[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Pages 25532-25533]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             ENERGY PRICES

  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, we have come from a Commerce-Energy 
Committee joint hearing with the CEOs of the major energy companies. 
They came to talk to us about the price of energy.
  I made the point this morning--I know the Presiding Officer was also 
there and made the points she wished to make--as we go into the winter 
season, those who are trying to figure out how they afford home heating 
fuel, natural gas, propane, and so on, take a look at the newspapers 
and see the highest profits in history for the oil companies. They are 
the ones, the consumers, who will have to bear the pain. Heat your home 
in the winter or try to figure out how you are going to pay the fuel 
bill in the spring if you are a farmer or a rancher. These prices are 
going to eat away all the profit that existed, and then some, with 
respect to family farmers in my State. That is according to estimates 
that come from the farm organization and from economists who have 
looked at it.
  The question for family farmers who are being ripped by these energy 
prices or people who drive to the gas pumps or people who are figuring 
out how to heat their homes is, Is anybody going to do anything about 
it? You have all the gain on this side and all the pain on this side. 
All the gain with the big energy companies, the big oil companies, the 
major integrated oil companies, bigger, stronger, with more raw muscle 
power in the marketplace because of block buster mergers, and all the 
pain on the other side, the consumers.
  Especially in a State that is an agricultural State where we rely on 
family farmers as a significant part of our economic base, knowing that 
those family farmers operate on a thin margin, knowing that they are 
trying to figure out how to pay energy costs going into spring planting 
and fertilizer costs and so on, knowing that it is going to wipe away 
any net profit they would have, any opportunity for a net profit next 
year, they are saying to this Congress: Talk is cheap. What are you 
going to do? Will Congress take some action? Will Congress take action 
to ease the pain and provide some fairness and restore fairness? I hope 
so.
  I won't go into great detail about the action I think we should take. 
I have done that many times on the floor with respect to a Windfall 
Profits Rebate Act, to rebate to consumers a portion of these profits.
  My hope is that in the shadow of the hearings we held today, Congress 
will

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be ready to take some action with respect to energy price issues.

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