Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman very much. Mr. Speaker, let me yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman. I have here a very recent report, ``Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells,'' a white paper by the President's Council on Bioethics, and the next chart shows page 25 from this. The highlighted part says: ``It may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single cells,'' the process we have been talking about, ``extracted from early embryos and in ways that do no harm to the embryo,'' thus biopsy. ``But the initial success of the Verlinsky Group's efforts at least reaches the possibility that embryonic stem cells could be derived from single blastomas removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them.'' Then there is an asterisk, and if you go to the bottom of the page it says: ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001 before the President gave his executive order.'' There are four potential sources listed here. This source is number two. They do a very good job of discussing this in the body of the text. They talk about parents going for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. They talk about the possibility that you could develop from the cell or cells taken a repair kit. This is a fascinating potential. This is why we are collecting and freezing umbilical cord blood, because we hope that through the life of that person, there might be some opportunity to use stem cells. They are not embryonic, they have limited application, but maybe, just maybe, we could produce something that would help that person later on with a disease. But in this case, if they did preimplantation genetic diagnosis and if they developed a repair kit from that, then all that we would ask for is that a few surplus cells from the repair kit could be made available for a new stem cell line. But that is not even what our research, our paper, our bill asks for. What our bill asks for is simply Federal money to do research on animals, on nonhuman primates, that is, the great apes, which genetically are remarkably similar to humans, if it works there, it probably would work in humans, to determine the efficacy and the safeness of doing this. Unfortunately, if all that you read was their recommendations, you would be disappointed, because they never therein mention that the parents have made an ethical decision to make sure they do not have a baby with a genetic defect, the parents who made a decision to establish a repair kit so that their baby at any time during their life could have available compatible tissue to fix a medical problem. They simply state in their recommendation section that they consider it unethical to go to an embryo and take a cell out of it just to establish a stem cell lot. It must be that a different person wrote the recommendations at the end as compared to the person or persons that wrote the text in the front, because they certainly should have mentioned the parents' decision to develop a repair kit, the parents' decision to make sure that their baby did not have a defect. These are decisions that parents make, I think, ethically to the benefit of their baby and for all that we would hope in the future. And, again, our bill deals only with animal experimentation to determine the efficacy and the reliability of doing this. The next chart shows another development chart, and I would just like to reemphasize: Now, imagine this is not in the mother; this is an infant dibulum, in the ovary and the fallopian tube here. Imagine that this is in a petri dish and not in the mother, and we fertilized the egg, and it has now developed to the eight-cell stage, and we can take a cell from that stage and do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Maybe, as the authors of the white paper said, you could develop a stem cell line from that. We do not know. They simply have not tried. It has been too easy to take and kill embryos to get stem cell lines from them. There is one other ethical argument that maybe is a problem, Mr. Speaker. They address this in the President's white paper. They do not think it is a problem. When you read that white paper you will see that they are bending over backwards to satisfy all of the concerns that even the most concerned prolife person could have. They do not believe that you could develop an embryo from a single cell. But if we waited a little later, and I have asked the researchers, the medical people who are doing this preimplantation and genetic diagnosis, if they could wait until the inner cell mass stage, if they could wait until the inner cell mass stage to take the cell. Now we avoid even that potential ethical argument, because we already have a differentiation that has occurred. There are now two kinds of cells in what we call the embryo. There is the inner cell mass, which will become the baby; and then there is the rest of the trophoblast which will become the decidua. The decidua is the amnion and chorion. Now, you cannot have a baby without amnion and chorion; it cannot grow. So if you take cells only from the inner cell mass, they could never become an embryo because these cells have lost all of their ability to produce the decidua, but they retain all of the ability to produce the cells of the body, the great variety of cells in the body. I am prolife. I have an impeccable, 100 percent prolife voting record. I would not be here on the floor today talking about a possible solution to this debate if I did not think that this was perfectly ethical and probably perfectly doable. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that a number of my colleagues will sign on to our bill. We are going to hold this until about noon tomorrow, because we would like to get as many prolife signers as possible. If the other bill reaches the President's desk, no matter what he decides, some people are not going to be happy. If he vetoes the bill, as he has said he would, then all of those Americans, and I believe it is a majority, as there will be a majority tomorrow that vote for H.R. 810, will wonder why it is not okay to take these embryos that hardly look like a baby, just eight cells, to take these embryos, and they are going to be discarded anyhow. And given the two arguments, they may not be discarded, they may be adopted, and at the end of the day, you are taking a life. If you think it is okay to take one life to help another, that is okay, but a lot of people do not think that is okay. On the other hand, if he lets it become law, then he is going to offend all of those prolife people who really see this as life. What I hope, Mr. Speaker, is that my bill can be on the President's desk when he is faced with the unhappy choice that he will have with this bill, so that he can now say, Gee, I have a bill which supports what I want, and that is embryonic stem cell research without harming an embryo. We are not ready yet to work with humans. This bill addresses only animal experimentation. But as we saw earlier, Mr. Speaker, from this chart that we had from that page of the white paper, let me put that back up because I think it makes the point, it may be some time. That is why we have researchers and that is why we have money from NIH, because it may be some time before stem cell lots can be reliably derived from single cells. They believe that it is possible to do that. It may take some time, taken from early embryos in ways that do not harm the embryo. As we have pointed out, they will be taken to benefit the embryo, to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis and to develop a repair kit for the embryo. But the initial success of the Verlinsky group's efforts at least raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single-blast embryos removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them. Indeed, if it is taken for preimplantation genetic diagnosis and to establish a repair kit, not only are they not harmed, they are benefited by it. Mr. Speaker, I know that all America will be watching this debate; they just voted $3 billion in Alaska to pursue this. I believe we can pursue all of the potential miracles that could come from embryonic stem cell research and applications to medicine without harming embryos, and I urge an early vote and adoption of this bill. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record: Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, May 23, 2005. Hon. Roscoe G. Bartlett, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC. Dear Mr. Bartlett: I am pleased that Drs. Allen Spiegel and Story Landis were able to meet with you, Mr. Otis and Mr. Aitken during your visit to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last month to discuss ways to derive human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Drs. Spiegel and Landis were serving as Acting Co-Chairs of the NIH Stem Cell Task Force during my leave of absence from this position. Earlier this month, I returned to chair the Task Force. NIH shares your enthusiasm on the therapeutic potentials of hESC research and thank you for your continued support of this field. Drs. Spiegel and Landis briefed me about your April 26th meeting. I am also aware that you have had previous meetings with NIH officials, including myself, Lana Skirboll and Richard Tasca, on this topic. You propose the possibility of using a cell (or two) removed from the 8-cell stage human embryo undergoing pre implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to: 1) create a ``personal repair kit'' made up of cells removed from the embryo and stored for future use; and 2) for deriving human embryonic stem cell lines. You suggested that creating hESC lines in this manner would avoid ethical questions surrounding the fate of a human embryo. Live births resulting from embryos which undergo PGD and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that this procedure does not harm the embryo, however, there are some reports that a percentage of embryos do not survive this procedure. In addition, long-term studies would be needed to determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later- developing injury to children born following PGD. Also, it is not known if the single cell removed from the 8-cell stage human embryo has the capacity to become an embryo if cultured in the appropriate environment. NIH is not aware of any published scientific data that has confirmed the establishment of hESC lines from a single cell removed from an 8-cell stage embryo. We are aware of the published research of Dr. Yury Verlinsky in the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago that showed that a hESC line can be derived by culturing a human morula-staged embryo (Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2004 Vo. 9, No.6, 623-629, Verlinsky, Strelchenko, et al). It is also worth noting, however, that in these experiments, the entire morula was plated and used to derive the hESC lines. The human morula is generally composed of 10-30 cells and is the stage that immediately precedes the formation of the blastocyst. At the April 26th meeting, NIH agreed that such experiments might be pursued in animals, including non-human primates. That is, animal experiments could be conducted to determine whether it is possible to derive hESCs from a single cell of the 8-cell or morula stage embryo. To date, to the best of our knowledge no such derivations have been successful. NIH also does not know whether these experiments have been tried and failed in animals and/or humans and, therefore, have not been reported in the literature. NIH agreed to explore whether there have been any attempts to use single cells from the 8-cell or morula stage of an animal embryo to start embryonic stem cell lines by consulting with scientists that are currently conducting embryo research. From these discussions, these scientists believe it is worth attempting experiments using a single cell from an early stage embryo or cells from a morula of a non-human primate to establish an embryonic stem cell line. Of note, a recent 2003 paper from Canada shows that when single human blastomeres are cultured from early cleavage stage embryos, before the morula stage, that there is an increased incidence of chromosomal abnormalities. Even with hESCs derived from the inner cell mass of the human blastocyst, the odds of starting a hESC line from a single cell are long, perhaps one in 20 tries. Thus, the odds of being able to start with a single cell from an 8-celled or morula staged embryo are equally challenging. This would make it difficult to accomplish the goal of establishing ``repair kits'' and hESC lines from any single PGD embryo. (Fertil Steril, 2003 June, 79(6): 1304-11, Bielanska, et al). It is possible, however, that improvements in technologies for deriving and culturing hESCs may improve these odds. NIH concludes that the possibility of establishing a stem cell line from an 8-cell or morula stage embryo can only be determined with additional research. NIH would welcome receiving an investigator-initiated grant application on this topic using animal embryos. The Human Embryo Research Ban would preclude the use of funds appropriated under the Labor/ HHS Appropriations Act for pursuing this research with human embryos. As with all grant applications, the proposal must be deemed meritorious for funding by peer review and then will be awarded research funds if sufficient funds are available. It also bears keeping in mind that it may take years to determine the answer. At the April 26th meeting, you had mentioned that twins can develop when the inner cell mass splits in the blastocyst and forms two embryos enclosed in a common trophoblast. You asked if cells from the inner cell mass could be safely removed without harming the embryo. In animal studies, it has been shown that the blastocyst can be pierced to remove cells of the inner cell mass and the embryo appears to retain its original form but it is not known whether the embryo will result the birth of a healthy baby. Since this experiment in human embryos at either the morula or the blastocyst stage would require evaluations of not only normal birth but also unknown longterm risks to the person even into adulthood, it would have to be considered a very high risk and ethically questionable endeavor. Because of the risk of harm, this research would also be ineligible for federal funding. You had also asked NIH about the latest stage in development that an embryo can be artificially implanted into the womb. We know that infertility clinics transfer embryos at the blastocyst stage (approximately Day 5 in human embryo development) as well as at earlier stages. Finally, I am providing an additional resource that was discussed at the April meeting. I have enclosed a copy of a recently released white paper developed by the President's Council on Bioethics (PCB) on Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stern Cells. In this white paper, the PCB raised many ethical, scientific and practical concerns about alternate sources for deriving human pluripotent stem cells without harming the embryo. Your proposal is specifically discussed in this report. I hope this information is helpful. Sincerely, James F. Battey, Jr., Chairman, NIH Stem Cell Task Force. Enclosure.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, the data that led these 30 people you mentioned, Jim Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, and there were about a dozen admirals and generals, and several retired heads of agencies in the government that signed that letter, these were really thought leaders in the country. And the data that they quoted that led them to write that letter is what is on the board here. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. But we use 25 percent of the world's oil. And let me digress for just a moment. I have not been enthusiastic about drilling in ANWR, because if you have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and if ANWR is a part of that 2 percent, I am having some trouble understanding why it is a good idea to use that 2 percent up as quickly as possible. Certainly we need oil, but we will need it in the future if our economy continues to grow even more than we need it now. So I think we need to reflect a bit on whether it is a good idea to exploit that resource now. We import about two-thirds of the oil we use. And the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) said that is just going down hill from the direction we ought to be going, because during the Arab oil embargo, we imported only about a third of the oil that we used, and you may remember then the long lines at the service stations and a few fights over it, I think a death or two. And you may remember that gas guzzling cars, you could hardly give them away. And now when we are importing two-thirds of our oil rather than a third of our oil, suddenly SUVs and pickup trucks represent more than half of the personal vehicles sold in the country. So these 30 world and United States leaders who wrote this letter referred to this data. They said, Mr. President, this is an unacceptable national security risk. We cannot be using 25 percent of the world's oil, have only 2 percent of the reserves, and import two- thirds of what we use from other countries without having a big unacceptable national security risk. And they noted, and the President agreed, because I have heard him say it more than once, that much of that oil we imported comes from countries that do not even like us very much. This is indeed a big national security concern. Two other bullets on the chart point out some relevant factors that we need to be concerned with. First of all, the bullet here that says we are 5 percent, we are a bit less than that, actually about 1 percent out of 22 in the world, less than 5 percent of the world's population, and having only 2 percent of the known reserves, and using 25 percent of the world's oil, two-thirds of it coming to us from other countries, much of it from across the seas. If those shipping lanes were interrupted or if there was some impediment to the flow of oil through some choke points in the world, we really could have an economy at risk. One other thing that I wanted to denote, and that is from this little 2 percent of the reserves that we have, we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We are pretty good at pumping oil. That is both good news and bad news. It is good news in that we are importing only two- thirds of what we use. If we were not so good at sucking that oil out of the ground, we would be importing more than two-thirds of what we use. The bad news is that it is going to be gone sooner doing that. And the more efficient we become at pumping these reserves the more quickly they will be exhausted. The Chinese recognize that we are pretty good at this, and as the next chart shows here, they have been scouring the world for oil. And they were in our country a week or two ago and what they were doing is talking with our technical people, how do you could it? How do you get that oil out of the ground from these wells that were nearly exhausted? This chart shows the world, and by the way, this green here for Russia should come around the other side because that is Russia there right next to Alaska. Russia spans 11 time zones. They are now a major oil exporter. One of the few countries that probably has several years before they peak in their, they have peaked but that peak is being stretched out because of very poor performance when the Soviet Union was disintegrating. So they have a ways to go before they are on the steep down slope of a curve that we are going to talk about in a minute. But what this shows is all of the places in the world that they have gone to and secured contracts, and in some places bought assets to make sure that they have access to the world's oil. They are in our backyard. They have contracts in Canada. They have contracts in Colombia, in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, several in the Middle East. They are now meeting with Russia to build a very large pipeline from the Sakhalin Island region, the Russian far east to get oil down to China and perhaps on down to the Korean Peninsula. China's economy is growing very rapidly, 10 percent last year, about the same the year before. They increased their oil imports last year about 25 percent. I have a set of exponential curves that we will show in a moment that show what those growth rates mean, but we are focusing on energy this evening with particular reference to national security. And China recognizes their dependence on oil, not only are they scouring the world for oil, they have noted that they are dependent on the shipping lanes to get their oil. And they are now aggressively building a blue water navy. There is no other country other than the United States that has a blue water navy. By that I mean a Navy that patrols the seven seas, that controls access to those shipping lanes. A couple of years ago, one of the senior members of the Pentagon sent some interrogators to China and India to ask people, men on the street, up and down, from the workers up to the leaders of the country, questions about oil and what they saw as China's future. And they were surprised that most of the people they talked to in China recognized the dependence that China had on oil and recognized how vulnerable they were to disruption of that and how essential it was for them to develop the capability so that they would have some assurance that they would continue to have oil in the future. India is also growing rapidly. The next chart I want to show you is the one that brought us here. It is knowledge that we have had for half a century now, actually just about half a century, and this is a chart that was developed by a scientist called M. King Hubbert who worked for the Shell Oil Company. And he was observing the production of oil from oil fields in the United States and he was observing the exhaustion of those oil fields, and he noted that they all follow a bell curve way was not too surprising. There are many things that follow a bell curve. How tall we are, how long we live. Most things in our world, the most of the data, most of the individuals, most of the length, most of the heights fall in a fairly narrow range in the future, but there are some that were very much less and some that were very much more and we call this a bell curve. M. King Hubbert rationalized that if he added up all the individual bell curves in the country that he could predict when we would reach that peak. And he noted that when we reach the peak in these individual fields that about half of the oil had been exhausted. Now, it is reasonable that the first half of the oil is going to be easier to get than the last half and it takes more and more energy to get the last part of the oil and it comes with more difficulty and so you cannot pull it out of the ground as fast. After observing this for a number of years, he made a prediction in 1956 that the United States would peak in oil production in the early seventies. As a matter of fact, it was 1970 that we peaked in oil production, and this smooth green curve here is his prediction. The more ragged green curve, the actual data points show how close to the predicted curve the data points fell. It did peak in 1970 and we are now sliding down Hubbert Peak. As a matter of fact, we now are producing only about half as much oil as we produced in 1970, when we were self-sufficient in oil. The red curve here shows a similar Hubbert's Peak curve for the Soviet Union, Russia. It was the Soviet Union early on. Now it is Russia. You see how poorly they performed and how they deviated from the projected curve with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They now are getting their act together and they will have a second little peak here. This is larger, the peak back here is higher than the second peak will be. Most other countries have a single peak and several of them have already peaked in oil production. The little blue line here that does not show up very well on this chart shows what happened with ANWR. And the next chart that shows all of the places that we get oil from in our country. I am sorry. I said ANWR. I am thinking Alaska. This is Prudhoe Bay. Two places in Alaska, one we are getting oil from. That is Prudhoe Bay, and one we could get oil from if we drill there, which is ANWR. This chart shows the contributions of Texas and the rest of the United States and this is liquids here. And notice what Prudhoe Bay did. We already reached our peak, and we are starting to slide down the peak, and there is a little blip as we slide down that peak from Prudhoe Bay. About a fourth of our oil production in our country comes from Prudhoe Bay. We are now reaching the end of the production from that field. I am sure all of you can remember a little bit after that there was a lot of optimism because of what was supposed to be a major oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. That is this yellow. That is all it amounted to. We are still sliding down Hubbert's Peak. This did not stop the slide down Hubbert's Peak. I would like to again mention ANWR. Mr. Speaker, you may be supportive of drilling in ANWR or you may not be supportive of drilling in ANWR, but the reality is that it will not make much difference whether we drill or not in ANWR. That will not come on line until maybe as much as 10 years, certainly not before 5 years. And when it comes on line, it is almost certainly going to be less than Prudhoe Bay was, and you see the fairly small contribution that Prudhoe Bay made. Drilling in ANWR will not solve our oil problems, which is another concern about drilling there because if it gives people the illusion that we have solved our oil problem then we will have done a great disservice. The next chart shows a generic curve and this is one that we really need to focus on. It shows a 2 percent rise. Let me show you this one next because this one shows some exponential curves and most people do not really understand the exponential function. The story is told of the ancient kingdom in which one of its citizens invented the game of chess. It was very popular and the king was very pleased and he told his subject that I would like to reward you for what you have done. Anything which is reasonable I will give you for your contribution to our society. And the inventor of the chess board said, I am a simple man with simple needs. And if you will simply take my chess board and put one grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the fourth square and just keep doubling the wheat until you have covered all the squares on my chess board, that will be adequate compensation for my contribution. Well, the king was elated. How simple. All he wants is one grain of wheat and double it for each one after that. What he did not know was of course that there was no way that he could comply with that wish. My understanding is that that would represent more wheat than is grown in the last 4 years in all of the world. This is the exponential function. Albert Einstein was asked about the next great energy source in the world after nuclear. What will be next, Dr. Einstein? And he said the most powerful force of the universe is the force of compound interest. So here we see some curves where you have compound growth. The lower curve here is a 2 percent growth. This 2 percent growth rate represents the rate about the rate at which we have been growing. Now, some people think you can represent a 2 percent growth with a straight line. But if that is what you project, then each year you have a lesser percentage growth rate than the year before. All of us who have interest in the bank and it is compounded know that what you get at the end of the year is more than the simple interest rate because you get interest on interest if it is compounded. Sometimes it is compounded almost instantaneously by computers. Sometimes it is compounded every month. But when it is compounded, instead of having this lower flat curve, the 2 percent growth rate follows the second curve. In just a moment we will show you a generic curve that shows how that relates to where we are now. This next growth rate is 4 percent growth, and this first dotted line here is 5 percent growth. And what I really want to focus on is this steep line here, and that is 10 percent growth and that is the way China has been growing. Now, at 10 percent growth it doubles in 7 years. That means it is four times bigger in 14 years. That means it is eight times bigger in 21 years. Now, I think that it is unlikely that China will continue this 10 percent growth rate for 21 years. But if they did, they would be using eight times the energy that they are using today. Where will they find that energy? I would like to look at a couple of recognitions in news weeklies and they are fairly recent. This one is U.S. News and World Report. It is May 16. This is the last one. And I have here Time Magazine and I think May 9, so these are very current. I think it is significant that two of our major news weeklies are focusing on the energy problem, particularly the oil and gas part of the energy problem. The article in U.S. News and World Report is about Exxon Mobil. This is really a giant. ``In the past year the corporate titan began pumping oil and natural gas from eight major new fields, including challenging projects in the deep water off Angola's coast, the icy depths of the North Sea, and the tough terrain of landlocked Chad.'' Yet Exxon's production continued to slip in spite of these new fields. Even these significant additions could not make up for the inexorable decline of the company's fast mature fields around the world. Then the article goes on to note, ``The company's production eroded nearly 5 percent in the first quarter.'' By the way, in spite of this spectacular production of oil their stocks fell and they have enormous profits. Their stocks fell because they did not reach the expectations and that was because the company's production eroded nearly 5 percent in the first quarter, a rate that surprised analysts and caused Exxon to miss earning projections and therefore their stock fell. It says here that Exxon has shown ``little concern about its reserves, even though by the government's accounting method it replaced only 83 percent of the reserves it depleted last year.'' They did pretty well because worldwide we are pumping about six barrels of every new barrel of oil that we find. In a few moments, we will show you a chart which shows that the major oil discoveries from which we are pumping today occurred roughly 30, 40 years ago. From a national security perspective, which is what we are focussing on relative to energy this evening, this phenomenal growth in China has to be a major concern. Where will they get that oil? The next curve, the generic curve, shows what is probably the situation today or will shortly be in the near future. Notice that the past bell curves were pretty steep, and you can make them as high and steep as you want. You simply change the abscissas and the ordinate. This is a 2 percent growth curve, and M.K. Hubbert predicted that the world would peak in its oil production about the turn of the millennium. That was delayed a little because he could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the oil price hikes and the worldwide recession that occurred. Because of that, we reduced the consumption of oil, and there are now many people who believe that oil may be peaking in the world today. As a matter of fact, yesterday there was what I think to be a fairly significant book that came out, written by the CEO of the largest energy investment bank in the world, Matt Simmons, and the title of the book is ``Twilight in the Desert.'' The content of the book addresses Saudi Arabia and production of oil there. He believes that Saudi Arabia has probably peaked in their oil production. My colleagues may have noticed that a couple of weeks ago when the Saudi oil prince was here that he did not promise the President that they would increase oil production. That may be the right verb. It may very well be that he could not promise the President that they would increase oil production because many people believe that they cannot increase oil production. This is just that little leisurely 2 percent growth curve. China is growing very much more rapidly you will remember. By the way, when this doubles, which goes from about here to here, that represents 35 years. So you get some idea of the scale here because a 2 percent growth rate doubles in about 35 years. So you see that the real problem begins not when you reach peak oil, but it begins when you are nearing the peak, and the increase in production shows that it cannot keep pace with the increasing growth of demand. There is some belief that the peak production may, as a matter of fact, be several years off in the future. The latest I have heard is 2037. Even if it was 2037, it is really quite past time that we should have been addressing this.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me again and thank him for that clarification. He is right. At the top of Hubbert's peak, still about half the oil remains, and the problem is that it is not that we are going to run out of oil. What we have run out of is high quality, readily available, cheap oil, and when the world's demand for oil keeps increasing along this curve, and the production of oil is the blue curve, then you see there is an ever increasing discrepancy between what we would like to burn and what there is to use. The real question is: What will the world do; what will we do; what will China do; what will Russia do; what will the world do when it is recognized that, in fact, there will be no increased production of oil? The Third World is trying to industrialize. India and China are rapidly increasing their economies and using more and more energy, and by the way, not very efficiently. One of the things that we might very well do to help ourselves in the end, and everybody, is to show them how to use energy more efficiently. Not only do we use 25 percent of the world's energy, we use it pretty efficiently. You might question, do we really need to use that much energy? We have a chart which we will show a little later that shows that people in California use only 60 percent of the energy of the rest of us in the country, and it would be hard to argue with California that they do not have a quality of life equivalent to ours. So you can use less energy. I promised a slide, and the next one shows when we found this oil. It shows how long it is between when you find the oil and when you pump it. Of course, we might have pumped it a little sooner, because you are not going to pump oil that people are not demanding, and the world's economy grew. There were enough resources there in the oil in the ground that we could pump it out, but this shows when the peak occurred. This is worldwide. It shows that the peak occurred way back in the 1960s, well before 1970, and now we are peaking in production out here about 2000. So you see it is roughly 30, 40 years after the peak discoveries that we are peaking in the production of oil. The next chart is a very interesting one, and it shows that drilling more will not necessarily get you more oil. By the way, even the oil companies now have fabulous profits, and ExxonMobil has billions of dollars in reserves. Their turnover is greater than most of the countries in the world. Why are they not out drilling for more oil? It is probably because they recognize what this little chart shows, and this shows what happens to oil drilling with the Reagan administration. Remember, Hubbert's Peak peaked in 1970. By 1980, when Reagan came to office, we are already sliding down Hubbert's Peak, and that administration recognized that we were producing less oil. Their solution to that was to give the oil companies an incentive to go out and drill more. This yellow line here represents the number of wells drilled, and notice, there is a big spike just after 1980 when they came in. They drilled a lot more wells but look what happened. The green here represents the additional finds, as compared to the oil that we are pumping, and except for this one little brief green blip, there is just nothing but red after they started drilling for oil and kept on drilling for oil. Notice where it is now. It is way down. They recognize that there is not much return for aggressive drilling of oil, and so none of the major oil companies now are aggressively drilling for oil. I mentioned the articles in these two magazines, and both of them reflect the reality that we really do have a national security implication here. This is the May 9 of this year Time magazine, and it has a good article that has questions and answers, and it makes it easy to read that way. Is the world running out of oil? And the answer is, no, half the oil is left. That is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot get it out fast enough to meet the demands of our growing economies. So cheap oil is now just part of history? And their answer is, yes, it is going to be expensive from now on. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much the time that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) yielded me.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, the special orders of this evening, I think, have been a good example of a problem that faces families and businesses and countries and indeed is facing the world today and that is the tyranny of the urgent. So often, no matter whether it is your family or your business or your government, the urgent takes precedence over the important. It is really urgent that we are talking about confirmation of the judges in the Senate and the possibility of the nuclear option. This is just an example of how frequently the need to deal with the urgent diverts us from considering things which in the long run are going to be very much more important than that. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about here, and this is an article written by Matt Savinar. The introduction to it will really grab your attention if he is correct. This is what he says: ``Dear Reader: ``Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophecy sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global peak oil.'' It is not just Matt Savinar that is concerned about this because he quotes several people in his article. One of them is an investment banker that he referenced. That is Matthew Simmons, with whom I had lunch last week. Simmons and Company International is considered the most reputable and reliable energy investment bank in the world. Given Matthew Simmons' background, what he has to say about peak oil is truly terrifying. For instance, in August of 2003, in an independent interview with ``From the Wilderness'' publisher Michael Ruppert, Simmons was asked if it was time for peak oil to become a part of the public policy debate. He responded, ``It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks,'' he might have said when energy peaks, ``it will be a tremendous jolt to our economic well-being and to our health, greater than anyone could ever imagine.'' When asked if there is a solution to the impending crisis, Simmons responded, ``I don't think there is one. The solution is to pray. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered, there will be no crisis for maybe 2 years. After that,'' he says, ``it's a certainty.'' Mr. Speaker, if we are talking about things that are important, if he is correct, and this evening we will explore the evidence so that the listener can make up their own mind, but if he is correct, this truly is something which is important. Former industry insider Jan Lundberg recently pointed out: ``The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices skyward.'' He is talking about a time when oil prices are peaking and that this is the response of the market. ``And as supplies can no longer slack daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day,'' which it is now 84 million barrels a day, ``the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of economy and even daily living in 'advanced' societies. There may be an event that appears to trigger this final energy crash, but the overall cause will be the huge consumption on a finite planet.'' In an earlier hour this evening, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) shared part of his Special Order hour with me, and he tells the story of when he was a little boy, he was told that there was about 250 years of oil remaining in the world. That was grossly over-optimistic; but even if it were true, his immediate response, he says was, gee, what will the world do when the oil is gone? We may now be approaching peak oil. What will the world do? ``The trucks,'' he says, ``will no longer pull into Wal-Mart or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno- toys and whatnot from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence, and chaos. For only a short time will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all.'' I am not sure that this has to be true. I really hope that it does not have to be true. And what we will be doing is talking about some of the things we need to keep it from being true. And I am sure all have heard of the Lundberg reports on gas prices. Dr. Ted Trainer explains in a recent article on the thermodynamic limitations of biomass fuels, and this is his quote: ``This is why I do not believe consumer-capitalist society can save itself. Not even its `intellectual' classes or green leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the will to even think about the basic situation we are in. As the above figures make clear, the situation cannot be solved without huge reduction in the volume of consumption.'' Going on in a few moments we will have a chance to look at some curves that put that in context. Dr. Smalley, in the February 2005, issue of Discover magazine gave the following prognosis as a result of the energy shortage brought on by peak oil and the fact that the world cannot produce oil as fast as the world's growing economies demand it: ``There will be inflation as billions of people compete for insufficient resources. There will be famine. There will be terrorism and war.'' I hope he is not correct. I am just reading these quotes, Mr. Speaker, to point out that it is not just one person. It is many people who are concerned about this. The chief economist of Morgan Stanley recently predicted that we have a 90 percent chance of facing ``economic Armageddon,'' while stating, ``I fear modern-day central banking is on the brink of systematic failure.'' No wonder someone like Matt Simmons says that the only solution is to pray. And it is not just the people quoted in this article, Mr. Speaker. Recently, there have been two articles in major news weeklies. Just this week in U.S. News and World Report, an article on ExxonMobil points out that this giant was not able to meet its projection production last year. They slipped 5 percent, as a matter of fact. Although they made enormous profits, their stocks still fell because they did not meet expectations. The other article is one in Time magazine, and that is last week's Time magazine: ``Why Gas Won't Get Cheaper,'' and they ask a number of interesting questions in the article and display a considerable understanding of the probability of peak oil. ``Is the world running out of oil?'' And the answer is ``No.'' The world is not running out of oil. What the world is running out of is its ability to produce high-quality cheap oil on demand. How did we get here? The chart that we have on the easel here shows a prediction that was made in 1956, and I keep coming back in discussions to M. King Hubbert because it was his predictions that started this discussion, which has now been going on for half a century. In 1956, he predicted that the United States would peak in its oil production about 1970. As a matter of fact, it was exactly 1970. How could he do that? How could he watch what was happening in 1956 and conclude that we would peak in oil production in this country in 1970? What he was doing was watching the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and he noted that they all followed a very similar pattern. They followed a bell curve, lots of bell curves. If we measure people, how tall they are, we will see some are very short, most are bunched in the middle, and a few are very tall. If we weigh people to see how much they weigh, we will find a few are 60, 70, 80 pounds, very few at that weight. A few would be up at 600, 700, 800, very few there. But the big mass of people are bunched in the middle, and that is called a typical bell curve. He found that the production of oil followed this curve that is well known to scientists and statisticians. When oil is plentiful in the ground, it is easily pumped and it reached a peak, and he found that when it had reached that peak production rate that about half of the oil had been pumped. It is reasonable, Mr. Speaker, that the last part of the oil would be more difficult to get. As a matter of fact, I just heard today that the scavaging wells that we have in our country, the yield between three and 10 barrels of oil a day, much of it electrical energy in pumping, are requiring more energy to get the oil out than we will get out of the oil. But, never mind, we may have enough electrical energy, and one cannot put that in their car unless they have awfully big batteries and then it will not take them very far. But we really do need the oil, and so they are producing the oil, which energy-wise is uneconomical to produce. So after we reached the peak production, we started falling down what is called Hubbert's Peak. This is a well-known phenomenon and M. King Hubbert became a celebrity among his peers because he predicted that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970. He looked at the world situation and made some guesses to how much more oil the world would find. And, by the way, most of it had been found during his lifetime. We are now pumping it some 30 or 40 years after it was found. And he made a prediction of when oil production would peak in the world, and he said that that would be about the turn of the millennium. It was a little after that, obviously. He could not have known about the Arab oil embargo or the oil price hikes or the worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil, and so we had a few years of grace. Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States and, using those same analysis techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in oil production at about the turn of the century, why should the world leaders not have been concerned that maybe, just maybe, he was right about world oil production peaking about the turn of the millennium? And if that was true, then we should have been embarking on an aggressive program to develop alternative energy sources. Before leaving this, I would like to point out that the red is what happened in the Soviet Union and now Russia. There are going to have a second little peak here because they kind of came apart when the Soviet Union was dissolving, and we see the oil they pumped did not meet the expectations of the Hubbert's curve. The next chart I want to show is kind of a schematic curve that shows the relationship between oil demand and oil use. During all of history until this time, there has been adequate oil in the ground and adequate capability to pump it that the oil supply has been equal to the demand for oil. But when we are reaching the peak of this curve and demand keeps on going up, there will be an increasing discrepancy between the amount of oil we would like to use and the amount of oil that is available to use. This is a 2 percent growth curve. With 2 percent growth compounded, it doubles in 35 years; and so from this point to this point, it has doubled. So that is about 35 years. So it shows that rolling over this peak, and, by the way, sometimes this phenomenon is known as ``the great rollover.'' We have been referring to it as peak oil. It about 35 years from this point to the end of the yellow there. And this points out that the world problems with oil will occur considerably before the peak. In this schematic, it occurs about 17 years before the peak. Have we peaked? It may very well be a few years in the future. But as production slows down as we reach that peak and demand keeps on going up, even before we reach the peak, there will be a discrepancy, a difference, between what we would like to use and what is available to use. The next chart shows us something about the challenges that we face, and this is an interesting chart. The top graph here shows the history of the use of energy in the world, going clear back to the 1600s and bringing us up to the present. The brown curve here is wood; and for a very long time, that was the world's only energy source. And then the Industrial Revolution was almost floundering because we had decimated the forests in New England. There are now more forests in New Hampshire than there was at the time of the revolution because we had used the trees in very large numbers for producing coke, for producing charcoal, for producing iron. And then we discovered coal, and notice how many more quadrillion BTUs we were able to produce with coal. That is for two reasons: one, because the energy density of coal is higher, and because it is more convenient to use. And then, long before we ran out of coal, we transitioned to oil. And notice then what happened to energy use. That is because, again, these two qualities of oil, one is it is more convenient to use; you could have a coal cart following the engine and shovel coal as we did in trains for a long time and run the train on coal. That is very difficult to do with your car, but oil you can put in the tank of your car, and so we found lots more uses for energy, and the energy density of oil is greater than the energy density of coal. So we see a greatly increased production of BTUs with oil. The challenge that we face as we roll over Hubbert's Peak, and the available oil does not meet the demands for oil in the world; the challenge we face is to find energy sources which can replace oil. Now, unless there is some sort of energy that we have not envisioned yet that is hidden out there, we just need to go find it, we are going to have to deal with the energy sources that are available to us. The next chart shows us the energy density of a number of different substances, and it begins with something like domestic refuge which, by the way, can produce a lot of electricity if you burn it rather than putting it in a landfill; brown coal, which is a very poor quality coal, baled straw, this is the biomass that you may hear people talking about, dried dung, we burned buffalo chips when our forefathers went west in this country, and they still burn dried dung in many parts of the world, and then that is just about the same as wood. Notice that coal is better than wood, higher energy density than wood. Then we go through coke and ethanol, and notice that ethanol does not have the same energy density, it is considerably less than crude oil and, of course, as you refine it, why you get the diesel and petrol, the automotive gasoline, naptha is still higher, aviation fuel is still higher, and natural gas, which contains relatively more hydrogen, still has a higher energy density. Just a word about this energy density and what that really means. The energy density in these fossil fuels is just incredible, and we have kind of taken them for granted, and we have fashioned a society and economy which is just about totally dependent on them. The energy in one barrel of oil, that is 42 gallons of oil, which today at the pump will cost something like $100; it is about $50 to buy it and another $50 to refine it and transport it to the station. You are paying a little over $2 a gallon, so that is about $100 for that barrel of oil. That barrel of oil, Mr. Speaker, has the energy equivalent of about 25,000 man-hours of labor. Now, in another life, I worked for IBM and we prepared a lot of responses to proposals, and we would price our manpower in man-years, and a man-year was 260 hours; that is the number of hours a person works in a year. So if I divide 260 hours into 25,000, I get roughly 12 man-years. What that means, Mr. Speaker, is that with this barrel of oil that costs you $100, you have bought the work equivalent of 12 people working full-time for you for one year. What a cheap servant fossil fuels have been for us, and how addicted we have become to using them. Another little example so that you can get perhaps a more personal appreciation of the energy density of these fossil fuels, imagine how far a gallon of gasoline, not very large, and still cheaper, by the way, than water in the grocery store, unless you buy it in a gallon jug in Wal-Mart or K-Mart or some place like that; but note how far that gallon of gas takes you in your car. And if you are going up a mountain, how long it would take you using some mechanical advantage to pull yourself up that mountain, and you can get some notion as to the energy density in these fossil fuels and the enormous challenge we have in finding alternatives, and alternatives we must find. The next chart takes a look at some of the options that are available to us as we transition from our enormous dependence on oil and natural gas, which tend to go together, because natural gas is kind of a volatile from oil, it exists generally with oil; remember pictures of old oil derricks that are burning the natural gas off, we did not have pipelines, it was just a waste product and they burned it off. The gas is collected there, it is gas associated with oil; if not, it is vented through the millennia to the atmosphere. Of course, we have some fields of only gas and they generally are much deeper where there has been more heat and all of the oil has, in a sense, been vaporized and become natural gas. Here we have a list of the alternatives that are available to us, and there are some finite resources that we can tap, and we will need to do that, but we need to recognize two things. One is that there is some economic and environmental penalties that we will need to pay for tapping some of these, and the second is that they are also not forever. So we must not conclude that if we are successful in developing some of these; well there is one of these that could be forever and that is nuclear fusion. I think the odds of getting there, Mr. Speaker, are relatively small; about the same odds as you and I planning on our economic future by winning the lottery. That would be nice, but unlikely, and I think that fusion would be very nice, but just about as unlikely. We have some enormous deposits of tar sands in Canada, and they have invited us to come there this summer to look at those. They are being exploited, by the way, and China has bought the rights to purchase much of the oil that they are producing from the tar sands and the oil shales. There is a lot of potential oil there. But the problem is that it is very difficult to get. It takes a lot of energy to get, with a pretty high environmental penalty. In a few moments we will show a chart that looks at energy profit ratios and we will see where the tar sands and oil shales fall on this plot. Then there is coal. I would like to digress for just a moment. We will come back to this chart, but let us look at coal, because I know some people say, gee, we have a lot of coal in this country and China has a lot of coal, we are the two biggest economies in the world now, and why worry, we will just burn coal. And your children may come home from school and tell you there is a 500-year supply of coal. That really is not true. The best estimates today that, at current use rates, with no growth, there is about a 250-year supply of coal. Well, gee, that sounds like a lot of coal. Well, that would tide us over. But notice what happens when I assume just 1.1 percent growth rate. Remember those exponential curves we showed; with just 1 percent growth rate. Notice what happens with 2 percent growth rate, it drops down to about 100 years. But since there are not very many uses for coal directly, except maybe firing a furnace that produces steam that drives a turbine that produces electricity, we are going to have to convert coal into gas and into oil. I remember as a little boy that all of the lamps that we burned were not kerosene lamps, they were called coal oil lamps, and that is because we learned that before we were refining oil to get kerosene, we had learned how to get oil from coal, so we can do that again. But notice what happens. When you recognize it, you are going to have to spend some of the energy in the coal to convert the coal to more usable forms. Now, our 250-year supply of coal, with no growth, now has shrunk to just about 50 years. When we have only a 2 percent growth and, by the way, last year the world economy grew 5 percent, we grew about 2 percent, the world economy grew 5 percent, and China's economy grew at about 10 percent last year, which, by the way, they doubled their economy in just 7 years. We are going to have to depend more on coal clearly to tide us over, but it is a fantasy that it will carry us through to the indefinite future. We have to recognize that it is a resource that we have to use wisely. Let us go back now to the original chart and look at the nuclear, this is a nuclear option, which is a little different than the other one, because we do have some nuclear options here. We produce 20 percent of our electricity with nuclear power plants in this country. France produces about 70, 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear power. There are three ways in which you can use nuclear power to produce electricity. One of those I mentioned already and that is fusion, and that is what the sun does. That is why we get so much energy from the sun. That is the hydrogen bomb, and you get a lot of energy from that over a very short time period, and it becomes difficult to effectively utilize that, but we are trying. We are trying to exploit fusion so that we can use it in a scale large enough to produce electricity economically. If we ever get there, we are kind of home free, Mr. Speaker, because this really could produce energy with which we could do wonderful things in the world. But the odds of getting there are pretty small, I think. You can use your own judgment, but I think that they are pretty small. So it is something that we need to keep pursuing, but let us not bank on it. There are two other ways we can use nuclear power. One of them is in the lightwater reactors that uses fissionable uranium, which is probably in shorter supply in the world than either gas or oil. And so that is not a final solution. We really have to ramp up nuclear, and we really seriously need to look at nuclear power. I know there are some environmental concerns, and as long as oil was plentiful and natural gas burns cleanly, why worry about nuclear when you can burn these fossil fuels. But if, in fact, Mr. Speaker, we are at or will soon be at peak oil, then we need to reevaluate nuclear, and I know some of my friends are now taking a new look at nuclear who have been kind of stoutly opposed to nuclear in the past. Well, since fission with fissionable uranium is limited because of a limited supply in the world, the third way to produce electricity from nuclear is what is called the breeder reactor. We have none of those in this country. The only one we have here were producing nuclear weapons. France has a number of them. As the name implies, they produce more fuel than they use, and so this could be a big energy source. But it produces, the way we now use it, it produces by-products, Mr. Speaker, which have to be stored away for maybe as much as a quarter of a million years. I have a feeling that anything which is so hot, that it has so much energy in it that you have to squirrel it away for a quarter of a million years ought to have enough energy in it that resourceful, creative, innovative people could find some use for it. And I think that that is a challenge that we need to address, because if we are going to have anything like a smooth transition and not have the dire predictions that I read in Savinar's article here, if we are going to have anything like a smooth transition to alternatives, we are going to have to use a whole lot more nuclear than we are using now to buy us time to move to these renewables. Now, with nuclear, we are limited in the kind of energy we can produce. Heat, which can boil water and run turbines and produce electricity, that is the way we use nuclear energy now. Of course, there are limited things we can do with electricity, and so there are other types of energy that we need equivalent to the type of energy that we get from oil. Now we look at some truly renewable sources, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) earlier this evening was talking about how this is our income, and we ought not to be dipping into our savings, and our savings are things like tar sands and oil shales and coal and so forth; we ought to be able to make due with our income and if you keep dipping into your savings, by and by you will be bankrupt. That is what we have pretty much done as a society is dip into these savings and, from an energy perspective, we are near bankruptcy. So you look at all of these renewables now and by and by, with the exception of nuclear and how much of that you are willing to put up with in terms of environmental effects and so forth, we are going to have to have a society that runs on these renewables, because obviously, fossil fuels are not forever. Solar is one of them. And by the way, Mr. Speaker, most of the energy that we are using or will use came from or comes from the sun. It is no wonder the ancients, so many of them, worshipped the sun, because they intuitively recognized it as the source of life. It was the sun that made the plants grow, that produced the coal. As a little boy I remember we used to use what was called run-of-mine coal. You took it from the mine just as it came, some big lumps and some dust, and I grew up in western Pennsylvania, and some of the lumps were so big we could not put them in our furnace. And so I would go to the basement, and with a sledgehammer I would break the lumps of coal to get them small enough to throw in the furnace. And I remember the feelings that I had, Mr. Speaker, when I broke open those big lumps of coal, and there was a fern leaf. And I recognized how many thousands of years ago that plant grew that was producing coal for us today. And then, of course, it was the sun that made the little organisms grow in those ancient waters in a very much warmer Earth than we have today. It was warm at the poles because there is oil up at the poles. And these little organisms grew in the water. They would die and settle out to the bottom, and then in many places they would fall into deep crevices and the rains would wash sediment in over them. And time and pressure, the sediments were converted to rock, then with the movement of the tectonic plates in the Earth, they would sink down to where heat acting on this organic material trapped under the rocks would be converted to oil and gas. And so all of the fossil fuels that we are burning came from the energy of the sun. Today, we can harness the energy of the sun in many ways. You build a house with windows that face south, and your house will be warmed by what we call passive solar heating. You can put a little mechanism on the top of your house that has a copper pipe painted black usually inside of it, under glass. You know what happens to your car in a parking lot, it gets really hot inside that glass, and you can heat your water with it. We now have developed technologies where we can convert the photons into electricity. And the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) earlier mentioned the thin films that we have developed that you can incorporate in tiles for your floor or roof shingles for your house, or siding for your house, which can produce electricity. That has been fairly expensive, like 26 cents a kilowatt hour. We pay about 7 now per hour now here in the East, but that is really coming down in price. With oil at $50 a barrel, and Goldman Sachs says it is going up to $105, I do not how they picked that magic number, but since solar is coming down and the price of oil is going up, those curves will cross; and I hope we will see a whole lot more solar, because it is really clean. There are no byproducts, for at least 30 years. Those solar cells will sit there. Every time the sun shines or you have light, they will be producing electricity, less when there is no sun. Then there is wind energy. Mr. Speaker, I have driven and seen some real forests of these wind machines, out in some of the passes in the West; and they are now producing electricity at 3\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. Some people do not like their looks. I think they look a whole lot nicer than those swaths that we cut through our forests to run these high tension lines; and if we had more of these wind machines closer by, we would have less susceptibility to terrorist attacks, because we would have a distributed energy production, and we would not need so many high tension lines, and you would not have a grid which is at such risk. Of course, the wind blows because the sun shines, and the differential heating produced by the sun causes the wind to blow, so that really is solar energy. We get it through wind, but it is the sun shining that makes the wind blow. And then there is true geothermal. Now, that term is used in an interesting way in heat pumps. The ordinary heat pump is not very brightly, wisely conceived, because what it does in the winter time to warm you in the house, it tries to make the outside air even colder; and the summer time, to cool you in the house, it tries to make the outside air warmer. If you are working not against the outside temperature, which can be zero in the winter time and 100 in the summer time, if you are working against the Earth or groundwater, obviously you are working against something which is a whole lot warmer in the winter and a whole lot cooler in the summer. And they sometimes call that geothermal. But real geothermal is when you are doing what Iceland does and that is tap the energy from the core of the Earth, which is molten iron, and some places it comes close enough to the surface, sometimes it actually boils the water, it, of course, comes out through a volcano, but some places you can drill down deep enough, if you tap that heat, that is a very large molten core. So that is an energy source that we have some places in the West we can tap that, which would be an important source of energy, but only in certain places. And then there is ocean energy. Two kinds of energy in the ocean. One is the waves, and of course we have waves in the ocean because the wind blows, and the wind blows because of the sun, and we come back again to the sun as the source of energy. The other source of energy from the ocean are the tides. And this is about one of the few energy sources that does not come from the sun, and that of course comes from the Moon, because as the Moon goes around the Earth, it has the gravitational pull, and it is pulling the water up about 2 feet. How much energy would it take to raise the whole ocean 2 feet? There is a whole lot of energy there if we could tap it. And we have tried, but that is very difficult, because there is an old axiom that says that energy, to be effective, must be concentrated. And these tides are spread out over far too great a distance, and they are difficult to tap. But as energy becomes more and more critical, we should become more and more creative in how we approach tapping that energy source, because there is a lot of potential energy there that could be made available. And the next point here is agricultural resources. This is one I really am very enthusiastic about. A few cautions, however. Our agriculture in this country is in trouble economically. And there are lots of potential sources of energy from agriculture. The soy diesel and biodiesel are an obvious energy source, and there are now engines today that will run on soy diesel, soybean oil, indeed, as well as on diesel fuel. So this is a potential source of energy, ethanol, which everybody has heard about. And I would like to digress for just a moment and come back to this chart. I have another chart here that looks at ethanol. This points out some very interesting challenges that we have. On the right here, it shows how you go from petroleum, that is crude oil, how you go from crude oil to gasoline. And it shows all of the energy inputs at every step from recovering it, to transporting it, to refining it, to hauling it to the gas station. And to get 1 million Btus out of it, you had to consume 1.23 million Btus of fossil energy. So it cost you about 25 percent of the energy to produce the energy. On the other side here, we look at ethanol. And, of course, we start out with energy from the sun, and corn, and this is the energy input of the fertilizers and so forth to plant the corn and transport the corn and make the ethanol and transport the ethanol. And for the same one million, it will be more volume, by the way. Do you remember the energy density? Lower for ethanol, more volume, but the same. We are comparing apples to apples, because it is a million Btus. To get a million Btus of ethanol, we had to use .74 million Btus of fossil fuel, still a net gain but not a really big net gain. But still worth doing. The bottom here shows something really interesting. It shows the energy which is used to produce a bushel of corn. And I want to note how much of this energy comes from fossil fuel. Nitrogen. All of that comes from fossil fuel. All of the nitrogen fertilizers we have today are made from natural gas. Until we learned how to do that, the only source of fertilizers was barnyard manures and guano. Guano is the droppings of birds and bats over thousands of years accumulating in caves and on tropical islands. There was an industry, before we learned how to make nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas, there was an industry that mined guano. That is gone now; that is not a resource we can fall back on. By the way, Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether you have noticed or not in the summer time when you water your lawn, it is nowhere near as green as when you have a thunderstorm. You may have wondered why. We used to call a thunderstorm poor man's fertilizer, because what the lightning does in the thunderstorm is to combine nitrogen of the air, and about four-fifths of all of the air is nitrogen, combines it in a form that can be carried down by the rain, into the soil so your lawn does look greener after nature waters it, as compared to you watering it, and that is because of the nitrogen which has been converted to a form by the lightning, which can be carried down by the water. What will we do for nitrogen when natural gas is gone? Now we can produce it with other energy sources. But we are looking at enormous investments of energy. Because, look, nearly half of all of the energy that went into producing that bushel of corn is just the natural gas and the nitrogen fertilizer. But let us go on. Here is the seed. Some energy went into growing that. Input hauling, that is fossil fuels. Purchased water. That was probably pumped using some fossil fuels. Chemicals, a whole bunch of those chemicals are made from fossil fuels, which, by the way, we have not mentioned the importance of oil and gas as feed stocks for an enormous petrochemical industry. Some have very appropriately noted that gas, particularly, and oil are too good to burn. We live in a plastic world; that all comes from gas and oil. And so many of these chemicals came from oil. For custom work, he came in to harvest on the combine. He used oil to drive his combine, oil helped produce the combine. Natural gas, electricity that could have been produced by these fossil fuels, oil or gas or coal. Here is liquid gas here, and gasoline and diesel fuel. And then we come to the other two nutrients that we give corn in large quantities, that will put some lime on it to make sure that the Ph is okay. And then phosphate and potash. Now, we use fossil fuels in mining and hauling the phosphate and potash. So you see, Mr. Speaker, that probably 95 percent, at least, of all of the energy that goes into producing corn comes from fossil fuels. The corn that we eat is in a very literal sense oil. Because if it were not for oil, unless we were producing corn in a very different way than we do today, we would not have corn to eat. Let us go back to our selection of the options. And we were talking about ethanol, and methanol is similar. You get ethanol from the carbohydrates in plants and corn. You get methanol from sawdust and things like that. This is a one-carbon alcohol, this is a two-carbon alcohol. And then biomass. Biomass is just using corn stocks or switchgrass or trees or something like that to produce energy. By the way, we still produce a lot of energy with wood. It is generally in industries where wood waste is a byproduct. If you have a lot of sawdust, you burn the sawdust, and that produces energy. That is why the energy on one of those first charts I showed getting from wood is not zero now, because we are still using a fair amount of energy in some industries from wood because it is a waste product otherwise. And then, of course, waste to energy. I mentioned that previously. We were looking at that as one of the lowest, that was the lowest on that chart, in fact, energy density. But, never mind. There is a whole lot of it. We still could get some meaningful energy out of it. And then the last one here: hydrogen from renewables. And hydrogen bears spending just a moment talking about it, because hydrogen, contrary to what many people believe, is not an energy source. Hydrogen is, in effect, Mr. Speaker, pretty much the equivalent of a battery. A battery is a handy way to take electrons, electricity, and store them, and then get them back at another time at another place where you want to use it. That is pretty much exactly what hydrogen is. There is no hydrogen out there that you can suck out of the air, or you can pump out of the ground. The way you get hydrogen is to invest energy to get it from natural gas, or to split water. Water is made up of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen. So you can get a lot of hydrogen from water. But you will always spend more energy making the hydrogen than you will ever get out of the hydrogen. Well, you say, gee, why are people talking about a hydrogen economy? And why is that a good idea if it will take more energy to produce the hydrogen than you will get out of the hydrogen? It really is a good idea. And the reason it is a good idea is because once you have got the hydrogen, and you can produce it from like nuclear, coal, biomass, you cannot have a trunkful of garbage and run your car down, but you could produce electricity, and with electricity you could produce hydrogen, and then your car will run very well on that. When you are using the hydrogen, if you are burning it, it does not matter how you burn it, if you use it in a fuel cell or reciprocating engine, the fuel cell is much better because it has twice the efficiency. You just get water. So the only pollution you have to worry about is the pollution at the site where you made the hydrogen. And the economies of scale make it a whole lot easier to control the pollution there than it does in a million cars running up and down the road. I am very supportive of the hydrogen economy. I really need to emphasize again, Mr. Speaker, this is not a solution to our energy problem, Mr. Speaker. It will not replace oil. Hydrogen is simply the equivalent of a battery. It is a handy way to take energy from one place, to store it, to take it to another place where you can use it in a very handy form, that you can use it in a nuclear cell and get at least the twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine, that is the kind of engine you have in your car or truck, and that produces only water as a by-product which is not polluting. The next chart we will show you shows some of the characteristics that you will have to look for in substitutes for oil as we run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. Here on the ordinate we look at energy profit ratios. What that is is how much energy you have to put in to get energy out. If you are putting in one unit of energy and getting one unit of energy out, you do less than that in producing hydrogen. You put one more than one unit to get one unit out, but never mind. It is still a good idea because hydrogen burns so cleanly and is used so efficiently in a fuel cell. The abscissa shows the economic effectiveness, how easy is it to transport it and use it. So where you want to be is right in the upper right-hand corner and most giant oil fields are up there all alone. That is gas and oil of course. There is not anything out there that competes with these. Let us look at the alternatives that we have been talking about. Here is the 1970s direct use of coal. It was sort of good on the energy profit ratio but, boy, was it inconvenient to use. It is way over here on the left. Trains used it directly. You had the coal car and you shoveled it into the train and produced heat and steam and you ran the train with that. Here is photovoltaics. In 1995 they were not very good. Photovoltaics is another name for solar cells. But we are now getting very much better with them. We are probably even better than this chart shows that we are moving up here. But they will never move to the right because they are stuck on the roof of your house or something like that. So you have to use the energy from them if you want to go someplace like to charge a battery or make hydrogen so you can put that in your car and go with that. Electricity is produced from hydro plants, from coal fire plants, from nuclear plants; and notice that it is down here very close to the abscissas and it cannot much move from there. And notice that the energy profit ratio is not very high. Never matter, because electricity is so convenient. We do so many things with it, that it really does not matter that it is not produced very efficiently. And of course you cannot transport it very well so it is stuck somewhere down here on the abscissa and it never goes very high on the ordinate. Look down here, in the worst possible place to be in terms of energy- profit ratio and that is tar sands and ethanol. Of course, the worst place to be is here by zero. It has no energy-profit ratio and you cannot do anything with it. Once you get the oil out of the tar sands and once you get the ethanol, then it is very convenient. But notice how far it is down here in terms of energy-profit ratio. We are putting almost as much energy in as we are getting out of it. Here is U.S. oil in the 1970s. It was up here, very convenient to use. But it is way down in energy profit ratio because we pumped our good oil a long time before 1970, our easy to get oil. We peaked in 1970 as you know. This is the oil use in 1985. It is sliding down. We are now in 2005. 20 years later. Look what it did in these 15 years. For our oil we are down somewhere near zero here. We are putting in almost as much energy as we are getting out. But never mind because the energy we are putting in is more convenient to get, like electrical energy. I mentioned previously that some of our stripper wells, we are putting in more Btus of electrical energy than the Btus we will get out of the oil. But we are still doing it because oil is a commodity that is just so useful in our society. The next chart shows us the transition that we need to go through if we are going to be successful in going from our enormous dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil, and gas, if we are going to transition to these renewables. The first thing we have to do is voluntary conservation. We have a chart if we can find it of the situation in California. It shows what the Californians did voluntarily. As you can see from this chart, this graph, the average citizen in California uses only about 60 percent of the energy that used in the rest of the country. Now, I know a lot of Californians. They are the biggest delegation here, and none of them believe that they have a lesser quality of life in California than we have in Mississippi or Oregon or Maryland, and they have done that through, much of it voluntary. Not all of it voluntary. Let us go back to the other chart to show the route California has been following to get where they are. The next is organized voluntary conservation. By the way, there were no rolling blackouts in California because they voluntarily reduced their consumption of electricity by 11 percent which avoided the rolling blackouts that we were sure they were going to have. Now we have organized voluntary conservation. Let us work together. Let us share our experiences. Monetary incentives, something where government can gets involved. Policies for voluntary conservation. Efficient technology retrofits. How can we live as well as we are living now using much less energy? We were a very creative people. We really can do this. Finally, monetary incentives that will increase our efficiency. The last chart we are going to show here kind of capitulates this and looks at where we are and what we need to be doing. What we clearly need to do is buy time. Remember that earlier chart we are showed, Hubbert's Peak and the 2 percent exponential increase in use of energy? We have got to buy some time or we will be sliding down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and you buy time by conservation and efficiency. Conservation you can do very quickly. Turn down the thermostat. Turn out the light when you are not using it. Drive less in your car. Car pool. There are a lot of things we can do for efficiency. We can buy time by using new technologies. Conservation and efficiency of course go hand in hand. Conservation you can do more quickly. Efficiency you have to develop the technologies to be more efficient. We have done that by the way. Our refrigerators today probably use half the electricity they did a couple of decades ago. Then we need to use this time wisely. Once we bought some time we need to use wisely. Now we are about out of time in our special order this evening, and I would like to talk a little bit at another time about Jevons' Paradox and how if the whole world does not do this, Jevons' Paradox which says the harder you work on some problems the worse they get. Jevons' Paradox could be a real problem here. The whole world really needs to work together here. Suppose we really do heave to and conserve and become more efficient and save a lot of oil and all that happens is that makes it more available to China to grow their economy and grow their military? That is an application of Jevons' Paradox. We are working real hard to solve the problem. And from our personal perspective and national security perspective in this country, we have just made the problem worse because we have made more oil and gas available for China. But we are all in this boat together and the whole world needs to work together. Let us assume we do. Then we need to use it wisely and we need to make the investments in these alternatives that we should have been making. We have known for at least 25 years that peak oil was coming. If Hubbert was right about the United States, Mr. Speaker, then why was he not right about the world and why did we waste the last 25 years and paid no attention to the obvious necessity of freeing ourselves from this dependence on fossil fuels. For oil, much of that comes, two-thirds of it we import, much of that as the President says from countries that do not even like us. The benefits of this, additional benefits include business opportunities. We are a very creative culture. We have lots of opportunities to make contributions here. Potential worldwide markets, if we are going to pioneer domestic job creation, environmentally benign technologies that are not producing greenhouse gases. We need to be a role model. Like it or not we are a leader in the world. We use a fourth of the world's oil, a fourth of the world's energy, we are a fourth of the world's economy. We are a role model. We have got to be a role model. Mr. Speaker, I hope we can be a good role model, inspiring the rest of the world to do what needs to be done to conserve, have more efficiency, to buy time, to invest that very wisely. This can create a whole new economy with all of the technologies that are necessary to transition to these renewables. By the way, Mr. Speaker, we have to have some other way of measuring success other than how much energy you use, a bigger car, a more expensive vacation, an enormous house that you heat and cool. These are the signs of success and they all require more energy. We are going to have to have a different yard stick by which we measure success. We can do it. I am sure we can but will not do it unless we mobilize, unless we all understand that this is something that we need to work together to solve. Mr. Speaker, I have confidence that America can rise to this challenge, but the real challenge now is for all of us to understand that if we do not do this we are going to face a very bleak future as was quoted from all of these experts that Matt Savinar quotes in his article.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we are here this afternoon to build on a discussion that was started last evening when five of us were here on the floor to talk about the problem of energy in general and about oil and peak oil in particular. I would like to start with a chart that shows some curves that will lead us to this one. Here, we have a 2 percent growth curve, and what this is is the rate at which we are increasing our demand for oil. You will see that it is exponential. It is not a straight line. It goes out and up, and the further you go, the steeper it gets. I wanted to talk for just a moment about these exponential curves because I think a lot of people do not understand the exponential function. There is a very interesting story about the person who a very long time ago invented the game of chess, and the monarch of the kingdom was so impressed with that contribution that he told the inventor that any reasonable thing that you ask, I will give you. The inventor said, I am a simple man, with simple needs, and if you will simply take my chess board and put a grain of wheat on the first square and 2 grains of wheat on the second square and 4 grains of wheat on the third square and 8 grains of wheat on the fourth square and just continue, continue doubling the number of grains you put on each square until you have gone through all the squares of the chess board, that will be reward enough for what I have done. The king thought he had gotten off lightly; geez, that is easy. He could not do that, of course, because if you do that, go to the 64th power, that would represent all the wheat that is grown in all the world in 4 years of harvest, I understand, and you notice that is the exponential function. We see here just a 2 percent growth curve, and many people think of 2 percent growth as a straight line. That is only 2 percent for the first year, but then if it is going to 2 percent for the second year, it is not going to be 2 percent of what existed at the end of that year. So you are kind of getting interest on interest which is what compound interest is, and I think many people have a little appreciation of compound interest. This is a 4 percent growth curve. It quadruples in 35 years. This is a 5 percent growth curve, and China now is on a 10 percent growth curve. That is this curve. In 7 years, if they continue on this curve, their economy will double, and their use of oil will double if it follows the economy. There is not much way to keep it from following the economy. In 14 years, they will be using four times as much oil, and in just 21 years, they will be using eight times as much oil. The next chart kind of puts the thing in perspective as far as our country is concerned. We have 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two- thirds of what we use. That is up, by the way, from the Arab oil embargo where we imported just about a third of what we use. Two other figures are of interest. One is that we represent less than 5 percent of the world's population. We are about one person in 22 in the world, and this one person is so fortunate that we get to have 25 percent of all the good things in the world, a subject for another discussion, but I wonder, Mr. Speaker, if you have asked yourself the question, how come that is true; what is so unique about this country and our culture that this one person in 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? Perhaps we will come here to the floor another day to talk about that because I think there are some real lessons to learn. If you understood how we got here, then we might understand what we need to do to stay here, but that is not the subject of tonight's discussion. With only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we produce 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are really good at pumping oil. We know how to get oil out of the ground better than almost anybody in the world. As a matter of fact, we are so good at that, that the Chinese have come here. They may still be here. They were here a few days ago, and they were coming to try and see how we do it, because we are really good at getting oil out of the ground. What that means, of course, is for the moment we are better off because with 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are getting 8 percent of the world's oil. So we are really maximizing the opportunities we have from the oil that is available to us. The next chart will show us one of the consequences of this, and I have to go back now about 6 decades to put what we are talking about in perspective. There was apparently lots of oil available in the world at that time. We were awash in oil, and gasoline was very cheap. I remember buying it at 6 gallons for a dollar. You could not do that today, no matter what the price of crude oil was, because I think there is $0.48 tax per gallon. And then, obviously, there was a much lesser tax per gallon, because I remember buying gas, 6 gallons for a dollar. There was during the 1940s and 1950s, a scientist working for Shell Oil Company named M. King Hubbert. He became quite an icon in that world because he made a prediction in 1956 that the United States would peak in its oil production; that we would reach a maximum capacity for pumping oil in this country in about 1970. He made that prediction 14 years before the date at which he said it would happen. He made that prediction because, as a student of this technology, he had watched the exploitation and the depletion of individual oil fields. He noticed that for every oil field the rate of production increased and increased until after it reached a peak, and then after it reached a peak it was more difficult to get, and so it fell down the other side of the slope, and it always followed a bell curve. Here we have a bell curve. As a matter of fact, that is the bell curve, the green there. That smooth green line is a bell curve that was predicted by M. King Hubbert. The more ragged green line are the actual data points where they fell on that curve, remarkably close to his predicted curve. If we look at the next graph, and by the way, before we look at that one, the red one here shows Russia. There are charts for a lot of countries, because a number of countries have now peaked in their oil production. In this next one, the red one here shows Russia, really the Soviet Union, and they kind of fell apart. And notice that the actual production did not follow the predicted curve. They now are capitalizing on that and they are having a second little peak here, but it is still falling off. Notice the blue lines here. We will talk about that in just a moment with the next chart here, because what the next chart does is to show where we got our oil from and where we were getting it from when M. King Hubbert made his prediction. When he made that prediction back here in 1956, we were getting a tiny bit of natural gas liquids, and we were getting about half of our oil from Texas and the other half from the rest of the United States. He predicted that by 1970 that we would peak. And he did that because he rationalized that if you took each one of these little oil fields that was going to follow a bell curve, and if you added up all the little bell curves, you would get one big bell curve for the whole country. And so with some confidence he predicted, by estimating the additional oil that we would find, he predicted when we ought to peak. As a matter of fact, we did peak in 1970. When we were falling down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, we discovered oil in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska; and there was a lot of oil there. There was hopes that this would solve our oil problem. You see what it did? There is just a little blip in the slope down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. That, by the way, represents about 25 percent of our present production of oil. That is tailing off, as you see, because we are now down pumping relatively the last oil out of Prudhoe Bay. I am sure, Mr. Speaker, that you can remember all of the hullabaloo, I guess is the best way to say it, about the enormous oil finds in the Gulf of Mexico. We were going to be home free. It was energy and oil for the foreseeable future. That is the little yellow segment here. That is how much it amounted to. The next chart shows the discovery of oil. We have been talking so far about the production of oil, and the reality is that the world found its oil many years before it produced oil. I hope there is a whole lot of oil out there that we have not found; but by the time we finish this evening, I think you will agree that for our present situation and for the next few years, it really is not going to be of much moment whether we find a whole lot more or not. I hope we do. I do not think the industry expects that we will, because they are now awash in cash. And you may or may not know, they are not spending a lot of that money on prospecting. They believe that they have found much of the oil that is out there to find. This chart reflects worldwide. Our peak occurred well before this, but worldwide the peak discoveries occurred back here in the mid-1960s, and now we are reaching the peak production about 40 years later. That is roughly what it was in our country, about 30 or 40 years later after we had the maximum discoveries, then you have the maximum exploitation and the highest pumping of that oil. We were already 10 years down the slope of the other side of Hubbert's Peak when Ronald Reagan came to office. And he and his administration understood that we were becoming every day more dependent on foreign oil, and so they had a solution to the problem. It turned out to be not the right solution, but at least they tried to do something. You may remember those days, and the philosophy was that the marketplace solves problems. And with unlimited resources, the marketplace is great at solving problems. So they theorized if we just gave our oil industry an excuse, an incentive to drill more wells, that they would go out and drill more wells and they would find more oil. So we put in place a number of incentives to go out and drill more wells and, boy, it worked. This was the rate at which we were drilling wells. And then after Reagan came in, notice how it shot up. Now, the green here represents the excess we had compared to what we were pumping. The red represents a deficit that we are now using more than we pump. And notice that the increased drilling coincided with the beginning of a surge in red, which continued more and more. And notice how drilling has fallen off. With us having only 2 percent of the reserves and using 25 percent of the world's oil and importing two-thirds of what we use, and with oil at $50 a barrel, you would think that with the big profits the oil companies have that they would now be drilling a lot of wells. They are not drilling a lot of wells. Could that be because they have some reasonable confidence that they have probably found most of the oil that is out there to find? The next chart shows us something very interesting. We are not the only country in the world that uses oil. China, of course, is a big user of oil. As a matter of fact, they are now the number two importer of oil in the world. I think they are the number two user of oil in the world. They just surpassed Japan, with 1.3 billion people that have some qualities that you can admire, because they are the qualities, at least some of the reason, that America is the great country that it is. We had a great work ethic. We had a great respect for education. And we have been the most innovative society in the world. But now the Chinese are rivaling us and maybe surpassing us in the work ethic. And if you look at our schools, particularly our technical schools in science math and engineering, you might conclude they had a little more respect for technical education than we have, because not only have they filled the schools up in their country, and they have some pretty good schools there now, but they are also about half the students in our country. Their economy has been growing at 10 percent a year. Last year, they increased their demands for imported oil by about 25 percent. I hope that does not continue, because if it does, the world is going to have an oil crunch or crisis a little sooner than it might otherwise. This map of the world, and by the way there is an interesting depiction here, and that is the green, which is Russia. By the way, this should be colored green over here too, right next to Alaska. Russia spans 11 time zones. They go almost halfway around the world. And they have got a lot of oil over in what is called the Far East of Russia, over here near the Sakhalin Islands. And China, this symbol here represents China's negotiating with Russia, and they may very well build a pipeline from Russia's Far East down to China, maybe on down to the Korean Peninsula, because the Russians have the oil and the Chinese need the oil. Not only are they working there to get oil, but they are certainly several places in the Middle East. They are in Africa. They have contracts in these areas. And in many areas they are buying access to facilities to make sure that they will have more reasonable access to oil in the future. They are in our back yard. They are in Colombia; they are in Venezuela. By the way, they are talking about building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama so they can move oil from one side to the other to more quickly get it to China. They are in Brazil. They are in Argentina. They are scouring the world for oil. As a matter of fact, they have locked up the oil from the oil sands in Alaska, oil sands that I suspect we are counting on, because Canada is a big exporter to the United States. But they now have, I understand, a 40-year contract, locking up at least some of the production of the tar sands. And that production may well drop off so that the oil available to them through this contract may be a major part of the oil produced in Canada. This is a reality that we must deal with. Although we are now big, using a fourth of the oil in the world, China, with 1.3 billion people, with an economy growing at 10 percent a year, will double in 7 years. Our economy has been growing more or less 2 percent a year. We are pretty good at efficiency, so our use of oil has only been growing at 2 percent. Even if our economy grows a bit more than that, this 2 percent growth means it will take 35 years before we double our use of oil. But China, at their 10 percent, will only go 7 years before they double the use of their oil. So when we look to the future, we will have to recognize that there will be a lot more people out there needing oil and looking for oil than just the United States. The next graph shows us something pretty interesting. It goes back through history, and we go way back. Here we go back to the 1600s and the 1700s, and what this chart shows is the development of the Industrial Age. The first energy source that we really learned how to use was fire and wood, and that is the brown here. You see that we developed an economy with wood. This shows how many quadrillion Btus were produced by wood. By the way, the Industrial Revolution almost floundered because we were stuck on wood for too long. England was largely denuded of trees to fuel their furnaces for making steel, and we largely denuded New England. I understand there are more forests in the New England States, New Hampshire today, than there was at the Revolutionary War, because those trees had been cut and hauled to England for charcoal to make steel. But then we found coal, and look what happened to the economy, because coal has a higher energy density than wood. So the economy grew to five times the size in terms of quadrillion Btus. Then we discovered a fuel source, an energy source even more convenient than coal, and that was oil, and that is the red line here. That is oil and gas, because they frequently occur together. Sometimes it is only gas if you are very deep, and the heat of the Earth and time so that most of the oil has now kind of been converted into gas. But many of the other reservoirs have oil and the gas trapped above it, with a dome of rock over it so it holds it. Otherwise, the gas would have leaked out and the oil would have been of poorer quality as a result of that. You may have seen pictures of many oil wells in the past that had a big flame burning there at the well. That is because of the natural gas that occurred with the oil, and it was just a product that they did not have any use for because you cannot put gas in a truck and haul it and so they just burned it off at the wellhead. Now, of course, we do not do that and gas is becoming a very precious commodity. Notice that when we were using a lot of wood, we were using very little coal. When you looked at the energy use across our country in those days, very little coal used and a lot of wood, but soon there was a lot of coal and less wood because coal was more efficient. And look how small oil was here when coal was a big, big factor. But then when we started using oil and found out how superior it was for many uses as compared to coal; why, the use really shot up. What is there on the horizon today that could take the place of oil when we have run down the other side and as we are running down the other side of Hubbert's peak? The lower curve here, and we have here separated out the petroleum and the natural gas so you do not have the big peak here. If you added these two together, it would be the red line there. We have many fewer years, just this little segment in here. But notice at the bottom those things that we might look to for the future. Nuclear, getting 20 percent of our electricity now, it is not a big percentage of our total energy, but it is meaningful. And solar and wind, they are very little down here but these are the kinds of things that we need to look to for the future. I would like to go back to the first chart that is on the board here now and just spend a couple of minutes looking at this because this kind of tells us where we are or where we are shortly going to be in the future. This is Hubbert's Peak. By the way, we can make this peak very steep. By compressing the abscissa and expanding the ordinate, you will make it a very steep peak. So whether it is steep or spread out just depends upon the scale you use. Two percent growth. Notice that, at some point, as we near the peak that the 2 percent growth, and that is the oil you would like to use. The blue down here is the oil that is available. Up until this time, all the oil we needed to use has been there. That is pretty much where we are today; although there may be a bit less than we would like to use because oil is not $20 a barrel, it is $50 a barrel. That may reflect an already recognized shortage or potential shortage. As time goes on, you see the enormous variance between the oil that we would like to use and the oil that is available to use. I would like to make a point that, if we use all the oil for our ordinary economic functions that is available to use, that we are dooming ourselves to a very rough ride in the future, because we will need a bunch of energy, much of it from oil, to develop the alternatives that will be essential as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So, at this point in time, we cannot use that much oil when we would like to be using that much. We can only maybe use that much oil, so we are going to be in a position, unless we can reduce our use of oil to about half of what it is now, we are not going to have the energy available to invest in the alternatives so that will ultimately free ourselves from this dependence on a diminishing resource. From our perspective in this country, our dependence on a resource that is largely in foreign lands and much of that, a great deal of that, as the President himself said, is in countries that do not even like us and that may be pretty terrible in expressing their attitude toward us. There are many observers of this phenomenon of peak oil that do not believe that we as a country and we as a society have either the wit or the will to do the things that we really need to do to avoid a train wreck in the future. I would just like to read from a few of those. Some of these names you will recognize because some of them are very prominent names. The first is from a Matt Savinar who wrote a treatise, which I have here and you can find it, Life After the Oil Crash. Just do a Google search and go to Peak Oil and you will find Matt Savinar and Life After the Oil Crash. I would encourage you, Mr. Speaker, to read that if you have not. This is the way he begins his treatise. I almost put it down. I said, This guy has to be a nut to say this. This is what he said. I did not put it down. I am glad I did not put it down. I read it through. When I finished reading it through, I found it very difficult to argue with his premises unless we make a big, big effort in this country and worldwide to avoid what he says will happen. This is how he begins this article: ``Dear Reader, ``Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' That is enough to grab your attention or to convince you that, gee, this guy is a nut, I don't need to read that. ``This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global peak oil.'' If this is true, Mr. Speaker, why have you not been hearing about this? That is a very reasonable question to ask. There is an aversion to bringing bad news. As a matter of fact, in ancient Greece, the bearer of bad news frequently paid with his life for the fact that he brought bad news, and politicians frequently pay with their seat for the bad news they bring the people. And since this was a problem where the sky probably was not going to fall on my term, let's let the next guy deal with it. We have in our country the tyranny of the urgent. In the business world, they always deal with what is urgent. In dealing with the urgent, you may put off the important. The urgent thing for a business is to have a good quarterly report. If you do not have a good quarterly report, your stock is going to drop, the board of directors may meet, and you may not have your job. So you need to have a good quarterly report. Looking down the road to make the kind of investments that you need to make in the event that Hubbert and, by the way, I really need to emphasize something. M. King Hubbert was dead right, right on, for the United States. He predicted it precisely. Why should he not be right for the world? In 1973, he predicted that the world would peak in oil production about the turn of the millennium. It occurred a little bit later because he could not have anticipated the Arab oil embargo and its consequences or the oil price spike hikes or the worldwide recession that occurred most largely because of the price of energy. So now we got about another 5 years. Somebody should have noticed that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and if he was right about the United States, maybe he could be right about the world. And if he could be right about the world, then should we not be doing something about the situation in the world? I was privileged to have lunch today with, I think, the largest energy investment banker in the world, Matthew Simmons, adviser of the President, widely known by many people in both the economic area and in the oil area. ``Simmons is a self-described lifelong Republican. His investment bank, Simmons & Company International, is considered the most reputable and reliable energy investment bank in the world. ``Given Simmons' background, what he has to say about the situation is truly terrifying. For instance, in an August 2003 interview with From the Wilderness publisher Michael Ruppert, Simmons was asked if it was time for peak oil to become part of the public policy debate and this was his answer: `` `It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks,' '' and I think, and he believes, that energy has peaked or will imminently peak. As a matter of fact, he has a book coming out on the 15th. I hope it will be a best seller. It is called Twilight in the Desert. It is a book about Saudi Arabia. He believes, and there is pretty good evidence, that Saudi Arabia has now peaked in its oil production. The oil prince from Saudi Arabia was a week or two here visiting the President, you may remember. The President was very anxious to extract the promise that Saudi Arabia would pump more oil because $50 a barrel oil and $2.25 for a gallon of gasoline is not good for our economy. So it would be nice to have more oil which would bring the price down and would help our economy. You may have noted that the oil prince did not, I think he could not, promise the President that he would increase oil production. `` `It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks, particularly while 5 of the world's 6.5 billion people have little or no use of modern energy, it will be a tremendous jolt to our economic well-being and to our health, greater than anyone could ever imagine.' ``When asked if there is a solution to the impending crisis, Simmons responded: `` `I don't think there is one. The solution is to pray. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered, there will be no crisis for maybe 2 years. After that, it's a certainty.' '' I hope he is wrong. I hope that we in the United States and we in the world recognize the impending crisis as our demand for oil goes ever up and as the oil available to us peaks. Are we here? Are we here? Where are we? We are somewhere near there. There are a lot of experts who agree that we are somewhere near that. And then it starts down the other side. There is this big difference between what we would like to use and what is available to use, and I have already made the point that if we use all the oil for our routine economic functions that is available to us, there will be no energy to invest in the alternatives that we are going to have to have if we are going to transition from the age of oil to the age of renewables. Ultimately, we are going to have to make that transition. Another expert, Lundberg. You have all heard of the Lundberg report on the price of gas. This is Jan Lundberg: ``The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices up skyward.'' That has not happened. But who knows when it may happen, when there is suddenly a realization that we are not going to be able to increase the production rate of oil. ``And as supplies can no longer slake daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day,'' it is now 84, ``the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and even daily living in advanced societies. There may be an event that appears to trigger this final energy crash, but the overall cause will be the huge consumption on a finite planet. ``The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno-toys and whatnot from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence and chaos. For only a short time will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all.'' I think we all know how thin the veneer of civilization is. Just let the lights go out in any of our major cities for a relatively short period of time and you get some idea of how thin the skin, the veneer of civilization is. I hope he is wrong. But after you read Matt Savinar's, and this is in Matt Savinar's article, after you read that whole article, you will find it difficult as I did, Mr. Speaker, to dismiss that with a wave of a hand, because if it is true that this is the reality, and it was for the United States, why should it not be true for the world? It was true for England. They peaked. Several countries have now peaked. It will be true for the world one day. Everybody admits that. The only difference of opinion is when it will occur. Many believe that we are now at peak or very close to peak oil. These predictions, I think, are made on the assumption that there will not be an adequate response. One of the reasons I am here today, Mr. Speaker, is hoping that we can educate the American people, the people of the world, to this pending problem. By the way, another example of this tyranny of the urgent; in politics, it is very difficult to see beyond the next election. What political people tend to do are the things that will maximize their vote total at the next election, and talking about peak oil is probably not one of those things to make people feel good about their future. But I think that leadership has a responsibility. I want future generations when they look back on my generation to say, Gee, they did the right thing. Another observer, Dr. Ted Trainer. By the way, we cannot see beyond the next election very far. Somebody in America, do you not think, Mr. Speaker, needs to be looking down the road? Who is that going to be if not the elected representatives of the people? And I think the people out there across this great country, Mr. Speaker, are wise enough that they will accept the truth. We are an enormously innovative and creative country. I think that we can get by this. I think that we can have very high-quality lives using much less energy, and I think that we can create a brand-new economy around all of the entrepreneurship, the creativity, the inventions that are going to have to be there when we go from these fossil fuels to renewables. Dr. Ted Trainer explains in a recent article on the thermodynamic limitations of biomass fuels: ``This is why I do not believe consumer- capitalist society can save itself. Not even its `intellectual' classes or green leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the will to even think about the basic situation we are in.'' I hope, Mr. Speaker, as a result of this evening and several prior times I have been here, and I will be here again. I am an old teacher, Mr. Speaker. I taught for 24 years, and I had an adage that I believed in in teaching, and that is that reputation is the soul of learning. And for 12 years I taught nursing students, and not one them failed the board. And I think that is because I had this philosophy that one never can spend too much time making sure that they understand something. So we are going to spend some time at this podium with the American people until we understand this. ``This is why I do not believe consumer-capitalist society can save itself. Not even its `intellectual' classes or green leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the will to even think about the basic situation we are in. As the above figures make clear, the situation cannot be solved without huge reduction in the volume of consumption.'' And that is what we have been talking about. If we are here, we would like to use oil at this level. We are going to have to use it at this level so that something remains, so that we can make the investments that we have got to make in renewables, or we are not going to get there. In the February, 2005, issue of ``Discover'' magazine, Dr. Smalley gave the following diagnosis: ``There will be inflation as billions of people compete for insufficient resources. There will be famine. There will be terrorism and war.'' I hope not. But if we really permit ourselves to get to this point where we would like to have that much oil and there is only that much remaining and we recognize that if we somehow denied oil to some other parts of the world there would be more oil for us, who knows, who knows what we might do? Mr. Speaker, I have been very fortunate. I have never been placed in a situation where I had to do this, but I am not sure what I would do if the life or the health of my wife and children were at risk. And I think we need to be very careful that we do the things we need to do to create a future environment in which we will not be tempted to do things that under other circumstances we would be embarrassed to even think about. The chief economist at Morgan Stanley recently predicted that we have a 90 percent chance of facing ``economic Armageddon,'' while stating, ``I fear modern-day central banking is on the brink of systematic failure.'' When somebody like the chief economist at one of the world's biggest banks makes a statement like that, it is not a surprise. Somebody like investment banker and Bush consultant Matt Simmons has stated ``the only solution is to pray.'' There was a recent article in ``Time'' magazine. It was pretty near the center, kind of a center spread. It said: ``Why Gas Won't Get Cheaper,'' and they asked several questions, and then they answered the questions. And in broad terms, they were realistic in their answers. Let me go through some of these because I think it is very instructive. This is a major news medium which has now recognized that we may be getting near this point. ``Is the world running out of oil?'' And the answer is: ``No.'' We have got half of all the oil that was ever there. That is not what is running out. World's oil is not what is running out. What is running out is cheap oil, readily available, and high-quality oil. That is running out. We are not going to run out of oil for a long time, but we have run out or are about to run out of cheap oil, and we are about to run out of our ability to increase oil production. So their next question is: ``So cheap oil is now just part of history?'' And their answer is: ``Correct.'' Then they go on to explain why. I was talking to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) the other day, the longest-serving Member of the House here on this floor, who has served here, I think, over 52 years, and what he told me was we will never see $50-a-barrel oil again. Now, it may dip. Today I think it may be a bit below $50. But what he meant was that oil is really not going down to $25, $30, $40 a barrel again; that it is going to go up from here. That is a recognition that we are probably at this point where demand is going to exceed supply, and when that happens, a little bit of difference, just a dip in supply, and we have seen what happens to prices. ``Will other sources of energy, like wind power or nuclear power, save the day?'' And then they make a very correct statement: ``Only if they replace oil consumption. Building nuclear plants or wind farms to produce electricity, for example, won't add a barrel of oil to the world's supply because we generally don't use oil for electricity.'' In a few moments, we are going to be talking about the real challenges we have in developing these alternatives. It is not impossible, but it is going to challenge the best of us. There is nothing like a challenge to sharpen the intellect or give one the satisfaction of achievement. And, boy, we had better sharpen a lot of intellects, and there is going to be a lot of satisfaction of achievement if we get by this without the rough ride that these authors in this report were making reference to. ``Why is demand for oil rising?'' And then they talk about China and India. We would like our economy to grow. As a matter of fact, if our economy does not grow at least 2 percent a year, we cannot service our debt. And the interest on our debt at today's low interest rates, pray they stay low, is almost as large as all of the money that we spend on the ordinary military. That does not include fighting the war: about $400 billion on the military, about $300 billion interest on the debt. So the interest only has to go up about 30 percent and we are spending as much interest on the debt as we are for our military. These are the big-ticket items. Demand is rising. It will continue to rise. And if we have reached the peak, then there is going to be a big difference between what we would like to use and what there is available to use and who knows the geopolitical consequences of that? Who knows the stresses and strains in the world that will occur as a result of that and what this or that nation, including our own, by the way, might do? Next question: ``Will technologies like hybrid cars, which run on a combination of gasoline and electricity, lower the price of oil?'' And they incorrectly answer: ``Eventually, yes.'' I do not think that the author of this understood that we are close to peak oil. No, it is not going to decrease the price of gas. If we have a massive effort at conservation and efficiency, what it is going to do is to permit us to continue to live well while we reduce our oil consumption below this level so we have something to invest in the alternatives. ``Will higher oil prices cripple the U.S. economy?'' And then he makes reference to another article written by Howard Kuntsler, and it is in a book. ``The Long Emergency,'' he calls it. And it goes something like this: ``Gasoline will soon get so expensive that most Americans simply won't be able to afford it. Suburbs, strip malls, interstate highways, the infrastructure of the modern U.S. economy just won't work anymore without cheap oil, and the U.S. will have to reinvent itself or risk falling into decay.'' That is a pretty dire prophecy. What does ``Time'' magazine say about that? This is what they say. It is very interesting what they say. That dire prophecy, though, is really all about timing. What they are really saying is if we do not take the right actions at the right time, that could very well happen. That is what they mean. This is all about timing. If we now aggressively pursue a program of conservation and efficiency and developing renewables, we will have a less rough ride through this crisis. It is really quite lamentable that we have now blown 25 years. We very well knew we were on the downside of Hubbert's Peak in 1980. We should have then begun to make the investments in the alternatives that would make their use a realistic replacement for oil today. Today we have a very steep hill to climb. I would like to put the next chart up which shows energy density. This gives us some idea of the challenges that we face here as we look to what is going to take the place of gas and oil. And this lists a number of things that we can burn and get energy from and how much energy there is. Domestic refuse, it does not have much. It is wet, and it has got a bunch of stuff in it that will not burn. But many places are burning it to get electricity, and the excess heat can now provide what is called ``district heating.'' By the way, we do not need to be getting rid of this heat in these big cooling towers and evaporating precious water. This heat ought to be used for heating buildings and so forth. They do that all over the rest of the world. We need to do more of that in this country. Here is brown coal. That is a cheap coal that has a very low energy density. Straw, we are talking about burning biomass, pretty low energy density. If we burn enough straw and soybean stubble and so forth, we can get some energy from it, enough sawdust. Dung, in some countries they are burning dried dung to heat themselves. We used to do that out in the West. Cow chips, I think they called them. Buffalo chips. They picked them up and burned them there. Wood, 16.2 gigajoules per ton. Black coal, better than wood, 50 percent better than wood. Coke, even better. Ethanol, notice that the ethanol that we would like to have more of because it replaces gasoline has nowhere near the energy density of gasoline because here is petrol down here at 46 and ethanol has less. But, nevertheless, we will talk in a few minutes about ethanol. It is still a really good idea. Crude oil; diesel; petrol, automotive petrol; naptha; aviation fuel, higher octane, more energy; and natural gas, more hydrogen and still more energy. I would like to give just a little anecdotal illustration of how important energy density is. One barrel, which is 42 gallons, of crude oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 manhours of effort. From 8 years with IBM and writing a lot of proposals, I know that 2,060 is a man-year. So this is about 12 man-years of effort. What that means is that for $100, about $50 for the oil and maybe $50 to refine it and transport it to something a gallon for gasoline times 40 is about $100. For $100 one can now buy the energy equivalent worth of 12 men, or women, 12 people working for them all year long, and they bought that for $100. That is the challenge--we have to find something that cheap. And one will say $50 a barrel is not cheap, that $2.25 a gallon for gas is not cheap. But gas is still cheaper than water in the grocery store, is it not? The challenge is to find something with that kind of energy density. Let me give another little illustration that people may be able to identify with because almost all of us drive cars. We drive a Prius, since 2000. A few weeks ago we had four people, and we were going down into West Virginia, up some mountains down there. We got lousy mileage going up the mountain. We have instantaneous mileage on the Prius so we could see what we were getting. And our mileage was only 20 miles per gallon. But I thought about that. One gallon of gasoline. Members know how big it is. A gallon of milk in the grocery store. One gallon of gasoline took four people and their luggage up a West Virginia mountain for 20 miles. And I thought, Mr. Speaker, how long would it take me to pull my Prius up 20 miles a West Virginia mountain? Now, obviously I cannot pull it up. I am not strong enough. But I can get it up there with some mechanical advantage like a winch that is built into the little thing we call a ``come-along'' and hook it to the guardrail or trees and by and by, if I did it in 90 days, and one can calculate out how far they would have to pull the car in a day, they would be pretty good if they got it up that 20 miles of mountain in 90 days. That is the equivalent of the 20 years of effort from a single 20,000 man-hours of effort, about 24 years of man work that you get from one barrel of oil. So we have a big challenge in getting a replacement that has the energy density. I would like to look at one possible replacement, and that is coal. We have a lot of coal. You hear 500 years. That is not true, but we have about 250 years of coal at present use rates, about 250 years at current use rates. That is no growth. Remember those exponential curves that we looked at a while ago? Just 1.1 percent growth, and that comes down to 125 years. Two percent growth, the curves we have been looking at, we are down to under 100 years. But you cannot put a trunk load of coal in your car and go up the mountain. You have to convert it into something where you can use it, so it is going to take some energy to convert it. It has to be a liquid or gas, and you can make both. When I was a little boy, the things we burned in the lamps, we had no electricity when I was a child, and we burned coal oil. I kept calling it coal oil for a long time. That was a big improvement over whale oil, by the way, which is what we had before coal oil. It was called coal oil because we made it from coal. But then we were able to make kerosene from oil, and that was cheaper and easier to make, so nobody used coal oil any more. We may be back using coal oil. After conversion with a 2 percent growth it lasts just about 50 years. We really need to use oil. It is dirty, big environmental challenges, got to get the sulfur out of it. But still there is energy there and we need to use that energy. But coal, we have to be careful now. These are resources that are finite. When they are gone, they are gone. So we need to plan a future in which we use coal and all of the other of these finite resources in the wisest possible way. The next chart I want to look at something that is really very revealing. There is a lot of talk about ethanol and ethanol could replace gasoline. Well, yes and no. Here we have petroleum. You start out with petroleum and you end up down here with 1 million Btus of gasoline at the refueling station. This is all the energy inputs you have to put into the several stages in going from recovery, to transportation, to the refining facility and then transporting it to where you pick it up at the station. So you get 1 million Btus out of the gasoline, but you had to use 1.23 million Btus of fossil fuel to get there, because you have got to expend energy all along this transportation and conversion route. Now, if we look at ethanol, and we end up with the same thing, 1 million Btus of ethanol, it is going to be a bigger volume, by the way. You remember the energy density? Ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline. But we made them equivalent here because we are talking about 1 million Btus, so we can compare them, we are comparing apples to apples here. Now we start with solar energy, and that is going to make the corn grow that we plant, and these are all the things that go into corn. We are going to look at that in a moment. That is really interesting. Then we have to transport the corn, and we have to produce the ethanol, we have to transport the ethanol to where we are going to use it. But notice that for every 1 million Btus of ethanol we have at the pump, we have put in about three-fourths of a million Btus of fossil fuel to get there. Obviously you would not have to use the fossil fuel, you could use corn energy, ethanol energy, but that is going to further depreciate your yield here, is it not? Tonight, 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry, and so our limits to transmute food into energy are obviously going to be limited if we would like to continue to feed the world. What is on the bottom here in this little pie is really interesting. This is the energy that goes in to producing a bushel of corn. It could be a bushel of soybeans or a bushel of wheat. With soybeans, by the way, you need less nitrogen here because they are a legume and they have little nodules on their roots and they get nitrogen from the atmosphere. But this is corn. It is going to be typical of wheat and rice. Nearly half of all the energy that goes into producing corn comes from nitrogen, and nitrogen today comes almost exclusively from natural gas. Mr. Speaker, before we knew how to get nitrogen from natural gas, we only got it in three places, nitrogen fertilizer. We got it from barnyard manures, and they were pretty limited. The farmer might have a good garden if he concentrated his manures on the garden. But for his fields he had to rely on what we called rotation farming. You planted grass and legumes, the legumes fixed nitrogen and put it in the soil, and after several years you plowed up the sod and you planted corn for one year. That sucked most of the nitrogen out of the ground, so you were back in grass and legumes again until you stored enough nitrogen to get another corn crop. Today we use natural gas to get nitrogen and without natural gas to get nitrogen, I will let you, Mr. Speaker, draw your own conclusions as to how difficult it would be to feed the world, because you see the enormous amount of energy that comes in through natural gas and nitrogen. Then there is hauling, that is oil; purchased water, you probably pump that with maybe some oil and gas for energy. Chemicals. Many of the chemicals that are used in farming come from a petroleum base. By the way, there is something we have not talked about, Mr. Speaker, very important. There is an enormous petrochemical industry out there. In a very real sense, oil, and particularly gas, are too good to burn. We live in a plastic world, and all of these things, lipstick, all of these things, come from oil. There are other sources, but they are not as convenient and nowhere near as cheap. So many of the chemicals come from oil. Custom work. His tractor was built with oil. It ran on oil. There is a lot of oil there. Natural gas, that is all fossil fuels. Electricity, that could have been produced with oil or gas. Liquid propane gas to dry the corn probably. Then gasoline itself, diesel. We are not even free of the need for oil when you come to lime and phosphate and potash, these nutrients you have to put on the soil in addition to your nitrogen to grow the crop, because we had to mine those, and haul those. We needed energy for all that, and a great deal of that energy came from oil. So you can see how much our food, in a very real sense, Mr. Speaker, the food you eat is oil. And in our country, just a word about agriculture in our country. We brag we have the most efficient agriculture in the world. That is because we spend fewer man-hours to produce a ton of this or a bushel of that than perhaps any other country in the world. But we do that because we have these very large tractors that burn a lot of oil. There is a trade-off here. The fewer man-hours you use, the more energy you are probably going to have to use. So although we have the most efficient agriculture in the world in terms of man-hours of effort needed to produce a crop, we may have close to the most inefficient agriculture in the world in terms of energy in and energy out. As a matter of fact, the food you eat, which, by the way, each helping traveled an average of 1,500 miles before it got to your plate this evening, the food you eat is quite literally energy because of all of the energy that it took to put in to that food. The next chart looks at some of the alternatives. We need to come back, Mr. Speaker, and spend more time, because we really need to spend a lot of time on this chart, because if these dire predictions that we read earlier are not going to come true, we have got to pay attention to this chart. There are finite resources. We mentioned the tar sands and the oil shales. A lot of oil there that is not very good, very expensive to get out. You may spend almost as much energy getting it out as you get out of it, so there is not a big energy profit ratio there. Then coal, we have talked about coal. Nuclear, we really need to look at nuclear. There are three forms of nuclear. Fusion is one that will get us home free. I do not think that is very probable. In spite of that, I support all the money, about $300 million a year I think we spend in that sector. Because if we really are able to get fusion, energy, and that is what the sun does, by the way, and most of the energy we use comes from the sun. All of the gas, all of the oil, all of the coal if you believe in a biogenic source, of that, and most people do, came from the sun, which shone a while ago. Hydropower comes from the sun. The sun lifts water, it falls on the mountain and runs through the turbine and produces power. Direct solar, the wind blows because of differential heating. Ocean energy, differential temperatures in the ocean. Of course, you have some ocean energy from the tides. The only potential source of energy free from the sun is the moon; very diffuse, hard to harvest that. Fission. Two kinds of fission. We have light water reactors, 20 percent of our electricity. The French produce about 70 to 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear and they have breeder reactors. At another time, Mr. Speaker, we need to talk about breeder reactors. If we are going to get serious about nuclear, we are going to have to go to breeder reactors, because there is not much fissionable uranium in the world. If we all need to go to nuclear it will run out quicker than coal, quicker than oil, quicker than gas. So we need to talk about breeder reactors. Well, we will come to the floor another hour and spend most of that time talking about these renewable sources. I hope to have with me then, we had five people here last evening, this is a getaway day, they have gone home. The next time it will not be, and we will have a number of people here, and we will have a good time talking about all of these renewables, the challenges and the opportunities there.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I really want to thank the gentleman for organizing this hour this evening. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) mentioned the energy future, and I have a chart here which looks at the past. If you understand how we have gotten here, why, you may be able to see the future a little better. The gentleman mentioned the wood, and that is the brown line way down here. Then the gentleman mentioned coal. We transitioned, and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) mentioned that also. We transitioned to coal. You see that we got lots more energy out of coal than we got out of wood. Then look at the energy that we get out of oil. Of course, as we look to the future, we need to find something that will at least come close to producing the kind of energy that we get from oil. Our next slide relates to something the gentleman said about energy represents the ability to do work. Here we have a chart which lists the energy density in a variety of things that we get energy from. To kind of put this in perspective, I would like to note that if we come down here to crude oil, I will give you some idea of the energy density of crude oil, one barrel of crude oil, 42 gallons, represents the energy from 25,000 man-hours of labor. That is about 12 man years of labor. That is the equivalent of having 12 people that work all year for you. And what will it cost you for that? $100 today, about $50 for the barrel of oil and maybe $50 to refine it and distribute it. So that is the kind of energy density that we get from fossil fuel. Now, we are going to have to find something that comes close that that in the quantities we are using fossil fuels. We are talking about oil and gas. We use in our country 21 million barrels of oil a day. The rest of the world uses 63 million barrels of oil a day. That is 84 million barrels of oil a day total. If you look here, you will see we did go to higher and higher energy density fuels. As we moved along, you can burn domestic refuge, and we ought to be doing that, by the way, instead of putting it in landfills. We ought to be burning that. Some are doing that. You get heat for the surrounding houses, you get electricity from it. Brown coal, that is not very good coal. Straw, you can burn bailed straw, that is called biomass. There are lots of things you can do with biomass. In some parts of the world they burn dried dung. That also has lots of energy in it, about the same as wood. Then we move to black coal, that is what we really mean by coal. You see coal has a higher energy density than wood. And here is coke and ethanol. Notice that ethanol has a lesser energy density than crude oil and diesel and petrol, that is what you put in your car. Naptha has a higher energy density, aviation fuel a still higher energy density, and natural gas, it was mentioned, the hydrogen content goes higher and higher in these so you get more energy out of it. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) mentioned the agricultural revolution. We have a chart here that looks at the agricultural revolution. This is a very interesting chart. The top part of the chart shows how we get energy from petroleum, and it goes from petroleum clear down to gasoline and all of the energy inputs in the stages that are involved in doing that. You have to recover it. Here is the energy input that you need to recover it. You have to transport it. You have got to refine it. You have got to transport it again. And this is what you get from it, 1 million Btus of gasoline at the refueling station. And what did that cost you? It cost 1.23 million Btus. So about a fifth of all the energy you started with in petroleum now is gone in getting this gallon of gasoline. Well, on the other side here we have now energy from ethanol, from corn. If you go down, we have to farm the corn, we have to produce it, we have to transport it, we have to produce it, we have to transport it again to where you are going to use it, and we still have the 1 million Btus, a little more than a gallon here, by the way, because it does not have the energy density of gasoline. But still we are making the equivalent 1 million Btus. Notice that that took 0.74 million Btus of fossil energy. The difference, of course, was the energy we got from the sun. So here we are capturing energy from the sun to make ethanol. The bottom of this chart is really very interesting, because this points to a big problem that we face in this country particularly, and in the world in general, as the availability of fossil fuels winds down, because this is the total energy requirement that goes into a bushel of corn. Notice the kind of energy that goes into that bushel of corn. Nearly half of it is nitrogen. That comes from natural gas. Before we learned how to get it from natural gas, the only place we got it from was barn yard manuers or plants that put it in the soil in rotation farming or guano that we mine from bath caves and tropical islands. Notice as we go around this pie, the input of oil. Here we have input hauling, that is oil. Water, that was moved probably with energy from fossil fuels. Chemicals, a lot of host chemicals are made from fossil fuels, an enormous petrochemical industry. Custom work. The fellow came in to do custom work, he used some oil. His tractor was made with oil. Natural gas. Electricity. Natural gas goes along with oil. Electricity could have been produced with natural gas or oil. Propane, again, a product of fossil fuels. Gasoline, diesel. So far, almost everything here is the product of oil or oil itself, is it not? And then we get to some things we mine. We can mine phosphate, lime and potash, but it takes energy to mine those and that energy probably came from oil. So the food you eat in a very real sense is oil, is it not, because that is where the energy came from to produce that food. Then you have the very interesting chart of income savings and inheritance, and I have a chart here that looks at some of the alternatives. These have been mentioned. We will just spent a couple of moments looking at these alternatives, because we have been talking about it this evening. We have some finite resources and we need to husband those carefully. We need to use them only as we have to. Some of them will not be very valuable. Tar sands and oil shale may cost you almost as much to get the energy as you get out of the energy after you have gotten it. Coal, and I want to put a coal chart up here in just a moment, because that is a very interesting one. And then nuclear. Several of the speakers have mentioned nuclear this evening. There are three kinds of ways you can get power from nuclear. Fusion, I hope we get there. If we get there we are home free, are we not? I think the odds of getting there are not all that good, so you better not bank on it, the same way you better not bank on solving your personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice too, but the odds are not real high that you are going to do it. Then there is the light water reactor, which we have, and then there is the breeder reactor, which we do not have, which we are certainly going to have to look at if we are going to be serious of getting nuclear energy. Then there is a whole list of renewables here. These are the ones we really need to be focusing on. But the big challenge here is, and I want to put the last chart up, is to move so we can make do with the energy from these alternatives, because it is not going to be as available in as large a quantity or with the energy density of the fossil fuels. So I want to put up the last chart, and that is the chart that shows the things we need to be doing. These are the kind of things we need to be doing. The first thing we need to be doing is voluntary conservation. Let me put up very quickly the chart that shows California. This is a really interesting one. It shows that you do not have to depreciate the quality of life to useless energy. Californians use about 60 percent as much energy per person as in the rest of the country. It would be hard to argue they do not have a good lifestyle. Let me put this down and look at the next one. The next thing we need to do, we need to organize voluntary conservation. If we can organize, we can do a little better job. Then this is with the government cuts in now. We need to have monetary incentives, some policies for volunteer conservation. We have to conserve to buy time so we can use the fossil fuels remaining, not only total fuel our present economy, to make the investment we need to make in these renewables so we will be able to sustain ourselves for the duration. Then we need to go to efficiency. We have done a lot with efficiency. Your present refrigerator is at least twice as good as the one 20 years ago in terms of efficiency. Then again the government is involved, we need to have monetary incentives and policies for efficient technologies. I would say to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), we should have been moving down this path for the last 25 years, because in 1980 we knew absolutely moving down Hubbard's Peak. Tomorrow I think we have another opportunity in one of these special order hours to talk about this. We will be able to do this in more detail. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me and for organizing this hour this evening.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) was talking about growth in the use of energy; and I have here some curves, some exponential curves. Ordinarily, when people think about growth, they may think about a straight line. And on the bottom here it shows the extrapolation of 2 percent growth starting at this point. If it is a straight line, it would look like that. But that is not 2 percent growth because every year we are growing something less than 2 percent. To be 2 percent growth, one has got to grow 2 percent more than they were the last year, and that is called exponential growth, and this is a 2 percent growth curve for exponential growth, just 2 percent. The next curve here is a 4 percent exponential growth curve and then 5 percent. And I put on here the growth curve that China has been following, and that is a 10 percent growth curve. In just 7 years, if they are growing at 10 percent, they double. They double again in the next 7 years; so in just 14 years, they are four times bigger. They double again in the next 7 years so that at 21 years it is eight times bigger. That is why this curve is so sharp. China is now following this growth curve. It is very difficult for one's economy to grow at 10 percent without their energy use growing at somewhere near 10 percent. So we need to keep that in mind as we go through the charts that are going to follow this, that China is growing at this rate. The world, by the way, grew last year at 5 percent. We grew probably a bit over 2 percent in this country. Of course, we were way ahead to start with; so with our 2 percent growth, we are still way out in front of everybody else in terms of the amount of energy we use. As a matter of fact, the next chart shows some figures which alarmed 30 of the leading figures in our country: Jim Woolsey and McFarland and Frank Gaffney and 27 others who wrote a letter to the President just a few weeks ago, and they noted to the President that we have only two percent of the world's oil reserves. By the way, from that two percent, we are generating eight percent of the world's oil. And what that means, of course, is that we are getting four times as much oil relatively out of each of our wells as the world gets out of their average wells, so we are really good at pumping oil. In fact, we are so good at pumping oil that just recently, the Saudis came here to find out how we do it, how we get out those last dribs and drabs from our oil reservoirs, because we have been doing this for a very long time. We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person in 22 in the world, but we consume 25 percent of the world's energy, and we are importing about two-thirds of that. And, as the President himself said, a lot of that oil comes from countries that do not even like us. These 30 people, about half of them were retired generals and admirals. There were several retired secretaries of previous administrations. These were really the leaders in America that wrote to the President: Mr. President, this is an unacceptable national security risk that we have only two percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import two-thirds of that. By the way, that is up from about one-third that we imported during the Arab oil embargo. We peaked in 1970. As a matter of fact, the next chart shows when we peaked and we can get a better idea of this. To explain how this curve got here, I have to go back about six decades. It was in the 1940s and 1950s, a scientist at the Shell Oil Company named M. King Hubbert was watching the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each of those fields followed a bell curve. The oil came out very rapidly at first and then, when it reached a peak, at which time he noted about half of the field had been pumped, and then it stands to reason the last oil out of the field is going to be harder to get, so there was now a downslope. So in 1956 he kind of guessed at the additional fields that we were going to find in this country, and he mathematically calculated when we should peak, and he thought that would be in the early 1970s, and he made this prediction in 1956. As a matter of fact, we did peak in 1970. Now, his curve is the smooth curve here, his projected curve, and he did that back in 1956, and the data points here, the rougher curve, the actual data points which fall remarkably near his curve, Prudhoe Bay, the Alaska oil, that occurred after we were already on the down slope of what is called Hubbert's Peak here, and we see what Prudhoe Bay did. And then we are going to go to a chart just after this that shows the different places we get oil from in our country. The red curve here shows Russia, and when the Soviet Union was falling apart, they had more oil than we, so they peaked higher. When the Soviet Union was falling apart, they did very poorly and, as a matter of fact, there is now a little secondary peak, here is a recovered one, but it is on down; the first peak was considerably higher than the second peak. The second chart shows where we get our oil from. A great deal of it came from Texas. I saw some early photographs of some of the oil fields in Texas, and I will tell my colleagues, the oil derricks were about as close together as trees in a forest, just an incredible bonanza of derricks down there getting this oil out of the ground. The rest of the United States is the big area here, natural gas liquids, we have learned how to liquefy natural gas, and now that is supplementing the petroleum. There are two parts of this curve that I want to pay special attention to. One of them is Alaska here, that is Prudhoe Bay. And notice that it was just a little blip in the downslope here from Prudhoe Bay, we are still going down. It delayed it just a little; it never got back to the peak production in 1970. By the way, we are now sliding down this curve and we produce about half as much oil now as we did in 1970. Mr. Speaker, I am sure that my colleagues can remember all of the hullabaloo about the enormous finds of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. That was going to solve our energy problems for the foreseeable future. What that turned out to be is this little yellow here. That is all there was to it. And again, it did not bring us back to where we were in 1970; we are still sliding down Hubbert's Peak. I would like to come back to the Alaska oil for just a moment. We are now talking about going into ANWR. It really does not matter whether one is for going into ANWR or one thinks that is a pristine wilderness that we should not drill in, because the amount of oil in ANWR is probably not more than half of this. Even if it were that much, it is not going to come on line; the chairman of the Committee on Transportation, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) says it may be 10 years before it comes on line, and it is really not going to make enough difference to matter. My concern is that if we drill in ANWR, Americans will think, gee, we have solved our energy problem, we are drilling in ANWR. It will be little more than a nit in terms of the enormous amounts of oil that we use. That kind of helps us put ANWR in perspective, because this is Prudhoe Bay, which may be twice as large as ANWR. So it kind of gives us a picture of what we can expect from ANWR. The next chart is a generic chart which kind of shows us where we are, very probably where we are, and we have here only a two percent growth. Remember those curves I showed earlier? This is only the two percent growth curve. But notice what happens: it gets steeper and steeper as we go out. That is the interesting thing about exponential growth. The blue curve here is the available oil. Now, obviously, the use of oil and the production of oil paralleled each other going up the slope because nobody was storing it in large reservoirs anywhere. The yellow area between the amount of oil that can be produced and the oil that we would like to use represents the deficit. We do not even have to get to peak oil to have a problem, as the curve shows here, because we start deviating from this curve before we get to the peak of the curve. So we might expect, if we are at this point where the arrow points here, we might expect it for the next couple of years or so that it will be marginally greater increases in the production of oil, but they will not begin to keep up with the increased demand for oil. Last year, for instance, China increased their oil imports about 25 percent. They now are the number two importer in the world. They have replaced Japan as the number two importer in the world. Of course, we are number one. We import more oil than anyone else in the world. India is following closely behind China. The Third World is now industrializing and probably, one of the things that we could most productively do would be to help India and help China and help the Third World countries who are industrializing to do it more efficiently. They are not only industrializing 30, 40 years after we did; they are kind of following the same path that we followed and using very inefficient techniques. So we could help alleviate the world's energy problem by helping these countries, which are now following us by 30 years or more in industrialization, to use techniques that are more efficient, which would make more oil available for everyone. The next chart shows the discovery of oil, and the discovery of oil, if my colleagues see, that peaked for the world back here before 1970, and it peaked for the United States considerably before that. So discoveries peak a long time before consumption, and they are down, down, down now. I just had a paper sent to me that says that there is a whole lot more oil out there that we have not found. I hope that is true. But whether it is true or not for the moment is not going to make much difference, because it is not going to come on line, as Chairman Young says, for maybe 10 years. And in 10 years we are going to be sliding down Hubbert's Peak. So if there is a lot more oil out there, the most it will do is kind of slow our descent down Hubbert's Peak. We cannot escape the reality that the world production of oil will peak, many believe that it has peaked, and the demand for oil is certainly not going to peak. That is going to keep on going up. The next chart shows something very interesting, that is, that drilling more will not help. And this is an interesting chart, because what it shows, the green shows the discoveries above use by the United States, and the red shows when we started to run a deficit. What you see is in the 1980ish time zone, the yellow here shows the wells that we drilled. And notice this big spike in the number of wells we drilled. This was early in the Reagan administration. Now, President Reagan recognized that we had a problem. We were already sliding down Hubbert's Peak. And he thought that the reason that we did not have more oil was simply because they did not have enough incentive to drill for more oil. And so he gave them incentives to drill for oil, and these incentives did work, they did drill for oil; but notice the increased drilling for oil simply followed an ever- decreasing discovery of oil with increased use, so now we have been operating in the red for a long time. Notice that in spite of enormously increased profits, the industry is not drilling very many more wells. Why are they not drilling many more wells? It quite obviously is because they have done a lot of exploration, we are really pretty good at that today, and we use seismic and 3-D and computers. And if they thought there was a whole lot more oil out there to be found, they would be drilling more wells, because they certainly have the capital to do that now. There is another dimension in this story that our next chart shows for us. And this is what is happening around the world. And I want to pay particular attention to China. China is now, remember, the number two importer in the world, 1.3 billion people, with an economy growing, remember that 10 percent curve, very sharp growth in their economy. And they are now scouring the world for oil. They have contracts in Canada for oil, in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, a number of them in the Middle East and Africa. They are now negotiating with Russia for oil there. They are talking with Russia about building a pipeline from the Sakhalin Island, in the Russian far east. Russia spans 11 time zones. This ought to be colored green here, because Russia comes clear around here, nearly up to Alaska. They cover 11 time zones. And their far eastern oil is so far away from their major population centers, that they just cannot get it there over this large expanse. And so now they are talking about a pipeline that would carry it down to China and perhaps down to the Korean Peninsula. By the way, they negotiated for an oil company in our country, and were just barely out- bid. They may be back bidding for oil companies in our country. They now control a number of assets around the world to make sure that they have access to this oil. For instance, for a number of years now they have had ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. A poll, kind of an informal poll, was conducted in India and China over a several-month period by sending people that would just talk to people across the spectrum of their society there to ask them about energy and the future, and there is pretty broad knowledge in both of those countries that energy is going to be an increasing problem. And in China they found a big recognition that China was dependent on the sea lanes for their oil, and they do not control the sea lanes. The United States controls the sea lanes. And so China is know aggressively developing a blue water navy. By a blue water navy, I mean a navy that operates in the oceans of the world. Many countries have a navy, but most of them are designed to protect the country close in. Only we now, since the Soviets and the Russians have pulled back, only we now have a blue water navy that controls the world's oceans. And China recognizes that we could, if we wished, cut off their oil supply. And so they now are aggressively developing, among other armaments, a blue water navy. By the way, last year our trade deficit with China was $162 billion. So it is not that they are without resources to develop this blue water navy. The next chart is a very interesting one, and Congressman Gilchrest talked about this. And this shows the transition from one fuel to another. And notice the lower brown curve here is wood. And we really started using wood when we learned how to make steel. As a matter of fact, the hills, the mountains of New England were largely denuded of trees. There are now more forests in New Hampshire than there were when the Industrial Revolution began here, because it began in England a bit sooner, and they were cutting trees from New England to take to England. As a matter of fact, the Industrial Revolution almost foundered because, as Congressman Gilchrest mentioned, we were exhausting the forest and cutting the trees for energy, and then we discovered coal. And notice how much greater the economy became, because over here is quadrillion BTUs. Remember you talked about BTUs, these are quadrillion BTUs over here. I think you were up, what, over a hundred quadrillion BTUs? Here it is 70. We are now up over a hundred quadrillion BTUs. And then we discovered oil. And here it goes. Up to a hundred quadrillion BTUs total energy production. By the way, the lower curve here is a breakout of these, and it shows what maybe I hope is the future, what better be the future, or the future is pretty grim, that is, some alternatives to fossil fuels. Those are things like nuclear and solar and wind. They are so far down here in the noise level you do not see them so we have blown it up. By the way, you do not see this big red peak here, because this combines petroleum and natural gas which come together, and here they are separated so you add this to this, you will get this big peak up here. This explains some of the characteristics that alternatives must have, and that is energy density. Why were the Btus so much higher with coal and enormously higher with oil? And Congressman Gilchrest mentioned this, it is the energy density there. Give you a little example of energy density. At maybe 25 percent efficiency only, because in your internal combustion engine you are lucky if you get 25 percent efficiency, which is the reason that you have that big radiator and all those pipes and fins to get rid of the heat. A barrel of oil contains the energy of 25,000 man-hours of labor. That is the equivalent of having 12 people work for you full time for a whole year. And it costs you about $100, $50 for the oil, that is about what it was today, maybe another $50 to refine it. So you have got 42 gallons at $2-something a gallon. That is about $100, is it not? And that $100 will buy you the work equivalent, the energy equivalent of 25,000 man-hours of labor. So when we are looking for something to replace these fossil fuels, we have got to find something with a lot of energy density, or we are going to have to change the way we live and change the way we use energy. You may have trouble calibrating that 25,000 man-hours and 12 man-years, but let me give you a little example that it may be easier to identify with, and that is what your car does with a gallon of gas, a gallon of gas, not very big. By the way, still cheaper than water in the grocery store, at $2-and- something a gallon, unless you are buying it in Wal-Mart or KMart a gallon at a time. But in the little bottles you buy it in, it is much more expensive than gas. Recently, I went with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law in our little Prius. We have been driving one for a number of years now, since 2000 as a matter of fact; but the first one in Maryland, the first one in Congress. 85,000 miles on it. We were down in West Virginia going up mountains down there. It has an instantaneous record of your efficiency, miles per gallon. The worst mileage we got was 20 miles per gallon. Well, that is going up a West Virginia mountain with four people in the car and luggage, and that one gallon took me 20 miles up the mountain. How long would it take me to pull my car 20 miles up the mountain? Of course, I cannot do that without some mechanical advantage. I could use a winch. We call it a come along and chains and the guardrail or trees or something, and by and by I could get my car up the mountain. If I got it there in 90 days, that would be 90 hard days work, if you want to calculate that out how many feet you have to pull it a day. That gives you some idea of the energy density in these fossil fuels. So that is the challenge we have. The next chart shows us the kind of things we can look to for getting energy to replace these fossil fuels. Now there are some finite resources we really have to pay attention to. They will not last forever, but in this transition we will have to use them as we can. The tar sands, and I am going to Canada this summer, when I gave a talk on a couple of weeks ago, they called and would like me to see their tar sands exploitation so we will look at that. There is a lot of oil in tar sand, but most of it is pretty poor quality and it takes a lot of energy to get it out. It may take almost as much energy to get it out as you get oil out of the tar sands. Then we have the oil shale in this country. The same thing is true there. Ultimately when Goldman Sachs has oil going to $105 a barrel, when it gets there it might be feasible to get oil shales. But again, a big environmental penalty and a lot of energy to get it out. Coal. We will leave this chart up and put another chart in front of this because we want to come back to this one. The chart we put in front shows coal, and you have heard that we have 250 years of use, that is true, with no growth at current use rates. Remember that flat curve we showed before? No growth at current use rates. This is perfectly flat. It will last us 250 years with no growth, but if it just grows 1.1 percent a year it will only last that long. Less than 150 years. At 2 percent growth it will last less than 100 years. But what are you going to do with coal? You cannot put it in the trunk of your car and go down the road. You have to convert coal to a liquid or a gas so that you can use it. And when you have a 2 percent growth rate and after conversion you are now down about 50 years of supply. And you have got to use a lot of energy to make sure that you clean up the coal. We appropriate money from the Congress for clean coal technology, I support that, because we cannot use coal in the traditional way because it is enormously polluting. We will go back now to our chart we were looking at the options that we have. The only thing on this table here that comes close to the energy density of fossil fuels is nuclear. Now, a lot of people have some big concerns about nuclear. But we have had 104 nuclear power plants in our country. We have never had a fatal accident. We have never had any real serious accidents there. Three Mile Island, by the way, was not a catastrophe. It was very unfortunate. As far as I know nobody was hurt from that and we learned a lot from that. There are three different ways we can get nuclear energy. The way that will get us home free is fusion, that is what happens in the sun. And by the way, the sun is the origin of the most of energy that we have. All of the fossil fuels came from the sun ultimately. The ferns grew that produced the coal. The little organisms that grew in the water that settled to the bottom and were later covered over by silt, and then with the movement of tectonic plates they were buried with heat and pressure. In time they became oil. The odds of getting fusion in time are pretty small. I would like to use the analogy that me trying to solve my personal economic problems by winning the lottery is pretty much the same kind of odds that we face if we want to solve our energy problems in our country with fusion. That does not keep me from voting for the something less than $300 million that we appropriate each year to fusion, because if we get there we are really home free. That is incredible. But that is probably not going to happen. We certainly would not bank on it. If it happens that is nice. Like winning the lottery, if it happens that is nice. Two other kinds of energy is from nuclear. These are fission. One of those is whitewater reactor, which is the kind we have in this country. This uses uranium which is in even shorter supply in the world than oil. So that will not last forever. Ultimately if we are going to get large amounts of energy from nuclear figures, we are going to have to go to breeder reactors. France gets about 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear and they have a lot of breeder reactors. With breeder reactors, you buy a problem of waste products that you have to store away we believe for maybe a quarter of a million years. That is a time span we can even think of and how do you safely store something away for a quarter of a million years? Anything that has that much energy in it ought to be good for something. If it is so hot, if it has so much energy in it that you have got to store it away, you cannot even come close to it for a quarter of a million years, I would think you have not unleashed the ingenuity of the American people to see what we can do with that energy. I just think there is some potential there that we have not tapped. Our time for this evening is nearly up. So what I want to do now is just mention, and we will be coming back again for a full hour and we will be talking about in detail about these renewable resources down here, what can we realistically expect from them and what do we need to do to get them started? Solar and wind and geothermal, tapping that hot molten iron core of the earth. Ocean energy, the tides and the waves. Lots of potential from agriculture, soy diesel, bio diesel, ethanol, methanol, bio mass. Waste of energy. Great idea. Rather than filling landfills with it, burn it and get energy from it. By the way, the heat you got from it ought to be used for heating people's home. It ought not be wasted in evaporating water in a big tower outside town. Last, we will close with hydrogen from renewable. Hydrogen is not an energy source. You cannot mine hydrogen. You cannot suck it out of the air. The only way you get hydrogen is to produce it. Right now we are getting hydrogen from natural gas. It would be better to get it from renewables. We can do that. We can get it from nuclear. One of the things you might do with a nuclear plant is to split water to get hydrogen. You put that hydrogen in a fuel cell in your car. It has at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine. It produces only water when you burn it. You do not have a flame but you are, in effect, chemically burning it in the fuel cell. There are lots of things to look at here. But the real urgency here is that we have got to buy time by conservation and by efficiency so that we can use the limited resources of oil that we have, not only to continue the economies we now have in the world, but to make the investments we must make in these renewables so that we are going to continue to be able to live the kinds of qualities lives that we have been living. I am sure that Americans are up to this. What we need is leadership articulating the problem and articulating the things that Americans need to do. Americans just need leadership. We are the envy of the world and we need to be a world leader in this because we use most of the oil in the world. I would note that you can turn to our Web site and there you will find a discussion of these items of links that will carry you are to other places. If you would like to order a video or DVD, this is the telephone number you call at C-SPAN.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago I read a treatise written by Matt Savinar, and I was galvanized by his introduction. Let me read it. ``Dear reader,'' he begins, ``civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the whacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophesy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists, and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global peak oil.'' Mr. Speaker, in the weeks since I read this, I have checked with a large number of experts in this area across the country and indeed around the world. He could be right. He will be right unless we appropriately address this big challenge which faces the world and particularly faces the United States, and that is what we will be talking about in our Special Order this evening. I have been joined by the gentleman from the eastern shore of Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest), one of my colleagues who shares a concern in this area of energy, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, on March 24 of this year, 30 of the prominent leading individuals in our country wrote a letter to the President about what they considered a very critical national security issue. The letter was signed by Robert McFarlane, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Boyden Gray, Timothy Wirth, and 30 other people, including 12 retired generals and admirals, five Secretaries of Defense Departments, and several retired Senators and Representatives. To understand their concern, we need to go back about 6 decades to a sequence of events that brought us to a situation that very much concerned them. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we use 25 percent of all of the oil used in the world, and we import two- thirds of that. We have less than 5 percent of the world's population. How did we get here? The next chart shows us that, and this goes back the 6 decades that I mentioned to a Shell oil scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert who, in the 1940s and 1950s watched the exploration, the pumping, and the exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each of the fields followed a bell curve. It rose to a maximum, and then it fell off as they pumped out the remaining oil. He noticed that at the peak of that curve, that about half of the oil had been consumed from the average field. It is logical that the second half of the oil would be harder to get and take more time, and it would not flow as quickly. He theorized that if you added up all of the individual fields in the country, you could predict when that country would peak in its oil production. And in 1956, he made a projection for the United States. Fourteen years later, which was when he said it would occur, the United States peaked in its oil production. This curve here in green, the smooth, green curve was his prediction. The little more ragged curve, the points that do not fall quite on the curve were the actual data points which we see fell remarkably close to his prediction. We are now well down that curve. We are now producing less than half of the oil that we produced in 1970. The red curve there, by the way, is the curve for Russia. There is going to be a second peak there, because after the Soviet Union fell, they kind of got their act together and they are going to have a second peak, but not so high, and so their real peak was when it is shown there. The next chart shows us the elements of the oil in this country, where we got it from. We see a whole bunch of it came from Texas, and then the rest of the United States, and then nos gas liquids, the red above, and we see what is called Alaska there. That is all the oil that we got from Prudhoe Bay, the north slope, a lot of oil. But it really did not make a very big difference. You see, we are still sliding down that slope and there is just a little blip produced by Prudhoe Bay, and then we slide down the slope. Mr. Speaker, we remember a couple of years ago, the Gulf of Mexico oil, and that oil w going to solve our oil problem. That oil is represented by that yellow there. Not a whole lot, and it did not stop our slide down Hubbert's peak. The amount of oil that may be present in ANWR is predicted to be, who knows; it may be very little, it may be a whole lot, but the prediction is about half of what was in Prudhoe Bay. So you may agree or disagree that we should drill in ANWR, but it really does not matter because there is not enough oil in ANWR to really make a difference. The next curve we have shows a very simple curve, the problem that we face. If, in fact, we have reached peak oil, and I spoke here on the Floor a bit more than 5 weeks ago for an hour on this subject and we have had a lot of people come through our offices and a lot of phone calls and e-mails from all around the world, and I will tell my colleagues that there is nobody who does not believe that we are either at peak oil or will shortly be at peak oil. As this chart shows, you do not have to be at peak oil to have a problem. If peak oil occurs here, and we are here, you see that there is a bit of yellow between our use curve and by the way, this use curve is only a 2 percent growth. Now, we think that if our economy is not growing 2 percent, that the sky may fall, the stock market reacts very badly, and this is only a 2 percent growth curve. Look what happens with this 2 percent curve, with that yellow there, that is what we would like to use at only 2 percent growth, and the blue line there shows us the oil that will be available. Now, we cannot use oil that is not there. So that is going to be all the oil that we have available to use if, in fact, this is correct. Now, I would point out 2 things. One is that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. Using exactly the same prediction techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in about 2000. It did not quite, because he could not have known about the Arab oil embargo or the big price spike hikes or the world recession that resulted from that net delay that is probably occurring about now. But we have a problem of a shortfall before we actually get to peak, and that is probably where we are now. Let me just spend a moment on this chart, because I want to point out some realities here. This is the amount of oil that we would like to use, following up this just 2 percent slope. And the amount of oil we will have to use is represented by the blue curve here. But we cannot use all of that oil for the present purposes for which we use oil, because if we do, there will be no oil left over to make the investments we have to make in the alternatives and the renewables that ultimately must take the place of oil, because you see, we are shortly going to be sliding down Hubbert's peak. The next chart shows us the slopes of these peaks when you have more than a 2 percent growth. This is the 2 percent growth line, if you chart out with 2 percent growth and then extrapolate that as a straight line, but that is not what growth is. Growth is always exponential. It is like compounding interest, and people understand compound interest, and I am not sure why they do not understand exponential growth, but 2 percent growth follows this curve, it does not follow this straight line curve. The next curve above it is only 4 percent growth. I would note that last year, the world economies grew by 5 percent on average. Now, we did not do quite that well, but China did a whole lot better. China grew at 10 percent. I was kind of playing around with this chart and I think the 10 percent curve goes about here. Mr. Speaker, with a 10 percent growth curve, every 7 years, it doubles. That means in 14 years, it is 4 times bigger, and in 21 years, it is 8 times bigger. As a matter of fact, one of the biggest forces in this world is the force of exponential growth, and it is very difficult for a lot of people to understand. Albert Einstein was asked, Dr. Einstein, you have been instrumental in developing nuclear energy. It is really very powerful; from a little tiny bit of this, you get a great big explosion. What will be the next big energy source? And his response was the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest, which is an exponential growth curve. The next chart shows a reality here that we really need to pay attention to, and this was the reason, this was the reason for the letter that these gentlemen wrote. It was in the letter that they said, the United States' dependence on imported petroleum poses a risk to our homeland security and economic well-being. If we have only 2 percent of the known reserves, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import more than two-thirds of it, and as the President said himself, much of that oil, he said, we rely upon energy sources from countries that do not particularly like us. Yes, Mr. President, that is true. Most of the reserves of oil are in the Middle East, and many of those countries go a bit further than just do not particularly like us. What we have here on the easel is a view of the world which shows what China has been doing. China has been scouring the world, looking for oil. And all of the blue, here is where China has been: In the Orient, in the Middle East, several places in the Middle East, in our backyard. They have contracts in Canada, they have contracts in Colombia, they have contracts in Venezuela, they have contracts in Brazil, they have contracts in Argentina, and they almost bought an oil company in our country; they were just outbid a little. They will be back again trying to secure an oil company in our country. China now is the second largest importer in the world. Last year, they increased their demand for oil by 25 percent. Now, that will not go on year after year, because last year, they shut down a lot of coal-fired power plants because the pollution was killing them, so they bought a whole bunch of diesel generators; I suspect that the pollution might be almost as much from them, but they are more widely distributed, which is one of the reasons they used so much oil last year. The next chart shows us something very interesting about energy and the effect that it has had on civilization and on growth of economies. On this chart, and I am sorry that most of it is blank, but that is just the reality of what has happened through history. We started out the industrial revolution relying on wood, and here it is, the brown curve here. We were burning wood. As a matter of fact, the industrial revolution almost floundered before we discovered that we could get energy from coal, because we had largely denuded New England in sending the trees to England to produce charcoal to produce coal. There is a little relic of bygone years up by Thurmont, Maryland, and they denuded the hills of Thurmont, Maryland for a tiny foundry there in Catoctin, up near Thurmont, and then we discovered coal. And notice, there is a big jump. This is quadrillion Btus.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we cannot live in the land of the free without thanking the brave veterans who secure our liberty. It is my privilege to honor Colonel Orville Hughes from Monkton, Maryland, selected Veteran of the Year by the Joint Veterans' Committee of Maryland. Colonel Orville Hughes served our country for 27 years in the Army during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He was a POW in Germany, earned a Silver Star in Korea, and served as the military attache at the embassy in Vienna, Austria. He earned many other commendations, including the Legion of Merit and the Purple Heart. After his retirement from the Army, Colonel Orville Hughes continued to serve our country through the DAV, VFW, Military Order of the Purple Heart, American ex-POWs, and the American Legion. I hope that by honoring the contributions of Colonel Orville Hughes to the country we love, we will appreciate and be inspired by his great example of achievement and service to others.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, Congress typically writes laws with a broad application, but sometimes a special situation, such as this one, requires unusual legislative action. Life is sacred. Many across America have voiced support in an effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive. Nothing can diminish the importance of life. Terri Schiavo suffered a heart attack 15 years ago and experienced brain damage. While in the hospital, tubes were inserted in her digestive system to provide nutrition and hydration. Three years later, Terri was still talking when speech therapy was discontinued. Terri Schiavo is currently not terminally ill or in the process of dying. She is brain damaged, but she is otherwise healthy. Terri Schiavo is not on artificial life support. No extraordinary measures are being taken to keep her alive. Ms. Schiavo is a living person. She is awake and aware of her surroundings. Many are galvanized by her cause because like me, they recognize that the right to life is one of our core fundamental human values. The 14th Amendment states, ``No State shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.'' In this special circumstance, we were left with a last legal recourse to help save her life by providing her with the opportunity to have her case heard before a Federal court. There is clear precedent for Federal review of life and death cases. I strongly value the importance of States' rights. This case does not weaken my resolve to fight for States' rights. The State and Federal government should not take life, but by giving the Federal court an opportunity to hear the case, this allows one more opportunity for Terri Schiavo to live. Judge Greer of the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court stated, ``I see no cogent reason why the committee should be able to intervene into a case involving the decision of whether or not to remain on life support.'' He added, ``I don't think that legislative agencies or bodies have business in court proceedings.'' I respectfully disagree. The Constitution not only outlines a separation of powers but also a system of checks and balances. It is Congress's duty to hold the judicial branch accountable or to act itself within its powers when it believes it is necessary. The driving force behind many people's efforts on behalf of Ms. Schiavo was plainly to save her life. Yet there have emerged a number of difficult and complicated issues. I applaud the efforts of those who fight for Ms. Schiavo to live. These issues resonate with many as some of us contemplate how we would like to die. I, however, focus on how Congress can protect Ms. Schiavo's life because that is of paramount importance.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, in this first chart we have some headlines from The Washington Post just a month or so ago. These are headlines from just one day in The Washington Post. The Dow drops 174 points driven, the article says, by economic damage from rising oil prices, the plunging dollar, and growing worries about consumer spending. It goes on to say that a recent oil price rise of 20 percent is continuing to crunch the profits of struggling airlines and is believed to be a factor in disappointing retail sales. Another headline: ``Dollar Slides Against the Euro and the Yen.'' And another headline: ``Consumer Confidence Slips in February.'' Now, should we have had any indication that these were going to be the kinds of headlines that we have been reading in our paper recently? We need to go back a few years, as indicated on this next chart. Let us go back to the 1940s and the 1950s when a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, a geologist, was working for the Shell Oil Company. He was watching the discovery and the exploitation and final exhaustion of individual oil fields. He noticed that every oil field followed a very typical pattern. It was a little slow getting the oil out at first, and then it came very quickly and reached a maximum, and then it tailed off as it became more difficult to get the oil out of the ground. This followed a bell curve. Here is one of those bell curves. Now, bell curves are very familiar in science, and in life, for that matter. If we look at people and how tall they are, we will have a few people down around 4\1/2\ or 5 feet and some up to 7\1/2\ feet; but the big mass fall in the middle, clustered around 5\1/2\ to 6 feet. Looking at a yield of corn, a few farmers may get 50 bushels per acre, some may get 300, but the big mass today it is somewhere around 200 bushels per acre for corn. Hubbert noticed when the bell curve reached its peak, about half of the oil had been exhausted from the field. Being a scientist, he theorized if you added up a lot of little bell curves, you would get one big bell curve, and if he could know the amount of reserves of oil in the United States, and he was doing this in the 1940s and early 1950s, and could project how much more might be found, he could then predict when the United States would peak in its oil production. Doing this analysis, he concluded that we would peak in our oil production in 1970. This curve is what is known as Hubbert's Curve. The peak of the curve is what is known as Hubbert's Peak. Sometimes this is called the ``great rollover'' because when you get to the top, you roll over and start down the other side. It is frequently called ``peak oil.'' So peak oil for the United States occurred in 1970, and it is true that every year since then we have pumped less oil and found less oil. The big blue squares here are the actual and Members see they deviated a little from the theoretical as M. King Hubbert predicted, but not all that much. At the bottom, see the difference the big field in Alaska made, and see what that made in the down slope, that never increased production in our country. It just meant that we were not going down quite as fast. You can see that here on the curve. Notice that the Alaska oil production was not the typical bell curve. It should have been, but a couple of things meant it could not be. One was it could not flow at all until we had a 4-foot pipeline. So the fields were developed and they were waiting; then we got the pipeline on board, and it was filled with oil and oil started to flow, and Members see the rapid increase here. It could not flow any faster than through that 4-foot pipe, and so it levels off at the top. We have pumped probably three-fourths of the oil in Prudhoe Bay. Many people would like to open up ANWR. ANWR has considerably less oil than Prudhoe Bay, so the contribution will be significantly less. I want to note on this chart we also have the red curve, which is the theoretical curve for the former Soviet Union. It is a nice bell curve, peaking a little higher, they have more reserves than we do, and later because we entered the industrial age with vigor before the Soviet Union was quite there. Notice what happened when they came apart; notice how precipitously it fell here. After they got things organized, the fall stopped and now they are producing more oil. As a matter of fact, we might see a little upsurge in this; but the general trend is still going to be down. On the next chart, and we have here the same Hubbert Curve, but the abscissa is a little too long and the ordinate a little too compressed, so it is not the sharp peak that we saw before. That is the curve we saw before. It shows the Texas component, and it shows the rest of the United States; and it also shows some natural gas liquids. We learned how to extract those a little later. So if you were plotting that as a bell curve, it would peak about here. It is little and then it is much, and then it tails off. This is the contribution of Alaska, and you can see this not going to be our salvation to pump ANWR because ANWR contains probably not even half as much as Prudhoe Bay. And notice the small contribution that Alaska made. And that is not a bell curve for the reason I mentioned before because we had to develop the fields and they waited for the pipeline, and then it would surge through the pipeline when it was developed. So you do not see the tail getting greater and tailing off. This is gulf oil. Remember the hullabaloo about the big finds of gulf oil that were going to solve our problem? That is what it did. There never was a moment in time between the big Alaska oil find and all of the pumping discovery and pumping in the gulf, there never was a moment in time when it decreased the fall in our country. The peak occurred, as you see here, about 1970. Now, the next chart shows what is happening worldwide. The red curve here shows the actual discovery of oil. Notice that that peaked. There was a big find here that distorted the curve a little but if you rounded that off, you would have the typical bell curve. It started somewhere back here off the chart, then it peaks, and then it is downhill and it tails off. These are the discoveries. The last find there is simply an extrapolation. We have no idea where it is going. We are, by the way, very good at finding oil now. We use 3D seismic detection techniques. The world has drilled, I think, about 5 million oil wells and I think we have drilled about 3 million of them in this country, so we have a pretty good idea of where oil is. A couple of Congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science. One of the first things I wanted to do was to determine the dimensions of the problem. We held a couple of hearings and had the world experts in. Surprisingly from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic, there was not much deviation in what the estimate is as to what the known reserves are out there. It is about 1,000 gigabarrels. That sounds like an awful lot of oil. But when you divide into that the amount of oil which we use, about 20 million barrels a day, and the amount of oil the rest of the world uses, about 60 million barrels a day, as a matter of fact, the total now is a bit over the 80 million that those two add up to. About 83\1/2\, I think. If you divide that into the 1,000 gigabarrels, you come out at about 40 years of oil remaining in the world. That is pretty good. Because up until the Carter years, during the Carter years, in every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Let me repeat that, because that is startling. In every decade, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. The reason for that, of course, was that we were on the upward side of this bell curve. The bell curve for usage, only part of it is shown on this chart. That is the green one down here, the bell curve for usage. Notice that we are out here now about 2005. Where is it going? The Energy Information Agency says that we are going to keep on using more oil. This green line just going up and up and up is a projection of the Energy Information Agency. But that cannot be true. That cannot be true for a couple of reasons. We peaked in our discovery of oil way back here in the late sixties, about 1970. In our country it peaked much earlier than that, by the way. But the world is following several years behind us. And the area under this red curve must be the same as the area under the green curve. You cannot pump any more oil than you have found, quite obviously. If you have not found it, you cannot pump it. If you were to extend this on out where they have extended their green line, even if it turned down right there at the end of that green line, the area under the green curve is going to be very much larger than the area under the red curve. That just cannot be. We will see in some subsequent charts that we probably have reached peak oil. Let me mention that M. King Hubbert looked at the world situation. He was joined by another scientist, Colin Campbell, who is still alive, an American citizen who lives in Scotland. Using M. King Hubbert's predictive techniques, oil was predicted to reach a maximum in about 1995, without perturbations. But there were some perturbations. One of the perturbations was 1973, the Arab oil embargo. Other perturbations were the oil price shocks and a worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil. And so the peak that might have occurred in 1995 will occur later. How much later? That is what we are looking at this evening. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that if not now, then very quickly we should see world production of oil peak. What are the consequences? What are the consequences of this depletion? The remaining oil is harder to get. It requires greater energy investment, resulting in a lower return on energy invested. That is the energy-profit ratio, which is decreasing. When we started out, you put in one unit of energy and you could get 30 out. Then that fell off, and then we found a few more fields and we got really good at extracting oil with better techniques. It looked for a little while like it was going up, but look what happened. It falls off to where it would have come anyhow if this curve had simply gone down. This is an inevitable consequence of pumping a field. Lower profits are not the only concern. When more energy is required to extract it than is contained in the recovered oil, that is, when this ratio is less than 1, notice, we are over there at about 1984, we have got to get now another 20 years, I am not quite sure where we are now when you plot that day. We are getting very close to the unit it takes as much energy to get the oil out as you get out of the oil. It may still seem profitable from a monetary perspective, but when you are using more energy to get oil out of the ground than you are getting out of the oil, then clearly you need to leave it there when we reach that point. I mentioned the bump there was caused by a few more discoveries and particularly by increased efficiency in pumping the oil. What is the current U.S. status? We have only 2 percent, between 2 and 3 percent, not really known for certain, but approximately 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. By the way, we have about 8 percent of the world production. What that means is if we have only 2 percent of the reserves and 8 percent of the production, that means we are real good at pumping oil, does it not? That means we are pumping our reserves at roughly four times faster than the rest of the world. That means that this 2 percent will not stay 2 percent by and by because we are so good at pumping oil, we are going to be down to 1 percent of the known reserves in the world and we will still be using about 25 percent of the world's oil. We are now importing about two-thirds of that. At the Arab oil embargo we imported about one-third of that. So we are now importing, relatively, two times more oil, actual quantity much more than that, but relatively about two times more oil. Chart 6 shows us that more drilling just will not solve the problem. This is a very interesting chart. This shows the difference between the amount of oil that you are finding and the amount of oil that you are pumping. Notice from 1960 on until about 1980, declining for sure, but every year except for one we found more oil than we pumped. The yellow line up here is drilling. You remember the Reagan administration and all the emphasis on drilling because we knew that we were approaching this flipover point where we were going to be pumping more oil than we found and so there was a rationale that if you just give them a profit motive and you have the right incentives, tax and regulatory incentives and so forth, they will go out and they will dig more wells and they will find more oil. Sure as heck they went out and dug more wells. But did they find any more oil? As a matter of fact, in 1982, more oil was used in looking for oil than the oil they found in 1982. Pretty consistently for every year after 1982, we have used more oil than we found. Today worldwide we are pumping at least six barrels of oil for every barrel that we find. Chart 7 shows that worldwide discoveries are repeating the U.S. pattern. This is a rough bell curve. You find a big find of oil and it is going to make a spike. This is average for 5 years. If you look at it on a year for year, it is really up and down as you find big reservoirs of oil. But generally it starts low and it goes up and it comes down. It follows roughly a bell curve. I would not pay too much attention to the figures on the ordinate here, because the area under this curve must equal just a little bit over 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. If I visually sum the area under this curve, it is going to equal something more, not frightfully more but something more than 2,000 gigabarrels of oil which from other sources we know ought to be the total amount of oil under the sun. Notice that we are tailing off to something very low. It is unlikely that we are going to find big additional finds in the future. Again, we are very good at that. We have dug about 5 million wells worldwide. We have done a whole lot more than that explorations with detonations and seismic and 3D and computers and we are very good at looking at the kind of geology where you might find oil. There is just no real expectation that there are going to be big additional fields of oil found out there. This dropoff in discovery is really in spite of very improved technology for finding oil. Chart 8. This is a very interesting chart. It has nothing to do with time, because on the abscissa here, we have the number of wells that are drilled, the cumulative oil caps, and on the ordinate, we have the amount of oil that was found. For any relatively big field, here we are talking about 50 gigabarrels. Remember, there are about 2,000 gigabarrels worldwide, so this is a meaningful part of the world reserves of oil. We see that that goes up and up and then it tails off. You cannot find what is not there. No matter how many more wells you drill, you are not going to find oil that is not there. The same pattern should be apparent on a world scale. Chart 9. This is a very interesting chart. It is a little too busy, but let me try to explain what is there. The oil companies for reasons of pricing and regulations and so forth have had the habit through the years of underreporting initially how much oil they found. Then later when it was appropriate to their license to produce more oil, they would report additional oil. They never found any additional oil, they simply reported oil they had found previously. By the way, you may have noted that three times in the last roughly 3 weeks, oil companies have admitted that their estimates of the reserves were exaggerated and have downscaled the reserves that they said were there. If you took the original reporting of the reserves, you might be able to construct a curve, a straight line curve which said we are just getting more and more. But if you backdated that to the actual discoveries, then you get this curve. This curve is asymtoting at a bit over 2,000 gigabarrels, which is about what the world's experts say had been there. We have now pumped about half of that. We have about 1,000 gigabarrels remaining. What now? Where do we go now? One observer, Matt Savinar, who has thoroughly researched the options, and this is not the most optimistic assessment, by the way, but may be somewhat realistic, he starts out by saying, Dear Readers, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. I hope not. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is a scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as global peak oil. Why should they be terrified? Why should they be terrified just because we have reached the peak of oil production? Last year, China used about 30 percent more oil. India now is demanding more oil. As a matter of fact, China now is the second largest importer of oil in the world. They have passed Japan. When you look at how important oil is to our economy, you can understand the big concern if, in fact, we cannot produce oil any faster than we are producing it now and there are increasing demands, as there will be, for oil. In our country, for instance, we have a debt that we must service. It will be essentially impossible to service that debt if our economy does not continue to grow. So there are enormous potential consequences, which is why he says that these people are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as peak oil. What can we do to avert the kind of a catastrophe that he hints at with those words? We must not squander an opportunity. One is always reminded of Malthus. I am sure you have heard of him. He was looking at the increase in world population and he looked at our ability to produce food and he says, gosh, those two curves are going to cross because the world population was increasing faster than our ability to produce food and we are going to have mass starvation. That did not happen. The reason that did not happen was because Malthus could not have anticipated the green revolution, which, by the way, was made possible almost entirely, well, the plant science had a lot to do with it but better plants and better genes without the fertilizer to make them grow is not going to do you much good, so the green revolution was very largely the result of our intensive use of oil. Most people do not know it, but all of our nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. You may have observed that when you have a thunderstorm in the summertime, your lawn is greener than when you have watered it. That is because of what is known as poor man's fertilizer. The lightning combines some of the nitrogen so they can be carried down by the water and one's lawn is, in fact, greener after a thunderstorm than it is when they water it. We have kind of learned how to mimic lightning, and we now know how to make nitrogen fertilizer from gas. By the way, before we knew how to do that, the only sources of nitrogen fertilizer were barnyard manurers. If one is on the Eastern Shore with a lot of chickens, one could go a long way with that now in agriculture, could one not? But barnyard manurers would fertilize only a tiny percentage of the nitrogen needs of our plants. And other than that it was guano. My colleagues know what guano is. Guano is the droppings of bats or of birds on a tropical island, their droppings accumulating for thousands of years, and there was a major industry in sending ships around the world to tropical islands and getting the guano. We must not squander the opportunity that we have. Jevons Paradox becomes applicable here. Just a word about what Jevons Paradox is because I am going to mention it a time or two again. But Jevons Paradox says that frequently when one works to solve a problem, they really make the situation worse. Let me give one little example. Suppose there is a small businessman who owns a store. He is really concerned about peak oil, and he is concerned about energy, and he wants to do something. His little store is using $1,000 worth of electricity a month, and he decides that he can really cut that use. So he does several things. He gets a storm door. He puts on storm windows. He insulates more. He turns down the thermostat, and he asks his workers to wear sweaters. And he is successful because he reduces his electric bill from $1,000 to $500. Almost no matter what he does with that $500, he has just made the situation worse by doing that. Let me explain. One of the things that he may do, and it is a natural thing for a small businessperson to do, he may decide, I could hire more people and have a bigger business if I expanded. And so now he will expand, and he will still be using as much energy. Or if he decides to invest his money, if he invests his money in the bank, the bank will lend his money out five or six times, and at least some of those loans will be to small business people. And what the small business people will do is to create jobs and use energy. So the store owner is concerned about energy and the environment and being a responsible citizen, cutting his use of electricity, because everybody did not do it, because only he did it and nobody took advantage of the opportunity that was presented because he used less energy, he really contributed to the problem. Because after he expanded his business, he would be using still more energy. Or if the money was lent out by the bank and small businesses created more jobs and they used more energy, the situation would have just gotten worse. All that the ``green revolution'' did was temporarily extend the caring capacity of the world. If we think about that, ultimately if we cannot do something about it to stabilize it, the green revolution just made matters worse. In the meantime we have all eaten very well in spite of the fact that about a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry tonight; but on the average, we are eating very well, and because of the average American, we are eating maybe too well. But what we have done with the green revolution is to permit the population of the world to double and double again. So if we cannot now make sure that we stabilize population and bring it to the point where it can be supported by a technology where there is not what was ordinarily perceived as an inexhaustible supply of oil, there will simply be more people out there to be hungry and starved if we cannot meet their needs. So we have got to make sure that whatever we do to solve this problem that Jevons Paradox does not contribute. Chart 10, this shows that this growth cannot be sustained forever. The greatest power in the universe, Albert Einstein was asked this question: Dr. Einstein, you have now discovered the ability to release energy from the atom. We get just incredible amounts of energy from the atom. A relatively small amount of fuel in one of our big submarines will fuel it for 33 years now. Enormous energy density. And they asked him, Dr. Einstein, what is the most energy-intensive thing in the world? He said, ``It is compound interest.'' That is what we have here in this exponential curve. And by the way, we, and when I say ``we,'' I mean the world, have been using oil as if our economy could just continue to grow on this unlimited exponential curve. Whether it is 2 percent a year or 5 percent a year or near 10 percent, which is what China has been growing in the last few years, we are still on an exponential curve. Not quite so steep if we are on a lower growth rate. It goes up and up forever and ever. Obviously, there is not an inexhaustible amount of oil in the world; so we have the exhaustible resource, which is this lower curve. It reaches a peak, which, if not now, shortly. Oil, as the Members may have noticed, is $54 or $55 a barrel. I saw the other day one future had sold for $100 a barrel, and the experts are saying we are probably going to see $60 before we see $50. We will wait and see. The third curve here is the renewable resource curve. Do not be confused by the size of these curves. They are simply placed here so that lines would not cross other lines. But in actual practice, the renewable resource curve is likely to be nowhere near the peak of the exhaustible resource curve, energy. Let me give a little example of what the problem is and why this is almost certainly true. One barrel of oil, 42 gallons of oil, equals the productivity of 25,000 manhours. That is the equivalent of having 60 dedicated servants that do nothing but work for someone. We can get a little better real-life example of this. A gallon of gas will drive a 3-ton SUV, and some of those are better than others, and let us say it takes it 20 minutes, which some will but most will not. Most are around 10. But let us say one gallon of gas will take a 3-ton SUV 20 miles at 60 miles an hour down the road. That is just one little gallon of gas, which, by the way, is still cheaper than water. We pay more for water in the grocery store than we pay for gas at $2 a gallon at the pump, added up. How long would it take one to push their 3-ton SUV the equivalent of 60 miles an hour, 20 miles down the road? To get some idea of the energy density in these fossil fuels, there is just nothing out there in the alternatives that have anything like this energy density. There are some potentials, nuclear, and we will talk about those in a little bit. But of the general renewables, there is nothing out there with that kind of density. So this curve is likely to be much lower than this curve; and notice that if it is, in fact, going to be renewable, it cannot go to an unrealistic height. There is only so much wood to cut. Easter Island had that experience. When they cut the last tree, they totally changed the ecology. The Bible talks about the large clusters of grapes and the honey and so forth that they found when the spies went out. That now is a desert. The Cedars of Lebanon, the grand Cedars of Lebanon that built the temple, that is now largely a desert. Why is it a desert? Because they cut the trees, they changed the environment, they changed the climate. So obviously this line has to be a reasonable sustainable level. It just cannot go on forever. The challenge, then, is to reduce consumption ultimately to a level that cannot be sustained indefinitely without succumbing to Jevons Paradox. How do we buy time, the time that we will need to make the transition to sustainability? Obviously, there are only two things that we can do to buy time. One is to conserve, and the other is to be more efficient. And the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) mentioned our increasing efficiency. We have done a great job. Our refrigerators today are probably twice as efficient as they were 20 or 30 years ago. But instead of a little refrigerator, we have a big one. Instead of one, we may have two. So I will bet we are using as much electricity in our refrigeration as we ever used. Conservation, we can do that. Remember several years ago when there were brownouts, blackouts in California and we were predicting, boy, the next year is really going to be rough? Do the Members know why it was not and we did not see any headlines about blackouts in California? Because knowing that there was a problem, the Californians, without anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their electricity consumption by 11 percent. That is pretty significant. And that avoided the rolling blackouts or brownouts. And, finally, we must commit to major investments in alternatives, especially as efficiencies improve. This must ultimately lead to the ability to do everything within the capability of renewable resources. If we have got a solar breeder, and this shows a picture of a solar breeder. That, by the way, is about 5 miles from my home. It was built by Solarex, and it is a sign of the times. Mr. Speaker, this is now owned by BP. They know that oil is not forever. They are now the world's second largest producer of solar panels. A few years ago, the largest buyer of solar panels in the world, and I do not know if that is true today, but a few years ago it was Saudi Arabia. Why would Saudi Arabia, with the most oil in the world, be the biggest purchaser of solar panels in the world? The reasons are very simple. These are not dumb people, and they figured out that solar panels were better for them in producing electricity than oil because they had widely distributed communities that were very small. Electrons in a wire are very different than oil in a pipeline. Put a gallon of oil in a pipeline up at Prudhoe Bay, and a gallon will come out where it goes on the ship. If we put electrons in a line which is long enough, nothing will come out in the other end. It is called line loss. And they knew that in their small communities, widely distributed, with the enormous line losses they had from big plants, that they would be better off with distributed production. By the way, just a hint to our people who are concerned with homeland security, the more distributed production we have, the less vulnerable we are going to be to terrorist attacks on our power infrastructure. Transition to sustainability will not happen if left applying market forces alone. Everyone must be part of the effort or Jevons Paradox will prevail. If only our country tries to do it and nobody else helps, we will just put off the day when we must make the transition, and it will be even more difficult. The market will, indeed, signal the arrival of peak oil. To wait until it does, however, is like waiting until we see a tsunami: by then it may be too late to do anything. We now are doing a lot of talking here in the Congress and fortunately across the country about Social Security, and it is a big problem. But I tell the Members if the problem of Social Security is equivalent to the tidal wave produced by the hurricane, then this peak oil problem is equivalent to the tsunami. The impact and the consequences are going to be enormously greater than the impact and the consequences of Social Security or Medicare or those two put together. It will take a sustained, conscious, coordinated national and even international, effort. If everybody is not working together and buying time by conserving and being efficient and using wisely that time we bought, then all we do is put off the inevitable. The hydroelectric and nuclear power industries did not arise spontaneously from market forces alone. They were the product of a purposeful partnership of public and private entities focused on the public good. This is what we have to do relative to alternatives. As I mentioned, California solved their energy crisis by voluntarily reducing their demand for electricity. Time, capital and energy resources are all finite. We have only so much time until it would be too late to avoid a real problem. Capital is limited and energy resources are certainly limited. This time it will not be like the seventies. The big difference between now and the seventies is that in the seventies, we were just going up this curve, we were nowhere near the top of the curve, so there was always the ability to expand, to surge. If, in fact, we are now at peak oil, there is no such ability remaining. Is there any reason to remain optimistic or hopeful? Let me go back to Matt Savinar, that not-too-optimistic journalist. ``If what you mean is there any way technology or the market or brilliant scientists or comprehensive government programs are going to hold things together or solve this for me or allow for business to continue as usual, the answer is no. On the other hand, if what you really mean is is there any way that I still can have a happy, fulfilling life, in spite of some clearly grim facts, the answer is yes. But it is going to require a lot of work, a lot of adjustments, and probably a bit of good fortune on your part.'' What now? Well, what we need to do now clearly is to buy time, and we buy that, as I mentioned, with efficiency and conservation. This will keep energy prices affordable. If demand continues to increase and output cannot increase, energy prices are going through the ceiling. So we have got to reduce demand so that prices do not get so high that it is impossible to invest the capital necessary to develop the alternatives, using existing conventional technologies to make the transition as new technologies are developed. We must use it wisely. If we do not use it wisely, and I have talked about Jevons Paradox several times, we have got to make investments in efficient, sustainable technologies, further reduce requirements for energy in any form, making smaller systems feasible which reduce both initial and operating costs. The benefits are enormous. Additional benefits include business opportunities, lots of business opportunities we do not even dream of. Look at the business opportunities created by putting a man on the moon. I have 200-some companies in Maryland alone which are there only because of technology breakthroughs in putting a man on the moon. That same thing could happen if we had a Manhattan type project focusing on renewables, potential worldwide markets, if we are the leader, and we have every reason to be the leader because we have the biggest problem. We can develop worldwide markets, domestic job creation and environmentally benign technologies with potential to reduce and or eliminate pollution. We could be a real role model. We are, as I mentioned, less than 5 percent of the world's population, and we use 25 percent of the world's energy. I was in Europe a month or so ago, and their comment was somewhere between anger and disdain. ``You are still only paying $2 a gallon for gasoline in your country.'' It is $5.50 or $6.00 a gallon there. And they are not unmindful that this one person in 22 in the world is using 25 percent of the world's energy. We have a real opportunity to be a role model. Let me put up the last chart. This is potential alternative solutions. For what time we have remaining, let me ask my colleague, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) to join us as we talk about this. I have only have some of the potential solutions here. I just want to go down this list and look at these. There may be some others. The gentleman mentioned hydrogen from the ocean. That is certainly one. There are some finite resources here, ones we have not maximally exploited here, and some renewable resources here, and we want to spend another whole hour talking about this, because there are a lot of things to talk about in these resources. But almost none of these have the density of energy that we find in fossil fuels. There are tar sands in Canada, there is oil shale in this country, but it takes an awful lot of energy to get energy out of those. You may not have much more than a one-and-a-half to one. I have heard it takes six barrels of oil to get one net barrel of oil out of these tar sands and oil shale. There is an awful lot there, but there are considerable environmental costs and enormous economic costs to develop it.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, of course the real challenge is to have everybody agree on what the facts are. I suspect a big percentage of the people that might read or listen to what we say this evening had not even heard of peak oil.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, but now we must do it on a global basis, because of Jevons Paradox, if all the world does not cooperate, we will not get there. Had we paid attention to M. King Hubbert and not relegated him to the lunatic fringe, and he was right as evidence indicates on his prediction from 1970, had we paid attention to him we would have had at least 20 years headstart, and then we could have done it alone in this country because we are so big and use so much of the world's energy. Before we leave coal, we are going to come back to this and spend another hour with a lot of detail on this, but someone said there are 500 years of coal, that is not true there is maybe 250, at present use rates. But as oil becomes harder and harder to find, we are going to turn more and more to coal, and that 70 years with enormous environmental penalty will shortly become a relatively few years. That is not forever. But we will be leaning on coal more than in the past nuclear. Three ways we can get nuclear energy. For one of them we are home free, and that is fusion. We send a little less than $300 million a year on that. I would like to spend more if there was the infrastructure out there to support it, because if we get there, we are home free. But I kind of think that hoping to solve our energy problems with fusion is a bit like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial problems by winning the lottery. That would be real nice. I think the odds are somewhere near the same. I am about as likely to win the lottery as we are to come to economically feasible fusion. I hope I am wrong. Frequently my hopes and my anticipations are different. My anticipation is we are not going to get there because of the enormous engineering challenges. My hope is I am wrong and we are going to get there. Two other ways to get energy from nuclear. One is the light water reactor, which is all we have in this country. By the way, tonight when you go home, every fifth home and every fifth business would be dark if we did not have nuclear. It produces 20 percent of all of our electricity. But there is not all that much fissionable uranium in the world, so we are not going to get there with light water reactors. France produces about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They have a lot of breeder reactors. They do what the name implies, they make more fuel than they use, with big problems, in enrichment, shipping it around, squirreling away the products for a quarter of a million years. That presents enormous challenges to us. So there is the potential here in nuclear, but a lot of problems involved with it. It is not just that simple. By the way, it takes a lot of oil to build a nuclear power plant. At some point, you pass the point of no return where there is not enough readily available high-quality fossil fuels to support our present economy while we make the investment we have got to make to transition to these renewables. And then we come to true renewables: solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy. All of these suffer. By the way, I am a big supporter of these. I had the first hybrid electric car in Maryland. I had the first one in the Congress. I have a vacation home that is off the grid and totally powered by solar. And I am going to put in a wind machine. I am a big supporter of this. But the energy density here is very low. And it is intermittent. It takes a lot of solar panels to produce the electricity that you use in your home. It takes 12 of them to power your ordinary refrigerator just as an example. So those are real potential, and they are growing. Wind machines now produce electricity at 3\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. That is getting competitive. A whole lot of them in California. They are in West Virginia. We are putting some up on Backbone Mountain in western Maryland. Boy, if we could get down there to geothermal we would have it, would we not? There is not a single chimney in Iceland because they do not need them. They have got geothermal. They have a little bit of it in the West. But for most of the world that molten core is far too deep for us to tap.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Is this tying the school to the molten core, or is it simply using a heat pump and exchanging, not with the air? What you are trying to do in the winter-time is cool the air and what you are trying to do in the summer time is heat the air.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. It is indeed. But you still have to have energy to use that. You are much more efficient using a heat pump that is tied to the ground, to groundwater than it is to the cold air in the winter and the hot air in the summer. If you are thinking about what you are trying to do is to cool the cold air in the winter time and to heat the hot air in the summertime. And obviously ground water is very much better in both seasons than either the air in the winter or the cold, the hot air in the summer or the cold air in the winter. Ocean energy. You know, it takes an enormous amount of energy to lift the ocean 2 feet. That is roughly what the Moon does in the tides, is it not? But the problem with that is energy density. There is an old adage that says what is everybody's business is nobody's business. And the corollary to that in energy is if it is too widely distributed, you probably cannot make much of it. And we have really tried to harness the tides. In some fjords in Norway where they have 60-foot tides you put a bar there, when it runs in you trap it and then you run it out through a turbine. When it is running out, you can get some energy from it. And there is potential there, a lot of potential energy. But you know it is very dispersed. We have a hard time capturing that energy. I suspect that our hour is about up, and this is maybe a good place to end. We are going to come back and spend another hour looking at agriculture, enormous opportunities from agriculture. But let me remind the gentleman that we are just barely able to feed the world now. And if we start taking all of this biomass off the field, what is going to happen to the tilth of our soil, to the organic matter in our soil, which is essential to the availability of nutrients in the soil by the plant. So there are lots of challenges here. There are lots of opportunities here. And we will spend another hour talking about them. Thank you very much. And I yield back, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, the Supreme Court cases, Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU seek to remove the Ten Commandments from government property. These cases represent a concerted effort to ignore the central role and contributions of religion in American history and culture. In 1854, Congress studied the assertions that America is a Christian Nation. They concluded, ``The Founding Fathers had no fear or jealousy of religion itself nor did they wish to see us an irreligious Nation.'' The Ten Commandments are a historical and cultural embodiment of America's commitment to a government based upon the rule of law. The Ten Commandments reflect our Nation's Judeo-Christian history and our Founders' deep religious faith. That is why the Ten Commandments should continue to be displayed inside courtrooms throughout our country, including the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, today, I am reintroducing ``Holly's Law''--a bill that would suspend FDA approval of the drug RU- 486. This bill has been introduced with 48 cosponsors. Senator Jim DeMint has reintroduced Holly's Law in the Senate. Holly's Law is named in memory of Holly Patterson, an I8-year-old Californian who died after taking the drug in 2003. When I tell people that the FDA approved a drug to treat a life-threatening illness that has killed three pregnant women and seriously injured dozens of other pregnant women in the United States, they're shocked. They want to know why the FDA and Congress would allow a drug that kills and injures young women to stay on the market. RU-486 is a drug that always kills babies and sometimes kills and seriously injures healthy young women. I urge my colleagues to support Holly's Law to take the dangerous and unsafe drug RU-486 off the market.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, on December 17, 2004, the People's Republic of China announced its intention to include a new ``anti-secession law'' in its legislative agenda for the upcoming March session. This bill is expected to set up a legal framework for the incorporation of Taiwan. According to press reports, this law will also oblige the Chinese military to invade Taiwan immediately if there is a future Taiwanese ``declaration of independence.'' There are many potential roads to a resolution of the well-entrenched differences between Beijing and Taipei. China's choice here could result in regional violence, instability and undermine democracy. This law will likely erode any goodwill that has arisen across the Straits over the years. It is in the interest of the region and the United States to see that the negotiations between China and Taiwan be resolved peaceably. The Bush Administration has said that its policy is to inspire and encourage the growth of democracy. This law, which may compel military force against Taiwan, should signal concern by the Administration. China should not seek to impose its communist government upon the 23 million Taiwanese people. The Taiwan Relations Act states ``that the issues between Beijing and Taiwan be resolved peacefully and with the assent of the people of Taiwan.'' China's anti-secession law signals a change in the status quo and is a roadblock on the path to peace.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall vote No. 31, I had thought that I had voted and that the machine had accepted my vote. Apparently, it did not; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the Congressional Record show that had my vote been accepted, I would have voted ``yes'' on rollcall No. 31.