[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 20526-20527]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                                 ENERGY

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, energy prices are going up; gasoline 
prices are up. I doubt there are many families who do not spend $60 a 
month on gasoline. Those who commute, those who have children with 
vehicles, a husband and wife working may have two or three vehicles per 
family and not be wealthy. They may be paying $100 a month or more for 
gasoline. If they were paying $60 a month for gasoline 18 months ago, 
they are now paying over $90 a month. If they were paying $100 a month 
last year, they are probably paying over $150 a month this year.
  That is $50 a month or $30 a month, perhaps more in some families, 
withdrawn from the usable income of that family, money with which they 
no longer can buy shoes, a new set of tires for their car, to go on a 
vacation with their children, take the kids to a ball game, buy shoes 
for them to play soccer or basketball, baseball, or volley ball. That 
is $50 a month extra of aftertax money that American citizens had 15, 
18 months ago and no longer have today. That is because the price of 
energy has gone up.
  In addition, businesses are facing those same increases. I traveled a 
couple of months ago with a full-time truck driver and his wife. I 
traveled from north of Birmingham to Clanton to Montgomery and 
discussed with them the problems they are facing. They are paying up to 
$800 to $1,000 a month extra to operate their truck. They try to pass 
it on, which increases the costs down the road, but they are not able 
to pass it all on and it is reducing their standard of living. They 
have, in fact, less money with which to go to the store and buy 
products.
  What does that ultimately mean? It means there are going to be fewer 
widgets bought, there are going to be fewer shoes bought, there are 
going to be fewer new cars bought, fewer new houses bought and many 
other things we would like to purchase. We will not be able to purchase 
those items because OPEC, through its price-gouging cartel, has fixed 
the oil and gas prices and driven them up to an extraordinary degree. 
As a result, it is hurting us. We know this. We know the economy 
appears to have some slowing. We know that profit margins across the 
board have been shrinking significantly, and we know that higher energy 
costs are a big reason for that.
  I say that because we are talking about some very big issues. If you 
do not have money to purchase, let's say you purchase 8 things this 
month instead of what you would normally purchase, 10, there is 
somebody who would have made those other 2 items, somebody who would 
have sold those other 2 items; they may not be able to continue to do 
that. What does that do to the producing business? It puts stress on 
them. It can cool off this robust economy with which we have been 
blessed for quite a number of years.
  Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the U.N., wrote an editorial 
recently which I was pleased to read. He pointed out how it hurts poor 
nations more than wealthy nations, but it hurts wealthy nations, too. 
Wealthy nations are hurt when poor nations do not have money to buy 
products from us. We sell all over the world. Whatever cools off the 
entire world economy cools off the American economy and jeopardizes 
jobs.
  What caused us to come to this point? I say with confidence that it 
is the Clinton-Gore policies, primarily Vice President Al Gore's energy 
policies, that have been involved here. The simple fact is that those 
policies are driven by and motivated at the deepest level by his 
adoption of a radical, no-growth agenda that is playing in his book. He 
set it out some years ago. People are astounded when they read that 
book because he is deeply revealing of a philosophy that we ought to 
reduce spending on energy and that will somehow drive up costs and we 
will use less oil, less gas, we will ride bicycles and use solar cells, 
and that is how we are going to meet our national energy policy.
  The trouble is that solar cells cost 4, 5, 10 times as much as fossil 
fuels do to produce energy. Who is going to pay for that? Working 
Americans are going to pay for that while some elite people think it is 
a cool idea and for which they are not paying the price. They can 
afford to pay it perhaps. We are into that mood now. This radical 
agenda is demonstrated by the policies that have been carried out 
systematically since this administration took office.
  It has been steady, and it has been regular. They have not said our 
policy is to raise prices. They are too clever for that. They are not 
going to allow that spin to get about. What have they done against the 
consistent opposition of Members in this body who have warned over and 
over that reducing production of American fuels was going to lead us to 
a crisis? What have they done? They have opposed drilling in the ANWR 
region of Alaska which has huge reserves equal to 30 years of the 
production in Saudi Arabia. This one little area amounts to the size of 
Dulles Airport. It is a very small area with huge reserves. They vetoed 
legislation that would have allowed us to produce oil and gas to help 
meet our needs. Over vigorous debate in this Senate and a strong 
majority vote, it was vetoed by the Clinton-Gore administration.
  What else? They steadfastly oppose nuclear power. France has gone 
from 60 percent of their power nuclear to 80 percent. Industrialized 
nations realize it is the cleanest, safest of all sources of energy 
with unlimited capacity to produce electricity, with no air pollution--
virtually no air pollution, and only a small amount of waste that we 
can easily store in the Nevada desert. Oh, no, President Clinton and 
Vice President Gore vetoed the ability for us to store that waste in 
the Nevada desert, therefore, helping shut down our nuclear energy. We 
have not brought on a nuclear plant in over 20 years in this country.
  We are denying ourselves that capacity to produce energy. There are 
huge reserves of natural gas in the Rocky Mountain areas. Natural gas 
is the cleanest burning of all our fossil fuels. All our electric-
generating plants today are natural gas plants. We are hitting a crisis 
in the production of natural gas. They refuse to allow those Federal 
lands in the Rocky Mountain areas, almost all of it owned by the 
Federal Government, to produce natural gas, which isn't a dangerous 
fuel to produce. It doesn't pour oil all out on the ground; it is an 
evaporative gas. It is safe to produce. Certainly we could do that.
  They are opposed to drilling offshore. In fact, Vice President Gore, 
during his campaigning in New Hampshire, promised not only to not 
approve any additional offshore drilling of natural gas but to consider 
rolling back existing leases that have already been issued.
  How are we going to meet our energy needs for natural gas if we 
cannot produce it? There are many other areas where, through 
regulation, we basically shut off coal as a viable option for expanding 
our energy needs. In fact,

[[Page 20527]]

even though we are much more efficient than we have ever been with 
electric energy, we need more. The projections are that we will have a 
substantial increase in demand even though we are improving our 
efficiency steadily. So that is the problem we are facing.
  The problem is that when OPEC realized our demand was increasing, and 
the world demand was increasing, and our own domestic production was 
decreasing 14 percent, while demand was going up 18 to 20 percent, they 
were able to reduce production, force the price up to exorbitant 
levels, and make themselves rich. In fact, it was a political decision 
by governmental leaders to force up the price. It was not even a free 
market decision. It was a political decision by the leaders of these 
oil-producing nations because of our failure to produce energy and 
because we have become dependent on their oil. So they have been able 
to demand what they want to in price. Our politicians lost to their 
politicians. Their politicians beat our politicians.
  And who is paying the price? The American citizen, when he goes to 
the gas pump, when he buys his heating oil, when he goes and buys a 
product. It is more expensive today to buy that product than it was 
before because of increased gasoline prices in the whole production 
system. That is what has happened. We have been taken to the cleaners. 
To me it is as if we put a tax on the gasoline, but instead of taxing 
gasoline 50, 60 cents a gallon extra where the revenue comes to 
Washington so it at least can be spent in the United States, it is, in 
effect, a 50-, 60-cent tax that goes to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and 
the Middle East. The OPEC cartel gets our tax. They are taxing our 
wealth and sending it abroad.
  This has the capacity to kill the economic growth this Nation has 
been experiencing. It has the capacity to drain our wealth to the 
degree that this economy could slow down. It could even go into 
recession because we have done nothing to deal with it. We have done 
nothing. The only thing, in the long run, that we can do is to make 
sure we produce what we have.
  We have virtually unlimited reserves of natural gas and oil in the 
United States--certainly for decades to come. There are myths that we 
do not have enough. We have large reserves. We should have been 
producing those more effectively. But the policies of this 
administration have been to reduce our production.
  And as night follows day, the price is going to go up. It threatens 
not only the pocketbook of a mother who is trying to now get by--she 
was paying $100 a month for the family's gasoline; now she is paying 
$150 a month for the family's gasoline. She cannot buy things at the 
store she used to buy. And the producers of those products are now 
going to have to lay off workers because people are not buying those 
products at the rate they were previously buying them.
  This is not an itty-bitty issue. This is a tremendous issue for our 
country. I hope it will be discussed tonight in the debate. I hope it 
will be made a part of this campaign. I believe, with an absolute 
conviction, that if we allow these international greedy producing 
nations to jerk us around, to take money from the average mother and 
father and working American when they go to the gas pump, having their 
money sent to those nations, they can hurt us badly. It hurts a lot of 
people.
  I pumped gas a few months ago and washed people's windshields. I 
talked to them about the costs they were facing. I talked to a young 
lady in her early twenties. She was going to college 3 days a week. The 
college she attended was 30 miles up the road. She talked about how 
much her gas bill was. She was trying to save money for tuition. Her 
car was not a new car. She said she would like to have a new car, but 
she could not afford it. That extra cost was coming out of her pocket.
  This is a real issue. It hurts our families. They have less money in 
their pocket and in the family budget because it has to be spent on 
gasoline. It is hurting businesses. Their profits are down. Home 
building is down.
  What will happen in the future? I don't know. But if we do not get in 
this ballgame, if we do not challenge OPEC and figure out a way to 
break that cartel, and if we do not increase our own production of 
energy, we will have what we have had numerous times before; and that 
is, a recession driven by increased energy costs. What a tragedy that 
will be. It should not happen.
  Our projections are and our needs as a nation are to continue this 
prosperity, to continue the surplus we have been able to generate in 
this Government, and to pay down our debt and to be able to do some 
things we wish we could have done before. This is a glorious time for 
us.
  I believe we have to take strong action. I have been frustrated that 
this administration remains steadfast in blocking, time and again, any 
step to increase our production of energy. And that has no more 
consequence but one: When you reduce production, it will drive up 
costs.
  I thank the Chair and, again, express my appreciation for his fine 
remarks on national defense.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

                          ____________________