Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT

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

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, as the representative of the Sixth District of Maryland and a proud graduate of the University of Maryland, I commend your attention to the University of Maryland's recently retired mens' basketball coach, Gary Williams. Gary Williams started for three years and was team captain of the Terps during his senior year at the University of Maryland before he graduated in 1968. As a graduate student in 1969, he began his coaching career at the University of Maryland. After great success as a coach at other colleges, Gary Williams leaped at the chance to be the Terp's head coach in 1989 though the team was battered by setbacks. Fighting back tears at his first news conference, Gary explained, ``I never thought I'd have the opportunity to come back and coach at Maryland because . . . you very rarely get the opportunity to do that.'' Only one other coach in history engineered a greater win-loss turnaround during his first year than Gary Williams at UMD. Gary is one of only seven college basketball coaches since 1980 to guide his alma mater to the Final Four and the first since 1974 to lead his alma mater to a national title--which he did in 2002. Gary Williams also led his teams to seven victories over top-ranked opponents--more than any other coach in history. Though retired as a coach, Gary Williams is continuing to work at the University of Maryland. Gary Williams, thank you. Your loyalty to our beloved University of Maryland, your integrity, and your example of dedication to the pursuit of excellence on and off the basketball court sets an example that all Americans can be proud of and should emulate.

Mr. BARTLETT

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

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Oil is about $100 a barrel. We're in a recession. The United States, just a couple of years ago, used 22 million barrels of oil a day. Now we're using less than 19 million barrels of oil a day, and still oil is $100 a barrel in the middle of a recession. We are also producing more oil in our country than we did last year for the first time since 1970. The production of oil has increased this last year. Every year before that, the production of oil was lower than it was the preceding year. Now, with Bakken oil, we're producing a bit more than we did last year. So why, with increased oil production and decreased oil use in the middle of a recession, should oil still be $100 a barrel? This is really hurting our economy. It increases the cost of just about everything we use because, if you've got it, a truck probably brought it, and the increased fuel cost increases the cost of just about everything, therefore, that we have. I believe the most important speech given in the last century was given in 1956 on the 8th day of March in San Antonio, Texas, by an oil geologist known as M. King Hubbard. We need to put his speech in context. At that time, the United States was king of oil. We produced more oil. We used more oil. We exported more oil than any other country in the world. On this 8th day of March in 1956, M. King Hubbard made an astounding prediction. He said that in just 14 years, the United States would reach its maximum oil production. He wasn't sure what that number would be. But he made the prediction that we would reach our maximum production in 1970, just 14 years later, and no matter what we did, it would continue to go down after that. And from 1970 until about a year or so ago, that was true. Here I have a chart that shows what has happened to oil production in our country. A whole lot of it comes from Texas, as you can see from the lower dark blue below, and the rest of the United States is the lighter blue above. The kind of orange here is natural gas liquids. That's not in your gas tanks. That's propane and butane and chemicals like that. M. King Hubbard made his predictions using only the contiguous 48. He didn't include Alaska, and he didn't include the Gulf of Mexico in his predictions. He made that prediction in 1956, about here. In 1970, as you can see here, we reached our maximum production in the lower 48, and it went down pretty consistently after that. Then we found oil in Alaska, a lot of it. And there was a little blip on the way down when you add that to the oil to the rest of the United States and Texas. And then a little later were the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And you can see what that did--you can hardly see the blip there. A lot of oil, but we use a lot of oil. The world uses 1 billion barrels of oil every 12 days. It's pretty simple arithmetic: 84 million barrels a day by about 12; that's 1,000 million, which is 1 billion barrels of oil every 12 days. Oh, by the way, the M. King Hubbard that predicted that the United States was going to peak in 1970--of course he became a legend in his own time because he lived well beyond that, and he was exactly right. Relegated to the lunatic fringe for maybe 15 years or so, he became a celebrity after his predictions came true. And he predicted that what happened to the United States had to happen to the world. Oil is finite. One day, it will run out. One day, we will reach our maximum production, after which it will tail off in the world, just as it did in the United States. Now if you think that, collectively, the world is brighter and cleverer, and so forth, than the United States, then you might think that that won't happen. I think that we are the most creative, innovative society in the world. And if we couldn't turn it around, I think it's unlikely the world is going to turn it around. Well, here is a chart from just a few years ago: Peak oil, this is a plateau. The maximum production is called peak oil. And the question was asked, Are we there yet? Because you see, these curves have flattened out. These are from the two entities that do the best job of cataloging the production and use of oil, the EIA and the IEA. It's the same three letters of the alphabet turned a bit. One is a creature of the OECD, and the other is a part of our Department of Energy. They both, as you see, had a plateau here. And look what happened to the price of oil. Now this was a little bit before it peaked at $147 a barrel and the economy collapsed, along with the housing market. That was kind of a double whammy, with both the housing market and the price of oil at $147 a barrel. When the economy came tumbling down, oil dropped to something under $40 a barrel, and it has steadily climbed since then up to now around $100 a barrel, where it has been for several months now. Are we there yet? Well, just recently we've had two charts produced by one of those entities, the IEA, the International Energy Agency. This is called the World Energy Outlook. The chart on top here is from 2008, and the one on the bottom is from 2010. Now if you look at their Web site, you're going to have trouble finding the chart from 2008. They have purged their Web site of that chart. And in a few moments, you will understand why they purged it. Let's look at that chart. This dark blue is conventional oil. That's what we looked at before in the production of the United States. And it's been going up now for a very long time. If you started back here 150 years ago at zero, and then we pumped more and more and more. And now the total liquids--not all of it oil; some of it is natural gas liquids--are up to about 84 million barrels of oil a day. Now they are predicting just exactly what M. King Hubbard predicted, and that is that there would be a peak, and after that peak, it would fall off. And you see, they are predicting a fairly dramatic falloff in the production of oil from the fields that we are now exploiting. But predicting out to 2030, they believe that by then, we will have a total liquid fuels production of about 106 million barrels of oil a day that will be made up of increasing amounts of natural gas liquids. And that will happen. We have found a lot of natural gas, so those will increase. The green here is nonconventional oil. That's going to also increase. That's oil like the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, that won't flow. You have to lift it with a 100-ton shovel and put it in a truck that hauls 400 tons. And then you cook it into what we call stranded natural gas. That is natural gas where there aren't very many people to use it. So it's kind of stranded, so its price is less. So you can afford to cook this oil with it. And that's going to grow too some. And then they make two predictions here. That this light blue is production from fields that we've found but are too difficult to develop, like a field found in the Gulf of Mexico under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. I heard a number. I have no idea how you get this precise. But it was said that when oil was $111 a barrel, they could afford to develop this field. So this is projected production from fields that we have found but are, with the current price of oil, too difficult to develop, uneconomically feasible to develop. And then the bright red here are fields yet to be discovered. The dark red here really belongs as a part of the oil down here. It's a little bit of additional conventional oil we've gotten by what we have called enhanced oil recovery. That's pumping some live steam down there or pumping some CO2 down there or, in Saudi Arabia, pushing some seawater down there. And some of their wells now are producing seven times as much seawater as oil, but it's okay because they can separate the seawater from the oil. Okay, two things about this chart: Note the falloff in production from conventional fields, and note that by 2030, 106 million barrels of oil a day projected--that's what the world is going to be producing. Just 2 years later, in 2010, reality is setting in--that's the lower chart down here--reality is setting in. Now they are up by 35, 5 years later, now they're up to only 96 million barrels of oil a day, not 106 million barrels of oil a day. This is 5 years later, when it really should have been higher. These top two curves here have been reversed and the colors different, but they are exactly the same thing. This is unconventional oil and this is natural gas liquids. Notice the precipitous decline in production from our current fields. And this includes, by the way, the enhanced oil recovery. You see it is in this chart, but it doesn't exist in this one because they have now incorporated and included where it belongs, and it is part of the conventional fields where we are now pumping from. Here they show two huge wedges. To keep this production going up slightly, they show two huge wedges here. Notice how considerably bigger they are than the ones they projected just 2 years earlier. I don't think that these two wedges are going to occur. They did not occur in the United States. Now today we have technologies that we didn't have there, like horizontal drilling and fracking. So we can get more out of a field than we could then, and we are going to go down and get some more oil out of fields that we thought were exhausted with this new technology. When you find a field that produces 10 billion barrels of oil, that is a big field. We have not found very many fields that produce 10 billion barrels of oil. That will last the world 120 days. Every 12 days, we use a billion barrels of oil. Now, I think you can see why you can no longer find this projection they made in 2008 in their Web site, because it is just not consistent with the reality that they are forced to use in projecting here just last year, in 2010. I will be enormously surprised if these two wedges occur. There is little evidence that they should occur. They did not occur in our country. Unless you think the world is incredibly more capable than the United States, then you will have some doubts whether those two wedges will occur or not. If they don't, this top curve is going to tip over for the world just exactly the way it did for the United States. We're not running out of oil. Many people who are disparaging, people who talk about peak oil will say that the peak oil people say we're running out of oil. We're not running out of oil. There is a lot of oil out there. There is more oil out there to be pumped than all of the oil that we have pumped in the last 150 years. What we're running out of is our ability to pump that oil as fast as we would like to use it. This next chart is an interesting one. It kind of puts what we're talking about in perspective--the world according to oil. This is what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil reserves it had. You see here that Saudi Arabia kind of dominates the planet. They do for oil reserves. They have, we believe, maybe about 22 percent of all the reserves in all the world. Now, we aren't quite sure of that because a Wikipedia leak a few months ago indicated that they may have 40 percent less oil than they've said. Let me explain what happened back when OPEC could produce more oil than the world needed and increased production would drive down prices. And so they had an agreement in the OPEC nations that you could pump a certain percentage of your reserves. So if you were a country that needed some more revenue, you simply had more reserves. And without finding any new oil, you can look back through history and see that some of them magically had maybe twice the reserves that they had. They didn't find any new fields; they just said they had twice the reserves in the fields they already had. Then you see, they could pump more oil. None of these OPEC nations will let our technical people in to look at their records so we really don't know how much oil they have, but we believe that it is relatively like this. You see little Kuwait looms huge on the world scene in terms of how much oil they have. Iraq, Iran, huge amounts of oil. Venezuela really dominates our hemisphere, doesn't it. It's bigger than all of the rest of the countries put together in terms of oil reserves. And here we are, the United States. We have 2 percent of the reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, a little less now because our cars get a little better mileage and our economy is down a little so we're using a little less, but roughly 25 percent of the world's oil. Our number one importer is Canada. They have less oil than we, but they don't have very many people up there to use it, so they can export it to us. Until a couple of years ago, our number two importer of oil was Mexico. They also have less than us. Now, they have a lot of people, but their people are too poor to use the oil so they can export it. Just a few years ago, the second largest oil field in the world, the Cantarell oil field in Mexico, started in rapid decline, declining as much as 20 percent a year in production. So now Mexico is our number three importer and Saudi Arabia is now our number two. Mexico has been displaced by Saudi Arabia. Look at China and India over there. Tiny. China with a 1.3 billion people, India with well over a billion people, with an economy in China that's growing--well, in a recession; they've slumped. They were 16 percent growth, and now I think they are something like 8 percent growth, and India is not far behind them. With a static oil production of 84 million barrels a day, and China last year used 6 percent more oil than they did the year before, where is it coming from? We used less. We used to be 22 million barrels a day; now we're less than 19 million barrels a day. And some of the poorer countries of the world just can't afford the oil so they are doing without. This disparity between the people who are using the oil and the people who have the oil is going to set up some huge geopolitical tensions in the world. China last year sold more cars than we sold, and that curve is accelerating. China is now the number one polluter in the world. They just passed us. China is buying up oil all over the world. I wonder why. We have only 2 percent of the oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the oil in the world, and we're not buying oil anywhere. We don't need to because all you need to do is go to the global oil auction and have enough money and be the high bidder or participate at the bid price, and you get all the oil that you need if there's enough to meet everybody's needs. So why is China buying oil? They aren't just buying oil; they're buying goodwill: you need a hospital, soccer field, roads. Simultaneous with buying oil reserves all over the world, China is also aggressively building a blue-water navy. They soon will have more ships than we. They aren't our ships yet by a long shot, but this year they will graduate seven times as many engineers as we graduate, and about half of our engineering students are Chinese mostly and some India students. We can't for long have that disparity between the graduates of engineers and our two countries and we continue to be the world's premier economic and military power. We have got to do something to capture the imagination of our people and encourage our young people to go into careers of science, math, and engineering. Let me tell you what I think may happen; I hope it doesn't. Why would China buy oil while they're simultaneously very aggressively building a blue-water navy and building capabilities for denial. There is now-- look it up--a Chinese anti-ship missile that we essentially have no defense against. It travels 1,200 miles. There's no reason they can't put it on a ship, which means you couldn't get within 1,200 miles of a Chinese ship that had this missile on it unless we developed some defense against that missile. Let's hope the time does not come when China says, hey, guys, I'm sorry, but we have 1.3 billion people. We have 900 million people in rural areas that, through the miracle of communications, know the benefits of an industrialized society, and they're saying, hey, guys, what about us? And our empire may unravel if we don't meet the needs of those people, so we can't share our oil. It's ours, we bought it, we can't share it, and we've got to have it. That would plunge the rest of the world into a recession, and China then would have to look to their population as consumers for the goods that they produce. And 1.3 billion people could be a pretty big consuming population. The tragedy is that your government has paid for four different studies, two of them issuing in '05 and two of them in '07, that said the same thing, the peaking of oil is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences. Your government chose to ignore those four studies because it was not politically expedient to admit that we had a problem of those proportions. Now, we should have known that those predictions were coming because a very wise man in what, I think, was the most insightful speech of the last century, M. King Hubbert, gave the most important speech. I think that Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, gave the most insightful speech just about a year later. I don't know if these two men knew each other, but on the 15th day of May in 1957 to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hyman Rickover gave a speech that was lost until a few years ago, and now you can find it on the Internet. Just Google for ``Rickover'' and ``energy speech'' and it will come up. He said some things there that should have been self-evident, and everyone should have been saying it; but it took Hyman Rickover to say the obvious. There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fuel reserves. They are finite. The Moon is not made out of green cheese; the Earth is not made out of oil. One day, it will be gone. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways to live off renewable energy--you've heard of renewable energy--or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes that we can expect from such a shift. Have you noticed we've been doing that? I haven't. I love this last quote here because I think it pretty well describes where we are and what we're doing. Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare. Drill, baby, drill. And the unspoken part of that mantra is the hell with our kids and our grandkids, let them shift for themselves. I remember when the Vice President came and asked me if I would vote to drill in ANWR, and I said I would be happy to do that when you commit--this was Dick Cheney--that you're going to use all the revenues you get from ANWR to invest in alternatives, because we're way late in doing what Hyman Rickover said we needed to do in 1957. I noted that we were going to leave our kids a huge debt. It's bigger now than I thought it would be then. I said, wouldn't it be nice to leave them a little oil? Here is a quote from one of those studies. This was the first and the biggest of those studies, the so-called Hirsch, SAIC, big study: world oil peaking is going to happen, world production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum was called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. It has happened. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult. He says that oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this. It is an unprecedented problem that the world faces. I have a last chart here that I think kind of helps us to put this in perspective. And this shows the production of oil, and this chart is a few years old. We need to have it updated. But this is when oil was discovered, way back in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. This is the use of oil. By the way, tonight when you do your prayers, thank the Islamic world for the oil price spike hikes in the 70s. Look what it did. It woke us up. If they hadn't awakened us and this curve continued, we would be through the top of the chart by now. Up until the Carter years, it was a stunning statistic. Every 10 years we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Now look at the slope of that curve. It is much lower than that. Our time is running out, and I must yield back; but I will come to the floor again soon, and we'll spend quite some time looking at this chart. Because if you had only one chart to look at where you were going to predict what you thought might happen in the future, I think this would be the chart, because you look back through history and see what has happened, and then you'll make a judgment. Wow, are we going to find that much more oil in the future that we found back here even with our increased capability to find oil? Yeah, we're going to find more, and we're going to pump more, but I think there is little or no chance that we'll be able to produce that oil fast enough to meet the growing demands of the world. I love challenges. This is a huge challenge. And I think that facing this challenge we can produce more jobs; we can be an exporter of the technologies for green energy. I just feel challenged by this, Mr. Speaker, and I hope Americans feel the same way. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much for yielding. I sat and listened to this discussion, and I am reminded of how futile efforts are to try to get something done by doing it wrong two different ways. The President believes that we need higher CAFE standards, and he is going to impose those through regulations from the EPA. He is also assuming that the American people don't have the sense to understand that they need to have higher CAFE standards, so he is going to force them on them. Without trying to educate the American people, he is just going to tell them you need to trust me, you need higher CAFE standards, and this is what it is going to be. What the President is doing is illegal and ill-logical, and I don't think that the American people are going to stand for it. I just have a couple of charts here that put in context why we need to look at CAFE standards. If the President would use this approach, the American people would do the right thing relative to the kind of car they buy when they understand the environment that the United States and the world is in. Here I have two charts and they are from the IEA, the International Energy Association. This is a creature of the OECD. It is perhaps, maybe along with our Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Energy, the best followers and prognosticators of energy in the world. This is their world-energy outlook. This one is in 2008. I just want to point to a couple of things here. First of all, the oil that we are now pumping--and you could go back here 150 years with this blue thing here. It started back at zero, and it pumped more and more and more and more. Here we are today pumping this much oil. These are the conventional oil fields that we are pumping oil from now. We are also getting some natural gas liquids, and you see that curve is growing and growing. This is not gas in your gas tank. This is propane and butane and gases like that. The green here is nonconventional oil. We are having a lot of discussion of nonconventional oil now about the Keystone pipeline and bringing the oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. We are going to build a pipeline. It is either going to be in this country, or it is going to be across Canada through the Rocky Mountains. If the environmentalists are worried about environmental impact, they ought to be thinking about what is going to happen to the environment when they put a pipeline through the Rocky Mountains. Either we're going to get that cheap oil, or the Chinese are going to get that cheap oil. They're going to have a pipeline. We're not going to avoid a pipeline. There's going to be a pipeline. I just think that commonsense comes down on the side of, gee, I would like that oil, I would like the jobs that go with getting that oil. And I am concerned about the environment, but there is going to be a pipeline. That is a given. It is either going to be here, or it is going to be in Canada. I think it is going to be more of an environmental insult going through the Rocky Mountains than down through the Mississippi Valley with that pipeline. That green area is nonconventional oil, and that is increasing. It will increase. You see it is not a big fraction of what we get. Notice that we have been stagnated here for 5 years now at 84 million barrels. We call it oil, but it is more than oil because it is natural gas liquids too. The world has not been able to produce any more oil than 84 million barrels a day, which is why oil is about $100 a barrel and we are in a recession, and it is still stuck at about $100 a barrel. They prognosticate that the production from current fields is going to go down fairly dramatically. You see it dropping off there. Not to worry, because we are going to get a lot of oil from the fields that we discovered, the light blue here that are too tough to develop. Then we are going to get a fair amount of oil from fields we have yet to discover, the bright red there. This is kind of a nice dream, isn't it? By the way, the dark red here is enhanced oil recovery. It really ought to be a part of this. That is putting CO2 down there or live steam or something down there to get a little bit more oil out. Note that by 2030 they are prognosticating that we are going to be up at 106 million barrels of oil a day. This chart has disappeared. If you go on the Internet and try to find that chart, it is not there. It was there. That's where we got it. They're a little embarrassed by its presence because just 2 years later in 2010, they made this prognostication, the same people. By 2035, 5 years later, instead of having 106 million barrels a day, they are up to only 96 million barrels of oil a day. Notice they've now incorporated the enhanced oil recovery here with conventional oil and notice a fairly precipitous drop-off. Now they're telling you that the production of oil is not going to decrease because we're going to get huge amounts of oil from the fields that we have now discovered that are too tough to develop like under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of discoveries like that, and fields yet to be discovered. I think there is little probability that these two wedges are going to occur. I think what's going to happen is that this curve is going to tip over and start down. Let me tell you why I think that's true. Because the United States reached its plateau, which is called ``peak oil,'' in 1970, and that was predicted in 1956 in what I think was the most important speech in the last century, given by M. King Hubbert in 1956. He says, 14 years from now, in 1970, the United States will reach its maximum oil production. After that, it will drop off. It did. Now, he didn't predict the discovery of any oil in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska, and here we see there was a little blip in the slide down with the huge amounts of oil we found in Alaska. Remember the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the yellow there. That's all it did. We now produce half the oil that we did in 1970. I do not think the world is any more resourceful or creative than the United States. If we could not reverse this downtrend in our country, I do not think that the world will be able to reverse it worldwide, which is why I say that the world is going to follow the United States. By the way, this was predicted by M. King Hubbert. He said that the world would be peaking about now. Your government has paid for four studies that said this is going to happen. I quote here from one of those studies. This was the first big study. This was the SAIC report called the Hirsch report. World oil peaking is going to happen, they said. Peaking is when you reach this plateau, and after that, it falls off. They said the peaking of oil is going to happen. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this. I just have one more chart here, and these are some quotes from what I think is the most insightful speech of the last century. The most important one I think was given by M. King Hubbert on March 6, 1956. This speech was given just a bit later, the 15th day of May in 1957, a speech given by Hyman Rickover, the creator of our nuclear submarines: ``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: The longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off of renewable or substitute energy sources''--we've been trying to do that, haven't we?--``and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.'' By the way, this talk was given to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you simply Google for ``Rickover energy speech,'' his speech will come up. They lost it for several years. It's now back on the Internet. In another place in this speech he said, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. And, wow, what a ride it's been. The quality of life that we have as a result of using these fossil fuels has just been incredible. Just one last quote from what I think was the most insightful speech of the last century. I love this quote: Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use this capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one wit how his offspring will fare. I think what our President needs to do is educate the American people to the situation we're in. If these charts truly represent that situation, the American people will voluntarily say, Mr. President, we need to respond to that in a responsible way. The President doesn't need to assume that you're ignorant and can't understand or assume that he has to tell us what we ought to do.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I rise in support of the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012. This is the 50th consecutive conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act. I have the honor of serving as the chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee of our Armed Services Committee. Under the full committee leadership of Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith, the support of Silvestre Reyes, our subcommittee's ranking member, and a superb staff, ours is truly a bipartisan effort. Consideration of this conference report comes at a critical period for our Nation and our military. World events and the Nation's fiscal circumstances have challenged our government's will and capacity to constructively address the enormity of the challenges we face. We need to develop a new national military strategy that better reflects the current and projected threat and fiscal environment. This is needed to facilitate full and balanced consideration of force structure and equipment investment plans and programs. Our first priority and immediate requirement is to fully support our personnel serving overseas in Afghanistan and the many other countries where we have asked them to serve under the daily, constant threat to their personal survival. This conference report properly reflects this immediate requirement. The National Defense Authorization Act Conference Report authorizes an additional $325 million for National Guard and Reserve equipment unfunded requirements; $3 billion is provided to support urgent operational needs and to counter improvised explosive device activities; $2.7 billion is provided to support Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle modernization and survivability enhancements; and $2.4 billion is provided for Army and Marine Corps Tactical Wheeled Vehicles, including $155 million for development of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. To meet projected future needs, an additional $255 million is provided to support the Abrams Tank industrial base and National Guard tank modernization, increasing the request of 21 to 70 tank upgrades, avoiding a production break in the tank upgrade program; $8.5 billion is provided for F-35 multiservice aircraft; $3.2 billion is provided for 40 aircraft in two models of F-18 aircraft; $2.4 billion is provided for V-22 Ospreys for the Marine Corps and the Air Force; and multiyear procurement is authorized for various models of Army and Navy H-60 helicopters. I urge all of my colleagues to support this conference report.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, on the 8th day of March, 1956, a scientist, geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert spoke to an audience in San Antonio, Texas. The audience was a bunch of oil people. He gave what I think is going to be recognized as the most important speech of the last century. It was really a very audacious speech. At that time, the United States was King of Oil. We produced more oil, we sold more oil, and we consumed more oil than any nation in the world. M. King Hubbert told that group of oil geologists and company executives that in just 14 short years the United States would reach its maximum oil production, that no matter what they did after that their oil production would decline. This was an incredible speech. Essentially no one believed it because, as I say, at that time the United States was the King of Oil, producing more, shipping more, consuming more than any other nation in the world. For a number of years, M. King Hubbert was a pariah. Nobody believed him. He was kind of relegated to the lunatic fringe. In 1980, 10 years after his prediction that the United States would reach its maximum oil production, you could look back, and what you saw is shown on this chart. This, of course, goes out beyond that year. What you see is what happened then. The United States did reach its maximum oil production in 1970. After that, the production fell off no matter what we did. Now, there was a little blip on the downside because we found a lot of oil in Alaska. You can see it there on the chart. And we found a lot of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the yellow that you see there. There was a little blip on the down slope, and M. King Hubbert had not included in his predictions the oil that we would find in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. He included only the lower 48. This chart shows where that oil came from. A lot of it came from Texas, the biggest single source of oil. The first oil, of course, was found in Pennsylvania and part of the rest of the USA. Then you have natural gas liquids on the top. As we found and used more and more natural gas, the natural gas liquids increased. That's not gas in your gas tank. That's propane and butane and things like that. This is something that could have hardly been believed. How could a country as creative and innovative as the United States possibly not be able to continue to produce more and more oil when they needed more and more oil? What M. King Hubbert did was a pretty simple thing. Oil had been pumped for long enough--50 years or so--by that time that they had some idea of what went on in a field, and the production in an individual oil field followed kind of a bell-shaped curve. As you pumped the field, you got more and more; and then when you reached the top, it became harder and harder to get the oil, and so it fell off as you went down the other side of the bell curve. And so what he reasoned was, if I can make some estimate of how many oil fields there will be in the United States and I add up all those little oil fields, all those little bell curves, I'll get a big bell curve, and that will tell me when we're going to reach our maximum production in the United States. Just about a year later, another speech was given. I don't know if these two gentlemen knew each other at all. But this other speech was given by the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover. Hyman Rickover spoke to a group of physicians. The audience is irrelevant. He spoke to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he said something that should have been self-evident, but obviously they weren't because nobody else was saying them and nobody has said them much since then. What he said in this speech was that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip, and he referred to it as this ``golden age.'' Here are a few quotes from that speech. By the way, you can find it on the Internet. If you simply Google for Rickover and energy speech, it will come up. It was lost for a number of years, and a few years ago it was found and put on the Internet. And what he says here seems to be axiomatic. ``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy,'' he says, ``500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. ``In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuels are finite''--they will run out--``the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.'' Now, this would seem to be, as I said, axiomatic. Obviously, the Moon isn't made out of green cheese and the Earth isn't made out of oil. It is finite. One day it will run out. And so it is obvious that one day one will have to come to grips with this. You will have to find alternative energy sources. Just when is that time for the world? When we ran out of our ability to produce more oil when we wanted more oil was in 1970. But the United States was the first great industrialized Nation and so we would expect that we would reach that point before the rest of the world. Just when would the rest of the world reach that point? I love this statement: ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit about how his offspring will fare.'' I have 10 children, 17 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Particularly my great-grandchildren and some of my grandchildren will look back and they will ask themselves, how could they have done it? How could they have gone on feverishly looking for and drilling for oil when it was obvious that it was finite, when it was obvious that there would come a time when we would have to transition from oil to alternative sources of energy? Now, this is a warning from the past, but that wasn't the only warning that we were going to have because your government has paid for four separate studies of this problem. And the phenomenon is called ``peak oil.'' That's the time at which you reach your maximum production capability; and after that, no matter what you do, production will fall off. As we saw earlier, that happened in the United States in 1970. By the way, by 1980 it was painfully obvious that M. King Hubbert was right, because looking back those 10 years, we say, gee, we really did peak in 1970, didn't we? And we're tipped over and starting down the other side now. Your government paid for four studies. Why four? Because they didn't like what the first one said, and so they ordered another one and didn't like what that one said, so a third and then a fourth. I have quotes here from two of those studies. The first of those studies was a study by SAIC, and the primary author of that study was Robert Hirsch, and it's usually referred to as the ``Hirsch Report.'' It was issued in 2005. These are just a couple of quotes from that: World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of confident forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is very difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain. The world, they said, has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation, more than a decade before the fact, before peaking occurs, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. We had a temporary problem with the Arab oil embargo in the seventies. This will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions--wood to coal and coal to oil--were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary, the report said. We were very comfortable living in this ``golden age''--as it is referred to by the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover. He noted that the incredible amount of energy and oil permitted us to live a very high-quality life, as compared to our ancestors who had not yet found how to tap into the enormous riches of fossil fuels. When I first heard this statistic I was stunned. I said to myself, it can't be true. One barrel of oil--that's 42 gallons--one barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man-hours of effort. That's 12 people working all year. A barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year long. Wow, that seems incredible, doesn't it? And then I thought, I drive a Prius and it takes me about 50 miles on a gallon of gasoline, not very big, a gallon of gasoline. Now, I could pull my Prius that 50 miles, but it would take me a long time. With the come-alongs and the chains and hooking to the guardrail and trees, I could get the Prius that 50 miles. Wow, I said, maybe there are 25,000 man-hours of work in one barrel of oil. Now, it wasn't very long ago that oil was worth $12 a barrel. That means that you could buy the life-enhancing effects of having a full- time servant work for you all year long, and you could buy it at the well head for $1. If you look around the world and see the quality of life that most of the world's people live, it is really quite incredible compared to the quality of life that our ancestors lived before they found how to tap into the enormous potential of fossil fuels. There was another report which issued in 2005, and that was a report by the Corps of Engineers. And here is a quote from that report: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural, simple curve-- production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace similar to its initial increase.'' This is the bell curve, the curve that M. King Hubbert had noted that permitted him to make his prediction as to when the United States would reach its maximum oil production. The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when it will peak. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline. Your government didn't like what these two studies said, and so there were two more studies ordered, one from the Government Accountability Office and the fourth one from the National Petroleum Council. I do not have quotes from these two; but they say essentially the same thing, that the peaking of oil is inevitable with potentially catastrophic consequences. Since your government didn't want to hear what these reports said, it didn't pay any attention to what the reports said, and we have gone on with policies of Drill, Baby, Drill. Just recently, there have been two more reports that tell us where we are--they also look at where we have been--and they make their prediction of where we are going. The first of these reports is the one on top that issued in '08. And the people who issued it were the IEA, the International Energy Agency. They are a creature of the OECD, a consortium of major industrial countries. There is a similar organization, the Energy Information Administration, which is a part of our Department of Energy. And they do similar things and have published similar curves; but this is the IEA, the International Energy Agency. The blue part of the chart here represents conventional oil. Now, if they had a long enough chart, it would go back here about 100 or more years. We started pumping way back here when we didn't need much, and so we didn't pump much. And every time we needed more oil, we could find more oil and we could pump more oil. And we've been doing that now for right at 150 years. And so here we are now. And what they show in this chart is the total liquid fuels--that's the line up here--has been plateaued. You can see it's flat there at 84 million barrels a day. We've been stuck there for 5 years now. We're in a recession worldwide. We aren't using as much oil as we might use. And still oil hovers near $100 a barrel. A couple, 3 years ago when the world's economy, including ours, kind of had a momentary collapse, the oil prices dropped down to $40 a barrel. But the reality of the supply compared to the demand, the prices steadily rose until oil is right at $100 a barrel now. What this chart showed was a fairly significant drop-off in the production of oil from our conventional oil field. This is following the same curve, you note, that was followed by the United States after 1970. So our 1970 plateau is the world's plateau that occurred--what?-- '05 to '09, something like that, was roughly when their curve occurred. The chart here has several other contributions to our liquid fuels. The top on here is natural gas liquids, and you saw that in the previous chart. That's propane and butane and liquids like that. The green one under it is nonconventional oil. That is growing, and that will grow. That's oil from places like the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, where they have a lift there, a shovel that can lift 100 tons at a time. It dumps it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and then they haul it to a big cooker, and they heat it up so that the oil will flow. It won't flow otherwise. They have a large amount of what we call stranded natural gas. Stranded natural gas is natural gas that is where you don't have very many people. And since it can't be moved--it's not a liquid. It's a gas, and it's difficult to move long distances, so it's cheaper when it's stranded, and so they're using this stranded natural gas as an energy source to warm this oil up so that it will flow. The next little wedge there, a dark red wedge, really is a part of the dark blue one down here. It's enhanced oil recovery. It's the additional oil we get by pumping live steam down there or pumping seawater down there, or pushing CO2 down there to push it out. Enhanced oil recovery, that is growing. That will grow because we're finding more ways of doing that. Then they show two wedges to keep this production line going up, because they think it should go up, and so we'll just find some oil so that it will go up. The light blue here is oil from the fields that we've found but are too difficult to develop, like the field in the Gulf of Mexico that is under 7,000 feet of water and--what?--30,000 feet of rock. It's way down there. As the price of oil goes up, why, more and more of these fields will be feasibly economically developed. The bright red wedge there is a wedge of fields yet to be discovered because they, predictably, cannot get enough oil from the fields that we have discovered. They're too difficult to develop now, so we'll need to find some new fields. Notice that by 2030 they have predicted that we would rise from our current 84 million barrels of oil a day to about 106 million barrels of oil a day. Now, this same organization, the IEA, issued another chart 2 years later, in '10, and this chart is pretty different. It shows, of course, the same plateau. Actually, they show a little dip here. Is it starting down or is that simply an undulation at the plateau? They have reversed the top two contributions and given them different colors, but they're the same thing. This is natural gas liquids, the purple one, and the yellow one is nonconventional oil production. Notice that they don't show the little wedge here for enhanced oil recovery. They have included it where it ought to be, simply as a part of the production from the current oil fields. And notice, they go out to '35 rather than '30 in this chart. They go out 5 years further, and they show a really precipitous reduction in the amount of oil that we're going to get from the fields that we're presently pumping. And so, to keep this curve going up, because it must go up if the world is going to have any opportunity for a growing economy, to keep the curve going up, they are predicting two huge wedges that will come from the fields that we have now discovered: the too difficult to develop and fields yet to be discovered. There is little confidence that these prognostications will occur. The United States could not do this. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world, and we could not reverse the decline of oil production in our country. And most of those who are serious students in this area do not believe that these two wedges will occur. So it is very probable that what the world is going to do is what the United States has done, and that is that it will tip over and there will be ever less and less oil, harder and harder to get, and more and more expensive. The next chart kind of puts this in a global perspective. This is a chart which shows what the size of the countries of the world would look like if their size were relevant to the amount of oil reserves that they have. And you notice here that Saudi Arabia dominates the world. That's because Saudi Arabia may--we aren't really sure because they won't open their books. Saudi Arabia may have 22 percent of all the reserves in the world. You may remember, oh, 6 weeks or a couple months ago, there was a WikiLeaks expose that said that maybe the Saudis had overestimated their oil reserves by as much as 40 percent. So the map might not look quite like this, but relatively like this. Now, why would they overestimate their reserves? When OPEC couldn't produce more oil than they were producing and they were all anxious for more revenues, OPEC decided that they would limit their production so as to keep the price of oil up. And so they permitted each of the countries to pump a percentage of their reserves. And so if you look back at the history of this, you will see that, without finding any new fields, their reserves could go up 50 percent, sometimes their reserves doubled. It was kind of a contest amongst liars, because the more you said you had, the more you could pump because you could pump a percentage of what your reserves were. So we really aren't sure what these reserves are because they will not open their books, but it's roughly like this. Certainly, the largest reserves of all the oil are in Saudi Arabia. Look at those countries around them, Iran and Iraq and Kuwait. Little Kuwait, that looks like a province down there in the corner of Iraq, and look how much oil they have. The United Arab Emirates, you can hardly find them on a map. Now, I want you to look for the countries on the map that have the largest economic activity, and that's the United States. We represent a fourth of all the economic activity in the world. We're one person out of 22, and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. It's really interesting to ask yourself: How come? What is so different about the United States that this one person out of 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? That is a subject for another time, and we will come and talk about that, but it's an interesting challenge: Why? Look at the United States here. We have only 2 percent of the reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the oil in the world. Now look at Europe. It's hard to find them on this map, isn't it? Europe, collectively, is economically a bit bigger than the United States, and they're even in worse shape than we are as far as having oil reserves. They are almost totally dependent on oil which is shipped in. And now look to find the two countries that have between them better than 2\1/2\ billion people out of our 7 billion people in the world, China and India. See them over here? Tiny, tiny. They have very small reserves of oil. Last year the Chinese bought 13 million cars. We struggled to sell 12 million cars. China is now the world's largest polluter. They just passed us. We're number two in that category. China's economy is growing very rapidly. Their demands for oil are increasing rapidly. I do not have the chart here, but China is buying up oil all over the world. I asked the State Department why would China buy oil. We have only 2 percent. We use 25 percent. We're not buying oil anywhere. I said why would China buy oil. You see, you get your oil today by going to the global oil auction and if you have the money--it's dollars today; let's hope it stays that. If it turns to yen or euros, we're going to be in a heap of trouble. And if you have the money, you get the oil. So you're not benefited at all by owning oil today. The State Department's answer was, I'm not sure China understands the marketplace. Wow. A country at that time growing at 14 percent, I think China understands the marketplace. I think they understand that there is such a thing as peak oil. Well, do they understand that? Five years ago, I led a codel to China, this holiday season. I was in Shanghai on New Year's Eve. Nine of us went to talk about energy. China began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Of course there will be a post-oil world. It's not today. We're not running out of oil. That's not what we're running out of. There is a lot of oil left. There is more oil left than all of the oil we have used in all of the world's history up to now. What we're running out of is our ability to produce that oil at the increasing rate to meet increasing demands. We're not running out. There will be oil for another 150 years. Ever less and less, more and more expensive, harder and harder to get. Our time is running out. If you have only one chart to look at, this would be the chart. This is when we discovered oil way back there. Huge amounts of oil. This dark, heavy line here is our consumption of oil. You need to kind of thank the Arabs or their Arab oil embargo. If they hadn't had that in the seventies, look where this curve would be. It would have gone off the top of the chart. That woke us up. Your air conditioner now is probably three times as efficient as your air conditioner was then. Well, we will return to talk about what can we do about this. Today, we talked only about the problem. It's a huge problem. We're equal to that problem. We'll be back and talk about how we respond to the problem. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. On November 18 Ron Smith, a respected and beloved Baltimore-area radio talk show host on WBAL, as well as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun, announced his retirement after 26 years because of his diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer and impending death. I ask all of my colleagues to join me, along with thousands of loyal listeners and readers who have expressed their deep appreciation and admiration for Ron Smith. Ron unfailingly contributed a voice of reason with unmatched candor while providing a forum for civil and vigorous debate about politics and policy that is sorely needed everywhere in America. I feel privileged to have been a guest a number of times on Ron's show on WBAL. It was always equally a pleasure and a challenge to meet Ron's high standards. Ron is a true conservative in the classical and historical meaning of the term. With equal enthusiasm and utmost respect, Ron asked tough questions of guests and callers and dissected the arguments of liberal elites, Democrats and Republicans, and others who call themselves conservative. From a vast knowledge of both history and government, Ron Smith shared, and we in Maryland were most privileged to benefit from, his succinct and persuasive dialogue and dedication to liberty and reason. Thank you, Ron. Godspeed.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, as we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, I want to salute Army Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Rascon of Laurel, Maryland, one of the 41 men of Hispanic heritage who have received our military's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor. Alfred Rascon was born in Mexico, but joined the Army after graduating from high school in California. He explained, ``I volunteered to join the military and serve in Vietnam [before I became a citizen] because I was always an American in my heart.'' While serving as a medic, Rascon's reconnaissance platoon came under fierce enemy attack in thick jungle on March 16, 1966. Rascon repeatedly used his own body as a shield against withering fire and saved the lives of two wounded buddies and tried in vain to save the life of a third. Despite wounds from gunfire, shrapnel and a grenade explosion in his face, he raced into a hail of bullets and recovered an M-60 machine gun and ammunition. That action turned the tide of the encounter and may well have saved the lives of his entire platoon. Rascon refused evacuation before other injured buddies. Alfred Rascon served two more combat tours in Vietnam and also served additional tours since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan. He continues to serve our country speaking to our youth. America is blessed by generations of immigrant Medal of Honor recipients like Alfred Rascon. They are heroes who sacrificed themselves to save the lives of others and put their newly adopted country above their own self-interest. There is no greater love than a man lay down his life for a friend.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the Defense Intelligence Agency on the occasion of its' 50th Anniversary. Created in 1961, DIA is our nation's premier provider of intelligence on foreign military intentions and capabilities. DIA's workforce of over 16,500 military and civilian intelligence professionals conducts all-source analysis, human and technical intelligence collection, counterintelligence and provides secure information technology support worldwide for military commanders, warfighters and policymakers. DIA is responsible for the Defense Attache System, Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT Center, National Defense Intelligence College, National Media Exploitation Center, National Center for Credibility Assessment and several specialized intelligence centers: the Underground Facility Analysis Center, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center and the Joint Intelligence Task Force--Combating Terrorism. In addition to these components, I am especially pleased that DIA's National Center for Medical Intelligence, NCMI, is located in my Congressional District on Fort Detrick. NCMI's 150 civilian and military intelligence analysts and scientists are charged with preparing and coordinating intelligence on foreign health threats and medical issues to protect U.S. interest worldwide. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a frequent visitor to NCMI and Fort Detrick, I have received numerous briefings from DIA and NCMI personnel. Each time I have been briefed by DIA analysts I have been impressed by the Agency's expertise identifying medical threats to U.S. forces and our allies, and the insights these intelligence professionals bring on foreign military intentions and capabilities. During DIA's five decades of existence, the Agency has remained agile in the face of evolving national security threats. From the Cold War, to the Vietnam War, to the first Gulf War, DIA's early efforts focused on understanding and, if necessary, defeating state-sponsored militaries and providing strategic warning. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, DIA has responded to the asymmetric threat posed by transnational terrorist groups such as al-Qaida by pushing more analytic and collection capabilities forward in direct support of our military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Today intelligence professionals from across DIA, including personnel from NCMI are forward deployed alongside our troops to provide the best and most timely military intelligence possible. Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the men and women of DIA on 50 years of service. Guided by their Agency motto ``Committed to Excellence in Defense of the Nation'', I am confident that DIA will be standing watch to defeat the threats we face today and to indentify and meet the national security challenges of the next 50 years and beyond.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise to support my colleague Donna Edwards and her bill to reduce the corporate tax in order to create more jobs in this country. The corporate tax is, perhaps, the most regressive tax we have because, in reality, you cannot tax a corporation. It simply becomes a part of the cost of doing business, and they pass it on to the consumer, who pays the tax, which makes everything cost more that the consumer buys, so the consumer will be benefited in several ways when we reduce the corporate tax rate. Corporations will grow, and there will be more jobs. More corporations will move to this country, creating more jobs. By the way, the revenue stream from this increase in the size of corporations and in the number of corporations may actually increase as a result of reducing the tax rate. There will be more jobs for our consumers, and the things they buy will cost less. This is a win-win-win for everybody. Thank you, Congresswoman Edwards, for your leadership.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, today is the 14th Annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum going on until 4:30 p.m. in the Cannon Caucus room. The theme of this year's expo is ``Efficiency + Renewables = Economic and National Security.'' There are 57 exhibitors, including the United States Air Force. They all have displays. I encourage everyone to go and see the expo before you leave for the day. In addition to the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses, we partnered in hosting with the Sustainable Energy Coalition and its sister caucuses: the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, the House Algae Energy Caucus, the House Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Caucus, the House High Performance Building Caucus, the Green Jobs Caucus, as well as the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, and the Oil and National Security Caucus. I want to give special thanks to my colleague from Maryland, Congressman Chris Van Hollen, who is the veteran co-chair of the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, and Ken Bossong. This event would not have been possible without the efforts of Mr. Bossong and the Sustainable Energy Coalition. Please go to the Cannon Caucus, and see the great exhibits there--57 exhibitors, including the United States Air Force.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Chairman, I wanted to spend just a few moments putting our discussions in context. This year, the deficit will be perhaps as much as $1.6 trillion. Now, our total discretionary spending--that's the money that we vote here to spend, and spend nearly a year doing it--is a little over a trillion dollars. A bit more than half of that is the Defense budget. What that means is if we didn't have any government that we vote to spend money for here, if we had no Defense, we had no Homeland Security, if we had no EPA, if we had no NIH, if we had no WIC program, if we had none of the myriad Departments of government that serve us every day, we'd still have a half-trillion-dollar deficit. I'm not sure that the reality of this has gotten through to our Congress or the American people. Another way of looking at this is that we have revenues of about $2.2 trillion a year, but our mandatory spending--that's interest on the debt and our means-tested welfare programs and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security--are several hundred billion dollars more than that. What that means is that one second after midnight on January 1, we're already in debt that year several hundred billion dollars, and we haven't even started to pay for the defense of our country, for Homeland Security, for NIH, for the WIC program, or for any of these many, many programs that our government supports. There is no way with the meager cuts that we're making in these budgets that we're voting on that we're ever going to get to anything near a balance.

Mr. BARTLETT. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. BARTLETT. I was just trying to put in context our discussion here and what it means. Reclaiming my time, we have a $1.6 trillion deficit. We're coming close to that this year. The Ryan budget was kind of an expression of his roadmap. And in the last Congress only eight of us had the courage to sign on to his roadmap, because it was pretty tough. This year, when he filed that roadmap again, I think 13 of us signed on. And then we had the Ryan budget, which is even tougher, I think, than his roadmap, but what else was there to vote for, and almost nobody read it, so we voted for it anyhow. The Ryan budget doesn't balance for 25 years. It doesn't balance for 25 years. That means with that budget, with all of its austerity, for 25 years we still are accumulating more and more and more debt. Every six hours we have another billion-dollar deficit, which means another billion-dollar debt. About every 12 hours we have another billion- dollar trade deficit. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to put our discussions in context. I have 10 kids and 17 grandkids and two great-grandkids. I sure would like to leave them a country better than the country as I find it. And it's going to be really tough to do that. What I want for us to do as Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, is to sit down and talk through this. How are we going to solve this problem? Grandstanding and making these political points is not going to get us there. Mr. Chairman, we have got to do something serious. I don't see the Congress doing that. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I rise in support of the Boehner resolution. I am not here today to argue whether or not we should be in Libya. That is an argument for another day. What I'm here today concerned with is how we got into Libya, because I think that was a very important precedent. We went into Libya on March 19, Operation Odyssey Dawn. Just 12 days later, a House committee met and Secretary Gates was there and I made this statement: ``I'm among many people who feel that President Obama has involved the United States in an unconstitutional and illegal war in Libya.'' That same day I dropped H.R. 1323, which asked the President to find offsets in non-defense discretionary spending to pay for the war in Libya that was not authorized by the Congress because we have no money, and I shouldn't ask my kids and my grandkids to pay for that war. This is not the king's army. The power to move our Army into Libya is not inherent in Commander in Chief. If it were, they would not have put in article I, section 8, the responsibility of the Congress to declare war. This is an unconstitutional and illegal war. I think it sets a very dangerous precedent, and I hope that we make that very clear in our deliberations today.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I would like to spend just a few moments putting the debate that we are having on Medicare in perspective. This year, our budget deficit will be close to $1.6 trillion. That is a really big number. Well, what does it mean? Well, it means that about every 6 hours--as a matter of fact, a little less than that--we accumulate another $1 billion deficit that adds another $1 billion to our debt. This $1.6 trillion is, as a matter of fact, about a half trillion dollars more than all the money that we come here to vote to spend. We spend the better part of 12 months debating a large number of authorizing bills and voting the appropriations bills to spend just a little over $1 trillion. Our deficit is $1.6 trillion. That means it's about a half trillion dollars more than all the money we vote to spend. What that means, Mr. Speaker, is that if we had no military--just don't fund it, send all the service people home--if we had no Department of Education, no Department of Commerce, if we emptied all of those large buildings full of government bureaucrats, we would still have about a half trillion dollar deficit. What that means of course is that there is no chance, no opportunity of balancing the budget by cutting spending in all of those programs that we spend the better part of a year debating here. Well, if that wouldn't balance a budget, what then must we do? It's very clear that if the deficit is about a half trillion dollars more than all the money we vote to spend, that a lot of the spending that accumulates this deficit is in programs that we don't vote to spend money on. These are programs that pay the interest on the debt, that's kind of mandatory spending--if you don't do that you're in big trouble--and it's Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. And so in this debate on Medicare, it's not just the Medicare Trust Fund that we're talking about that will go bankrupt--it will because today and every day, with no time out for holidays or weekends, 10,000 of our baby boomers retire and they stop paying into these funds and they start drawing from these funds. And so as we debate this subject, we need to remember that it's bigger than Medicare, that even if you could agree that Medicare will somehow magically be solvent, it really won't matter if we have a country that's bankrupt, will it? Because you can't have a Medicare program in a country that has no government because it has gone bankrupt, and that's what is going to happen if we don't get a handle on this debt. And it's a huge problem. Our leadership on our side of the aisle worked very hard to keep the promise that was made during the campaign of cutting $100 billion from spending this year. That's a lot of money to cut. But even if we had cut the $100 billion, that would have been one-sixteenth of the deficit. But it turned out to be an amazing disappearing $100 billion. It shrunk to $61 billion, then it shrunk to $38 billion, and then when CBO looked at the actual outlays this year of how much we would save, it shrunk to $352 million. That is, Mr. Speaker, about one-third of 1 percent of what we promised. And even if we had delivered what we promised, $100 billion, that would have been roughly 6 percent of the deficit, one-sixteenth of the deficit. So when we talk about these individual programs, it's nice to keep in perspective the overall picture of where we are. If you are excited by challenges, you will be exhilarated by this challenge because this is a huge, huge challenge that our country faces. We now are about a decade into a new century and a new millennium. And it's interesting to look back at the last century and ask ourselves what was probably the most important speech given in the last century. Now if you were to ask that question of 100 people, probably not one of them would cite the speech that I'm going to tell you tonight was the most important speech of the last century, but I think that if you were to ask that question 10 or 15 years from now, that almost all of those 100 people would tell you that this speech is probably the most important speech of the last century. It was given on the eighth day of March in 1956 by a man named Marion King Hubbert--generally known as M. King Hubbert--to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas. At that time, the United States was king of oil. We were the first major industrialized nation in the world. We were pumping more oil, we were using more oil, we were exporting more oil than any other country in the world. And M. King Hubbert told this group of oil specialists that in just 14 years--by 1970--the United States would reach its maximum oil production, that no matter what they did after that, oil production in this country would fall off. That was audacious, it was unbelievable--as a matter of fact, it wasn't believed. M. King Hubbert was relegated to the lunatic fringe. How could it be that a country that had discovered this much oil, was king of oil, producing more oil, consuming more oil, exporting more oil than any other country in 14 years is going to reach its maximum production and then fall off? You know, if you stop to think about it, oil one day will run out, won't it? I started asking myself that question a lot of years ago when I was teaching school, and I taught a class in biology, and all of the publishers would send me their textbook hoping that I would use it in my class and they could sell it to the members of the class. And I remember I was asking myself the question, you know, oil can't be forever. When will there be a problem? Next year? Ten years? A hundred years? Maybe it is a thousand years. I had no idea. I had no idea when this crisis would occur. But obviously there had to be a time in which oil would run out. And if there's such a time when oil will run out, there has to be a time when you've reached your maximum ability to produce oil. Well, the chart that I have here shows what happened. He made that prediction here in 1956. We were here. He said in 1970--that's the peak up there--that we would reach our maximum oil production. This chart shows where that oil was coming from--from Texas, from the rest of the United States, from natural gas, liquids. And then we made two big oil discoveries. He hadn't included Alaska and he hadn't included the Gulf of Mexico. You can see Alaska there, just a little blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak, and there you could see the fabled Gulf of Mexico in yellow there, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. It hardly made a difference, did it? The United States now produces about half the oil that it produced in 1970, and that's in spite of the fact that finding oil that M. King Hubbert did not include in his prediction. He included the lower 48. He did not include Alaska. He did not include the Gulf of Mexico. But in spite of finding a fair amount of oil there, today we still produce half the oil we did in 1970. Now, by 1980 if you look on the charts--but in 1980 you could look back and you could say gee, M. King Hubbert was right, wasn't he? The United States did reach its maximum oil production 10 years ago. Wow. What that means, of course, is that won't the world at some time reach its maximum oil production? How could you argue that the United States is not a microcosm of the world? If the United States reached its maximum oil production in 1970, when would the world reach its maximum oil production? As a matter of fact, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would be reaching its maximum oil production just about now. Well, if M. King Hubbert's speech was the most important speech of the last century, one might ask the question, ``What was the most insightful speech of the last century?'' Now, I don't know if these two men even knew each other. I don't know if Hyman Rickover, who I think gave the most insightful speech of the last century, don't know if he even knew that M. King Hubbert existed. He was going to talk about the same phenomenon from a very different perspective. His speech was given the 15th day of May, just a little over a year later, in 1957. The audience was irrelevant, but the audience was a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. For many years his speech was lost. And just a few years ago it was found, and it's on the Internet now. And if you'll just Google for ``Rickover'' and ``energy speech,'' it will come up. And I'm sure that you will agree that it is probably the most prophetic speech that you have ever read. I'm sure you will agree that it might very well be the most insightful speech of the last century. I have some quotes here from Hyman Rickover's speech. And you know, I'm sure that speech was still around in 1980 when you could look back and see, gee, in 1970, we really did peak in oil production in this country, didn't we? And looking at what Hyman Rickover said there really should have been some pause, shouldn't there? There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy. Oh, it's really interesting. Almost all of the energy we use today came from or comes from the sun. It was the sun that made the plants and so forth grow that produced our gas and oil. It's the sun that, with differential heating, makes the winds blow. It's the sun that lifts the water and the clouds, then drops it on the mountains, it runs down to produce hydroelectric power. No wonder many of the ancients worshipped the sun. They kind of understood how important it was to their economy, didn't they? They were thinking about solar energy 500 million years ago that took eons to grow to its present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. Wow, what a profound statement he makes here: ``The longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.'' Now, this speech was given in 1957. That's more than a half century ago. This next quote, I love this next quote. ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.'' You know, I think of that statement when I notice how eager we are to ``drill, baby, drill.'' Drill more, pay less. I have 10 kids, 17 grandkids, and 2 great grandkids. When the Vice President came here to try to get me to vote to drill in ANWR, I told him I'd be happy to vote to drill in ANWR when he promised me they were going to use all the revenues we got from ANWR to invest in alternatives. Because more than a half century ago, Hyman Rickover said that's precisely what we should be doing. And we had not been doing any of it. I noted to the Vice President that we were going to leave our kids a huge debt. I had no idea then how really huge it would be because that was several years ago. I said wouldn't it be nice to leave them a little oil so that they might have something to work with that huge debt? The next chart is another quote from Hyman Rickover. ``Whether this golden age,'' as he referred to it--and wow, what a golden age it's been--``Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.'' Nearly 7 billion people in the world and energy from fossil fuels, particularly oil, is absolutely essential to their survival. ``Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength--mental and physical--to obtain the bare necessities of life.'' When I first got some statistics on oil and the energy density of oil, I could not believe them. One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of work. I saw that number and I said, That's incredible. That means it has as much energy in one barrel of oil, 42 gallons. That's 12 people working all year long. I drive a Prius. And then I thought, you know, a gallon, not very big, a gallon of gasoline will take my Prius--the most recent mileage is 53 miles per gallon. Now, I could pull my Prius 53 miles, but it would take me a spell, wouldn't it? I would have to use come-alongs hooked to the guardrail or trees off to the side and pull the Prius, but it would take me quite a while to pull my Prius 50 miles, and that's just one of those 42 gallons in a barrel of oil. So I guess that 25,000 man hours of effort is really the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil. And of course what that incredibly cheap energy has done has permitted us to develop a really great quality of life. And Hyman Rickover referred to that as this Golden Age. The next chart, and he kind of missed it a little here as you will see, in the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000, world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion with 90 percent. Well, we kind of passed that, didn't we? We're not quite double that, but we're past that. So growth exceeded what he thought it would be. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling. The next doubling will require only 50 years. As a matter of fact, it required less than that. And the path we are on, you know, we're just going to have increasing numbers of people while we have decreasing supplies of energy to support them. The next chart, another quote from Hyman Rickover. You know, reading this, after 1980, when you could look back and see that M. King Hubbert was really right about the United States, shouldn't our leaders have sat down and said, gee, what are we going to do about that? One final thought I should like to leave with you. ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.'' Have we done any of that? This is the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover. Great advice. The next chart gives a perspective that Hyman Rickover talked about, and this looks at the age of oil. It goes back to 1630. It could go back to the time of Christ and the chart wouldn't change because the amount of energy the world was using was so small that it wouldn't show above the baseline here. And then we entered the Industrial Age. The brown line there is wood. We started with steam engines and fueling them with wood. And then we found coal, and that's the black line there. And then we found gas and oil. Wow, look what happened when we found gas and oil. Now, we are going to see this curve again. And we are going to see it again and again. A very steep rise. With this very long time in the abscissa, that rise is really very steep. We will see some other charts where we have stretched out the time and the rise is not so steep. But notice what happens at the very top up there. It fell off and then rose again. That's the recession of the seventies, the Arab oil embargo. You know, you need to thank them for doing that because we woke up. Look what would have happened if that hadn't happened and that exponential curve kept on rising. It would be off the top of the chart. Our next chart shows that in a different perspective. This is called the oil chart. And if you had only one chart to look at to inform you, this would probably be the one that you would want to look at. The curve that we saw in the last one, that red curve, I said you would see it again and again, and here it is. This is the curve. Now, it was very steep there because they had compressed this time, and so it went up. This is that drop-off in the seventies. Notice what would happen if we hadn't become more efficient as a result of that. This curve would be off the chart by the year 2011. The vertical bars here show the discovery of oil, and we started discovering it in the forties. And, boy, in the fifties, and sixties, and seventies, huge peak in the seventies. And then by 1980--the black line here represents the use of oil--by 1980 we were using as much oil as we were finding. And after 1980, we always have used more oil than we found that year. But no matter, because there is a huge reserve back here. So we are now filling this space between what we found and what we use by dipping into those reserves that we have. How long will they last? This chart indicates the future discoveries will be on an ever-decreasing slope. It won't be smooth like that because this has been up and down. That will be up and down. I want you to make your own judgment as to how much of that we're going to find. By the way, this chart was what, '04 was when this chart was created, and they were predicting that the world was going to reach its maximum oil production probably about what, '10 or so there. As a matter of fact, they were somewhat optimistic, as we'll see a bit later, the peak oil production. Oh, the next chart shows some of that. And we will look at the next chart. There are two entities in the world that do a very good job of keeping track of how much oil we pump and use. Of course we use all we pump. There is no big reservoir of oil anywhere. And this is the EIA and the IEA. One of them is a creature of the OECD in Europe, and the other is a part of our own Department of Energy. And these are their records of how much oil we have produced. And notice that for about the last 6 years now we have been plateaued in oil production at about 84 million barrels a day. We are stuck there for about the last 6 years at 84 million barrels a day. When demand goes up--and the increasing economies in China and India and the developing world, the demand is really going up. When demand goes up and there is a constant supply, what happens to prices? You know, $50, $80, $100, $147 finally. And that high price of oil combined with a silly housing bubble that we produced in this country, and the world's economy is kind of near collapse. And then oil fell to a bit under $40 a barrel. But as soon as the economies picked up again, the price of oil increased, and now it's roughly $100 a barrel. The next chart looks at the world's picture, and the dark blue on the bottom here is conventional oil. Notice that it increases. They have it at about 2006. There is now general recognition by experts all over the world, even the naysayers like ExxonMobil and CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, now concede that oil peaked in about 2006. But we have had unconventional oil, and we have had natural gas liquids. We are finding more and more natural gas. And there is natural gas liquids. You won't probably put that in your fuel tank because it's propane and butane and that kind of energy source. This chart admits that we have reached the peak, and it's going to fall off. Doesn't this look very much like Hubbert's curve for our country, falling off? Now, I am sorry I don't have the next chart that they created just 2 years after this, but let me tell you the differences. The chart they created 2 years after this has two main differences. One, it went out to 2035 instead of 2030. Notice that the total oil production, adding up all of these various sources of oil, came to 106 million barrels a day, they thought, by 2030. Now, just 2 years later--this was an '08 chart--by '10, they had produced a chart that said that the peak production 5 years later was going to be only 96 million barrels a day. They had lowered their expectations. They also had lowered their expectations of how much oil we are going to be getting from our current fields, because this line had dropped off considerably lower in their chart just 2 years later. Now, they have our availability of oil ever going up and up, down to only 96 million barrels a day in 2035 in their next chart. But the contribution to that is very little of it comes from our conventional oil. Most of it is going to come from oil from fields that we have discovered and not developed. That's the light blue. And the red there is from fields yet to be discovered. And that disparity is even more acute in the chart that they developed just 2 years later. I will tell you with considerable confidence that those two wedges are not going to occur in anything like that magnitude. The world inevitably will follow the same curve that the United States followed. We reached the peak in 1970. We have been falling off ever since. In spite of finding oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, in spite of drilling more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together, today we produce half the oil we did in 1970. This relates to the discussion that we are having about the budget and about Medicare. Paul Ryan had a bill which he called the ``roadmap,'' and it was a way to get at the problem of our debt and deficit, and it was pretty tough. It was so tough that only about 12 or 13 of us signed onto that roadmap. Then we came to the budget debate, and all but four Republicans voted for that budget. I was almost the fifth one not to because I didn't think that it was going to solve our problem. It didn't cut enough. We weren't going to balance the budget. Paul says that his budget pays down the debt, but it doesn't balance for 25 years. And to make it balance in 25 years, he projects fairly robust growth. That robust growth will not occur because, as soon as the world's economy picks up and the demand for oil picks up, since we have done nothing that we were advised to do by Hyman Rickover more than 50 years ago in planning an orderly transition to other sources of energy, when the price of oil goes up again to $125, $150 a barrel, even if you believe that our economy is going to pick up--and it won't--it still takes 25 years to balance the budget. So what we are talking about tonight in this energy thing really, really is important in our budget debate as well. The next chart is an interesting one. This was from several years ago, before the peaking of oil. It shows the exports in the world and when they thought oil would peak. Here is the year they thought it would peak--and some of them a very long time from now. Well, Deffeyes said before 2009, and it certainly was before 2009, but it occurred earlier--well, 2006 and 2007. It occurred in 2006. The next chart shows exactly these same things in a pictorial form so that you can see some of them. They weren't going to miss the bet, were they? They could occur any time during those many, many years there, but there is almost unanimous agreement now that oil did peak in 2006. The next chart shows four studies. There are five reports, but there were only four studies because two reports came from the same study. Your government paid for four different studies, two of them issued in 2005 and two of them issued in 2007. There was a second iteration of the DOE report here that occurred a little later, in '05 and '07. They all said essentially the same thing, that the peaking of oil was either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences. Now, why did your government pay for four reports? Because they didn't like what the first report said. Then they got the second one that said the same thing, and they didn't like that either. So they ordered a third one, and they didn't like what that report said either. The President finally ordered the National Petroleum Council report. The next chart is one of the quotes from the first report, which is a big SAIC report. Dr. Robert Hirsch was the leading investigator, so it's frequently called the ``Hirsch report,'' and I have a couple of quotes from this. The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, up to $149 a barrel; and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented. On the next chart--and this was all out there since 2005--world production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and will decline thereafter. They said that with quite some confidence because it happened in the United States, unquestionably, and the United States has to be a microcosm of the world. That maxim is called the ``peak.'' A number of confident forecasters projected peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Well, it occurred well within the decade. The world has never faced a problem like this. It is unprecedented. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions--wood to coal and coal to oil--were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. This was in 2005. Your government didn't like what that report said, so they just ignored it. In the same year was another report by the Army Corps of Engineers, and I have several quotes: The current price of oil is $45 to $57 a barrel and is expected to stay that way for several years. Wow, even the experts get it wrong sometimes, don't they? Oil prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Well, it reached $147, but it didn't reach $180 because the economy collapsed, and the demand for oil went down. With the demand down, the price went down. The next chart is another quote from this same study. Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Youngquist, Albert Bartlett--my namesake. I wish I had some of his genes. He has given a great speech on energy. Google for ``Albert Bartlett, an energy speech.'' He has probably given his speech about 2,000 times now. It is the best speech I have heard on energy-- have estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. It occurred in 2006. They didn't miss it very much. The next statement isn't from the Corps of Engineers. It's a statement from Condoleezza Rice, which I thought was a very insightful statement: We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is--I will use the word-- ``warping'' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now, a diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply. Good advice. What did we do? What did we do? The next chart is another quote from the Corps of Engineers: Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no energy source equals oil-intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. All ignored by your government. On the next chart, there is another quote from this same study by the Corps of Engineers. Well, they're quoting Jean Laherrere and our Energy Department. Just go back and look. Historically, you can Google and find him, I'm sure. They are projections of what energy was going to be available to us. This is his quote on that, Laherrere's quote: The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate--you have to have that much discovery rate to keep up with what we're using--for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide surge and the deliberate efforts to find the largest remaining prospect. We are finding more oil. One of the big finds in the Gulf of Mexico was under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. A big discovery of oil is 10 billion barrels. We use 84 million barrels a day. That means, in 12 days, we use 1 billion barrels of oil. That's a staggering number. What that means is if you found 10 billion barrels of oil and you could get it all out, that will last the world 120 days. Big deal. The next chart is Shell Oil. By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be radically different from today's. The world's current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step change in the growth rate of energy demand, and Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy access to oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand. That didn't wait until 2015. It happened in 2006. But he was generally right. This was of an absolute certainty going to happen. The next chart presents us with a dilemma that many people are concerned about. It's a national security issue. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We are only a little less than 5 percent of the world's population. We import about two-thirds percent of what we need. Many people rightfully believe that having only 2 percent of the world's reserves and using 25 percent of the world's oil and importing two-thirds of what we use presents an undesirable national security risk. As a matter of fact, there were 30 prominent scientists and thought leaders who wrote a letter to President Bush saying exactly that. Notice that, though we have only 2 percent of the world's oil, we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We field more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. It's like several kids sharing a soda and they have half a dozen straws in one soda, you can suck it down pretty quick, can't you? And that's where we are with oil. The next chart is an interesting one. And what this chart shows us is the energy density of these various types of fuel. Notice that oil aviation fuel, boy, that's refined, isn't it? It's got lots of energy. And so does natural gas, which is why natural gas is a great fuel for cars if you have the infrastructure to support that. But notice all these other sources of energy, the energy density in oil is just incredible. There's nothing else, there is no readily available source of energy that comes even close to the energy density in oil as we look at alternatives. The next chart, and some people will tell you, yes, I know, oil is short, but who cares? Because we are king of coal, we're the Saudi Arabia of coal, we have enough coal to last us for a long time. I've had Members tell me it will last us 500 years. A commonly quoted amount of coal is we have a 250-year supply of coal--at current use rates. Note when people tell you how much of something we have at current use rates, think about what increasing use will do to that. If we increase the use of coal only 2 percent--and we'll increase the use more than that as we run down on oil and we have learned to do what Hitler did and South Africa did to create oil and gas from coal--just a 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. That's not enough growth to keep our stock market happy. It wants more than 2 percent. But 2 percent doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years. It's 8 times bigger in 105 years. It's 16 times bigger in 140 years. So that 250 years of coal shrinks to just 50 years of coal, by 85, if you use it as coal, but if you're going to use some of the energy to convert it to a gas or liquid, now it shrinks to 50 years. So your 250 years shrinks to 50 years if you have only 2 percent increase in its use and if you convert it to a gas or a liquid. But the reality is that there is no way you can avoid sharing that coal or the gas or oil you would get from it with the world. Because if you use oil or gas that you've made from your coal, then somebody else buys the oil from Saudi Arabia or Hugo Chavez. So the reality is that you have no alternative but to share it with the world. We use one- fourth of the world's oil, so that means it will last the world 12\1/2\ years. Now the National Academy of Sciences says we haven't looked at the coal reserves for a long while, since the 1970s, and they think we probably have about 100 years of coal at current use rates. But even if we had 250 years at current use rates, just 2 percent gross shrinks to 85, convert it to gas or a liquid and it drops to 50, and you have no alternative but to share it with the world. So it drops to 12\1/2\ years. The next chart shows us something very interesting. What it shows us is that we don't have to look to a decreased quality of life if we are using less energy. This is the human development index. It's a per capita energy consumption. You notice that we share a lone position way out there at the end of the curve. But notice how flat that curve is on top. The people using roughly half the energy we do, the human development index, which is life expectancy, education level, relative income, is about the same as ours using only half the energy we use. As a matter of fact, that's where Europe is. They use half the energy we use. The next chart looks at some of the same phenomena in a different way. This is how happy people are with their station in life. Now here we are, using the most energy, that's on the bottom, how much energy you are using, we use the most energy, and we're pretty happy about things, aren't we? But notice how many countries, I think there are 22 of them, that feel better about their quality of life than we feel using, some of them, only half as much energy as we use. Now on both of these curves you have to get back down to about here, which is about one-third as much energy as we use before you start falling off quickly in these indices or in your perception of quality of life. The next chart looks at our energy consumption. Where does our energy come from? We've been talking about oil. But we're getting energy from a lot of other sources too, from natural gas, most of it from oil, from petroleum, from coal, from nuclear about 8 percent, which is about 19 percent of our electricity. This is total energy production, not electricity, but 19 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear. If you don't like nuclear, drive down the road tonight and note that every fifth house and every fifth business would have no lights if we had no nuclear. So it is a little wedge in there, 6 percent, which is renewables--just 6 percent. And notice--well, hydroelectric is a big part of that; biomass, that's the paper industry and the wood industry burning by-products and so forth and waste-to-energy, instead of putting it in a landfill you burn it; geothermal, that's true geothermal, tapping into the molten core of the Earth; wind and solar, look how tiny they are. They have huge potential for growth. But at the moment they are pretty, pretty small. The next chart shows us something interesting, and that's about efficiency. The bar on the left looks at incandescent lights. My wife got a few chickens recently, and she put a lightbulb over them to give them heat because about 90 percent of all the energy from the light bulb, more than 90 percent, goes to heat. But if you use a fluorescent--look at it--enormously more efficiency in the fluorescent. And if you do go to an LED, look at the ratios in a LED. I have an LED flashlight, and I forget when I put batteries in it. Notice most of the new cars in front of you have LED lights. The next chart kind of puts this problem in a global perspective. This is the world according to oil. It's what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil it had. Now we've got to modify this a little because WikiLeaks just exposed some papers from Saudi Arabia that said they've been fibbing about how much oil they have, that they really have 40 percent less oil than they said they have. That's true I think of all of the OPEC countries, because back when they could produce enough oil to drive the price of oil down, they could produce a certain percentage of their reserves. But if they wanted to produce more oil, they just said they had more reserves. They didn't find any more oil, but some of their reserves magically grew on paper. It was kind of a contest amongst liars, and Saudi Arabia was exposed. So it would modify a little, but still most of the oil is in that part of the world. Here is the United States, 2 percent of the oil. We use 25 percent of the oil. Our biggest supplier of oil is Canada. Our third biggest supplier is Mexico. Both of them have less oil than we, but Canada has few people, so they can export. Mexico has a lot of people, but they are too poor to buy the oil, so they can export. Just a few months ago, Mexico slipped to number three supplier and Saudi Arabia now is our number two supplier of oil. I want you to look at China and India over there. They are tiny. Last year the Chinese bought 13 million cars. We struggle to sell 12 million cars. They have 1.3 billion people, and they are entering the industrial age. Mr. Speaker, the next chart looks at this same global picture in a somewhat different way. The left bar is the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil production. Now, we think ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and BP are pretty big players, don't we? They have only, collectively, 22 percent of all of the oil production in the world. The right-hand bar looks at another part of this, and that is who has the oil. Notice that our big three or four don't even show up over there. These are the top 10. Almost all of the top 10 are Arab countries where it is not a company that owns the oil; it is a country that owns the oil. LUPE Oil, which is kind of private up there, they show it white, in Russia, is only 2 percent of the total amount of oil held by the top 10 countries in reserves. Anyway, China is buying up reserves all over the world. And I asked the State Department why would they do that since in today's world it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. The person who comes to the global oil auction with enough dollars--and let's hope it stays dollars and doesn't go to Euros or we are in really big trouble--you buy the oil you want. We have only 2 percent of the oil, we use 25 percent of the oil, and we aren't buying oil reserves anywhere. What is the difference? The State Department's answer, and I don't think that is the correct answer, they told me that China didn't understand the marketplace. Come on now. A country that during this recession dropped from 14 percent growth to 8 percent growth, and they don't understand the marketplace? China is doing something else simultaneously, by the way. They are aggressively buying a blue water navy. Do you think the time might come when China says, hey, we have 1.3 billion people, and these 900 million people who are in rural areas through the miracle of communications know the value of an industrialized society and they say, gee, how about us? I think China sees their empire unraveling the way the Soviet empire saw their empire unravel if they can't meet the needs of these people. China is buying oil reserves and building a big blue water Navy because the day will come they will tell us, gee, I'm sorry, but it is our oil. We have 1.3 billion people, and we can't share the oil. I led a codel to China a little over 4 years ago, and I was stunned. This wasn't just the people concerned about energy in China; it was everybody we met. They talked about post-oil. There will, of course, be a post-oil world. It will be a long while from now. Hyman Rickover had no idea how long this age of oil would last. He was 100 years into what we call this golden age. We now know pretty much how long the age of oil will last. We are about halfway through it. We are 150 years in it. And he was right, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, Hyman Rickover said the age of oil would be but a blip. It will be about 300 years long. We are about 150 years in it. From now on, the next 150 years, there will be less and less. It will be harder and harder to get, more and more expensive. This is the five-point plan. Conservation. My wife says that she thinks that conservatives ought to be interested in conservation--they don't seem to be--because they come from a common root. Conservatives aren't interested in conservation. That is the only thing we can do to buy some time, to free up some energy so we can invest in developing alternatives. The second and third are domestic sources of energy and diversify as much as you can. The fourth one may surprise you: environmental impact. Be kind to the environment. They know that they are not. But as I mentioned, they have these 900 million people that are clamoring for the benefits of an industrialized society, so they are building a coal-fired power plant every week, and they are starting the construction of 100 nuclear power plants. And the fifth bullet here: international cooperation. They know that there is no way that any one nation can face this problem alone, that we need international cooperation. But while they plead for international cooperation, they are planning for the eventuality that we won't have international cooperation because they are buying up oil reserves all over the world. And they are not just oil reserves; they are buying goodwill. What do you need, a soccer stadium? roads? a hospital? Wherever they buy oil reserves, they are buying goodwill. And remember, they are simultaneously building this huge blue water navy. What now? Our next and last chart for this evening, What America Needs. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. If we understand the problem, there is nothing that we can't do. Our people just need to understand the problem. We need to have leadership that understands the problem. I tell audiences that the innocence and ignorance on matters of energy in our general population is astounding; and, sadly, we have truly representative government. Well, what do we do? We need the total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. I was born in 1926. I know the total commitment we had during that war. There has been nothing like it since. We need the technology and intensity and focus of the Apollo program to land a man on the moon. That cost $275 billion in 2006 dollars, which is when oil peaked. And we need to have the urgency of the Manhattan Project. Minus that, we are going to face the kind of disruptions that were forecasted by the Hirsch Commission, the big SAIC report. The world has never faced a problem like this. I like challenges. They excite me. And this is a huge challenge. It is an exhilarating challenge, but I know with proper information, with proper knowledge, with proper leadership, the United States is up to the task. By the way, developing this green technology will again make us an exporting country. People brag about we have this nice, clean, service- based economy. If you think about that, no matter how much you charge for cutting each other's hair and taking in each other's laundry, that is not going to be a viable economy. Only three things produce wealth, and manufacturing is a major one of those. That is now all moving offshore. We can again become a major manufacturing country by focusing on this green technology and by developing the alternatives that we must develop if we're going to continue to maintain our quality of life. I look forward to a very challenging future. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I rise in support of H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. I have the privilege of serving as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee's Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. Our jurisdiction includes approximately $78 billion of selected programs within the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Office of the Secretary of Defense procurement and research and development accounts. I first want to thank the subcommittee's ranking member, Silvestre Reyes from Texas, for his support this year in putting the bill together. Ours is a truly bipartisan effort, as it is for the full committee under the leadership of Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith. The committee's focus is on supporting the men and women of the Armed Forces and their families, providing them the equipment they need and the support they deserve. Our first priority, of course, is in providing the equipment to support our military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill adds no additional funding for the Department of Defense programs within the subcommittee's jurisdiction. The bill, however, reallocates approximately $1.5 billion from canceled, delayed, or otherwise lower priority programs to higher priority requirements. First, an additional $425 million is provided for modernization of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The Army budget request would result in a costly production break for these two programs in 2013, which could last anywhere from 1 to 3 years. These production lines cannot be turned on and off like a light switch. The unique skills of the workforce cannot be just put on the shelf to be retrieved several years down the road. For the Abrams tank production alone, there are almost 900 suppliers. Seventy-five percent of these suppliers are small businesses. Based on the information we have received to date, it is more efficient to keep these lines warm than it would be to shut them down and start them up again. Second, an additional $325 million is provided for the National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account for equipment shortfalls. Thirdly, the bill increases funding at Army and Air Force test ranges by $209 million. The Pentagon has recently acknowledged its proposed large fiscal year 2012 reductions in Test and Evaluation in the Army and Air Force could lead to ``unintended consequences'' and acknowledged the need to readdress this issue, especially in regards to complying with the Acquisition Reform Act. Finally, acquisition and sustainment of the engine for the F-35 aircraft over its lifetime is estimated to cost well over $100 billion. The Armed Services Committee has believed and continues to believe that the F-35 engine acquisition and sustainment should be done on a competitive basis. That is why, on a bipartisan basis, the committee has strongly supported the final development phase of the F-35 competitive engine program since it began nearly 6 years ago. Although the committee's bill provides no additional funding for the F-35 aircraft competitive engine program, the bill takes strong bipartisan action that was supported by a recent vote of 55-5 by the committee to enable the competitive engine contractor to continue development of the competitive engine at no expense to the government or the taxpayer. I strongly urge all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this bill's innovative approach to continue the F-35 competitive engine development program. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank a truly superlative staff, and again want to thank the chairman and ranking member for assistance on a really good bill.

Mr. BARTLETT

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

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much for yielding. If our only reason for being in Afghanistan was to deny sanctuary to al Qaeda, I probably would have asked time from the gentleman from Ohio and be speaking from the other side, because when we are successful in Afghanistan, that will not have denied sanctuary to al Qaeda because they will simply go over into Pakistan. If not there, they'll go to Yemen and Somalia. If we leave Afghanistan now or if we leave Afghanistan before victory in Afghanistan, we will have sent a message to the world that their suspicions are really true, that all you have to do to the United States is make it tough for them and they will pull out. We did it in Beirut. We did it in Somalia. It is absolutely essential that we win here, or our credibility is gone forever as a major player in geopolitical things in the world. A second good reason for staying in Afghanistan is that if we can have a fledgling democracy there, that will send a very powerful message to the Middle East from which most of the world's oil comes. There is a lot of upheaval there, and a stable democracy in Afghanistan would be enormously important. Beyond denying sanctuary to al Qaeda, there are very good reasons for staying in Afghanistan until we have victory. Our young people there are doing an incredible job. I just came from there a bit over a week ago. We can succeed there, and I think we must succeed for the two reasons I mentioned.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I don't think that anybody would object to paying workers on these projects a real prevailing wage. The problem is that what's called a ``prevailing wage'' is not the prevailing wage. I have a friend who does a lot of ornamental ironwork. A lot of these buildings around here he has done. He lives out in Hagerstown. The contracts that he has to put that in require him to pay prevailing wage when he puts it in down here. The same people that install it down here do the work of preparing it out there. This is a good job in Hagerstown, and that's only--what?--about 70 miles from here. When he comes down here to put it in down here, he has to double their pay for the time he's down here. It's just not prevailing wage, and that's why it's wrong.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Last week, there was WikiLeaks activity that pointed out a huge problem that we in the world face. WikiLeaks released some confidential emails that indicated that the Saudis had only 60 percent of the oil that they had advertised they had. I think this is probably true of most of the OPEC countries that were incentivized to exaggerate their oil reserves when they were permitted to pump a percentage of the oil reserves. Mr. Chairman, there is almost nobody now who doesn't agree that the world reached its maximum production of conventional oil in 2006. We've been stuck now for about 5 years at 84, 85 million barrels a day of oil. Increasingly, the difference between conventional oils, which are now falling off in production, and that 84, 85 million barrels a day is that it is made up by unconventional oil, like the heavy sour of Venezuela and the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. Our military has been very wisely pursuing a goal that the rest of us should have been involved in. Maybe they read Hyman Rickover's speech from 1957 where he noted that, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. He didn't know then how long it would last, but he said how long it lasted was important in only one regard--the longer it lasted, the more time we would have to plan an orderly transition to other sources of energy. Of course we have done none of that in spite of the fact that we have known for 31 years with absolute certainty that we were going to get here today, because by 1980, we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's peak as predicted by M. King Hubbert in 1956. The military has been attuned to this problem much more than any other part of our society, and they have been very wisely pursuing alternative fuels because, as we wind down on the available fossil fuels, the world will ultimately, of course, move to alternative fuels. The military has several reasons for doing this. It is a very aggressive program, a very wise program; and I think that it would just be tragic if we were to eliminate the funds for this. They increasingly need to move to alternatives for all of those reasons; and the rest of us need to move to alternatives for an additional reason, that they now are moving to alternatives that they can produce on site to reduce the long supply trails that create so many casualties over there. They ought to have been doing this earlier. I am delighted they're doing it now, and I think it would be a national security tragedy if we were to deny them the funds to continue doing this. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.