Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, in the last year, two major studies were done at the expense of our U.S. Government; one by the Department of Energy, the other by the U.S. Army; both indicating that we are at or will shortly be at peak oil with potentially devastating consequences for our country. But drilling ANWR now is not an appropriate response to that. We have only about 2 percent of the world's reserves of the oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We import about two-thirds of what we use. Mr. Speaker, with those statistics, I am having a lot of trouble understanding how it is in our national security interest to use up a little bit of oil as quickly as we can. If we could drill ANWR tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, what would we do the day after tomorrow? Talking about tomorrow, we are saddling our children, our grandchildren, with an unconscionable debt. Will we add to that the insult of using up the little bit of liquid fossil fuels remaining? This is not the right thing to do at this time.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, recently our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, made a statement that I would like to read. In this statement 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 that 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.'' Mr. Speaker, the 8th of this March was a really historic date, and it passed and really very few people knew how historic it was. It was 50 years since a report given in San Antonio, Texas, by a world-famous scientist. And I will talk about that a bit more in a few minutes. The 15th of March of this year marked one year from the date that I first came to this floor to talk about the problem that Condoleezza Rice was talking about, about the energy problem; and since that time I have been to the floor several times to talk about that. Since then, there have been two major government studies on this same topic. One of them is known as the ``Hirsch Report,'' from Robert Hirsch, who was the principal investigator for SAIC, a very large prestigious scientific engineering organization. This study was sponsored by the Department of Energy; and for several months after the report was available, it was kind of bottled up inside the agency and we were kind of asking the question, why wasn't it out on the street sooner because it really makes some very significant points. A second study was done at the request of the Army by the Corps of Engineers. And I have those two reports here. Here is the ``Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management.'' The project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch. And here is that report, paid for by our Department of Energy and done by SAIC. That was dated February of 2005. A few months later, in September of 2005, a report by the Corps of Engineers, and here is a copy of that report, which just got out to the street about 3 months ago, by the way. So for a number of months this was bottled up inside the Pentagon. Both of these reports say essentially the same thing, and I would like to spend a few minutes this afternoon talking about what these two reports say. The first is a quote from the ``Energy Trends and Their Implications, U.S. Army Installations.'' And, Mr. Speaker, anywhere in this report that the Army is mentioned, you could put the United States in, or for that matter the world, and it would have the same meaning. But since they are a part of the Army and this was an Army study, they talk about the Army. This first statement: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources,'' and fossil fuels are generally perceived of as being in the time scale that we are concerned about, nonrenewable. ``In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace similar to its initial increase. The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves, giving rise to many estimates of when peak will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all of the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once a peak occurs, then historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease.'' And the next is a quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``World oil peaking is going to happen,'' saying the same thing as the Army Corps of Engineers. And, by the way, we have no reason to believe that there was any interchange between these two groups that were doing the study. ``World oil production is going to peak. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter.'' Exactly the same thing that the Army Corps of Engineers was saying. ``That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade, others contend it will be later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.'' ``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. And then this astounding statement: ``The world has never faced a problem like this.'' There is no precedent. You cannot go back in history to find a problem like this. They say: ``The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, `` and most of the world experts believe we do not have a decade, in fact, we may be there, ``without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.'' The next chart shows that these same data inspired 30 prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, Jim Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney, and 27 other very prominent people, among them several retired four-star generals and admirals, to write a letter to the President. In effect what they said was, Mr. President, the fact that we have only about 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and we import about two-thirds of what we use, presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that. As the chart shows here, we represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, about 1 person out of 22. And we are really good at pumping our oil. We have only 2 percent of the reserves, which from that 2 percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil, which means we are pumping our wells four times faster than the average. Now, what are they talking about? As the next chart shows, this was all predicted quite awhile ago. To understand the history of this, to put it in context, we have to go back more than half a century to the 1940s and 1950s. A scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert was working for the Shell Oil Company, and he observed the pumping and the exhaustion of individual oil fields. The United States was pretty much first on the scene in any large way. At one time we were the world's largest producer of oil, and I believe the world's largest exporter of oil. And right when we were in our heyday in 1956, M. King Hubbert went to San Antonio, Texas, and gave that famous paper I referred to a few minutes ago, saying that in just 14 years, in about 1970, the United States would peak in oil production; we would reach a maximum. Shell Oil Company did not believe that was going to happen and cautioned that he would make himself a fool and them a fool for hiring him if he went to give that paper and published it. And he went anyway. Then 14 years later, right on schedule, we peaked in oil production. The smooth green curve here was the M. King Hubbert's curve. The more ragged green curve with the larger symbols is the actual production data. And you see that that peaked in 1970 and then fell off. Now, this is the lower 48. In just a moment, we will put another chart up here which shows what happens when you include the Alaskan oil finds. This is the lower 48, and this is what has happened in the lower 48. The red curve there, by the way, is the former Soviet Union, and they kind of came unglued when the Soviet Union fell apart. You see that their production did not reach the potential. They are already on the downside, by the way. They have somewhat more oil than we. They peaked a little bit later. They had a second small peak, but then it is all downhill after that. The next chart shows where our oil has come from in our country. And the rest of the U.S. and Texas, the dark blue and light blue, are what M. King Hubbert was talking about, and these are the actual data points from 1935 to now. We have added to this now the natural gas liquids and the Alaskan oil find, that big oil find in Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, Dead Horse. I have been there, at the very beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which about a fourth of our domestic production has been flowing. That is on the downside now, by the way, and it is becoming less and less. Notice that there was just a blip and the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak with that big Alaska oil find. The thing on this chart, Mr. Speaker, which interests me is that little yellow there on the downside. Just a blip. A small blip. That is the famed Gulf of Mexico oil find. You may remember that. It wasn't all that many years ago we found that, and, boy, that was a lot of oil. There are now 4,000 oil wells out there in the Gulf of Mexico. And that was to save us. It just barely, barely is a ripple in our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. The next chart puts this in world perspective. We have been talking about the United States, and now this takes us to the world. The big bars here are the discovery of oil, and you will notice some of that was found way back in the 1940s, some big discoveries, then the 1950s, and, boy, the 1970s and the 1980s. But notice that since 1980, the finds of oil have been ever less and less, and that is in spite of really good techniques for finding oil. We now have 3D seismic, we have computer modeling, and we have been very aggressive. You see, since about 1980, we have been finding less oil than we are using, because the consumption curve here is this solid black line. At about 1980, you see there the consumption of oil exceeded the oil that we were finding. So for that period between 1980 and now, the deficit between what we found and what we are using has been filled with reserves that we have. Worldwide, pretty big reserves. Not much in our country because we have been pumping our oil for a long time, very aggressively. This is an interesting chart, and anyone who works with these charts knows that the area under one of these curves represents the total amount available. So if you add up all of these little bars, we made a smooth curve through the discovery here. The area under that discovery curve would represent the total amount of oil that we have discovered. Similarly, the area under the consumption curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have consumed. Now, what is very obvious is that you can't consume oil that you haven't found. So what does that mean? Now, you can have any projection for the future that you like. You can assume that we are going to do a lot of enhanced oil recovery, that we are going to find a little bit of oil, most experts believe there isn't that much left, the little bit of oil that remains and pump it very quickly. But one thing is certain: you cannot pump what you haven't found. And so ultimately the area under the consumption curve cannot be greater than the area under the discovery curve. Notice that they are suggesting in this little chart that peaking is going to be at about 2010. Some believe that it may have already occurred. The next chart is an interesting one from the Energy Information Agency, and they use a very strange, in a way, bizarre application of statistics. We have the 95 percent probability in statistics which is the most probable, and something is significant if it is the 95 percent probability. It is highly significant at 97. You can go on down with the 50 percent probability or a 5 percent probability. You can get a little sense of these probabilities when you look at the little chart they draw about a hurricane's path. You notice that for the next 24 hours it is a fairly narrow funnel, and then it gets wider and wider as they go out because of the increased uncertainty as you go out. Well, here the Energy Information Agency has drawn the oil curve, and you see that they peaked in 1970. We have been going downhill ever since. And back there, a little bit before 2000 I guess on this graph they made a projection of where we were going. Now, they are using these statistics you see at the bottom down there, the past, which is the red line, and then the 95 percent probability and the mean, which is the 50 percent. The 50 percent probability is not the mean, Mr. Speaker. If you were going to draw this chart realistically, you would have to have another green line that came as far below the yellow line as that one is above it like here, and another blue line that is down here. They are using the 50 percent probability as if it were the mean and saying that is the most probable. Of course in statistics, 95 percent probability is obviously more probable than the 50 percent probability. Well, this bizarre use of statistics results in something that the next chart will show. But just a moment on this one. Notice what has happened since they made this projection. Notice where the red line has been going. It has of course been following the 95 percent probability, although they believe that it should be following the 50 percent probability, or the green line. In other words, we should be finding more and more oil. The next chart looks at that in another way. By the way, they say here the probability, they say 95 percent is low probability. That is the highest probability. I have no idea how you get this warped statistic; 95 percent is the highest probability. The 50 percent probability is not the mean, and the lowest probability is 5 percent. Well, they mean that the lowest amount of oil you would find is a 95 percent probability. The highest amount is 5 percent. But the 5 percent could just as well be the other side of the 95 percent probability which would be really, really low. Well, here is a graph that they have drawn, and this graph points out something very interesting, the peak for the 95 percent probability, which says that the world had totally about 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. By the way, we use ``giga'' rather than billion because in England a million million is a billion. In our country it is a thousand million, which is a billion. But giga means the same thing to everybody world around, so we use gigabarrels. If we have in fact 2,000 gigabarrels total, we have used about a thousand of that, and about a thousand remains, which means that we are at this point here; and this should start sliding downhill after that. But they have imagined another thousand gigabarrels of oil to be found; and if that is true, notice that moves the peak out only to 2016. We are using oil at such a horrendous rate in the world, that even if we found 50 percent more oil than we have ever found, that moves the peak out only that far. And then they show what happens if you go out to 2037. If you have enhanced oil recovery and so forth and get that much more, look what happens. Look at the way it drops there. The next chart is an interesting one. It shows the same thing pretty much that we showed in that big oil chart that showed the discovery curve. And these are, this is the relationship of discovery to use. Notice, in about 1980 here, we started using more than we had discovered. So this curve says the same kind of thing that the previous one said, only this shows the relationship of discoveries to use. The next chart is another statement from the ``Hirsch Report,'' and I want to spend a few minutes now on these two reports because they are really very meaningful reports. I will note, Mr. Speaker, that both of these reports have come out in the past year after we gave our first discussion here a year ago, the 14th of March. This again is from the ``Hirsch Report.'' The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. And without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand side, but to have substantial impact they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking. Mr. Speaker, we probably do not have a decade. As a matter of fact, we may be here. Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars, and require many years of intense effort. Mr. Speaker, the question I am asking is, If this is true, and if this report was paid for by the Department of Energy, why aren't the leaders in our country telling the American people this? Now, if they didn't believe this report, just a few months later came the report from the Corps of Engineers that says essentially the same thing as we will see from some following charts. The next chart is another quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules.'' They are talking now about what will we do to make sure that there is enough oil available when we have reached peak production; what can we fill that gap with. They are saying they can't conceive of any affordable government- sponsored crash program to make this happen, so as to incorporate higher energy efficiency technologies in the privately owned transportation sectors. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time consuming on the order of a decade or more. For some things like efficient automobiles, the average light trucks and cars out there, some 16 to 18 years in the fleet, the big 18-wheelers are out there 28 years. So if you are going to make any impact on efficiency in that market, you have to really wait awhile unless you think people are going to scrap their newly purchased SUV. The next chart is from the Corps of Engineers study, and this is really an interesting chart. Remember the date of this was September `05. The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per-barrel range and is expected to stay in that range for several years. Mr. Speaker, I don't think $70 a barrel is within the range of 45 to 57. And it has been less than a year. So what this shows is that even the experts, these people who spend a long while studying this, when they look at the picture, they didn't anticipate the extent, the seriousness of this problem. Oil prices may go significantly higher and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Mr. Speaker, if that is true, why aren't the leaders of our country telling the American people this? Friends, we have got a problem ahead of us. It is not an insoluble problem; but the longer we wait, the tougher it is going to be to get through it. We really need to get started now. I don't here our leadership telling us that, Mr. Speaker. And in view of these two reports both saying essentially the same thing, I am wondering why. Another chart from the Army Corps of Engineers study: oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. I think few would deny that. In addition to transportation, and we use 70 percent of our oil in transportation, it is the feed stock from a really large petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world. Just look around you at all the things made of plastic. Without oil, most of them wouldn't be here. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. And another chart from this same Corps of Engineers study, over and over, Mr. Speaker, they are saying the same thing: we face a big challenge. Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, John LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett, no relative of mine, but you can pull up on the Web Albert Bartlett, do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and he gives the most interesting 1- hour lecture I have ever heard on energy and the exponential principle, have all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. This is 2006. The corporate executive officers, CEOs at Eni SPA Italian oil companies and ARCO have also published estimates of a peak in 2005. So the problem may already be here. The next chart shows a very interesting quote from one of the experts in this area, and this really focuses on a chart that we had just a few minutes ago. Jean LaHerrere made an assessment of the USGS report that concludes, now, USGS says that we are going to find half again the oil that we have already found. We have found about 2,000 gigabarrels, used about 1,000 of that. They say we are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels. This is what Dr. LaHerrere says. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery that is over the present anemic discovery, a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects. In other words, he is saying that we have been looking really hard with really good technique and we haven't found it for the last decade. There is just no justification to this euphemistic projection that we are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels of oil. The next chart puts this in kind of a global and time perspective. The chart on the top shows the last 400 of 5,000 years of recorded history. And it shows the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with wood, and it did begin with wood. We were making steel with wood, with charcoal, denuded the hills of New England, carrying it to England to make steel. You can visit Little Catoctin Furnace up here in Frederick County, and we denuded the hills of Northern Frederick County to make charcoal for that little furnace there. And then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here is quadrillion Btus. That is the amount of energy you produce. Not very much from wood down there. You see the brown. It really got six or eight times bigger with coal. And look what happened when we found oil and gas. That is the red curve there which seems to go almost straight up. This is only about a 2 percent increase. Albert Einstein said that the force of compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe which, after discovering nuclear energy he was asked, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great force in the universe? And he said that it was the power of compound interest, which is exponential growth, of course. Notice what happened in the 1970s there, and the downturn. There really was a world recession. We used less oil, fortunately, because what was happening up until that time, Mr. Speaker, is really quite phenomenal. Every decade we were using as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that means is that when we used half of all the oil, only one decade of oil remained at current-use rates. Of course that is not the rate at which oil will be used. We are now about 150 years into the age of oil; 5,000 years of recorded history. That curve is now coming down. It is peaking and will be coming down. And it will come down for about another 100, 150 years. So in 200, 300 years we will have been through the age of oil. It is interesting, Mr. Speaker, to put this in this perspective: 5,000 years of recorded history, we found this incredible wealth under the ground. It really was incredible wealth. Just one barrel of this oil provides you the energy of 12 people working all year for you; 12 people working all year. You can buy that for a little more than $100, 42 gallons, a little more than $100 at the pump. If you produce electricity with it, for less than 25 cents a day, an electric motor will do more work than a hardworking, athletic worker. Really incredible wealth. What the world should have done when we discovered this, realizing that it could not be infinite, that there just had to be an end to it, that the world is not made of oil and even if it was made of oil, there would still be an end to it by and by, but it is not made of oil; we should have stopped and said, what can we do with this incredible wealth to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did. As this chart shows here, we just pigged out like kids who found the cookie jar, with no thought for tomorrow. We behaved as if oil was infinite, that it would be there absolutely forever. And, of course, that could not be true. I started asking myself these questions maybe 40 years ago. I knew that oil and gas and coal could not be forever, and I asked myself what does that mean? Is it something that we need to worry about in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 1 million years? What does it mean? And a number of people have been asking themselves this question. The next chart is interesting, and it kind of simplifies this curve. By the way, this is the same curve that we saw before, the red curve going up very steeply. All we have done here is to compress the scale on the ordinate and expand the scale on the abscissa so that now we have a more gradual curve. But it is still a 2 percent growth rate. That doubles in 35 years. At the beginning of the little yellow there, which is the difference between what we would like to use, that is, the demand curve, and the supply curve, which is the blue-green curve, that is doubled at the end over there. So we know that took 35 years to get there because it doubles in 35 years. If we are there, and there should be a question mark after that because we are not dead certain, what this shows is that the shortage actually starts to occur a bit before the peak occurs, as you are breaking away from that nice, smooth curve. And, of course, there are going to be ups and downs, as we have seen in the price of oil. It is up $5 and down $4 and up another $5 and down $4, but ever up and up as we go through. We face some big challenges. What most people want to do since we are, as the President says, hooked on oil, we would like to keep that habit. We do not want to kick that habit. We would like to keep that habit. So what most people are focusing on is how do we fill the gap? The gap is that yellow. The gap is the difference between what we have and what we would like to use. And as time goes on, that gets bigger and bigger. I would like to make the argument, and we will come back to that in a few minutes, that we probably should not be trying to fill the gap, for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not think that we can fill the gap. And the second thing is that there will be a future and we do have kids and we do have grandkids, and to the extent that we are successful today in finding and pumping what oil remains, we are dooming them to an increased crisis where they are going to have less and less opportunity to live like we have lived because our incredibly lavish life-style is in large measure built on this really high-quality fossil fuel energy. The next chart shows us what we will ultimately transition to, and there is no escaping this, oil is finite. There will be a peaking. It could be now; it could be in a few years. It is not if, it is when. And there are some finite resources that we can have that we can work with, but they are finite, although they are enormous in volume. For instance, the tar sands, the Canadians would rather call them oil sands because ``tar'' does not have a good sound to it. But it is tar. It is not much better quality than the asphalt out here in the roadway, which flows with the hot sun, as you may notice. The cars sit on it and it sinks down. Put a blowtorch on it and it will really flow. The oil shales in our west and coal are all finite resources. The Canadians are aggressively pursuing the production of oil from their tar sands, or oil sands, as they like to call them. But I understand that they are using more energy from natural gas to cook that oil sand to get the oil out and more energy from natural gas than they are getting out of the oil. From a business perspective, that makes good sense because that gas up there is stranded. It is in Alberta, Canada. There are not very many people there. Gas is hard to transport, and stranded gas is very cheap. So they use a cheap gas to produce very expensive oil. It costs them about $18 a barrel, I understand, to produce it. And they are getting $70 a barrel. That is a really good dollar/profit ratio. The energy/profit ratio is less than one; so ultimately that is not sustainable, of course, using more energy in than you get out. The oil shales in our west, there have been some very glowing articles in the papers. I talked to the investigator there. He attended a conference out in Denver, Colorado a few months ago that I was at. And Shell Oil Company, it will be several years before they decide whether or not it is even feasible economically to get oil out of our oil shales. There is an enormous quantity there, nearly as much as the world has found, but not all recoverable. There are estimates that 800 billion barrels may be recoverable, but at what cost? What they do out there is to drill a series of holes around the periphery, and they freeze that so that the oil that they melt out in the middle will not contaminate the groundwater, and then they cook it with steam for about a year. And then after they have cooked it for about a year, heating it up, they drill a well there and they start pumping and cooking, and they do that for another year or two, and they can get meaningful amounts of oil. But the scalability of this and the economic feasibility of this are still unknown, so they are pursuing that. I would caution, Mr. Speaker, not to be too euphoric about their prospects of getting energy out of these tar sands and oil shales. There is a lot of energy there. It will be difficult to get it out economically, particularly difficult to have a meaningful energy/profit ratio getting it out. But it is there and we have to do the best we can to get it out as efficiently as we can. Then coal, you will hear we have 250 years of coal, and the next chart shows that is true. We do have 250 years of coal at current use rates, at no growth. But notice what happens when there is only 2 percent growth. Now, I think that as we have less oil, we are going to have to use coal more. Hitler ran his whole economy and his military on oil from coal. So did South Africa with the embargoes that we had there. With just 2 percent growth rate, this exponential growth has an incredible effect. This 2 percent, the 250 years shrinks to about 85 years. And for most of its uses, you cannot use coal. You are going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid. And if you take the energy to do that, you have now shrunk it down to about 50 years. And that is only 2 percent growth. I believe we will have to increase the use of coal more than 2 percent. Now, back to this chart of the potential alternative sources: Nuclear. Nuclear produces now about 8 percent of our total energy in this country and about 20 percent of our electricity. In France it produces about 80, 85 percent of their electricity. There are three kinds of nuclear power. Two kinds of nuclear fission: the lightwater reactor and breeder reactors. We use only lightwater reactors in this country. The only breeder reactors we ever used were in producing the fuel for our nuclear missiles. The world has a limited supply. It is hard to get good numbers on that, but the world has a limited supply of fissionable uranium, and then we will have to go to breeder reactors, which, as the name implies, produce more fuel than they use. But you also buy big problems with that, transporting it around and enriching it, and some of it is weapons grade; so you have to deal with those problems if you want to go to fission with a breeder reactor. I have friends here in the Congress who were devoutly opposed to nuclear. They are bright people, and when they are considering the alternative, which may be shivering in the dark if we do not have enough electricity, now nuclear is not looking all that bad to them if the alternative is shivering in the dark. Nuclear could and maybe should grow. But in this country it is very difficult to site a plant and to build it. It may take 10 years, and I understand that the plant has to be operating maybe 20 years before you get back the amount of fossil fuel energy that went into producing the plant. Again, Mr. Speaker, on many of these things we need good numbers. It is hard to have a rational discussion when there is so much disagreement in numbers, and we really do need to enlist an honor broker so that we can agree on numbers because it is very difficult to have a rational discussion when there are such wide differences of opinion as to how much is out there of this and that. Nuclear fusion. If we can discover that, we are home free. That is what the sun does to produce all the energy we get from the sun. And we are just a tiny, tiny speck in that whole sphere around the sun and the incredible amount of energy that comes from the sun. We are home free if we get there, by the way. But I think the odds of getting there are about the same as the odds of your or my solving our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice, but I doubt, Mr. Speaker, that you are plotting your economic future on the assumption that you are going to win the lottery, and I do not think we ought to plot our energy future on the assumption that we are going to get fusion. I support all of the money, about $250 million a year or so. Of course, it goes into fusion. I hope we get there. But, frequently, my hopes and my expectations are not the same thing. In this case I would not bet the ranch that we are going to get fusion energy. If we do, we are home free, and we need to continue to invest all the money that that technology can reasonably absorb. And now we come to the truly renewable resources. And ultimately, Mr. Speaker, after this age of oil, which will end, and when I say ``oil,'' I mean gas and coal too, which will end in about another 100, 150 years, we will be running our world on these energy sources: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy from tides or thermal gradients or waves. Agricultural resources, a lot of possibilities there: soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass, cellulosic ethanol. You hear a lot of these words. Burning our waste to get energy, that is a really good idea, and we should do more of that. We need fewer landfills, and we would have a little more electricity if we did that. The last one here that I want to spend just a moment on, it says hydrogen from renewables. Today we are not making hydrogen from renewables. We are making hydrogen from natural gas. That is going to peak and be running down about the same curve that oil is running down. One thing is true, Mr. Speaker: We will always use more energy producing hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Unless we are going to suspend the second law of thermal dynamics, that will be true. Well, if it takes more energy to produce hydrogen, why are we even thinking about hydrogen? For two reasons: One is when you finally use it, burn it, you get only water. That is not a very polluting product. And the second reason we are really interested in hydrogen is that it is one of the better things to feed a fuel cell with if we ever get economically feasible fuel cells. A fuel cell will get more than twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. So even though you lose some energy when you go from electricity or coal or whatever to hydrogen, you will more than get it back in the increased efficiency of the fuel cell if we ever get to the fuel cell, if it is economically feasible. And you are certainly not polluting, you are producing only water. The next chart is an interesting look at one aspect of the agriculture, and that is the amount of energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. On the chart we show two things: On the right is petroleum, and it shows that if you put in about 1\1/4\ million Btus, you will get out 1 million. On the left-hand side, it shows a picture for ethanol, that if you put in three-fourths of a million Btus, you get out 1 million. And some people will tell you that this is pretty optimistic. In fact, Pimentel says it is actually negative. You use more energy producing ethanol than you get out of it. But if this is true, what that means is that today the way we produce ethanol, for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you are burning the equivalent of three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuels, because that is the fossil fuel energy it took to produce ethanol. The chart at the bottom shows why this is true, and it shows all of the total energy requirements of farm inputs. This is BTUs per bushel of corn. The energy goes into producing a bushel of corn. You notice that big, nearly half of it, that says nitrogen? Mr. Speaker, that is natural gas from which we make nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learned how to do that, all of our nitrogen fertilizer came from barnyard manures or guano. Guano is gone. If we wait another 10,000 or 20,000 years, there will be some more. But most people don't know that nitrogen fertilizer today, essentially all of it comes from natural gas, almost none of it produced in our country. Natural gas is too expensive here. It is made in other countries where gas is kind of stranded. The next chart looks at where we are. I use an analogy here which I think is very apt. We are very much like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents died and left them a big inheritance, and they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. They look at the inheritance, and it is not going to last until they retire. So what will they do? Obviously, they have got to do one or both of two things. They either have got to spend less or make more. I use those numbers, others may use 86-14. I use those numbers because that is exactly where we are with our energy use today. Eight-five percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural gas, and only 15 percent of it comes from some other source. Now, a bit more than half of that comes from nuclear electric power. That is 8 percent of our total energy, about 20 percent of our electricity. The rest, 7 percent, is the true renewables. Mr. Speaker, those are the things which we ultimately will transition to. Now this is a chart from 2000, and the solar and the wind and so forth would be bigger today. That is 1 percent in this chart of 7 percent. That is .07 percent. It is really in the noise level. We are four times bigger than that today at .28 percent. Big deal. It is a long, long way to go from .28 percent to go to something really meaningful as a contribution. But that is what we will be turning to increasingly in the future. Notice that on this renewable sources there, the biggest one, 46 percent, is conventional hydroelectric. That will not increase in our country. We are pretty much tapped out on that. We might go to microhydro and use little microturbines in thousands of little streams across the country without affecting the environment as much as the big ones, by the way, and get about that much more energy. But notice that solar and wind and agriculture down here, it is just alcohol fuel there; but it could be biomass, soy diesel, biodiesel and so forth, are very small amounts. Where we can get it, we ought to be getting more of geothermal. There is not much in this country. All of Iceland's energy comes from geothermal. I don't think there is a chimney in Iceland, because they don't need it. They get it all from geothermal sources. Notice the waste to energy up there, which is 8 percent. That could grow. Instead of putting it in a landfill, there is a very nice plant up here in Montgomery County they will be happy to show you through. It is really a very handsome plant, and they are burning waste up there to produce electricity. Just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. We must keep two realities in mind. The first is that we must feed the world. Tonight, about 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry, obviously not in this country. And we have to maintain our top soils. If you don't have top soils, you will not feed the world. Now, if we would live lower on the food chain, if we ate the corn and the soybeans instead of the pig or the chicken or the cow that eat the corn and soybeans, we would have between 10 and 20 times as many calories to eat, because that is about the ratio. They say one pound of grain to three pounds of pig or chicken, but that is dry grain and wet pig and you can only eat about half of the pig. When you get down to the true ratio of dry to dry matter, it is about 10 to one for the steer. By the way, milk and eggs are very much more economically produced and really higher-quality proteins. When it comes to things like cellulosic ethanol and biomass and so forth, be careful that we aren't using so much of that that we are mining our top soils of an essential element called humus. Humus is what gives tilts to the soil. It is why top soil is different than subsoil. It holds water; it holds the nutrients. If you take all of that out, you no longer have top soil. We can get some energy from agriculture, but it will not fill the gap between what will be available and what we would like to use. The next chart is a really interesting one. This shows on an interesting scale, this is how good you feel about your station in life on the ordinate here. Then the absyssa is how much energy you use. Notice where we are. We are way over there in the far right. We use more energy than any other society in the world. You know, notice you can't feel very good about your station in life until you have used a meaningful amount of energy, but it is striking that this is all relative. China is up here. China feels really good about where they are. Notice how little energy the average man uses, so they are better off today than yesterday, so they feel good about it. They are improving. What I want to point out on this chart, you don't have to use the amount of energy we use to feel good about your position in life. There are about a dozen countries over there that use less energy than we. Everybody above that line uses less energy than we and feels better about their station in life than we feel. We have lots of potential to use less energy and feel good. The next chart shows a really interesting one on energy efficiency. There may not be this kind of opportunity everywhere, but on the left here is a usual incandescent bulb. If you are brooding chickens, you use a light bulb. It is not light you want; it is heat. But notice that 90 percent of all the energy that comes out of that incandescent bulb, that is what is up here, I am looking up at them, Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the energy that comes out of that is heat. Now, if you go to a fluorescent, you have these little screw in fluorescents now, and notice, by the way, the green here is the same amount of light every time. Notice that you use demonstrably less energy, four times less energy. A 13-watt little spiral bulb will give you as much light as a 60-watt bulb. These fluorescents are very efficient. Now notice what happens with a light-emitting diode. Notice that the amount of heat produced in a light-emitting diode is only about one- tenth of the light you get. No wonder much of new technology is moving to diodes. The next chart is an interesting one from our country, and this shows the energy used per capita electricity consumption in California and the U.S.A. Remember several years ago they had some blackouts and brownouts in California, and we were predicting massive rolling brownouts or blackouts the following year. It did not happen. The reason it didn't happen is because the Californians, without anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their consumption of electricity by 11 percent. And notice, the average Californian uses about, what, about 65 percent of electricity as the average in the rest of our country. It would be hard to argue that Californians don't live as well as we. The next chart is a very interesting picture. We don't want to go there, and unless we do something meaningful to address this coming energy crisis, we could do what the Easter Islanders did. They had a good thing going for them there. They fished the oceans and the fish was there for the taking. To make their boats, they cut down the trees. And the trees weren't growing as fast as the boats they were making, and they cut down more and more trees, and ultimately they cut down the last tree. And when those boats rotted and they could no longer fish, their society started deteriorating. When they were finally discovered, they were down to eating rats and living in caves and eating each other. They had a civilization before that which could indulge in such things as these very large sculptures that you see here. What they did was to mine a nonrecoverable resource, and they had no fallback. They had no alternative to fall back on. The next chart shows kind of where we are and where we need to go. So far, Mr. Speaker, it may not be obvious that we have a really bright future ahead of us, but I think we do. We have some big challenges here. Challenges and opportunities are two faces of the same thing, and I would like to think of them as opportunities. I think that what we need to address this problem is the equivalent of a program that embodies the total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. There were no automobiles made in, what, '43, '44 and '45. There was gas rationing. I can't remember people grumbling about the gas rationing. Everybody had a victory garden who could. They were encouraged to do that. It was the patriotic thing to do. We started daylight savings time so you could have some time after work in the evening to work on your victory garden. Everybody saved their household grease. I am still not quite sure what they did with that, but we took it to a central repository. The point is everybody was involved. It was the last time in our country that everybody has really been involved, and we need a program that involves everybody. We also need a program that kind of has the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, because there are some really big technology challenges here. Thirdly, this program needs to have the kind of urgency that we had in the Manhattan Project, because time is really of the essence here. We don't have the luxury of a leisurely approach to solving this problem. There will be an increasing deficit of oil in the world and in our country; but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I think the biggest deficit today is leadership, both here and in the world. With so many experts, and these two studies, and again I go back to the two studies, here they are, paid for by our government, saying that we are at or nearly at peak oil and pointing to the dire consequences if you haven't prepared for that, I don't see our leaders in our country or in the world standing up and telling their citizens that we face this problem. This chart shows what we need to do. The first thing we need to do is to buy some time. How do we buy time? Right now there is no surplus energy available to invest in alternatives, like building a nuclear power plant, like finding a really good way to make ethanol, to make a whole lot more solar panels, to make a whole lot more wind machines. By the way, wind machines are producing electricity at 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. That is very competitive. If we can have a very aggressive conservation program that you can do quickly, we can free up some oil, which buys us some time so that we can invest in these alternatives. Then we need to use this wisely. Somehow we need an entity which is making judgments as to what is the best uses of the limited resources of both time and energy that we will have. By the way, Mr. Speaker, we need to invest three things to get these alternatives. We need money and we need energy and we need time. Of course, in this Congress, we never worry about money, we just borrow that from our kids and our grandkids without their approval. But we can't borrow time from them, and we can't borrow energy from them. Thinking about our children and grandchildren, Mr. Speaker, I would just like to make an argument that there is a moral dimension to the challenge we face. To the extent that we are able to go out there and get these remaining resources to fill the gap, to continue life as we know it, we are going to be denying our children and our grandchildren access to these energy sources. Right now, we are telling them although we cannot do it, we cannot even come close to running our government on current revenue, not only will they have to run their government on current revenues, they will have to pay back all the money we borrowed from their generation. I am having a moral problem with going out there with the techniques that we have to get this gas and oil and coal, the little that remains, more quickly. We will certainly be denying our children the opportunity to do that. Somehow we have to have an organization which makes decisions. We have only limited time. We have only limited energy. How will we invest it? What is the wisest way to invest it? There are many benefits that can come from this. One of the benefits, Mr. Speaker, I can imagine Americans going to bed in the evening feeling really good about the contribution they have made that day to this problem. This shouldn't be viewed as a problem; this should be viewed as a challenge. Life is really easy in our country. Most people don't have to really stretch to do well. I think that our people would marshal. We have the most creative, innovative society in the world; and if our people only knew that there was this problem, I think that all of our energy, our creativity, our innovation could be marshaled to address this. We have no alternative but to be a role model. We use a fourth of all the world's energy. We are a role model. We need to be a good role model for this transition. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, with the realization that if every American is challenged to address this problem, that there is a way out, we will have a bright future. But the later we start, the more difficult that transformation will be. We should have started a decade ago. We can't turn back the hands of time, but we can from now on do what we should have been doing in the past.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 5122, a truly bipartisan bill that supports our troops. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Projection Forces, I want to recognize the outstanding service rendered to our great Nation by our men and women in uniform around the globe here, meeting every challenge with true dedication and professionalism. I also want to thank all Americans, especially the families of the deployed service members, for their unwavering support of our servicemen and women. I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), ranking member of the Projection Forces Subcommittee, for his extraordinary partnership and support in completing this bill. Thank you, sir, so very much. I express my sincere gratitude to all of my colleagues and staff on the subcommittee for their diligence, commitment and hard work. Further, I would like to recognize our chairman, Mr. Hunter, and ranking member, Mr. Skelton, for their continued exemplary leadership in bringing this year's National Defense Authorization Act to the floor with unwavering bipartisanship and clear focus to providing our military what it needs to accomplish its mission. I am pleased to report that the National Defense Authorization Act that we consider today takes bold steps to ensure our Nation's continued ability to safeguard our national interests and, when necessary, project U.S. military power around the globe. We have taken action to provide our troops with the capabilities they need to meet current and emerging threats. But we also have taken precautions to ensure that current capabilities are not permanently or prematurely retired to fund future replacement capabilities that are either undefined or unaffordable. Some of the Projection Forces highlights in this bill include: a program to infuse our shipyards with leading-edge manufacturing technology and management systems to reduce shipbuilding costs and return our shipyards to global competitiveness; legislative provisions that will improve the Navy's ability to execute the 313-ship plan envisioned by the Chief of Naval Operations by setting cost limitations at Navy budget estimates for the LHA(R), CVN-21 and LPD-17 programs; force structure initiatives that set a minimum requirement for 48 attack submarines and 299 strategic airlift aircraft and limited retirements of KC-135E and B-52 aircraft; 400 million in advance procurement funds to begin construction of a second Virginia class submarine in fiscal year 2009; $300 million to procure three additional C-17 aircraft; and $200 million to accelerate the DDG-51 destroyer modernization program by 2 years. While there is much more to do, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2007 is an important step in strengthening the Armed Forces of the United States. I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, when the unbridled expression of one right infringes on another, we appropriately limit that right, and that is what we do today. On March 3 of this year, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder of Westminster, Maryland, was killed when his Humvee overturned on assignment in Iraq. Before his deployment, Matthew explained that he volunteered for convoy escort security because, ``There was a position that needs to be filled, and I am a Marine.'' Outside the church where Matthew's family and friends gathered for his funeral, a group of six out-of-State protesters loudly chanted and carried signs, including, ``Thank God for Dead Soldiers.'' I stand today joined in spirit by members of the American Legion and the For Our Troops Club of Hereford High School in support of this bill that will honor America's fallen soldiers and respect the privacy of their families by protecting the dignity of their funerals.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I have here in my hands two pretty big reports that were paid for by our government and have for reasons that it is difficult for me to understand been pretty much ignored apparently by the organizations that paid for them. The first of these is a big report paid for by the Department of Energy called The Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. This is generally known as the Hirsch Report, because the project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch from SAIC, a very prestigious scientific and engineering organization. This report is dated February, 2005. For reasons that we are trying to find, this was bottled up, apparently, inside the Department of Energy, because it didn't become publicly available until several months after that. The second report I have here is the report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This obviously is paid for by the Army. It is dated September of 2005, and it was just about 2 months ago that it finally got out of the Pentagon into the public. This one is called Energy Trends and Their Implications For U.S. Army Installations. I would submit that wherever they mention ``Army,'' you could substitute ``the United States'' and it would be completely appropriate. What I would like to do for the first few minutes is to look at some of the comments and recommendations in these two reports; and I would like to keep asking the question, why have these two government agencies which paid for these reports done essentially nothing to promulgate this information across the country? Rather, it would seem that there was an intent to keep this information from the public, because the Hirsch Report was bottled up inside the Department of Energy for several months, and the Army Corps of Engineers report is dated September of 2005, and it says on the cover here, ``Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.'' But there was essentially no distribution of that until just about 2 months ago. As you will see, Madam Speaker, if the content of these two reports is correct, if their observations and recommendations are correct, you would have expected these two government agencies to be using every vehicle at their disposal to get this information out to the public. Let's look first at a few quotes from the Hirsch Report. The first here says, ``The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically,'' oil was almost $75 a barrel today, ``and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. ``Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.'' A little later we will talk more about this. I am not sure that this is exactly the way that I would have articulated our challenge. We will talk about that a little later. ``Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort.'' Now another quote from this Hirsch Report. ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules so as to incorporate higher energy efficiency technologies into the privately owned transportation sector. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time-consuming, of the order of a decade or more.'' If we are talking about transportation, Madam Speaker, that is indeed true. Because the average automobile and small truck is in the fleet about 17-18 years and the average 18-wheeler about 28 years. So any improvements that we ever make, we are making in energy efficiency in automobiles and trucks, is going to take quite some time to show any meaningful effect because of how long they are in the fleet. Now a third quote from the Hirsch Report. Madam Speaker, I would like us to keep in our mind the question, if this is true and we have two reports, as you will see, that have reached essentially the same conclusion, we have no reason to believe there was any collusion between them. Indeed, their dates of publication are quite different, February to September. And if these observations and recommendations in these reports are in fact correct, then one might wonder why haven't these agencies been using every vehicle at their disposal to get this information out to the American public and to initiate programs to deal with these problems? ``World oil peaking is going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.'' Then this, Madam Speaker, a very significant statement. ``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say, and then this statement. ``The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.'' Now I would like to read a few of the quotes and recommendations from the Corps of Engineers study just out about 2 months ago, although the date was September of last year. ``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil's many advantages provide 1-\1/3\ to 2\1/2\ times more economic value per million BTUs than coal. Currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum.'' Madam Speaker, that is a startling statement. If in fact the world is peaking in oil production and there is no viable substitute for petroleum, wouldn't you think that the agencies paying for these studies would have used every vehicle available to them to get this word out to the American public and to articulate a rational program for dealing with this emergency? ``Oil prices may go significantly higher,'' they say, ``and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years.'' Just under $75 today, $180 a barrel in a few years. ``In general, all non-renewable resources follow a natural supply curve: Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak and then declines at a rapid pace, similar to its initial increase. The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves, giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all of the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline.'' Campbell and Deffeyes, several references here. Let me digress for just a moment. One of these, Dr. Deffeyes, predicted that the peak did occur a couple of months ago, and he says he is no longer a prognosticator, he is now a historian, because the peak, he believes, is behind us. ``Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia has not been able to increase supply above its monthly production peak of April 2003.'' And I am reminded here of a recent book by Matt Simmons called Twilight in the Desert. He has done a very scholarly and exhaustive study of all of the open literature and believes that Saudi Arabia has peaked in oil production. Iraq may also have significant excess capacity if it can be brought into production. Under Saddam Hussein, we got about 2\1/2\ million barrels a day from Iraq; now we are lucky to get 1\1/2\ million barrels a day. Meanwhile, domestic oil production in both the lower 48 States and Alaska continues to decline. Many non-OPEC oil producers have also passed or are currently reaching their peaks of production. Indeed, Madam Speaker, of the 48 largest oil-producing countries in the world, 33 have already peaked. And now their recommendations. And excuse me for reading, but to paraphrase this would not have quite the impact of reading exactly their words. The coming years will see significant increases in energy costs across the spectrum. Not only are energy costs an issue, but also reliability, availability, and security. It is time to think strategically about energy and how the Army, and please substitute here the United States, should respond to the global and national energy picture. A path of enlightened self-interest is encouraged. The 21st century is not the 20th century. Issues will play out differently and geopolitics will impact the energy posture of the Nation. Technology will change more rapidly and flexibility will be a crucial part of installation operations. This must also extend to the energy infrastructure and its operational concepts. And then this very interesting statement: the days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy sources are quickly drawing to a close. When I read that, Madam Speaker, I was reminded of the short paragraph that Matt Savinar uses in introducing his discussion of peak oil. He says: ``Dear reader. Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' I hope that he is overly pessimistic. We will see. Domestic natural gas production peaked in 1973. Now, note this statistic, Madam Speaker: the proved domestic reserve lifetime for natural gas at current consumption rates is about 8.4 years. What this says is, if we can get all of our gas from our resources, it would last 8.4 years. Of course, we cannot get it out that fast. So we are importing gas. But that is all we have remaining is 8.4 years. This is the Corps of Engineers. The proved world reserve lifetime for natural gas is about 40 years, but will follow a traditional rise to a peak, then a rapid decline. Domestic oil production peaked in 1970 and continues to decline. This is a really startling statistic. Proved domestic reserve lifetime for oil is about 3.4 years. That means if we could pump oil as fast as we are using it, our 2 percent of the world's reserve would last us, at the rate at which we are using oil, 3.4 years. World oil production is at or near its peak; and current world demand exceeds the supply, which is why oil is about $75 a barrel. Saudi Arabia is considered to be the bellwether nation for oil production and has not increased production since April of 2003. After peak production, supply no longer meets demand; prices and competition increase. World proved reserves lifetime for oil is about 41 years, most of this at a declining availability. Our current throwaway nuclear cycle uses up the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years. We will see significant depletion of Earth's finite fossil resources in this century. We must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other sources. This is dated September of last year, Madam Speaker. Have you seen anybody in authority in our country telling the American people this? We must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other energy sources. Policy changes leap ahead of technology breakthroughs, cultural changes and significant investment is requisite for this new energy future. Time is essential to enact these changes. The process should begin now. Indeed, if they had written this 20 years ago, they would use exactly that same language. Because we really should have started some 20 years ago. Madam Speaker, what is all of this about? What are they talking about? To understand that, we need to go back about six decades and to the life of a very, now very famous oil geologist, Dr. M. King Hubbert, who worked for the Shell Oil Company. In 1956, as a result of his studies, he published a paper that the 50th-year anniversary of that was March 8, in which he predicted that the United States would peak in oil production about 1970. Now this was revolutionary. Because at that time I believe we were the largest producer of oil in the world, and probably the largest exporter of oil in the world. Shell Oil Company pleaded with him not to publish a paper, that we would make him and them look really silly. He published the paper anyhow. And 14 years later when right on target we peaked, he became kind of a celebrity. What we have here, Madam Speaker, is his predicted curve, the smooth green curve. And then the more ragged curve, green curve with the largest symbols represents the actual data points. And you see that right on schedule in 1970, oil production peaked. Now, this is the lower 48. He did not know about Alaska at that time, and in just a moment we will look at another chart which includes Alaska. The red there, by the way, is the Soviet Union. More oil than we, peaked just a bit after us. They kind of fell apart when the Soviet Union fell apart, and they are now having a second small peak. But after that it will be continually downhill. The next chart shows where we have been getting our oil from. Not just in the lower 48. And that is this blue curve and the dark blue one under it, Texas and the rest of the United States. But then you see the natural gas liquids and the Alaska oil, and the Gulf of Mexico oil. And you see that in 1970 we peaked, and just a little blip in the downhill side of what is called Hubbert's peak here. I remember particularly, Madam Speaker, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries which were supposed to get us home free. That is the yellow on this chart. Notice the relatively trifling contribution that the Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries made, about 4,000 wells out there. We were reminded of that last fall with these hurricanes, when a number of them were damaged. The next chart is from the Hirsch report, and that shows you what we do with this oil. It is really kind of interesting. The light blue here represents transportation. That is about 70 percent of all of the energy from the oil that we use is used in transportation. Then there is industrial and a little bit of electric power and a little bit commercially. But the major part of our oil is used in transportation. That is a liquid fuel. And, you know, the challenge is to find something to replace that. The next chart is a really interesting one, and we could spend a long time on this chart, because it has so much information on it. But I want to look at it just in gross form here. The bar graphs here represent the discovery of oil, and you see that way back in 1940 we were discovering some big fields of oil. And then a little later in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, we were discovering a lot of oil. And our use of oil was very small then. The heavy black line here represents our use of oil, and notice that we were finding enormously more oil than we were using. So there was every reason to believe that for the foreseeable future and beyond everything was going to be just fine, because we were finding enormous amounts of oil and we were not using very much oil. But then that all turned around about 1980. Because at about that time, the discoveries of oil reached a maximum, and then they trailed off. And you can see it here on the downslope here. And in spite of improved techniques, in spite of intense drilling, year by year, we have found on the average less and less oil. For those who are familiar with curves like this, it is quite obvious that the area under this curve, if we were to draw a smooth line through this discovery curve, the area under that curve represents the total volume of oil which has been discovered. And the area under the consumption curve represents the total amount of oil that we have consumed. Now, it is very obvious that you cannot consume oil that you have not discovered, and so to find out how much consumption we can have in the future, all one needs to do is to look at the area under this discovery curve, and then to project where you think the consumption curve is going. Now, this chart has peaking occurring, what, in 5 years or so, about 2010. There are a number of people who believe that peaking has occurred about now or will occur very shortly. The lightly shaded part of this graph, of course, is to the future; and, Madam Speaker, you can make that future within limits look about any way you want to make it look. For instance, if we use enhanced oil recovery, and we drill a lot more wells, the United States has drilled 530,000 wells. I believe there are about 400 wells in Saudi Arabia and maybe 300 in Iraq, both of which have enormously more reserves than we have. But if you vigorously go after this oil, you might get it sooner. But if you get it sooner, there will be less later, unless you are really good at enhanced oil recovery and you are able to get significantly more out of the ground. The next chart kind of puts this in long-range perspective, and this is a really interesting chart. Looking at the top chart here, we are looking back about 400 years through history; and we see that the quadrillion Btus, it is so near the zero line here that you probably cannot see the difference. And then we began the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. And we began that with wood, of course. We denuded the hills of New England, the mountains of New England, carrying charcoal to England to make steel. We have a little furnace up here in Frederick County, and we denuded the hills of northern Frederick County to provide charcoal for that little furnace there. The Industrial Revolution was stuttering with wood when we found coal and were able to utilize that. And then look what happened, Madam Speaker, when we discovered gas and oil. It just took off. This is an exponential curve at about a 2 percent growth rate. In a moment we will show this same curve with different units on the ordinate abscissa, and it will appear to be a much less dramatic curve there because it really spread out the abscissa here. But I would like to note that the world population has reasonably followed this energy cycle. So that we went from about one-half a billion to about 1 billion people here. Steady state for quite a long time until we now have between 6 and 7 billion people. And that dramatic increase in the world's population was largely due to the incredible quantity and quality of energy from oil and natural gas. I would like to reflect for just a moment on the quality of this energy, the energy density of these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil, and you will now pay a bit more than $100 for the refined product at the pump, 42 gallons, will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you. If you worked really hard in your yard this weekend for a full day, I will get more work, more mechanical work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. And that may be kind of humbling to recognize that we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of the energy available in these fossil fuels. Madam Speaker, our children and certainly our grandchildren will look back at our generation and the generation of our parents, and I say that because my father lived almost half way through the age of oil, and they will wonder how we could have behaved the way we have behaved. When we found this incredible resource, this wealth, we should have stopped and asked ourselves, what do we need to do so we can provide the most good for the most people for the longest time with this incredible wealth. It should have been obvious to everybody that this was not infinite. The earth is not made of oil. It is a finite resource. We are now, as this chart shows in 5,000 years of recorded history, about 100, 150 years into the age of oil. In another 100, 150 years, we will be through the age of oil. What, then, when we have had to transition to the renewables? Notice here, Madam Speaker, what happened in the 1970s. That was really quite dramatic. There was a worldwide recession, demand for oil fell, the price collapsed, and we reduced our energy consumption. It is now with China and India and the developing world demanding more and more oil increasing again at the same kind of a rate that it did up till 1970. Madam Speaker, I would like to give one statistic that is just startling. Up until the Carter years, in every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that means is, had we continued on that course, and fortunately we did not as this chart shows, but had we continued on that course when we had used up half of the world's supply of oil, only one decade of oil would have remained. In 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil would be just a blip, about 300 years long is all, out of 5,000 years of recorded history. The next chart shows the predictions of some of the experts about when peaking should occur, and this is from the Hirsch report, and this was about a year ago, and they could not have known that Dr. Deffeyes was going to conclude that the peaking has already occurred. He gave a specific date for that, and he rather humorously said he is no longer a prognosticator, he is a historian. Well, all these people believe the peak is going to occur in the next 5 years; and then there are a few that believe it will occur about 5 years after that. Then there are Serum, Shell Oil Company, a few who believe it will be sometime in the future. Nobody, Madam Speaker, will contend that we will not have peaking. It is not if. It is when. The next chart is a simple depiction. It shows the same curve, that really dramatic one you saw a couple of charts ago, when we had this dramatic increase in the production of energy, same curve. You can make it short and very high or spread out, depending upon the units you use in the ordinate and the abscissa. This is a 2 percent exponential growth rate, and notice that starts out rather slow, but 2 percent, leave the interest in the bank, it grows and grows till it is now getting quite steep, even on this expanded abscissa scale. As you saw from the previous chart, most of the experts believe that oil peaking is either now or very shortly in the future. If, as we have indicated here, we are at this point, then the peaking will indeed occur a couple of years or so hence. But notice that the discrepancy between the oil we would like to use, the demand curve and the oil which is available to use, begins before the curve. It will not be as smooth as this. It will be ups and downs, and oil may again fall down to $50 a barrel. That will be nice. Do not count on it. What we have produced here is what is called a gap. That is a difference between what is available to use and what we would like to use; and, as the next chart shows, the Hirsch Report focused on the problems of filling that gap. What they did is look at the consequences of filling the gap, dependent upon when you start to fill the gap, and if you wait until peaking has occurred, you see zero here, that is when it has occurred. Then there will be significant shortfall. You will be able to do some mitigation. In a few minutes, we will talk more about that mitigation; and I wonder if, in fact, we should try to mitigate or whether we need to effect a steady state where we can live happily and productively at the current energy level and thus leave a little more for our kids and our grandkids and a little more for the next few years just ahead of us. What it shows here is that if you are going to have no supply shortfall, that you need to begin the mitigation 20 years before peaking occurs. Now, from all of the experts' predictions that we saw, that is going to be manifestly impossible because almost nobody believes that peaking is two decades from now. So what one would conclude from this is that there are going to be consequences. The next chart shows what we would be using to peak. We would be using enhanced oil recovery, coal liquids; and, by the way, South Africa and Hitler's Germany demonstrated you can indeed do that; heavy oil, that is the oil shales, tar sands and so forth, gas-to-liquids and then vehicle efficiency. I mentioned previously how long these vehicles stay in the fleet. If you start here, there will be several years before you notice any effect, and then slowly over 50 years. That is a little less than the average lifetime of the average car and pickup in the fleet and about half the average lifetime of an 18-wheeler in the fleet. Madam Speaker, I would like to wonder if, in fact, we ought to be trying to fill the peak, that is, to fill this gap till there is no shortfalls so that the world can continue to use all the oil that it would like to use. Notice that, except for vehicle efficiency, we are dealing here with finite resources. They are not forever, and the more we use now, the less we will have to use in the future. Today, we are amassing the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. I would like not to include with that an enormous energy deficit that we are going to pass on to our kids and our grandkids. We are already burdening them with an enormous responsibility to not only run their government on current revenue but to pay back all of the money that we borrowed from their generations to run our government today. In good conscience, Madam Speaker, can we also borrow from their generations the fossil fuel energies which will be essential for establishing any reasonable quality of life in their generations? I would submit that the challenge should not be to fill the gap. The challenge should rather be to establish an infrastructure and economy, lifestyles that can be interesting and productive and sustaining while we make the inevitable transition to renewables. These are all finite. You cannot fill that gap forever with these. As a matter of fact, for some of them, you cannot fill it very long. The next chart shows us something about the consequences of excessive consumption. This is a really interesting chart. I would like to start here with this little insert where I think we are, and this is from our Energy Information Agency, and they get the data from the USGS. We talked to the Energy Information Agency, and they just use the information from USGS, and I think this is a rather meaningful misrepresentation of what the world will look like. Madam Speaker, for any statisticians out there, it will be quite obvious that the 50 percent probability is not the mean. The most rightly thing to happen is the 95 percent probability. That is a high probability. It is the lesser, the lower amount of oil. By the way, the 50 percent probability means that there could be a whole lot more oil. It also means there could be a whole lot less oil. You just do not know. What the Energy Information Agency does and the USGS is to assume that 50 percent probability is the mean. This is an unusual, and one might say bizarre, use of statistics, but using these statistics, you end up with almost twice the recoverable oil left in the world. You see, they said that the ultimate recovery would be about 2 trillion barrels of oil with a 95 percent probability. We have already used about half of that, about 1 trillion barrels. So there is about 1 trillion left. With the mean, which they say is expected, now that is not the expected value. The expected value is the 95 percent probability. That is the most probable. That is what it means. It is the most probable. But with this assumption that that is the mean, which is a bizarre use of statistics, that pushes the peak out only from here at about 2000 to about 2016. So even if there is that much more oil there, and, by the way, only half of that yet to be pumped 2 trillion barrels have been found, you remember that earlier chart that showed the steep decline in discoveries, one must project something phenomenal in the future, that it will look just vastly different than the last few years. It would discover enormous basins of oil, and there is no expert out there that I know who believes that anything like that is going to happen. Notice that you push the peak out only about 10 years if you have that much more oil. Now there is another interesting assumption that is made here, and that is if you can produce it with enhanced oil recovery and then you have a 10 percent decline, look what happens. You are really falling off a cliff. The next chart kind of puts this in perspective; and it is these numbers, Madam Speaker, which prompted Boyden Gray and Frank Gafney and Jim Woolsey and 27 other prominent Americans, four-star admirals and generals, to write to the President some months ago, a number of months ago, saying, Madam Speaker, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, importing almost two-thirds of what we use, is an unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we have got to do something about that. Even if you think that the only problem with oil is a national security risk, we ought to be about freeing ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. Even if there was no such thing as peaking, our behavior today needs to be vastly different than it is. We are less than 5 percent of the world's population, about one person out of 22, and we use a fourth of the world's energy. Madam Speaker, when we found all of that oil, and we more than others fit this characterization, rather than a responsible response to that discovery, which would ask the question how can we get the most good for the most people for the longest time, we acted like kids that found the cookie jar. We just pigged out, and here in the United States we are now using 25 percent of all the world's oil, and we represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. These top two numbers are significant. With only 2 percent of the oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. That means we are pumping our wells four times faster than the average in the world, which means that we are going to be increasingly dependent on foreign oil as we pump down our reserves. The next chart kind of puts this in a global perspective. Because what this shows, and many people now recognize this, that for the last several years China has been scouring the world for oil. We have symbols here which show who has access to the major sources of oil in the world, and notice the symbol for China is all over this map. They have bought all of the increased capacity of the Canadian oil sands. They have major commitments from South American countries. They almost bought Unocal in our country. They have really major commitments from the Middle East. Madam Speaker, not only this, but they recognize that we have the only blue water Navy, that is the Navy that sails the seven seas of the world and can control all of the access lanes. They see that we could, if we wish, cut off their source of oil. So they are very aggressively building a blue water Navy. Last year, we launched one submarine; they launched 14 submarines. Now theirs are not the quality of ours, certainly, but they are improving. Well, what do we do? And the next chart kind of presents this challenge and this picture. Obviously, if what these two big reports say is true, that we are just about reached peaking, then we need to be about transitioning. In fact, we should have been about transitioning from fossil fuels to the renewables. Madam Speaker, we knew of a certainty 26 years ago in 1980 we had already slid 10 years down the other side of Hubbard's Peak. Now, M.P. Hubbard was right about the United States. He predicted that the world would be peaking about now. Madam Speaker, he was right about the United States. Would you not think that our leaders have wondered maybe, just maybe, he might be right about the world, and maybe we ought to be doing something about that? There has been a deafening silence on this subject for the last 26 years. Any rational person, get a bright fifth grader and he will tell you what we need to be doing: We need to call upon all of our finite resources to help us through this transition period, and those finite resources are the tars and the oil shales and coal. And then there is nuclear as kind of a separate class, light water reactors, breeder reactors. And note the quote from the Corps of Engineers study that the high- quality cheap, that is fissionable, uranium, will be exhausted in about 20 years, so we will need to move to breeder reactors which, as the name implies, makes more fuel than they use and so they are kind of self-sustaining. But, with that, you buy some problems of transportation and enriching and products that could be used by bad guys for making nuclear weapons. I have a number of colleagues who have been stoutly opposed to nuclear, but when they are now rationally considering the alternative of shivering in the dark, nuclear is looking better and better. Nuclear fusion, if we ever got there, Madam Speaker, we are home free. There is nothing else on this chart that gets us home free. Fusion does. I support happily the roughly $250 million a year that we put into this technology. But I think that counting on solving our energy future challenges with fusion is a bit like me or you, Madam Speaker, planning to solve our personal economic problems by winning the lottery, and I think the odds are probably somewhere near the same. Once we have gone through these finite resources and have developed all the nuclear that we wish to develop, then we will ultimately, and the geology will assure it, because coal, gas and oil are not forever, we will transition to the renewables, and these are what they are, solar and wind and geothermal. That is true geothermal, where you are tapping into the molten core of the earth. There is not a chimney in all of Iceland because all of their energy is geothermal there, ocean energy, the tides and thermal gradients and so forth. Agriculture resources, a lot of talk today about ethanol and methanol and soy diesel and biodiesel and biomass. Waste energy, a great idea. Instead of putting it in a landfill, burn it. There is lots of energy there. A very productive plant, state-of-the-art plant up in Montgomery County who would be happy, Madam Speaker, to have you come visit them there. And then hydrogen from renewables. That is significant. Today, we are getting all of our hydrogen from natural gas. That is not renewable. That, by and by, will be gone, and then we will have to get hydrogen from renewables or from nuclear. Just a word of caution. Hydrogen is not an energy source. We will always use more energy to produce hydrogen than we get out of it, or else we will have to suspend the second law of thermodynamics. And, Mr. Speaker, if we can do that, we can suspend the law of gravity and we are really home free, are we not? Why even talk about hydrogen then? Well, because of the two characteristics of hydrogen. One is when you finally burn it, you get water that is not polluted. And if you have used a nonpolluting energy source to produce it like nuclear, for instance, or wind or solar, then you are totally nonpolluting. The second advantage of hydrogen is that it is quite ideal for fuel cells if in fact we are ever able to make fuel cells that are economic. With the fuel cell, you get about twice the efficiency or at least twice the efficiency that you get out of reciprocating engine. The next chart looks at coal. And some will tell you do not worry about energy because we have got an incredible supply of coal, they will tell you, in 500 years. That is not true. At current use rates, we do have 250 years of energy, of coal. Albert Einstein said that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. If you increase its use only 2 percent, that 250 years shrinks to about 85 years. And, now, if you have to use some of the energy from the coal to convert to a gas or a liquid, and we will have to do that because we have limited uses for coal itself, then you reduce it to 50 years. That is meaningful. But it is a finite resource. It is not forever. It is dirty. You are either going to pay a big environmental penalty or an economic penalty for cleaning it up. The next chart is an interesting one, and that looks at the opportunities and limitations from the agricultural world. On the top here, we have two little sequences which indicate the energy transformation from petroleum, and notice that you start out with maybe 5 equivalents of energy and end up with 4, so it is 5:4. And with corn to ethanol, you ought to do better, because you are getting some energy from the sun here. There are lots of challenges. It is or it can be energy positive. It certainly is in South America, where Brazil is converting sugar cane, which is a bit better than corn, to ethanol, and they are now freeing themselves from dependence on imported oil and soon all of their cars will be ethanol cars. The bottom pie chart here is something I wanted to spend just a moment on because it is so startling. This shows you the energy input into producing a bushel of corn. Notice the purple area there, almost half of it, it says nitrogen, that is nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas. When natural gas is gone, that source of nitrogen fertilizer is gone. Madam Speaker, before we learned how to do that, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manure and guano. The guano is gone. It took tens of thousands of years to produce it, we believe, and now it is harvested, and it is gone. That is the droppings from birds and bats on tropical islands and caves and so forth. All those other segments of the pie here are other fossil fuel energy inputs into growing corn. I would just like to emphasize in very large measure the food we eat is just transformed gas and oil, and without gas and oil it would be very difficult to produce the amounts of food that we are producing today. The next chart is a really interesting one. The little analogy that I use here is that we are very much like a young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance, and they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. They look at the inheritance and how old they are and project a reasonable life span, and, gee, the grandparents' inheritance is going to give out long before we retire. So, obviously, Madam Speaker, they have got to do one or both of two things: Either they have got to make more money, or they have got to spend less money. I use that 85/15, and others will use 86/14. The 85/15 shows what our energy dependence is now. About 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. That is like the inheritance from our grandparents: It will not last forever. And only about 15 percent of it comes from other sources. A bit more than half of it that comes from nuclear power, 8 percent of our total energy, 20 percent of our electricity. As you drive home tonight, note that every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if it weren't for nuclear power. Then we look at that 7 percent which is renewable energy, and the biggest chunk of that is conventional hydro that will not grow in our country. We may get some micro-hydro, but the big rivers have all been dammed and probably more than we should have dammed. The next biggest chunk of that comes from wood, and that is the paper industry and the timber industry wisely burning a waste product that would otherwise end up in the landfill. And then waste energy, that 8 percent. By the way, this 1 percent is 0.07 percent, because that is 1 percent of 7 percent from solar. That is a tiny, tiny amount of energy. But this was in 2000. That has been growing at 30 percent a year, so now it is about four times bigger. It is now 0.28 percent. Big deal, Madam Speaker. 0.28 percent? And that is about the same thing for wind, maybe a bit more from agriculture. Those are the energy sources we are going to have to increasingly rely on in the future. So we have got a big challenge ahead of us. The next chart depicts what we ought to be doing. The first thing we need to do is to buy some time. You see, it takes three things to develop these renewables: It takes money, and it takes energy, and it takes time. Mr. Speaker, we will not worry about the money, although we should. Because when it comes to money we just borrow it from our kids and our grandkids by running up a big debt. So let us not worry about the money here. But we cannot borrow time from our kids, and we cannot borrow energy from our kids. The only way to buy some time and free up some energy is with a pretty massive conservation program which frees up some energy. Today, Madam Speaker, there is no surplus energy to invest in alternatives. All of it is needed by the economies of the world, or oil would not be roughly $75 a barrel. Madam Speaker, what this chart denotes is a program that I think needs three qualities if we are going to make this transition in any acceptable way. First, we must have everybody involved, a total commitment like World War II. I lived through that. Everybody had a victory garden, everybody saved their household grease and took it to a central repository. It was the last war, the last time that everybody in our country was involved. We need a program, Madam Speaker, that has the total commitment of our population in World War II. It needs to have the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, because we are going to have to have a lot of technology breakthroughs and applications here if we are going to make it. Thirdly, it needs to have the intensity of the Manhattan Project. Minus that, I think we are going to have a very rough ride. We should have begun 26 years ago. Once we have freed up some time and freed up some energy, we need to use it wisely. And what has the biggest potential? What will have the biggest payoff? I think there are enormous benefits to this. I can see the American people going to bed every night thinking to themselves, gee, I really contributed today. I used less energy, I lived very comfortably, and I am really working on that new project which is going to help my kids and my grandkids to live as well as I live or maybe even better. I think that we can be a role model for the world. I think that we can develop a lot of technology that we can export, but, Mr. Speaker, we will never get there unless we start. I am wondering again, unless we close in the way we started, these two big studies paid for by our government noting the problems that we face in the future, why have not those parts of the government that paid for these reports claimed ownership? Why are they not using the resources available to them to make this information available to the American people? Why are they not coming to us with a program that says we have a big challenge, we have big opportunities, we really need to get going? Madam Speaker, I think that we have a great bright future if we challenge the American people and marshal the resource. I think we have a very bumpy ride if we do not. I look forward, Madam Speaker, to our leadership showing the way. I think Americans will follow. I think that we can be a role model to the world, and I think that we can get through this with less problems than many are depicting, but we won't get there unless we start.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, this is a historic event for me personally because it was just one year ago this date that I first came to this floor to talk about the subject of peak oil. As a matter of fact, that subject was so new that when we were preparing to give that first talk, we were debating should we talk about the great rollover or should we talk about peak oil. The great rollover refers to that peak of the curve when it rolls over and you start down the other side of that consumption curve, which is the availability curve of oil. We finally decided that the proper designation to use was ``peak oil,'' and I guess that most other people who are talking about this subject have decided the same thing, because in this year, Mr. Speaker, just about everybody is talking about peak oil. We looked at the statistics for last year and found that oil has increased about $10 a barrel, about 52 or 53 last year, 62 or 63 this year. Gasoline, I think, was about $2.05 last year. Now it is up and down a little, but $2.35, $2.45. Local stations where I live it is now $2.45. A couple of very interesting things have happened in this last year. Oh, I have another document here, Mr. Speaker, which is about another very historic event; and it was 50 years ago, the 8th of this month, and I am sorry that I didn't know that date last year or I would have tried to do my first Special Order on peak oil on the 8th of March, because it was just 50 years ago on the 8th of March that M. King Hubbert gave his very famous talk at the spring meeting of the Southern District of the Division of Production of the American Petroleum Institute, Plaza Hotel, San Antonio, Texas. And this was a startling article. It is now very historic. This was in 1956. In that speech, he predicted that the United States would peak in its oil consumption in about 1970. He did that with words. He did that with graphs, and he showed the graphs of the use of oil up to that time in 1956 and how much oil he thought that the United States would find and, therefore, when we would peak in oil production. He was able to do this, Mr. Speaker, because he had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and he found that they all followed a very similar pattern. The oil production increased until it reached a maximum. That maximum production was, for most fields, about the halfway point of all the oil that you would get out of the field. And after reaching that maximum, no matter how vigorously you pumped that field, the production fell off steadily until at the end of the exhaustion of the field it reached a zero. And he theorized that if he knew how many individual fields there were in the United States, he could predict when the United States would peak in oil discovery. This is a long paper with a lot of math in it. This wasn't just some intelligent guesses from looking at the data. He did a lot of mathematical analysis. Here is one of his graphs, for instance; and we have a larger one that we will show you in a minute. But this graph shows that he expected a peak about 1970. That was 14 years after he made this prediction. So this tonight for me is a historic event because it is 1 year since I gave the first speech here on this subject. Since then I have given nine others. This will be the 10th since then and the 11th overall. About the time I started this, 30 prominent members of our society, and let me put up a chart that shows that here for just a moment and then we will come back to two things that have happened in this year, which are really very interesting. These numbers encouraged 30 prominent members of our society, including Boyden Gray and McFarland and Jim Woolsey and Frank Gaffney and 26 others, a number of retired four-star admirals and generals, to write a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil, and import about two-thirds of what we use, is a totally unacceptable national security risk; and, Mr. President, we have to do something about that. I just want to show one chart here. Then I will introduce my colleague, and I will read a little paragraph from a recent report before doing that. This is the curve that M. King Hubbert predicted in this article, reprinted here from 50 years ago, an article and a speech. The smooth green curve here was his prediction. The larger symbols, where the actual data points, and you see that right on target, we peaked in about 1970. The red curve is the Soviet Union. They had a bit more oil than we. They peaked a little bit after us. Then they kind of fell apart when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they did not reach their potential. There will be a second little peak now, but they are nowhere near their former peak. They reached peak oil some time ago. Mr. Speaker, in fact, I think 33 of the 45 countries in the world that produce oil have already passed their peak. Many others are at their peak or rapidly approaching it. I want to read briefly from a new study, and this is one of the two really interesting things that have happened in the past year. One was a study by SAIC funded by the Department of Energy. I have some charts in a few moments that I will show, some of the comments that they made. There is another study that has just come out. Although this is not a brand-new study, the date on this study is September 2005. This is dated September 2005; but for some reason, it has not been released from the Pentagon. This was done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and I am going to read from it a little later. Ordinarily, I don't read, but I haven't had time to make charts of this. I think this is so interesting and so startling, and it just came out. Yesterday, I think, may have been the first day; and for most people today, this was the first day they could get a hold of it. Mr. Speaker, let me read you something, from that article and this will introduce my colleague, Wayne Gilchrest, who said he would be happy to come down and join me in this talk, if he could talk about global warming. I said, Wayne, that is exactly what the Corps of Engineers was talking about. Let me read what they said here: ``Worldwide consumption of fossil fuels and its coincident and environmental impact continues to grow.'' The Earth's endowment of natural resources are depleting at an alarming rate, exponentially faster than the biosphere's ability to replenish them. Mr. Speaker, I would remind you that this is not an article from some environmental journal. This is from a report, which has kind of been kept under cover now since last September, just released. I think that it was inadvertently released, by the way. But now that it is out, you can get a copy of it. This was done by the Corps of Engineers. This is a U.S. Army publication. The Earth's endowment of natural resources are depleting at an alarming rate, exponentially faster than the biosphere's ability to replenish them. It took nature 100 million years to create the energy the world uses in 1 year. Fuel consumption affects the global climate with the production of greenhouse gases and localized production of acid rain, low-lying ozone, and smog. Mr. Speaker, this is not from some environmental journal; this is from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Mining and production of fuels destroy the ecosystems and biodiversity. The loss of habitat is leading to localized extinction of species. This reduction of biodiversity results in greater vulnerability of the planet to ecological stresses. Mr. Speaker, I would like to digress for just a moment to note how wise this observation is. There may be a species that you don't think has much environmental impact; but when you lose that, you have lost a gene pool that for one reason or another we may need to go back to in the future. I just want to give one little example of this in agriculture. To produce hybrid corn, you have to have male and female. You have to take the tassels, that is the male part of the corn. You have to take the tassels off the top parts of the stalks whose ears you want fertilized by the male from the other corn. For many years they hired college students to go through and break the tassels off, always a chore because some came out later and you could not have a tassel here or there which was going to fertilize the other ears, the female part of the silk. They discovered what they call a Texas male-sterile cytoplasm. When they put this gene in the corn, the male was sterile. They didn't have to go through the field and pull off these tassels. There was a blight, I think it was, that struck all plants that had the Texas male-sterile cytoplasm. We couldn't produce any hybrid corn the way we ordinarily produce it. If it weren't for Hawaii, where we could go to produce two generations of corn, you see, we had to go back to the old gene pool that we were no longer using. We went back to that older gene pool, and they went to Hawaii where you could produce two crops of corn in 1 year. Over the winter season, they produced two crops of corn so that we would have enough seed so that we could do the planting in this country, but still the seed was somewhat scarce and considerably more expensive. This reduction of biodiversity, they said, results in greater vulnerability of the plants to ecologic stress. If the gene pool is not there, you cannot go to that gene pool for more diversity. Waste from nuclear power generation plants is accumulating, and no viable means exist to safely and effectively dispose of them. Current energy policies and consumption practices are not sustainable. They clearly limit, boy, this is quite a statement, they clearly limit and potentially eliminate options for future generations. Mr. Speaker, just think for a moment what they are saying. They clearly limit and potentially eliminate options for future generations. Mr. Gilchrest, a discussion of climate change and global warming is perfectly appropriate and anticipated by this report from the Corps of Engineers. I would yield to you, sir.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield for just a moment, I would like to note that during the Christmas break, because I am a senior member of the Science Committee, I went down to Antarctica to our experiment station down there at the South Pole. That is about as far away as you can get from any factory that is burning fossil fuels. The CO2 you measure there is going to be probably lower than the CO2 any place else; and it will fairly represent the base for CO2 increase, and they will give you a chart there, they have now been following this, charting this for a number of years. They will give you a chart which shows exactly what you said, that the CO2 is rapidly increasing. They have done corings of the ice pack there, and it goes back for tens of thousands of years. It is a desert down there with about 2 inches of precipitation a year, but it has been accumulating so long that the ice is almost 2 miles thick in the middle of the continent, up about 10,000 feet. When we go back to those corings, they can find the CO2 level of the atmosphere, because ice is totally impervious to CO2, and it is trapped there. They can find the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and they can judge from the pollen and so forth what the temperature of the Earth must have been, because there was more growth. They have found that every time in the past that there was an increase in temperature this was accompanied by an increase in carbon dioxide. You are exactly right. They have now been measuring this, I think, in the best place of the Earth to measure it. That is at the South Pole, which is as far as you can get away from any place where they are burning fossil fuels. I thought this would be interesting. It would just emphasize what you have been saying that the CO2 is increasing in our atmosphere. I yield back to you again, sir.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield again, you are talking about this exponential increase. It reminded me of a very interesting and startling statistic. Up until the Carter years, every decade, the Earth used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That slowed down after the crash of the 1970s and so forth. Up until then, each decade, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that meant was that when you had used half of all the oil in the world, that just 10 years of oil would remain. Now we are better than that today, because we have slowed down. I am going to read you some numbers in a few minutes from this report from the Corps of Engineers. But you were talking about exponential increase, and this was a startling example of exponential increase, and fortunately, we are more efficient today and we have slowed down, or we would be in bigger trouble than we are. May the gentleman continue?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming down and joining us. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to come back again to this very historic document, this speech that was given by M. King Hubbert, just 50 years and a few days ago, and because this is so important, Mr. Speaker, I would like to place this in the Record at this point. Mr. Speaker, I want to return to these numbers here, the 2 percent of world oil reserves, the 25 percent of the world's oil which we use, and the roughly two-thirds which we import. I want to look at a couple of other numbers here. We produce 8 percent of the world's oil. And we do that from only 2 percent of the reserves. What that means is we are pumping our oil pretty quickly. In a couple of minutes, I am going to read you a statement from this report from the Corps of Engineers, it startled me when I read it, that talks about relationship here. We represent a little less actually than 5 percent of the population of the world. And I want to read something else here from this report, from the Corps of Engineers. It is understood a subheading called ``Security.'' You will remember, Mr. Speaker, that it was security that these 30 people wrote to the President about, national security. ``In an age of terrorism, combustible and explosive fuels along with potential weapons-grade nuclear materials create security risks. The United States currently has 5 percent of the world's population, but uses 25 percent of the world's annual energy production. ``This disproportionate consumption of energy relative to global consumption causes loss of the world's good will.'' You need to think about what they are saying for a moment. A summer ago, I was in Europe on a trip visiting the major shipyards there. And at one of the events, one of the Europeans mentioned to me, you mean gas is still only $2 a gallon in your country, it was about $2.05, still $2 a gallon in your country? His tone was somewhere between anger and disdain. And I thought of that comment when I read this statement. ``Causes loss of the world's good will and provided a context for potential military conflicts at the cost of lives, money, and political capital. A more equitable distribution of resources is in our best interest for a peaceful future.'' That is a very wise observation, I think, Mr. Speaker. What they are saying is that our disappropriate use of these resources, only 5 percent, actually less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person out of 22, using 25 percent of the world's energy has not gone unnoticed. And they note here that it causes a loss of the world's good will. So in addition to providing for our national security, by freeing ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, it will increase the good will that the United States has in the world, is what they are saying here, and I think that is correct, Mr. Speaker. There were two things that happened in this past year that confirmed my concerns. And by the way, I need to say this evening, Mr. Speaker, what I say every time I speak about this, and that is that I hope I am wrong. I hope that all of these experts, I hope that this study by the Corps of Engineers is wrong. I hope the Hirsch report is wrong, because if they are not wrong, and if I am not wrong, I think we are in for a very bumpy ride as we transition from the fossil fuels to the renewables. Two things happened in this last year. One was this study that was done last September, dated then, but just came out now. You have to wonder a little, Mr. Speaker, why it was kind of kept under wraps for this long. And the other thing that came out was a study funded by the Department of Energy done by the very prestigious SAIC organization. Dr. Robert Hirsch, was the principal investigator on this, and it is generally called the Hirsch report. If you do a Google search, you can find the Hirsch report. Here are some comments from their report. The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and politically costs will be unprecedented. Let me read now, while that is up there, a quote from this report by the Corps of Engineers. ``The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy resources are quickly drawing to a close.'' When I read that, Mr. Speaker, I was reminded of an introductory sentence in a report by Matt Savinar, that you can find if you do a Google search for peak oil, and then click on Matt Savinar. And the first little sentence of his report says, ``Dear reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' My wife read that and said the guy is an idiot, I am not going to read any further, and I said, please reserve judgment and read on. And she did. And by the time she finished reading it, she was genuinely frightened. If you will click on Matt Savinar, you will get about 11 pages. If you then click on page 2, you will then get another 33 pages. That is well worth doing. Because there he discusses all of the potential alternatives and the pluses and minuses of these alternatives. Matt Savinar, Mr. Speaker, may be audacious, but he is not an idiot. Domestic natural gas production, reading again from the Corps of Engineers study, and listen to these numbers. They are striking and frightening. Domestic natural gas production peaked in 1973. The proved domestic reserve lifetime for natural gas at current consumption rates is, what do you think? Is about 8.4 years. Maybe that is why gas is $6, $7, it has been $12 and $14 for 1,000 cubic feet. The proved world reserve lifetime for natural gas is about 40 years, but will follow a traditional rise to a peak and then a rapid decline, like the curve that we saw a few minutes ago for oil. Domestic, that is the United States oil production, peaked in 1970 and continues to decline. In spite of feverish drilling in the 1980s and in spite of Prudhoe Bay, it continues to decline. Now this is a number, in this next sentence, which shocked me, but I saw it twice in their report, so I am guessing it is not a typo. Proved domestic reserve lifetime for oil is about 3.4 years. Now that gets us back to that we have only 2 percent, we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We are really good at pumping oil. We have been so good at pumping oil, we have drilled, by the way, 530,000 oil wells in this country. Saudi Arabia has roughly 400, Iraq has maybe 300. We are really good at pumping oil. The Corps of Engineers say that we have 3.4 years remaining. World oil production is at or near its peak. They believe we are either at peak oil or very near peak oil. And current world demand exceeds the supply, and that is why oil is $62 a barrel today rather than the $10 a barrel it was a relatively few years ago. Saudi Arabia is considered the bellwether nation for oil production. And it has not increased production since April 2003. A few months ago, the Saudi Arabia oil sheik was over in our country talking to the President. And you may have noticed from the news that he did not, I think the proper verb is could not, promise the President that the Saudis would increase oil production. One of the current experts in this area is Matt Simmons, who runs one of the largest, if not the largest energy investment bank in the world, personal energy advisor to the President, I think in both of his campaigns. And Matt Simmons had gone to Saudi Arabia, gone to the library, gone through a great deal of material there, and he has written a book with the interesting title, Twilight in the Desert. He believes, as the Corps of Engineers believes, that the Saudis have probably reached their maximum oil production. The great oil field, the granddaddy of all oil fields, Garwar, probably reached its peak production several years ago. After peak production, supply no longer meets demand. Prices and competition increase. World proved reserve lifetime for oil is about 41 years. Now, Mr. Speaker, this is not 41 years at current use rates and then you fall off a cliff. We are going to follow that traditional bell curve, the curve that the United States has been following. We are well down the other side of Hubbert's Peak now, we are going to follow that curve. There will still be a lot of oil available 40 years from now, but in greatly reduced amounts, and probably by the end of the century, we will have gone through or very close to being through the age of oil. Most of this they say, of the oil for this 41 years, is that declining availability. Our current throw-away nuclear cycle, and here is another number that surprised me, our current throw-away nuclear cycle will consume the world reserve of low cost uranium in about 20 years. That, Mr. Speaker, is at current use rates. If we build more nuclear power plants, the use rate will go up and it will last less than that. That does not mean that we cannot have nuclear power 25 years from now, what it does mean is it is going to cost more, and we are probably going to have to go to breeder reactors. France and Japan are already doing that, so it is not like we would be plowing new ground. Unless we dramatically change our consumption practices, the earth's finite resources of petroleum and natural gas will become depleted in this industry. I think there may be a little at the end of the century, but it is going to be a very small amount compared to what we are now pumping. We may, Mr. Speaker, long before that, decide that it is really not very bright to burn this gas and oil you remember which is the feed stock for a very important petrochemical industry. We really live in a plastic world. And if you look around you and see how much of your automobile, how much of your office, how much equipment you buy is made from oil, it is just everywhere. Coal supplies may last into the next century. If we can find that coal chart, I would like to look at that. Coal supplies may last into the next century depending on technology and consumption trends as it starts to replace oil and natural gas. This is a very correct statement. It may last into the next century, but only if you keep using at current use rates. It will last 250 years with current use rates. You see on the abscissa here, 250 years. But if you increase the use of oil just 2 percent, that is not much, if you increase the use just 2 percent, it reduces the supply to 85 years. When Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the detonation of the nuclear bombs, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big energy discovery in the world? And he says, it is already discovered. The most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. That is exponential growth. Just 2 percent exponential growth doubles in 35 years. And that reduces the 250 years with no growth to only 85 years with 2 percent growth; and then when you recognize that much of the use that you will have to make of that energy cannot just be coal. We will have to do in our country, and the world will have to do, what Hitler was forced to do in World War II and that is to make oil and gas from coal; and the technology for doing both of those is readily apparent. As a little boy, we did not have electricity in our house until I was near a teenager, and we used what was universally known then as coal oil lamps. And after other people were calling them kerosine lamps, we still called them coal oil lamps because the oil used in the original lamps, the oil that replaced whale oil, saved the whales, thank goodness, when we learned to get oil from coal, was called coal oil. When you use enough energy to convert the coal into an oil or a gas so you can use it, now it is shrunk to just 50 years. So their statement that it may last depending upon use is a very correct statement. They say we must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other energy sources. Policy changes, leap- ahead technology, breakthroughs, cultural changes, and significant investment are requisite for this new energy future. Time is essential to enact these changes. The process should begin now. Just back for a moment to the Hirsch report. That is not what they said. What the Hirsch report said, and I do not have those charts with me, they said unless you start 20 years before peak oil, there are going to be meaningful economic consequences. Here are some other quotes from the Hirsch report. World oil peaking is going to happen. The study by the Corps of Engineers says that, in other words, it is not ``if,'' it is ``when''; and they believe that it is now or very shortly in the future. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. And now to that list has been added the Army Corps of Engineers. Others contend it will occur later, few in this category. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. This is a startling statement. The world has never faced a problem like this. Maybe that is why our government has not claimed ownership of either the Hirsch report or the study by the Corps of Engineers. As a matter of fact, they have asked for a new study. The results of these are so startling, Mr. Speaker, and they indicate that we should have a number of years ago begun addressing this problem, and to make sure that we need to invest time, energy, and money and so forth that is going to be required if we are going to make this transition. I understand the desire of the administration to make sure that this is real so that now they have commissioned another study by the National Petroleum Council. If they are looking at the same data these other two studies looked at, they should reach the same conclusion. It is not like the Department of Defense is not doing anything, because the Department of Defense Under Secretary for Acquisition Technology and Logistics and the Office of Force Transformations is sponsoring a new interagency monthly series of seminars entitled ``Energy, A Conversation About Our National Addiction.'' And they are borrowing the President's word from his speech when he said we are ``addicted'' to oil. By the way, recovering from addiction to most things requires some trauma, and I think that there will be sufficient trauma here in breaking our addiction to oil. The Department of Defense is the single largest buyer of fuel in the United States, so I am really glad that they have initiated this series of seminars. The first speaker is Jim Woolsey, and I think the second month I will be the speaker at this series of discussions. Back to comments, and again I apologize for reading, but I have not had a chance to make charts, and these are such significant comments because the Hirsch report said, and it has been out for several months now, and we have been saying this, Mr. Speaker, this is now the 11th time that I have come to the floor to talk about peak oil. A year ago I was kind of a lone voice. As I mentioned, we were debating should we call it ``peak oil'' or the ``great rollover.'' But since then, peak oil has found its place in the common jargon and many people are talking about it, and I am really pleased that these two major studies are saying the same thing that we thought the evidence was saying when we started doing these floor speeches a year ago. Our best options for meeting future energy requirements are energy efficiency and renewable resources. Energy efficiency is the least expensive, most readily available and environmentally friendly way to stretch our current energy supplies. The oil you do not use is the cheapest oil you can buy. For efficiency and renewables, the intangible and hard to quantify benefits such as reduced pollution and increased security yield indisputable economic value. They have a little subtitle in their report called ``Petroleum'' and they say: ``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability,'' poke a hole in the ground and it came gushing out in many places, ``transportability,'' put it in a pipeline and move it hundreds of thousands of miles. Put it in a truck and carry it over the road. Put it in a tanker and carry it across the ocean. ``Transportability. Versatility.'' How many different ways do we use oil? To heat our homes, to cool our homes, to run our cars, to run our ships. How many different way do we use it? The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil's many advantages provide 1.3 to about 2.5 times more economic value per Btu than coal. Currently, they say in the report there is no viable substitute for petroleum. Let me read that again. This is the Corps of Engineers. Currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum, and petroleum has probably reached its maximum production. It will hold at about this level for about awhile, and then it will inevitably taper off. It will become smaller and smaller as we go through the years. In summary, they say, the outlook for petroleum is not good. This especially applies to conventional oil which has been the lowest cost resource. Production peaks for non-OPEC conventional oil are at hand. Many nations have already passed their peak and are now producing at peak or below peak capacity. The next chart shows where we have gotten our oil from in our country. Now, M. King Hubbert's prediction was for the lower 48. And the curve has followed exactly what he said for the lower 48. If we take out Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, you see that it peaked in 1970 and then fell off. Now we found a lot of oil in Prudhoe Bay at Dead Horse. There is a 4-foot pipeline there. I have been there at the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline, that has for a number of years been producing about a fourth of all of our domestic oil. But notice that that caused only a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. The next chart shows a stylized curve. By the way, you can make this curve as steep as you want by simply changing the dimensions on the ordinate and the abscissa. This is a 2 percent growth rate. We know that because in 35 years it doubles. And you see the little yellow there which represents the shortfall if we are at that point. I believe we are, I hope we are not, but I believe we are at that point. And this represents the shortfall that will occur over the next 35 years. Notice that the problem occurs before peaking, before you actually reach the peak. The demand curve has deviated from the supply curve. Now, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to have any energy to invest in renewables, in alternatives, we are going to have to have a pretty massive program of conservation because today there is no surplus energy to invest. If there was any surplus energy, oil wouldn't be $62 a barrel. The next chart looks back through history and that is a really interesting chart and the Corps of Engineers talked a little about this. This shows only 400 years of 5,000 years of recorded history, but it kind of puts in perspective where we are. The little brown hump on the bottom there is the Industrial Revolution that began with wood. We learned to make steel with wood. We denuded the mountains of New England. More forest today in New Hampshire than there was at the Revolutionary War. We denuded many of the hills, the mountains there to send charcoal to England to make coal. Catocin Furnace just up the road here near Emmitsburg, near Thurmont in Emmitsburg, is a little furnace where they denuded the hills there in northern Maryland to make steel there. Then you see what happened to the Industrial Revolution when we found coal. But look what happened when we found gas and oil. That is the red curve. Going on this scale, and this is only 400 years of our 5,000 years of recorded history, on this scale going almost straight up, you notice there at the top of it what happened in the seventies. It really made a difference. Remember I noted that up until the Carter years every decade we were using as much energy as we had used in all of previous history. That is on the steep part of this curve. We now have broken away from that, thanks to a lot of energy efficiency. Your air conditioner today may be two or three times as efficient as it was in the seventies. The similar thing for your refrigerator. We really are very much better today at efficiency than we were then. By the way, that is one of the things that we ought to be exporting from our country because much of the developing world is using oil energy very inefficiently. For now, about 150 years we have been in what you call the age of oil, and another 100 to 150 years, the report by the Corps of Engineers says maybe less, we will be through the age of oil. What does that mean? I started thinking about this subject probably 40 years ago. I guess it is the scientist in me. I knew that fossil fuels could not be forever, and I asked myself the question, what does that mean? Do we have 10 years remaining? Do we have 100 years remaining? Do we have 1,000 years remaining? I had no idea when I started looking into this what the dimensions of this problem were. If you can think about this, Mr. Speaker, and where we are and where we come from, for 5,000 years of recorded history, the world's population was somewhere between a half billion and a billion people, and then we hit oil. And not only did the economy grow, represented here on the ordinate by quadrillion Btus, not only did we use ever increasing amounts of energy, but boy, did our population spurt. If we had an ordinate on the other side with population curve on it, it would follow. It would pretty faithfully follow this increase in energy production. Once we are through the age of oil, and we will one day be through the age of oil, and thinking about this, I often think about my father, who was a little boy in Kentucky. He remembered the first one-cylinder gasoline engine that came into Lincoln County, Kentucky. He died in 1985. He lived within a score of years, roughly halfway, through the age of oil. What is the carrying capacity of the earth minus this incredible resource we have in gas and oil? I want to, for a moment, give you a couple of illustrations of how important this gas and oil has been to our life and our economy. Just 1 barrel of oil, the refined product you can buy now, is just a little over $100. Forty-two gallons, a little over $100 at a pump will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you in manual labor, and you buy it for $100. To give some sense, if this is probably correct, reflect on how far a gallon of diesel or gasoline, and I was drinking a little bottle of water last evening and drove by a service station and noted the $2.45 gas, and I paid more for my bottle of water than for that in the grocery store. So gasoline is still cheaper than water. But reflect on how far that little gallon of gas takes your car or your SUV and how long it would take you to pull it through. Now, I drive a Prius. I get about 50 miles per gallon, but it would take me a long time to pull my Prius 50 miles. I could get it there with a come- along and hooking to the guardrail or tree, but it would take me a long time. Another little indication of the incredible quality of these fossil fuels is electricity. If I work really hard at manual labor all day long, I can get more mechanical work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. That may be humbling to recognize that I am worth in terms of manual labor less than 25 cents a day, as compared to the energy we can get from fossil fuels. Future historians, after the age of oil, may very well wonder how we could have done this, how we could have found this incredible resource, one barrel of which provides you the work output of 12 people working for you all year long, incredible wealth, how we could have found this and not have stood back and asked ourselves the question, what are we going to do with this? How could we get the most good to the most people for the longest time out of this enormous wealth that we found under the ground? But that is not what we did. Like children that found the cookie jar, we just pigged out. I wonder what future generations will say about us. Well, our time is running out, and there are so many other things I would like to talk about. Let us look at the chart that says where we go to now, and we will transition ultimately, Mr. Speaker, to renewables. Geology will demand it. We either do it because we are running out of readily available, high quality gas and oil, or we do it on our schedule which will be a kinder, gentler schedule. These are the alternatives. We have some finite resources: the tar sands, the oil shales, the coal. We talked about coal. Nuclear, light water reactors, feeder reactors, fusion. If we ever get to fusion, we are home free; low odds, I think. These will only tide us over for a while. Then true renewables, which now represent, as the next chart shows us, tiny percentages of our total energy production. We are very much like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents have died and they have got a big inheritance and they have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from their work. They look at the reserves and their inheritance and how much they are spending, and it is going to run out. So they have got to do one of two things. Either they have got to make some more money if they want to continue that lifestyle, or they are going to have to change that lifestyle. That is exactly where we are. I use those numbers because 85 percent of our current energy use comes from coal, petroleum and natural gas, and these are not all renewables, by the way. They are alternatives. Nuclear is a bit more than half. Other people may have only 6 percent for the renewables. This chart uses seven. These renewables, seven are blown up, and you see that the biggest contributor there is conventional hydro. It is not going to grow in our world. Wood, that is, the paper industry and timber industry, wisely using a waste product, and then solar, winds, agricultural, geothermal, alcohol from fuel is part of agricultural, and energy from waste, that is a big one that should grow and could grow. Mr. Speaker, if we are going to transition to these, and we will, I shouldn't say if. We are going to. We are going to transition, but if we are going to do that as painlessly as possible, we need today a very aggressive program. Time is running out. The Hirsch report says that. The study by the Corps of Engineers says that. Common sense says that. If we are at peak oil, where is the energy going to come from to invest in the alternative? We need a program, I believe, Mr. Speaker, that has the dimensions of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan project. I think it can be very challenging. I think Americans will rise to the challenge. I think Americans will feel good about victory gardens, about getting cars that have high mileage, about two and three going together in a car. Life is so easy today that I think Americans would be challenged, that they would feel really good about making a contribution. What we need, Mr. Speaker, is a national commitment to a program that has the commitment of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan project. If we do that, Mr. Speaker, I think we can have a relatively smooth transition and Americans feel good about their contribution.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, very shortly now the juvenile diabetes people will be coming through the Congress. They do this every year, I believe. I look forward to this visit with really mixed emotions. These children come in with this disease that has and will change their lives. Many of them are so brittle that they have to have a pump embedded under their skin that pumps insulin, because the sugar may go violently up or down with potentially disastrous effects on the person. Many times a day they may have to get a droplet of blood to determine the sugar level. They will appeal to us, as they have every year for the past 5 years, please vote for Federal funds for embryonic stem cell research because they believe, like the loved ones of many other types of patients, that there could truly be miracle cures from embryonic stem cells. They will tell us that there are several hundred thousand embryos out there that are frozen in fertility clinics. I have a daughter-in-law who is going through that process now. They harvest eggs. They fertilize the eggs. First, they have to give a hormone treatment to the prospective mother so that there will be the production of more than just the one egg that is produced normally per month. They will harvest a number of eggs, 8, 10, 12 eggs. Then they will fertilize those eggs, and they will watch their growth in the laboratory, and they will choose two or three of what look like the strongest fertilized eggs, and then they will implant those in the prospective mother. The remaining eggs are frozen. It costs money to keep them there. The family may pay for that process because these little embryos that are implanted may not take, and they may need to do it again, and frozen, they could last quite a while, and they may want to have another child. So they will pay to keep them frozen for a while; but by and by, time and changes in the family, they will see no further need to keep them frozen. When they cease doing that, then the laboratory must either dispose of the embryos or bear the expense of keeping them frozen. So each year a number of these embryos are discarded, and there has been an appeal, which has been bought into by some of my very good friends in the Congress, that from a ethical perspective, why should we not get some medical use from these embryos that are going to be discarded anyhow. That is a tough position to put pro-life people in, and the reason that most, but not all, pro-life advocates are opposed to this is because they view this as the beginning of a slippery slope. Today, you are permitting the use of surplus embryos that are going to be discarded anyhow; tomorrow, you might be producing embryos. They may be stronger, younger. You may be producing embryos just so you can discard them so you could use them for medical research. I remembered the juvenile diabetes groups that come through, the children and their parents when, in 2000, I went to the National Institutes of Health when they had a briefing for Members of Congress and staff on embryonic stem cell research, the potentials and the challenge. There were a number of staff there. I think that I was the only Member of Congress who was there. I went there from a somewhat unusual background, a different background than the average Member of Congress, because in a former life, I went to school and got a doctorate in human physiology. I got it not in a medical school but at an arts and sciences campus, and so we had to take a great variety of courses. Things like limnology and ichthyology and cytology and protozoology and advanced genetics. And one of the courses I took was advanced embryology. And in that course I had an opportunity to study and learn something about the process which is so familiar to anybody who has studied biology in life, that is, the development of the embryo and how this process goes. I recognized that occasionally in humans in the early embryo, sometimes at the two-cell stage and sometimes later, and you can tell by how the babies present whether they share an amnion or simply share the chorion; how they present at birth you can tell at roughly what time in the development of the embryo did it split. And each of those halves of the original embryo, either one cell if it was a two-cell stage, or multiple cells if it was further along in the development before it split, each half produces what appears to be a perfectly normal baby. We call them identical twins. And there are tens of thousands of them out there and a great deal of scientific interest is in these twins. And a lot of research has been done, because when you are looking at two genetically identical people, you have an opportunity to make some studies and observations that you would have to use a great many more subjects to make using the usual genetic different subjects. And so recognizing that you could take half of the cells away from the original embryo and each half produced a perfectly normal baby, I rationalized, gee, it ought to be possible to take a cell from the early embryo and it would not even know it. And that is because all the cells in the early embryo are what we call totipotent or at least pluripotent. Totipotent means they can produce another embryo if you take the cell out, and pluripotent means they can produce all of the cell types that make up the body. By the time they are pluripotent, they have lost the ability to coordinate all of the different kind of cells into an integrated individual, so they could not produce an embryo. I asked the researchers at NIH, should it not be possible to take a cell from an early embryo without killing the embryo, probably without hurting the embryo, since in every set of identical twins half of the cells have been taken away from the embryo. And by the way, Mr. Speaker, one of those is a clone. I guess you can decide which one of those identical twins you would identify as the clone, but clearly one of them is a clone, and both of them develop into what appears to be, by observations over hundreds of years and more recently many years of intensive physiological and medical observation, what appear to be perfectly normal human beings. And so I asked the researcher at NIH, shouldn't it be possible to take a cell from an early embryo without killing the embryo, probably without hurting it? And they said, yes, they thought that should be possible. So a few days after that I happened to be at an event when the President was there, and I knew that he was laboring with a decision, a very difficult decision, of whether he was going to permit Federal dollars to be used in embryonic stem cell research when presently at that time the only source of embryonic stem cells resulted from the destruction of an embryo. So I told the President about the meeting at NIH and about my discussion with the researchers there, and a few days later I got a call from Karl Rove. The President had remembered that conversation and turned the follow-up over to Karl Rove, and Mr. Rove told me that he had gone to NIH and had spoken with the investigators there, and they had told him that that was not possible. I said, Karl, either they are funning you or they misunderstood your question, because these are the same people that can go into an individual cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in that cell. And they are telling you they cannot take a cell or two out of a big embryo? So he went back and asked them again and came back and called me a second time and said, Roscoe, they tell me that they cannot do that. I wondered at the time what had happened. And a couple of years later, when the researchers at NIH were in my office, they somewhat sheepishly admitted that they had permitted Mr. Rove to believe something that wasn't quite true. Because what they had told him was that they weren't sure that they could produce a stem cell line from a single cell taken from an early embryo. That is exactly what my bill had proposed to do, was to determine, with animals, whether in fact that was possible or not. They had not meant for him to believe that it was not possible to take a cell from an early embryo. Now, I cannot get inside their head to tell you, Mr. Speaker, why they permitted Mr. Rove to go away with this misconception, I can only tell you that I think that if I were in their place, I would have judged that the President might very well make the decision that it was okay to use these discarded embryos. Because, after all, they were going to be discarded anyhow, and the potential for life-saving medical applications was so great that I think that they may have rationalized that the President was going to issue an executive order which would make possible the use of Federal funds in the study of embryonic stem cells taken from these surplus embryos. That, of course, is not what the President did. I am happy to be joined this evening by Dr. Gingrey, and I wanted to engage him in a dialogue, because I think that the same kind of an emotional response that might have permitted the researchers at NIH to permit this discussion to result in a misconception by Mr. Rove, that an analogous emotional response on the part of many pro-life advocates makes it very difficult for them to even talk about the potential of any form of embryonic stem cell research because they are so conditioned that the only way in the past that we have been able to get embryonic stem cells was by destroying an embryo, and so they equate any discussion of embryonic stem cell research as requiring the destruction of an embryo. The President has a bioethics council that published a white paper in which they talked about four different techniques, potentially bioethically acceptable that could produce embryonic stem cells without destroying an embryo. And I wonder what is the best approach, because we want to carry everybody along with us. I want no one to be offended that what we are proposing, what has been proposed as a matter of fact by the President's council on bioethics is a violation of our fundamental belief that life is sacred. Every life is sacred, and particularly the least of these, this totally defenseless embryo. Their life is sacred, and we must protect that. So the research that I am proposing, that my colleague has been supporting, does exactly that. And I am wondering what is the best way to bring this community along with us so that they understand that there are potential techniques that could be used for producing embryonic stem cells that will not consist of destroying or even hurting the embryo. What do you think is the best way to approach this?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Dr. Gingrey, thank you very much. There is another consequence of this understandable emotional reaction on the part of the pro-life community, and that is the statement that is made over and over again that we have, I think it is up to 70-some now, treatments or cures from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells; therefore, why would you want to bother looking at embryonic stem cells? The reason we have 70-some treatments from adult stem cells is we have been working with them for about 3 decades and we have been working with embryonic stem cells for just a little over 6 years. A newborn baby cannot run a marathon, and there just has not been time for the medical community to develop the potential from embryonic stem cells. I will be the first to tell you that this research may be very disappointing. I hope that it will not be, because these cells really want to divide, and like an obstreperous teenager, they may be very difficult to control. But the hope is that since embryonic stem cells can certainly make any and every tissue and, potentially, organ in the body, they ought to have the greatest potential. And I wonder what we need to do so that the statement is not repeated that it is really silly to talk about embryonic stem cell research because we have 70-some treatments or cures from adult stem cells and none yet from embryonic stem cells. That is, of course, a true statement, but you need to put it in context. The reason for it is we have been working for more than 3 decades with adult stem cells and just a little over 6 years with embryonic stem cells. And I want our community to have credibility at the end of the day. How do we meet this emotional challenge?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much. I appreciate your mentioning the diabetes, particularly juvenile diabetes. The deficiency, of course, is in the Islet of Langerhan cells, named after the German scientist who first saw them. They are like little islands scattered through the pancreas. I have no idea why they are in the pancreas. They have no relationship to the physiology of the pancreas; they just happen to be there, and they are not producing enough insulin. But replacing the insulin does not cure diabetes because the person who has diabetes will end up with eye problems, circulatory problems, toes that they lose, gangrene, and so forth. And these children now are starting out with the absolute certainty that they are not going to have the quality of life of other children because just replacing the insulin does not cure diabetes. It controls many of the effects, but there will still be consequences to the diabetic. And as you mentioned, there is the hope that with embryonic stem cells we could grow Islet of Langerhan tissues. And you would not have to put those back into the pancreas. You could, as a matter of fact, put them in the groin or under the arm or under the skin, anywhere. They just have to have access to circulation. They will produce the insulin. The circulation will pick up the insulin, and then it flows to the liver and the cells of the body where it does its miracle work. But this is the reason that they are so enthusiastic about embryonic stem cell research, because of all of the diseases out there. And we spend more money on diabetes than any other disease in the country, and there is probably more debility and suffering from diabetes than any other disease in the country. And that is why they are so adamant in their desire that we permit Federal dollars to be spent, because with the power of NIH and the peer review, and they have created miracles in the past, they hope they can do another one. I would like to just look for a moment at the physiology, and the chart, boy, this is really abbreviated. I will show you a little more expanded one in a moment. But the two gametes come together and produce what is called a zygote, and this is the fertilized cell. It now has half the genes from the mother and half the genes from the father. And then that fertilized cell grows through several stages, and they have skipped the morula stage here and they go right to the blastula and then to the gastrula. And here you start the differentiation into the three germ layers. Every tissue of our body develops from one of the three germ layers: the endoderm, that is what is inside; and the mesoderm, that is what is in the middle; and the ectoderm. Very interestingly, the parts of the adult body that develop from ectoderm is our skin and our nervous tissue. Most of this, by weight, develops from mesoderm. All the muscles, all the bones develop from mesoderm. And here you see at the bottom are derivatives of the ectoderm and the mesoderm and the endoderm, and then the unique cells, the germ cells, the sperm in the male and the egg in the female. Now, adult stem cells, when you hear people talk about adult stem cells, what they are talking about is a cell down here, and one of the easiest ones to talk about are adult stem cells that have to do with making blood, and these stem cells found in the bone marrow primarily can produce a variety of cells. The polymorpho-nuclear leukocytes, the erythrocytes, the thrombocytes, all of those can be produced. Now, you can take an adult stem cell and trick it into believing that it has not gone through all of this differentiation, that it is somewhere back here so that it can now make tissues other than just the ones that it was destined to make and the organ from which you took it. And these are the techniques that are used in adult stem cell research and treatment. The next chart shows a little more detail in this development process, and this shows it in the reproductive tract of the female. Here is the ovary from which the egg is released. And the egg now starts a long journey down through the fallopian tube. It will be 7 to 10 days before it finally implants in the uterus. The sperm, of course, makes its way from the vagina up through the uterus and through the fallopian tube, and it fertilizes the egg. It shows it very correctly here. Fertilization occurs well up in the fallopian tube. A little later down and it cannot be fertilized. And this shows the production of the zygote. It shows the first cleavage to produce a two-cell mass. At this point these two cells could separate to produce two embryos, two babies. We know them as identical twins. Or it can go on to split into four cells and eight cells, and I will come back to the eight cell in just a moment because that is the one medically that is of considerable interest. Then it becomes a morula. You see it there, the compacted morula. And then you get the inner-cell mass, which you saw a pretty good picture of in the previous slide. And, of course, what we are talking about is what goes on in the laboratory now in a petri dish. You fertilize it there rather than in the reproductive tract, but the same sequence of development occurs. And they simply take the inner-cell mass out of the embryo and squash it and kill it and take the cells out to produce a stem cell line. In the laboratory, in in vitro fertilization, they grow the embryos up to the eight-cell stage, and it is at that stage that they have the most luck in implanting them in the uterus of the female. Several years ago in England, a clinic there began taking a cell, and sometimes they got two, from the eight-cell stage, and they did a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on it because if you had the option of making sure that your baby was not going to have a genetic defect like trisomy 21, mongolism, for instance, you certainly would want to avoid that if you could. They do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and if there is no genetic defect, they then take the remaining six or seven cells and implant them, and now worldwide I suspect there have been more than 2,000 babies born. There is a clinic just outside Washington, in Virginia, and a year ago I spent more than a half hour talking with two of the physicians there who have been doing this technique. So we now are producing babies with this technique, with the assurance that there will not be any genetic defects. Another really good use of that cell that you take from that, and I have to credit Mr. Dorflinger with this, the spokesman for the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and he suggested that the most ethical reason for taking a cell from the early embryo, even more ethically defensible than doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, would be making a repair kit. That is sort of the goal when you freeze the cord blood, and we had a bill that everybody but one voted for that gave Federal dollars for freezing cord blood. Those will not be embryonic stem cells. They will be adult stem cells, but at least they are closer to the genetic identity of that person than other cells would be. And more than 2,000 times worldwide now we have had a perfectly normal baby from that process. So what I had proposed to the people has, in fact, been done. And what I envision at the end of the day in our bill, H.R. 3144, does not support experimentation in humans. It is only animal experimentations to verify that these procedures are, in fact, doable and efficacious and that the embryo is not harmed. This technique and three other techniques are included in the white paper prepared by the President's council on bioethics, alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Gingrey mentioned totipotent and pluripotent, and I would like to spend a moment talking about that. Totipotent means that the cell you take could produce another embryo. Pluripotent means that it could produce all the cells, tissues, organs of the body; but it does not have the capability to organize them into a person. Ethically, if you took a cell that was totipotent, you would simply be creating a new embryo, and so the argument starts all over again. So you need to take a cell from a stage where it is just pluripotent, not totipotent. I am assured by the research community that no one has ever been successful in developing an embryo with a cell taken from the eighth stage. You see, these cells know, and I use that term advisedly, know that ultimately they are going to differentiate, and apparently that differentiation problem has started well before you see the three germ layers developing, because between the fourth stage and the eight-cell stage, they have lost their ability to be totipotent. They can now only be pluripotent. As Dr. Gingrey pointed out, it is very essential that ethically you take cells that could only be pluripotent. I have two quick slides here that look at the development of twins. This is the two intercell masses. These are when the twins develop, the identical twins develop later, when it splits later. You can see that because they each have their own amnion. They share a chorion, of course, but they each have their own amnion. Let me see the next one, which shows how you have what are called fraternal twins. Here you have two eggs produced by the mother, ordinarily only one, sometimes two, sometimes three, but ordinarily only one egg, unless you are giving some hormone treatment. Then those are now presented in separate chorions. They, of course, have their own amnion, which is the tissues around the baby which contains the fluid in which the baby floats, and the tissue around that is called the amnion. There are four techniques in the white paper. I would like to look at the technique that I have been looking about. Number two in the white paper. They credit me with suggesting that. There is a little footnote: ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001,'' and I think I actually talked to the President before that. They say it may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. We have two investigators, Landry and Verlinsky, who claim that they have done that. You see, these cells love company, and they don't behave well if they are alone and they don't have company, so that is why there was the concern that maybe you could not develop an embryonic stem cell line from a single cell. But these two investigators have done it in a very clever way. They provide company for the cells, and then they separate the company, these are other types of cells, they separate the embryonic cells from the other cells that provided company for them to encourage them to continue the division process. A second technique, as a matter of fact it was number one, mine was number two, the first technique that they talked about is a really interesting one. What this does is to propose the use of cells from an embryo much like we use organs from a cadaver. Everybody is familiar with that, and there are many people that have a will that say you can harvest their organs to benefit somebody if that would be useful. When you create these embryos in the laboratory, not all of them are robust. A fair percentage of them never make it. They divide through a few stages for a few days and then just die. This proposal is if you determine that the embryo is moribund, and there is pretty good scientific evidence that you can do that with quite some certainty, kind of equivalent to determining a person is brain dead and therefore there is no chance that they can go on with life as we know it, and his proposal is that if you determine that the embryo is not going to make it, that it will die, but before it dies, you then take a cell or cells from the embryo to create an embryonic stem cell line. This is very equivalent to taking organs from a cadaver. There may be some question as to whether you can get a really good strong cell from an embryo that is in a day or two going to be dead, but it is possible that you could do that. My bill actually asks for Federal dollars to explore all of these techniques with animal models. I was talking to one of the researchers, Dr. Hurlbut, the other day. This is Dr. Landry's proposal. I noted that I would be enormously surprised if what we found in the great apes was not going to be what we found in humans, and he agreed that he too would be enormously surprised. It may be somewhat humbling, but we share a vast majority of our organs with the great apes, the chimpanzees and orangutans and gorillas. You have to look to see genetic differences. They have the same number of chromosomes, and we share many, many, most, 90-odd percent of all the chromosomes. So it would be very unlikely that what we found in animals would not occur in humans. We have a couple more charts that address this. There has been a lot of thought given to this, and I think that we have one; let's look at the one that actually shows the depiction, yes, that one. Let us look at that one. That shows what happens in these cells, these embryos, in just a couple of days. They go from a perfectly normal looking embryo to a dead embryo, but there are clues that that is a certain result that the experts can see in these cells. So this is a potentially viable, I believe ethically acceptable technique, very analogous to taking organs from a cadaver. This is simply taking cells from what would be the equivalent in an embryo of a cadaver, an embryo that will not live, that will die. There is another technique, and I would like to submit two papers here for the Record, and these are papers describing another technique, a very interesting one. This is Dr. Hurlbut's contribution. Researchers can take an oocyte, that is the egg from a mother, and they can take the nucleus out of that oocyte and place a nucleus from an ordinary cell, like a skin cell, inside the cell, and then with a little shock treatment you can trick the cell into believing that it was fertilized, and it will go on to develop into an individual. That is how we got Dolly the Sheep. It is called cloning. Dr. Hurlbut's suggestion is, and this is called epigenetic nuclear transfer, that he alters that. The nucleus that you place in the cell has an induced genetic defect. They alter one of the genes so that the result cannot produce an embryo. There are things that happen in some mothers where you have growths and they will have teeth and hair, but it certainly is not a baby. It is not coordinated. You can turn off this gene so that what you have produced is not an embryo, could not be a baby. It is very interesting that the way you turn that off is by RNA, ribonucleic acid, rather than deoxy ribonucleic acid, which is what is in the nucleus and what makes up the genes and chromosomes. The RNA is out in the cytoplasm, and I am not so sure that a clone is going to be that identical to the original because the RNA, the cytoplasmic RNA, is going to be different; and the cytoplasmic RNA has a big influence because it can turn on and turn off genes. This is the technique used for doing this. This, I think, is from Nature Magazine, one of the premier scientific journals. It is the British equivalent to our Science Magazine. It is really multi-disciplinary and very discriminating in the articles that it prints. The bottom sequence here shows what he would do. He is producing something that cannot be a baby because the gene that is responsible for the organization of these various types of cells into a coherent human being is turned off. By the way, whether he turns that off in the cymatic nucleus before he puts it in the cell so you avoid the argument that you are altering an embryo, because it is not an embryo, it is just a nucleus from a skin cell and he turns off the gene there, and then he takes the cell out of an oocyte and places this nucleus from the skin cell with the genetic alteration, places it in there. This is also a potentially viable technique. All of these, by the way, you can argue that you may have some ethical problem with it. You may argue that you are intentionally creating a freak here just so you can harvest the cells from it. But since you are doing this before you place the nucleus in the oocyte, you are simply altering the nucleus in a skin cell, I think you can get by the ethical arguments. Let us go back for a moment to the ethical arguments, because they are very important. I want to make sure that sensitivities of nobody in the pro-life community are violated. The technique that I suggested to the President and the one that is described in our bill, we would not get the stem cells until several things had happened over which we have no control and no influence. The first thing is that a couple has decided that they are going to do in vitro fertilization. In addition, they have decided that they want to create a repair kit for their baby. They may or may not decide that they want to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. By the way, you can do both of those in the same cell. You simply culture the cell and you have now more than one, ultimately many, so you can take a cell for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. They will have made the decision they want a repair kit. All we are asking for is a few surplus cells, one will do, a few would be better, a few surplus cells from their repair kit. What this would do is provide for that baby, then a child, then an adult, throughout its life the potential that if it had diabetes, you could develop other Langerhans cells from its repair kit that are genetically absolutely identical to the person so there would now be no threat of rejection. This would clearly, clearly be miracle medicine. I think we have gotten by the ethical objections, because whether or not you believe that parents ought to use in vitro fertilization, these parents have decided to do that. Whether or not you believe they should take a cell to produce a repair kit, these parents have decided to do that. So they have already made those two decisions, both of which I think are ethical. Parents really want a child when they will go to the extent of in vitro fertilization. As I mentioned, my daughter-in-law is going through that. And after the surgery for harvesting of the cells, she cannot even drive a car for quite a while. This is not a casual procedure. So these are loving parents who want a child. And I think it would be very rational that they would want that child to have a repair kit if they could, and we are simply asking for a few surplus cells from the repair kit. I should mention the fourth procedure that is in this white paper, and that is the dedifferentiation of the adult cells. This dedifferentiation is a play on differentiation, and what happens is that the single cell produced by the union of two gametes, called the zygote, this cell now differentiates. It produces tissues that are endoderm, from which the lining of your intestinal tract and lungs and the lining of your blood vessels will come, the mesoderm and so forth. So they have differentiated. You can now potentially get the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell if you can simply take one of these adult cells and trick it into believing that it has not differentiated. What you will do is dedifferentiate it. I do not know how consistently you can do that, but that is why we need to do the research. On occasion you can do that, and I do not know how consistently you can do it. I do not know how viable the tissues will be once you have done it, but that is the reason that you do research. I would just like to again mention that our bill, 3144, does not provide any Federal funds for any work on humans. It is only animal experimentation. And it would provide Federal money for working on all of the techniques that the President's Council on Bioethics indicated might be ethically acceptable under the right circumstances. Of course, one of the things that is very much involved in whether it is ethical or not is, does it do harm to the baby? And that is why the animal experimentation first. We want to make sure that in fact these techniques can occur. We want to make sure that there is no negative effect on the embryo. There should not be, Mr. Speaker, unless you think that identical twins are somehow deficient, there should not be any medical effect, because we have, over hundreds of years, tens of thousands of identical twins, all of which appear to be perfectly normal human beings. The potential for healing, medical applications in embryonic stem cells is just incredibly great, which is why the big interest in this. It is why the people at NIH would really like funding for this. It is why the groups that will come to see us, the juvenile diabetic groups that come to see us, will be advocating so strongly for research with embryonic stem cells, because this really could be a big, big breakthrough. It could provide miracle cures that we can only dream of today. We need to make very sure that we are not crossing ethical bounds, that we are purely ethical. Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned that none of my friends in the pro- life community be offended by any of this research, which is why the animal experimentation first, with a clear bioethical look at this. I appreciate very much this opportunity to discuss this. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the articles I referenced earlier. Production of Pluripotent Stem Cells by Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming As described in the President's Council on Bioethics' recent White Paper, altered nuclear transfer (ANT) is a broad conceptual proposal for producing pluripotent stem cells without creating and destroying embryos. In the description set forth below, we outline a research program for a form of ANT that should allow us to produce pluripotent stem cells without creating or destroying human embryos and without producing an entity that undergoes or mimics embryonic development. The method of alteration here proposed (oocyte assisted reprogramming) would immediately produce a cell with positive characteristics and a type of organization that from the beginning would be clearly and unambiguously distinct from, and incompatible with, those of an embryo. Incapable of being or becoming an embryo, the cell produced would itself be a pluripotent cell that could be cultured to establish a pluripotent stem cell line. Significantly, this cell would not be totipotent, as a zygote is. Our proposal is for initial research using only nonhuman animal cells. If, but only if, such research establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that oocyte assisted reprogramming can reliably be used to produce pluripotent stem cells without creating embryos, would we support research on human cells. With few exceptions all human cells contain a complete human genome, i.e. the complete DNA sequence characteristic of the human species. Specifically, one-celled human embryos, pluripotent human embryonic stem (or ES) cells, multipotent human adult stem cells, and differentiated (specialized) adult human cells such as neurons all contain a complete human genome. Thus, possession of a human genome is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defining a human embryo with its inherent dignity. Rather the nature of each cell depends on its epigenetic state, i.e. which subset of the approximately thirty thousand human genes is switched on or off and, if on, at what level. For example, the gene for albumin, a liver specific protein, is found both in human embryos and in adult human liver cells called hepatocytes. However, neither the messenger RNA (mRNA) for albumin nor the protein itself is found in single-celled embryos because in them the gene is silenced. This fundamental observation has given rise to the concepts of cell fate plasticity and epigenetic ``reprogramming.'' If successful, reprogramming converts a cell from one kind to another by changing its epigenetic state. The ability to clone animals, such as Dolly the sheep, by transfer of a specialized adult nucleus to an enucleated oocyte demonstrates the power of epigenetic reprogramming: the oocyte cytoplasm is sufficient to reprogram the somatic nucleus to a totipotent state. Human cloning has been proposed as a means of generating human embryos whose pluripotent stem cells would be used in scientific and medical research. Here, through a form of altered nuclear transfer, we propose to utilize the power of epigenetic reprogramming in combination with controlled alterations in gene expression to directly produce pluripotent cells using adult somatic nuclei, without generating and subsequently destroying embryos. How do pluripotent stem cells differ from totipotent single-celled embryos? Several key transcription factors essential for establishing and maintaining the pluripotent behavior of ES cells have been identified. Importantly, some of these are specifically expressed only in pluripotent cells, such as embryonic stem cells or the cells found in the inner-cell-mass (ICM) of the week-old embryo or blastocyst. They are not expressed in oocytes or single-celled embryos. Expression of these factors therefore positively defines and distinguishes mere pluripotent cells from embryos. These factors instruct a cell to have the identity of a pluripotent cell. Currently, the best studied example is the homeodomain transcription factor called nanog (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al. 2003*). Nanog is not present in oocytes or single-celled embryos, but first becomes expressed weakly in the morula and then highly in the ICM (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al. 2003; Hatano, Tada et al. 2005). Deletion of nanog does not prevent early cleavage stages of embryogenesis including formation of the ICM but does prevent the formation of an epiblast (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al. 2003). ES cells in which nanog is blocked lose their pluripotency--which clearly shows that nanog is a positive factor instructing cells to be pluripotent, i.e. to behave like an ES cell. Furthermore, ES cells which constitutively express nanog can no longer be differentiated, i.e. are forced to remain in their undifferentiated state (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al. 2003). We propose a procedure that combines epigenetic reprogramming of a somatic nucleus with forced expression of transcription factors characteristic of embryonic stem cells, to produce a pluripotent stem cell. As a result of this procedure, nanog and/or other, similar factors, would be expressed at high levels in somatic cells prior to nuclear transfer, to bias the somatic nucleus towards a pluripotent stem cell state. Such altered nuclei would then be epigenetically reprogrammed by transplantation into enucleated oocytes. Alternatively or concomitantly, the mRNA for these same factors could be introduced into the oocyte prior to nuclear transfer. This procedure could ensure that the epigenetic state of the resulting single cell would immediately be different from that of an embryo and like that of a pluripotent stem cell: the somatic-cell nucleus would be formed into a pluripotent stem-cell nucleus and never pass through an embryonic stage. Therefore, unlike some other proposed methods of ANT, this method would achieve its objective not by a gene deletion that precludes embryonic organization in the cell produced, but rather by a positive transformation that generates, ab initio, a cell with the distinctive molecular characteristics and developmental behavior of a pluripotent cell, not a totipotent embryo. This should allow us to produce a pluripotent stem cell line with controlled genetic characteristics.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, sometime ago, our Department of Energy commissioned a study with SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, to do a study on the peaking of world oil production, impacts mitigation, and risk management. This very prestigious scientific organization took some time to complete this study; and when they completed it, they made a recommendation to the Congress and to the Department of Energy. Part of what they said in their recommendation is included here: ``The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem.'' That is quite an adjective to use. No risk problem like this ever in the history of the world is what they are saying: ``. . . unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. And without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political cost will be unprecedented.'' Again, Mr. Speaker, they are pointing out, and they will use these words in a chart I will have a little later, that the world has never faced a problem like this. ``Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand side, but to have substantial impact they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.'' When will peaking occur? Do we have a decade? And they are saying if we do not have a decade, we're going to have problems. Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars, and require many years of intense effort. Our next chart, which speaks to the same phenomenon, inspired 30 of our leaders, Boyden Gray, McFarland, James Woolsey, and about 27 others, many of them four-star retired admirals and generals, to write a letter to the President. In that letter they said, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world oil reserves, that we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use represents a totally unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we need to do something about that. Two other numbers here are of significance. We represent a bit less actually than 5 percent of the world's population, about one person out of 22. And in spite of the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world oil reserves, we produce about 8 percent of the world's oil. We need to keep this in mind for some of the later charts we are going to show, because what this means is that we are pumping our little reserves, only 2 percent, four times faster than the rest of the world. If we were pumping it as fast, with 2 percent of the reserves, we would be producing 2 percent of the production; but we are producing 8 percent. So if the world is going to run into trouble with decreasing amounts of oil, Mr. Speaker, we are going to get there first because we are pumping our oil more rapidly. How did we get here? The next chart speaks to that, and we need to go back about six decades. There was a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, who worked for the Shell Oil Company; and he noted the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields. We would find an oil field, we would start pumping, and the oil field would reach a maximum production. And then after the maximum production, at about half of its total ultimate production, it would start falling off. No matter how hard they pumped, it would produce less and less oil, until finally the field petered out. He rationalized that if he knew how many oil fields there were in the United States and roughly what their reserves were, and if he could predict how many new oil fields the United States would find, he could then add up all these little bell curves and he would get a big bell curve which would tell him when the United States was going to peak in oil production. So he did that in a paper in 1956, and he wrote in that paper that with this analysis he predicted that the United States would peak, and that was the lower 48 at that time, that the United States would peak in oil production and consumption of our own oil about 1970. Right on schedule, and some authorities will say 1970 and some will say 1971, but as this chart shows, the smooth green curve here was his prediction peaking about 1970, and the more ragged large green symbols represent the actual production, which pretty much followed his curve. And it did peak, as you can see, at about 1970; and it has been downhill since then. By 1980, we knew very well that we were downhill, and the early Reagan years provided a lot of incentives for drilling. There were a lot of oil wells drilled in our country. Notice the tiny increase from that. It simply brought us back to the curve that had been predicted by M. King Hubbert. Now, the red curve here is the curve for the Soviet Union. They had more oil than we, and they peaked higher than we. And when the Soviet Union fell apart, you see that they broke away from the predicted decline. They are now going to have a second little peak here, and then it will be falling off. They will never get back to their earlier peak of oil production. The next chart shows some detail about where our oil has come from through the years. And if you are looking only at the lower 48, you are going to be following this curve. And if you add to it the liquids that we are getting from gas, you will see that it still followed Hubbert's curve. It peaked in 1970 and then fall off. But we found a lot of oil in Alaska. As a matter of fact, I have been there, Mr. Speaker, at mile zero, at Dead Horse, Prudhoe Bay. And through that pipeline has come for the last several years a fourth of all of our domestic production. But notice that in spite of that enormous find of oil in Prudhoe Bay, there was just a little blip on the downside of Hubbert's peak. This yellow here on the chart is very interesting. That, you may remember, Mr. Speaker, was the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. I remember how that was hyped. That was going to save us. There was plenty of oil there. That was all it did, Mr. Speaker. It hardly slowed us down. In terms of the total amount that we were producing, you can hardly see any effect of the Gulf of Mexico oil discovery. We were thinking about that discovery and those wells in the recent hurricane. There are 4,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico. By the way, Mr. Speaker, that is about 10 times as many wells as there are in all of Saudi Arabia. We have about 530,000 oil wells in our country, about 80 percent of all the oil wells drilled in all the world. Maybe that is why we are able to produce oil from our reserves relatively four times faster than the rest of the world. The next chart looks back through history, and it shows two things. It shows two curves, one superimposed on the other. One of the curves is the discovery curve, and this shows when we found the big oil fields starting way back in the 1930s, and then a lot of them in the 1940s, and some big oil fields found in the 1950s. But notice that this follows kind of a curve like so, and it peaks at about 1970, and it has been falling off ever since that. In spite of very large profits from the oil companies, they are not finding much more oil. I might note, Mr. Speaker, that the profits for the oil companies was inevitable. They do not set the price of oil. Chevron and BP and ExxonMobil, they do not set the price of oil. The price of oil is set by you and me and all the other roughly 7 billion people in the world who use oil. We set the price by our demand relative to the supply. As supply has fallen off in the last several years, the price has gone up. Oil companies that were making money at $25 a barrel, how much more money do you think they will make when oil is $65 a barrel? We should not be carping about how much money they make; what we should be looking at is how responsibly they use the profits they make. Some of those profits need to be invested in finding new oil fields, but the experts do not think there is much more to find. Several Congresses ago I was chairman of the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. We had the world's experts in to talk about how much oil is out there that we can realistically pump. There was general agreement, quite surprising agreement, that it is roughly 1,000 gigabarrels. Giga is used because in Europe a billion is not our billion so if you say billion, not everybody will understand it. So giga means a billion, and it means the same thing around the world. A thousand gigabarrels is about a trillion barrels of oil. That may sound like a lot, but it is about the amount of oil that we have pumped so far in all of history. If you divide the 84 billion barrels a day that we are using today into that trillion barrels of oil, it comes out to about 40 years. Most of the experts believe we have found about 95 percent of all of the oil we will find. We now have very sophisticated seismic techniques with 3-D computer modeling. This is what they believe will be found, this gray-shaded area over here. It is not going to follow that smooth curve, but on average that is how much they think we will find. The solid black line here represents the amount of oil we have been using. Up until about 1980, we always found more oil than we were using. There was always a big reserve out there. Since 1980, we have found less and less oil, and we have been using more and more oil. We have been able to do that because we are now using up some of these reserves we found before. All of the oil that we can use has to be all the oil that is there. If you have not found it, you cannot pump it. So you make your own judgment how much oil you think we are going to find in the future, then you add that to the reserves back here. That is going to be the area under this curve from now on. By the way, this 40 years that I mentioned, that is not a plateau. You do not plateau out for 40 years and then fall off a cliff. It is going to follow that typical bell curve of every oil field. By the way, 33 of the top 45 oil-producing countries have now peaked. It is only a few that have not peaked. What will this curve look like from here on? We can change the shape. If we use some of our good recovery enhancement techniques, we can pump oil a little faster, and we may pump a little more, so we may get a little more out of these fields than depicted here. This is not all of the oil in the fields because probably half of the oil there will not get pumped because it is so difficult to get, it is going to cost more energy to get the oil than you get out of the oil. So you get to the point of you stop getting the oil. As the old farmer said, at that point ``the juice ain't worth the squeezing,'' so we stop trying to get oil at that point. The next chart shows a simple schematic that depicts the problem and where we are. Everybody may not agree this is where we are. Most of the people that have thought about peak oil think we are here or will shortly be here. This is a 2 percent growth curve. With 2 percent growth, that doubles in 35 years. This point is twice that point, and so this is a 35-year period from here to here. Notice what this chart points out is that you start having a problem before peaking because the exponential use curve, the demand curve keeps going up like this, whereas when we reach peak oil, it will of necessity level off, and then no matter what we do, it will inexorably go downhill after that. It does for individual oil fields. It has for the United States. By the way, the same M. King Hubbard that predicted we would peak in about 1970, he was right on. He predicted that the world would peak about now. If he was right about the United States, maybe he is right about the world, and maybe we should have been paying some attention to that. I would submit that we have now, in common parlance, we have blown 25 years when we knew very well M. King Hubbard was right about the United States. If he was right about the United States, would not it have been prudent to recognize that maybe he just might be right about the world? If he is right about the world, the world is about to peak in oil production now, then we should have been doing something during these last 25 years so this would be a smoother transition. The next chart shows us the alternatives. As the world peaks in oil production, we are going to have to, first of all, turn to some finite resources, and we are now doing that. I will chat for a moment about those. And those will not last forever. They are finite, as the word implies, except for nuclear, which is kind of different. The only nuclear that is finite is light water reactors that use fissionable uranium. If we go to breeder reactors, as the term implies, you make more fuel than you are using, and that could go on and on. You have to accept the problems you buy there with the enrichment and moving fuel around that could make bombs and so forth. Of course, the one thing that gets us home free is nuclear fusion. If we could harness the kind of energy that the sun sends down to us every day, we are home free. But, Mr. Speaker, the odds of our doing that are a bit like you or me solving our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice, and by the way, I do not play the lottery, but I do not think that rational people count on solving their economic problems by winning the lottery, and neither do I think that we should count on solving our energy problems of the future by nuclear fusion. That does not mean I do not support it. I vote every year for all of the money, $250 million or so, that we put into that, because we have to try. If we do not successfully harness nuclear fusion, we have a really challenging road ahead. Let us look at these finite resources and what kind of potential we can expect from them. There is a lot of suggestion today about the tar sands up in Alberta, Canada. There are enormous reserves there. The reserves there are at least as large of all of the oil reserves in all of the world. Then what we are worrying about? Well, because it is there does not necessarily mean that we can harness it in enough quantities or soon enough to really make a big contribution. As an example, Mr. Speaker, every day the Moon goes around the Earth roughly in a day, and it lifts the oceans about 2 feet. That is an incredible amount of energy. I carry two gallon buckets of water and lift them up, that is a lot of energy. If we could harness the energy of the tides, we would be home free. There is an old adage that says energy to be effective must be concentrated, and because those tides are spread out over all of the oceans of all of the world, it is difficult to harness them. The tar sands are a little like that. There is an incredible amount of energy there, and the Canadians are working very hard at harnessing that. Let me see if I can remember the numbers. I think they have a shovel in Alberta, Canada, that lifts 100 tons at a time and dumps it into a truck that carries 400 tons, and I think those are the right numbers. It carries them to a place where they are cooked, because the oil in those tar sands is a bit better, but kind of like the oil in your asphalt road. If you put a blow torch on an asphalt road and mix it with some lighter fuels, it will flow. That is kind of like what we are doing with the tar sands. They are working very hard, and they are producing a million barrels a day. We will talk in just a moment about energy profit ratio. They are making a lot of dollars doing that because it costs them less than $30 a barrel to make it. The oil is now bringing $60-some a barrel, so the dollar-profit ratio is up there. They are using, I have heard, maybe more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. That makes good sense for them because they have natural gas there, and it is hard to ship, and it is relatively cheap, and the oil is easy to ship and in high demand at $60-some a barrel. Mr. Speaker, by the end of the day, we really need to be thinking about energy profit ratio because that is what will be telling. They are now producing a million barrels a day, and if they work real hard, they will be producing 2 million barrels a day in 5 years. Big deal. The world today is using 84 million barrels a day, and if they work really hard, 10 years from now they will be producing 3 times as much as today, 3 million barrels a day, but the world would like to be using another 40 million barrels a day. I do not think it will be there, but if you project our current demand for those 10 years, we would like to be using another 40 million barrels of oil, and they will be producing another 2 million barrels of oil, \1/20\ of the additional oil the world would like to use. Although there is a lot of energy there, and I am sure that we will find techniques to get it out that have some energy profit ratio so there will be energy there for a long time, but it is not going to be available anywhere near the quantities needed to meet the needs of contending with the crisis that will occur with peak oil. Now, the oil shales in our country are very much the same thing. Recently you may have read of an experiment out in Colorado. I think it was Shell Oil Company that devised a new technique for getting the oil out of the oil shales, which is like the oil in the tar sands. It is very thick and will not flow. What they did to avoid polluting the groundwater was drill a series of holes in a circle, and then they froze the ground because the oil will not move through frozen ground. Inside that frozen vessel, if you will, they cooked and cooked it for a year. They put steam down and cooked it for a year. After that year, they started sucking on the oil, and for another year they cooked and they sucked, and they got a pretty meaningful amount of oil out of that. There is an awful lot of oil in the oil shales, maybe about as much as in the tar sands, but the scale, scaling up for this is incredibly difficult. I am not sure what the energy profit ratio is, because if you have to freeze the perimeter of that big vessel, if that is what you want to call it, and then you have to cook it for a couple of years, obviously you are putting a lot of energy in. They believe they got more energy out than they put in. But still, the energy profit ratio is not going to be enormous. Even if you can make that attractive, you still have the problem of scale. With the world using 84 billion barrels of oil a day, you have to have a lot of a million here, a million there before it adds up to what we are using. Coal, you may hear people do not worry about energy, we have 500 years of coal. That is not true. At current use rates, we have about 250 years of coal. That is a long time, so why are we worrying? If we have 250 years of coal at current use rates, and obviously you can do with coal what we do with oil. Hitler did it. When we denied him access to oil, he made oil out of coal. When I was a little boy, the lamps that we call kerosene lamps today, we called them coal oil lamps because they were filled with oil, made from oil. So if you must use coal, if you have greater demand than we use today, that 250 years quickly shrinks. I have a chart a little later that shows that. But it quickly shrinks to about 85 years, and if you have to use some of the energy to convert the coal since you cannot have a trunkload of coal in your car, the energy to do that now shrinks that supply. There is only a 2 percent growth rate, and I think we will have to use it at much more than 2 percent growth rate, and it shrinks it to 50 years. So we have to husband that resource very wisely. We have already chatted briefly about nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Today we produce 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. France produces 75 or 80. If you have some concerns about nuclear power, when you drive tonight note that every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if were not for nuclear energy. One-fifth, 20 percent, of all the electricity in our country comes from nuclear. Well, once these are gone, and they will be gone, except nuclear breeder reactors, as many of those as we want to have and maybe, maybe if we are lucky nuclear fusion. But we will transition, Mr. Speaker, whether we like it or not, as the world runs out of oil, we will transition to the renewables. What are they? They are solar and wind and geothermal. Geothermal is when we tap into the molten core of the Earth when we are close enough to that that you can get some heat from that. If you go to Iceland, there is not a chimney there because all of their energy comes from geothermal. We are trying very hard, as I mentioned previously, to tap into ocean energy. It is not just the tides. It is the waves. It is the thermal gradients in the ocean, the cold water at the depths, the warmer water on top, kind of a thermal couple effect that you can get there. Then there is lots and lots of talk about getting energy from agriculture. Soy diesel, bio diesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass. The President mentioned it in his State of the Union. He said we are hooked on oil and have got to wean ourselves from that, and technology will do it. And he talked about some exciting technology, about taking some biomass like soybean stubble and corn stalks and switch grass. What is switch grass? Switch grass is prairie grass, and a lot of it grows. Of the prairie that we did not plow up and let that return to switch grass, it is a big crop every year. And they are talking about harvesting that and using something like culling cellulosic ethanol. We bioengineered a little organism that can split cellulose into its requisite glucose molecules. It is made of sugar. Sure does not taste like sugar. See, because the human's molecules are so closely tied together that the enzymes in our body cannot split them. But these little bioengineered organisms can do that, so we break cellulose down to glucose, and then we ferment the glucose, and we get ethanol from it. And there is a lot of talk about that. And biomass. Waste energy. Burning waste. There is a plant not far from here in Montgomery County, I would be proud to have it by my church. It looks like an office building. You do not even know it is an incinerator burning trash and producing electricity. They bring the trash in by truck or train in containers. You do not even see it until it is inside the building and then they dump it. Really interesting to watch it because that trash comes in with all sorts of things in it. They have a crane there that picks it up and drops it to see if there is something evil in it like a tank of propane. You would not want to put that in the fire. It might explode. And if they drop it and there is nothing evil-looking in it, they pick it up again and drop it over into the fire. It is really worth a trip there. And we now get a meaningful amount of energy, as a later chart will show from waste to energy. Then hydrogen. Many people think that we do not have to worry about energy because we have got hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. Hydrogen is simply a way of transferring energy from one point to another. It will always cost more energy to make hydrogen than you will get out of the hydrogen. I can say that with some confidence because just as sure as there will never be a perpetual motion machine, we will never suspend the second law of thermodynamics. And that says that when you transfer energy from one form to another, you will always loose some energy in that transfer. Why are we so enthusiastic about hydrogen if that is true? It is because hydrogen has some incredible capabilities. When you burn it, you get water. That is really not very polluting, is it? And further more, hydrogen is a great thing to put in a fuel cell. And a fuel cell gets twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. So I am not depreciating the value of looking at hydrogen. I am simply pointing out that hydrogen is little more than a battery which takes energy from one place to another place. As a matter of fact, in a recent hearing, we had three experts on hydrogen, and there are three ways that you could transport hydrogen. One is as a liquid. It must be really, really cold, several hundred degrees below zero to keep it as a liquid, which means you have to have a lot of insulation, and even then it is going to boil off, so you have got to use it faster than that boils off. The other way to carry it is as a gas. Well, hydrogen is the lightest element we have. Those gas molecules are really trying to get apart from each other, so it takes a really high pressure vessel to contain hydrogen. The third way to transport hydrogen is in solid state. You adhere the hydrogen either by some adhesion or by some chemical process. You carry it in a solid state. That is very much like the way we carry electrons in what we call a battery. Hydrogen is a proton plus an electron; and so, and I asked the question, is a hydrogen battery inherently going to be more efficient than an electron battery? Well, we really need to look at hydrogen, but it is not a salvation to our problems. The next chart looks at the characteristics that we are going to want to find in whatever alternative we turn to, and here we have on the ordinate the energy profit ratio. I have talked about energy profit ratio. That is how much energy you put in compared to how much energy you get out. And our big oil fields here, you see, they are up at 60 to one. As a matter of fact, the charts were even higher. Some of those were more than 100 to one. By the way, there were none of those in our country. They exist only in the Middle East and most in the big Darwar oil field. The granddaddy of all oil fields is in Saudi Arabia. And the energy profit ratio is 60. You put in one unit of energy, one BTU, and you get out 60 BTUs. The abscissa here is economic effectiveness in transport, that is, how handy is it to use. And we are talking primarily about transportation and liquid fuels, how handy is it to use. Well, oil of course is the handiest thing to use. It is way over here on the right. And it had an enormous energy profit ratio if it came from the giant oil fields. In 1970, when we peaked, our energy profit ratio was down here. Now it is harder and harder to get our oil, and so by 1985 the energy profit ratio had slid down to here. Notice where the energy profit ratio is for tar sands and ethanol and that sort of source: way down here, just about zero. In fact, some people think that the energy profit ratio for ethanol, the way that it is frequently made, is below zero here, that more energy goes into making ethanol from the fossil fuels that made the tractor and plows field and makes the fertilizer and so forth than you get out of the ethanol. Well, here we have some of the other things: hydro, coal fired, nuclear, photovoltaics. They now are getting much better. They are moving up in energy profit ratio. Wind machines should be on here too, and they would be about in this same category. So whatever alternative energy source we use, to see how useful it is going to be, we need to put it on this chart: does it have a high energy profit ratio, and is it really convenient to use for transportation. The next chart is one which really has the long look. I like this chart because it is kind of humbling. It kind of puts us and oil and our whole history into perspective. Here we have only about 400 years, a little less than 400 years out of 5,000 years of recorded history. But for the first 4,600 years not a whole lot happened. And so if you extended this back 4,600 years, it would look very much the same. Very little energy produced. Here you see it. Wood. And then we learned how to use it more effectively. The Industrial Revolution started here in the early 1800s. We denuded the hills of New England to send charcoal to England to make steel. There is a little historic place called Catoctin Furnace up in Frederick County, and we denuded our hills up there to make charcoal for Catoctin Furnace. And then we found coal. Oh, the ordinate here is quadrillion BTUs, how much energy you are producing. And then we found coal. And boy, look what happened. Look what happened. We really took off. The coal was very limited in what it could do compared with gas and oil, and the red curve here is gas and oil. And look what happened. It just took off and was reaching for the sky. Notice here the worldwide recession after the Arab-induced oil price spike hikes, worldwide recession, and we did use less oil. So we can economize. We can be more efficient. We can use less. I might point out, Mr. Speaker, that the world's population has pretty much followed this. Just this afternoon I was looking at a chart of world population. Half a billion, a billion people for way back as far as we can look in history. And then we start the Industrial Revolution, and the world's population took off and it mirrors this. From a half a million, half a billion to a billion people up to now nearly seven billion people. If, in fact we are at peak oil, and almost nobody denies, the most optimistic estimate I have ever seen is that we will reach peak oil at about 2035 or 2036. You know, that is not forever in the future. Most authorities believe that we are either here or it is very imminent. But if we have reached peak oil, we are about halfway through the age of oil. That is incredible. Out of 5,000 years of recorded history, 150 years now we are into the age of oil. In another 150 years we will be through the age of oil. Our great grandchildren will live then. What will their world be like? We face a lot of really serious challenges. Mr. Speaker, when I think back, and someone asked me the other day how long I have been thinking about this subject, and maybe it is because I am a scientist. I knew that the fossil fuels could not be forever and so maybe 30, 40 years ago, when I was teaching school and doing research, I started asking myself that question, what does that mean, not forever? Do we have another 10 years, a hundred years, a thousand years? Obviously, it is not going to last forever. But what does that mean? And so I have been following this for 30, 40 years now. The next chart looks at something that I have spoken briefly about and that is coal. And some will tell you, and I have heard a lot of people who ought to know better say, do not worry, we have got 250 years of coal. That is true, at current use rates. But if you start increasing coal only 2 percent a year, you know, Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy, what is next? What is the most powerful force in the universe, Dr. Einstein? You know what his response was? The power of compound interest. That is exponential growth. Compound interest. And if you grow only 2 percent a year, that 250 years now immediately shrinks to about, what, 85 years here? And obviously you cannot fill your trunk up with coal. You are going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid. And so when you have used some energy to convert it to a gas or a liquid, after conversion you have got about 50 years left. That is a long time. And it is a meaningful resource. But it is not forever. And by the way, there are one of two penalties you are going to pay for burning coal. Either you are going to pay a big environmental penalty if you do not clean it up. And every year we vote some billions of dollars for clean coal technology. And still we have too much CO2, too much pollution from coal. And by the way, Mr. Speaker, the use of coal is not without its price. We have had, what, 16 miners killed in West Virginia in the last couple of weeks in producing coal. When was the last time you heard that a worker in a nuclear power plant was killed or injured? The answer is, never in this country. It just has not happened. I lived through the Three Mile Island disaster. I was not very far from it in Frederick, Maryland. There was a lot of hoopla about that. Very little actual effects of that. I have some friends who have been avidly antinuclear. When they are considering the alternative of shivering in the dark as we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak, they are wisely taking a new look at nuclear. Our next chart is a very interesting one. We have talked about the potential from agriculture. Let me make two generalizations as a caution. We are barely able to feed the world. Tonight, 20 percent of the world or so will go to bed hungry. How much food can we convert to energy and still feed the world, particularly if we permit the world's population to increase as it is today? The other caution is, how much biomass can we take from our land and still have topsoil? With all of our good techniques today, no till farming and so forth, every bushel of corn we grow in Iowa is accompanied by three bushels of topsoil that go down the Mississippi River. Now, topsoil is topsoil, rather than subsoil simply because it has organic matter in it. And that organic matter, the humus comes from decaying organic material. And if you are taking all that organic material off to burn or to ferment or whatever you are going to do with it, I am not certain how long we can maintain the quality of our topsoil so that we can continue to produce the food and fiber that we need and that the world needs. On the top here are shown two depictions. One is the amount of energy you get out of petroleum. Obviously, you do not get all the energy in your car. It takes energy to drill the wells, to pump it out, to transport it, to refine it, to haul it to the gas station and so forth. So when we get out 1 million BTUs, there are probably, they estimate, it took 1.23 million BTUs input. So you do not get it all in your car. You would not expect to. Now, what about the energy profit ratio here of ethanol? And here we are getting a lot of energy from the sun. What does that mean in terms of the final product? And I am told by some this is a pretty optimistic assessment here. But even if we reach this, you have put in .74 million BTUs. Almost three-fourths of the energy you get out of ethanol is represented by the energy that went into producing ethanol. There is an energy profit ratio, although some have disputed that. There is a doctor in the East here and one in the West, and they have done what they say is a very good analysis of all the energy, and it is hard to keep track of that, Mr. Speaker. It is not just the diesel fuel they use in the tractors. How much energy does it take to make the tractor? Every automobile tire has the equivalent of 6 gallons of oil in it. As you burn the tire, you get some sense that that is probably pretty close to the truth. These two scientists believe that today in the way that some ethanol is made, it takes more energy from fossil fuels to make the ethanol that we get out of the ethanol. Even if that is true, there is a good byproduct remaining, all the fat and all the protein. Tofu is a protein, by the way. That is the protein from soybeans. We get a similar protein from corn. So we can use that as animal food or human food. The bottom chart here shows some of the challenge of getting energy from corn. This is a pie chart which shows the total amount of energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. And notice, Mr. Speaker, that almost half of that total energy comes from nitrogen. That is because nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. Before we learned how to do that, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manure and what we call guano. Guano is the droppings of bats and birds for very long periods of time, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, and it accumulated on the tropical islands, and in the case of bats, we mined that to get guano. That is gone. If we wait another 10-, 20-, 30,000 years, there will be some more. But it takes a very long time to accumulate that. This is all the other energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. Potash was mined using fossil fuels. Phosphate was mined using fossil fuels. The lime was quarried using fossil fuels. Here is the diesel fuel that ran the tractor and the combine, the gasoline that is used in some of the farm equipment, liquid gas, electricity, all of which is produced by fossil fuels, most of it by fossil fuels, some by nuclear, 20 percent by nuclear. The custom work, the diesel that went into doing the work, the energy, the fossil energy it took to build the tractor and so forth. And many of the chemicals we use in agriculture are made from oil. The water is pumped using energy. The hauling, the seed, fossil fuel energy goes into producing all of this. Mr. Speaker, how will we feed the world once we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak? The next chart, this is a really interesting one. I use an analogy here that helps me to understand this. I imagine a young couple that has just gotten married, and their grandparents died and left them a pretty big inheritance. So they have now established a life-style where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. And they look at the amount they are spending and at the size of the grandparents' inheritance and say, gee, this is not going to last until we retire. So obviously they have got to do one or both of two things: Either they have got to spend less money, or they have got to earn more money. I use that 85-15. Others may use 86-14. The 85 or the 86 is the percentage of energy in our economy that we get from the fossil fuels, natural gas and petroleum and coal. Only 15 percent in this depiction do we get from nonfossil fuel sources. A bit more than half of that, nuclear energy, 8 percent, that is, 8 of 15, a bit more than half, comes from nuclear. That is 20 percent of electricity, but 8 percent of our total energy use heating buildings and manufacturing and so forth. Seven percent of it comes from renewables. Remember that previous chart? Ultimately we will transition to these renewables, with the exception of what we will get from nuclear. When we are through the age of oil, it will all be renewables. What are they? Solar. This is a 2000 chart. We are better today. In 2000, solar represented 1 percent of 7 percent. That is .07 percent. It has been growing at 30 percent a year. That doubles in about 3 years. So now, big deal, it is .28 percent of our total energy. Wood, 38 percent. Not the West Virginia hillbilly, but this is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using a waste product, what would otherwise be a waste product. I mentioned waste before. That is 8 percent of our total renewable energy. We ought to be producing a lot more of that. Landfills are pretty silly when you think that you could be producing electricity with that rather than worrying about the methane that is produced there. They do harvest some of that, by the way, and use it. Wind, another 1 percent. By the way, wind and solar are essentially the same energy source. The wind blows because of the differential heating of the sun; so they both go back to the sun. We can now produce electricity from wind at 2\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. That is really competitive. Why are we not producing more of it? Wind farms are growing. You may see them. Some people do not like the look of those. I think that the big wind machines are pretty handsome. That is about where solar is today, about .28 percent of our total energy. How long will it take us to get to any meaningful percentage there? Because that is increasingly what we are going to have to rely on in the future. Conventional hydro, almost half of all of our renewables comes from an energy source that is not going to grow in our country. We have dammed every river that should be dammed and probably a few that should not; so that is not likely to grow. Now we are down here to agriculture, alcohol fuels and so forth. Again, almost in the noise level. And geothermal, where we are close enough to the molten core of the Earth, we really should tap into that. That is free. It is forever if you use it properly. The next chart shows us something very interesting. Mr. Speaker, I would like to get some input from statisticians on this because everybody knows the jargon of something which is statistically significant. There is a 95 percent probability, there is a 5 percent probability, and so forth. And here they have done something which I find very strange. If you are looking at the path that a hurricane is going to take, you notice it starts out very narrow. It could get pretty good for the next few hours, but when it gets out to hours and days, it gets broader and broader. Now, the hurricane maybe will go down the middle, but there is just as big a chance it will go to the left as there is that it will go to the right. And what these folk are doing and what they are using here is statistical jargon. They are saying a high 5 percent probability, low 95 percent, and the mean is what is in the middle. Now, that could just as well be a whole lot less as that much more. So the real peak is probably going to occur about right here. This is where we are now. This is the 2000 chart. We are about right here. They are using this mean here. No one that I know of believes that the ultimate recovery, 1 billion barrels of oil, is 3 trillion. But even if you use the 3 trillion, that takes you only to this point. It pushes peak oil out only to 2016. The next one is a really interesting one. If you assume that you are going to get it faster and move the peak out to 2037, look what happens after that. You fall off a cliff. So we need to be careful about this enhanced oil recovery, because if there is only so much to pump, and you pump it sooner rather than later, later you are going to have less to pump. Back to Robert Hirsch and the study done by SAIC. They say on Page 64, ``World oil peaking is going to happen.'' And down here he says that oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this without massive mitigation, more than a decade before the fact. And remember, Mr. Speaker, very few authorities believe that peak oil is more than a decade from now. So we are pretty much here. The next chart points out something very interesting, and that is that this really is a worldwide problem. We are all in the same boat on this little planet Earth traveling through space. There is only so much oil. There are about 7 billion people, and clearly we would do better to engage the nations of the world in a competition to achieve sustainability instead of a consumption contest, which is now what we are doing: Who can use the most oil to grow their economy the fastest? The next chart shows ideally what we need to be about. By the way, Mr. Speaker, I think that if we do not have a national and indeed international program which kind of has the breadth of putting a man on the Moon and the intensity of the Manhattan Project, I think we are in for a pretty rough landing. First of all, there is voluntarily conservation, and we can do that. We can conserve. California did. They had no rolling blackouts because they voluntarily reduced their electricity use by 11 percent in a single year. That is big. We start out with voluntary conservation, ride with two in the car, turn our thermostat down, put a sweater on. To organize voluntary conservation, working together to provide for the van pools and so forth, then the government can provide some monetary incentives, giving you the incentive to do the right thing. And then efficiency, of course. These were two words that were absent from the President's very good message on energy, conservation and efficiency. I am a conservative. My wife says she thinks that there ought to be some relationship between conservation and conservatives. Does that make sense, Mr. Speaker? The next chart we are going back again to the Hirsch report. That was such a great study. They said on page 24, ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules so as to incorporate higher energy efficiency technologies into the private-owned transportation sector. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time- consuming of the order of a decade or so.'' For instance, if everyone was to drive a hybrid car, which gets two or three times the mileage of an ordinary car, it takes one or two decades to turn over the motor fleet; 28 years, I think, for the big trucks; much less than that for the vanity of cars and so forth. The next chart, this is something that we are doing out in Frederick. We wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to be totally self- sufficient, so we have proposed, and we have funding to do it thanks to the generosity of the taxpayers, that we are going to build a welcome center coming down into Frederick that is totally energy self- sufficient. We will get all of our water from the rain. We will handle all of our waste without putting anything into the ground, with composting toilets and constructed wetlands and so forth. We will produce all of our energy with wind machines and solar panels and so forth. This should in the next couple of years be existing. If you go up 270 into Frederick and start down the hill where you look over the Frederick Valley and see the city there, on your right will be the Goodloe Byron Overlook. If you pull in there, you will be at this welcome center, which will have a lot of what we call benign technologies. In the few minutes remaining, I would like to use the Apollo 13 as an example of the challenge that we have. You may remember the Apollo 13. They had an explosion in one of their oxygen tanks. They had two oxygen tanks. And that explosion caused the other oxygen tank to leak. So not only were they going to be short of oxygen for themselves if they were not careful, they were going to be short of energy because they were using that oxygen to combine with hydrogen in a fuel cell to produce energy. What they had available to them was the module, the lunar lander. They turned around, as you may know. They had to evaluate what they had to work with, and that is all they had to work with, what was in that little spacecraft out there. What could they do with that? They had a big challenge of CO2 buildup and what they were going to do to manage that so that they could get back. They had a very narrow window. There are a lot of analogies between the Apollo 13 and where we are today. They had a challenge not of their choosing. We did not choose to reach peak oil at this time, but they were faced with the inevitable decision of either making the right choices or not making it through, and we are faced with very much that same kind of a dilemma. We have some choices to make now, and the next chart points to the kinds of choices that we have and what I think we need to be doing. I want to refer you to an earlier chart which, by the way, we had that bell curve and we had the consumption going up like so, and there is a gap there. A lot of people are trying to fill the gap. Here is that chart. Put that in front of this one. We will talk about that in just a moment. A lot of people are talking about filling the gap so that we continue on this course and use ever more and more. I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, it is not what our challenge should be. As a matter of fact, to get alternative energy sources, we are going to have to invest three things. Money, we will not worry about that. We will borrow that from our kids and our grandkids, I am sorry to say; but we cannot borrow time from them, and you cannot borrow energy from them. We have run out of time. We are using all the oil that is available. If there was more oil than we would like to use, it would not be a sixty-couple dollars a barrel, would it? So in order to have any energy to invest in the alternative, we have to reduce our demand for oil so we have something to invest. Trying to fill the gap just puts off the inevitable. If, in fact, we are able to do that momentarily, since there is not going to be much more oil found out there, the experts believe all you are doing now is setting yourself up for a bigger fall later. The old adage, in a hole, stop digging, the corollary to that is you are climbing a hill and you are going to fall off the other side, the higher you climb, the further you fall. This is pretty much where we are with oil. Let us go back now about the choices before us now. Like Apollo 13, we have got to develop those contingency plans. What will we do? We need to prepare proactively. We have almost run out of time to do that. We must reduce energy consumption to make some energy available. That will buy some time. By the way, the cheapest oil is the oil you do not use. We have bought some time so we can make investments now in more efficiency, first of all, and then in these alternatives which we will increasingly turn to. The ultimate goal is to achieve sustainable growth. By the way, Mr. Speaker, there is no such thing as sustainable growth, whether short term you may make it appear to be so; but ultimately there is no such thing as continued forever sustainable growth. We are going to have to learn to be happy with being satisfied with what we have got. I think, Mr. Speaker, we have some really, really great times ahead of us. I can imagine nothing more than all Americans feeling really good about contributing to a solution to this problem. What we really need is leadership that the American people understand that they really can contribute. We have enormous creativity and entrepreneurship. We need to harness that. The next big burst in economic efficiency and growth can be in developing these alternatives and more efficient ways of doing things. The ultimate goal, and we will get to that goal, we will transition. When the age of oil is finished and there is no more oil that can be gotten without paying more for the oil than you get out of it, we will have been transitioned to the renewables. What will life be like then? What will life be like in that transition? This is really a good-news story. The sooner we start to address this problem, the less traumatic will be the transition. I like to think, Mr. Speaker, that if we harness the creativity and the energy of the American people, there is nothing that will make sleep so refreshing other than just knowing you really contributed something that day. Mr. Speaker, I think that we have a bright future ahead of us. Unless we recognize, we probably are approaching peak oil. I would encourage, Mr. Speaker, that you go do a Google search for peak oil, pull up the articles on peak oil or do Hubbert's peak, you will find essentially the same articles there. There is a lot of information out there. The average person is so consumed with the necessities of life, the tyranny of the urgent that pushes the important off the table: you really need to change the diapers; you really do need to be responsible; you also need to be thinking about tomorrow. We think about our next election. The board of directors thinks about the next quarterly report. Who is looking 5 years from now, 10 years from now? Mr. Speaker, I think we have a great future ahead of us. The American people will respond if properly challenged.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, Pastor Appel's ministry extends beyond his congregation to embrace the entire Frederick community, as well as missions abroad. He is currently serving as the president of the Ministerial Association of Frederick County, Maryland. This organization is composed of all of the ministers in the county. It meets monthly to engage in fellowship, dialogue, and to promote interfaith cooperation and activities to meet the spiritual needs of Frederick County residents. Pastor Appel is also an active supporter of the Adventist Church's Hope for Humanity projects in southern Africa in response to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic. Pastor Appel explained: ``Hope for Humanity is coming to this program saying, `Here are some challenges, here are some needs. We are a world church. We just can't stay focused congregationally. We've got to start thinking about our brothers and sisters around the world who need our help.' '' Mr. Speaker, today's prayer continues a tradition that began when Benjamin Franklin spoke during a moment of crisis at the Constitutional Convention, and these are his words: ``In the days of our contest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity to establish our Nation. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. ``If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that a new Nation can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to any business.'' Mr. Speaker, I am really honored that my pastor, Pastor John Appel, senior pastor of the Frederick Seventh-day Adventist Church and currently serving as the president of the Ministerial Association of Frederick County, is here today to continue this precedent followed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend Chairman Hunter and Ranking Member Skelton for completing the impressive task of this conference report in such a short period of time. I also want to thank my subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Taylor, for his tireless efforts and dedication to the preparation of this report while simultaneously coordinating Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in Mississippi. The intense work involved in preparing the conference report has been accomplished only with the assistance of our able and hardworking staff and I really want to commend their efforts and the quality of the work they have so diligently done. Mr. Speaker, this conference agreement provides the men and women in our Armed Forces the tools to effectively project our Nation's power and influence throughout the globe. Initiatives within this bill to build the Navy of the future, authorize advance procurement funding for the Navy's next generation platforms while continuing development and buildout of the Littoral Combat Ship and Virginia Class attack submarine fleet. I am also pleased that this conference report takes steps to improve our U.S. shipbuilding industry to make it more efficient and commercially competitive in the future. Only by applying downward pressure on shipbuilding costs will we be able to afford a fleet of sufficient size to meet the national security needs and global commitments of tomorrow. This agreement authorizes multiyear contract authority for additional C-17 aircraft if procurement is consistent with the results of the Quadrennial Defense Review. Furthermore, we encourage the Secretary of the Air Force to evaluate options for maintaining C-17 production capability until results of the C-5 modernization programs are available. This conference agreement is an important milestone in making our country more secure. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 is critical in meeting the challenges and demands placed upon our Armed Services today, supplying a foundation on which to build well into the future. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines by voting for the Fiscal Year 2006 National Defense Authorization Act.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, if our Founding Fathers could be resurrected and be with us here this evening, they would be astounded that we were discussing, debating this subject. Let me explain. Most of our Founding Fathers came here to escape one of two tyrannies, the tyranny of the crown and the tyranny of the church. In the Second Amendment, they address the tyranny of the crown. But that is a subject for another day. In England, the Episcopal Church was the official state church, and it could and did oppress other churches. On most of the countries of the continent, the Roman Church was the official state church, and it could and did oppress other churches, and our Founding Fathers wanted to make sure that this never could happen in their new country. And so in the First Amendment, they wrote the establishment clause which means exactly what it said, not the way it is frequently interpreted today. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, no established state religion, please, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Not only should there not be a state religion, there should be free exercise of every religion. But they had no fear, Madam Speaker, of religion. The Continental Congress bought 20,000 copies of the Bible to distribute to their new citizens. And for the first 100 years of our country, our Congress each year voted funds to send missionaries to the American Indians. For 160 years of its existence, the Supreme Court, up until 1947 when they did an abrupt about face, 180 degrees from where they were before in every decision relative to this subject, our Supreme Court said that we were a Judeo-Christian nation, and they affirmed the right for expression of those beliefs. Indeed, 102, I believe, of the first 104 universities in our country were church schools, including Harvard. Harvard's handbook has an interesting note, that the Bible should be the constant companion of its students. And for the first hundred years of its existence, about half of all of the graduates of Harvard were ministers. Madam Speaker, if our Founding Fathers could be resurrected and be with us this evening, they would unanimously support this commonsense resolution. Madam Speaker, we should join them and unanimously support this resolution.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I would first like to thank Congressman Dingell for his many years of service to his country. Sometimes there is a young person who is very bright and well-achieved. And it is said of them that they are wise beyond their years. Congressman Dingell has served 50 years in the Congress. Before that, he served in World War II. Matter of fact, he is just about a year younger than I, so obviously he is not a really young person. I can truly say of Congressman Dingell that he, too, is wise beyond his years. As a matter of fact, the subject I am going to talk about tonight is better understood by Congressman Dingell, I think, than any other Member of the House. I remember a conversation with him some time ago, several months ago, when he noted that he did not believe that oil would ever be $50 a barrel again. I spoke with him tonight, and he said, you know, we probably had better hope that it is not ever $50 a barrel again because the only thing that could cause it to drop to that level would be the demand construction that would be precipitated by a world crisis. Thank you, Congressman Dingell, for your friendship, and I thank you for your contribution to your country. The first chart is taken from a publication from a report that was funded by the Department of Energy. I want to make that clear. The principal investigator was Robert Hirsch. He works for SAIC, a very prestigious scientific organization. ``The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand side, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.'' Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. Mr. Speaker, what is he referring to? To put this in context, as the next slide shows us, we need to go back about six decades. Working for the Shell Oil Company was a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, and he watched the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields. He found that they all tended to follow a similar pattern. Oil came freely at first and then reached a peak production, and then, not surprisingly, the last oil from the field, as a matter of fact, roughly the last half of the oil from the field, was more difficult to get than the first half of the oil from the field. So he judged that if he could add up all of the little fields in the country and the curve that would be produced by the exploitation and exhaustion of that, and these are called bell curves, they are typical curves of phenomena, that he then could predict when the United States would peak in oil production. He made this prediction in 1956, and he said that the United States peak oil production would occur about 1970, certainly in the early 1970s. Right on target, the United States peaked in oil production in 1970 or 1971. The smooth green curve here shows what he predicted. The somewhat more ragged curve with symbols shows the accurate data points. You see how closely this is for the lower 48 States. It shows how closely they followed his predicted curve. The red curve is the similar curve for the Soviet Union. You notice that on the down side, they peaked some years ago, after us, but some years ago, and on the down side, when the Soviet Union fell apart, they lost a lot of production capacity. Now they are going to have a second small peak, but then on down. Russia is now a major producer of oil in the world, but they were in the past a larger producer of oil in the world. The next chart shows the sources from which our oil production has come. And notice that this peak, about 1970, and this curve differ from the previous one in that we have added here the oil from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. There was a tiny blip on the down slope. Without that oil, there was no blip at all. But in spite of that enormous find in Prudhoe Bay, about a fourth of our total production for a number of years, we still continued our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. I want to note the yellow there, that is the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico where there are now, I think, what, 4,000 oil wells. That was supposed to solve our problems with oil for quite some time. Notice the fairly trifling contribution it made. This was a big find. But we and the world use a lot of oil, and that kind of puts it in perspective. The next chart shows two characteristics of the world. The previous one, the one just removed, we were looking at the United States, and in this one we look at the world. And there are really two curves here, and they are superimposed because that helps us to understand the situation a little better. The bar graph here, the dark shows the discoveries of oil; and notice that we started discovering a lot of oil back in the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s; and after the 1980s, that is 25 years ago, we have had diminishing discoveries of oil. The heavy black line here shows the use of oil. For many, many years we were discovering far more oil than we used. But since about the early 1980s, every year we have used more oil than we found. And until today, and that is at this point, you can see that we are using several times as much oil as we find, maybe four barrels of oil used for every barrel of oil that we find. Now, of course one can only extrapolate into the future. But if you make reasonable assumptions for what we will find, and that is this curve here, we could find more; we could also find less. But if you look back through the last 20 years, this is a fairly optimistic assumption of what we will find for the next 25 or 30 years. And then, of course, you cannot pump oil that you have not found. And so the consumption curve, this curve, suggests that that will peak in about 5 years. But the consumption curve must have under it exactly the same area as is the area under the discovery curve, because obviously you cannot pump oil that you have not found. We will come back to this chart a little later, and we will mention some of the critical relationships here a time or two as we address other points. Now, there are a number of critics, and the next chart points to the statements that one critic has made. And we will come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, in the future to talk about other critics and the points that they have made, and we will carefully and respectfully address each of the points that they make. This critic made four comments, four points. And what he said was, if we really understood this, you would not have any concern about peak oil because we are really not facing a problem, in his view. I am only going to talk about the first one now, and then we will put this chart down here, and we will pull it up after we have talked about this one and then talk about the second, third, and fourth bullet here. In the first bullet, he says: Simply put, known reserves can produce far more oil if more aggressively drilled, as in the United States. That is true, and it is not true. As the next chart shows, this shows the relationship between drilling and pumping oil in this country. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan became President, we had already slid 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak; and we knew in this country, and the world knew, that M. King Hubbert had been correct, that the United States had peaked in its oil production. Mr. Speaker, I wonder why there was not more recognition given to the fact that M. King Hubbert also predicted when the world would peak, which, considering events like a worldwide recession and the oil price spike hikes and so forth, would be about now. I wonder why more people were not concerned that maybe if M. King Hubbert were right about the United States, he might be right about the world. And if he was right about the world, then we really ought to be paying attention to that. This curve shows the effect of the extra drilling that was encouraged by the tax policy of the early Reagan years. It showed that that had no effect on the amount of oil that we pump, because we went from positive, pumping more oil than we were consuming, to negative, pumping less oil than we were consuming, in spite of the fact that there was a very large spike here in increased drilling. So depending upon the state of exhaustion of the oil fields, increased drilling may not produce any increased flow of oil. It certainly did not here. In spite of all this increased drilling, we produced relatively less and less oil. Now, it is true that if there is still a lot of oil left in the fields, you could exhaust it more quickly by drilling more wells. I think that in this country, Mr. Speaker, we have drilled at least three-fourths of all of the oil wells that have been drilled in all of the world. And the critic was saying if we drilled relatively as many wells in Saudi Arabia as we have drilled in this country, that we could get that oil out more quickly. That may be true. But as we will discover a little later in this discussion, Mr. Speaker, that probably is not a good idea. There is an old adage that says: If you're in a hole, stop digging. And I think a good corollary to that is, if you are climbing a hill and you know that you will fall off the other side, it is obvious that the higher you climb, the greater the fall will be. So if there is only so much oil there, if we are able to get it out more quickly now by drilling more holes, then does it not stand to reason that there will be even less oil for the future, and the slope down the other side of Hubbert's Peak will be even sharper? The next slide shows again a relationship between drilling and the amount of oil that you discover. The red curve here is a hyperbolic model. It approaches in ascentot. It will never quite reach the top because it will go up ever more slowly. And the yellow points here show the actual cumulative discovery of oil. And notice that it follows this very clear ascentotic curve. What that points to, Mr. Speaker, is that there is probably not a lot more oil in the world that we are going to find. For the last number of years, we have had very good techniques: seismic, 3D modeling with computers. We are really very good now at characterizing the geologic formations in which oil is likely to be found, and we have drilled and exploited all of those that held much promise. The next chart is another one taken from this very excellent report called the ``Hirsch Report,'' done by SAIC, and funded by our own Department of Energy. This shows the net difference between annual world oil reserves, reserve additions, and annual consumption. And this showed when we flipped over from every year finding more oil than we used to the point that for every year since, what, the early 1980s, as you can see from this chart, the world has found less and less oil than it has pumped. I would like to now come back to the chart that I showed a few minutes ago because I think that this chart actually shows if you make this curve here a straight line, then that produces the curve that you have just seen. I would like to come back to this and point out that the history of discovery indicates that we probably are not going to have any more really large oil fields discovered. The last of the great oil fields were discovered in the 1980s. And in spite of intense drilling and vastly improved discovery techniques, just about on the average every year since then we have found less and less. And I would like to point out again something which is very obvious, that you cannot pump oil that you have not found. Now, if you want to change the shape of this consumption curve, and you can change the shape of that curve, if you want to change the shape of that curve and have it ever go up and up, then you are obviously going to have to find a lot more oil. Now, you can in the short term have it go up somewhat faster if you simply were to drill in Saudi Arabia relatively as many wells as we have drilled in this country. But what that will do, Mr. Speaker, is maybe to extend this curve a bit like this. But you cannot pump more oil than you have found, so then it will fall off very sharply on the other side. I am not sure that is what our economy needs, and I am not sure that is what the world needs. So I am not certain, Mr. Speaker, that in the absence of finding more oil that it is in anybody's self-interest to find ways to exhaust the oil that we have found more quickly than we are doing it now. Now, if you believe that just around the corner we are going to find enormous additional amounts of oil, then that might be a supportable philosophy. But I would suggest, looking at this history of our discovery of oil, that it would be very prudent to not use techniques for more rapidly exhausting the oil until you have found more oil, or we are simply going to be building a larger and larger economy in the world that is going to be even more and more difficult to support as we inevitably run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. I would like now to put back up the comments of this critic, and we want to look at the second bullet here. There is enough tar and natural gas in the world to fuel the globe for hundreds of years at current rates of consumption. And I should have underlined it there, the ``at current rates of consumption.'' There are two things I want to talk about on this. The first is that there is a great deal of natural gas and other sources of hydrocarbons in the world. I am not sure that they are economically exploitable. And the second thing is at current-use rates. Let me finish this, and then I will put the next chart up. And that does not include even more massive amounts of coal that could be turned into gas and oil, and indeed it can be turned into gas and oil. That is the way Hitler ran his country and his military in World War II, because we cut him off from oil and he made oil from coal. As a matter of fact, when I was a little boy, the lamps you now call kerosene lamps we called coal oil lamps. And that is because it was coal oil that first replaced whale oil before we learned how to refine crude oil and make kerosene. So we can do that. The next chart points to what Albert Einstein said was the most powerful force in the universe. After we discovered nuclear power as a result of his theory of relativity and his contributions, he was asked, Dr. Einstein, we have now discovered this incredible power source, energy source. What will be next? And he said, you know, the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. Now, that is an exponential function. What we show here are several curves, and this lower curve here shows a 2 percent growth rate; and the straight line shows, if you extrapolate that out without compounding, that is you do not add this year's growth to the baseline for next year's growth, if you have money and interest and you take the interest every year and do not let it accumulate. But notice how much it grows if you let it accumulate. And this is only a 2 percent growth rate. There is a 4 percent growth rate. Notice how much more quickly it grows. By the way, a 2 percent growth rate doubles in 35 years. This steepest curve here is a 10 percent growth rate. I would like to remind you that that is pretty much the curve that China is on, and India very close behind them. China, about 9.5 percent; 10 percent growth rate doubles in 7 years. It is four times bigger in 14 years, it is 8 times bigger in 21 years. That is exponential growth. Mr. Speaker, if you will do a Google search for Dr. Albert Bartlett, not a relative of mine, but he gives the most interesting 1-hour lecture I have ever heard, and pull up his lecture on exponential growth and energy. He has some excellent analogies to help understand exponential growth. I will give just one true story from an ancient kingdom where one of the citizens of the kingdom invented chess. The king was so impressed he called his citizen in and said, I will give you any reasonable request for the contribution you make for inventing chess. The inventor said, I am a simple man with simple needs; Mr. King, if you will simply take my chess board and put one grain of wheat on the first square and double that and put two grains of wheat on the second square and double it and four on the third square and eight on the fourth until you have finally filled all of the squares of my chess board, that is all the reward I would ask. The king thought, silly man, I would have given him a great deal more. No problem. But had the king understood the power of exponential growth, he would have had to place on that chess board more wheat than the world has harvested in the last 40 years. That is the power of compound growth. We see that in the next chart that looks at one of these assumptions, and that is that we have a lot of coal. We do. We have 250 years of coal at current use. But if you have to use more of it, and we certainly will have to use more of it as we have less natural gas; today that topped $15 for a thousand cubic feet, the highest ever, and if you increase the use of coal only 2 percent a year and compound that, notice what happens. It shrinks to about 85 years. That is the power of compound growth. And for much of its use, you will not be able to use coal, you will have to make it, as the critics suggested, into gas and oil, and that takes energy to do that, and so now it has shrunk down to about 50 years. With just 2 percent growth, we will be really lucky if we can get by with increasing the use of coal only 2 percent, but that now lasts only 50 years. It is there. It is a very valuable resource, and we need to use it, but it is not a long-term solution to our problem. The next chart shows something which is really very interesting. This shows the current consumption, and it is making an interesting assumption. I would like to pause for just a moment because, in another life, I had a course in statistics, and they give you some probabilities here. That is what statistics is all about, probabilities. They have the 95 percent probability and the 50 percent probability and the 5 percent probability. The 5 percent probability means only 1 time in 20 would you expect that to happen. The 95 percent probability is what is called statistically significant, and 97 percent probability is highly significant. What they have done here is to take the mean and to assume that is the expected value. No, Mr. Speaker, that is not the expected value. The 50 percent probability means there is 50 percent probability it could be more. There is also 50 percent probability it could be less. What they have done, they say that is the mean. That is really, I think, a major distortion of statistics and reflects a misunderstanding of statistics because it could be just as well less than that as more than that. But this red curve assumes that there will be 50 percent more. The total amount of oil most authorities believe that was recoverable, and we have recovered about half of it, was about 20,000 giga barrels. That is 2,000 billion barrels. This mean is 3,000. This is roughly the 2,000 here, and the 3,000 is here. Notice, even if you assume, which I think is a very rash assumption, that there will be 50 percent more oil than most of the world's experts believe, notice how little that pushes out the peaking. That is what exponential growth does. Albert Bartlett uses another interesting explanation of exponential growth. He has a little colony of microbes that are growing in a liter flask and notices that they are doubling every minute. When they are only partially full, they say, we better be looking for more territory because we are soon going to fill up this liter vessel. They send out scouts and find not one or two or three more liters. Wow, three times as much as they now have. That should last them for a long time. Remember, they are doubling every minute. If they fill their present liter flask at midnight, 1 minute after midnight they fill the second one because they double every minute, and in 2 minutes after midnight, they fill the third and the fourth. That shows why if we find 50 percent more oil than most of the experts believe is there, that will only push out peak oil those relatively few years. If by some means you are able to extract oil more quickly, like drilling a whole lot more wells or using this enhanced recovery technique, you might push the peak out to 2037, but this curve acknowledges a reality that you cannot pump what is not there. And so now you fall off very quickly, and the area between these two curves is going to have to equal the area between these two curves. So from a very real perspective, Mr. Speaker, if we are not going to find enormously more oil or gas or coal or large amounts of alternatives, it will not be in the long-term best interest of the world to exploit our present reserves more quickly. The next chart shows the characteristics that any alternatives will have to be useful because the primary crisis that we face is not just an energy crisis; it is really a crisis of liquid fuels because that is where our economy and the world's economy will be first impacted. This is an interesting chart, and it has an ordinate and an abscissa. The ordinate is energy-profit ratio. The energy-profit ratio is the amount of energy you have to put in to get out a certain amount of energy, and obviously, the best energy sources will be those where you put in just a little bit of energy, like drilling one well and getting out an awful lot of oil. And the energy profit ratios may be 60 or 80 or 100, and some even 200. That means you get out 200 times as much energy as put into drilling and developing the field. Now on the abscissa here, we have economic effectiveness in transport. What that means is how convenient it is to use transport. The source that is the highest in both of these is the giant oil fields. None of those exist in this country. They are all in the Middle East and many in Saudi Arabia. But notice that they have a very high energy-profit ratio and also a very high economic effectiveness in transport. Our oils were just as effective in transport, so they are way over here in the abscissa. But notice they are much more expensive to get than the Middle East oil. This is 1970, and now they are harder and harder to get, and so now we are down at this point where it is maybe five to one. We put in one unit of energy and get out five units of energy. Notice where the tar sands and ethanol are. They are really easy to use once you develop them, but you get very little more energy out of them than you put in them. Over here we have hydro, coal-fired and nuclear, photo voltaics, and they have really improved, and direct use of coal. So any alternative that we are going to develop to replace our current oil for transportation needs to be put on this table, this chart, to see where it fits. It must have a very high energy-profit ratio, and it should have a very high economic effectiveness in transport quotient. I will return now to the next of these points made by the critic. He says we have just produced the tip of the shale gas iceberg, and the likely resources in the U.S. are vast. What he is saying is, do not worry about energy; there is absolutely an enormous amount of energy in these shale gases. What they are, are gases trapped so tightly in shale that the only way to get them out is to drill a well and then to put sand and water in that well under a very high pressure, kind of an explosive pressure that fractures the rock and pushes the sand in between the levels of the shale so the gas can now come out. Yes, there is a lot of gas there, and you can get it out by doing that, but it is quite expensive. It is one well for every one relatively small area of the reservoir where this gas is trapped. What I want to show now is a number of potential sources of energy. As we run down the other side of Hubbard's peak, we are going to have to turn to other sources of energy. Some of those are finite like the tar sands and the oil shales and the shale gas that he was talking about, and coal and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. I guess the nuclear thing ought to be put in a category kind of by itself because if you are talking about the light water reactors and fissile uranium, you are talking about a finite source. If you are talking about nuclear fusion, and I support all of the money that that technology can absorb, but I do not think that it is likely in any timely manner that we are going to have economically viable fusion to produce power. The general estimates are, in 30 to 50 years, that technology may have matured to where you will be using electricity produced by fusion. That is what happens in the sun and in the hydrogen bomb. If we were to go to breeder reactors, they are pretty much sustainable, and they would not be finite, so nuclear is in a category by itself. We need to exploit all of these areas, but the energy-profit ratio is very low for those. Let me give an example of an enormous amount of energy, and we really would have no energy problem if we just could harness that energy. It is called the tides. Every day, the moon lifts all of the oceans about 2 feet. I just pick up two 5-gallon buckets of water, and they are pretty heavy. Can you imagine the amount of energy it takes to lift the oceans 2 feet every day? The oceans are three-fourths of the earth's surface. If we just could capture that energy, we would be home free. But the problem is the energy-profit ratio is very low. There is a lot of energy there. It is very disbursed, very diffuse, very hard to harness, and we still try. Ocean thermal gradients are another potential source. Here are some potentially enormous sources of energy. Solar. If we paved our desserts with solar cells, we would have all of the energy we needed. That is a big if. It is about as big an if as getting all of this gas out of the gas shales. Wind. If we put a wind machine every place the wind was blowing, we would produce incredible amounts of energy, but it is very diffuse, very expensive to build them, and it would take a long time to build enough of them to make any real difference. Geothermal. If we just drilled down deep enough to tap into the molten core of the earth, there is essentially inexhaustible energy there. But again, the energy-profit ratio, except for a few places where the crust is thin, is very high, and so we are not doing that. I would like just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. I am a big fan of energy from agriculture, but you must recognize its limitations. We barely are able to feed the world. Now, you would not believe that by looking at many Americans, but tonight maybe a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry. And so if we are going to take what would otherwise be a food crop like corn or sugarcane and use it for energy, then we have to ask the question, How will we feed the world? Another caution about energy from agriculture. A lot of the sources of energy are from what is called cellulose or agricultural waste like beet pulp and corn fodder and soybean stocks and switch grass. Now, all of these things are organic. All of them, in one way or another, by sheet composting or some other composting techniques, are returned to the soil to help make what we call top soil. And topsoil is different from subsoil because it has organic material in it that supports life, and it has a quality which we call tilth which is not there if you take the organic material away. To rob our topsoils of organic material will be the exact equivalent of mining them. You may get away with it for a year or two or a few, Mr. Speaker; but in the long run, unless you husband our topsoils, we will not be able to continue to grow the food we need. Now, there are potentials for getting energy from agriculture. But they are going to necessarily be limited by our need to feed the world and our need to maintain our top soil. I just heard the other day that for every bushel of corn that we produce in Iowa, three bushels of topsoil go down the Mississippi River. So in spite of no-till farming and the other advanced techniques we have, we still have a problem holding our topsoil. Here is a great one: waste to energy. Up here in Montgomery County there is a facility that burns waste to produce electricity. I would be proud to have my church next to it or live next to it. You would think it is an office building from the front. The waste comes in in big containers on the back of trucks or trains, and you do not even see it. It is really quite an engineering marvel. We are producing some energy that way. We could produce more and probably should produce more. The last bullet here: hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. Hydrogen is simply a convenient way, and sometimes not all that convenient way because of what it is, an explosive gas. But it is a way to move energy from one place to another. If you think of it in terms of a battery, then you get the notion of where hydrogen is going to fit into our economy. It is a good idea, because when you finally use the hydrogen, it produces, well, we say no pollutants. It produces a little bit of heat. And it produces water, but you know that is really no pollutants compared to what we get from the internal combustion energy in burning gasoline or diesel fuel. And you can now use it, not in an internal combustion engine, but if we ever perfect them, we can use it in a fuel cell which gets at least twice the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. So you are now burning something, using something that produces, at the point of use, essentially no pollutants, and which produces about twice the net energy output that you can get by burning it in a combustion engine. So it is a good idea, but fraught with problems because if you are going to carry it as a gas, you have to really compress it, a big thick vessel, the lightest element we have, gas molecules just wanting to separate themselves and get out of there, so you have to have a big heavy vessel to contain it. If you want to liquify it, it is very cold, a lot of insulation, again a big problem. And the experts believe that if it ever becomes a part of our economy, that it is going to be in a solid state form, in other words, a hydrogen battery. So if you will think of it as something maybe quite better than the electron battery that you have in your car, but very similar to that because it is simply something that takes energy from one place, a nuclear power plant for instance, producing electricity that is then used to split water and produce the hydrogen, taken to another place where you use it like using it in your car. The next chart shows the details on one of these possible alternatives, and that is ethanol. And on the right, we show there the energy balance in getting gasoline from fuel oil. And it shows there that you must start out with 1.23 million BTUs of fossil energy to produce 1 million BTUs. That is quite reasonable. You have got to drill for the oil. You have got to transport it. You have got to refine it. You have got to haul it to the service station. You have got to pump it out. That all takes energy, and so you put in 1.23 units and you get out 1 unit of energy. Now, when it comes to corn, to ethanol, which you get from corn here, you start with solar energy. So you would expect that there is going to be some contribution of solar energy. And this, by the way, I am told by some people, is quite optimistic because Dr. Pimental believes that the usual ways of producing ethanol use more energy than you get out of the ethanol because of all of the applications of fossil fuels to building the farm equipment, plowing the ground, putting the corn in, harvesting the corn, that if you account for all the fossil fuel inputs, he says with the usual techniques you use, you get less energy out of the ethanol than you put in growing the corn. But I think we will do better than that, and we may get to this goal, and that is, you put in .74 units of energy, and you get out one. Well, that is not a really big energy-profit ratio. You would probably never drill an oil well if that is all you got out of it. That is a very low energy-profit ratio. But it is one of the things that we will need to turn to. The bottom little pie chart here shows something that will stun most people. Notice the big purple, nearly half segment of that circle. That is the energy that goes into producing corn from natural gas producing the nitrogen fertilizer. Very few people know, Mr. Speaker, that essentially the only source today of nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas. When natural gas is gone, we are going to have to find another big energy source to produce nitrogen fertilizer. By the way, before we learned how to do that, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer were the barn yard manures. We still have those today, but they do not go very far with the enormous agricultural lands we have, and guano. Guano were the droppings of bats and birds over thousands of years in the tropical islands on the cliffs and the bat caves, and there was a generation ago a major industry of mining guano. If we wait another 10,000 years, there will be some more guano. If you look at this circle, you will see the contribution of oil and gas and natural gas to producing corn. It is hydrocarbon, very energy intensive. Almost literally, Mr. Speaker, the food you eat is gas and oil. If it were not for gas and oil, you would not be eating that food. The next chart kind of puts this challenge in perspective, and the analogy I like to use here is that we, in our country, are very much like the young couple that had their grandparents die and left them a big inheritance. And so they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent comes from their earnings. And they look at the rate they are spending it and at the size of their grandparents' inheritance, and it is going to run out a long time before they retire. So obviously this young couple is going to do one or both of two things: either they are going to have to spend less money, or they are going to have to make more money. And I use that 85/15. Others will tell you it is 86/14, not quite as good as the 85/15, because this is exactly where we are in energy use in our country. Eighty-five percent of the energy we use comes from natural gas, today at the highest price ever, over $15, and oil and coal. And only 15 percent of it comes from other sources. A bit more than half of that 15 percent, 8 percent of it, comes from nuclear. It is 20 percent of our electricity, but only 8 percent of our total energy production. As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, every fifth house and every fifth business would be dark if it were not for the electricity produced by nuclear power. And here we have blown up the 7 percent of renewable energy. Now, as we run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and as we exhaust, as we surely will, in time, the fossil fuels in our world, this is what we will have to deal with, nuclear and renewables. Look at what these renewables are. Conventional hydro. Nearly half of it. We have tapped out in our country. We might get some microhydro, but the big stuff we have dammed up all the rivers we should have and maybe a few that we should not have. Second largest contributor: wood. That is the paper industry and the timber industry, wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product. And then burning waste. I mentioned that in a former chart, and that is 8 percent now. That is 8 percent of 7 percent. That is not a lot, by the way. That could grow and should grow. And then we get down to the things that we increasingly will have to rely on. Now, this is the 2000 chart, and things like solar and wind have been growing at 30 percent. Mr. Speaker, that doubles in about 2\1/2\ years. It is four times bigger in 5 years. So this is 5 years later. So let us say it is four times bigger. So instead of being .07 percent, that is what 1 percent of 7 percent is, is it not, .07 percent, instead of being .07 percent, it is .28 percent. Big deal. A little over one-fourth of 1 percent. Now, eventually we will have to be getting a major proportion of our energy from such things as solar and wind and agricultural. Today they are trifling amounts. And it takes quite awhile to ramp these things up and a lot of investment. It takes investments of both time and energy and also money. The next chart, I think, is one that puts in perspective what we are talking about better than perhaps any other chart. And I want to look at the top here. The bottom of it, by the way, we simply, for a short time period, explode the petroleum and natural gas. They are joined here, and it is a little better to see them together. But this shows the history of the world from 1600s on, and it shows the Industrial Revolution that began with wood and we were making steel when we were using charcoal from wood. And then it shows what happened with coal and how much more energy on the ordinate here is quadrillion BTUs of energy. Notice what happened when we found oil and gas. It exploded. That is the result of exponential growth. That is 2 percent exponential growth. Now, it is very steep because we have really compressed the abscissa here. And the previous charts, we will show another one that shows it in a big spread out curve like this. But that is spreading out only a few years. If you expanded this abscissa, that curve would look like that. And by the way, the world's population has generally followed this. We started out with about a billion people, more or less here. And now we have 7 billion people. Mr. Speaker, we are about 100 to 150 years into the age of oil. It is probable that we are halfway through the age of oil. I would submit that when we found that incredible wealth under the ground, that we collectively, our country and all the other countries in the world, should have stopped and said, gee, what will we do with this? Now, this was incredible wealth. Let me give you a couple of examples of what this meant. One barrel of oil, the refined product which you can buy for less, about a hundred dollars, will give you the work output of 12 people working all year for you. Imagine how far 1 gallon of gas or diesel fuel will carry your car and how long it would take you to pull your car or SUV or truck that far. You get some idea of the quality of energy, of the energy density in these fossil fuels. If you worked really hard all day long at manual labor, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. That is the quality of this wealth that we found. What we should have done is say, gee, what will we do with this, so that mankind, for now and for the future, will benefit most from this incredible wealth that we found under the ground. We did not do that. What we did, we collectively, the whole world, what we did was to pile in and exploit this just as quickly and irresponsibly as the kids who found the cookie jar. We really, Mr. Speaker, should have taken note--what will we do with this incredible wealth so that it will do the most good for the most people for the most time? In another 100, 150 years we will be through the age of oil, and 5,000 years of recorded history will be just a blip on this long screen. What will our world be like when we have run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, when we have exhausted the natural gas, when we have converted the coal to gas and oil and used that? What will we feed our people, 7 billion people now? The next chart shows some of these characteristics. This shows kind of the energy density quality. These are gigajoules per ton. A joule is a measure of energy. It is a scientific one that most people do not use in their usual discussions, but it shows here, we start with crude oil, and it gets better and better as we refine it. And then the things that we are going to have to replace it with, domestic refuge, brown coal, that will be gone. Straw, dung. We do not burn much dried dung in our country. In some parts of the world, they cook their meals and warm their houses with dried dung. Wood. Black coal, that will be gone. When we are through the age of oil, we will have used the coal. Ethanol, it does not look at all that bad here, does it? Way short of the energy density of these hydrocarbons from fossil fuels but better than most of these other things, many of which will be gone anyhow by that time. This speaks to the challenge that we have. Let us put the critics chart back up again. And the fourth one here, By the time we are close to peaking out on all of the types of hydrocarbon molecules which can be refined into oil, a host of competing fuel technologies will have overtaken hydrocarbons altogether, using technologies that no one can anticipate today. I hope he is right. I hope he is right. I also hope that everybody who has played the lottery today is going to win. Obviously, only one out of the millions who played it is going to win. And I think the odds of this happy scenario happening are roughly the same odds that you or I, and I do not play the lottery, but if I did, the odds of my winning the lottery. What could it possibly be? I would submit that we need to be very careful how quickly we exhaust the resources we have until we are sure what these miracle replacements are going to be. Once they are out there and definable and achievable, then, yes, okay. But short of that, we really need to husband what we have so that we can make this transition as smooth as possible. The next chart are some quotes that I would like to spend just a moment on because I think they are so significant. Again I would like to emphasize, this is a report that was funded by our Department of Energy, done by the very prestigious SAIC, Dr. Robert Hirsch, a real authority that headed this, and let me read what they said: World oil peaking is going to happen. No wishful thinking will avoid it. It is going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. It happened in our country. King Hubbert predicted it. Why will it not happen in the world? It will happen in the world. The only question is, when it will happen? Predicting the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand, elasticity, political influences. Peaking will happen but the timing is uncertain. Most of the authorities believe that it will be within the next decade: Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. And then I emphasize here, The world, he says, has never faced a problem like this. And the first chart, it said, unprecedented challenges. Never have there been challenges like this. Without massive mitigation, more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, as we just looked at, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary, he says. In our closing moments, I would like to just show some of the things that they were doing. What they have done is to simplify this bell curve to make it a little triangle because they want to use that to depict the solutions that they are suggesting are possible. On the bottom here is an interesting one, and what it shows is that oil price spike hikes have not made any difference in the amount of oil that is available. This is the production of oil, and this is price spike hike. If making more profit because it sells for more would stimulate production, then one would have thought we would see a big production peak follow this. Notice we do not really see any big production peak following that. Now, they have simplified this bell curve, and the next chart shows the reason why. This is just a little schematic, and they have a number of alternatives that they could use to fill the gap. The gap is going up like this, and then it is going to fall off, and we would like it to keep on going up so we could keep using more and more, and these are things we would fill the gap with. The next chart shows what happens if we wait until it happens. Then we have a major, major economic problem because it takes quite a while to get these things going. If we anticipate it by 10 years, we have less of a problem but still a problem. To not have a meaningful problem, we must anticipate it by 20 years. Clearly, we have probably passed that point. By most people's reckoning, we have passed that point. The next chart is a little schematic that I think shows it very well. This, again, is a 2-percent curve. This is a schematic curve, and what it shows is a 2-percent increase in the rate at which we are using it, which has been the rate at which we are producing it. That will slow as we reach peak oil. And notice that the gap starts to occur before we reach peak oil. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that what we do not want to do is to try to meet the challenge of filling that gap because, if we do, we only have a really sharp decline on the other side. What we really need to do is to depress our use with conservation efficiency so that we have something to invest in the alternatives that we must invest in. With oil at $60 a barrel, obviously there is not as much as we would like to have or it would be cheaper. I would like to close by putting up again this chart which I think is so significant. This is kind of a global long-term look at the problem. This is where we are, about halfway through the age of oil. Now, we have been as a world and as a country, as a society, rather grossly irresponsible up to this time. Mr. Speaker, whether we like it or not, oil will peak. We will start down the other side. We will shift to the alternatives. That will be a much less traumatic transition if we plan for it. And my urging tonight is that we need in our country to address this problem with the kind of an overall commitment we had when we fought World War II, and I lived through that, with the kind of a technical commitment we had to putting a man on the moon and the kind of urgency we had in the Manhattan Project. Mr. Speaker, I think that if we have a national, an international program that has those elements in it, that we probably can have a relatively smooth landing. Minus that, it could be a very rough landing not just for us but for all of the world. Mr. Speaker, the great ingenuity of the American people cannot be harnessed, and I hope that we can challenge them so that we will meet this challenge and have a relatively smooth transition.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I have in front of me a document called Peaking of World Oil Production, Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. As I look at the second page, it says this report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. That agency was the Department of Energy, and the organization that was funded to do this work was SAIC, a very prestigious, scientific organization. Dr. Robert Hirsch was a project leader. He was supported by Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling in this very important work. It was submitted in February of 2005. What I would like to do this evening is to go through the salient points of this so-called Hirsch report. Remember, it was funded by the Department of Energy, and it was performed by a very prestigious scientific organization, SAIC. I have here a quote from page four of this report. This is so important, I have highlighted a couple of phrases, but I would like to read these couple of statements here, because they are so important. The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. What that means is that never in history has there been a risk management problem like this. It is unprecedented, they say. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically and without timely mitigation. The economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. Mr. Speaker, what that means is that never in history has there been an occasion when economic, social and political costs will be this big. Viable, mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking. Dealing with world oil production, peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars. Now, around here, we talk a lot about billions of dollars, but seldom about trillions of dollars. This will cost trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. Mr. Speaker, what are they talking about? What is this oil peaking that they are talking about that is going to present unprecedented risk-management problems, and have economic, social and political costs, which will be unprecedented? What we need to do to put in this in context to understand it is to go back about 60 years, and our next chart helps us do that? This begins with the work of a Shell oil scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert. M. King Hubbert worked during the 1940s and 1950s. He was observing the exploitation and the exhaustion of oil fields. He noticed that each oil field followed what we call a bell curve, goes up steeper and steeper, finally reaches a peek, and then down the other side. He saw this in field after field. He rationalized if he could add up all the fields in the United States and guess as to how many more we were going to find, he could then estimate when the United States would peak in oil production. He made that estimate in 1956, and he said that the United States would peak in oil production about 1970. As it turned out, he was right on target. You can see here from the graph, this peak in 1970. The smooth curve here is his prediction. The more ragged curve, or the actual data points, and you see that right on target, it peaked in 1970. The red curve here is the curve for the Soviet Union, now Russia. They kind of fell apart with their dissolution, and they did not reach their potential, so there is going to be a second kind of a much lower short peak here. Russia has already peaked in their oil production. Mr. Speaker, more than half of all of the oil-producing countries in the world, some 25, I believe, have already peaked. Their peak oil production is already behind them. The next chart shows a schematic that helps us understand this, perhaps a little better. This represents a 2 percent exponential growth in oil. Now, all the oil that was produced was used. For the first part of the curve the production of oil and the use of oil are the same thing. Obviously, you are not going to produce oil that you do not use. If you need more oil, and it can be produced, your price indicators will mean that more oil is going to be produced. So for this part of the curve, we have used the oil as fast as we produced it. At some point in time, it will peak. It peaked for the United States in 1970. M. King Hubbert said it would peak for the world about now. Actually, he said a few years earlier, but he could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the world oil price hike spikes which sent the world into a recession, which reduced the demand for oil. That moved the peak a little forward. We believe, many observers believe, that we are peaking about now, or will shortly be peaking. Mr. Speaker, I hope that the message that is in this document, peaking of world oil production, and the things that I am going to say, I hope they are wrong. Because if they are not wrong, we in United States and the world is in for a very rough ride. By the way, we can make this a very sharp peak or a very gradual one, by simply changing the scale on the abscissa and the ordinate. This represents a 2 percent increase in oil use. It is 2 percent of what it was last year, so it keeps growing, it grows what we call exponentially. With a 2 percent growth, it doubles in 35 years. Since this point is half of that point on the ordinate scale, this represents 35 years. So you see that some years before we actually reach peak, and we believe that we may be here at this point, but a few years before you reach peak, you actually are not producing as much as you would like to use. Just a very few years ago in 1998, I think, oil was under $10 a barrel, and now it was about $60 a barrel. So, clearly, there is not as much there as the world would like to use; and because there is not as much there, there is a higher demand for it, and so the price goes up. We will be talking this evening about filling the gap. This is the gap we are talking about filling here. What are we going to do now that we have reached this point? There are two things we can do. One of them is simply reduce our consumption of oil so that there is enough to go around, and the other is to try to find some other source of energy so we can fill this growing gap; and the further out we go, you will see the bigger the gap gets. We will be talking about that a little later. The next chart is an interesting one that shows the relationship between the oil we found and the oil we used. This is the difference between the oil we found and the oil we used. You see this is about the year 1980. Up until about 1980, every year we found more oil than we used. So we were accumulating an excess. This much excess was accumulated. From about 1980 on, we did not find as much oil as we used; and so to have enough oil available, we had to now start pumping our reserves. And so since 1980 our reserves have been going down and down because we have never, I think, in any year since about 1980 found as much oil as we pumped. The next chart shows these relationships in a somewhat different way that may be a little easier to understand. Here we have these bars and they represent, you see that was very similar to the previous chart, and this shows the actual discovery of oil. This does not subtract what we use from what we found because we have a second curve here, which is the use curve, and you will see this black curve here. That is the amount of oil that we have used. Now, it is very obvious that you cannot pump oil that you have not found. So if you kind of round this curve out and you get a curve here that has an area under it, that is the amount of oil that we can use. The amount that we have used is under this curve here. And since about 1980 we have had to make up for what we did not find by borrowing from that which we had found. So you are going to have to borrow some of this and fill in this space here to get us to where we are now in 2005. Where do we go from here? Well, where we go from here is going to be determined by how much of this oil that we found is still available and how much more oil we are going to find. Now, the people who put this graph together guessed that the oil could keep going down because it has been going down for 20 years. See the slope down for about 20 years? They guessed it would keep on going down at that slope. So the amount of oil we can use in the future is going to be the difference between what we find, which they think is going to be less and less each year which I am sure it will be because it has been for the last two decades, and the amount of oil that we use, and that will be made up by the oil that is here. So you can draw very many curves that do not have you falling off a cliff. And clearly the wells do not perform the way that you pump full bore and you get the last drop out and you do not get any the next day. It tapers off little by little as you come down what is called Hubbert's peak. The next chart is from the Hirsch Report, and in this chart he has simplified Hubbert's peak. And for purposes of their presentation here, they have depicted Hubbert's peak as not being the bell curve that we looked at before, but as simply being a slope up and they slope down. And they will tell you in the report that they have simplified that because of the points that they want to make later. The bottom of the chart here shows something very interesting. It shows our production of oil in our country peaking in 1970. After 1970, we have developed some really good techniques for improving the discovery of oil and the recovery of oil. Mr. Speaker, really big increases in our technologies for both finding oil and for pumping it, enhanced recovery of oil, did not make any appreciable difference in the amount of oil that we were able to pump. This points to the fact that the geology really determines how much oil we are going to get in the enhanced recovery techniques, and the field exploration techniques do not make much difference. Another thing that does not make much difference at all is price. We are falling down the slope here. Notice what happened to price. It went way up. That ought to have resulted, if you think the marketplace works, that ought to have resulted in a lot more oil production in our country. It did not. You see, nothing really happened to the oil production when the price really spiked here. But what this graph does is to make the point that increased technologies and increased price will have little effect on the production of oil from a field that has already peaked and you are going down slope. The next chart is an interesting one, and what this shows is kind of what was shown in the past one, perhaps in a more dramatic way. By 1980 we were already 10 years down the other side of what was called Hubbert's peak, and the Reagan administration noted that and they knew they needed to have more oil. Their solution to that was to incent our oil companies to go out and drill more, so they provided some tax incentives for that, and it really worked because this is the drill here you see. And it really spiked after 1980; they drilled a lot more wells. But notice this relationship between the oil that you have found and the oil you are pumping; and in spite of all that drilling, we went negative. What that shows is if it is not there, you cannot drill it. No matter how many holes you drill, you will not get more oil if there is not more oil there to get. The next chart is kind of a blow-up of the situation in our country since 1935 to roughly the present. This shows where we have gotten our oil from. It shows us peaking in 1970. Oil from Texas, the rest of the United States, the natural gas liquids, and then the big discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay. We were already slipping down Hubbert's peak. There was a little blip there as we slipped down Hubbert's peak. But notice this source where we are getting 25 percent of our oil really did not stop us from slipping down Hubbert's peak. Notice the yellow there, Mr. Speaker. That is the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discovery. You may remember that. A number of years ago that was supposed to solve our problem. It was oil for the foreseeable future. That is all the contribution it made. Now, we clearly have been using more oil since we peaked, and we have been getting it from overseas; and we now get nearly two-thirds of our oil from overseas because, Mr. Speaker, we have only about 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world. We use about 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. The next chart shows the estimate of a number of authorities on when peaking is going to occur. Here we have the dates, and this first block of dates are those between now and 2010. That is pretty soon. You see the individuals there. Several of those I know personally. Colin Campbell, I have talked with him on the phone from over in the British Isles. Matt Simmons is the personal energy adviser of the President, president and CEO of perhaps the largest energy investment bank in the world. Dr. Deffeyes is a professor at Princeton University who has written a book on this subject, ``The End of Oil,'' I think, ``The View From Hubbert's Peak'' is what he calls it. Then we have a few who think the peak is going to be between 2010 and 2015. And then there are three that say that it is going to be there at notice. Mr. Speaker, there is no argument that there will be a peak except for the last one here, Lynch, who believes it will be a long plateau. He is not arguing that it will not peak, but he thinks it will not reach the top and fall off. It will be a long plateau. I would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that the economists here tend to be those that think that peak will be sometime in the future. What economists do is simply predict the future from the past. They are very good at studying the past. And if, in fact, there are inexhaustible resources, it is very logical that you ought to be able to predict the future from the past. But if, in fact, there is a limited supply of oil, then you may not be able to predict the future from the past. But notice the big group of experts, and this is who they work for and what they are, and notice several of them are retired. We find when a military person takes off their uniform, we sometimes get kind of different testimony from them than when they wear the uniform. These people do not have any company they are accountable to. They are retired. For people who are just retired, Mr. Speaker, you tend to get very honest testimony from them. So you know who they are and who they work for and they are very credible people and they are pretty much all saying that peaking is pretty soon. The next chart shows how we use the oil that we get. The big blue on top here is transportation. That is where we use about 70 percent of it. The yellow is industrial. The purple down here is electric power, and then what we use in our homes, residential, and then commercial at the very bottom. The important part of this is the transportation, important for two reasons. One is that it is the biggest chunk of it and, secondly, it is that use of oil that cannot be readily replaced by something else. In industry they can use energy from many other sources for much that they do; but for transportation, we are pretty much stuck with oil. The next chart shows us some of the characteristics of the fuels that we use and this is talking about energy density, how many gigajoules you get per ton. Gigajoules is a technical term. It simply means BTUs or calories or heat or energy that you get from a given volume of this. We tend to think of it in gallons or barrels, 42 gallons in a barrel by the way. Here you see that crude oil is here at 449, and then diesel automotive as you start to refine it you get higher and higher densities. Now, as we run down Hubbert's peak and start running low on oil and still want to drive our cars and our planes and so forth, we will have to find a substitute. Notice that the substitutes here have very much less energy density. I would like to spend just a moment, Mr. Speaker, talking about energy density because it is really very important and presents a big challenge to us. One barrel of oil, that is 42 gallons of oil, the refined product of which you can buy now for just a tenth of a penny under $2 at some stores now. So you can buy it for well less than $100. That will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you. If you have some trouble getting your arms around that, Mr. Speaker, just imagine how far that gallon of gas or diesel fuel takes your pickup truck or your SUV or your car. By the way, that is still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you are buying it in the small bottles. Now, you could pull your car or truck or SUV as far as that gallon of fuel takes you, how long would it take you to pull your truck there. Obviously, you cannot pull it, but you can use a come-along and guard rails and trees and so forth, and by and by you will get it there. But it would take you quite a while to take it the distance that that one gallon takes you. Another little example of this energy density and the tremendous challenge we face of finding something that is equivalent to this: If you work all day real hard in your yard this weekend, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. That may be kind of humbling to recognize that in terms of fossil fuel energy we are worth less than 25 cents a day, but this incredible wealth that we found under the ground, how fast we have used it. How little concern we show for the future. The next chart addresses the transportation challenge we have. Obviously, the oil will go further if we are using less of it, but what he says here is that we cannot conceive of any affordable, government- sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules for our cars and trucks. The average car is on the road I think 16 years. That is the median. That does not mean it is the average because the last one is 18 years, that is the middle one, and the average light truck, about the same distance, 16 or 17 years. The average big truck, heavy truck, is on the road for 28 years. So if you want to buy a Prius or an Insight or one of these hybrid cars now, we ought to be doing that. I am not discouraging us doing that. That will make a very small dent in oil use because the things that were bought just this year are going to be on the road 16 or 17 years for cars and light trucks and 28 years median for heavy trucks. So it will take a long time. If you want to dramatically reduce oil use, you have got to get these gas hogs off the road and get some fuel efficient things on the road. What they are saying is they cannot conceive of any affordable here, and that is the key word here. Obviously, we could bribe all the people in the country to take their SUVs to the junkyard and give them enough money to get a new hybrid. That would not be affordable. That is the key word here. What he is pointing out here is it is going take a long time to make this change from our present gas guzzling SUVs, big cars and trucks and so forth and go to these hybrids. The next chart shows us the contribution that enhanced oil recovery can make. We have some really good techniques today, and some people will tell you do not worry. We are really good at getting oil out of the ground now, so do not worry about this peak. What this shows is it does not affect the peak. Indeed, if you think about it, it should not affect the peak, because up until this peak, the oil comes out of the ground easily. You do not need the enhanced recovery techniques to get it out because it comes out very easily anyhow. When you really need them is on the down slope, and this shows you get a little more oil out on the down slope. The next chart shows a depiction that the authors use, and this is really a simplification. They will tell you that this should be a growth curve here, an exponential curve, but they are making it a wedge because it helps them to make their points. And this is a schematic one for any substitute that you want to have. It takes awhile before you get anything out of it. You have got to build the plant and plan, and then you start producing some of whatever this is. The next chart will show us the variety of things that it is, and the longer you have, the more and more of it you produce a day, present this thing as a wedge. The next chart shows us an addition of some of wedges that you might use to have more liquid fuels available. Enhanced oil recovery, we looked at that. That will produce something. Coal liquids. When I was a little boy, in our lamps we used coal oil. By and by that was substituted by kerosene, and Hitler ran his military in World War II on oil made from coal because he did not have any oil and we were not going to let him get any. So he had to make it from coal. They had a lot of coal. Heavy oil. Heavy oil is what determines why it is heavy. It will most likely sink in water some of it. All the rest of oil floats on water, and some of it is what is called sour. When you see that sour crude, light sweet crude is the most valuable. Sour crude has a lot of sulfur in it. You have to take that sulfur out. You are really polluting the air. Then gas to liquids, and then he shows something about efficient vehicles. It takes a while before you get this in the fleet, and notice in 15 years the trifling contribution that efficient vehicles have made. The next chart is a composite here that makes a salient point that they make in their paper, and here they look at three different scenarios of when you start to address the problem and the consequences of that. The first of these, you start your crash program when you peak out. You say, gee, we cannot get as much oil out of the ground today as we got yesterday. That will not literally be true. It will be this month compared to last month because day-to-day is probably not going to make that big a difference. If you wait until you see peak oil, what they are saying here is that run as fast as you can. With mitigation, you are still going to have a big shortfall. By the way, I would like to refer back to their simplification of the bell curve. They simply use a slope up and a slope down, and what they are saying here, when you reach peak oil, you would really like to keep on going and use more and more. This really, of course, is an exponential curve going up, but they show here for simplicity a straight line and what they are trying to do is fill the gap. I am going to come back to that in a couple of minutes, but I am not sure we ought to be trying to fill the gap. The second curve here represents what happens if you anticipate it by 10 years, and notice that most of the people in that former chart thought you were going to have peak oil a lot sooner than 10 years from now, but if you have 10 years and start the mitigation, you are still going to have a shortfall. To have no economic consequences, they say they are going to have to start 20 years ahead. Now, almost nobody believes that we have 20 years ahead. So obviously, if we are trying to fill that gap, there is going to be some shortfall because it is either upon us or will shortly be upon us. I would like to talk for just a moment about whether or not we ought to try to fill that gap. For two reasons I think that maybe we ought to be considering that that is not really a good idea. One is there is a pretty widespread belief that the warm weather we are having and the more frequent and intense hurricanes, the melting of the icecaps and the glaciers may be due to global warming that may have resulted from an increase in greenhouse gases which are produced by burning these fossil fuels. Now, if that is true and you believe that is going to have a negative effect on our environment, our climate and so forth, which will ultimately affect us economically, then I am wondering why you would want to have more of this by trying to fill that gap. Let me give you another maybe even better reason that you should not be thinking about filling the gap. There is an old saying that if you are in a hole, stop digging. Now, a corollary to that would be, in this case, that if you are climbing a cliff, a hill, where you will come to a precipice and by and by fall off and have to uncomfortably go down the other side, the higher you climb, the further you have to fall. That is very germane to this because the more oil that we use, the more energy that we use, the higher we will have climbed up that cliff and the steeper will be the descent down the other side. The next chart, and you should notice, Mr. Speaker, the page where you can find these on each one. This is from page 64 of their report, and let me read this because this is really significant and I suspect that not too many people know this. World oil peaking is going to happen. That is a certainty. I think that everybody understands that oil cannot be forever. There is not an inexhaustible supply of oil. It is not going to last to forever. What does that mean? They think that it means that we will shortly peak in oil production. I would like to emphasize that peaking does not mean that we are going to run out of oil. We will not run out of oil for a long time, maybe 100 years, but what we will have run out of is readily available, high quality oil that can be produced at the rate we would like to use it. It is oil peaking. It is not running out of oil. A hundred years from now there will be some oil, some gas, some coal, that we can find in ever-decreasing amounts at ever-increasing cost. It will not be very much in 100 years, but there will still be some. ``World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak.'' I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that one can find a lot of information on this if you simply do a Google search for peak oil. Now, you get essentially the same information if you do a Google search for Hubbert's peak but peak oil will do. That is maybe easier to remember. You will find a lot of articles there relative to this. ``A number of competent forecasters,'' and we looked at that chart a few minutes ago, ``project peaking within a decade; others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of'' a number of things, ``geological complexities.'' Let me pause just a moment to talk a little bit about the geology here and why you do not find oil everywhere. We believe that a very long time ago there were warm seas, and at that time, the world was warm up in northern Alaska and Siberia because there were warm seas there. In every sea there was life there that grew like algae on your pond. At the end of the season, it sank to the bottom, and then dirt was washed off of the adjoining hills and through a very long time that built up large deposits at the bottom of these warm seas. Then the tectonic plates of the earth separated. As you know, Mr. Speaker, there are tectonic plates that ride on the molten core of the Earth, and then the crust of the Earth is above those. These separated somewhat so that the bottom of these ancient warm seas were submerged, covered by a lot of rock and dirt. They were warm enough to the molten core of the Earth that it was just the right amount of heat. They were under enough pressure, and with time in this pressure cooker, this organic material was converted to oil and gas. Gas is the volatile part of this oil. Now, you do not only need that, Mr. Speaker, you need something else before you really have oil deposits and gas deposits. You need a dome of rock over top of this like a big umbrella that keeps the volatiles, the gas, from going up and escaping because, you see, if they can escape, you do not end up with the nice, light sweet crude oil that we value so much. You end up with something like the tar sands in the oil shales. It is a little bit like the asphalt roads you drive on. Now, if you cook that stuff, it will flow, and it is pretty much what these tar sands in oil shales are, something like that. So they were a very unique series of events that occurred that provide the oil and the gas for us, and it is no argument that you should not find it, probably are not going to find it everywhere in the world. By the way, when I was a little boy we lived near a coal mining town, and we got what was called Run-of-mine coal. In those days there was not a big mechanical thing on a coal face digging it off. It was a miner with a pick and his shovel and his wheelbarrow. He may have had a little cart and a mule inside the mine to help him in some of the bigger mines. But that would come out of the mine, and we would buy it just as it came out, called Run-of-mine, just the way you mined it, some big lumps on down to dust. Some of those big lumps were so big I could not put them in the furnace. So there was a sledge hammer, and we would have to break the lump to put it in the furnace. I remember breaking some of those lumps and they would fall open and there would be a fern leaf. I remember the thoughts that I had, gee, how long ago did that thing grow. It was very obvious where coal came from. You can see the vegetation inside the coal. ``Geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity,'' how much of it we are going to need, ``and political influences,'' are they really going to sell us the oil or not. ``Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.'' But the fact that it will peak is not uncertain. It will peak. ``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. Then I emphasize this statement. ``The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.'' The next chart takes us back about 400 years in history. It would be nice to have one that took us back 5,000 years in history because that is about the extent of recorded history, about 5,000 years. But we go back here to the very beginning, a little bit before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and we notice that the Industrial Revolution began with wood and it ramped up, and we denuded largely the mountains of New England to make charcoal to take to England to make steel, and then we found coal. And the ordinate here is quadrillion BTUs. That was the amount of energy we got. Boy, did we get a lot more energy from coal than we did from wood. It is more dense. It is easier to get and haul large quantities of it. But notice what happened when we came to gas and oil. There was essentially an explosion in the amount of energy that we could produce. Notice up there at the top, Mr. Speaker, the recession of the 1970s produced by the Arab oil embargo. There is a stunning statistic. Up until the Carter years, every decade, the world used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Now what that means is that when we had used half of all the oil that was there, we would have only one decade of oil remaining. Now, that slowed down after the Arab oil embargo. We got a lot more efficient. The refrigerator we have today probably uses a third of the electricity it did then; so we really slowed down in our use of oil, or this chart curve would have kept on going up. There is another curve we might put on here, Mr. Speaker, and that is the world's population. And it might not be too surprising that the increase in population pretty much paralleled the increase in available energy. We started out with 1 billion, more or less, before the Industrial Revolution. Now we have almost 7 billion people. Mr. Speaker, in terms of 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a brief blip. We have been in the age of oil about 150 years. It was about 150 years ago we first found oil in any quantities and started to use it. In another 150 years we will essentially be through the age of oil. What will our world look like when we have exhausted the fossil fuels? And they will be exhausted. One of the writers in writing about this says that our great grandchildren, in looking at history and what we did with these fossil fuels, will say how could the monsters have done that. How could they have found this incredibly valuable resource buried in the ground, these riches buried in the ground, and used them wantonly with no regard that they might be finite, that they would one day run out. Matt Savinar, who wrote one of the articles that people will find when they do the Google search for peak oil, Matt Savinar begins his article by saying: ``Dear reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' I pulled it off the Web and gave it to my wife, and she read that first paragraph and said, The guy is crazy; I am not going to read any more. I said, Please read on and reserve judgment. She read on and was genuinely frightened when she had finished his article. Matt Savinar may be audacious, and I think that the future may not be so bleak as he presents it, but I will tell the Members, Mr. Speaker, if we do not do something meaningful in terms of trying to mitigate the damage, it could be, it could be as bad as Matt Savinar presents it. He may be audacious, but he is not an idiot; and I would suggest that Members read his article. It is very useful. The next chart shows something really interesting that we have been talking about this evening. This is where we are now. We have been running up this side of Hubbert's peak. This, by the way, is worldwide. The question is now, When will the world do what the United States did in 1970? When will the world reach peak oil? I had a course in statistics when I was working for my doctorate in school maybe 55 or 60 years ago, and what they have done here, we have a probability of 95 percent. That is most likely what we will find. And then we have a 50 percent probability that it could be higher or it could be lower and then a 5 percent probability or it could be higher or it could be lower, and somehow they mysteriously take this as the expected value. It could be low just as well as high. That is not the expected value. The value that the statistician would tell us to expect is a 95 percent value. And, by the way, that is pretty much what the experts tell us. A couple of Congresses ago, I was Chair of the Energy Subcommittee on the Science Committee, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of this problem. So we had a hearing and invited in the world's experts on oil reserves, and there was pretty unanimous agreement. I was surprised. It was somewhere like from 970 to 1,040, about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil that remained. Now, we have pumped about the same amount. We have pumped about 1,000 gigabarrels. That is 1,000 billion barrels. That is 1 trillion barrels, and that sounds like a lot. But if we divide that 1,000 gigabarrels by the 84 million barrels that we use a day, 21 in our country alone, 63 in the rest of the world, 84 total, if we divide that 84 million barrels a day into the 1 trillion barrels that the experts told us are still out there, we come to about 40 years' remaining oil. Remember up until the Carter years, when we used half of it, which is about what we have used, we would have only 10 years remaining; so we have really slowed down, fortunately. We are using it much more efficiently now than we did then. But they make two assumptions for this chart. One is that it peaks in 2016 and that there is 3,000 gigabarrels. That is not what the experts say. The experts say that there will be a total of about 2,000 gigabarrels, 1,000 already pumped, another 1,000 to be pumped. If that is true, then we would start downhill from this point. But if we have another 1,000 gigabarrels, notice with this exponential curve how little that pushes peak oil out. Not very far. What is it? About 2017, 2016, something like that is all that it pushes out. Here it is: 2016. And if we now assume that there is more than that, it pushes it out further. But notice what happens. Notice what happens. Notice how quickly we fall. I made the point before I am not sure we want to fill the gap because the analogy of if you are in a hole, stop digging is if you are climbing a hill and you are going to fall off a cliff on the other side, the lower the hill, the less you will fall. And they make exactly that point here in these predictions. These are predictions of the Energy Information Agency. These are economists working for the Department of Energy. They are not oil experts. They are economists, and they do what economists do. They predict the future from the past. And they really study the past and know it, and they think that if they know the past well, they can predict the future. But what they do not take into account is that oil is finite and their predictions would be exactly right if market forces controlled and if oil were limitless, but oil is clearly not limitless. In the last chart that I want to spend a few minutes on, where do we go from here? From where will we get our liquid fuels? From where will we get our energy as we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak? We have here some finite resources. By ``finite'' we mean they are not forever. Some of them are pretty big if we can get the energy out. Tar sands and oil shales. Some will tell us do not worry about the future of energy because there is 1\1/2\ trillion barrels of oil in the oil sands of Canada alone. That is true. But, Mr. Speaker, there is also an incredible amount of energy in the tides. I pick up two 5-gallon buckets of water, and they are pretty heavy; and then I note that the Moon lifts the whole ocean about 2 feet. That is an incredible amount of energy. But because there is that incredible amount of energy out there does not mean that I can harness it and use it effectively. The same thing is pretty much true of these tar sands. Yes, there is potentially a lot of energy there, but how effectively, efficiently can we get it out? The Canadians are now producing oil maybe even less than $30 a barrel. They are selling for $60. That is a good deal, and they are producing a lot of it. But when we look at the energy that it takes to get it out, there are better techniques than the one they are using; but the technique they are using, they use more energy from natural gas than they get out of oil so that the energy profit ratio is less than nothing. The oil is sought on the market and brings a good price. The gas is up there and they do not need it and it is hard to ship. So from a dollar-and-cents perspective, it may make sense to use that gas, even more energy and gas to produce the oil than they get out of the oil. But ultimately, of course, as we move to a more energy-efficient world, we will not be able to do that. I was out at a conference in Denver, Colorado, just this past weekend; and the Shell Oil scientist that was doing some of the tests in the oil shales of Colorado emphasized that his work was just experimental, that he could not extrapolate from what he had now done to the future. And what they have done is kind of interesting, Mr. Speaker. They have taken a small patch of Colorado desert out there, high desert, and they have drilled a lot of holes in a circle and frozen, put pipes down there, and they froze in the ground. What they have done is to make a vessel out of frozen ground because they do not want what they are doing inside that big vessel to contaminate groundwater outside, and then they cook the oil. I hear from 2 years to 4 years, for some period of time, they cook the oil inside that vessel. They keep putting hot water down there, steam down there, and they cook the oil. By the way, they heat that with natural gas, which is why it takes so much energy. And then they pump on that. When they have heated it up, it will flow so they can pump it out. But this is pretty small. It is hard to scale up from that. And they put in one unit of energy from heat and they get out 3\1/2\ units of energy. That looks like a pretty good energy profit ratio, but it does not account for all the energy that goes in there: drilling the holes and refrigeration and the energy it took to make the equipment that they use and refining it when they get it out and so forth. So we are not yet sure how positive that is going to be. It may be that we will use the energy from four barrels of oil and have one net plus. By the way, that would not be all that bad because that is about the ratio in producing ethanol. We have to put in about three-fourths as much energy into the ethanol as we get out of it, about 750,000 BTUs of energy to get 1 million units of energy in producing ethanol; and that is for efficient production. Many of our ethanol production facilities now are producing ethanol, Dr. Pimental believes, with a negative energy profit ratio: the more fossil fuel energy goes in to producing it than we get out of it. Coal: we have about 250 years of coal remaining in our country. That is the current use rate. If we increase the use only 2 percent exponentially, that 250 years shrinks to 85 years. For many uses like our car, we cannot use coal. We are going to have to use gas or a liquid, and we are going to have to take some energy to make that conversion. Now it shrinks to 50 years. So we have got about 50 years of effective coal remaining at only a 2 percent increase. We may need to increase its use much more than 2 percent. It is there. We need to husband it and use it wisely. Nuclear: we produce 8 percent of our electricity in this country from nuclear. That is 20 percent of our electricity. That can and maybe should grow. But the kind of plants we use, the light water reactor plants, cannot be expanded indefinitely because there is a limited supply of fissionable uranium in the world. I get wildly divergent estimates, from 30 years to 200 years. That is at current-use rates. As soon as you start exponentially increasing the rate of use, whatever that time is, it shrinks very rapidly. That means if we really wanted to go big-scale nuclear, we need to go to breeder reactors. With breeder reactors, you borrow a lot of problems, like transporting the fuel for enrichment. You have weapons- grade plutonium produced, and you may in the future be making a choice between buying these problems and shivering in the dark because in an energy-deficient world, that may be the choice that you come to. Nuclear fusion. Oh, how I hope we get there because then we are home- free. But planning to solve our energy problems in this country of the world with fusion is a bit like you or me planning to solve our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. It would be nice if it happened; it probably will not, and I certainly would not count on it. And then we come to the truly renewable sources. About half of those, a little more than half comes from nuclear up here as compared to what is down here. Solar, wind, they now represent about a quarter of a percent of our total energy. A bit more than that of electricity, but about a quarter of a percent of our total electricity. Geothermal, that is tapping into the molten core of the earth. Where we can do that, we ought to do it because that will last a very long time. I mentioned ocean energy. Lots of energy there. The tides, the waves, thermal gradients in the ocean. There is a lot of potential energy there, but there is an old axiom that says energy to be effective must be concentrated. It is so diffuse in the ocean. We have been trying for a very long time to capture some of that energy, and it is very, very difficult. And then we come to agricultural resources. A lot of people have high hopes for what we can get from agriculture. We can get energy from agriculture in two different ways: One by producing fuels like ethanol and methanol by fermenting the product; and the other is by burning the product. There are limits to both of these. We now are barely able to feed the world. Tonight a fair number of people will go to bed hungry. We could free up more of this energy if we would be content to eat the soybeans and corn rather than the pig and the cow and the chicken eating the corn and the soybeans. To take biomass from the soil, that is what makes topsoil different from subsoil is organic material, biomass. I am sure we can get some energy from that. But we have to be careful how much to tend to get from that. Waste energy, instead of putting it in the landfill, burn it. There is a really good plant here in Montgomery County very near. I would be proud to have that next to my church. I cannot even see that it is burning trash because trash comes in inside a big container. It is inside before it is emptied, and it looks like a nice brick office building. The last thing is hydrogen from renewables. Hydrogen is not an energy source. You cannot mine it or suck it out of the air. The only way you get hydrogen is to use energy from some other source like natural gas. This is where we get most of it or like splitting water with electrolysis. You will always use more energy in getting the hydrogen than you get out of hydrogen, or else you are going to have to repeal the second law of thermodynamics, and that is not going to happen. It is still a good idea because hydrogen burns very cleanly. You get only water. You can burn it in a fuel cell where you have at least twice the efficiency of reciprocating engine, but it is not a solution to our energy problem. Think of it as an energy carrier which is exactly what your battery is. If you think of this as being a hydrogen battery as opposed to an electron battery that you have in your car, you will get it right as far as hydrogen is concerned. There is a lot of talk about a hydrogen future. That is not going to happen in the next decade or two or even three. It is going to take a very long time to ramp up, and we will always have to have some bigger energy source from which we make the hydrogen because it will always be made with an energy deficit because we are not going to repeal the second law of thermodynamics. Mr. Speaker, I want to submit for the Record this report because it is not available anywhere else for the public to review. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management (By Robert L. Hirsch, SAIC, Project Leader; Roger Bezdek, MISI; Robert Wendling, MISI) February 2005

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 2048.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support the Gingrey amendment. Before Kelo, a Christian church, after spending 5 years acquiring property, had the city intercede when it learned there would be a church built on the property. The city initiated eminent domain to give the land to Costco. The church prevailed, but that was before Kelo. In Justice O'Connor's Kelo dissent, she warned that in expanding the definition of ``public use,'' the majority had come close to embracing ``the absurd argument that any church might be replaced with a retail store.'' She continued to state that this ``is inherently harmful to society.'' Because of Kelo in general and in this situation in particular, the fifth amendment takings clause has been stretched beyond the bounds that the Framers intended. By expanding the fifth amendment's definition of ``public use,'' it could limit the scope of the ``free exercise'' of religion guaranteed in the first amendment. Kelo shattered our private property rights. Today, by passing H.R. 4128, Congress will help pick up the pieces. Congress must act to prevent the demolition of our rights, our homes, our businesses and our houses of worship.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I have here an article that appeared on the front page of USA Today. It is above the fold. It is the center article. It says: Debate Brews: Has Oil Production Peaked? The undeniable facts that spawned this article were noted by a number of the leading persons in our country several months ago, Boyden Gray, McFarland, James Woolsey, and a large number of retired four-star admirals and generals when they noted the facts that are on our first chart here: That we have in our country only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil; we have 8 percent of the world's oil production. Just those two statistics together say something rather interesting. If we have only 2 percent of the oil reserves but are producing 8 percent of the world's oil, that means we are really good at pumping oil, does it not? That means that we are pumping down our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world. We represent only 5 percent of the population, they noted, and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import about two-thirds of what we use. They wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the reserves and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we use is a very large national security risk. We really need to do something about that as a country. Whether you believe, as this article points out, that oil has peaked--in just a moment, Mr. Speaker, we will note how this term came into existence--or whether you believe that we need to do something about energy because of this national security concern, what you are going to do is essentially the same thing, because what you need to do, if this is just a national security concern, is to free ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. That is exactly the thing you have to do. If you believe that we have reached peak oil, you have to free ourselves from the dependence on oil, most of which is foreign oil. In the former, if you just think it is a national security concern, we may muddle through that and come out okay. If you think that it is a peak oil issue, then there is no way of muddling through that, because unless you forcefully and intelligently approach that problem you are going to have some big problems. The next chart shows us how this term originated, and we need to go back about six decades to the 1940s and the 1950s when a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert whose name is widely known. I was reading an article just today. Without ever telling the readers the derivation of the term they were talking about Hubbert's Peak. Well, in 1956, Hubbert as a result of his analysis for nearly two decades of the behavior of oil fields made the prediction that the United States would peak in oil production in about 1970. As it turned out, he was right on target, we did peak in 1970. He made that prediction because, as he noted, the exploitation and exhaustion of an individual oil field followed a typical not surprising or unsurprising bell curve, that it went up and up as you pumped a field until you reached the peak, and then at that peak about half of the oil had been pumped, and then the last half was more difficult to get and so you came down the other side of that typical bell curve, and that has come in the literature to be known as Hubbert's Peak. This smooth green line is his prediction for the United States. The rougher green line with the heavy symbols indicates the actual production of oil. What you see, it roughly followed his prediction. The red curve here is for Russia that had more oil than we. They peaked after us. But when the Soviet Union fell apart, you see that they did not reach their potential, and they are now experiencing a second smaller peak that does not show here but it is a peak about like so. If we look at the next chart, we see where we got the oil from in our country. I am going to spend a couple of minutes just to say what peak oil is, and I have got several colleagues that are going to join us. This shows where we have gotten the oil from in our country, Texas and the rest of the United States and Alaska and natural gas liquids. Notice the small contribution that Prudhoe Bay made, a big source of oil. We were starting down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. Remember, he said we would peak in 1970, and right on target that is when we peaked, and the big Prudhoe Bay oil field was a little blip in our downward coast on Hubbert's Peak. I am sure you can all remember the fabled oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico which was going to save us for the future. That is this yellow here. That is all that amounted to. There are 4,000 oil wells out there, I think, and that is their contribution to oil in our country. The next chart shows the world situation, and this is a too busy chart. It is like reading a textbook. There is really a whole lot of information there. They spent a lot of time putting this together, and what I have done is to pull out one part of this. This little inset here will be our next chart, and this inset shows two curves. They are really very interesting curves. The bars here show the discovery of oil, and you notice that we were discovering oil way back in the early 1900s and a whole lot of it was discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. The black curve here indicates our consumption of oil. Notice, up until about the early 1980s the world was finding a lot more oil than it was consuming. Up until this point, this is all history, and from this point on now is a guess as to where we will be going. Because these two curves have the same abscissa, the area under these two curves, and this is one curve, the production curve, and this is the consumption curve. The area under those two curves has to be the same. What that means is that the only oil that we can pump is the oil that we found, and what the authors have done is to make a guesstimate of the oil which is yet to be found, and this is their estimate of what we are yet to find. We may find more, a little, we may find less. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that most of the world's experts agree that we have probably found about 95 percent of the oil that we will find, of the recoverable oil that we will find. I did a little play with these curves, and I noted that this part of the consumption curve will consume some of this discovery, and I noted that it took all of the discovery to about this point just to make up the difference between the rate at which we are using oil, which you can see is three or four times as high as the rate at which we are finding oil. So what we have got yet to consume is this oil which remains here, and the authors believe that it will follow that kind of a slope. The next chart shows a simplistic bell curve. By the way, this bell curve can be very sharp. All you have to do is change the ordinate and abscissa, you can make it very short and sharp, or you can make it spread out. This is a 2 percent growth rate in the production and consumption, because up until this point the production of oil and the consumption of oil have been the same thing. There have been no real shortages until currently, and there have been no big surpluses that have been stored away somewhere except for our strategic reserve and some other countries that have some strategic reserve. This shows that the problem will occur not at peak oil but sometime before peak oil, because you see that the demand curve will separate from the supply curve quite a while before you reach a peak. If this is a 2 percent growth rate, that means you double, that is exponential, you double in 35 years. So that yellow area on the abscissa is 35 years long. What this says is that you should start seeing some little perturbations a decade or so before you reach peak oil. The next chart kind of puts this in context, and I think that it is good to look back through history to see how we got here. Here we have three little curves, one of which shows our economy, and this starts way back in the 1600s and goes up to the present. This shows the economy of the world with wood, the brown; black appropriately for coal; and then look what happens when we get to oil. It just does not show the quadrillion Btus that the world has produced, that also mirrors pretty much the population growth of the world. We started out back here with less than a billion people for hundreds of years, less than a billion people. When we finally had the energy available from fossil fuels, primarily oil, our population has shot up from about 1 billion people to now almost 7 billion people. I want to show one more chart before I put one up that we can talk to with the Members that have joined me. This is an interesting one that kind of tells you where we are today. The analogy I use is that we as a country are very much like a young couple that has gotten an inheritance from their grandparents, a pretty good inheritance, and they have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from what they earn, and the grandparents' inheritance is not going to last until they retire at the rate they are spending it. So they have got to do one of two things. Either they have got to spend less money, or they have got to earn more money. I use those numbers, 85 and 15, and some other people may use 86 and 14, by the way, but that is pretty much where we are in our country in terms of energy use. 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels and only 15 percent comes from other sources, a bit more than half of that 15 percent comes from nuclear. That could and probably should grow. There are obviously some problems with using nuclear, but you will make a choice between borrowing those problems or not having energy in the future, I believe. The 7 percent which is what we call renewables has been blown up here so that we can see what it consists of. Notice that the biggest part, nearly half of that renewable energy, is hydro. That is probably not going to grow in our country, we are breaching more dams than we are making now and so hydro has probably peaked out in our country. The next biggest source is wood. That is not rural people burning wood to keep warm. That is the paper industry and the timber industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product and they are using it to produce energy. Then, waste. That is a really interesting one because that is pretty big, well, pretty big compared to other things in renewables but not very big compared to the total amount of energy that we use. That is municipal waste being burned. The county instead of a landfill ought to have a generating plant that is burning this waste. There is a very good one, by the way, up at Dickerson not very far from here that they would be happy to show you. Now we get down to those renewables that are talked about as the sources of energy that we are going to have to increasingly turn to as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. They are solar, 1 percent. That is 1 percent of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. Wind, 1 percent of 7 percent, .07 percent, more than that of electricity, because this nuclear power which is 8 percent of total energy is 20 percent of electricity in our country. Then agriculture. By the way, there are two ways we use geothermal. One is the true geothermal where you are tapping into the molten core of the Earth and getting heat there. There is not a chimney, I believe, in Iceland, because they get all of their energy that way. We are now using that term ``geothermal'' in another way where you wisely couple not to the air, which you are trying to heat in the wintertime and cool in the summertime to condition your house, but you are coupling your heat pump to the ground or ground water which stays a constant temperature. Fifty-six degrees seems pretty cool in the summertime and pretty warm in the wintertime, does it not, and that is ground water temperature here. Then we get to agriculture, and what we can expect to get from agriculture. I know one of the Members who has joined us is going to talk about agriculture. Let me just call on the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) because he wants to talk about agriculture. Let me put the next chart up here, because what we are going to be speaking to now is the finite resources we have, the things we can turn to; but they are finite. They will not last forever, and then the renewable resources, and the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) is interested in one of those down here in the agricultural resources area.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for joining us this evening. Ethanol is certainly one of the alternatives to which we can turn. But if there were some here on the other side, let me just indicate what they would probably say because, as a friend told me a number of years ago, the thinnest sheet of paper has two sides, and so let us look at what they would say on the other side. I have here a chart which shows the energy input for producing a million Btus from gasoline and the energy input for producing a million Btus from ethanol. And to get a million Btus out of gasoline, we have to input 1.23 million, because you are not going to get it all. You have to transport it and refine it and you are going to lose something in the process. But for ethanol, we have the happy consequence of getting a lot of energy from the sun. So this chart says that for every million Btus you get from ethanol, it takes only .74 million Btus of fossil energy to produce it, and that is a good bet. But, there are others, Dr. Pimentel, for instance, and his colleague from the West Coast. About 6 weeks ago I attended an all-day conference at the National Press Club, and their argument was that if you really look at all of the fossil fuel energy that goes into producing ethanol, you use more fossil fuel energy in producing ethanol than you get out of it. I hope they are wrong; but even if they are not wrong, the energy profit ratio is not going to be really large. Let me look at this next chart for just a moment, and then I am going to come back to this one for a minute, because both of these relate to ethanol. This is an interesting chart. What it shows is energy profit ratios for several fuels. This is energy profit ratio. Now, what the gentleman was looking at was dollar profit ratio. It is really profitable dollar-wise to produce ethanol today because it takes less money to produce it than you would pay for an equivalent gallon of gasoline. This is the energy profit ratio, and this is contrasted with a quality, economic effectiveness in transport, how feasible is it to use over a wide range of uses. Of course, the source that tops the list is the giant oil fields. We do not have any of those, by the way; they are all in the Middle East. But the energy profit ratio is very high: if you put in $1 you get out $60. And they are very economically useful, because you can make a whole lot of things out of it. You can make pharmaceuticals out of it, you can heat your house with it, you can run your car with it, you can make plastics out of it, do a whole lot of things with oil. This shows the other compounds. Here is U.S. oil. We never were very good, and now we are getting on down further, tar sands and ethanol. Ethanol is way down here at the bottom because they say there is not a big energy profit ratio. But if it is even positive, it is really good, because when you use ethanol, it is relatively nonpolluting as compared to fossil fuels. As the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) properly pointed out, there is no CO2 penalty for that, because every bit of CO2 you get out of it, next year's plant is going to absorb in growing it. We use oxygen, produce CO2, the plants, happy neighbors; they use our CO2 to produce oxygen which we then can breath. But you must be very careful with the energy profit ratio. The dollar profit ratio is one thing; and, today, that is about all economists look at. But energy profit ratio, at the end of the day, if we really have finite sources of these fossil fuels, is going to be important. Let us go back now to the previous chart. I just want to take a quick look at the bottom of it because this shows something that most people have no idea about. This is the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn which you are using for your ethanol, and notice that nearly half of all of the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn comes from natural gas. And the other sources are the tractor that guides it, the seed, the phosphates, the diesel fuel, the gasoline, the electricity, natural gases and so forth. But nearly half the energy comes from natural gas which produces nitrogen, and most people have no concept of that. Before we learned how to do that, the only nitrogen sources we had in the world were barnyard manures and guano, and it was a big industry a number of years ago. Guano, of course, is the droppings of bats and birds over tens of thousands of years that accumulated, and that is gone. If we wait a couple of hundred thousand more years, there will be some more. But ethanol is certainly something we ought to look at. It is one of a number of things on this list and it is down here in ethanol, and it is one of the things we can get out of agriculture. We will come back a little later in the hour to talk more about agriculture. Several other Members have joined us, and let me let them speak in terms of the time they appeared. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest).

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much. You mentioned prioritizing. And, you know, if we are going to avoid a really rough landing here, we need as a country, indeed as a world society, we need to have a mentality like the Manhattan Project or putting a man on the moon. This is a big, big challenge. I just wanted to note your observation about we would reach peak oil. I come back to this chart for just a moment. This is only since 1630. We had a lot of recorded history about, what, 4,000 years before that of recorded history. Out of 5,000 years of recorded history we have been about 100 years in the Age of Oil, and we are probably about half way through the Age of Oil. There is a little argument whether it is 50 percent through, 40 percent through the Age of Oil. But we are roughly halfway through the Age of Oil. And during this Age of Oil, now we have permitted the world's population to grow to almost 7 billion people. We will come down the other side. This will reach a peak. It will come down the other side. What will we do as we come down that other side? Now we can avoid catastrophic consequences of this, but we really must anticipate them to do that. Let me go back for just a quick moment to the analogy of the thinnest sheet of paper has two sides. The argument for ethanol is great, and we need to go to ethanol. But I just want to dissuade people from believing that this is the solution to our problem. We are barely able to feed the world today. Tonight I understand maybe a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry. We are just barely able to maintain the quality of our topsoils. Now taking corn does not degrade that, because we are taking the corn off anyhow. But ethanol will be a really meaningful contribution when we have drastically reduced our total need for energy, because to produce enough ethanol to make a dent in the amount of energy we use now is just going to take more corn than there is out there to do that. Let me give you a real quick example of the energy density of these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil, the refined product of which will cost you a little over $100 will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you. We have some difficulty getting our arms around that. Imagine how far one gallon of gas or diesel fuel takes whatever you drive, from a big SUV that gets 8, 10 miles a gallon to I drive a Prius that gets 45 miles per gallon. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 45 miles? How long would it take you to pull an SUV 8 or 10 miles? If you can do it with a come- along and chains and guardrail you can get it there. It would take you a long time. Something, another analogy to help you understand how energy rich these fossil fuels are. If you work in your yard real hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. So in terms of fossil fuel energy, we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of work output. So that is the challenge we have. Now ethanol is nearly as good as gasoline. But as I showed on the chart before, it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel input to produce the ethanol. You know all of these are solutions, but I tell you, none of them will work with the amount of energy that the world is presently using, particularly in the United States. Now me turn now to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert). I know that he has had a long-time concern about energy and particular concerns that we ought to be getting more mileage from our motor vehicles.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. The gentleman mentioned a collision course with catastrophe. I just wanted to make a quick quote from the article in the paper that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) was mentioning. `` `The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s,' says Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton University professor emeritus of geosciences.'' He goes on to say that he made that prediction because ``the worst case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.'' That is better than war, famine, pestilence, and death. It is interesting that the gentleman's ``collision course with catastrophe'' is mirrored by what he said. I want to yield the remainder of my time to a colleague who has a fascinating Energy 101. We will only get partway through it today and we will give him a chance for a full explanation of this.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, this evening I wanted to spend the first few moments reflecting on the crisis in the gulf. I have been privileged to observe nearly 8 decades of life and I will tell you that this is the only time that I can remember that I was looking at television, coming from our country that seemed really surreal to me. I had to pinch myself to make sure that I was not dreaming, because how could it be that in our country, the United States of America, there were people sitting dead in wheelchairs by the sidewalk, there were people rolled up in sheets dead and others walking by them, there were corpses floating by in the water? There were tens of thousands of people in buildings that they could not leave because water was around them and they had no food, no water, no bathroom facilities and no power. The situation is better now and it is improving; and no one is happy with the response of either the local officials, the State officials or the Federal Government. But, Mr. Speaker, this is not the time to look at what went wrong. Now is the time to make sure that these people are all rescued, who are not already out, to make sure that they all are comfortable in housing, to make sure that their needs are met, that their children are in school. There will come a time that is not now, Mr. Speaker, when we will really take a hard look at what went wrong, not to place blame. Because I really believe, Mr. Speaker, that everyone at every level made what they thought was the right decision at the time they made it. Obviously, in hindsight, it was not the right decision and we need to make sure that we learn from this experience so that we do not repeat it when we have another crisis. And there will be another crisis, either a natural disaster or a terrorist-induced crisis. Americans are really helping. When a tragedy occurred overseas we poured out ourselves to help in the tsunami and Americans are doing that now for other Americans. And we are learning that sometimes bureaucracy gets in the way because we have people who want to help and they are ready to help and they wait and they wait. What can we do? And they are ready with supplies. We are working very hard, Mr. Speaker, as we clear away these roadblocks in our bureaucracy because we know that what the Bible says is true, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. We are now taking a lot of money from our people and from our children and our grandchildren because we will not be able to pay it back, money we need to help the survivors of this catastrophe. But we must not deny our citizens the satisfaction, the reward, the fulfillment that they get from helping themselves. And so we must continue to work to make sure that bureaucracy does not get in the way of people helping people because that really, in the end, is the best kind of help. Just a little example about how much some of our agencies have done. This is the Coast Guard. They rescued over 23,000 survivors, assisted in the evacuation of another 10,000 from area hospitals. They have brought in over 2,600 servicemen and women, called up another 800 Reservists to undertake response operations. They moved over 75 aircraft, 22 cutters, those are ships, 110 small boats into the disaster area to execute search and rescue, environmental clean-up and to restore navigation to ports. That is very important because a lot of oil moves in there. They dispersed tons of food, potable water and other supplies to survivors, surveyed and replaced dozens of aids to navigation required to reopen 62 percent of the local ports and waterways to deliver critically needed oil, gas and other natural resources. They have begun the environmental remediation on gulf waterways by removing 60,000 gallons of oil, 665 floating containers of unknown liquid, 132 compressed cylinders and 10 petroleum tanks. Mr. Speaker, as a result of this crisis, gas that was already high has skyrocketed higher, and now many people are talking about energy. We started talking about energy and a coming crisis on March 14. Katrina has just hastened and magnified the process that we began talking about then. On March 4, just 10 days before we gave our first floor speech here on this subject, gas was $1.93. By August 29, just before the hurricane hit, it was $2.60. That is a pretty big increase, from March 4 to August 29 a 67 percent increase. In just 7 days from August 29 to September 5, the price of oil jumped from $2.60, this is an average nationwide, more some places, less some others, to $3.04 average. This is an increase of $1.22 in just 1 year. But, Mr. Speaker, it could have been much worse. We have over 4,000 wells in the gulf; 953 of those are manned rigs and platforms. Only about 20 of those were cut. And, by the way, from those 4,000 wells we get about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, which is just a bit more than a fourth of all the oil that we pump. So we pump just a little over 6 million barrels of oil. But, Mr. Speaker, we use 21 million barrels of oil and the rest has to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else is all over the world, and much of it from countries that are relatively unstable, whereas, the President says, the people do not particularly like us. I have here, Mr. Speaker, a little chart that shows the density of the oil rigs off the coast. And notice the little line here, the little symbols here. That shows where the hurricane came in. Lucky for us the hurricane came in where there was the least density of oil wells. Had it come in just a little west of that, it would have hit a very much higher density of oil wells, and the crisis might have been much worse than it is. On September 7 there was an article by Reuters that said another storm would devastate U.S. energy, and it was quoting some analysts. And one of the analysts I know, because I have spoken with him several times and met him, was Matthew Simmons; by the way, he is the energy adviser for the President. He was an energy adviser in his first campaign and in his second campaign. He is the president and CEO of the largest energy investment bank in the world. This is what Matt Simmons said in talking about our refineries and the infrastructure that moves the refined product to a great many users on the east coast. He says, ``We shoved it all into Texas and Louisiana. We put the heart of the industry in the middle of hurricane alley.'' Mr. Speaker, we may want to rethink where we have this infrastructure in light of its vulnerability to this kind of natural disaster. I have here a news story from the 4th of March of this year, that was just 10 days before we gave our first floor speech here on this subject; and I am quoting from this. ``The average pump price then was $1.93,'' as I just said. Trilby Lundberg--this is the Lundberg family, everybody has heard of the Lundberg Report that for many years now has been giving the price of gas and predicting what it will be in the future--she said, ``The chances of gasoline rises are very, very strong, if not immediately, then in coming weeks as we move into spring.'' It was $1.93 then, remember. A government official who works for the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and I will not give you his name, Mr. Speaker, because he would be quite embarrassed, because this is what he said. He said, ``It takes about 8 weeks for crude prices to make it to the pumps,'' and he did not think the increase would be more than 10 cents. It was $1.93 so he did not think it would go up in the summer to more than $2.03. Mr. Speaker, it was $2.60 before the price was pumped up by the hurricane. I guess it just goes to show, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot believe everything your government tells you. The AAA reporting in that same story made this statement, Mr. Robert Sinclair from the AAA said, ``Probably the era of cheap oil as we have known it, where a barrel of crude oil was $29 or $30 is gone forever.'' Sadly, Mr. Speaker, I think that Mr. Sinclair was exactly right, and the chart that I have here shows that. Now I have had to modify this chart. This shows inflation steadily rising and it shows the price of oil which has been up and down. And we notice what I had to do over there at the end, because a few weeks ago when I used this chart, we had not gone over $55 a barrel for oil and so I put that down as the 2005 figure. But just a few days ago during intraday trading, the price of oil went up to $71.85, almost off the chart. When I come back again, Mr. Speaker, and I will, to talk about this subject, because I think it is so important that we need to emphasize it over and over again so that we have enough interest and enough knowledge so that we do the things that we really must do to avoid a really big problem with this in the future. So I suspect, Mr. Speaker, that when I come back to talk again that this might very well be off the chart, and we will try to add something to the corner of the chart to show you how high it has gone. On the next chart are some numbers that are widely known. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. As I said just a few moments ago, about two-thirds of that is imported. By the way, we have gone from bad to worse. In the Arab oil embargo in 1973 we imported 34 percent, about one-third of the oil we use. We did not learn a whole lot from that, did we, Mr. Speaker, because now we are importing two-thirds of the oil that we use. So we are even more vulnerable, and look what happened then with the Arab oil embargo. We represent only 5 percent, as a matter of fact less than 5 percent, of the world's population, one person out of 22, and we use a fourth of all of the oil which is used in the world. The other figure here is a really interesting one, and that shows that we pump 8 percent of the world's oil. If we have only 2 percent of the reserves, and from that 2 percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the oil, that means we are pretty good at pumping oil, and we are. It also means that we have a whole lot of oil wells probably, and we do. More than half of all the oil wells drilled in the world, Mr. Speaker, are drilled in this country. So we do not have much oil, and we are using it up really quickly. When there is an end to oil, we will come there before the rest of the world because we use so much, we have so little, and we are pumping the so little we use so fast. The next chart shows a consequence of this, and by the way, those numbers inspired about 30 of the leading citizens in our country, McFarland, Jim Woolsey, Frank Gaffney and about 30 names total, retired generals and admirals and leading people in our country wrote a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the oil and use 25 percent of the oil and import two-thirds of what we use is a national security risk, which is unacceptable. We have to do something to wean ourselves from foreign oil. The chart that I have here, Mr. Speaker, points out one of the problems that we face, and that is, that we are not only a country that needs a lot of oil. China now is the second largest importer in the world. Last year, they increased their importation 25 percent. I saw the number. They increased their oil use by 14.7 percent. I am not sure how we get so precise, but this chart of the world here shows where they are. They are now scouring the world to make sure that they have oil, and they are entering into contracts and buying assets. You may remember, Mr. Speaker, they bid on Unocal in our country, almost got it, bid more than Chevron. Fortunately, they withdrew their bid. By the way the price of oil is not set by who owns it. It is set by how much of it there is in the world compared to demand in the world. It would have not been nice for China to own oil right in our country, but it really would not have affected the price of oil at all. Notice, they are in Colombia. They are in Venezuela. They are in Brazil. They are really in the Middle East. In the big far eastern Russian oil reserves in the Sakhalin Islands, they are now building a pipeline. Originally, we thought it would go to a port where the oil would then go to Japan. Russia has just recently said that at least a large part of that is going to be diverted on down to a pipeline that goes to China. So we now have a world in which China and India and all of the developing countries, many of them in northern Africa, particularly in the Orient, are now demanding more and more oil. To put this in context, Mr. Speaker, and to kind of see how we got here, we need to go back 60 years. Our next chart takes us back there 60 years and just a word about the origin of this chart. Working for the Shell Oil Company in the 1940s and 1950s was a scientist known as M. King Hubbert. He watched the pumping and the exhaustion of oil fields and he noticed that for almost all of those fields that they followed a bell curve. Now, most people are familiar with a bell curve. There are some people very short, some very tall, but most of us are somewhere in the middle. So there is a bell by weight, and most things out there in the nature, their distribution follows a bell curve. What he found was that we pumped oil faster and faster until finally we reached a peak, and at that peak, he noticed that about half of the oil that was in the field had been found, and no matter how hard they sucked and pumped, the production of oil from that field fell down the other side. It is perfectly reasonable that the last part of the oil is more difficult to get than the first part of the oil. So what M. King Hubbert did was to say, gee, if I knew how many oil fields there were in the United States, and I knew how many more we were likely to find, and if I added up all these little bell curves, I could get a big bell curve which would tell me when the United States was going to peak in oil production. He did this study and he made that prediction in 1956. Everybody thought that he was going to be really wrong and really be embarrassed, and Shell Oil Company said, please, do not do that. He published the paper anyhow, and right on target, in 1970, we reached our peak oil production. M. King Hubbert went from being something of an embarrassment to being an icon because he was right on the money. He predicted 14 years ahead when we would peak in oil production in this country. Using those same analytical techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in oil production about 2000. That did not happen because he could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the oil price spike hikes and the worldwide recession that occurred as a result of these oil price spike hikes. Many experts believe that we in the world are peaking about now. If not now, soon. The next chart shows where we have gotten our oil from in the United States, and it shows the production curve and the fact that right on target in 1970 we peaked in oil production, and it has been downhill since. This shows where we get the oil from, a whole bunch from Texas, the rest of the United States, natural gas, liquids. Notice Alaska there. This is Prudhoe Bay, from which we get a fourth of our oil, and Mr. Speaker, that produced only a little blip in sliding down Hubbert's Peak, and notice the yellow there. I am sure you can remember the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. This was going to solve the problem. There would be oil for a very long time. That is all the contribution. That yellow there is the total contribution from the Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. Mr. Speaker, I am having some trouble understanding why we ought to drill ANWR. Let me tell you why. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. I am having trouble understanding how it is in our national security interests to use up that little bit of oil we have as quickly as we can. If we could pump that oil tomorrow, and we cannot, but figuratively, if we could pump that oil tomorrow, what would we do the day after tomorrow? And there would be a day after tomorrow. ANWR will be, most people believe, not more than half of what Prudhoe Bay was, and you see that it did little or nothing to stop our slide down Hubbert's Peak. So I would like to reserve ANWR. We are really going to need oil in the future. It and gas are the feedstock for an enormous petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world, and in the future, when we look back at what we have done, we will be embarrassed that we burned, just to get energy, so much oil, and particularly gas, because they are such an important feedstock for our petrochemical industry that we see all around us. We live really in a plastic world. It builds our tractors and makes the insecticides, makes the herbicides. It makes the plastics. It is anything and everything in our society. The next chart shows something very interesting. In spite of increasing techniques, in spite of computers, in spite of 3D seismic, the peak oil discoveries were about 40 years ago. Now, this is blocked off by 5-year increments, and there was a big one here at about 1980, but generally speaking the discovery of oil has been down, down, down. And the experts do not believe that there is more than about maybe 5 percent of the known reserves that are yet to be discovered. We have drilled a lot of holes. We have done a lot of exploration. We are really good at finding oil. And most of the experts do not believe we should count on much more than maybe about 5 percent of our current reserves as unknown, yet-to-be-discovered reserves. The next chart shows something very interesting, and that shows that you cannot drill your way out of this problem. This shows the production of oil in the United States; and in 1980, when the Reagan administration came in, we were already 10 years down Hubbert's Peak. We had slid over the top and were starting down the other side of this bell curve called Hubbert's Peak. We were importing oil, and Reagan was concerned that we needed more oil. And so he did what you do in a market society like we have, he gave incentives for drilling. If we just give them some incentives, some tax advantages, some profit motive for drilling, they will go out and drill. This yellow line represents the number of wildcat wells that were drilled. And, boy, was he successful. He got them to drill a whole lot more wells. But notice what happens down here. They produced less and less oil. They soon tired of drilling those extra wells when they were not finding any oil; and so, notice that the number of wells they drilled slipped down and down because they were finding less and less oil and we were going more and more negative. The next chart shows something which Albert Einstein said was the most powerful force in the universe. When we had discovered atomic energy and the nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein was asked, Gee, Dr. Einstein, what will we do next? What will be the next big increment in energy? What will we fight the next war with and so forth? He said, The most powerful force in the universe was the force of compound interest; that is exponential growth. And so here we show some exponential growth curves. The bottom straight line here is a 2 percent growth in the first year, and then just extrapolating out there from that. If you have money in the bank and it is getting 2 percent interest, and every year you take out the 2 percent and just keep it and do not let it in there to create any more interest, that is the rate at which it will grow. But if you leave the interest in and it is compounded, then you see what happens. You have what is called an exponential curve. This is 2 percent and 4 percent and 5 percent. And this one on the left here is a really interesting one, Mr. Speaker. That one that goes almost straight up, that is the rate at which China is growing, almost 10 percent a year. With a 10 percent growth rate, you double in 7 years, 7.2 years to be precise, but roughly 7 years. You are four times bigger in 14 years and you are eight times bigger in 21 years. Now, I do not think China will necessarily continue with a 10 percent growth rate for 25 years, but if they do, their economy will be eight times bigger than it is today. The next chart shows this same 2 percent growth. And, by the way, you can make that bell curve very sharp, very high and very sharp. You can simply change the numbers on the abscissa and the ordinate here. But this is the same 2 percent we saw in the previous one, and this has been about the rate that the consumption of oil has grown in the world, about 2 percent a year. That is the 2 percent curve here. Now, obviously, up until this time the rate of reduction has equaled the rate of use because we have used all the oil that was produced and we have had all the oil we needed to use. But there will come a time, if in fact there is a phenomenon known as peak oil, when you peak, and there was for our country. I want to remind you, Mr. Speaker, that there are a couple of unassailable facts. The first one is that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We did peak in 1970. He predicted that we would peak in 2000. Now, why should not M. King Hubbert be right about the world if he was right about the United States? And we now have oil at, what, roughly $65 a barrel, that has recently spiked up to over $71 a barrel. But notice, Mr. Speaker, from this chart that the problem does not wait until peak. And, by the way, this 2 percent growth curve doubles in 35 years. So from this point to the end here, all the shaded area, that spans 35 years, because the upper point here is twice this one. That would mean that you start to have problems, if you could see them that precisely, 17\1/2\ years before peak. So we do not necessarily have to reach the peak before there is a discrepancy between what you would like to use, India and China and us. We think, Mr. Speaker, if our economy is not growing at least 2 percent a year, the sky is going to fall, so we need to grow. China is certainly growing. India is growing. All of the Orient is growing and all demanding more oil. And if we stay with only a 2 percent increase-- China last year increased 14.7 percent, India increased. If we stay with only a 2 percent increase, we are going to be really lucky. And, Mr. Speaker, we will not even be able to use all of the energy that is available here if, in fact, we are going to make a reasonably smooth transition to alternatives. Mr. Speaker, we will transition to alternatives, because the age of oil will not last forever. And as oil runs down, we must move to alternatives. We will either move to alternatives because there is not any more oil available in the quantity we would like, and by the way we are not running out of oil; there will be oil for another 100 years. What we are running out of is readily available, high-quality oil produced in the quantities that we need to meet our current economic demands. Now, we really are going to have to reduce our consumption here so that we will have some energy to invest in the alternatives, because you are not going to make the transition without investing three things: Money. Mr. Speaker, we do not worry much about money. We just borrow it, without permission, from our kids and grandkids. But we cannot borrow time and we cannot borrow energy. So we are going to need to have time and need to have energy. So what we are going to need to do is to conserve, so that we reduce our energy demands so that we have something to invest. The next chart shows us, Mr. Speaker, that we really can do that. This shows through the years from 1960 to 2000 the energy use per capita, per person, in the United States. Now, on this chart, Mr. Speaker, we see something very interesting. We, and by ``we,'' me and everybody else in the United States and California, started out at the same place, about 4,000 kilowatt hours per person. We have been using more and more energy as we have lived better and better from 1960 until now. We have more labor-saving things that are using fossil fuels to help us. But notice what has happened. Because of their emphasis on environment and efficiency in California, the average Californian uses only about 65 percent as much energy as the rest of America. This shows, Mr. Speaker, that we can conserve. We can be more efficient. We can reduce our consumption of energy. The next chart shows what we have available to us to transition from fossil fuels, oil, gas, and coal to renewables. We have some finite resources. These are things which we have that are not the typical petroleum product that we can rely on to give us some energy. Tar sands and oil shales and coal and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Just a word about these. I would first like to make an observation about energy density, because this is a quality of energy that is very important in our society. Fossil fuels have enormous energy density. For instance, Mr. Speaker, one barrel of oil, the refined product of which is 42 gallons of gasoline, you can buy at the pump for just a little over $100 now. That will give you, Mr. Speaker, the work output of 12 people working all year for you and it costs you just a little over $100. Now, to give you some sense that that is probably correct, I would like you to reflect for a moment, Mr. Speaker, on the car you drive and how many miles per gallon you get. That gallon of gas is still, at $3- something, cheaper than small bottles of water in the grocery store, by the way. But reflect on how far that gallon of gas will take you in your car and then you think about how long it would take you to pull your car that far. So you will get some notion that this energy density is probably correct, that a barrel of oil, 42 gallons of gas, the refined product will give you the work output of 12 people working all year for you, and it costs you just a little over $100. Mr. Speaker, another way of looking at this is to go out this weekend and work very hard in your yard, manual labor, digging a ditch, cutting grass, whatever you want to do. I will use an electric motor and less than 25 cents worth of electricity, and I will get more mechanical work done than you will working all day long real hard. That is kind of humbling, is it not, Mr. Speaker, to recognize that in terms of the energy in fossil fuel, you and I are worth less than 25 cents a day. But this is really the problem we have had, because these fossil fuels are so good, they are so available, the energy density is so high that we have just come really to rely on them. So when we are looking for alternatives, if we are going to continue the lifestyle anything like the lifestyle we have now, we are going to have to find substitutes that have something like the quality of energy this our fossil fuels. That is not going to be easy, Mr. Speaker. Here are the finite resources that we have. There are some big oil sands, they call them oil sands up in Canada, and they are now producing oil from the oil sands at about $30 a barrel. Oil is selling at $65 a barrel, and that is a good deal, so Canadians are producing a lot of oil up there from the oil sands. From a dollars and cents perspective, that makes a lot of sense. They are doing that and selling it. But there is another profit ratio that we have to think here, and that is energy profit ratio. That is energy in and energy out. I am told that at this time they are using more energy from natural gas. You see, this tar and the tar sands is so stiff that it will not flow at normal temperatures. So they drill two wells together, then they go horizontal, and in the upper well they put hot water, steam, and that softens the oil. Then it goes down through the rock and sand and then they pick it up in the lower well that is drilled under that. They can now drill down perpendicularly and go horizontally, as they have been able to do for a number of years. I am told they are using more energy from natural gas than they will get out of the oil they produce. For them that is still maybe a good idea, because the natural gas is up there and it is cheap for them and hard to transport. Because it is a gas and there is not very much of it, the density is very low. They are converting gas energy into oil energy, and although they get less energy out of the oil, you can put it in a pipe or ship and you can easily move it and you are getting $65 a barrel for the oil, so they are doing it. But this points out, Mr. Speaker, that we should not be too sanguine about all of the potential energy in the tar sands and oil shales, because it may take, even if we get really good, and they are now talking about putting a nuclear power plant up there to heat the water, to soften the oil to get it out of the ground, if we are really good at getting this out, it is not going to be very energy positive. We are going to have to be good to make it energy positive at all. Then coal, in a couple of moments I will show you a chart on coal, we have 250 years at current use rates, but that shrinks when you have to use it in higher quantities, and we will have to use it in higher quantities. Nuclear fission, that is the conventional nuclear power plants, now we get 14 percent of our total energy, 20 percent of our electricity, from nuclear. As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, note that every fifth house and every fifth building would be dark if we did not have nuclear energy. We probably in this transition period need to have a lot more of that, and we need to think through what we do with the waste from that and how we handle that. But either you are going to end up using far less energy than you are using now, or you are going to get energy from sources you are not now getting it from, and nuclear is a very attractive source to get energy from because you have such enormous energy output from a single plant. But that is not a final solution with the kind of power plants we have now, because they use fissionable uranium, and that is in limited supply in the world and that will not last forever. Maybe, I get different numbers, I get numbers between 30 years and 200 years, depending on who you are talking to. We desperately need an honest broker, like maybe the National Academy of Sciences, to help us agree on a number so we have something to work with. But in any event, when fissionable uranium is gone, and that is at current use rates, by the way, we have 30 to 200 years. If you ramp up the use rates, it goes more quickly. Then we have to go to breeder reactors, with which we have little experience and which produce by- products that have to be stored away, even more critical by-products, end products, than from the fissionable uranium, that have to be stored away for maybe a quarter of a million years, and that kind of boggles the mind to think of storing something away for that long. The last one here is nuclear fusion. I support all the money that technology can absorb. I think the chances of getting to nuclear fusion in our lifetime are about the same as my chances of winning the lottery and solving my personal economic problems. If I think the lottery is a good bet, I am going to think that nuclear fusion is a good bet. But I would not bet the ranch that we are going to get to nuclear fusion. If we get there, Mr. Speaker, we are home free, because there is essentially a inexhaustible amount of energy there. We ought to support all of those skilled people that have expertise in this area to see if it is possible to get there. But it is certainly something we should not bank on. It will be really nice if it happens, but we better have an alternative course of action, because it is unlikely to happen. Once we have gone through these finite resources, then we come to the alternatives. I would like to look at the next chart and leave this one up, because I want to come back to it. This now shows where we are. This is our total energy use in the little circle here, and three-fourths of that, the natural gas, the petroleum and the coal, if you add those up, they add up to 85, it should be 85 percent. The other sources of energy are then 15 percent total. A bit more than half of that comes from nuclear power and so-called renewables. Here the chart has blown that up so we can see it. The biggest part of that comes from hydroelectric, and that is not likely to grow in our country, because we have dammed up about every river we should and maybe a few we should not and we are breaching more dams than we are creating now. So that is probably not going to grow. The next biggest source of renewables is wood. This is not the rural person burning it for heating their home. This is a big timber industry and paper industry wisely burning what would otherwise be a waste product to get energy. Then waste. This one can grow, the waste, and it should grow. It is really kind of dumb to bury our waste rather than burning it to get energy from it. Landfills create problems. When you burn it many of those problems, when you control it the pollutants disappear and you get energy from it. But what this points out is that the sources that we are going to have increasingly turn to as we run down Hubbard's peak are things like solar, which is now one percent of 7, which is one out of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. Wind, these are just now really minuscule, but they are the resources that we have got to invest in, because they are going to have to be big sources of energy for us in the future. Here, alcohol. A couple of weeks ago I spent a full day, Mr. Speaker, at the National Press Club here on a conference on ethanol. There is a big controversy out there about whether or not we can produce ethanol and get more energy out of the ethanol than we put into producing it, mowing the land, building the tractor, putting the tires on the tractor, fertilizing and so forth. There are a couple of really good scientists who believe they have looked at all of the energy inputs and they think that you have an energy deficit when you go from corn to ethanol, that you put more energy into producing it than you get out of it. Others think it is maybe energy positive. But the point I am making is if it is energy positive, it is not going to be very energy positive, and it may be a nice convenient way to end up. You cannot put cornstalks in your car and go, but you could have a little critter that breaks down the cellulose there into glucose and then ferment that and get alcohol and put that in your car and go. I am not saying it is not a good idea, but I am saying we are not going to get enormous amounts of energy from it. It may be energy positive; but if energy positive, not very energy positive. Here is geothermal, and, by the way, that is not the geothermal of the guy who is selling the heat pump and telling us he is going to put in a heat thermal system. And what he is doing is very wisely connecting us either to groundwater or the ground so that we are not trying to heat the summer air to cool our house or cool the winter air to warm our house. It is what we do with the heat pump that interfaces with air, and they call that geothermal. And I agree they ought to put that in quotes because the real geothermal is where we are doing what Iceland does and tap into the molten core of our Earth where we are close enough where we can drill down and get the benefit of that heat. If one goes to Iceland, I have never seen a chimney there. I have been there several times. They do not need chimneys because they have a lot of geothermal there. This points out the importance of these now very miniscule contributions to our energy. We are very much, Mr. Speaker, like a young couple that has just gotten married and we have really lucked out. We have got a big inheritance from our grandparents. We really lucked out. We found a lot of fossil fuels. So now we have established a life-style where 85 percent of all the money we spend is our grandparents' inheritance and only 15 of percent of it comes from our income. But our grandparents' inheritance is not going to last until we retire and certainly not until we die. So we are going to do, Mr. Speaker, one of two things. Either we are going to have to spend less money, or we are going to make more money; and that is exactly where we are in energy. Eighty-five percent of what we use is fossil fuels. Fifteen percent of it is what we have earned in a sense because it comes from nuclear power, and if we go to breeder reactors, that could be a perpetual source of power, and it comes from these renewables. And we are going to have to transition as we run down Hubbert's Peak. We are going to have to transition from this 85 percent inheritance of our grandparents to the 15 percent, and would it not be nice if we could make it more than 15 percent? But the probability is that we are going to have to have life-styles in the future which require less energy. And let us go back to our previous chart. If we look at the potential for energy sources from all of these solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy, can one imagine, Mr. Speaker, how much energy it takes to lift the ocean 2 feet, the tides? But the problem with that is it is so diffuse, it is very hard to harness. But people are trying. Wave energy, thermal gradients in the ocean, there are lots of possibilities of energy from the ocean; but it is very diffuse. It is very difficult to get it concentrated so we can use it. Then all the agricultural sources. Mr. Speaker, I am not so sanguine about energy from agricultural as I once was as I recognize that we are barely able to feed the world. Tonight, a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry. When I recognize that we are barely able to maintain the productivity of our soils with no till farming that helps us keep our top soils. Before that we were losing the battle, and our top soils in the center of our country were ending up in the Mississippi Delta, from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. They were ending up in the Chesapeake Bay. Now we are doing better; but I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, how much biomass we can take from our agricultural land and still have enough organic material, good tilth, which is what we call that quality of soil. So we can get some energy from agriculture, but it is going to be limited. It is not going to be enormous amounts of energy we get there. But we need to get energy from every place we can get it because we have an enormous challenge to come up with enough energy to replace the fossil fuels as we run down Hubbert's Peak. Waste energy, we mentioned that. It was on the previous chart. We really need to do more of that. That is a really good idea. Just a word about hydrogen from renewables. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. It will always take more energy to produce hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Otherwise, we are going to have to suspend the laws of thermodynamics, and they are not going to be suspended. But still it is a good idea to use hydrogen because we can get hydrogen from some things like coal, like electricity from a nuclear power plant; and we cannot put a nuclear reactor in the trunk of our car. We cannot put coal in the trunk of our car. We did that in the coal car behind the engine, but we do not do it in our cars and we will not. So what we are doing really is converting one kind of undesirable energy to a very desirable form of energy in hydrogen that burns and we get only water from it. And in addition to that, Mr. Speaker, we can now use it in a fuel cell. It is very adaptable to a fuel cell where we will get about twice the efficiency that we do from a reciprocating engine. But please think of hydrogen as the equivalent of a battery. It takes energy from one place and stores it in a very convenient form so we can use it someplace else. Several weeks ago we had a hearing here, and we had experts here on hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. And they all agreed that of the three ways that we could store hydrogen, only one of them was really feasible if we were ever going to move to a true hydrogen economy. Three ways of storing hydrogen. One is to compress it. It is the lightest element in the universe. It is always trying to get out of wherever we put it. And it takes big, thick pressure vessels because it is so light to store very much of it. So that is a big problem. They say that we can never really have a really functional hydrogen economy if we have to compress it. Another way of storing is to liquefy it. Then it is really cold, and it takes a lot of energy to compress it and cool it, compress it and cool it until it finally becomes a liquid, and then we have to store it in a really insulated vessel; and when we park our car, it is just going off. And they say that the third way of storing it is the only way that is really going to make a hydrogen economy feasible, and that is solid state storage. Storing the hydrogen in a reversible chemical reaction. Mr. Speaker, that is exactly what we do with the electron battery, which is the conventional battery we have. We take electrons and we put them in a chemical form that is reversible so we can charge the battery and then discharge the battery to get power from it. So when we have a hydrogen economy, which will really be effective and doable, these experts say we are going to have to find a battery, a way of storing hydrogen in a solid form to make it really doable. So just think of it as another kind of battery. The next chart is really a very interesting one, and it points out to us something that we should have realized, and this covers about 400 years. It goes from 1630 to the present. And on the ordinant it shows the energy that our societies have produced; and over here, of course, is time. And the brown here is wood, and it shows that when we really learned how to use wood in the Stanley Steamer and our charcoal for smelting iron and so forth, we started an industrial revolution. It was stuttering, and then we found coal, and, boy, it really jumped. But then the use of coal really dropped off when we found oil because oil had qualities that exceeded coal. It was so much easier to use. The energy density was higher. And look what happened to our production of energy. And, by the way, the increase in population pretty much followed the increase in the production of energy. It made it possible now to live so much easier. We could have more children. We could support the children. And notice up at the top up there that little dip. That is the Arab oil embargo and the worldwide recession. And what that did, Mr. Speaker, was to delay the onset of peak oil. The next chart shows us some characteristics of the alternatives that we are going to have to replace these fossil fuels. On the ordinant here, we have energy profit ratio. I talked a little bit ago about energy profit. This is how much energy we get out from what energy we put in. And if we go subzero, we may as well not do it if we are putting in more energy in than we get out unless what we are getting out has some qualities that are better than the qualities we are putting in. And we are down here now with hydrogen. Hydrogen is down here. It is below zero. We are putting more energy in than we are getting out. But never mind, because hydrogen has real economic effectiveness in transport. We can put it in a vessel, and we can run our car with it. Now, what you want, of course, is an alternative that has the highest energy profit ratio and has the highest economic effectiveness in transport, and what meets that are the giant oil fields. We do not have any of those in our country. Most of U.S. oil is way down here. It is really good in terms of economic effectiveness, but it takes a whole lot more energy to get it out than it takes over in Saudi Arabia, and the big, giant oil fields are up here, and there never were any of those in our country, they are in the Middle East. You can see here coal. You get a meaningful amount of energy out of coal but, boy, it is not very good in economic effectiveness. You have to convert it into something else. Photovoltaics in 1995, they were way down here, and now we have moved them up to here. Hydro and coal-fired and nuclear are down here, and this tells you the qualities of the replacements that we are going to need to find for fossil fuels if we are going to be able to maintain anything like the economic activity and the lifestyle that we now have. The next chart is an interesting one. It shows us coal, and people will tell us, do not worry about energy, we have 250 years of coal left in our country. That is not forever, by the way, but that is a very long time. That is true. At current use rates, we have 250 years of coal. But, if we are going to use more coal, we are going to have an increased use of coal, and if we use coal only with a 2 percent growth per year, and, Mr. Speaker, we are going to have to use a much greater growth rate than that to make up for the slide down Hubbard's Peak in oil, but only 2 percent growth per year, compounded, it now shrinks to 85 years. And, since you cannot use coal for a lot of things like running your car, you have to convert to a gas or liquid; well, you have now made that conversion, you are now down to only about 50 years. The coal is there, it is dirty, it produces a lot of pollutants. You either put up with the pollutants or you pay a lot of energy and money, and we will not worry about money, we should worry about energy, to clean up the coal. The next chart is an interesting one. The top shows you the subject that I spent a full day down here at the National Press Club a couple of weeks ago on, and that is ethanol. On the right here it shows the energy you get from oil. You put in 1 million BTUs and you get out 1.23 million BTUs. I am sorry. With an input of 1.3 million, you get out 1 million BTUs. Obviously, you are going to have to use some of the energy and the oil to transport it and to refine it and to deliver it and so forth. Now, the chart on the left here was given to me by our Department of Energy. I am told by the experts that this is wildly optimistic, but this is at least this group's view of what we can get out of it. The Energy Conference had these two experts who said that you need to put in more energy than you will get out. And even this optimistic assessment says that to get a million BTUs out, you need to put in three-fourths that amount. Now, of course, the extra energy comes from the sun, which, by the way, is where the oil came from too, because the oil and gas all come from things that grew a very long time ago with sun. On the bottom here is a really interesting chart. In this little pie- shaped thing here, it shows all of the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. And notice that nearly half the energy, Mr. Speaker, that goes into producing a bushel of corn comes from nitrogen. And that nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, so that is natural gas energy there. And notice almost every other slice of this pie, we are talking about fossil fuel energy to grow the seed to haul, to supply the water, many of the chemicals come from oil, custom work, putting oil in the combine, natural gas that is liquefied or used as natural gas for drying your crop, electricity that is used for a lot of things; gasoline itself, diesel, the lime and the phosphate and the pot ash are all mined using fossil fuels, so essentially, for every piece of this pie, fossil fuels are used. Now, what do we need to do? This next chart, which is our last chart, shows us the challenge. And, Mr. Speaker, what we need is a focus that is equivalent, if you are old enough to remember the Manhattan Project, it is equivalent to the Manhattan Project, or putting a man on the moon. That was a real challenge. And I think we need to challenge the American people in a very similar way. We have to do something about our dependence on foreign oil. If you do not think there is going to be such a thing as peak oil, and I think we are probably here. I hope not. I hope I am wrong, I hope these world experts are wrong. But if we are right, then we face a very bumpy ride. But even if you do not believe that as a problem, you have to believe that getting two-thirds of our oil from overseas is a big national security risk. By the way, we need to do exactly the same thing to reduce the national security risk that we need to do to transition. We need to buy time, conservation, and efficiency. We need to use that very wisely. If you do the wrong thing, you may end up making the problem even worse. I would encourage my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to look into Jevons Paradox. Very interesting paradox. For some problems, the harder you work, the worse the problem gets. There will be real benefits to doing this. We will have technologies we can sell to the world, not just we, but the world, so we need to make this transition. We will create a lot of new jobs. It will be challenging to our people. Whether we like it or not, Mr. Speaker, we are going to be a role model. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We are a role model. We are going to be a role model. We need to step up to that. Mr. Speaker, I would like to challenge our government and our people to step up to this challenge. There are those who believe that we cannot do this. One writer begins his article by saying, dear reader, civilization as we know it will end soon. His name is Mat Savinar, you will find him with a google search of ``peak oil.'' Please read the article. You will be genuinely frightened, having finished the article. I am not as pessimistic as Mat Savinar. I think that the American people, because we have met every other challenge, I think we can meet this challenge. But, Mr. Speaker, we are not likely to meet the challenge if we do not know there is a problem. So I am very appreciative for this opportunity to speak about this problem, and we will be back again, because this problem is not going to go away, and we need to talk more and more about the solutions and the problem.