.4 percent. I am not telling anybody something they do not
already know and they have not already felt, that they have not already
experienced. Everyone has experienced the higher prices. This is the
highest price for gasoline since 1981 when costs soared because of
another crisis in the Middle East.
Weeks ago President Obama said there is very little he could do about
high gas prices in the short term. I tell you, it is good he made those
comments in Miami, FL, and not Midland, TX, because Texans know that
greater domestic energy production would help reduce oil prices and,
therefore, reduce gasoline prices. Roughly 70 percent of the price of
gasoline is the price of oil from which gasoline is refined. You know,
sometimes I feel as though in Washington, DC, we are operating in a
parallel universe that has very little in common with the rest of the
country. And here it is--not to mix my metaphors--ships passing in the
night. But the fact is, the laws of supply and demand cannot be
suspended by the Congress or the President of the United States.
President Obama used to agree with that.
Last March, for example, he said producing more oil in America would
help lower oil prices. Well, lipservice will not produce lower oil
prices, but, yes, producing more oil will because the greater the
supply--we know the laws of economics say, demand being the same,
greater supply will lower prices. The fact is, there is greater demand
all around the world, not just in the United States, as economies are
growing in China, in India, and Brazil and places such as that.
To add insult to injury, this administration has adopted policies
that have directly conflicted with the goal of lowering oil and
gasoline prices. I do not know how to reach any other conclusion but to
say it appears to me that the administration has intentionally enacted
policies that will raise gasoline prices. I know they will deny that.
They will say it is not true. But I do not know any other explanation.
Let me provide the evidence that leads me to that conclusion and
perhaps you will agree. Today we learned that President Obama has been
busy calling Senators on the other side of the aisle and asking them to
vote against an amendment being offered by Senator Hoeven of North
Dakota that would allow the Keystone XL Pipeline project to move
forward--the President, on the phone calling Senators saying: Vote
against the Keystone XL Pipeline amendment offered by Senator Hoeven.
The President has previously said there is not a single morning he
wakes up that he does not think about creating jobs. But, apparently,
he woke up today thinking about how to lobby against jobs because the
Keystone Pipeline, in addition to providing an additional supply of
crude oil from the tar sands in Canada that would be transported to the
United States, would be turned into gasoline in places such as Port
Arthur, TX--apparently, the President got up and thought: How can I
obstruct additional supply? How can I destroy the jobs that would be
created, which is directly contrary to what he professed he does when
he wakes up each morning thinking about how to create new jobs.
The Keystone XL Pipeline is a $7 billion private investment that will
create 20,000 jobs in construction and manufacturing alone. It will add
tens of thousands of additional jobs throughout the economy in other
sectors that will support the pipeline construction.
This is kind of personal for me and my constituents in Texas because
we
[[Page S1503]]
are an energy-producing State. We actually think that is good because
it has created a lot of jobs. It has allowed us to weather this
recession. People have voted with their feet, and they have moved from
other parts of the country to Texas because that is where the jobs are
so they can provide for their families and they can try to achieve the
American dream.
Texas as a whole provides more than one-quarter of America's total
refining capacity. Last month, when the subject of the Keystone
Pipeline was very much in the news, I visited with a number of refinery
workers in Port Arthur, TX, who expressed concern about the future of
their livelihood. These constituents of mine in Port Arthur, TX, could
care less about the politics in Washington, DC--who wins, who loses,
the sort of stuff that seems to facilitate an obsession inside the
beltway. But they were particularly upset--not just Republicans but
Democrats, Independents, unaffiliated folks. They were particularly
upset with the Obama administration's rejection of the permit for the
Keystone XL Pipeline which, as I said, would terminate in the Port
Arthur region and allow our State to refine an extra 700,000 barrels of
oil each day and turn it into gasoline and other refined products that
would increase the supply and thus, according to the laws of economics,
have a tendency to bring prices down as we increase supply.
President Obama's behind-the-scenes maneuvers, this crusade, is the
starkest reminder yet. He is the only thing standing between this
country and more jobs and energy security. I regret to reach that
conclusion, but I do not know of any other reasonable conclusion to
raise.
Rather than asking Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries to produce
more oil in a region where our troops have been deployed for 10 years
or more, is it any coincidence that in the oil-producing regions of the
world that we depend upon for oil, where our American troops have
fought and some have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our
country, to protect our economy, to protect our way of life, that there
have been some in this Chamber who have suggested we ought to go, hat
in hand, to Saudi Arabia, and say: Will you please open the spigot a
little wider? Will you please supply us more oil so we do not have to
do it in America? You can do it for us, and we can buy it from you.
Well, I believe this administration should work closely with our
partners in Canada, a friendly country where we do not have to worry
about a disruption of supply because if the Iranian threat to block the
Strait of Hormuz comes to pass, 20 percent of the world's oil supply
passes through the Strait of Hormuz. You know what that would do to
prices, not to mention other consequences which are entirely negative.
Canada is a reliable and geographically secure trading partner. Their
oil exports are insulated from the potential supply disruptions in the
Middle East. Rather than demonizing oil and gas companies that employ
millions of hard-working Americans, while wagering more taxpayer
dollars on boondoggles such as Solyndra, the Obama administration
should take its regulatory boot off the necks of our domestic energy
producers.
As I said, this is personal for me and my constituents because Texans
are proud that our State remains the leading U.S. producer of oil and
gas. As I stated, it is what has helped us grow and create an awful lot
of jobs for which people are grateful. We know for a scientific fact
that America has just begun to tap the potential of its vast resources.
According to the Congressional Research Service, our country has more
recoverable energy resources than Canada, China, and Saudi Arabia
combined.
As American Enterprise Institute scholar Kenneth Green has noted, the
Outer Continental Shelf of the United States alone contains enough oil
to fuel 85 million cars for 35 years. Yet more than 97 percent of that
territory is not under lease as a result of Obama administration
policies. Expanding access to Federal onshore and offshore lands,
eliminating permit delays in the issuance of leases could help reduce
polices and strengthen our energy security while creating jobs and
boosting revenue to the local, State, and Federal Government that would
help us close our budget gap.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration's proposed offshore oil and
natural gas leasing plan for 2012 to 2017 eliminates--eliminates--50
percent of lease sales provided for in the previous plan and imposes a
moratorium on developing energy from 14 billion barrels of oil and 55
trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The moratorium on the natural resource rich Gulf of Mexico and
persistent delays in permits for shallow and deepwater leases could
result in a 19-percent decrease in production in 2012--a 19-percent
decrease in production.
So we are not only talking about keeping the production static, we
are talking about actually decreasing supply as a result of Federal
administration policies. Decreasing supply will have the inevitable
effect of raising gasoline prices as that happens, and then there is
the regulatory impact. Everywhere I go in my State, and as I talk to
people around the country--they come to visit us in the Capitol. If
they are in the private sector, they say the biggest threat to their
ability to start a new business or grow existing businesses and create
jobs is regulatory overreach.
We know during the last election the voters gave us divided
government. They made it harder for the Obama administration to single-
handedly pass policies such as the President's health care bill, such
as the stimulus, such as Dodd-Frank on a partisan basis. So we got
divided government. What we did not get is an ability to stop the
regulatory overreach of executive branch agencies.
If the President is serious about looking for every single area that
we can make an impact on gas prices, as he pledged in Miami, he must
reverse the regulatory overreach of the last 3 years. The U.S. Chamber
of Commerce reports that the Environmental Protection Agency alone is
moving forward with 31 major economic rules and 172 major policy
changes. That is not something Congress is legislating. That is what
the EPA is doing on its own because they are an executive branch
administrative agency. But they are going to have a negative impact on
our energy supply. The Chamber of Commerce rightly calls this an
unprecedented level of regulatory action. It has a chilling effect not
only on energy production, it has a chilling effect on jobs, something
we need more than anything else as our economy struggles to recover.
Even as gas prices have approached $4 a gallon, the Environmental
Protection Agency has proposed a tier 3 rule to cut air emissions from
fuels in light-duty vehicles. This rule alone would force refiners of
oil to gasoline to make dramatic changes in the way they do business.
A recent study concluded the rule would increase the cost of
manufacturing gasoline by 12 to 25 cents per gallon. So as high as they
are now, once this rule goes into effect, the price we pay at the pump
could go from 12 to 25 cents higher.
It could also inflate the refiners' operating costs by $5 billion to
$13 billion annually and lead to a 7- to 14-percent reduction in gas
supplies from U.S. refineries and force as many as seven U.S.
refineries to shut down.
We have already seen recent reports of a number of refineries on the
East Coast that produce gasoline in America shutting down because they
cannot do business economically under this regulatory burden. Beyond
the tier 3 rule, the American energy producers are deeply worried about
the EPA's proposed greenhouse gas regulations which will serve as an
energy tax on consumers. They are also worried, as if that wasn't
enough, about the agency's new source performance standards and its
boiler maximum achievable control technology rule.
I know a lot of this sounds arcane and is not something people talk
about over the kitchen table. But each one of these cumulatively have
had a negative impact on the gasoline prices that are directly harming
American families in their pocketbooks, lowering their standard of
living and making it harder to get by even as they struggle with the
slow economic recovery.
Collectively, if we were to have a moratorium on these regulations at
least until we begin to see unemployment come down and the economy
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grow, gas prices come down--collectively, these regulations will put
more U.S. refineries out of business and will lead to ever higher
gasoline prices at the pump. Conversely, if we were to have a temporary
moratorium, it would provide much needed relief to hard-working
American families.
If that weren't enough, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been
very active as well. I mentioned Midland, TX, which is part of the
historic Permian Basin, which is a huge source of oil and gas
production. Thanks to new technology and innovation, it is experiencing
a second boom and creating lots of jobs and a lot of American energy.
What a surprise it was when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
announced its intention to list the sand dune lizard--a 5-inch lizard
in the Permian Basin--as an endangered species without adequate
investigation of the science. It threatened the jobs of nearly 27,000
Texans in the Permian Basin, which is home to more than one-fifth of
the top 100 oilfields in America.
Looking at all of the evidence on energy prices, it is hard to come
to any conclusion other than that higher energy prices are part of
President Obama's plan. He talks about green energy and green jobs.
Those are great, but they only supply a low single-digit percentage of
our energy needs. We have to produce American energy, our oil and gas
reserves.
President Obama's policies have intentionally elevated the price of
gasoline to the detriment of the American consumer. One of the things
we can do is pass this Keystone XL Pipeline amendment. It will
eventually provide 700,000 barrels a day of oil from Canada to be
refined in America, creating jobs and creating more supply, which will
have a beneficial impact on gasoline prices, notwithstanding the other
policies I have mentioned this morning.
I hope my colleagues will support Senator Hoeven's amendment. I
certainly will. I would love to hear the contrary argument.
Unfortunately, we hear nothing but crickets when we start talking about
all of the beneficial effects of this policy.
I invite my colleagues who might not come from an energy-producing
State to go on the Internet and Google or use Bing or whatever search
engine they use and type in ``U.S. oil and gas pipelines'' and look at
the picture that comes up. They will be astonished, perhaps, to see all
of the pipelines that are operating safely, without the public knowing
about it, providing the oil and gas and other refined products we need
in order to keep our economy growing. This pipeline is not a threat to
the environment because we have adequate safeguards in place, and have
for a long time.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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