[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16918-16924]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege 
and the honor to address you on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives.
  This is one of these evenings that is a hot and sultry night here in 
Washington, D.C. It strikes me as the kind of day that actually was in 
August when the first hearings happened out here in Washington that 
were addressing the global warming issue. They had a Dr. Hansen--he 
happens to be from my hometown--who testified before that first 
hearing. The temperature was, oh, approaching 100 degrees; the humidity 
was, oh, approaching 100 degrees, and it wasn't an air-conditioned 
office about 20 or more years ago, maybe 25 years ago. It wasn't an 
air-conditioned hearing room, I should say, committee room.
  As the first testimony unfolded, Mr. Speaker, about global warming, 
it was a lot easier to convince Members of Congress that that could be 
a problem when they were sitting in that 100-degrees-feels-like 
temperature with the high humidity in the committee room here in 
Washington.
  You know, this kind of weather is the reason there is an August 
break. Why, as far back as our founders, they went home, and they tried 
to find some high ground where there was a breeze because they didn't 
have air conditioning, but August was used about 20, 25 years ago to 
kick off global warming.
  We know that there has been a long debate since then and that the 
foundation for that science is in question. There are some 31,000 
trained scientists who have signed off on a petition that says, ``We 
don't buy the science of global warming.'' Now, I don't know that you 
can find very many people on the street, Mr. Speaker, who really 
understand the science of the idea of global warming--I can surely find 
plenty who disagree--but I think, when you're going to do something 
that alters the state of our economy and the state of our culture and 
the global economy and the global culture in this fashion, then the 
proof has got to be on the people who want to make the changes and who 
want to shut down energy and energy access and energy production.
  What's going on in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is what has followed 
from that hearing those more than two decades ago. It's a belief that, 
when you use energy, it puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 
Greenhouse gases warm the Earth. It's a belief and not proof that a 
warmer Earth, in all categories, is bad for humanity. The people who 
are so concerned about global warming are not the kind of people who 
draw a line down through the middle of the paper on their legal pads 
and who write on one side ``these are the things that are bad about 
global warming'' and, on the other side of that line, in the center, 
``these are the things that are good.''
  No, Mr. Speaker. This is all a one-sided argument. In their minds, 
everything that has to do with the Earth--and it is very marginally, 
statistically, warming up. We don't know whether there's an increase in 
sun spots or whether there's a little bit of increase in greenhouse 
gases. Whatever the case, in their analysis, if the Earth warms by a 
degree, it's always bad in every case. Even when the Earth gets colder 
in certain places, it's still the fault of global warming because, 
after all, it's the average of the temperature; it's not the extremes 
that we should be looking at.
  Last winter was one of the coldest winters we've had. We see the 
dynamics in the weather extremes. As to those dynamics, by some of the 
weather forecasters, they say that it's not because the Earth is warmer 
but because the Earth is cooling in certain locations that we're seeing 
more extreme weather.
  In any case, this is not conclusive. Yet there are many people over 
on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, who have concluded that we 
should shut down energy consumption, that we should slow it down, back 
it down. Park your car. Park your SUV. Maybe even park your Prius 
because, right now, if you plug it into an outlet with a plug and you 
charge it up with electricity that was generated from coal, you're 
driving a coal-fired automobile down the highway. So they're saying 
park all of that. Get on your bicycle and ride your bicycle. If you do 
that, then it will slow down the greenhouse gas emissions. If that 
happens, it will save the planet for our children and grandchildren. 
Whatever the price is to our economy, to our way of life, to our 
culture, and whatever it does to shut down the economy, in their minds, 
it is all worth it.

                              {time}  2215

  That's what we're working with here.
  On our side of the aisle, we're saying we need more energy. We're 
arguing that, in all forms of energy, we need to provide more of it, 
that high prices slow down our economy.
  Everything we do takes energy, whether you're delivering Pampers or 
Pablum, or whether you're delivering French wine to the restaurants 
here in downtown Washington, D.C., it takes energy to do that. When 
that energy costs more money, everything costs more money. We say, 
let's put more Btus on the market of all kinds. When there's a huge 
supply, you'll see the demand doesn't meet the supply and prices go 
down until the demand meets the supply. That's something we understand 
over here. It's something that seems to be beyond the comprehension 
over here.
  That's what's up, Mr. Speaker. And I think we need to articulate this 
over and over again until the American people understand. There is one 
side of this argument that has pushed for more energy. And we passed a 
number of bills in the last several Congresses, passed them out of the 
floor of this House and over to the Senate. If they had not been 
blocked over there by extreme environmentalists that had an ability to 
put a hold on a bill, that had an ability to filibuster, many of the 
pieces of legislation that expand our energy would already be law, and 
6 or 8 or more years ago we would have started to open up places like 
the Outer Continental Shelf, non-national park public lands.
  We passed pad drilling in ANWR some years ago. We would have oil 
coming out of that pipeline up there today from ANWR if we had just 
signed it into law the day it was passed out of the House of 
Representatives.
  That's some of the backdrop, Mr. Speaker, on the energy issue. And I 
know that when you go to a place and you're looking for people that 
know something about energy, the first place you would go in the United 
States of America would be Texas. And I'm not sure it would be east 
Texas, but that's where I want to go, to the gentleman from east Texas, 
Mr. Louie Gohmert, and yield so much time as he may consume.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend from Iowa. And I admire so much, not 
just him, but also his State. And having had him be a gracious host 
previously, I appreciate all that Iowa is doing for the country.
  But Mr. Speaker, my friend from Iowa is right; there's a lot of 
people that know a lot about energy in east Texas where I'm from. And 
the fact is--and we brought this up in our Natural Resources 
Committee--you know, there in east Texas where I live they're drilling, 
they're exploring, they're producing. We're doing everything we can to 
provide energy for the rest of the country to use. But we're to the 
point now, we desperately need some help, and we need it from those 
States that have energy but have been sitting on it and will not help 
the rest of the Nation with it.
  Now, there are too many in this country that have to drive to 
survive.

[[Page 16919]]

There's no mass transportation that is going to get them where they've 
got to go to keep their job. We were in a debate in Judiciary last 
week, and one of the Members across the aisle said, well, our 
Democratic Party, we're concerned about the consumers, unlike the other 
party. And the fact is, I know those of us on the floor, our friends, 
we've got some good friends across the aisle--not the ones in 
leadership, but across the aisle--who understand. You want to help 
consumers, the men and women that are just trying to keep their job so 
they can pay down their credit card so they can get enough gas to keep 
their job next month, they're needing help. And yes, we want to help 
the consumer, we want to help them keep their job. We want jobs to be 
available. But I'm talking to people that have restaurants, that have 
small businesses, convenient stores. They're saying their business is 
down about 30 percent or so.
  And what some of our friends in leadership across the aisle don't 
understand is, yes, it's nice if you never had to use fossil fuel, but 
it's what is used to keep the economy going right now. And I'm hoping 
we can drive in directions--figuratively speaking--that will allow us 
to get off fossil fuel someday. But what they don't seem to understand 
is, when you destroy an economy, when you devastate an economy, which 
is beginning to happen now as these energy prices are hurting people so 
badly, you don't help the environment. We see that in India. We see it 
in China. When people are worried about keeping food on their table for 
their family, when they're worried about providing a place to live and 
sleep for their family, then they believe that the environmental issues 
have to take a back seat because we've got to survive first.
  Now, the United States--I know with all the beating up that goes on 
with the United States, but the United States has done more globally to 
help clean up the world's environment in the last 30 years than any 
nation on Earth. You destroy our economy, you hurt this economy the way 
this is beginning to do and you will lose the help from the best help 
source in the world, and that's the United States of America.
  And this isn't the first time I've been proud of America; I've been 
proud of America my whole life. But I note that on the Natural 
Resources Committee that I'm on, you look at things that we've been 
doing in the last several months and compare that to what went on in 
the last Congress, when the Republican leadership was in charge. Well, 
I was upset with some of the things that the leadership didn't allow or 
didn't get done or didn't help us to do, but some of the things that 
were done were good.
  For example, we had a bill, an energy bill in the last Congress, came 
out of our committee, we got it passed. And it provided incentives for 
people to use biomass to produce electricity. Tried and true, we've got 
a facility down in Nacogdoches just that's coming online. People relied 
on the representations that there would be incentives to use biomass, 
like left over tree limbs, things like that, to produce electricity. In 
our committee, in the last months, we decided to withdraw those 
incentives and instead provide a bunch of money for a new study to tell 
us whether it's feasible. I said, we know it's feasible, just use it. 
It's another source of energy.
  We've got wind--and of course our friend, T. Boone Pickens, has been 
talking a great deal about that--geothermal, hydroelectricity, the 
solar and biomass, as I've mentioned, those are all out there for use 
and they need to be pursued. But in the meantime, it's fossil fuel that 
is driving this country and it's fossil fuel that's driving the planet. 
And what we end up hearing in so many of these debates, including these 
late-night discussions, are people that hear things and just assume, 
well, it's said in committee, it's said on the floor, it must be true. 
And so we still hear people say, if we were to start drilling in that 
section 1002 part of ANWR that President Jimmy Carter designated would 
be used for oil and gas development, you know, nearly 30 years ago, we 
pursue that, well, it would still be 10 or 15 years before that would 
be available. What's been heard more recently that people aren't saying 
across the aisle is--at least not in the leadership, some of our 
moderate friends know--but that is that actually there is a pipeline, 
as I understand it, 74 miles from ANWR, this section of it. And despite 
what you see on the news, there are no pristine mountains, there are no 
antelope playing or buffalo roaming or anything like, it's just 
basically a waste land. And what better place to drill. The technology 
is there to do it.
  But we could have that in the United States--some of us have been 
told it can be done within 2 to 3 years; within 3 years it could be in 
the United States. Do it now. The mere fact that we would go after that 
would tell the speculators--that some say are contributing a third to 
the price--it would be nice to drop the price of gasoline by over a 
dollar just on speculation when they see we're serious about providing 
our own energy.
  The OCS. We're hearing people say, well, it can be 10 or 15 years 
down the road. Others say, you know what? We're serious about this. The 
price of oil is so high, gas is so high, we get out there, and some 
think it could be produced and on its way back to us within 2 years. I 
mean, this stuff is right here, available for us to utilize.
  We've got this--and most people, those that are listening probably 
have never seen, but that shale being talked about in the Green River 
Formation up in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, it's a thick black--looks like 
a black rock. It is full of what can be turned into barrels of oil, 
very clean oil. Now, the 2005 RAND study says that there are probably 
800 billion barrels of recoverable oil in this Green River Formation of 
oil shale. Some of us have heard numbers more recently that actually 
there may be a trillion barrels of oil in the entire Middle East left. 
Some think we can get two to five times that much recoverable from the 
shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. That is American energy from 
America for Americans, and there's no reason not to be producing that.
  But you look at the Outer Continental Shelf. We hear about all these 
acres that are not being drilled and produced. Ninety-seven percent of 
the Outer Continental Shelf is not leased and not being used. And as a 
Texan, I can remember growing up hearing people say, oh, no, if you put 
drilling rigs out there in the Gulf of Mexico, it will destroy all of 
the aquatic life that's left out in the Gulf of Mexico. And you know 
what? When those platforms went in out there, they looked to the fish 
like artificial reefs. And now, if you want to go fishing, there is no 
better place to go than around these platforms way out in the Gulf. Man 
and the aquatic life of the Gulf of Mexico are doing splendidly 
together.
  And when we hear about all this oil that is messing up beaches, most 
of that comes from tankers and natural ooze out of the Earth itself. 
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf off Louisiana and Texas, most 
people aren't aware, but it virtually destroyed some of those 
platforms. But you know what? They didn't leak. That's still coming 
from tankers and natural ooze from the Earth itself.
  And I appreciate my friend from Iowa yielding because one of the 
things that's coming out, it seems like yesterday and today, the price 
of gasoline may have dropped 20 cents or so. And some people are 
already saying, see, we can take credit, we can back off; we don't have 
to drill the Outer Continental Shelf; we don't have to drill ANWR; we 
don't have to produce from coal to liquid, as our friend, Mr. Shimkus, 
talked about; we don't have to produce from the oil shale in the Green 
River Formation; we don't have to go after this new Haynesville 
formulation for natural gas--some are saying may be one of the biggest 
finds in history of natural gas in Louisiana and part of east Texas. 
Some are saying we don't have to do that anymore, we're okay, not to 
worry.
  But you go back historically, and it's like that frog in the warm 
water; you know, you start it with warm, and you can get it warmer and 
warmer. And if he gets a little antsy, you may lower

[[Page 16920]]

the temperature so he doesn't get too antsy and jump out, and 
eventually you can boil him. And it seems like that's what's going on.
  We're to the point in American history where we can't keep funding 
people who fund our enemies, or as someone once said, ``we can't keep 
feeding the dogs that are trained to bite us.'' And I'm not calling the 
people that we pay for oil dogs, it's just a figure of speech that what 
we're doing, we're feeding people who are trained to hurt us. And 
that's got to stop.
  We have got to follow through. We have got to use an energy plan that 
makes us independent. And Mr. Speaker, I wouldn't have thought a year 
ago that I could say this in good conscience, and so I didn't, but now 
I can say it. I believe this Nation can be completely energy 
independent, where we're not having the biggest transfer of funds in 
the history of the world. We could be energy independent for a number 
of decades while we develop these alternatives.
  And I have some ideas. I'm hoping to file a bill this week that, if 
we follow through on this, could revolutionize ways to provide energy 
because of the way we store it. But we'll get into that later, but I'm 
hoping to file that this week.
  These are long-term goals that could make this Nation even greater 
than it is today as the greatest Nation in the world. But the more we 
become dependent on those who have funded our enemies, the more 
vulnerable we are. And those that thought a solution was to raid the 
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, there's not that much oil in the scheme of 
things. And when you know history like my friend from Iowa and I do, 
you know the Battle of the Bulge was lost by the Germans, not because 
it was toward the end of the war and we had worn them down--yes, it was 
late in the game--but they, many historians believe, could have driven 
the Allied Forces right to the Atlantic and North Sea if they hadn't 
run out of gasoline.
  We can't afford to get rid of our strategic reserve that may be 
necessary, if Iran decides to cut off the Straits of Hormuz, if we get 
a severe cut in our supply, we've got to be able to step up and allow 
our military to have what they need, and that petroleum reserve does 
that.
  So, I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa yielding. Let me mention one 
other thing. In the last month--I believe it may be the last thing that 
we've done in the Natural Resources Committee that deals with the issue 
of providing more of our own energy--we passed a bill--and I say ``we'' 
loosely because I sure voted and spoke against it; most of us walked 
out, we couldn't believe we were doing it. But anyway, we put the last 
best source of uranium in the United States off-limits.

                              {time}  2230

  We have already put vast amounts of our coal off-limits. Now we are 
putting uranium off-limits. We can't keep doing that and expect to be 
the greatest nation in the world much longer. I think we can go on for 
decades as the greatest, but it takes common sense now. I know my 
friend from Iowa has it. I know my friend from Texas out here has it. 
But we have got to deal with this problem now. We can't say, well, it's 
dropped 20 cents; so we won't worry about it. We have got to deal with 
this issue now or it will devastate the economy, which will devastate 
the environment, and will hurt the free world, and we can't afford to 
do that. I appreciate my friend for yielding.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
  And as I listened to your presentation, reclaiming my time, just 
going down through a list of some of the things that jumped out at me, 
the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to tap into the Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve, as the gentleman from Texas said, at a time when Iran has 
threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz. And through that closed 
strait comes 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply. That isn't 
just the valve through which 42.6 percent of the world's export oil 
supply goes. That valve, if they turn it down, let alone turn it off, 
that shuts down the world economy. It nearly shuts off the world 
economy, and the dynamics of everything we do change dramatically. 
That's why in past decades we have had the United States Navy in there 
to keep those straits open during times of crisis because that is the 
pressure point in the world for the world's economy. If they follow 
through on this, and there is a relatively unstable leader in Iran, 
they shut down the straits and we drain out our Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve, what are our alternatives? Hard-core rationing, and even then 
we get down to the point where we don't have the fuel for our own 
military and the scenario of how the Battle of the Bulge was won by 
Americans instead of won by the Germans falls into play. We won't have 
the gas. We won't have the gas for our military. We won't have the gas 
for our economy. We won't have the juice. This is not the time to drain 
down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It's a political ploy on this 
side of the aisle. That's, I think, clear to all of us.
  And, Mr. Speaker, the statement with ``use it or lose it,'' the 
argument that we have oil companies that have leases that are not being 
drilled upon, that's another one of those red herring arguments. And if 
we were serious about this, if we really thought the oil companies 
weren't developing leases that are on lands, they're just not 
developing dry holes. That's why those leases that are not drilled 
aren't drilled on yet. And if we would allow them to trade out those 
acres, 1 good acre for 5 bad ones, you would find out what the good 
land was and what the bad land was, what the good leases are and what 
the bad leases are. That would be my proposal, but that's not what 
happened here because we had to do another red herring. We had to stand 
up another strawman and make another argument because the American 
people aren't going to tolerate very long a Congress that refuses to 
act to open up energy.
  The belief that tightening down the energy supply, see gas prices go 
up. If gas prices go up, people burn less. If people burn less, the god 
of sky is happy. Mother Earth is happy.
  Human beings suffer. Grandmothers aren't going to get on their 
bicycles in January in Iowa and ride them down the gravel road 7 miles 
to town. That's how far it is for me to go to town, and it isn't all 
gravel, but the first mile is. It doesn't work for us. We can't drive 
those little Priuses either because the most recent time I had to shift 
my SUV into four-wheel drive to get home was still in April when the 
roads were soft and the frost was going out. So it's not an option for 
us unless we have a summer car and a winter car, a fair weather car and 
a foul weather vehicle. No, people in my part of the neighborhood drive 
the vehicles they do because that's what's necessary to get the job 
done. And a lot of those vehicles are farm pickups that are doing work 
every day.
  There's a whole different mindset going on. And the reason that the 
people who represent the blue zones, the inner cities, the ones who 
hold the gavels in this Congress today, can get by with higher energy 
prices, one of those reasons is because the people buying gas in places 
like Texas and Iowa, and it's a long ways between towns in Texas, 
further than it is in Iowa, the people buying that gas that are going 
from town to town and doing the things they need to do to maintain 
their life-style and their businesses are paying 18.4 a gallon Federal 
tax and a lot of States have 20 or more cents on that to maintain the 
roads, and 17 percent of the Federal gas tax goes to mass transit. And 
so the people that are voting, the inner-city people that are voting 
for the folks that are environmental extremists that refuse to allow 
the energy development in America, our own energy, those people are 
subsidized by the folks that are buying gas. And their ticket to get on 
the metro down here at South Capitol and ride out to Falls Church is 
about a buck and a quarter. It would be a lot more than that if they 
had to buy the whole price of the metro. And a ticket on the subway in 
New York is cheaper than it would be if they had to pay the full fair 
cost for travel, and a ticket on the ``L'' in Chicago and the cable car 
in San Francisco, those transits by my

[[Page 16921]]

measure are all subsidized by the people who are buying gas. And the 
constituents who allow their Members of Congress to drive up these 
prices are going to push us gas buyers to the point where we say, ``I'm 
not going to subsidize your mass transit anymore on my gas dollar. You 
pay for your own ticket.'' That's going to happen too in this Congress, 
and that will be when they squeal. And then they'll say, well, gas is 
too high; let's have some more energy.
  Here's what has happened during the Pelosi Congress. This was going 
to be the Congress that was the most open in history, by the way. I 
think it's the most closed in history. It was going to be the most 
effective and hardest-working Congress in history. Well, it's sure not 
open, and, Mr. Speaker, it's sure not effective. And, additionally, we 
still haven't passed an appropriations bill as late in history as that 
has ever happened. And this cheaper gas price that was promised if we 
would just hand the gavel to Nancy Pelosi and apply her San Francisco 
values to all of America, we would have this wonderful world where 
everybody got along and gas would be cheaper. That was the promise. We 
are going to get you cheaper gas, cheaper than it was than Nancy 
Pelosi, the Speaker, took the gavel.
  Here's what gas prices were when President Bush was sworn in, Mr. 
Speaker: $1.49. And it slowly crept up. And in about this area, we 
passed energy legislation, and it went over to the Senate, where the 
Democrats in the Senate filibustered our energy legislation that would 
have put many more Btus of energy into our marketplace. They said no. 
That blocked the smart legislation that came out of the House. And when 
that happened, prices of energy went up. And they went up to all of 
$2.33 a gallon for gasoline on the day that the new Speaker took the 
gavel here just behind me, $2.33, and gas prices were going to get 
cheaper. And here is what the promise results in. Now, it's fallen off 
a little bit more in the last week or so: $4.08, I saw $4.10, $4.11, 
more than that on the board in other places. But gas taking a leap like 
that, and why? Because there's less energy on the market, not more; 
because the people that are hedging because they need to have diesel 
fuel and gasoline see the supply that's there and they see that it's 
going to be harder to develop energy in the United States because of 
folks in this Congress in their majority won't let it happen.
  We say drill everything, drill it now, produce more energy of all 
kinds, drill ANWR, drill the Outer Continental Shelf, drill the 
nonnational park public lands. As Mr. Gohmert said, open up the Green 
River shale oil and go into that massive amount, 800 billion barrels, 
maybe a trillion barrels that are there; go in and get that natural gas 
in that huge find in Hainesville. Do all of those things. Produce more 
of every form of energy that we have.
  The argument that we can't go to the Outer Continental Shelf and 
drill because it's environmentally unfriendly, Mr. Gohmert spoke about 
how that's the place where you go if you want to go fishing out there 
is to the oil platform because in the shade of the structure is a place 
where the fish congregate. So it has been better. There are places 
where they sink ships out in the ocean because it's fish habitat. Well, 
the structure of the ship is structure for fish. The structure of an 
oil platform is structure for fish. And there was at least one oil 
platform that was torn loose during Hurricane Katrina that blew 60 
miles across the ocean, and it went up near shore near Mobile, Alabama. 
No leak, but a platform that was pushed 60 miles by a terrible storm. 
But they are set up now with the kind of connections that if they're 
torn loose, there are not leaks. And we have met this technology.
  The North Slope of Alaska is essentially identical topography and 
identical environment to that of ANWR. They're right next door. It's 
like Nebraska and Iowa or Iowa and Illinois, and that's how the 
difference is between North Slope and ANWR. Well, the habitat for 
wildlife in the North Slope, after we went up and built the pipeline, 
has done about the same thing, maybe even better, than the platforms 
out in the gulf coast. In that the count in the caribou herd in the 
North Slope in 1970 was 7,000 caribou, 7,000 head of caribou walking 
around out there in that frozen tundra. For a couple months out of the 
year when the sun shines 24 hours a day, it thaws the permafrost down a 
foot to 18 inches. Sloppy old tundra in there. And those caribou that 
were 7,000 caribou in 1970 today are over 28,000 head of caribou.
  Why is that? Well, one environmentalist said to me when I made that 
point, well, of course there are more caribou today. That's because the 
people that went up and worked on the pipeline shot all the wolves. 
That was their natural enemy. Now, I would not have come up with that. 
But this is what I can tell you, Mr. Speaker:
  I was signed up to go up on that pipeline, and they had to pay good 
money to get a man to go up there and work in that climate, not just 
80-below temperatures sometimes, though real men can do that, but the 
rules were this: First of all, there were no women allowed; so you're 
going to lose some of these men who don't want to go someplace where 
there are no women. It's tough for me. And the second thing was no 
gambling. The third thing was no booze. And the fourth thing was no 
guns. No women, no gambling, no booze, and no guns. That's why they had 
to pay such big money to get somebody to go work in 80-below 
temperatures. That was some of the worst of it. Most of it wasn't that 
bad.
  So the reality is that if there were no guns up there and nobody shot 
any of the wolves and that isn't why the caribou herd increased, they 
increased because they had a nice dry spot where they could have their 
calves, not down in the ice water in the frozen tundra.
  I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. You're talking about 
the caribou that more than 10 times gained from where they were before.
  And with regard to the wolves being shot, one of the things I was 
surprised about when I heard that polar bears were now listed as 
threatened here recently was the fact, and we discussed this--it came 
out in debate in our Natural Resources Committee--it's acknowledged 
that in the last few decades we were down to 10,000 to 12,000 polar 
bears in the world. Now it's acknowledged universally there are over 
25,000 polar bears, and somehow that caused the polar bears to now be 
threatened now that there are more than twice as many as there were a 
few decades ago. So it certainly isn't because of a lack of polar bears 
that the caribou are doing well. The polar bears are doing quite well 
themselves despite what you may hear from some of the far left folks on 
that issue.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from 
Texas. Yes, the polar bears are doing well, and they are probably 
dining on a seal diet. They'll eat caribou. They'll eat anything they 
can get their paws on. That's what a bear does. And 28,000 head caribou 
herd up there on the North Slope.
  But there is no resident caribou herd in ANWR next door. There's a 
migratory herd that comes in in the spring from Canada. They come in 
and have their calves there, and when the calves get to where they can 
walk, they all walk back to Canada. So it's a kind of a maternity ward 
for caribou there in ANWR. But no one can come up with any reason why 
they would stop coming over to have their calves or think that it would 
hurt their population. It would probably help their population because 
they like to get up out of that cold, frozen water and the tundra and 
get up on something kind of high and let the breeze blow the flies away 
and have their calves up there where they have a better chance of 
survival.
  Another gentleman that has come to the floor to address this issue is 
one of the three judges from the State of Texas, and they all come here 
from Texas knowing something about the law and something about energy.
  I would be happy to yield to Judge Carter, the gentleman from Texas.

                              {time}  2245

  Mr. CARTER. I thank my friend from Iowa, my classmate from Iowa. We

[[Page 16922]]

came in this Congress together and have been close friends since we 
have gotten here. The one thing that I have learned about people from 
Iowa, like Steve King, is that they are blessed, like a whole lot of my 
folks back home, hopefully I am too, with something called common 
sense. You know, this is really about common sense, and I think the 
American people get it.
  Tomorrow morning, in Round Rock, Texas, where I am from, that used to 
be a little bitty town of 2,500 people, and now we are bumping up 
against 100,000 people, but I estimate we have got at least 15,000 to 
20,000 vehicles that are operated out of Round Rock, Texas.
  So, tomorrow morning, in just my hometown, 15,000 people are going to 
get out of bed and go out and start up a vehicle to go to work, and 
it's summer, they may be wanting to take the kids on vacation, maybe 
taking them to swimming practice or to baseball practice or down to the 
park to play, or they are going to grocery shopping, as the price of 
groceries go up, or they are going out to work, or they are driving 
down to Austin, 30 miles away, to their job. But they are all mobile 
and going some place.
  There's no mass transit that comes to my town of 100,000 people. 
There's a Greyhound bus that passes through, going places. But I 
wouldn't call that mass transit. It won't get you back and forth to 
work. And all those peoples are going to start their vehicles tomorrow 
morning, either on gasoline or diesel. We may have a couple of hybrids. 
But the power that is going to recharge the batteries of that hybrid 
vehicle is going to come from a source of some sort. Hydroelectric used 
to be a big source, but it's one of the minute sources now. We got 
scared to death of nuclear energy and so we stopped making nuclear 
power plants. So we burn coal and we burn natural gas and hydrocarbons 
to make electrical energy most everywhere in this country.
  Now, sure, I like what I heard from my friend, T. Boone Pickens, from 
the panhandle of Texas, where the wind blows all the time. Wind mills 
are a great idea in the panhandle of Texas, and they are going to help 
a small amount. I am all for it. I, of course, am a big fan of natural 
gas because my daddy was in the natural gas business. I grew up in the 
natural gas business, and every summer job I had from the time I was 
16-years-old was in the natural gas business. Which brings me down to 
something that I discovered.
  Most of the people here in Congress know that I am married to a 
little lady who's from the Netherlands. I worked on a pipeline in the 
Netherlands back in 1965. That is how I met my wife. That pipeline was 
being laid because the Dutch discovered in the northern province of 
Holland--and Holland is a little country. It's not very big at all. I 
think it's 190 miles long by 90 miles wide.
  They discovered natural gas. In fact, one well in north Holland 
produced the same amount of natural gas as the entire west Texas gas 
field in the panhandle. Now they were elated. They were overwhelmed. 
Europe was fascinated. They had found a resource to power their homes, 
because they were still burning coal, they were still burning coal that 
was made into liquid. They were still burning coal oil in their homes 
in northern Europe in 1965. And they were excited about this great 
resource that they found.
  And then they moved offshore; off the shore of Norway, off the shore 
of Scotland, off the shore of Sweden, and out into the North Sea, out 
into the Baltic Sea, and they drilled and they found more oil and 
natural gas. And Europe was excited. Yet, we are ashamed of our natural 
resource that we know is sitting off the coast of the United States. 
Oh, woe is me. We can't touch that. That is not good for us.
  Now what is wrong with us? Because tomorrow morning in Round Rock, 
Texas, 15,000 people want to run their vehicles to live their lives as 
Americans. And, you're right, these folks, the intercity folks, they 
have got mass transit. Some of it's good, some not so good. But they 
have got it. Maybe that is what is part of the divide that divides the 
red States from the blue States in the old comparison that we get right 
now. Maybe us red State folks don't have as much transit as the blue 
State folks. I don't know about that.
  But I know this. The Republican Party stands for the right idea. 
Let's develop every power source known to man to make this an American 
independent power country. American power for Americans.
  You have got a chart right there. You have got a great list. I will 
be glad to yield back for you to go over that list of the power sources 
that we say are available and how we support each and every one of 
those power sources. I yield back.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas, one of the 
outstanding judges from Texas, Judge Carter, and my wing man on the 
Judiciary Committee for 4 years, and my voice of reason as well.
  This is a chart that was far harder to put together than it should 
have been. This should have been something that a simple little e-mail 
down to the office would have produced. You would think that when you 
ask a question, What is the energy production in the United States, 
what are all of its sources, and put it altogether and put it into the 
common denominator of Btus. Well, it didn't quite work that way because 
we don't measure electricity in Btu's. We measure it in kilowatts or 
megawatts, and sometimes coal doesn't give you that measurement either.
  So we got some help from some people and this chart is the energy pie 
chart, I call it. Each one of these different colors here is a 
different source of energy. And so I will take us around.
  This is the energy we produce in the United States. Overall, this is 
the number: 72.1 quadrillion Btus. Here's the number down here. That is 
15 zeroes or so. But we will get to the meaning of that number here in 
a moment.
  When I go around the horn and I start with gasoline, gasoline that is 
produced the United States amounts to 8.28 percent of the overall 
energy production in the United States. Then you go to diesel fuel and 
heating oil. That is 4.20 percent. Kerosene and jet fuel together is 
1.57. Less than I thought it would be. Other petroleum products, heavy 
oil, those things, 4.8 percent.
  Now there's a big piece here, the natural gas. The natural gas that 
Judge Carter talked about. Roughly 27\1/2\ percent of the overall 
energy that we produce is natural gas. Coal is 32\1/2\ percent of the 
overall Btu's. Nuclear, 11.66. Maybe bigger than most folks would 
think. We got to hydroelectric, which Judge Carter mentioned. Out of 
all our energy production, hydroelectric is 3.41 percent overall.
  Then you get to these tiny little pieces here. We want to do all of 
these things, as Judge Carter said. We want to do them all.
  Now we are getting down to the list of the things that the folks on 
this side of the aisle will do. Here they are. They will be okay maybe 
with geothermal as long as they don't have to watch it happen because 
they can't stand the thought of seeing a drill rig punch a hole down to 
turn the heat back. But once it's over, it's kind of okay.
  Wind. Well, they don't like wind so good. If Teddy Kennedy can see 
it, they don't want it. But out in Texas it's probably all right. T. 
Boone Pickens said this is one problem we can't drill our way out of. 
Well, I believe that may be true, but it's also a problem we can't get 
out of without drilling. That is what I would add to the gentleman's 
wisdom. Here's solar, at .11 percent.
  Here are the three sources of energy that are not objectionable to 
environmentalists, geothermal, wind, and solar, and they represent just 
a little bit more than 1 percent of the overall energy production in 
America, and that is what they would expand that into the entire energy 
supply for America.
  These tiny little slivers here that are so small, you don't even get 
a color in there. It's just the line, the black line. Expand those into 
the whole circle and let the rest of this wither and die on the vine. 
Because if we drill an oil well, it's going to reach maximum production 
pretty quickly. From there on, it's statistically a little bit less oil 
on a daily basis until it finally dries up. We have got to keep 
exploring.

[[Page 16923]]

  Same with natural gas. These wells don't last forever. They don't get 
bigger, better. They get to be a little lesser. With coal, you have got 
to keep opening coal mines. You can't be closing the uranium, by the 
way, or our nuclear will slowly get shut down.
  There's the little sliver they would have, geothermal, wind and 
solar. But the rest of us, we would expand all of this, and I include 
with that ethanol, biodiesel, biomass. All of that source of energy 
needs to be expanded because I have the chart that shows not just the 
energy production in the United States, but the energy consumption 
compared to it, and it is actually the more interesting of the two 
charts, Mr. Speaker.
  This chart shows the outside circle is the energy consumption in the 
United States. I showed you the number before, 72.1 quadrillion Btus of 
production, 101.4 quadrillion Btus of consumption. This circle in the 
middle is our production circle. The outside is our consumption circle. 
This inner circle is 72 percent of the outer circle.
  So, however we want to measure this, we need to grow more natural gas 
so it comes out to the width of the outer circle. We need to grow more 
coal production, more nuclear production, more gasoline over here, and 
on and on with the diesel fuel, jet fuel, et cetera.
  This inner circle, which is the energy production in the United 
States, has got to grow up to match up with the outer circle, which is 
energy consumption. If we do that, we are energy independent, however 
you measure it.
  Now, I'd change the proportion of these slices of the pie. I would 
use a lot less natural gas to general electricity because it's a finite 
source and I'd rather see it go to manufacturing, where natural gas is 
the mother's milk of manufacturing. I'd rather see it go to fertilizer. 
We have nearly lost the fertilizer industry in American because natural 
gas has been pushed to high.
  I would change the proportions and the priorities and I'd produce a 
lot more nuclear because we can and we should and it's environmentally 
friendly and it's the safest source of energy that there is on the one 
planet. The French produce 78 percent of their electricity with 
nuclear. Ours is 8.29--actually, 11.66 percent of our production and 
8.29 percent of our overall consumption.
  Mr. CARTER. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I will yield. I will add to the slice of the pie, 
just as I yield, one of these needs to be energy conservation. That 
changes the equation too.
  The gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. CARTER. There are commercials running on television on both sides 
of this issue, and one of them says, Why don't the oil companies do 
something about energy, not just oil? And do something about the 
environment.
  Well, we are told that the big challenge we have today is 
CO2. Carbon dioxide is ruining our planet. We talked about 
the polar bears earlier. If we captured carbon dioxide out of the 
atmosphere from some type of burn process, what will we do with it? Who 
has a use for carbon dioxide; taking it out of the atmosphere? The oil 
companies have a use.
  The oil companies can use carbon dioxide to deep inject into fields 
like east Texas, where Brother Gohmert comes from, which just about 
spinout oil fields, and geologists tell us there may be 50 percent of 
the oil in that field may not be recoverable without some change in the 
field.
  Under this future gen project, which this government is looking at 
spending billions of dollars on to study how to take coal, clean the 
burn of coal, capture the carbon dioxide and put the carbon dioxide 
deep in the ground, where it will change the composition of--I assume 
it's like tar sands that are left down there--and bring light crude to 
the surface.
  So, you know, these are not the evil empire. They actually have a 
solution to a problem that we are talking about, and as we learn how to 
capture carbon dioxide, which we are working on right now.
  I was in a meeting the day before yesterday with a group that has a 
process of capturing carbon dioxide from a burn process. As we capture 
it, it has a market price in a free enterprise world to the oil and gas 
industry to bring petroleum products to the surface safely, without 
polluting the atmosphere.
  We don't talk about these things because these are the things that 
they do in the regular engineering in their business. But the reality 
is this is a solution to the very problem that our friend, Mr. Gore, is 
talking about. And if you believe that carbon dioxide is the end of the 
world, there are energy companies, oil and gas companies, that are 
ready, willing, and able to take captured carbon dioxide to work in 
their business.
  This is the kind creativity when you challenge Americans to solve a 
problem. We say, Go to the moon. Yes, we can go to the moon by using 
these kind of new ideas to make life better for Americans so that when 
we get up tomorrow morning, we can comfortably start our automobiles 
and our pickup trucks and our SUVs and together work.

                              {time}  2300

  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. I would add to 
that that the free market solutions that we have, they constantly 
adjust. If government gets out of the way, the demand will create the 
supply, and when the supply gets to be oversupply, then the price comes 
down.
  Instead, we have people that have their hands on the gavel that don't 
believe in free market economy. They never sat down and read through 
Adam Smith's ``Wealth of Nations'' word-for-word and understood it. 
They don't live to appreciate it. They think there are a handful of 
intellectual elitists in the world that can manage the economy.
  We have had two Members of this Congress that have called out for 
nationalization of at least part of our oil industry or all of our oil 
industry. One of them, the gentleman from New York, called for the 
nationalization of our oil refineries. In other words, that word 
doesn't fit too good with Americans, but it happens in places like 
Venezuela, and it happened in Libya to the Hunt brothers with their oil 
fields. Nationalization means the United States Government would take 
over the oil refineries and run them.
  One other Member, the gentlewoman from California, argued that we 
should nationalize the entire oil industry in the United States, run 
that with the government.
  I wonder, where does this come from? Where I come from, we are 
steeped in free enterprise. We are steeped in free market 
capitalization. We understand that ambition and the desire and need for 
profit has done more for the standard of living of all humanity than 
all the missionaries that ever went anywhere. And God love the 
missionaries for all they have done, but it has been the desire for 
profit that has driven our technology, in math and science and in the 
oil industry and in information technology.
  It wasn't done because some intellectual elitist was sitting 
somewhere and decided let's invent a software package and a microchip 
and an oil drill rig and a derrick and a platform and a refinery. That 
was done because there was profit in it, and some good, solid, smart 
people put capital together and they worked hard and took risks and our 
lives got better.
  There is a book that I read years ago called ``Trashing the Planet'' 
by Dixie Lee Ray, former Governor of the State of Washington. She since 
has passed away. She served one term out there, as I recall.
  She starts the book out about how in 1900 the world was a very smelly 
and dirty and dangerous place, and she writes about how horses were 
going up and down in the streets, and they didn't wear diapers like 
they do in Central Park in those days. They left their mess behind 
them. The garbage got dumped out the window.
  There was a time there in transition when a gentleman walked on the 
inside, away from the curb, so when the garbage got dumped out, it 
landed on him instead of the lady. Then, after a while, it got to be 
where the vehicles were splashing water up, so the gentleman walked on 
the curbside instead of the building side. That is how the culture 
changed.

[[Page 16924]]

  We didn't have clean water and we didn't have clean air and we didn't 
have modern medicine, and she wrote about how we took a step up and new 
technology came, every new invention improved the standard of living 
and the quality of life on average of all Americans, and, in fact, most 
people in the world.
  I read that book next to, side-by-side, simultaneous with Al Gore's 
book ``Earth in the Balance.'' It was quite a thing to see the 
difference between the good, solid, commonsense of Dixie Lee Ray, that 
was full of footnotes and references, a very respectable, scholarly 
work, compared to the work of ``Earth in the Balance,'' that I didn't 
find a footnote, and I found quotes from a respected politician, a 
noted public figure, but not even names.
  So we are always better off with technology. Energy produces more 
technology, cheaper, and lets our economy flow. If we decide we are 
going to shut down, say, the coal mines here in the United States, shut 
down the oil drilling and for natural gas or for our crude oil, and, by 
the way, in the last 25 years, our oil rigs have gone from 4,500 of 
them operating and working in the United States down to 2,000 is all. 
Only six rigs working in Alaska. Only six up there in that huge oil.
  So we need more energy so that we can have a more effective economy. 
That is the bottom line. We believe in free market capitalization. We 
believe in supply and demand. We believe that if there is more demand, 
there will be more supply created, if government gets out of the way.
  You folks all believe get in the way and then drag a straw man out 
and a red herring and say, well, we will take some oil out of the 
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or we will say ``use it or lose it.'' The 
American people know better.
  I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. CARTER. The other bogeyman, strawman out there, is Big Oil. Big 
Oil finds the oil rigs. As a Member of this House, and I don't think 
you would be ashamed for me to tell this, and it is not a long story, 
his name is Trent Franks, he is one of our classmates, and he made his 
living drilling for oil. You know how he started? Trent was 18. His 
partner was his 15-year-old brother. They bought a makeshift drilling 
rig that was basically rigged on the back of an old truck, and they 
went down outside of Midland, Texas, and started looking for a place to 
drill for oil.
  Trent is out of the business now because he is a Member of Congress, 
but his firm today is drilling offshore off the coast of New Zealand 
and Australia. So he and his 15-year-old brother obviously found some 
someplace so they could keep drilling.
  The average person who seeks oil is an independent, more or less for 
the oil industry, small businessman, and we should stop throwing these 
bogeymen out there, because these are the people looking for our oil, 
and they are going to find it and they are going to change things, as 
are our coal miners and all the other people we have talked about. We 
will get clean coal, we will get oil that we can live with, we will 
have American energy.
  I thank you for allowing me to join you today. I yield back.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the judge and the judges from Texas. It has 
been a big help to me and a boost to hear your insight on this energy 
issue. I intend to continue to turn this up and do all I can to open it 
up.
  I am tired of $4 gas. The American people are tired of $4 gas. They 
know that this if Congress shuts down energy, the price will go higher, 
not lower, and it is up to us. We have got discharge petitions down 
here that many, many Members have signed. When we get to 218, they will 
come to the floor, whether it is blocked by the Speaker or not. That is 
one of the key pieces of this.
  I also wanted to add, first I will go back and recap this energy pie 
piece. The inside circle is energy production in America. The outside 
circle is energy consumption in America. The colored components of 
this, blue is gas production; diesel fuel is red; and you have got the 
yellow is natural gas; the kind of orange is coal; green is nuclear; 
and then you get hydroelectric is this little sliver right here in that 
faded lavender color.
  But when you go around the corner and you ask the question, can we 
bring more biomass into this equation, environmentalists say no, you 
are burning wood and stuff, so you are polluting the atmosphere with 
the emissions from burning cellulose. So you can't do that.
  Well, we get to diesel fuel and gasoline. We surely can't do that, 
because that comes from an oil well. That is a crude oil product. You 
can't do jet fuel, you can't do heavy oils, because that is all 
petroleum out of a well product. Here is natural gas. You can't do 
that. That is Outer Continental Shelf. They don't want to create fish 
habitat out there with those oil platforms.
  And the idea for some people in Florida that out there at 199 miles 
away from shore we might punch a oil or natural gas well down and 
somebody might not come to Florida and sit on the beach because there 
was once a drill rig 199 miles away and now there is a platform that 
might even be underwater, that can't be seen? That has about as much 
sense as somebody sitting on Iowa's border with Missouri in a lawn 
chair saying, I don't like the idea there could be somebody with a 
drill rig up there in Southern Minnesota, right across the line. Same 
distance, 200 miles north to south.
  Why is anybody worried about a drill rig 200 miles offshore of 
Florida? They can't see it from the beach. Chris Columbus, remember, 
said that is how he figured out the Earth was round. He saw the mast of 
the ship first as it got closer. He figured the Earth was curved, 
because you should have seen all the ship at once if it were flat.
  We have to grow the size of this energy pie, Mr. Speaker. All of 
these things are off the table from environmentalists: No more natural 
gas, no coal, no more nuclear. Hydroelectric, we surely couldn't stop 
the water in a river and save a flood, like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Iowa 
City, Iowa, in the process. No, we can't have any more of that. All we 
can have more of is geothermal, wind and biodiesel. They represent 
approximately 1 percent of the overall energy, the overall energy 
production in America, and they are only 0.74 percent of the overall 
consumption in America.
  So clearly something has to change. The American people will not 
tolerate expensive gas, as long as there is a logical, commonsense 
solution. We know what that is. We have talked about what that is, Mr. 
Speaker, and I call upon the Speaker of the House to let these energy 
bills come forward for votes and let the American people see where 
everybody stands in this Congress.

                          ____________________