[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3416-3422]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1630
                       FOSSIL FUELS TO RENEWABLES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, in just a few days now will be 
the third anniversary of the time I came to this floor to talk about 
this subject. I believe this may be the 39th time that I have come to 
the floor, and what an auspicious time to come, because when I got up 
this morning and turned on the television, I could hardly believe it, 
oil was $105 a barrel.
  There are three groups in this country that are interested in 
transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. They have very different 
agendas, they have very different concerns, but they have common cause 
in wanting to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. One of these 
groups is the group that is concerned about the national security of 
our country. This first chart speaks to that.
  There were 30 people about 3 years ago leading Americans: Boydan 
Gray, McFarland, Jim Woolsey, and 27 others, retired Four-star admirals 
and generals, who really understand the problems we face, who wrote a 
letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have 
only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the 
world oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally 
unacceptable national security exposure. We really have to do something 
about that.
  A couple of other statistics on this chart are interesting to note. 
With our 2 percent of the world oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent 
of the world's oil. We are pumping our wells four times faster than the 
average of the rest of the world. What that means of course is if there 
is the end of oil, our wells will go dry before the others because we 
are pumping them faster.
  The last statistic here is truly a bit less than 5 percent. We are 
one person out of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's 
energy, and this fact is not lost on the rest of the world. They 
recognize this.
  The next chart is a statement by our Secretary of State Condoleezza 
Rice. She had in mind the statistics that you just saw, and she had 
some other things in mind that we will come to in a few moments. When 
she said we do have to do something about the energy problem, I can 
tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of 
State than the way the politics of energy is, I will use the word, 
warping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something 
about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for 
energy supply. So our Secretary of State recognizes the national 
security implications of the world's oil energy supply.
  One of the things she had in mind was this next chart. This is a 
really interesting one. This shows what the world would look like if 
the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil that it had 
in reserve. Boy, this is a warped map of the world, isn't it? There is 
China and India over there, so small you can hardly find them because 
they have very little oil.
  Saudi Arabia is huge. It just dominates the landscape. Saudi Arabia 
has 22 percent, more than one-fifth of the world's reserves of oil. And 
notice little Kuwait through there, a tiny little province way down in 
there in the southeastern corner of Iraq, and Saddam Hussein thought 
that would look good as a province of Iraq, which was a problem about 
12 years, 16 years ago, I guess. But look at the size of their 
reserves. Iraq and Iran, the United Arab Emirates, just dots on the 
map, and look at how much oil they have. Then across northern Africa, 
Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, and so forth.
  Look in our hemisphere. Venezuela of course dwarfs everything else. 
Venezuela has more oil than all the rest of our hemisphere put 
together. Russia, big, but not huge compared to these other reserves. 
Little Kazakhstan, you see it's fairly large there.
  So some really striking things about this map. One is the size of the 
reserves in India and China. About almost one-fourth of the world's 
population lives in India, about one-third, really, live in India and 
China, and they have no more oil than we have. Notice that our two 
biggest suppliers of oil are Canada and Mexico, and they have less oil 
than we. Now, there aren't very many people in Canada to use the oil, 
so they can export it to us. Although there are a lot of people in 
Mexico, most of them are too poor to use the oil, so they can export it 
to us. But look how Venezuela is dominating this hemisphere.
  Another thing that Condoleezza Rice had in mind when she made that 
statement about how oil is warping the world's diplomacy was the 
distribution of the reserves of oil. On the right over there, we have 
the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserve holdings 
in 2004. Notice that 98 percent of those are governments, nationally 
owned oil reserves. LUKOIL in Russia, big, and they have 2 percent, and 
they are kind of quasi-government, really.
  But notice over here on the left. Now, this is the top 10 oil and gas 
companies on the basis of production. The graph on the right shows how 
much oil they have, and the graph on the left shows how much oil they 
are producing. The big boys up here, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell 
and BP and so forth, they weren't even big enough to show up over here 
on the right. They are not numbered among the top ten. So they don't 
own much oil but they are pumping a lot of oil that somebody else owns. 
So they are pumping 22 percent of the oil. But notice still that 78 
percent of the oil is pumped by these national companies that own it 
there. Condoleezza Rice I'm sure had this in mind when she made that 
statement.
  She also had this next chart in mind. This is an interesting one. 
This looks at holdings around the world. World energy picture of 
January of 2005. You will notice the symbols there for China. China is 
buying oil all over the world. Why would they do that? Because in 
today's world, it really doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. 
We own very little of the oil. We have 2 percent of the world's 
reserves, but we are using 25 percent of the world oil, and we do that 
because we come with our dollars. Let's hope it continues to be dollars 
rather than euros. We come with our dollars and we buy the oil.
  So why are the Chinese buying up the oil when it doesn't make any 
difference in today's world economy who owns the oil? The person, the 
company, the country that comes with the dollars buys the oil. Well, at 
the same time that they are buying up all this oil, and I am sure 
Condoleezza Rice had this in mind, they were also very aggressively 
building a blue water navy. You see, you would need a blue water navy. 
We have the only one in the world now. You would need a blue water navy 
to protect the supply routes if you wanted to take the position that 
the oil was yours and you couldn't share it.
  They have 1 billion 300 million people, and I can imagine that one 
day they may, with pressure from their people, tell the world, gee, I 
am sorry, but this oil is ours and we can't share it. They have 900 
million people in what they call rural areas that, with the miracle of 
instant communication and television, have observed the benefits of the 
industrialized world, and they are clamoring for some of those 
benefits. I think that the Chinese recognize that they must do 
something to meet those demands or they might see their empire 
unraveling the way the Soviet empire unraveled.
  So this is one group of people that have a concern about moving away 
from fossil fuels to alternatives, renewables. We have very few fossil 
fuels and so we have a big incentive to move away and develop 
renewables, and these are those who are concerned about national 
security interests.

[[Page 3417]]

  There is a second group, and I don't have any charts for this group, 
but you have seen so much of this that you don't need me to have 
charts. This is a very large group of people who believe that our 
excessive use of fossil fuels, which is some releasing of carbon 
dioxide that has been sequestered through the ages when the sun shown 
on ancient subtropical seas and algae and small animals and plants and 
so forth grew there. Then at the end of the season they drop to the 
bottom and silt came in, and then more the next season. And then 
finally the tectonic plates opened up and they went down to a proper 
point where, with pressure and temperature and time, this organic 
material was converted into what we know today as oil and gas.
  Coal is a little different. As a boy, I knew very well where coal 
came from because we lived in coal mining country. As a matter of fact, 
we had a coal mine on our farm, and the coal would come out of the 
mine, dust up to big chunks of coal. And we'd have to break some of 
those chunks to put it in our furnace. I remember taking that 
sledgehammer where it leaned against the wall and breaking a lump of 
coal and there it opened up and there was a big fern leaf. I remember 
as a kid the feelings I had. I wonder how long ago that fern grew. So I 
knew where coal came from plants. It came from plants that died. We can 
see the beginning of coal in the bogs of England, by the way.
  But what we are doing in burning these fossil fuels is releasing the 
carbon dioxide that was sequestered in these plants over very long time 
periods. You see, what happens in photosynthesis is carbon dioxide is 
taken out of the air and oxygen is released into the air. If you now 
bury that plant, you now have sequestered the carbon dioxide. When you 
take it out and burn it, you are releasing the carbon dioxide.
  In the last 100 years or so, we have doubled the concentration of 
carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Now this is what we call a greenhouse 
gas. You see the effects, the greenhouse effects when you go out to 
your car in the parking lot in the summer and you open the door and 
that blast of heat hits you. What has happened is that the rays of the 
sun have come in over a broad spectrum of ways and they have heated up 
the interior of your car and that re-radiates in the infrared, and the 
glass of your car is relatively impervious to infrared, so it keeps 
that heat in there. The same thing happens in our world. The sun shines 
down and warms up things down here and they radiate back.
  These greenhouse gases act very much in the atmosphere like the glass 
in your car or the glass in the greenhouse. It reflects the infrared 
back in, so it keeps us warmer. There are a growing number of people 
who believe that this increase in carbon dioxide, increasing the 
greenhouse gases are producing climate change in our world and 
producing a global warming. Of course, enough global warming could 
melt, it would take a very long time, couple of hundred years, 
probably, but could melt the polar ice caps. That would raise the level 
of the oceans about 200 feet. If you look around the world at the 
number of people who live in less than 200 feet above sea level, it's a 
big, big part of the world's population.
  So these people who are concerned about global warming and climate 
change, and by the way, I would note that very small differences in 
temperature make huge changes in climate. During the last ice age about 
10,000 years ago, our Earth was about 5 degrees Centigrade cooler than 
it is now. That is about 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That is not a whole lot. 
That is about like going from here to Minnesota. But that 9 degrees 
Fahrenheit difference in temperature caused the ice age.
  So when you're looking at a temperature change and saying I go from 
one room in my house to another and there's a bigger change than that 
and the sky isn't falling, how come that is a big deal? Just remember 
that relatively small temperature changes can make huge climate 
changes.
  Now, the solution to the problem that the climate change-global 
warming people see is exactly the same solution to the problem that the 
national security-concerned people see, and that is we have got to move 
away from fossil fuels. We have got to move to renewables where we are 
recycling the carbon dioxide. You see, if you burn something that grew 
this summer, if you burn it this fall, like burning wood from a tree 
that may have been growing for 30, 40 years, and taking CO2 
out of the air and storing it in the tree, then when you burn the tree, 
you put the CO2 back in the air, but that is the same 
CO2 the tree had taken out, so it's a balance and the 
CO2 doesn't go up.
  So what the climate change global-warming people want to do is to 
reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and the concomitant release of 
carbon dioxide and instead substitute these renewables which simply 
recycle the carbon dioxide.

                              {time}  1645

  Now, if you are going nuclear, by the way, it is even better. After 
you have paid a carbon cost for building the nuclear power plant, then 
there is no carbon dioxide produced for the duration of that nuclear 
power plant.
  The third group that have common cause, and before I talk about this 
group, I want to note that I think that the best interests of mankind, 
the best interests of our country, the best interest of Republicans and 
Democrats, will be served if we don't criticize each others' premise. 
There are those who believe that the global warming thing is just 
silly. There are others who believe that the foreign countries that own 
all this oil are going to play nice and give us the oil, so why worry 
about the national security interests.
  But rather than criticizing the premise of these others, why don't we 
just lock arms, because what we want to solve the problems, and in just 
a moment I am going to talk about the third problem, which I think is 
really the big one, is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and 
increase our reliance on alternatives.
  The next chart, and I have got to go back 52 years to talk about the 
origin of this chart, because this all began 52 years ago. As a matter 
of fact, that anniversary will be the day after tomorrow. The 8th day 
of March in 1956, a speech was given in San Antonio, Texas, that I 
believe within a few years will be recognized as the most important 
speech given in all of the last century. That speech was given here in 
1956, so we are right here on the chart now.
  The United States is king of oil. We are producing more oil, using 
more oil, exporting more oil I think than any other country in the 
world, and an oil geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert in this very 
famous speech in San Antonio, Texas, told a group of oil people that in 
14 years, roughly 14 years, it turned out to be 14, you will peak in 
oil production, and no matter what you do after that, you will not be 
able to produce more oil.
  Now, remember, the United States then is king of oil. Oil wells 
everywhere, Oklahoma, Texas. A little interesting sidelight here, why 
were there so many? That is because, as I understand it, of the law of 
capture. If the oil came out of your well, you owned the oil, even 
though much of it might have been sucked out of the ground of the 
person that owned the land next to you. It was called the law of 
capture, I think. So if you wanted to get some of those revenues, you 
had to drill your own well. I understand that wells were drilled in 
graveyards and through the foyers of churches. If you look at some of 
those pictures, it looked like a forest of oil rigs out there, and I 
think the reason was this law of capture. But, right on schedule, in 
1970 we peaked in oil production. This is a chart of that peak. We 
reached a peak here in 1970.
  Now, M. King Hubbert had included only the Lower 48 in his 
prediction. He had not included Alaska, where we found a lot of oil. He 
had not included the Gulf of Mexico, where we found a meaningful amount 
of oil. But you notice that the slide down the other side of Hubbert's 
Peak just had a little blip from the oil that we found in Alaska and 
the Gulf of Mexico.
  So, right on schedule M. King Hubbert and his prediction of a 
phenomenon which we call today peak oil,

[[Page 3418]]

said that we would reach that maximum in the United States in 1970. 
Now, this same forecaster, with the enormous credibility of having been 
right on target for the United States, said that the world would be 
peaking about now.
  The next chart is an interesting one, and if you had only one graph, 
one chart you could look at to talk about this, it would be this one, 
because this has so much information on it. The little bars here show 
the discoveries of oil. You notice that we started discovering it way 
back there, some of it in the Depression really, and then after the end 
of the Depression just before the war, and then huge discoveries in the 
fifties, the sixties and seventies. But ever since then, down, down, 
down, down. Kind of a ragged down, because every once in awhile you hit 
a pretty big field, and here is the spike here. But on average every 
year since the seventies and eighties it has been down, down, down.
  The solid black line here represents the oil that we have produced, 
which is also the oil we have used, because there is no big store of 
oil anywhere. We use it as we produce it. And a really interesting 
curve.
  Notice the shape of this curve here. If nothing happened to change 
that curve, it would have gone off the top of the graph by this time. 
Well, something did happen to change the shape of that curve. You 
notice that changed in the seventies, and these were the oil price 
spike hikes engendered by the Arab oil embargo, and it caused a 
worldwide recession. Here is the worldwide recession, and, boy, we woke 
up, we and much of the rest of the world, and we found ways to do 
things more efficiently. Now we are recovering from that and the 
economy is great for most of the world, there is a little tremor now, 
but it has been a great economy. But you notice the slope of this curve 
after that is very much less than the slope of this curve.
  There is an interesting statistic during the Carter years, up to the 
Carter years, as a matter of fact, that every decade we use as much oil 
as had been used in all of the world in all of previous history. Wow. 
What that means is, of course, when you have used half the oil, you 
have only one decade left. Well, we have really slowed down now. You 
can see the slope of this curve is very much less.
  Now, when will the world reach its maximum oil production? See, what 
we have been doing since about 1980, we have found less and less oil, 
but we have used more and more oil, so this area here, the area above 
the oil that we found has been filled in by the oil that we found way 
back.
  Now, we have got a lot these reserves left, and the makers of this 
chart say that this is the average of what we will find in the future. 
It won't be smooth, it will be up and down, but that is probably about 
the quantity that we will find. But we are using more. And they are 
suggesting that we will be peaking about now, as you can see, and that 
this area here will have to be filled in by reserves that we found back 
here, because we aren't finding any meaningful amount of oil now. So 
those who made this chart believe that oil in the world should be 
peaking about now.
  The next chart shows the estimates of a number of authorities. Some 
of them have enormous uncertainty in when they think peak oil might 
occur. Here is one that says it could occur anytime between now and 
2120, between 2020 and 2120. Here is one that says, gee, it could be 
anytime. But a great number of them believe it could be as early as 
about now. Here we are at about this point. A great many of them 
believe it could be now or shortly after this. So there is general 
consensus through most of the authorities in the world that peaking 
could be now.
  The next chart kind of puts all of this in perspective, and this is 
an interesting chart. Let's just refer to the upper part of it. The 
lower part of it is a blowup of the upper part separating out gas from 
oil.
  Hyman Rickover, who gave a great speech the 14th day of May, 1957, so 
this will be the 51st anniversary of his speech, noted that we were in 
an age of oil. I will have some quotes from his speech in a few 
moments. That we were in an age of oil. And he said in 8,000 years of 
recorded history we were, when he gave his speech, about 100 years into 
the age of oil.
  This is a chart that looks not back through 8,000 years. But if we 
went back that far, the amount of energy used by mankind would be down 
here so near zero you could hardly see the difference. We go here about 
400 years and the industrial revolution began with wood. And then we 
found coal, and, boy, it jumped up. And then we found gas and oil, and, 
wow, the quality of the energy, the extractability, how easy it was to 
get, how easy it was to use. And look what happened to energy use. It 
just spiked. Here we see that same discontinuity in the seventies, the 
worldwide recession, the oil price spike hikes.
  Now, let's look at the next curve here, because this shows exactly 
the same curve. What we have done here is to expand the abscissa, that 
is this bottom, and compressed the ordinate, so now it is a low, smooth 
curve. If you pull this in and push that up, you can make the sharp 
curve that we saw over there. We had only gone this far over there. Now 
we really dip down the other side.
  But I want to focus here on the yellow area of this chart. If we in 
fact are peaking in oil production, and if the world follows the 
pattern that we have been following in the United States, then the 
production of oil will look, it has looked up until now about like 
this, and in the future it will slide down the other side of Hubbert's 
Peak.
  Today in the United States we produce half the oil that we produced 
in 1970, in spite of finding a lot of oil in Alaska and a fair amount 
of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and in spite of drilling more oil wells 
than all of the rest of the world put together. So we are about at this 
point, I believe, and the demand is about 2 percent.
  Now, 2 percent doesn't seem like much, does it? As a matter of fact, 
our stock market doesn't like 2 percent growth. It thinks that is 
anemic and it is likely not to do well. But 2 percent growth doubles in 
35 years, and here we are talking about long time periods. It doubles 
in 35 years, it is four times bigger in 70 years, it is eight times 
bigger in 105 years, and it is 16 times bigger in 140 years.
  This phenomenon of exponential growth caused Albert Einstein to 
respond to a question, gee, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big 
energy force in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the 
world is the power of compound interest. The next, of course, after 
nuclear energy.
  So, with this 2 percent growth, and I would submit that it is going 
to be hard to hold growth to 2 percent, because we have India and China 
coming on board. I was in Beijing about a year or so ago and they had 
banned bicycles in parts of Beijing because they were getting in the 
way of cars. With the demand of oil in India and China, I think it will 
be hard to hold it to 2 percent growth. But this is 2 percent growth, 
and it doubles in 35 years. So this period is 35 years.
  Many people looking at the problem we face with peak oil say, gee, 
let's fill the peak. I think it is manifestly impossible to fill the 
peak, and I don't think we need to fill the peak. I would be happy if 
we were reasonably sure that we could just fill the area below this 
peak so we would have a plateau out here. I am not sure that the world 
will be able to do that. Neither am I sure that we have to do that to 
live well, actually.
  The next quote is a quote from this really great speech given by 
Hyman Rickover. If M. King Hubbert's speech was the most important 
speech of the last century, and I think that it may have been, then I 
think maybe the most insightful speech of the last century was that 
speech given 51 years ago the 14th day of this May.
  I came to this floor on the 50th anniversary of that, and Hyman 
Rickover's widow sat in the gallery there when I read largely from the 
really, really insightful prophetic speech that he gave.
  These are some of the quotes. ``I suggest that this is a good time to 
think soberly about our responsibilities to

[[Page 3419]]

our descendants.'' I do a lot of that. I have 10 kids, I have 16 
grandkids, and I have two great grandkids, so I think a lot about my 
descendants. ``Those who will ring out the fossil fuel age.''
  Wow. I was thinking of this statement when I led a CODEL to China the 
last holiday, not this Christmas and New Year's, but the one before 
that, and we went there to talk about, the nine of us, went to talk to 
the Chinese about energy. And it was really interesting.
  They began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Wow. 
As Hyman Rickover said, there will be a post-oil, because if there is a 
fossil fuel age, the age of oil, then there will be some time after the 
age of oil. We in this country think in terms of the next quarterly 
report and how am I going to get myself elected the next time, and it 
is really interesting that people in that part of the world tend to 
think more in terms of generations and centuries. But the Chinese 
recognize that there will be an age of oil.
  ``Those who will ring out the fossil fuel age, we might give a break 
to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to 
provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually 
must be made in a world without fossil fuels. There will one day be a 
world without fossil fuels.''
  I think that has to be obvious. If you look at the world, the whole 
thing is not oil, and, even if it was, it wouldn't last for oil. But it 
is certainly not. So there will be one day be a world without oil, and 
Hyman Rickover was suggesting 51 years ago was a good time to start 
thinking about how we make that transition.
  The next chart shows a reality that I don't know how many have 
thought about. This is a chart which shows on the abscissa the amount 
of energy you use, and on the right over here it shows how happy you 
are with your station in life.

                              {time}  1700

  Now, we use more energy than anybody else, and so there we are, the 
furthest one over here to the right, but we are not the happiest Nation 
in the world. There are 24 countries, everybody above this line, feels 
better, not just as good, better, about their quality of life than we 
feel about our quality of life, and some of them use only about half as 
much oil as we use. And when I look at the future and the huge 
challenges that we have from the future, I note that we have a lot of 
opportunity to live more efficiently and to live, not just as happily, 
but to live more happily, because there are 24 countries that use less 
oil than we, some only half the oil that we use, who feel better about 
their quality of life than we feel about ours.
  Now, this third group that has common cause with the first two, the 
first two being those who are concerned about our national security, we 
get far too much of our oil from over there and, as the President 
appropriately said, from people who don't even like us. The second 
group is concerned about global warming and releasing all of this 
sequestered CO2 from these fossil fuels and dumping it into 
the atmosphere and producing these greenhouse gases that reflect back 
the infrared radiation to the Earth and warm up the Earth.
  By the way, I lived in Siberia. You might have a hard time convincing 
me that a warmer Earth would be all that bad. And I would note that, if 
they played nice over there, these guys who have all the oil, that may 
not be a problem, so the national security thing may not be a problem.
  I would submit that the Earth has been very much warmer in the past. 
That is the only way we could have had subtropical seas in the north 
slope and the North Sea and ANWR and so forth. A warmer Earth will be 
very different, better for some people, worse for others, and I don't 
think it is a risk worth taking. But many will argue that, gee, the sky 
may not fall if the Earth gets warmer.
  But I will tell you that this third group of people, the people who 
are concerned about peak oil, there is no way that we are going to get 
through that without a very bumpy ride unless we aggressively pursue 
this challenge.
  Now, I am excited about this. My wife tells me that I really 
shouldn't be talking about this because people in ancient Greece killed 
the messenger that brought bad news, and I need to get myself reelected 
and I shouldn't be talking about this. I tell her, this is a good news 
story. The good news is that if we start today to meet this challenge, 
the ride will be less bumpy than if we start tomorrow.
  But the really good news part of this is that there is no 
exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big 
challenge. And, boy, this is a big challenge.
  Many of the problems we have with our unemployed and our kids and so 
forth in this country are because time weighs heavily on their hands, 
and they end up doing sometimes hurtful things to themselves and 
society. I lived through World War II, the last war, by the way, in 
which everybody was involved. It was the last war in which our country 
was at war. Now, our military has been at war since then and our 
military families have been at war since then. But, boy, World War II, 
our country was at war. Everybody knew we were at war. Not a single 
automobile was made for public consumption in 1943, 1944, and 1945. You 
had to have a ration coupon to buy gas. If you convinced them you were 
a good churchgoer, they would give you enough to go to church; 
otherwise, you stayed home or walked to church. You had to get a coupon 
to get sugar to do your canning with. There was a real scarcity of 
automobile tires. We saved our household grease and took it to a 
central repository. We had daylight savings time, that comes this 
weekend, and we had daylight savings time because then we had an extra 
hour to spend in our victory gardens. And there was no law from 
Congress that said you had to have a victory garden, but, boy, 
everybody who could, talk to your grandparents, they probably dug up 
their backyard and they put a garden there. I saw pictures of vacant 
lots in New York City where they took all the rubble and piled it up in 
rows and planted gardens between them. Everybody was involved in that 
war.
  And I will tell you, if we are going to get through this, this is a 
huge challenge, it will require the best of us. But we are the most 
creative, innovative society in the world. And, with leadership, which 
is I think fairly conspicuously absent today, I think that we can rally 
to this cause.
  What we need to get through this is the total commitment we had in 
World War II. We need to have the technology focus of when we put a man 
on the Moon and we need to have the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
  By the way, that technology focus would do other really nice things 
for us. I talk to a lot of businesses that cannot find enough 
technically trained people. Our young people today just aren't turned 
on to training in science, math, and engineering. Many of them are 
becoming lawyers and political scientists. I think we have quite enough 
of both of those, thank you.
  I remember during the less than a decade, our President challenged us 
to do it in a decade and we did it in less than a decade, putting a man 
on the Moon. And I remember how turned on, it captured the imagination 
of the American people and inspired our young people to go into careers 
of math, science, and engineering. I remember a cartoon of a little 
redheaded, freckle-faced buck-toothed young fellow who said, ``Six 
months ago, I couldn't even spell `engineer' and now I are one.''
  Everybody wanted to be involved in this. And we need to have the 
technology focus that we had then, and what that will do is inspire 
more of our bright young people. We have really bright young people, 
and they need to be going into pursuits that will really be productive 
like science, math, and engineering. If we inspire them to go into 
those positions, we might once again become a manufacturing exporting 
Nation.
  By the way, the technologies that we will need to develop to exploit 
these renewables, I think we could become the center for that in the 
world and, once again, could become a major exporting Nation.

[[Page 3420]]

  Again, I say, we are the most creative, innovative society in the 
world. Somehow, somehow, the genius of our Founding Fathers and the 
Constitution they gave us, which really, really respects the rights of 
the individual, created a milieu, a climate in which creativity and 
entrepreneurship would flourish, and it is still flourishing. Just look 
at our small businesses, that they are responsible for bringing us out 
of recession. So I am really enthusiastic about this.
  Everybody needs to be committed. We need to have the technology focus 
of putting a man on the Moon. And this is urgent. Just in the last few 
days, I have three things in front of me here where others are 
recognizing that this is urgent. There is a 2-day summit with our 
National Academy of Sciences, and they are looking at America's energy 
future. It is about time. They are going to be looking at America's 
energy future.
  We have a huge challenge. We use one-fourth of the world's oil, we 
have 2 percent of the world's oil, and the President very correctly 
said that we are hooked on oil. And, like the cocaine addict who is 
hooked on his drug, he has just got to have another fix, and so now 
there is a clamor to go out and drill for that oil up in ANWR and drill 
for that oil offshore.
  I haven't voted for those. I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and two 
great grandkids. We are leaving them a horrendous debt, not with my 
votes, but a horrendous debt. And I just ask, wouldn't it be nice if we 
could leave them a little energy?
  I was asked to vote to drill in ANWR, and my question was: If you 
could drill and pump ANWR tomorrow, what will you do the day after 
tomorrow? And for my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, there is 
going to be a day after tomorrow.
  Now, I will vote to drill in ANWR and offshore when a commitment is 
made that all of the energy that we get from those fields will be 
invested in alternatives. You see, today we have a situation where we 
have run out of time and there is no surplus energy. If there was 
surplus energy, oil wouldn't be $105 a barrel this morning.
  When I say we have run out of time, I am really very critical of what 
we, the world, has done in the last 28 years. I say 28 years because 
that takes us back to 1980. And, by 1980, it was absolutely certain 
that M. King Hubbard was right about the United States. We peaked in 
1970. By 1980, we are sliding down the other side of what is called 
Hubbard's Peak. So we knew he was right about the United States. Now, I 
believe it was in 1979, just a year before, that he predicted the world 
would be peaking about now.
  And I ask you, if M. King Hubbard was so right about the United 
States, shouldn't there have been some concern that maybe, just maybe, 
he might be right about the world? And wouldn't it have been 
appropriate to look at that possibility and put some programs in place 
that would address that potential eventuality?
  You know, it is very difficult to look back on what we have done 
without using a couple of not very complimentary analogies. When we 
first found that incredible wealth under the ground, and, boy, that was 
incredible wealth. One barrel of oil, and we use about 22 million 
barrels a day in our country, by the way. One barrel of oil has the 
work output of 12 people working all year, 25,000 man hours of work.
  When I first saw that number, I thought that can't be true; 12 people 
working all year, one barrel of oil has that much energy in it? And 
then I thought about that one gallon of gasoline, still cheaper than 
water in the grocery store if you are buying it in little bottles, how 
far that takes my Prius. Our Prius now is 47 miles per gallon averaging 
over the last maybe 20,000 miles. Now, I could pull my Prius 47 miles. 
That is almost all the way from here to my home in Frederick. That 
would take me a long while. I would have to get come-alongs and hook to 
the guardrail and so forth to pull the car. I could do it. And so I 
finally said, gee, that is probably right. Every barrel of oil has the 
energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of work, 12 people working all 
year for you.
  As a matter of fact, I saw a statistic recently that was really 
interesting. If there was no gas, oil, or coal, no nuclear, no sun, no 
hydro, if the only power available was the power of human activity to 
enjoy the quality of life that each of us enjoys, there would have to 
be 300 people out there working. That is the amount of energy from 
fossil fuels that each one of us consumes. We live as well as if there 
were 300 people out there working to support our quality of life. No 
wonder Hyman Rickover referred to this as a golden age.
  The next chart kind of shows where we are and where we are going. All 
three of these groups want to move away from fossil fuels to 
alternatives, of course for very different reasons and, again, I stop 
criticizing each other's premise, because what we want to do to solve 
the problem as we see it is exactly the same thing: Move away from 
fossil fuels to renewables. How are we going to do that?
  Now, there are some finite resources that are really quite 
unconventional, and we are exploiting some of them now. From the tar 
sands in Canada, we are getting about 1 million barrels of oil a day. 
That is with heroic efforts. They are using local gas which is 
stranded, which means that it is far away from any population and, 
therefore, it is cheap and so you can use it for something like this. 
They have a huge tailings pond which is full of all sorts of noxious 
chemicals. And the vein, if you are thinking of it as the vein, is on 
top and it will soon have to duck under an overlay so they have to 
exploit it in situ, and they don't know how to do that yet. They have a 
shovel, which lifts 100 tons at a time. They dump it in a truck, which 
hauls 400 tons. They haul it to a cooker, which cooks it until it 
loosens up its stiff oil and it flows, and they add some chemicals to 
it to keep it flowing when it cools down. They are getting about 1 
million barrels a day, and that is 1 million out of 88 million that the 
world is producing. So a bit more than 1 percent, but it is not 
sustainable and they know it is not. They are going to need more oil, 
they are going to run out of water by and by.
  But if they could continue this exploitation, there is more potential 
oil in the tar sands of Canada than there is in all of the huge oil 
reserves that we showed on that map of the world that we showed 
earlier. So there is a huge potential there.

                              {time}  1715

  But remember, in any one of these things, you need to look at energy-
profit ratio, how much energy you need to put in to get out a unit of 
energy. And if you are putting in more energy than you get out, 
obviously you are not going to do that, and you are going to move on to 
some other source.
  The oil shales in our western United States, they have reserves at 
least as large and maybe some larger, some believe, up in the trillions 
of barrels of oil.
  By the way, and we will come to the number later, but the world had 
about we believe 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil. We have 
recovered about 1 trillion of those barrels. Most authorities believe 
there is another trillion to be recovered. Some believe we can find 
more and get more out of the present reservoirs.
  But in spite of the brightest people in the world, the most 
aggressive economy in the world, we have not been able to reverse our 
slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So when you are listening 
to people speaking about a rosy future with abundant oil, remember that 
the United States with all of our superiority has not been able to 
reverse our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  There are a number of organizations looking at exploiting that. It is 
called ``the rocks that burn'' by the Indians. When you heat it up, it 
becomes oil. It is not exactly oil in the form that it is found. Can we 
develop that, how quickly, how much will we get from it, we will 
certainly get something from it by and by, but remember this energy-
profit ratio.
  Coal. We have a lot of coal. Not as much as we thought we had. The 
National Academy of Sciences took a new

[[Page 3421]]

look at that, and they said that the conventional wisdom that there was 
250 years out there at current use rates, and be very careful when 
someone mentions current use rates when making projections for the 
future because, with growth, that time duration really shrinks.
  The National Academy of Sciences now says we have something like 100 
years of coal at current use rates. I have a chart that shows what that 
really means in terms of energy that is available to us.
  Then we have nuclear. We have three different potential sources of 
nuclear energy. The one that the world is using for producing energy is 
fusion, light water reactor plants. France gets about 75 to 80 percent 
of their electricity from fusion. We get about 20 percent. We are much 
bigger than France and so we produce more electric power than France 
produces, but not so high a percentage of what we use.
  Fissile uranium is a finite resource. The world will one day run out. 
I have no idea when that will be because I get wildly divergent 
estimates when I ask people how long will it last: 10 years, 30 years, 
100 years. We need an honest broker. It is hard to have a discussion 
when there isn't agreement on the facts. I would like to commission the 
National Academy of Sciences to help us decide on what the reserves are 
and what the resources are so we can have a productive dialogue. But 
even when we run out of fissile uranium, we still can get nuclear power 
from what we call breeder reactors.
  They have problems, and you are producing stuff that is potentially 
weapons grade and you are hauling it around for enrichment, and there 
are opportunities for terrorists. Then there is an end product that you 
need to store away for a quarter of a million years. I understand there 
are potential breakthroughs there where we can burn more of this fuel, 
and we end up with a waste product which is much less radioactive with 
a shorter half-life. So the storage problems are going to be reduced. 
There is lot of new technology in the nuclear area, and I will tell you 
that some who have been stout opponents of nuclear, when they are 
considering a likely alternative in an energy-deficient world of 
shivering in the dark, nuclear is looking better to them.
  Nuclear fusion. That is the only energy source out there that is a 
silver bullet. If we find that, we are home free. By the way, we have a 
great fusion reactor. It is called the Sun. And the Sun is the source 
of almost all the energy we use. It was the shining of the Sun a long 
while ago that produced the plants that produced the gas, oil, and 
coal. It is the shining of the Sun that produces the differential 
temperatures and makes the winds blow. It is the sunshine that lifts 
the water from the ocean and the plains and drops it on the mountains 
and it flows down through the dams to produce hydropower. There are 
only a few sources of power that don't come from the Sun: nuclear, a 
trifling amount of chemical, and the tides don't come from the Sun.
  By the way, there is a huge potential amount of energy in the oceans, 
but it is so disbursed that it is just hard to collar it. There is an 
old axiom that says that energy or power to be effective must be 
concentrated. Look at the tides. The Moon lifts the oceans 2 or 3 feet. 
I carry two 5-gallon buckets of water, and that is heavy. How much 
energy would it take to lift the whole ocean, 75 percent of the world's 
surface, 2 or 3 feet? But the problem is harnessing that energy.
  But there are other potential ocean energy sources, like the ocean 
thermal gradients. In the tropics, it is very warm on the surface and 
very cold on the bottom. And there are several technologies for getting 
energy from that temperature difference.
  Then we get to the true renewables. By the way, there are many people 
who don't really think it is necessary to talk about this because they 
are market enthusiasts, and they will tell you that the market will 
solve this problem. The market will solve this problem. You may not 
like the way that the market will solve this problem because the price 
of oil, unless we do something and move aggressively towards 
alternatives, may go really high. I hear people telling me gas may go 
to $20 or $25 a gallon in an energy-deficient world. So the market will 
solve the problem, but you may not like the way the market solves the 
problem.
  There are two problems. One is that the resources are not infinite 
and they are not available in the time in which the market would like 
to have them. The second problem is that the market signals are not 
timely enough.
  One of the big studies done, our government, your government, has 
paid for four studies. They are ignoring all of them. The first one, 
the Hirsch Report, said that the world has never faced a problem like 
this, and challenges us to plan for this a couple of decades ahead 
because they said if you haven't started to plan for this two decades 
ahead, there will be some economic consequences. If it is only a decade 
ahead, there will be big economic problems. And if you wait until it is 
upon you, and apparently it is, they said the world has never faced a 
problem like this. There is no precedent in history.
  The next chart shows those things in an interesting form. I would 
like to use analogy for this chart, and that is, the young couple whose 
grandparents have left them a big inheritance and they have a lavish 
lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their 
grandparents' inheritance and 15 percent is from their income. They 
look at the inheritance and it is going to run out a long time before 
they retire at the rate they are spending it. So they have to either 
make more or spend less.
  Here we are: 85 percent of all of our energy comes from coal, gas, 
and petroleum, the oil. So 15 percent is left. A bit more than half of 
that is nuclear electric power, and the rest is renewables. Now, some 
people have it 86-14, but it is roughly 85-15. Notice the breakout here 
of the renewables. In 2000, solar was 0.07 percent. So maybe it is 10 
times bigger. That is still a tiny, tiny amount.
  Wood. That is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely 
burning what would otherwise be a waste product, filling up landfills.
  Waste energy. That is a great idea, a whole lot better than putting 
it in a landfill. We ought to recycle what we can productively recycle 
and then burn the rest of it. And there is a great facility in 
Montgomery County, and it is really a class facility. I wouldn't mind 
having it next to my church. It is a great-looking building. You don't 
see or smell the trash, and it is producing electricity. But that is 
not a solution to our energy problem because most of the trash that 
they are burning is the consequence of profligate use of fossil fuel 
energy. And in a fossil fuel-deficient world, that trash stream is 
going to be very much less. So for the moment that is a good idea, but 
it is not a solution to our problem.
  Wind. Wind is the most rapidly growing alternative today. The leading 
country in that is Denmark. They produce electricity at a cent and a 
half a kilowatt hour. We can do it here for 2.5 or so cents a kilowatt 
hour.
  Conventional hydro. We are tapped out on that, probably. Some believe 
we can get as much hydro from what is called microhydro. It is much 
less environmentally threatening, small devices in streams to produce 
electricity.
  Alcohol fuel. I have just a moment to spend on that. The National 
Academy of Sciences says that if we turn all of our corn into ethanol, 
all of it, and discount it for fossil fuel input, that it would 
displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. This is not Roscoe Bartlett 
saying that; this is the National Academy of Sciences. They noted if 
you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you could save as much 
energy as you would get from all of our corn converted to ethanol. We 
haven't converted it all, but the amount that we have converted has 
doubled the price of corn. And our farmers diverted land from wheat and 
soybeans to corn, and there was an increased demand for wheat and 
soybeans, so now the price of all three, for these major foods, for 
poor people around the world is up.
  In fact, a member of the United Nations said what we had innocently

[[Page 3422]]

done, inadvertently done, unintended consequences, was a crime against 
humanity because now three of the basic four foodstuffs in the world, 
rice, corn, wheat and soybeans, have increased in price because we had 
this government-subsidized corn ethanol program.
  We will get something from biomass, from cellulosic ethanol, 
something from corn. But Hyman Rickover cautioned wisely in his speech 
51 years ago, you should be careful eating your food. He also said you 
should be careful you don't burn up the fertility of your soil by 
removing the organic material which produces what we call tilth, which 
is what makes the difference between topsoil and subsoil. It holds 
nutrients and water. We will get something from these. I think now 
there is an irrational exuberance, as was said about the market a few 
years ago. We will get something, but it is not a silver bullet. It 
will not be a huge amount. And we use so much oil, it will barely make 
a dent in it.
  Geothermal. That is true geothermal, tapping the molten core of the 
Earth. That is one source of energy that didn't come from the Sun. We 
need to exploit that more. That is not tying your air conditioner, your 
heat pump to ground temperature, which is a great idea. In the 
summertime to cool your house, you are trying to heat up that 100-
degree air outside. It is easier to heat up the ground at 56 degrees. 
In the winter, you are doing the opposite.
  The next chart looks at coal. This assumes 250 years. If you grow 
only 2 percent, and I think we will need to dip into our coal more than 
2 percent, if we have less and less oil, it shrinks to 85 years. If you 
use some of the energy from the coal to produce a gas or a liquid, and 
it is not fair to make the comparison if you don't, then it shrinks to 
50 years.
  Now another interesting phenomenon here, which is unavoidable, we are 
going to have to share that with the world because if we use the oil 
that we produce from coal, then the oil we might have used someone else 
will use. So in effect you are sharing it with the world. So now 12 
divided by 4, we use a fourth of the oil, is 12.5 years. It is even 
less if it is only 100 years, maybe 6 years or so.
  The next chart is a great example of efficiency. This shows producing 
light from the incandescent bulb, the fluorescent, and the light-
emitting diode. The green on the top is the light. It is the same in 
all of these. The blue is the energy. And notice that the incandescent 
bulb is a better heater than light source. I brood my chickens with 
that.
  Notice the light-emitting diode. If you have an LED flashlight, you 
will forget when you put batteries in it, and we need to move to these 
kinds of technologies.
  I have one final chart to end this discussion with. There are two 
major entities in the world that follow the production and consumption 
of oil, and they make assumptions about the future. I wouldn't pay much 
attention to their assumptions about the future because they have been 
consistently wrong, but they are very good at charting what we have 
used.
  This is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our 
Department of Energy; and it is the IEA, the International Energy 
Association, this is a part of the United Nations. This is a group that 
has been following what has been going on in Iran. Both of them have 
been tracking what we have been using in oil, and these are their 
lives.

                              {time}  1730

  And these are their lines. And notice, for about the last 3 years, 30 
months or more, they're essentially flat. And during that time, that's 
just about the time that I have been coming here to the floor. It'll be 
3 years the 14th day of March that I made my first speech on the floor 
here relative to this subject. And during that time, oil has doubled in 
price. Here we are at about $50 a barrel. And there we are up there at, 
well, off the chart now, above $100 a barrel.
  In the few moments remaining to us, I'd like to look at a couple of 
charts. This is a very recent statement, January 22, by the CEO of 
Shell Oil. By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be 
radically different from today. Boy, will it. The world's current 
predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step 
change in the growth of energy demand. And Shell estimates that after 
2015, supplies of easy to access oil and gas will no longer keep up 
with demand. He's saying it's going to peak about then.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to close by saying again that this is an 
enormously invigorating challenge. America's up to this challenge. What 
we need is the leadership necessary to make this happen.

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