[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 2681-2687]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1945
                                 ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Boyda of Kansas). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. 
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, this is the 22nd time, I 
believe, that I have come here to the well of the House to talk about a 
subject which I think will be the overarching concern of our world for 
the next decades and several decades beyond that. That subject is 
energy and specifically the energy that we get from oil.
  As an illustration of the problems we face, I have here a map of the 
world as it would be drawn if each country was sized relative to the 
amount of oil reserves that it had. So this is the world according to 
oil. And you see here Saudi Arabia, and it would swallow up the United 
States. How many times would it swallow us up, a dozen, 15 times?
  Notice the incredible wealth of oil in the Middle East. Venezuela 
looms, what, two, three times the size of the United States as far as 
reserves of oil are concerned. The little United Arab Emirates, you can 
hardly find them on a map. They are kind of a little pinpoint on a 
usual map, and there they are six, eight times larger than the United 
States with their reserves of oil. The famed reserves of Russia up 
there. Notice that the United Arab Emirates have more oil than Russia 
has. And Saudi Arabia, of course, and Iraq. And little Kuwait, a little 
province that Saddam Hussein thought ought to belong to Iraq when he 
invaded it more than a decade ago, has many times as much oil as the 
United States and more oil than Russia has.
  Remember this map when we put the next map of the world up here 
because this is an interesting map. And this is a map with the 
continents, the countries drawn relative to their actual size. And you 
will notice here the little symbols that represent several things, and 
one of them is oil that China has bought around the world. And this is 
Unocal, which they almost bought in our country. Everywhere you see 
this little symbol, the Chinese have bought rights to oil. They are 
scouring the world for oil.
  And the next chart shows a statement by Condoleezza Rice, who 
recognized this. And this is a pretty interesting statement made by our 
Secretary of State: ``We do have to do something about the energy 
problem.''
  Thank you. I am pleased that you recognize that.
  ``I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as 
Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is. I will 
use the word wharping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to 
do something about the wharping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out 
rush for energy supply.'' And, of course, China has been preeminent in 
this.
  Several days ago I came upon an article. I have no idea why it took 
so long to come to light. It really is not an article. It really is the 
script of a speech that was given by Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the 
father of the nuclear submarine. And he gave this speech, it will be 50 
years this coming May 14, 1957. He gave this speech to a banquet of the 
Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association 
in St. Paul, Minnesota. And we will recognize, celebrate the 50th 
anniversary of that here in a relatively few months. That speech, by 
the way, was just 14 months and 6 days after a really famous speech 
that was given by M. King Hubbert in San Antonio, Texas, to a group of 
oil people in which he made a prediction that we will be talking about 
this evening, and that is that the United States would reach its 
maximum oil production just 14 years after that in 1970.
  And right on target, that is exactly what happened. And no matter 
what we have done since then, we have pumped less oil than before until 
now we are pumping about half the oil that we pumped in 1970. He 
predicted that the world would be peaking about now, and that is the 
subject that brings us here tonight. I have a few excerpts here from 
this speech that he gave:
  ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political 
power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an 
ever smaller number of countries. Ultimately the nation which controls 
the largest energy resource will become dominant. If we give thought to 
the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to 
conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we 
shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.''
  He said this 50 years ago: ``If we act wisely and in time,'' he says 
50 years ago, ``to conserve what we have and prepare well for the 
necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for 
our own country.'' We have done nothing in the last 50 years except try 
to find more and more gas and oil and coal and use more and more of 
what we have found.
  Another quote from this very interesting speech: ``In the 8,000 years 
from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population 
will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion . . .''
  Now, he missed it a little because we are at nearly 7 billion now.
  `` . . . with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 
5 percent . . . ''
  Way more than 90 percent taking place during the last 5 percent of 
that period.
  `` . . . in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded 
history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for 
the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.'' 
And it occurred well before that because we are now at nearly 7 billion 
people.

[[Page 2682]]

  The next chart shows what he says in chart 4. If you were to plot 
population on this chart, it would pretty much follow the curve here 
for the increased use of gas and oil. This is only about 400 years of 
the 8,000 years that he spoke of, of recorded history. So you can move 
this way, way back a great long distance here to see the whole history 
of the world. In the long history of the world, 8,000 years of recorded 
history, the Age of Oil will last but about 300 years. We are about 150 
years into the Age of Oil from when we started to where we are now. And 
if M. King Hubbert was correct, and he was correct about the United 
States, but if he is correct about the world, for the next 150 years 
there will be less and less oil pumped at higher and higher prices 
until finally, roughly 150 years from now, there will be little or no 
more gas, oil, and coal which is economically recoverable.
  This is an astounding picture, and future generations looking back at 
this Age of Oil may very well ask themselves how could they have done 
that, this incredible wealth?
  In a few minutes I am going to read a fascinating history, a very 
brief history of the world and energy that Hyman Rickover gave to those 
lucky physicians that night nearly 50 years. They will ask themselves 
how could they have done that when they found this incredible wealth 
under the ground? Couldn't they have understood that it couldn't last 
forever? Wouldn't they have asked themselves what can we do with this 
to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? But 
instead of that, we simply have used that energy as rapidly as we could 
with little or no thought for the future.
  Another quote from this very interesting talk: ``I suggest that this 
is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our 
descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.'' And he 
recognized 50 years ago that there would be a Fossil Fuel Age. ``We 
might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal 
consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary 
adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil 
fuels.''
  Less than a month ago I came back from China. Nine of us went there, 
nine Members of Congress. We went there primarily to talk about energy. 
We met with a number of relatively high officials in the Chinese 
Government. I was surprised in our discussions first with the energy 
people and then with others that they began their discussion of energy 
by talking about post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago anticipated that 
there would be a world without fossil fuels when we had gone through 
the Age of Oil.
  The next chart is another quote from this very interesting speech: 
``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuels 
reserves. They were created by solar energy.'' He says: ``500 million 
years ago it took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of 
the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length 
of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. The 
longer they last, the more time that we have to invent ways of living 
off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to 
the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''
  What a speech. Fifty years ago when the United States was king of 
oil, the biggest consumer in the world, biggest producer in the world, 
and he recognized, as I think any rational person would recognize, that 
gas and oil and coal cannot be forever. It is finite. It one day will 
be gone. The only question is when, which is what we are here to talk 
about.
  And this is a great quote here: ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in 
the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital 
sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of 
his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in 
riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.'' I 
will suggest that this is precisely what our offspring will accuse us 
of doing.
  You know, there are only a few places that we believe there are any 
meaningful amounts of oil left. One of those is in ANWR and the other 
is in offshore drilling. The vast majority of experts in the world 
believe that we have probably found 95 percent of all the oil we will 
ever find. And notice that the new finds of oil are way out there, 
difficult to get, expensive to get. That big find in the Gulf of Mexico 
under 7,000 feet of water, roughly 50,000 feet of rock and dirt under 
that. I am told, and I don't know whether this is true or not, you can 
hear a lot of things, that when oil is $211 a barrel, they will be able 
to develop that because it will cost that much to get that oil out.
  What I would like to do now is to take a look at some of the thoughts 
in this speech given by Hyman Rickover. I wish I had been a physician 
50 years ago. I would have been 30 years old at that time sitting in 
that audience. He predated me by about 10 years in thinking about this 
problem. It was probably 40 years, and maybe because I am a scientist 
that I started asking myself the question: you know, Roscoe, oil and 
gas and coal are finite. They are not an inexhaustible supply. At some 
point in time, we will have to be concerned about those supplies. Is 
that 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I had no idea, when I 
first asked myself this question, how long that time would be, but I 
knew that a time had to come when we would be asking ourselves the 
question isn't it time that we should start thinking about this.
  Just a few excerpts from this really interesting speech: ``Each 
American has at his disposal each year energy equivalent to that 
obtainable from eight tons of coal.'' Then coal was the primary energy 
source, a primary energy source, much less important now. Eight tons of 
coal, that is a lot of energy.
  ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus 
enormous fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines 
which makes each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves.''
  And notice these numbers, and these were 50 years ago. You decide how 
much this has changed today. ``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts 
continuously, or one twentieth horsepower.''
  Now, you can do more than that in working, but you can't do it 24 
hours a day, and this is a 24/7 figure.
  ``Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with 
energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his 
automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful 
household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent 
to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the 
humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once 
owned by the richest nobles and lives better than most ancient kings.''

                              {time}  2000

  ``In retrospect'', he says, and this is 50 years ago, ``and despite 
wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by'', 150 now, 
``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.'' And well they will 
when we look back on this.
  ``Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our 
ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our 
growing population.'' He thought it would grow to 4 billion by this 
time. It is nearly 7 billion.
  Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of 
energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations. And I found 
this part of his speech just captivating, fascinating. ``Possessant of 
surplus energy is of course a requisite for any kind of civilization, 
for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must 
exhaust all of his strength, mental and physical, to obtain the bare 
necessities of life.
  ``Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized 
living: A comfortable and tasteful home, instead of a bare shelter; 
attractive clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing 
food instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides 
the freedom from toil without which there can be no art, music, 
literature or learning.
  ``There is no need to belabor this point. What lifted man, one of the

[[Page 2683]]

weaker animals'', an interesting observation. We are really weak in 
muscle power. A chimpanzee the size of a man has four or five times the 
strength of a man. A dog has enormously better smell than you, the 
eagle infinitely better eyesight than you. Man is indeed one of the 
weaker animals.
  ``What lifted man, one of the weaker animals above the animal world 
was that he could devise with his brain ways to increase the energy at 
his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and 
spirit. Where man must rely on the energy of his own body he can 
sustain only the most meager existence.
  ``Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from the 
discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy 
resources, he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to 
an agricultural civilization, he needed more energy. In the past this 
was found in the labor of the pendent members of large patriarchal 
families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war 
booty.
  There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this 
type of energy, less today thankfully than there were 50 years ago. 
``Slave labor was necessary for the city states and the empires of 
antiquity. They frequently had slave populations larger than their free 
citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure 
attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative 
sources of energy were lacking.
  ``This may well have been the single most important reason why 
engineering advanced very little in ancient times. A reduction of per 
capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in 
civilization, and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.''
  I would like to pause for just a moment to reflect on that. If all of 
the energy available to the United States was the energy from the 
United States, we would now be living on half of the energy that we had 
available in 1970. If you believe that the United States is a microcosm 
of the world, and if you believe that M. King Hubbert's analyses, which 
were so right on for the United States, are probably pretty good for 
the world, then the world now or very shortly will reach its maximum 
oil production.
  After that, no matter what we do, there will be less and less oil 
available. And finally over the next 150 years, if the second half of 
the age of oil is as long as the first half, and M. King Hubbert found 
a bell curve in the exploitation and exhaustion of each of these oil 
fields, then we will have available to us less and less fossil fuel 
energy.
  Now, unless we can contrive to replace that fossil fuel energy by 
alternative energy sources, we will have available to us year by year 
less energy than we had the year before.
  And I was fascinated by Hyman Rickover's discussion of how energy 
contributed to the development of civilizations. And then he notes 
here, ``That a reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in 
the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more 
primitive way of life.''
  Will we be able to avoid that? Will we be able to create enough 
energy sources, other than fossil fuels, that we can replace the energy 
that will not be available from fossil fuels as we exhaust, slowly 
exhaust their supplies in the world?
  For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the 
primary reason for the fall of the Mayan civilization on this 
continent, and of the decline of once flourishing civilizations in 
Asia. India and China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle 
East. Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a further 
disastrous effect. Lacking plant cover, soil washed away, and with soil 
erosion the nutritional national base was reduced as well.
  It is a sobering thought to recognize that life on this planet is 
largely dependent on about the upper, on average, 8 inches of our soil. 
That is the top soils which grow our crops. And then he notes something 
that few people want to talk about, I am glad he had the courage to 
mention, that another cause of declining civilization comes with 
pressure of population on available land.
  No matter how clever we are at developing other energy sources, if 
population continues to grow, and I will say that I am a 100 percent 
pro-life person. I think there are ways to control population without 
killing the preborn. And so when I read this, do not think that I am 
advocating that we need abortion to control population.
  ``A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the 
people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first. 
Finally, even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man, who is 
2\1/2\ times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It 
must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agriculture 
machines increase productivity for man, maximum productivity per acre 
is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation.
  ``It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia--'' 
now this is less true today with a booming economy in China and a good 
economy in India, but this was true in that day. ``It is a sobering 
thought that the impoverished peoples of Asia who today seldom go to 
sleep with their hunger completely satisfied,'' 20 percent of the world 
will go to bed tonight hungry, ``were once far more civilized and lived 
much better than the people of the west.''
  And not so very long ago either. It was a story brought back by Marco 
Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes 
to the riches of the East and induced the adventurous sailors to brave 
the high seas in their small vessels searching for direct routes to the 
fabulous Orient, which, of course, brought Columbus to our shores.
  The wealth of the Indies is a phrase still used. But whatever wealth 
may be there is certainly not evident in the lives of the people today. 
Now, the last 50 years have seen meaningful industrialization in that 
part of the world, which just has consumed increasing amounts of 
energy.
  Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing 
populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has 
become again the primary source of energy. That was true then, it is 
still true in rural areas in these countries.
  Since other energy convertors have become too expensive, this might 
be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply 
a reversion to a more primitive stage of civilization, with all that 
implies for human dignity and happiness.
  Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his 
heavily laden wheelbarrow creeping along a cobblestone street, or who 
has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of 
burden moving to market in Java, the slender women bent under 
mountainous loads heaped on their heads.
  Anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone 
realizes the degradations of man's stature when his muscle power 
becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither 
when human beings are so degraded.
  Let me skip now to a little later in this very interesting talk. I 
think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance 
of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests on the 
technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels.
  True 50 years ago, truer today. And then this statement. Now, 
underline this. Use red ink. What assurance do we then have that our 
energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer 
is, in the long run, none. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not 
renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all 
earlier civilizations, which is why the Hirsch report says that man has 
never faced, the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no 
precedent in history.
  In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier 
civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by 
careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone 
forever. Fuel is even more effervescent than metals. Metals too are

[[Page 2684]]

nonrenewable resources, threatened with ultimate extinction, but 
something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap. And there 
is nothing that man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. 
They were created by solar energy, he says, 500 millions years ago and 
took eons to grow to their present volume.
  I might pause here to note that those who belief in a literal flood 
believe that all of this occurred with the upheavals that occurred 
during the flood and the time since then. But most people believe that 
it took a very, very long time. In the face of the basic fact that 
fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these 
reserves will last is important in only one respect.
  The longer they last, and I am repeating one of the charts I had. But 
you know we need to hear this again because this is so significant. The 
longer they last the more time do we have to invent ways of living off 
renewable or substitute energy sources, and to adjust our economy to 
the vast changes that we can expect from such a shift.
  Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. And I am going to repeat 
this again. This needs to be heard again too. A prudent and responsible 
parent will use his capital sparingly. Now have we been using this 
energy capital sparingly? Anything but. In order to pass onto his 
children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and 
irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not 
one whit how his offspring will fare.
  I am afraid that that is exactly what our children and our children's 
children will say of us when they recognize how little attention we 
paid to the warnings that we have been given for a very long time. This 
is Hyman Rickover 5 years ago, and just a year before that, M. King 
Hubbert and his prediction.
  Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics, far-
seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor 
which must enter into all planning for the future, responsible 
governments who realize that the wellbeing of their citizens and the 
political power of their countries depend on an adequate energy supply, 
all of these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. Gee, I 
wish that were true.
  If they began, then they stopped. Because I notice hardly anybody 
today is concerned about this problem. In this country especially, many 
studies have been made in the past few years. 50 years ago, seeking to 
discover accurate information on fossil fuel reserves and foreseeable 
fuel needs.
  Now he may have been referring to the studies that were made by M. 
King Hubbert just the year before when he predicted that the United 
States would peak in oil production in 1970.
  The chart that I have here kind of indicates to us the dimensions of 
the problem that Hyman Rickover was talking about and the problem we 
face.

                              {time}  2015

  The little analogy I use for this is that we are very much like a 
young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big 
inheritance. And they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of 
all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and 
only 15 percent from their income. And they look at how old they are 
and how large the inheritance is and they recognize, gee, it is not 
going to last till we retire, so, obviously, we have got to do 
something. Either we have got to spend less or we have got to make 
more.
  I use that analogy because that is precisely where we are. Today, 85 
percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural 
gas, and just 15 percent of it from other sources. Now, you may lump 
all of those as renewables, but they are not quite because a bit over 
half of that, 8 percent of the 15, comes from nuclear power. In this 
country, that is 8 percent of our energy, but it is 20 percent of our 
electricity, so as you drive home tonight, imagine that every fifth 
home and every fifth business and every fifth street light was dark. 
That is what our country would be without nuclear power.
  Now, we have had not a single death, no meaningful accidents. By the 
way, 3-Mile Island, and I lived within the drift zone of that, that 
worked. The containment facility worked. Too bad we had the accident, 
but good that we had prepared for it.
  A lot of people are concerned about nuclear energy. But they really 
don't reflect on how many people die from coal, all the black lung 
disease. I remember a number of years ago when I worked for NIH and had 
a contract to look at respiratory support devices, and one of the 
places I went to was West Virginia, where they had a lot of black lung 
disease. And I talked to the physicians there that were dealing with 
these patients, and each year thousands died from black lung disease. 
It wasn't so much, and this is not really related to energy, but the 
real problem there was silicosis. But the lungs were black from the 
coal, and so it was called black lung disease, but it was really rock 
dust primarily which was the offender there.
  How many miners are killed when the mine caves in or when it 
explodes? How many people are killed at the railroad crossing when the 
coal train goes by? We just seem to accept that as a part of the cost 
of having coal to use.
  There have been no injuries, I remind the listeners, from our use of 
nuclear. We have had no Chernobyls, aren't going to have any because we 
have designed them much better, so this could and probably should grow.
  Then we come to the true renewables. And there we see them, solar, 
and I am a big supporter of solar. I have a second home beyond the grid 
and we have only solar power. We are shortly putting up a wind machine 
because very frequently when the sun is not shining, the wind is 
blowing and so they complement each other very nicely.
  But notice how tiny they were. This was 2000. Now we are better today 
because they have been growing very rapidly. So they are several times 
bigger today. But that was 1 percent of 7 percent, .07 percent. Suppose 
it is four times bigger today, .28 percent. Big deal. We have a long, 
long way to go.
  Notice the contribution of wood. That is the timber industry and 
paper industry wisely using that waste product.
  Conventional hydro. We have pretty much peaked out on that. There is 
maybe as much as we could get from unconventional hydro, microhydro, 
small streams where it wouldn't have the environmental effect that big 
dams have.
  The waste to energy here, that is 8 percent of the 7 percent. That 
could certainly grow. It is probably a whole lot better to burn it than 
it is to put it in the land fill.
  But note that this is really kind of recycling fossil fuel energy 
because, in an energy deficient world, there would be no enormous piles 
of municipal waste. They are all produced with energy; and as we have 
less and less energy, we will be able to live with less and less waste. 
So that will be a diminishing source of energy in an energy deficient 
world.
  I want to take just a moment here to talk about ethanol. There are a 
couple of bills, and I will have it up here in a few moments, that look 
at developing ethanol. The price of corn, from which most ethanol is 
made in this country, was $2.11 a bushel in September. It was $4.08 a 
bushel in December. And that was because of the pressure of the demand 
for corn for producing ethanol.
  Now, I didn't read it in this speech, but Hyman Rickover cautioned 
that if you are going to get energy from agriculture, please note that 
you will be competing with two things for that energy. One, you will be 
competing with food.
  We eat some corn meal. Most of the corn goes to our animals, and our 
dairy farmers are really hurting now, because milk has not gone up much 
and their feed has gone up enormously because of the pressures put on 
corn by ethanol.
  Every gallon of ethanol that we burn represents at least three-
quarters of a gallon of fossil fuel to produce it. Almost half the 
energy in producing corn comes from the natural gas that produces the 
nitrogen fertilizer.

[[Page 2685]]

  If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, which is the only fair 
way to look at corn as an energy source, otherwise you are simply 
recycling fossil fuels and growing the corn and making ethanol from it.
  If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, and if you wanted to 
replace just 10 percent of our current gasoline consumption, I checked 
these figures with CRS, I think they are correct, you would have to 
double our corn crop and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 
percent of our gasoline.
  What is very likely to happen now that corn has doubled in price is 
that farmers, recognizing that, gee, if I planted more corn I would 
make more money, they are going to take land out of agricultural 
preserve where it has been reserved by putting it in a bank, and it is 
land that probably shouldn't have been farmed anyhow, which is why they 
took it out, and the government helps pay them for that, which I am 
supportive of, by the way, because it helps preserve that land.
  If they take that out and plant it to corn, corn is one of the worst 
crops for erosion. It is one of the heaviest feeders that we have, 
demanding more fertilizer than almost anything else. The insult to our 
environment by the erosion and so forth of this land as the result of 
more corn cropping, may off-balance, offset the benefit we get from the 
small decreased production of carbon dioxide, which is the primary 
reason most people are thinking about ethanol today, because of global 
warming and greenhouse gases.
  And if you are simply releasing the carbon dioxide that the plant 
picked up, you have not increased the amount of carbon dioxide up 
there, because the plant took it out of the air. You are burning it and 
putting it back into the air. So it is a balance.
  Hyman Rickover also cautioned, be careful about your expectations for 
energy from biomass. And today you will hear a lot of hype about energy 
from cellulosic ethanol. And this is a fascinating pursuit. Cellulose 
is made up of a lot of glucose molecules, simple sugar, half of the 
sucrose which is your table sugar. But they are so tightly bound 
together that there are no enzymes in our body which will separate 
them. In fact, the cow and the goat don't have any either. But they 
harbor in their gut some little critters that do have enzymes that do 
that. And so this is a great example of symbiosis. They both benefit 
from that relationship. These little microbes split the cellulose into 
the glucose molecules, and then they are absorbed by the host animals.
  Hyman Rickover cautioned, be careful how much of this biomass you 
think you can take from the soil because it is biomass, organic 
material, which makes top soil different from subsoil.
  There were three men from the Department of Agriculture in my office 
several months ago talking excitedly about the potential for cellulosic 
ethanol. And I asked them if our top soils were increasing in quantity 
and quality. And the answer is obviously, no.
  We are really good today compared to how we were 20, 30 years ago. 
But I am told that for every bushel of corn you grow in Iowa, three 
bushels of Iowa top soil go down the Mississippi River, which is why we 
have such a big delta down in Louisiana.
  Well, these little microbes that exist in the gut of these animals we 
have now learned to bioengineer so we can do this in the laboratory. So 
we can now turn newspaper into alcohol and run your car on newspaper. 
That is doable. But be careful how much energy you expect to get from 
that because for a few years you may mine the top soil, but soon you 
will decrease the product activity of the top soil. So there is a limit 
to that.
  So what do we do? The next chart, we buy time. How do you do that?
  I mentioned that I have been to China, came back 3 or so weeks ago. 
And they begin all of their discussions by talking about post-oil. And 
they have a 5-point plan. And it is not just the energy people. It is 
every member of government we talked to talked about this 5-point plan. 
So they recognize that energy is a real challenge for them.
  The 5-point plan begins with conservation. You see, today there is no 
surplus oil. There is no surplus energy to invest in developing 
alternatives. If there was any surplus oil, it wouldn't be $55 a 
barrel.
  So we have run out of time. We have run out of energy, but we can buy 
some time and free up some energy if we have an aggressive program in 
conservation. This is where they began their 5-point program: 
conservation.
  Two and three were produce as much of your own energy as you can, and 
diversity will help. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And the 
fourth one, a really good one, especially for them, be kind to the 
environment. They were apologetic. They are not kind to the 
environment, but they have 1.3 billion people who are clamoring for the 
kind of life style we have and want to go climb up that economic ladder 
and they aren't using energy very efficiently, and we need to help 
them.
  The fifth point, a really interesting one, international cooperation. 
They recognize that this isn't a U.S. problem or a Chinese problem. 
This is a global problem because oil moves on a global marketplace. It 
doesn't really matter who owns the oil. The person who has the highest 
bid gets the oil. It sells to the people who have the money to buy it. 
And when it is in short supply, there is more demand for it, so the 
price goes up.
  Once we have bought some time and freed up some energy, then we need 
to use it wisely. I think one of the things that we need is an ARPA-E. 
Many people know what DARPA is. It is an agency in our Defense 
Department that looks at far-out, really interesting things. They 
developed the Net, for one thing. And they invest in things that 
industry couldn't invest in because there is no imminent payoff, not 
even certain there will be any long-term payoff. You are running down a 
lot of dead roads. But, boy, when you hit it, you hit it big. And DARPA 
has been very creative. And we need something like that in the energy 
world because there are some things that may be big, big producers 
tomorrow, which may not be attractive to investors today.
  I am a big fan of the marketplace, but the marketplace is neither 
omniscient nor omnipotent, and there is a role for government here. And 
I am one of the biggest small government people in Washington. But, you 
know, we ought to get the government out of things that are not 
productive and put them into things where they are productive.
  And looking ahead and wisely deciding what some reasonable risk is 
and investing the taxpayer money has paid big dividends in DARPA, and I 
think it would in ARPA-E. Big benefits to this. We are now an 
incredible importer. I think this year the trade deficit we were $800 
billion or something like that. We could again become a major exporter. 
The world is going to be clamoring for these renewable technologies, 
and we could be a leader in this.

                              {time}  2030

  Whether we like it or not, we are a role model. We are one person out 
of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's energy. So we 
are a witness, we are a role model whether we like it or not.
  There are a couple of bills that I wanted to mention. This is our 
bill, and I am proud of this bill because if we can't do this, we are 
in for a really rough ride. This is a bill that encourages our farms to 
become energy independent. Not just energy independent, because if that 
is all they did, then the people who live in the cities would be in a 
world of hurt when we run out of fossil fuels.
  But the farmer must be able not only to produce enough energy to run 
his farm, but have some leftover energy, and I think this challenges 
him to produce as much leftover energy as he uses on his farm. And 
there are some rewards for farmers who can do this. There are a lot of 
creative ways we can do this, and we hope that these awards will 
challenge people to be as creative and innovative as Americans have 
always been, and I am looking forward to some very exciting 
developments here.

[[Page 2686]]

  The next chart has some data on it that I referred to previously. 
There is nothing like seeing it in a pretty colored chart. We can look 
at the top part of the chart. And petroleum, of course, if you start 
out with 1 million Btus, you won't have 1 million Btus to burn because 
you have got to pump it and refine it and transport it and put it in 
your car and so forth. So to get 1 million, you must start out 1.23 
million.
  Here we look at ethanol, and there is a big advantage here because 
you get solar energy. These, I am told, are very optimistic figures. 
Dr. Pimental believes that if you look at all the energy input into 
producing corn, that more energy goes into producing corn than you get 
out of corn. I hope that is not true. Most people believe that it is 
energy positive.
  You know, even if it were just balanced, once you have taken the 
ethanol out, you have left some really good feed. Tragically, many of 
the ethanol plants today carry that to the landfill. What a shame, 
almost a crime, because all the fat is left, all the corn oil is left, 
and all the protein is left. All we have taken out is the carbohydrate.
  What this says is, as I have mentioned previously, for every gallon 
of ethanol you burn, you are burning at least three-fourths of a gallon 
of fossil fuels. That is a fossil fuel input. Now, this down here 
depicts the fossil fuel input. I mentioned that almost half of it, this 
big purple area here, comes from the natural gas that produced the 
nitrogen fertilizer.
  Before we learn how to do that, by the way, the only nitrogen 
fertilizer--as a little kid I remember that pretty much the only 
nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manures and guano. And you took the 
manure out of your barnyard, you spread it out on your fields, and the 
fertilizer attachment on your tractor was about three times as big as 
the seed, the corn bin. You put very little fertilizer on it. But now 
we have learned to make enormous--we mine the phosphate rock and the 
potash and we make nitrogen fertilizer as incredibly energy intensive, 
as you can see. All of these are other fossil fuel energy inputs, 
making the tractor, fueling the tractor, putting the tires on the 
tractor, harvesting the grain, hauling it to market, drying it, the 
chemicals that go into killing the bugs and so forth on it.
  An incredible amount of energy goes into producing a bushel of corn. 
And if you were going to grow corn with energy from corn--I gave you 
the statistics a little bit earlier--I believe that you would have to 
double your corn and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 percent 
of our gasoline.
  That is an illustration of the huge challenge that we face. We use 21 
million barrels of oil a day in this country, 70 percent of it in 
transportation. Each barrel of oil, as Hyman Rickover so graphically 
described, represents an enormous amount of human energy. One barrel of 
oil represents the work of 12 people working all year. For less than 
$10 you can hire a guy who is going to work all year for you. These are 
part of those 33 faithful household servants that Hyman Rickover said 
our energy use provided to the average family.
  The next chart shows another energy bill, the DRIVE bill. This was 
dropped just very recently. We love acronyms down here, and this is a 
bill that has to do with transportation fuels, Dependable Reduction 
through Innovation and Vehicles and Energy Act, H.R. 670. I didn't sign 
on to any energy bills last year. There were some pretty good bills, 
but somewhat, not just somewhat, enormously exaggerated claims were 
made for them; and I did not want to give credibility to unrealistic 
expectations from these bills.
  The next chart here quotes several people: Petroleum expert Colin 
Campbell. By the way, he kind of inherited the mantle from M. King 
Hubbert. He is kind of the godfather today of all of these scientists. 
Jean Laherrare, Ryan Fleeley, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Albert 
Bartlett, no relative of mine. But if you put Albert Bartlett, do a 
Google search for Albert Bartlett and Energy, and you will put out the 
most fascinating 1-hour lecture I have ever listened to. He has given 
it more than 1,600 times. I will tell you, there will be no thriller on 
television that will be as interesting as Albert Bartlett's 1-hour 
lecture on energy. You will be captivated by it. They have all 
estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur at 
around 2005. This is now 2007.
  By the way, the world oil production has been roughly 84 million, 85 
million barrels a day for the last several years. That may or may not 
mean we have reached peak, but at least there has been a plateau. And 
if it weren't for a fact that there has been a 40 percent reduction of 
gasoline use in many South American countries, for instance, because it 
has just gotten too expensive, the price of oil would be far greater 
than roughly $55 a barrel today.
  This has been what they call demand destruction. If you can destroy 
demand, you can reduce the price. And when it got too expensive to use, 
they just quit using it, so the price of oil has dropped because there 
is less pressure.
  The next chart shows a number of experts and what they have 
predicted, and here are some of them there, Campbell and Goldstein and 
Deffeyes, Skrebowski, Simmons. Matt Simmons is an investment banker, a 
personal energy adviser to the President. They all believe that it is 
going to occur very shortly. The previous list had it in roughly 2005, 
these in the next decade and these further down. Now, CERA is one here 
that says it is going to be after 2020.
  I want to show you the next chart here, and this is a CERA chart; and 
CERA believes that we will find maybe several times as much more energy 
as all the energy that now is known, all the oil that we now know is 
out there. They think we will find two or three times that much more 
oil.
  Now, if we find only 5 percent more oil, then this will be when it 
peaks. If we find as much more oil as all that exist out there, this 
will be when it peaks. It still is not forever, it still is about 2040. 
And if we now are able to get enormous amounts of oil from these 
unconventional sources, the Canadian tar sands; and don't call it oil, 
please, it is tar, and the oil sands out in our west, and I don't know 
that we will ever achieve this, by the way. The Canadians are getting 1 
million barrels a day, just a little over 1 percent of production, 
using incredible amounts of energy, incredible amounts of water, 
producing a big lake that they call tailing water; it is really toxic 
water, and they know that what they are doing is not sustainable 
because they don't have enough natural gas to produce the energy.
  They are thinking about putting in a power plant. The vein, I 
understand, dips under an overlay so they will have to develop in situ, 
and they don't know how to do that. Enormous reserves, more than all 
the oil in the world potentially, are out in our West. Shell Oil 
Company had a little experiment out there. They said it would be 2013, 
I think, before they said they could even make a decision as to whether 
it was economically feasible to get that. So this is a huge ``if'' 
here.
  The next chart is an interesting one. One of the world's experts in 
this, Jean Laherrare, made an assessment of the USGS report. What I was 
looking at was not a USGS report, but they were basing their prognosis 
on USGS data, so this comment is appropriate to that chart as well. The 
USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve 
addition through which no evidence is presented.
  Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible 
given the great technical achievements of the industry over the past 20 
years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate efforts to find the 
largest remaining prospect. We have computer modeling in 3-D seismic 
and enormously improved techniques for finding oil, and still every 
year we find on the average less oil than we found the year before.
  This is a very heartening chart. As we face an energy-deficient 
world, I often think of this chart and the promise that it gives us. On 
the abscissa here we have energy consumption per capita here, and on 
the ordinate we have perception of how good life is. Now, it is not 
perfect for anybody, but

[[Page 2687]]

there are a whole bunch of people who think that it is about 85 to 95 
percent as good as paradise can be.
  And notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy. Little 
Switzerland is close behind us. But what this chart tells me is that 
you can use far less energy and be pretty happy with where you are. 
These many people, by the way, use less energy than we and are happier 
with their lives than we are, everybody above this imaginary line.
  And notice that if you have very little energy, it is tough to feel 
good about life. As soon as you reach 25 percent, as much as we use, 
then you can feel pretty good, 80 percent compared to 90 percent, not 
much improvement for an incredibly large increase in energy. So this 
gives us hope.
  Europe uses per capita about half as much energy as we use, and if 
you have traveled to Europe, nobody who has traveled to Europe believes 
that they live less well or are less content with their life than we 
are.
  The next chart shows an interesting, and this is one of many, many, 
opportunities for efficiency, but this is such a dramatic one. This is 
the efficiency of getting light. And this is the old incandescent bulb, 
a red hot hairpin hung up in a bottle is the way one old farmer 
described it. And this is the amount of heat you produce, which is why 
you use it as a brooder for fish and to keep them warm, and baby 
chickens, and this is the light you get, 90 percent heat, 10 percent 
light.
  This is fluorescence, which is why you have the little screw in 
fluorescence. A great Time magazine article that showed that each one 
of those bulbs saved a quarter of a ton of coal. And here is the light-
emitting diode. I have a light-emitting diode flashlight; I have 
forgotten when I put the batteries in. They just last and last.
  I have a couple of charts here, and we have only a few minutes 
remaining, and I just want to show a couple of them to refer you to 
very big studies paid for by our government, ignored by our government. 
One is the Corps of Engineers, and this is the Corps of Engineers 
study, and the other is the big Hirsch Report. You can find all of 
those on the Web. In fact, you can go to our Web site and either find 
these or find the link to it.
  In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. 
Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines 
at a rapid pace, remember, to its initial increase.
  The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak 
but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves 
giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high 
the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the 
conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years.
  This was paid for by the Army, essentially ignored by everybody.
  The next one, a bigger study, paid for by our Department of Energy, 
SAIC, a big, prestigious organization: We cannot conceive of any 
affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate the normal 
replacement schedules to fill the gap created by a decline in oil 
production.
  I won't use any more of these charts because the others, I have a 
dozen or so more, simply say the same thing, that one way or the other, 
in different words, we are either at or shortly will be at peak oil 
with potentially devastating consequences.
  There is hope with leadership. We are an enormously creative society. 
I think that we can meet the challenge, but it is going to require a 
program I believe that has a total commitment of World War II, I lived 
through that, that has the technology challenge of putting a man on the 
moon and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We can do that. It needs 
the help of every American, and leadership; our children and 
grandchildren are counting on it.

                          ____________________