[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9984]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 9984]]

                 WHEN WILL GOUGING ON OIL PRICES STOP?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the outrage of the week in energy is that 
finally we know how much some of these companies have been charging. 
During a brief time last winter in a desperate attempt to keep the 
lights on, California paid $3,880 per megawatt hour to Duke Energy of 
South Carolina who now owns plants, thanks to deregulation, in 
California. Of course, they do not feel much of an obligation to keep 
the lights on. What they are trying to do is maximize profits. Price 
gouging, it is open season on price gouging in the western United 
States. Yet, the Bush administration says there is nothing and they 
will do nothing about this. They will not even investigate whether 
price gouging is going on.
  The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is charged with determining 
whether or not there is a market, a functional market, and prices are 
fair and reasonable. The staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory 
Commission, the staff, the professionals, has found that in fact what 
is going on in the western United States is not fair; it is not 
reasonable. But guess what? The chairman, Mr. Hebert of Louisiana says 
he is just not going to do anything about that. He will pray for us, he 
has told us, but that is it.
  Now, this is extraordinary. This is the chairman appointed by 
President Bush. Now, we might wonder about the motivation. Well, there 
are others other than Duke Energy involved, and perhaps that is the 
motivation. Many of these companies that are making profits up to 1000 
percent over last year's profits are based in Texas, many in Houston, 
Texas. Many are very large contributors to the Bush administration.
  The CEO of one of these energy monoliths, the Enron Company, the 
chief architect of much of the legislation that has brought about this 
disaster, has personally, personally, one individual contributed in his 
lifetime more than $2 million individually, personally, to George Bush 
as a candidate for many different offices; $2 million.
  His company, of course, is in for many, many times that but, hey, 
they make it back in about a minute in these energy markets so it is a 
really good investment on their part. The same gentleman is now hand 
picking other people to go on to the Federal Energy Regulatory 
Commission. So we cannot expect that we are going to see much relief 
there.
  So then we turn to the Bush energy plan. Does this offer us relief? 
Well, I do not think so. If we look at the Bush energy plan, we had 
Secretary Norton before the Committee on Resources today, it is dig, 
drill and burn. We are not going to conserve.
  I asked her, I said if we went into the Alaska National Wildlife 
Refuge, if we went every place you want to go, if we went to the most 
sensitive coastal areas off Florida, which I doubt will happen because 
we have another Bush as governor, but let us say we went to the most 
sensitive areas off California, who this administration seems to be 
willing to stick it to every day, and off Oregon and Washington and 
other parts of the country, and found all the oil, went into Alaska and 
found all the oil, I said can you envision that we could increase 
possibly our supply of oil by a factor of ten, that is, instead of 
having x number of years, 100 years' supply, we would have 1,000 years?
  She said, oh, no, we would never get there.
  I said, let us just say you did. Let us just say there is a heck of a 
lot more oil out there than you thought. People want to talk about we 
are going to become oil self-sufficient. If we continue to increase our 
consumption at the current rate, we do not conserve, if we found a 
thousand-year supply of oil in the United States we would use it up in 
79 years; the miracle of compound interest, of compound increasing 
demand.
  Conservation has to be a robust part of this plan. But guess what? 
Conservation does not put profits in the pockets of the oil companies 
based in Texas and Louisiana and elsewhere, and the new energy 
companies based in Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and elsewhere, but 
price gouging at the gas pump, price gouging in the wholesale electric 
markets does. So that is the energy future that is being promised in 
this plan.
  Now one can turn to Congress. Are we going to get relief out of 
Congress? Luckily, today the so-called Emergency Energy Relief bill 
being offered by, strangely enough, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Barton), backed by the chairman from Louisiana, strangely enough, can I 
see something going together with this crowd here where they produce 
this stuff as the people who do not want to do much about it?

                              {time}  1445

  Their bill finally came crashing down today. That is good, because it 
would have done nothing for the consumers in the Western United States, 
nothing for us at all. It would have done nothing to rein in price 
gouging.
  They did not want to have to consider a price cap amendment to rein 
in what has become publicized more and more in recent weeks as 
outrageous manipulation of the market by some of these energy 
companies. The Reliant Company, putting their floor traders, their 
commodity traders, on the phone to the people who actually operate the 
plants in California; and when the price drops in the national markets, 
they tell them to shut the plants down. They do not care if the lights 
stay on. They are just trying to maximize their profits.
  The American people know this. They know they are having it stuck to 
them every day at the gas pump. They see the facts, that Exxon-Mobil is 
the most profitable corporation in the world, with profits of $15 
billion last year. They see those prices going up and on and up and 
know they are being had. This administration is engaging in inaction 
and stone-walling real relief, at its peril.

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