[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8479-8486]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM AND PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hill). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to 
address two very timely items. One is a just-released report by the 
General Accountability Office entitled: ``Crude Oil: Uncertainty about 
future oil supply make it important to develop a strategy for 
addressing a peak and decline in oil production.'' This report was 
released at a news conference at two o'clock today, and so we want to 
spend some time discussing this report.
  But there is also the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the 
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and so I wanted to take a few minutes 
to talk about this Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.
  This is the fifth anniversary. In 2002 when we debated this law, 
there were those who looked upon our deliberations as inconsequential 
because they thought that either the President would veto the bill or 
the Supreme Court would overturn the law. Indeed, the President did not 
veto it because he said that the Supreme Court would probably overturn 
at least a very important part of that law. Except the President signed 
the bill and the Supreme Court upheld it.
  As it turned out, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act has great 
consequences, the erosion of Americans' first amendment rights to 
freedom of speech. With regard to speech, the first amendment to the 
Constitution simply States Congress shall make no law abridging the 
freedom of speech or the press or the right of the people peaceably to 
assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
  I think it is worth just a moment, Mr. Speaker, to reflect on how we 
got here in this country and the milieu in which our Founding Fathers 
wrote this first amendment to the Constitution.
  Our Founding Fathers came here primarily from the British Isles and 
the

[[Page 8480]]

European continent, and they came here to seek relief from two 
tyrannies. One was the tyranny of the church and the other was the 
tyranny of the Crown, and they address both of these two tyrannies in 
the first two amendments.
  Indeed, in the first amendment, they address their concerns both for 
the tyranny of the church, shall make no law respecting an 
establishment of religion, do not make a State religion, and 
furthermore, let people free to worship however they wish. And the 
tyranny of the Crown. They wanted to make sure that the people could 
say whatever they wished about governing. It was political speech that 
they most wanted to protect.
  And to understand that, you have to go to the second amendment. The 
second amendment again was to assure that our people would never ever 
be persecuted, oppressed by a central government, because they said 
that every citizen had the right to be a member of the militia and to 
carry a gun. They said that was in order to secure freedom in our 
country, that every person should have the right to carry a gun.
  So this was the milieu in which this amendment was written, and the 
speech that our Founding Fathers found most precious was political 
speech, and it is just this speech that this unfortunate legislation 
denies our people of all rights derived constitutionally. The Framers 
dedicated little formal debate to freedom of speech. It was not until 
the 20th century that Supreme Court actions began to address the 
definition of free speech. Until that time, the only limitation placed 
on the press involved slander or libel. They felt they did not have to 
talk about it because it was generally understood how important that 
right was to the people.
  Freedom of speech did not generate great debate amongst the Founders, 
who believed that this freedom was so basic that no lengthy debate or 
independent editorials were needed.

                              {time}  1630

  One can only surmise that by its prominent location in the Bill of 
Rights that the Founders agreed that freedom of speech was an obvious 
right of any citizen. The Bill of Rights was designed to protect rights 
so important that it was necessary to explicitly restrict the 
government usurping these rights from the people. Our government serves 
the people, not the other way around. You might wonder about that from 
some of the laws we pass here.
  The concept of freedom of speech depends on truth and opinions 
expressed openly and honestly by an individual or an association with 
others by groups. It is a right of our Founders reserved for us. Here 
in America we cherish being allowed to question our government, to 
criticize our government and advise our government, those individuals 
who are elected or appointed leaders of our government.
  Freedom of speech does have limitations. You can't falsely shout 
``fire, fire'' in a crowded movie theater to falsely cause panic. You 
can't threaten violence or use fighting words to invoke violence. You 
can't knowingly lie or libel, although here there is a higher standard 
for proving libel against a public official.
  Until BCRA, this Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a 1976 Supreme Court 
decision, Buckley v. Vallejo, helped define the framework of public 
discourse regarding political speech. In part, the decision states, 
``Discussion of public issues and the debates on the qualifications of 
candidates are integral to the operation of a system the government 
established by our Constitution. The first amendment affords the 
broadest protection to such political expression in order to assure the 
unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and 
social changes desired by the people.''
  Not my statements, the statements of the Court.
  The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 chips away at the 
unfettered interchanges of ideas the Buckley decision strove to ensure. 
Of all the provisions in the Campaign Reform Act, I am most concerned 
with the chilling effect it inflicts on labor unions, trade 
associations and nonprofit organizations.
  These are associations that individuals choose to join. The 
restrictions of these organizations on behalf of Members to engage in 
issue advocacy under this law must be addressed and reversed.
  The authors of this legislation were so unsure of the Campaign Reform 
Act's constitutionality that a severability clause was inserted which 
provided that if any provision of this Act is held unconstitutional, 
the remainder of the Act would not be affected.
  This is hardly the language of a steadfast law, but, rather, language 
used when treading on shaky constitutional grounds when forging a new 
dimension or direction of law. This change in the wrong direction 
limits freedom. I believe it needs to be reversed before more laws 
limiting freedom of speech are adopted.
  In particular, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act limits a citizen's 
freedom of speech and freedom of association by banning specific groups 
of issue advocacy before elections at precisely the time when that 
advocacy is most advantageous to affect change in government. This is 
the time when voters are most focused on government and whether they 
are satisfied with their elected representatives.
  Specifically, this law bans unions, grassroots organizations and 
trade organizations from using their general Treasury funds to 
broadcast, issue advocacy and advertisements 30 days before a primary 
and 60 days before a general.
  Last year, in my home State of Maryland, due to a September primary 
date, these groups were banned 90 days from advertising before the 
general election. Few people were thinking about the general election 
90 days before that date.
  Fortunately, there are two courses of action which are currently 
being taken. As in past Congresses, I am offering the First Amendment 
Restoration Act, H.R. 71. This Act simply repeals the most onerous 
sections of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which contorts 
citizens free speech by lifting the current ban on electioneering 
communications 30 days before primary and 60 days before a general 
election.
  This legislation hopefully may not be necessary. On April 25, the 
Supreme Court will hear the arguments in the case of Wisconsin Right to 
Life, Inc. v. FEC. Wisconsin Right to Life has prevailed in a lower 
Federal court. The facts of the case are these, and I am paraphrasing 
from the James Madison Center for Free Speech, which is closely 
watching the case:
  In 2004, WRTL, Wisconsin Right to Life, challenged a 2002 provision 
of campaign finance law that prohibits citizens groups from 
broadcasting communications that mention a Federal candidate during 
blackout periods before elections. Now, listen to this, because this is 
very interesting. WRTL had been running grassroots lobbying ads about 
the filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees. The ads informed 
citizens they could call Wisconsin Senator Kohl and Senator Feingold 
and ask them to oppose the filibusters. This ad did not state the 
position of either Senator or on the filibuster. Since Senator Feingold 
was then a candidate, WRTL had to stop its ad many days before the 
election because of the Campaign Finance Reform Act, which banned 
electioneering communications.
  In December, 2006, a Federal district court in D.C. held that the ads 
were constitutionally protected. I hope so. The case was appealed to 
the Supreme Court.
  Members of Congress have intervened in the case so that they could 
argue that the government has every right to restrict WRTL's ads 
because they criticize a candidate on the issue. The ad, in fact, did 
not criticize Senator Feingold. Even if it had, WRTL's brief argues 
that criticizing official actions by public officials is a bedrock 
foundation of our government and exactly what our Founding Fathers 
tried to protect in this first amendment. The people are sovereign, and 
the government may not silence their criticism. That is

[[Page 8481]]

what led to the first amendment mandate that Congress should not 
restrict the people's expression, association and petition.
  I understand the goals of my colleagues who supported the Campaign 
Reform Act, disclosure and transparency. I support these goals. 
Disclosure of how much money was being spent by whom; transparency in 
identifying the citizens' groups which were sponsoring any 
electioneering communication. But I maintain that this disclosure is 
not for the government to demand from the people, but, rather, for the 
people to demand from the government.
  Disclosure and transparency are better served when it is the 
government official who should disclose his votes both on the floor and 
in committee, his earmarks and direct campaign contributions over which 
he exercises complete control. It is up to the public to decide motives 
of elected individuals. Motives of citizens should not be suspect. We 
cannot be afraid of honest debate. Citizens have the right to express 
themselves individually or by association. The rights of the citizen 
must be paramount.
  That is why on rise I the fifth anniversary of BCRA and to urge 
support of H.R. 71 to repeal its electioneering communication 
provisions. I hope the Supreme Court will rule these provisions as 
unconstitutional.
  Mr. Speaker, there is another very important thing that happened 
today, as I mentioned as I began. That is the GAO, the report is dated 
February 2007, but it was embargoed until today until our press 
conference, which released it.
  I have several charts here from that report. I think that might be a 
good way to begin this discussion. Let's look at the first chart.
  Now, I have been to the floor a number of times before, and I have 
shown other versions of this same phenomenon, and that is the reality 
that our country a number of years ago reached its maximum oil 
production, and it has been downhill since then. This was predicted in 
1956 by a Shell Oil Company scientist to a group of oil engineers and 
executives in San Antonio, Texas, on the 8th day of March, just a 
little over 51 years ago.
  In 1956, he predicted that the United States would reach its maximum 
oil production in 1970. Now, in 1956, we were perhaps the largest 
producer of oil in the world. We were a large exporter of oil, and oil 
was king.
  The industrial revolution was in full swing, and Shell Oil company 
told M. King Hubbert that he should not give that speech because he 
would certainly embarrass himself and them because he was employed by 
them. He gave the speech anyhow. For 14 years, he was a pariah.
  On schedule, as he predicted, in 1970, we reached our maximum oil 
production. He had indicated that at that point about half of all the 
oil that we would ever produce would have been produced, and the second 
half, which is reasonable, would be harder to get and, therefore, would 
be produced more slowly. It would be downhill after that.
  Yes, you know, advertise a little bump on the downhill. That little 
bump is that huge supply of oil that we found in Prudhoe Bay, up in 
Alaska. M. King Hubbert's predictions were for the lower 48. He didn't 
include the Gulf of Mexico. There is a little wiggle in the curve, 
hardly discernible by those discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico. But 
there was a little blip in the downhill slope, when we lowered the top 
of Hubbert's peak. So, right on schedule, we peaked in 1979. M. King 
Hubbert indicated, I think, it was in 1969, he predicted that the world 
would be peaking about now.
  The question I always asked myself, if M. King Hubbert was right 
about the United States, and he gave us the basis of his analysis, 
which was very logical, if he was right about the United States, and 
since the United States is obviously a microcosm of the world, why 
shouldn't he be right about the world? If he was right about the world, 
shouldn't we have been doing something in anticipation of reaching a 
maximum oil production beyond which additional oil production would be 
impossible, prices would rise, oil, $65 a barrel today, and production 
would inexorably decline.
  There is nothing that we have done in the United States to stop that. 
We have drilled more oil wells in the United States than all the rest 
of the world. Still we have not stopped that downward slope, just that 
blip from Prudhoe Bay; and now we are down to a bit over half of the 
oil that we produced in 1970, in spite of a vastly improved technique 
for enhanced oil recovery, for discovery of oil, 3-D seismic computer 
modeling and so forth.
  The next chart that they showed is an interesting contrast, and this 
is a chart from our Energy Information Agency. In spite of the fact 
that they know that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, 
that we did peak in 1970, and in spite of the fact that they know that 
he predicted that the world should be peaking about now, and there is 
every indication that he may have been right, they still are 
forecasting that the total production of oil, which is now they have it 
about 80, I think it's now about 85 million barrels a day, will do 
nothing but go up and up. They have this clear through 2030.
  Now, they do show that the non-APEC nations are peaking and will fall 
off. That is true. Most of them have peaked, and they are falling off. 
But they believe their oil production will simply go up and up.
  The chances that that is true, by the way, Dr. Lahere, who has 
written a couple of books on this subject, says it is absolutely 
impossible, considering the vastly improved techniques we have for 
finding oil. They are predicting that we will have as much more oil as 
all of the reserves we now know to exist in this country, that we are 
going to find at least that much more oil.
  The next chart is a compilation of a number of authorities and their 
predictions of when peaking will occur. Some of them have very, narrow 
projections. A number of people think that peaking has already 
occurred. Others have gross uncertainty in their predictions. It could 
be any time between now and the next century. But if you look at the 
preponderance of these, most of these authorities believe that peaking 
will occur or could occur before 2020.
  Now, of course, this kind of a consensus by the world's leaders is 
grossly inconsistent with the chart that we just saw where our Energy 
Information Agency is projecting an ever upward and upward projection 
production of oil.
  The next chart is an interesting one which they showed us, and this 
is worldwide proven oil reserves by political risk. This is a very good 
report, and they are a very credible organization, which is why I asked 
them to do this report a bit more than a year ago. I am pleased it is 
out now, because they do have a lot of credibility. When the GAO 
speaks, people tend to listen.
  They note that there are a lot of uncertainties about when the peak 
will occur, and probably the biggest uncertainties have less to do with 
how much oil is under the ground rather than risks above ground. One of 
these risks is a political risk. A lot of oil comes from places like 
Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and Iraq and Iran and Kuwait and so forth. 
So they list here the high political risk, the medium political risk, 
and the low political risk.
  You see here that about two-thirds of all the oil in the world is in 
countries where, by their judgment and the judgment of experts which 
they quote, either high risk or medium risk. Indeed, the night before 
last, when England and Iran were kind of yelling at each other over the 
sailors that Iran has taken, oil jumped up $4. Now, it quieted down by 
yesterday morning, so oil was only up a bit more than $1 yesterday. But 
this shows the volatility of the market relative to the political 
uncertainty in these areas.
  The next chart is a really interesting chart, and it shows another 
risk, and that is investment risk. A venture capitalist is unwilling to 
invest in places where they may lose their capital or a country, for 
instance, which now will permit venture capital but tomorrow may decide 
they are going to nationalize all the oil fields. Then you have lost 
all of your investment. So they are

[[Page 8482]]

listing this by high and medium and low.
  By the way, for about a third of all the places that oil comes from, 
there is no foreign investment, also no foreign visibility. We just 
have to go by faith on how much oil is in their reserves, because they 
won't let our people in. You can't make any investments there.

                              {time}  1645

  But I think here about 95 percent of all the oil in the world 
represents, in their view, high and medium risk. So when you add the 
political risk and the investment risk, you have a lot of uncertainty 
as to how much oil we are going to produce in the future, and this is 
added to the uncertainty of how much is there and when we will, in 
fact, reach that maximum capacity for producing oil.
  The next chart is an interesting one. And I should have brought 
another one that shows it in a very poignant way by showing what the 
world would look like if the nations' size was determined by how much 
oil they have. And of course we are dwarfed in that because Saudi 
Arabia has many, many times as much oil as we. We represent a fourth of 
the world's economy and we have two percent of the world's oil. We use 
a fourth of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we 
use.
  Here they have the oil in the non-OPEC nations and the oil in Saudi 
Arabia. Look how big Saudi Arabia is. And then the rest of the OPEC 
nations, and then they have blown this up over here so you can see who 
else is involved in the OPEC nations. Notice that, what, over three-
fourths of all of the oil is controlled by OPEC nations, and about a 
fourth of all of that oil comes from Saudi Arabia alone.
  The next chart is a really interesting one and this shows, the two 
bars here, and one, these are the top 10 companies on the basis of oil 
production and reserve holdings. Now, these reserve holdings are sort 
of iffy, because for most of these countries there is little or no 
transparency, and they really won't let us look at their data. But we 
do know who is producing oil.
  And here we see that big guys like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell 
and BP and so forth are producing 22 percent of the oil. And Saudi 
Arabia, a bunch of national companies are producing 78 percent of the 
oil.
  But look at the next bar over there, and that shows you who owns the 
oil. Ninety-eight percent of all that oil is owned, our big guys here 
that are pumping it, they don't own any of it. They have leases. They 
don't own the oil. The oil is owned by mostly OPEC Middle East 
countries and there they have up top, and that ought to be shaded gray 
because LUK Oil, I don't know if LUK oil is private or whether it is 
national. It is a huge oil company in Russia.
  Well, this points to the problems that we have, and these problems 
encouraged 30 of our prominent citizens, Boyden Gray and Jim Woolsey 
and McFarland and 27 others, a couple of years ago to write a letter to 
the President with these facts in mind saying, Mr. President, the fact 
that we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil and we use 25 
percent of the world's oil, and import two-thirds of what we use, and 
as the President says, much of that from countries that don't even like 
us, read down that list, this represents a totally unacceptable 
national security risk. And, Mr. President, we really need to do 
something about that.
  Well, the next chart is the one that I stopped with a couple of weeks 
ago when I was on the floor here, and I want to spend the rest of the 
time that we have today in talking about this chart. And, indeed, we 
could spend a couple of weeks talking about the chart, because what 
this looks at is the potential alternatives to these fossil fuels.
  I would like to mention that there are several groups that have 
common cause in that area. Al Gore came to the Congress last week, I 
believe it was, and testified before obviously a packed committee room. 
He believes that we have global warming. Indeed, I think, a majority of 
our citizens and a majority of scientists now believe that we have 
global warming. You may or may not agree with whether our Earth is 
warming or not, but if you believe that we have a national security 
risk because we get too much of our oil from overseas, or if you 
believe that it simply may not be there because the world will peak out 
and there won't be enough oil because the demand keeps going up at 
about 2 percent, exponential growth, then you would want to do pretty 
much exactly the same things that those people who believed we have 
global warming want to do.
  They want to get away from the fossil fuels because what we are doing 
in using these fossil fuels is releasing carbon dioxide that has been 
locked up by nature for a very long number of years. And we are now 
releasing that over a very short time period. We have about 8,000 years 
of recorded history in the world, and the age of oil, from pumping that 
first barrel of oil to pumping the last economically feasible barrel of 
oil, will probably be about 300 years. We are about 150 years into the 
age of oil, and in another 150 years we will probably have transitioned 
out of the age of oil and gas and coal. This is a relatively short time 
in the history of the world.
  As I mentioned before, with the knowledge that M. King Hubbert was 
right about the United States, and we knew that of a certainty by 1980, 
because when we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's 
peak. And the Reagan administration, my second most favorite President, 
decided that the thing to do, which by the way was totally the wrong 
thing to do, the thing to do was to encourage, to give our oil people a 
profit motive to go out and find oil. Now, you can't find oil that is 
not there. And you can't pump oil you haven't found.
  But they were encouraged to drill, and drill they did. We now have 
530,000 operating oil wells in our country. That is more oil wells than 
drilled in all of the rest of the world. They drilled and drilled. And 
if you have a pot that compares drilling with production, you will see 
that there was little or no increase in production as a result of this 
drilling, because this was 1980. We are already 10 years down the other 
side of Hubbert's peak and you can't pump what is not there. And M. 
King Hubbert was right, and we couldn't reverse that by drilling more 
wells. So now we are faced or will be faced very shortly in the future 
with the reality that we can't pump more oil; that we will have reached 
peak oil. And as you saw, a majority of all the experts in the world 
believe that that is either present or imminent. So we began to look 
for alternatives for this.
  Now, I know that for the last several years we have had some programs 
in Congress where we have been sponsoring green things like corn, 
ethanol and so forth; and this is supposed to free us from our large 
dependence on fossil fuels. There are some finite resources. These are 
fossil fuels, but they are not the oil that we ordinarily, or gas or 
coal we ordinarily exploit. And they are exploitable. And we will get 
some energy from them. How much is yet to be determined.
  Let me mention some of those. There are the tar sands in Alberta, 
Canada. These are huge reserves. They represent as much potential oil 
as all the known reserves of oil in the world, perhaps more than that. 
So why should we worry since there is that much there? They are now 
aggressively exploiting those fields. They have a shovel that lifts 100 
tons at a time. They dump it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and they 
haul it to a big cooker where they cook it and this oil, which is too 
stiff to flow, now is heated up so it will flow and some short chain 
volatiles are added to it so it will continue to flow when it is 
cooled.
  And they are now producing about a million barrels a day. Boy, a 
million barrels a day. I can hardly count to a million. That sounds 
like a lot. And it is a lot. But it is just barely over 1 percent of 
the 84 or 85 million barrels a day that our world produces and our 
world consumes. And they are using enormous amounts of energy, from 
what we call stranded natural gas. Now, natural gas is stranded when it 
is in a place where there aren't very many people. And since natural 
gas is

[[Page 8483]]

hard to transport, it is very cheap there and so we say it is stranded. 
So they have some cheap gas there and they are using this gas, and I am 
told, everything you are told is not true, but I am told that they may 
be using more energy from the natural gas than they are getting out of 
the oil.
  But from a dollar and cents perspective, it makes good sense because 
it takes them somewhere between 18 and $25 a barrel to make the oil, 
and it is selling today I think for about $65 a barrel, so that is a 
pretty good markup.
  But the profit ratio you really should be looking at is the energy 
profit ratio. How much energy do you get out per unit of energy that 
you put in. And they may be getting out less than they put in. They 
know that what they are doing now is not sustainable for two reasons. 
One is the natural gas there will not last forever. Indeed, talking 
about natural gas, we have peaked in natural gas in our country. That 
stunned us. It was a couple of years ago we reached our maximum 
production of natural gas. We thought that was way off in the future. 
We reached that a couple of years ago. They know the natural gas will 
run out so they are talking about building maybe a nuclear power plant 
there to get energy to cook this oil. But another problem looms.
  This vein, if you can think of it as a vein, is now near the surface 
or on the surface and so they are in effect mining it with huge pits. 
And they have a huge lake they call a detailing lake. It is really 
pretty noxious stuff there. And environmentalists are very concerned 
about it. But, soon, this vein will duck under an overlay and 
economically, they won't be able to take off that overlay. So what they 
are going to have to did is develop it in situ. And they yet don't 
know, economically, whether that is doable or not. So although there 
are potentially enormous amounts of energy available there, how much 
can we really get out, net energy?
  Now, we may be getting out less than nothing net energy. We may be 
putting in more energy from natural gas than we are getting out of the 
oil. But the natural gas is stranded. It is hard to ship and the oil is 
in high demand and so it makes dollar and cents sense to do this.
  Then we have the oil shales and they are a little different. They are 
not just a very heavy oil. It is bound in a rock, and it can be 
released with heat and pressure. And these reserves, primarily in 
Colorado or Utah, are enormous, perhaps as large as the tar sands in 
Alberta, Canada. So why aren't we sanguine about our future since we 
have a lot of this in our country?
  None of this has really been economically exploited so far. In the 
last few years, Shell has conducted an interesting experiment there. 
They have gone in and drilled a number of holes and frozen those so as 
to kind of make a frozen vessel because they don't want this oil they 
are producing to leak out to contaminate aquifers. And then they cook 
it for a year, drill some other holes in the middle and cook it for a 
year. And they have gotten meaningful amounts after some processing 
because it doesn't start out as an oil. They get some meaningful 
amounts of oil from it. But, you know, how much can we surge that? How 
much will it cost to build? What is really the energy profit ratio from 
that?
  The news accounts of this have been much more optimistic than the 
Shell Oil scientist who gave a report in Denver, Colorado, a couple of 
years ago that I attended. And he said, I think, that it would be 2012 
or 2013 before they even knew whether it would be economically feasible 
to develop those oil shales the way they were developing them. 
Potentially, there is an enormous amount of energy there.
  Let me note also that there is an incredible amount of energy in the 
tides. The moon lifts the whole ocean, what, 2 or 3 feet. I carry two 
5-gallon buckets of water, and they are heavy. This is a lot of energy. 
So why should we worry about the future? We have got all that energy 
from the tides. The reason to worry is that the energy is out there, 
but it is frightfully difficult to harness it. There is an old adage 
that says energy, to be useful, must be concentrated; and it is 
certainly not concentrated in the tides. And we have huge engineering 
problems in getting energy out of these oil shales. It may be there, 
but it is not something you would want to bet the ranch on.
  The third one is coal. And there will be people who tell you don't 
worry about our future; we have 250 years of coal at current use rates. 
That is true. But be very careful when people say at current use rates 
because if we increase our use of coal only 2 percent, and I submit we 
will have to ramp up its use more than that as we run down the other 
side of Hubbert's peak and more and more energy is needed, but if we 
increase our use of coal only 2 percent, that 250 years shrinks to 85 
years. You have to understand that at 2 percent increase, it doubles, 
that it is compounded, exponentially compounded, it doubles in 35 
years. It is four times bigger in 70 years. It is eight times bigger in 
105 years. This phenomenon, Albert Einstein said, was the most powerful 
force in the universe. He was asked, after the discovery of atomic 
energy, Dr. Einstein, what will be next? And he said, well, the most 
powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest, and 
that is what we have here in this exponential compound growth.

                              {time}  1700

  But for most of our uses, we can't use coal. You can use electricity 
with it, but you can't run your car with it. So if we are now going to 
gasify or liquefy the coal, which, by the way, is very easy to do. 
Hitler ran his whole country on it, and South Africa did a lot of that, 
too. So we know how to do that, but it takes energy to do that. And if 
the energy to do that comes from coal, now you have reduced the supply 
of coal to about 50 years.
  But we live in a world economy, and we share our oil with the world. 
It really doesn't matter today who owns the resource. He who has the 
dollars can buy it. It is bid up, which is why it is different prices 
different days, and he who has the dollars buys it.
  So if we have to share our oil with the world, there is not much of a 
way to do that. Since if we keep all our coal, we won't be buying oil 
from someplace else, and they will therefore have the oil, and to a 
very large degree energy is fungible. So our 50-year supply of oil, if 
we share it with the world, shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. Big deal. With 
only a 2 percent increase and the use of coal, if we convert it to a 
gas or a liquid and share it with the world, our 250 years shrinks to 
12\1/2\ years. There is a lot of energy there.
  And, by the way, when you use coal, you have reduced more greenhouse 
gasses than using either gas or oil. So those who are concerned about 
climate change will have some big concerns about using coal. If your 
only concerns are national security and peak oil, you have less 
concerns about using coal.
  But, in any event, it is not our savior. You can't sleep well tonight 
because we have 250 years of coal at the current use rate. Because with 
an increased demand of only 2 percent, converting it to a gas or a 
liquid and sharing it with the world, that shrinks to 12\1/2\ years.
  The next two subjects we are going to talk about briefly are sources 
of energy from nuclear. We get 8 percent of our total energy from 
nuclear. We get 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. When you 
drive home tonight, note every fifth business and every fifth house 
would be dark if it weren't for nuclear energy.
  I have some friends who were strong opponents of nuclear energy. They 
are very bright people. And now they are looking at a future where the 
trade-off may be between having more nuclear and shivering in the dark 
without enough energy for light and heat. And when they look at those 
two alternatives, they are taking a new look at nuclear.
  There are problems with nuclear. There are three fundamentally 
different ways you can produce nuclear energy. One is from the light 
water reactor. That is the only energy source we use. It uses fission 
nuclear uranium, and there is a finite supply of fission nuclear 
uranium in the world. We need an honest broker to tell us how much is

[[Page 8484]]

there at current use rates and how much will be there if we ramp up the 
use, and we will ramp up the use.
  China is now aggressively designing new nuclear power plants. They 
are building a coal-fired power plant, two a week. They have got to. 
They have got 1.3 billion people who want to abandon their bicycle and 
buy a car, and they are faced with kind of a mass revolt if they don't 
permit their people to enjoy the benefits of an industrialized society 
like the rest of the world does.
  By the way, China has a bit less coal than we. They are mining more 
of it, so their coal will end before ours. So they are building a lot 
of coal-fired power plants, but they are also, I understand, planning 
to build 50 nuclear power plants. We haven't built one in about 30 
years in our country. There has never been an accident or a death. 
There are accidents in coal mines, a lot more in China than here. We do 
a pretty good job, but still we have accidents and people die. They die 
from black lung disease from breathing polluted air. They die at the 
railroad crossing being hit by the train. We never seem to have a 
concern about the people who die as a result of using coal.
  No one has ever died, there has not been any serious accident with 
nuclear, and a large number of people are concerned about nuclear. And 
there are problems with the waste product of nuclear because the second 
choice is a breeder reactor. If, in fact, we run out of fission nuclear 
uranium, then we will have to go to a breeder reactor. Our only 
experience with that in this country is building nuclear weapons. We 
have no commercial breeder reactors. They do, as the name implies, 
produce fuel; and they produce more fuel than they use. So you are kind 
of home free, except you have a huge problem with moving this stuff 
around and enriching it, and it is weapons grade kinds of stuff, so 
there are a lot of concerns.
  I just have a notion, Mr. Speaker, that anything that is so hot that 
I can't get close to it for a quarter of a million years ought to have 
enough energy left in it to do something useful in it, wouldn't you 
think? You see, we call this spent fuel, and we have taken out only a 
relatively few percent of the energy of this fuel.
  I would like to challenge our engineering and scientific people, and 
we have the most creative and innovative society in the world, to 
figure out what we can do with this thing which is now a huge liability 
and we are fighting over where to put it. We have put billions of 
dollars into Yucca Mountain out in Nevada, and we may not put it there. 
It is now stored in the back 40 or underwater in our roughly 800 
nuclear power plants in this country. So there are problems with 
nuclear.
  But there are also problems with not having energy and not going to 
be able to make nitrogen fertilizer for corn and not having heat for 
your house, and we need to rethink those.
  The type of nuclear that gets us home free is fusion. By the way, we 
do have a huge fusion reactor. It is called the sun. That is what it is 
doing up there, and we have lots of energy from the sun. I understand 
that more energy from the sun falls on the Earth on any one sunny day 
than we use in a whole year if we could only capture that.
  By the way, we are using sun energy, of course. Almost every energy 
source we use comes from or came from the sun. It was the sun that 
caused the plants to grow from which coal was made. Boy, do I know 
that. As a little kid in Western Pennsylvania, we had a coal furnace 
and we bought coal, which went from dust to big blocks of coal, some so 
big I couldn't put them in the furnace. There was a sledgehammer there 
leaning against the wall, and I would break the lump of coal to put it 
in the furnace, and sometimes it would break open and there was a fern 
leaf. Boy, I remember the feelings that went through me, and they still 
kind of do, when I looked at that fern leaf. And I said to myself how 
long ago did that grow and fall into the bog and with time and pressure 
and Earth being washed over, it became whole.
  Most people believe that all of the oil and gas that we have is the 
result of subtropical lakes from a very long time ago. We see it now in 
algae that grows and it falls to the bottom. It has a cycle. It matures 
and falls to the bottom. Dirt washes in from the surrounding hills, 
more the next year. More dirt washes in. So most of our oil and gas is 
not in big lakes down there. It is trapped between grains of sand and 
rock and so forth. All of this, of course, is secondhand sun energy.
  We get some direct sun energy. You can warm your house if your window 
faces south. It can produce electricity for you if you put solar panels 
on your roof. If you put a wind machine up, by the way, that is 
secondhand sun energy because the wind blows because of differential 
heating of the Earth.
  It is no wonder, Mr. Speaker, when you look at what the sun does for 
us why many of our ancients worshipped the sun. As a matter of fact, 
the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox was 
an ancient pagan holiday because a new spring had come. The day and 
night were of equal length. So the first Sunday after the first full 
moon, and I have no idea why after the first full moon, it was a 
celebration to the goddess of fertility. Let's have lots of animals and 
let our crops grow well, and they were appealing to the goddess of 
fertility to make that happen.
  I wondered as a little kid what relationship chickens and eggs and 
bunnies had to the Resurrection, because we call it Easter; and I was a 
big boy before I learned that, of course, it didn't have any 
relationship. But as a little kid I lived on a farm, and I knew rabbits 
didn't lay eggs, but in my Easter basket were rabbits and eggs, and 
that confused me. And then I went to church and we talked about the 
Crucifixion. What in the heck do rabbits and eggs have to do with the 
Crucifixion? The answer, of course, is nothing.
  But very early in Christianity we wanted to make it attractive to the 
pagans, so we attached pagan significance to Christian holidays, and 
these are symbols of fertility. I once had a few rabbits, and pretty 
soon I had a whole lot of rabbits. And we now have bantam chickens, and 
if you let them do what they would like to do, they steal a nest out 
and they hatch and you would have a lot of bantam chickens by fall. So 
these were examples of fertility, and that is why we had them there.
  If you are counting on nuclear fusion to solve our problems, you are 
probably counting on the lottery to solve your personal economic 
problems. I would have plan B, and I support all the money, about $250 
million a year, we spend in nuclear fusion. But, boy, I want to have a 
plan B. We are really home free if we have nuclear fusion, because it 
is producing the same kind of energy that is produced from the sun. We 
have essentially an infinite supply of the raw materials here to make 
it, and it is nonpolluting except for the heat that it produces. But 
that is my personal conviction. Others think that they are better; some 
think they are worse. I think the odds are about the same as the odds 
of your winning the lottery. So if you are comfortable with solving 
your personal financial problems winning the lottery, you are probably 
comfortable believing we are going to solve our energy problems with 
nuclear fusion.
  Well, once we are through those and whatever we can get from nuclear 
for the long term and are willing to live with, then we come to the 
true renewables: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy, 
agricultural resources. There are a whole host of those. Let's just 
look at those one by one.
  The solar industry, that is, the solar panels, quite miraculously 
just a little bit of silicon there, and it is converting sun rays into 
electricity, and I have them and they produce electricity and charge 
some big batteries, and we get lights and run power tools and so forth 
from the energy stored in the battery. That industry in 2000 
represented .07 percent of our total energy. That has really grown 
since 2000. Today, it still represents far less than 1 percent. It is 
growing 30 percent a year, more than 30 percent a year.
  They had some recent problems with silicon, because they are 
competing

[[Page 8485]]

with the semiconductor industry, and they are growing so rapidly, and 
there weren't enough silicon plants. The silicon people were very edgy 
because they built some plants in the 1970s when oil was way up and 
then it dropped down to $10 a barrel and nobody wanted solar panels 
anymore, and they got stuck with factories for which they had no market 
for their product, and so the investors were unwilling. I think they 
are kind of getting by that because most people think that oil is not 
going down to anything near $10 a barrel in the future.
  Solar electricity today is produced at about 25, 26 cents a kilowatt 
hour. That is high. But the cost of electricity is going up. And, by 
the way, the more we learn about these solar panels, the more we make 
and the cost comes down. But, unfortunately, the price of lead is going 
up; and still the cheapest, most cost-efficient battery for storing 
energy is the lead acid battery. So as the cost of the solar panels 
comes down, the cost of batteries goes up. So if you want a self-
sufficient system, the cost of that total system is not declining. If 
you simply want a grid tie, produce enough electricity, you can run 
your meter backwards.
  We are trying to get legislation through to encourage our States, and 
I think that is all we ought to do, because I am an advocate of States' 
rights, to enact what is called net metering, that if you produce more 
electricity to use, they will buy it from you. This distributed 
production, by the way, is enormously important from a national 
security perspective.
  Unlike electricity, if you put a gallon of oil in a pipe and it goes 
a thousand miles, you get a gallon of oil out. You put electricity in a 
wire and if you run it far enough, you don't get anything out the other 
end, what is called line losses. So having distributed production has a 
lot of advantages. Not everything is down when the power plant is down. 
And, furthermore, you have less line loss because you are producing it 
closer to where it is used. So we ought to be using that a whole lot 
more than we are.
  There are thin films and there are still some technical problems in 
developing those economically, but these thin films, and some of the 
silicon things, too, can be put in things like the shingles on your 
roof. They look just like any other shingle, but they produce 
electricity. The siding on your house. Indeed, there is glass that you 
can get. It will look like the glass with a dark filter on it, but 
there is glass that you can put in your windows that will let light in 
and produce electricity at the same time. So there are some exciting 
things that are being developed in this area.
  I spent New Year's Eve in Shanghai, and we met in China and had lunch 
with the young man who about 5 years ago started what is now the second 
largest solar panel manufacturer in the world.

                              {time}  1715

  Suntec, I think he calls his industry, and they now have a subsidiary 
in this country.
  By the way, the top five producers of solar cells are in China and 
Japan. Number one is Sharp, and that is Japan. We used to have Solarex 
out in my district, now BP Solar, used to be number two in the world. 
Now they are not even among the top ten in the world.
  This is the most creative, innovative society in the world that 
invented the solar cell. I worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. 
We put the first solar powered satellite in space. The United States 
invented that. Like so much of the technology we invent, somebody else 
is benefiting from it.
  I want the United States to be a leader in these areas. Indeed, I 
believe that we have such a creative, innovative society, that if we 
really challenge our people, we can become a world leader again; not 
just a world leader in how much oil we use, but a world leader in 
moving to these alternative ways of producing energy.
  So I think there is a great future for solar, and I would like 
legislation out there that encourages people to put it on their roofs 
and encourages companies to build the plants. It is a national security 
issue.
  Wind. Wind is now producing electricity in our country at about 2.5 
cents per kilowatt hour. By the way, the leader in this in the world is 
little Denmark. Again, shame on us. The largest industrial country in 
the world, the leader technologically in the world, and Denmark is 
leading the world in building wind machines. They are really efficient.
  The little ones we used to produce, the blades turned very fast and 
they might kill birds and baths. Now they have huge blades. A single 
blade may be 60, 70 feet long. You may have seen them being moved down 
the highway. They move very slowly. It would have to be a really 
debilitated bat or bird that got caught by one of those.
  Indeed, if you are really concerned about bats and birds, then don't 
have picture windows. I am sure, not so many for the bats, but the 
bird, you are are going to lose more birds on your picture window than 
you will ever lose from that wind machine that you put up to produce 
electricity.
  We have wind farms out in the West. In the East here there are some 
Senators that are big proponents of wind, but not in my backyard. The 
NIMBY factor is very prominent. They would like that, but not in their 
view shed, thank you.
  You know, pretty is as pretty does, and I think these wind machines 
are beautiful. Knowing what they do, I think they are very stylish just 
on their own. But knowing what they are doing they become even 
handsomer.
  Geothermal. Now, this is true geothermal. If you go to Iceland, there 
is not a chimney in Iceland because all of their heating, all of their 
energy like that in Iceland comes from geothermal. They are close 
enough to the molten core of the Earth that they can get hot water. 
That is how they heat their houses and produce their energy there.
  We call geothermal something which is a really good idea, but it is 
not geothermal. We call geothermal those heat pumps that we tie to 
ground or groundwater, rather than rather stupidly to the air.
  If you think about your air conditioner in the summer, what you are 
trying to do is heat up the outside air. That may be 90 degrees. If you 
are trying to heat up groundwater in Maryland here, it is 56 degrees. 
That is really cool compared to 90 degrees, isn't it? And what you are 
trying to do in the wintertime is to cool the outside air with your 
heat pump.
  It is a whole lot easier to cool 56 degree air. That looks really 
warm compared to 10 degree air. That 60 degree water is very warm 
compared to 10 degree air. So you get a lot more efficiency out of your 
heat pump. People will call that geothermal. That is okay. Please put 
it in quotes, because it is not true geothermal. True geothermal ties 
you to the Earth.
  We are going to have to come back another day to talk about the rest 
of this, because I just wanted to skip down here to ethanol. Because 
there was this week, and we have only about 5 minutes remaining, there 
was this week in the Washington Post on Sunday, the Outlook Section, a 
really interesting article. ``Corn Can't Solve Our Problem,'' it says.
  The first paragraph is really interesting. ``The world has gone full 
circle. A century ago our first transportation, biofuels, the hay and 
oats fed to our horses, were replaced by gasoline. Today, ethanol from 
corn and biodiesel from soybeans have begun edging out gasoline and 
diesel. Lost in the ethanol induced euphoria, however, is the fact that 
three of our most fundamental needs, food, energy and a livable and 
sustainable environment, are now in direct conflict.''
  Interesting. I have here an article, and again we will come back 
again to talk about this, a really interesting talk given by Hyman 
Rickover 50 years ago the 14th of this May to a group of physicians in 
St. Paul, Minnesota, and he talks about this. He cautioned that if we 
try to get energy from our agriculture, we are going to be in 
competition with food.
  Let me read from the jump page here what they say about this. It is 
really interesting.

[[Page 8486]]

  ``But because of how corn ethanol currently is made, only about 20 
percent of each gallon is new energy.'' Eighty percent of all the 
energy you get out of a gallon of ethanol simply comes from the fossil 
fuels that are kind of recycled. The natural gas which made the 
nitrogen fertilizer, almost half the energy producing corn comes from 
that. The oil that made the tractor and the tires and the diesel fuel 
that pulled it through the fields and the energy used to mine the 
phosphate and potash rock and so forth, only 20 percent of every gallon 
represents new energy.
  So they say this: If every one of our 70 million acres on which corn 
was grown in 2006, if we use all of that corn to produce ethanol, we 
would displace only 12 percent of our gasoline. And if you discount 
that for the fossil fuel simply recycled by growing the corn and 
processing the corn to produce ethanol, you now get just 2.4 percent of 
our gasoline displaced by ethanol. If we use all of our corn to produce 
ethanol, they very wisely note that you could have reached that same 
objective by getting your car tuned up and putting air in your tires.
  Now, we are making a lot of corn ethanol. But compared to the 21 
million barrels of oil that we use a day, 70 percent of that in 
transportation, we have produced relatively negligible amounts of 
ethanol. But it was enough to drive the price of corn from $2.11 a 
bushel in September to $4.08 a bushel in November, and up from that. 
And the poor Mexicans now are hungry because their tortillas have 
doubled in price, and my dairy farmers are going bankrupt because the 
cost of the food they feed their cows is up.
  Just a caution, that one needs to be realistic rather than 
euphorically optimistic about how much energy we are going to get out 
of these alternatives.
  I would like to say in closing, Mr. Speaker, that I am exhilarated by 
this. There is no exhilaration like meeting and overcoming a big 
problem. And we have a huge challenge. I believe with proper 
leadership, we may not have much energy, we have even less real 
leadership in this area, with proper leadership, I think that Americans 
could be exhilarated by the challenge. I think we would again become a 
major exporter with all of the technologies for producing energy from 
these alternatives.
  Mr. Speaker, this is not a bad news story. This is a really good news 
story. America can lead the way. They can again be a real leader in the 
world. And I can imagine Americans going to bed at night saying, today 
I used less energy than I did yesterday and I am just fine. Tomorrow I 
am going to do even better. I think there would be fewer people on 
alcohol and watching bad movies and so forth if they had some real 
direction.

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