Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. During the debate to strike funding for the F-35 competitive engine you're likely to hear many statements that just don't square with the facts in the program. Just today, I have heard that it has been stated that the primary engine for the F-35 aircraft has, in one case, 200,000 flight test hours; another statement said 20,000 test hours. The reality is the F-35 primary engine has, as of the end of 2010, just 680 flight test hours and has 90 percent of its flight testing to go. You're also likely to hear that there are almost 30 U.S. military aircraft that operate with a sole source engine. That's interesting. The F-35 aircraft is a single engine aircraft. No fighter aircraft engine has ever been required to do what the F-35 engine is required to do--provide powered flight and also power a lift fan for the short takeoff and vertical-landing F-35B. In fact, this challenging act of physics has just resulted in the F-35B being put on ``probation'' by the Secretary of Defense, requiring redesign of the F-35B unique engine components. The current estimate to complete development of the F135 primary engine has been extended several years and the estimated cost to complete the development program is 450 percent above the February, 2008, estimated completion cost. In fact, only two U.S. operational aircraft are single engine aircraft--the Air Force F-16 and the Marine Corps AV-8B. The F-35 is scheduled to replace those aircraft and will not be operational until at least 2016. The F-16 was the first aircraft to use an alternate engine, beginning in the mid-1980s, and still does so today. Accident rates have trended from 14 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours in 1980 with the Pratt & Whitney engine, when the alternate engine program was first funded, to less than just 2 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours in 2009 for both the Pratt & Whitney and the GE engines. A review of the AV-8B accident data last year indicated an accident rate six times that of the other Navy fighter aircraft, the F-18, and over 3\1/2\ times the rate of the F-16. The AV-8B will be replaced by F-35B. So while the alternative engine F-16 has benefited from competition, with an accident rate having declined by a factor of seven, the AV-8B has an accident rate 3\1/2\ times that of the F-16. Some will cite that the F136--that's the competitive engine--will require $2.9 billion over 6 years to make it competition ready. It's interesting to note that the cost increase in the contract for the current primary engine, the F-35, is $3.4 billion, and that does not include other government costs, independent research and development, and component improvement program funding. The entire remaining development of the F-35 competitive engine could have been funded with the overrun to date in the F-35 primary engine. Further, the GAO has found that key assumptions in the cost to go for the F-35 competitive engine were unnecessarily pessimistic based on historic experience with the original alternate engine program. One of our colleagues has said that the F-35 primary engine is ``5 to 7 years ahead of the F136 alternate engine in development.'' This is not the case at all. First, the acquisition strategy for the F-35 competitive engine called for it to begin 4 years after the primary engine. The Pentagon told us last April that the competitive engine was only 2 to 3 months behind schedule of the original plan. At the same time the Pentagon notified the committee that the F135 primary engine was 24 months behind the schedule set in the original October, 2001, contract. In other words, had both engines begun at the same time, the alternative engine would now be almost 2 years ahead of the primary engine. I don't know why there's such confusion over the facts related to this issue. Our committee has followed this issue for over 15 years, and we ask you to support the F-35 competitive engine program as an important element to controlling F-35 program costs and future force readiness. The GAO has looked at the competitive engine programs. They have noted that historically the competitive engine always does two things: it makes the engines cheaper and it makes them better. Notice the accident rate that I noted earlier. Furthermore, this new aircraft is supposed to be ultimately 95 percent of all of the aircraft in all of our services. Can you imagine what would happen if there was a problem with the engine and we had to stand down. We would have essentially no fighter aircraft in any of our services. It is essential we continue with the alternative engine--and I hope not just to continue its development, to make the primary engine better and cheaper, but to provide a second engine for duplication. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. When I came to the Congress 18 years ago, I was assigned to the Armed Services Committee. The subcommittee slots on Armed Services are determined by seniority and Member preferences. We all get together in a room and we select our committees, and as the more popular committees are filled, less and less opportunities are available to junior Members. For reasons that I am not sure I fully understand, the Personnel Subcommittee is always the last to fill up, and since I was the lowest ranking person on the Republican side, I ended up on the Personnel Subcommittee. Ike Skelton was then senior enough on the Democrat side that he chaired that Personnel Subcommittee. And those were tough times for the military. We really didn't have enough money, and I remember that Ike was really stressed. He was stressed to the point that he was actually emotional that we didn't have enough money to meet the needs of our service people. I saw then a Congressman who was deeply concerned about the military, and I remember how all of us on the subcommittee were relieved when the appropriators gave us another $1 billion. Do you remember that, Ike? It was Jack Murtha who led that fight, and we got another $1 billion for our personnel. I have now worked with Ike and served with him for these last 18 years. I have gone with him on really hard-working CODELs. Ike, I can't imagine a more dedicated person, someone more interested in our troops, more knowledgeable about our military, more concerned about the future of our country. It has been, sir, an honor to work with you, and I am certainly going to support the Ike Skelton National Defense Authorization Act.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Madam Speaker, I've been involved with the LCS program from its very inception; and when the Navy announced that they were going to do a down select with this competition, I was somewhat dismayed because these are two very different ships, an aluminum trimaran, and the more conventional ship optimized for these special missions. And I wasn't sure that we knew enough about the potential of these two ships to make that down select during this competition. So I was very pleased when Sean Stackley called me and said that they were surprised and shocked by the quotes that came in. Competition, you know, really does matter. And when the down select was threatened, each of these competitors came in with a really good price. So I was very pleased when the Department decided that they would like to buy 10 of each of these ships. These are multi-mission ships. I'm sure one of these ships will be better for one mission than another, so I am very pleased that we're taking this route; and I couldn't be more supportive of where we're going now with this. If we're ever going to get to a 313-ship Navy, the LCS is going to play a big part of that. This is going to be a huge class of ship. A half of that class is going to be bigger than almost any other class of ships that we have had, so this is a win-win for everybody, and I'm pleased that we are taking this route.

Mr. BARTLETT. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BARTLETT. For 4 years I was the chair of this subcommittee, and Mr. Taylor was my ranking member; and then the leadership in the Congress changed, and for 2 years, I was his ranking member and he was my chair. And then, sadly, due to our term limits on the Republican side of the House, I had to leave that subcommittee, but never left my interest, strong interest in that subcommittee. And I will tell you that there is no person in the Congress who has been more committed or more effective in making sure that we have the right kind of Navy, the right size Navy. When I first came here, I looked up Gene Taylor because we shared some social things. And as a Democrat, he kind of shone out as different than the other Democrats. And we've become the very best of friends since then. He tells people that we're joined at the hip, and indeed we are. Gene, it's been a real, real pleasure to serve with you, and your departure is a grave loss to this Congress and to our Nation. I've been honored to serve with you, sir.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you for yielding. You know, one might wonder at our priorities. For the first time in many, many years we don't have time to pass the defense authorization bill, but we do have time to pull out a very controversial part of that, whose passage no one will argue will be particularly helpful; it just not might be too hurtful. Maybe that's just one more reason that our favorable ratings are somewhere between used car salesmen and embezzlers. There's an old adage that says he who frames the question determines the answer. I've had a graduate course in statistics, and I would certainly not have reached the conclusion that was reached from these studies. Thirty percent, almost twice that in the marines, said this would be a bad idea. Fifteen to 20 percent said it would be a good idea. You can't take that 50, 55 percent that didn't have an opinion and say that it is a good idea. If I was a statistician, I would have reached exactly the opposite conclusion. Thirty percent is a huge number. You know, no matter what my sexual orientation was, I couldn't be supportive of this. We are now fighting two wars. Three of the Joint Chiefs have said this would be very disruptive. There are a lot of prejudices out there. I might regret those prejudices, but I can't change the fact that they are out there. This will not be conducive to good order and discipline. This is not the time to do it. There may come a time when we can do this in the military. This is not that time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Madam Speaker, let me first note some press clippings today that caught my eye, kind of signs of the time. One of them talks about a 1,900-page omnibus appropriations bill that is being prepared. You know, there will be no one person in the country that has read all of that bill, and I think the American people are not supportive of bringing these huge bills to the floor that nobody has had a chance to read. But that wasn't what caught my eye so much as the subheading: ``Earmarkers feast on pork one last time before diet.'' And then in brackets it says it includes the Joint Strike Fighter second engine. I would like to make a couple of comments on earmarks. I know that they are symbolic of frivolous, wasteful, out-of-control spending in Congress. Even though the total amount of money in earmarks is pretty small, they still are symbolically a very big and important issue. I can live without earmarks. I've had earmarks. I publish them all on my Web site. None of them have sought to aggrandize me. When I first came to Congress, I thought that robotics ought to be of increasing importance to the military, and so I supported what is called earmarks. We call them, in Armed Services, plus-ups. I supported a little company in Carroll County. They now are owned by General Dynamics, and they are now the largest military robotics manufacturing company in the United States; that probably means the largest in the world. And they will tell you that, if it weren't for my earmarks, they might not be here. I would note that the unmanned aircraft were earmarks. I would also note that the Pentagon fought the aircraft carrier when it was first suggested, and it was Congress who pushed the aircraft carrier. I would like to reflect for a moment on the plus-ups in the military, which are really fundamentally different from earmarks other places. You see, if you do an earmark on alternative energy--and everybody wants to look green, and so just about everybody who does earmarks will have an earmark or two on alternative energy. And that money all comes out of the program money for a little alternative energy lab in Golden, Colorado. They never know how much money they're going to have. They never can really adequately plan or execute a program because their money gets taken with these little green earmarks that so many of our Members like to have. That's not what happens in Armed Services and Defense. Defense is a bit more than 50 percent of all of our discretionary spending--$600 or $700 billion. Whenever you have that many programs with that much money involved, there are bound to be some of them that don't go as planned and the money doesn't get spent. And so, near the end of the year, that money is gathered together and we have, in the past, gone to the chairmen of the services and asked them, If you had more money, what would you buy? And they respond, Gee, we would like to have this and that. We call these ``unfunded priorities.'' Then, the Members turn in their lists of requests, and these are all judged against some standards that everybody has agreed on. You don't get all your earmarks. I publish all of mine on my Web site. You certainly don't get them all. I can live without earmarks. But I would just like to note that the President's budget is one long series of earmarks-- spend money for this, spend money for that, spend money for the other thing--put together by people that you have never seen, that you will never see, that are not accountable. Now, I understand the psychology of earmarks, and I'm very supportive of doing away with earmarks. But I would like to make a point about plus-ups in Defense. You see, the President's budget is at least a year old. It takes a long time to put together that big budget--some parts of it are a couple of years old--which means that all the new technology of the last year can't be in the President's budget. Traditionally, we have used plus-ups in Defense to make sure that we don't fall behind our potential enemies. So if you would like to make sure that we're always potentially 1 year behind the Chinese and the Russians, then just don't have any plus-ups in Defense. I am a big supporter of doing away with earmarks because I think that symbolically they have become poison and they tell the American people that we are out of control and irresponsible. But, at the same time, I would like to note that we have got to have something to permit us to introduce the latest technology to our military, because it can't be in the President's budget. So let's call them plus-ups or something and ban earmarks elsewhere, but make sure that we don't fall behind in Defense. Another thing that was in the news was the leadership is not going to bring a separate Defense authorization bill, but they have taken one small part of that bill out--the Don't Ask, Don't Tell. One may wonder at the priorities. For the first time in many, many years, we're probably not going to have an authorization bill. And if we have an appropriations bill, it will be a part of this big 1,900-page omnibus. One might wonder a little bit about priorities when we're engaged in two wars and we face a resurgent Russia and a booming China that it is maybe not important to pass the Defense authorization bill, but it is really important to bring to a separate vote Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Then there are a couple of articles that I was really pleased to see--and we'll talk a little bit more about those later--from the National Defense Magazine: ``Navy Takes Biofuels Campaign Into Uncharted Waters''; and the second headline is that the ``Air Force Tells Biofuels Industry to `Bring It.' '' They want to buy these alternative fuels. There were two articles; one by Beidel and one by Grace Jean. And a little bit later, we'll have an opportunity to look at biofuels and their role and why the military is focusing so much on these. And then an interesting article in the L.A. Times, ``Pressure builds in the House to pass tax-cut package.'' A little bit later, we'll have an opportunity to look at taxes and should we cut them. We really have a huge debt, getting bigger every day. Getting money from our people to bring down this debt is important. So what are the arguments for cutting taxes? Benjamin Franklin, in 1787, came out of the Constitutional Convention, and he was asked--and one of the stories has it that it was a lady who asked him that. I like that story--Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? What have you wrought? And his answer was: A Republic, madam, if you can keep it. A very short response: A Republic. But I thought we lived in a democracy. At events we do that Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, and you come to that part that says, ``the Republic for which it stands,'' and then we get up and talk about this great democracy that we live in. What is the difference between a republic and a democracy? Before reflecting on that and why it is important to understand that difference, I would like to spend just a moment looking at Benjamin Franklin's hope: ``if you can keep it.'' I wonder what he thought the biggest threat to this Republic, this Constitution would be. I kind of think he wasn't all that concerned about foreign powers that got here across a big ocean in sailboats. I'm sure he had some concern about threats from outside the country. But I kind of think that he might have been more concerned about threats from within: A Republic, madam, if you can keep it. What is the difference between a republic and a democracy? I'd like to use a couple of examples of a democracy to help us understand that two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner would be a democratic process; the majority wins in a democracy. So what do you think is going to happen if the body is made up of two wolves and a lamb, and they are voting on what they are going to have for dinner? If it is a democracy, there will be lamb for dinner because the majority wants that. If it is a republic and the constitution, or whatever they call the body of laws that they live by, says you can't have lamb for dinner, you won't have lamb for dinner, no matter whether the majority wants it or not, because, you see, it is against the law. In our country, we would say it's unconstitutional. I really kind of hesitate to use this next example of a democracy, but I hope you will understand. A lynch mob is really an example of a democracy. Isn't the will of the majority being expressed in a lynch mob? Aren't you glad you live in a republic where it is not the will or the whim of the majority that controls but the law that controls? I remember back a number of years ago when, I believe it was, Harry Truman nationalized the steel mills. They were going to strike. Back then, it mattered that we wouldn't have any steel made as we had some manufacturing in those days. It wouldn't matter a whole lot now, would it? The economy was already in trouble, and it was going to be in even bigger trouble if they did that, so Harry Truman nationalized the steel mills. That was a very popular action. A huge majority of the American people applauded that because that made them, you see, Federal employees, and as Federal employees, you can't strike. That was a hugely popular action--an executive order. The Supreme Court met in emergency session. In effect, what they said was, Mr. President, no matter how popular that is, you can't do it, because it's unconstitutional. Now, why is this important? Congress is doing a lot of things that are not specifically permitted by the Constitution. Four years after the Constitution was ratified, there was the Bill of Rights. They started with 12 amendments, and 10 of them made it through the process: two-thirds of the House, two- thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the State legislatures. We call them the Bill of Rights. There was a lot of argument that they really didn't need to do that, because every one of those rights so explicitly enumerated in the Bill of Rights was implicit in the Constitution, itself. We in the Congress today involve ourselves in almost everything that affects citizens of the country. We use two different things in the Constitution to justify doing that. One of them is ``promote the general welfare.'' That's in the Preamble to the Constitution, itself. It is also repeated in the preamble to section 8, which specifies what the Congress can do. The Preamble of the Constitution simply says: ``promote the general welfare.'' But in the first paragraph of article I, section 8, it says to promote the ``general welfare of the United States.'' What they were talking about was the responsibility of making sure we had a strong country. Words change their meanings, and their use of the word ``welfare'' didn't even come close to our use of the word ``welfare'' because, when we think of welfare, we think of a big organization that handles a lot of money and that takes care of people who are in need. Then, in the Bill of Rights, there are the last two amendments, which are seldom referred to. The Ninth Amendment simply says that essentially all the rights belong to the people, and the people have chosen to give a few of those rights to the government. A few days ago, I was privileged to spend an hour or so with one of the Justices on our Supreme Court, and he gave a very interesting example. He had a piece of paper like this, and he tore off a little corner of it: These are all the rights that we have--and he tore off a little corner of it--and we're going to give this much to the Federal Government. Just a little. So the Ninth Amendment reiterates that. It says that essentially all the rights belong to the people except for those few that they give to the government. Then there is the 10th Amendment. This is the most violated amendment and the least referred to amendment in the Constitution. The 10th Amendment in everyday English--it's written in Old English and legalese--you've got to kind of interpret. What it really says is, if you can't find it in article I, section 8, you can't do it. Now, we do a whole lot of things that you can't find in article I, section 8. We use two things to justify that. One is the ``promote the general welfare.'' If it helps people, if it makes things better, we can do it. The second thing we use is called the commerce clause, which says that Congress has the responsibility and the authority to regulate commerce between the States. Now, there is nothing that doesn't pass over a State line, so you can argue that, therefore, we can concern ourselves with anything and everything--and we do. But then I asked myself the question: If that were how they wanted us to interpret the Constitution, why did they put all that detail in article I, section 8--like duties and imposts and excises, and borrowing money and regulating commerce? Well, that's the one they use. Establish uniform rules of naturalization, laws for bankruptcy, coining money. Somehow we gave that away to the Fed without amending the Constitution. I'm not sure how. Provide for the punishment of counterfeiting, to establish post offices and post roads, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, this is, copyrights and patents to constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court. That's our lower Federal courts. To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations. Then all the rest of it deals with just two things--to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and then the military. The last paragraph, of course, relates to the seat of government, what we call the District of Columbia. Then it ends with a paragraph that is used to justify doing anything and everything we want to do: ``to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.'' But the 10th Amendment says, if you can't find it in article I, section 8, you can't do it. Now, there are three big things that we do--more than three, really, but there are three big things we do that I can't find there. One is our involvement in education. Another is our involvement in health care, except for our military, and the third one is philanthropy. By the way, Madam Speaker, if you will do a Google search for Davy Crockett--he was a Congressman from Tennessee and a farmer--you will find a very fascinating discussion of philanthropy. We don't have time here today to go through it, but you will be fascinated by it. Then he gave a speech on the floor, talking about philanthropy. Now, these are good things. We support the National Institutes of Health. We support the National Academy of Sciences. None of these things are in the Constitution, and we do them all without amending the Constitution. Since these are good things and they help us, why should I be concerned? They're not explicitly permitted by the Constitution, and we haven't amended the Constitution so that we can legitimately do it. Let me tell you why I am concerned. This little country--and we're little, one person out of 22 in the world--and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. And I ask myself the question, why? What is so special about us that just one person in 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? We no longer are conspicuously the hardest working people in the world. We no longer have the highest respect for technical education. This year, the Chinese will graduate seven times as many engineers as we graduate. About half of our engineering students are Chinese students. And we no longer have the most respect for the nuclear family. This year, almost 50 percent of all of our children will be born out of wedlock. Why then are we so darn fortunate, that just one person out of 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? You may have other reasons, Madam Speaker, but I think that our enormous respect for our civil liberties established a climate and milieu in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish, and I think that if we put at risk these civil liberties, we put at risk who we are. If we can rationalize that because it's a good thing to support the National Institutes of Health or provide health care or have a Department of Education, that you can then just kind of ignore the Constitution, that sets, I think, a very dangerous precedent because, in the future, it may be that a majority of our people will feel that a minority of our people should be denied some of their civil liberties. And if we can just rationalize that we don't have to pay any attention to the specifics of the Constitution and these other things, why couldn't that happen to our civil liberties? And because I am so convinced that these civil liberties are such a huge reason that we are such a favored country, I'm very concerned that we shouldn't just ignore the Constitution because what you're going to do seems okay and popular and going to help. I remember back when we were congratulating ourselves because we had a budget surplus. We had to raise the debt limit ceiling. Kind of jokingly I asked our leadership, what are you going to tell the American people--all these months you've been telling them we have a budget surplus and now we're voting to raise the debt limit ceiling? Why would we have to raise the debt limit ceiling if we've had a budget surplus? We did have a budget surplus, and we did pay down a debt, but it wasn't the national debt. It was the public debt. I suspect, Madam Speaker, that there are not a large percentage of the American people that know the difference between the public debt and the national debt. The public debt is the Wall Street debt, the debt we owe to people who have bought our securities, who have loaned us money. The national debt is the sum of the public debt and the trust fund debt. You see, we have about fifty trust funds. Two of the biggest ones are Medicare and Social Security, and we have been running surpluses in those fortunately because when the baby boomers all come on line, we're going to really need those surpluses, but there's no money there. You see, this budget surplus was in what we called the unified budget, when we put the trust funds on budget, and then we made the perfectly irrational statement that the Social Security surplus offset the deficit. Well, if you have taken the money that you have taken out of the paychecks of our citizens for Medicare and Social Security and you spend it, which is exactly what we've done, you have incurred another debt. So what we did when we had this surplus, we paid down the national debt; for every dollar of national debt we paid down, there was another dollar increase in the trust fund debt. The sum of those two debts is the national debt. And if we kept our books on the accrual method, which we require of every business with more than something like a million dollars in transfers of money during the year, there never was a moment in time, I'm told, that the national debt really went down. Now I talk about this tonight because we're going to talk about taxes and what we haven't done and what we should do, and I just wanted to point out that when Congress tells you what the deficit is, add several hundred billion dollars to that, now less this year than other years because this year for the first time there was no surplus in Social Security, but there was a whole lot of surpluses in other areas. So, remember, it's the unified budget and the public debt that they're talking about, but it's the national debt that we need to fund, and that's the debt that determines how much money we owe and what the interest on that money will be. Madam Speaker, I've thought a lot about taxes. If we had a zero percent tax rate, we'd collect no money. And then if we had a 100 percent tax rate, we'd collect no taxes because nobody would work if you're going to take all their money. So I thought a lot about what's that magic number: somewhere between zero percent where you collect no taxes and 100 percent taxation where obviously you'll collect no taxes because nobody's going to work. Somewhere in there is the magic number where you're going to collect the most taxes. Now obviously if taxes are too high, 100 percent, nobody's going to work; and if you come down from 100 percent, people are going to drop out. It's not worth working; the government takes so much money. So what is that magic number where we will not depress the economy and, therefore, have the biggest revenue from our taxes? I submit that it is probably less than where we are now, because Tax Freedom Day, I think, is sometime in April. I haven't seen the number for this last year. But Government Freedom Day--that's when you can work the first day so that you can have money to buy your car and pay your mortgage and send your kids to college--that's sometime in July. For a year or two, it was just about July 4th, and I thought, How nice. That's the second freedom that we now have. We have the freedom to use the money that we've made for ourselves; government's not going to take it. Tax Freedom Day is sometime in April; Government Freedom Day is in July. You may have a different perspective, but I think that that's kind of a pretty big burden. As a matter of fact, we may be collecting less revenues from taxes because the taxes are that high. I want to spend the time remaining in talking about these last two articles that I mentioned, biofuels and our defense focus on energy. I have some slides here that will help to illuminate this. Of course, the thing that we're all concerned about now is the economy and taxes, and I think that if you don't factor energy in, oil particularly, you won't have considered all of the inputs that are going to determine what our economy will be. The first slide that we have here, the first chart, it's several years old as you can see, 2008, a couple of years old, and you will see the highest price for oil there was less than $100 a barrel. It really went a little after this to $147 a barrel. These two lines here are the lines that are compiled by EIA and IEA. One of those is a creature of the OECD, to which we belong, and the other is a part of our Department of Energy. And they have been pretty consistently agreeing with each other. This, starting in 2002 and ending in 2008, represents the amount of oil that the world has pumped. And you'll see, for about 3 years before the recession, the supply of oil was constant. Now, with a constant supply of oil and increasing demands, this year, China sold more cars to their people than we did in our country. China has now become the largest CO2 emitter on the globe, not yet the largest energy user, because they are not as good as we are at reducing the CO2 footprint. But what this says is that 3 or 4 years before the recession, the supply of oil was constant and demand was going up in our country. We like to grow. The stock market has a lot of trouble if you only have about 2 percent growth, you may have noticed. And the Chinese are growing. India is growing. Brazil is growing. So there were increased demands for oil. And so the price you can see going up here. It went from $50 to $100 to nearly $150 a barrel. And then the recession. Now, what does the future look like? Because unless you have some concept of what the future is going to be like, you won't be making rational decisions about taxes and spending, because energy is a huge, huge part of our lives. We live better than any civilization has ever lived at any time, largely because of the enormous supplies of this energy. This next chart is world oil production, looking to the future and where will it come from. The dark blue here is conventional oil. That's the kind of stuff we have been using for a lot of years now. We started using it way back in the early 1900s, and we are producing more and more and more. And now, as this chart shows, we have reached a peak. It's called peak oil. By the way, that happened in our country in 1970. It was predicted 14 years before that by M. King Hubbard, who was relegated to the lunatic fringe and ridiculed. But right on schedule, as he predicted, in 1970, we reached our maximum oil production in this country. The world, this chart says, has reached it now; and apparently that is so, because, as you just saw from the previous chart, both the EIA and the IEA had oil production flat for the last 4 years. Now, what will the future look like? This is their projection of what the future will look like. They say that we are going to get from this light blue area a lot of oil. By 2030, we are going to be getting as much oil from fields yet to be developed as we are getting from all of our developed fields now. That may or may not happen. But even more speculative is this interesting red area: Crude oil, fields yet to be found. And that's almost as big in 2030 as the fields we now know and the fields we have discovered and are yet going to develop. Now, the brown area is enhanced oil recovery, live steam and CO2 and pushing a lot of seawater down there if you are near it. These are ways to get some more oil out or, you know, opening up the fields down there and shale and so forth can get more oil out. So this is the additional oil we will get from fields that we now have. That's their guess as to how much that will be. Nonconventional oil, that's like the heavy sour from Venezuela, and it's like the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, which are very interesting, about a million and a half barrels a day. Bitumen, I think, is what they call it. It won't flow, so you have to cook it and then add some volatiles to it so that it will flow. I am reading a very interesting book, written by a Canadian, with a long discussion of the Alberta tar sands. They soon will have mined all that you can do by surface mining, and then it kind of ducks under an overlay that is too big to remove economically. So what they are going to have to do then is develop it in situ, which means, like, you know, pumping live steam down there to make it 1,000 degree temperature to soften up the stuff so that it will flow. But this is a guess as to how much unconventional oil we will get. And then with natural gas--and we are using more and more natural gas-- there are some liquids that will come with that, so they will increase. I think that both this light blue area and the red area and maybe the others, too, are kind of wishful dreams. I think that we will be more than lucky if this top line here is level. I think we will be more than lucky if we can make up through developing fields that we have already discovered, discovering new fields, and enhanced oil recovery and so forth, we will do very well if we can make up for the oil we are not going to get from the fields that we now know. The next chart shows that in a very different way. If you had only one chart that you could look at that would help you decide what you need to do about your economy and what you need to do with taxes, I think this would be the chart. There is a lot of information on this chart. The vertical bars here are the amount of oil that we found in each of those years. And you can go back to the thirties a little and the forties and, wow, the fifties, and then it exploded in the seventies and through the eighties. And we just found a lot of oil, a whole lot more than we were using, because this solid line here represents the oil that we were using. Of course, the area under that will be the total amount of oil that you have used. And if you draw a curve over these, the area under that curve obviously represents the total amount of oil that you have found. So up until about 1980 or so, we had, every year, found more oil than we had pumped. But then after 1980, look what happened. We are using more and more and finding less and less. Now, this chart is about 5 years old, as you can see, because the lightly shaded area there, which was a projection for the future, begins at 2005. And they were projecting a peak at about 2008 or 2009. That's precisely what happened, as you saw from the first two charts. Now, the discoveries for the future are not going to be that very smooth ever less and less. It's going to be up and down like this. But it's not going to be this kind of magnitude. The oil that we are finding now is in very difficult places. A major find in the Gulf of Mexico is under, what, 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. That is way down there. An oil discovery of 10 billion barrels of oil, we heave a sigh of relief. Ten billion barrels of oil. Why do we worry? Why do we still worry if we've found that oil? And we may find several fields of that size. That is because, in the math, it's pretty simple. Every 12 days, we use about 1 billion barrels of oil. We use 84 million barrels a day. I think 84 goes into 1,000 a little less than 12 times. So every 12 days, we've used a bit more than 1 billion barrels of oil. So that big find of 10 billion barrels will last 120 days. That's it. Notice the discontinuity in this use curve, a very interesting phenomenon. Notice the date back in the seventies. The Arab oil shocks back then, it changed the world. In a way they were fortuitous and good, because look what happened, or look what would have happened if we didn't have those oil shocks. This is the rate of increase in the use of oil. Had that exponential curve continued, we would be off the charts. That was a big wake-up call. And we, and most of the rest of the world, became very much more efficient in the way we use oil. Your new freezer and refrigerator and air conditioner is very much more efficient than those of the seventies and early eighties. Exponential growth is a poorly understood phenomenon. Albert Einstein was asked, when they were talking about nuclear energy and what that was meaning to the world, what was going to be the next big thing that we'd find? And he said the most powerful thing in the universe was the power of compound interest. If you just think about that, 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. And 2 percent growth is not much. It's kind of feeble. Our stock market doesn't like 2 percent growth. It wants more than that. But 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years. It's 8 times bigger in 105 years. It is 16 times bigger in 140 years; 16 times bigger in 140 years. Obviously, we're not going to be using 16 times as much energy in 140 years from now as we are using now. So when you're thinking about spending and taxes and what we ought to be doing you need to keep in the back of your mind this reality. Gas is now a bit more than $3 a gallon. Oil is what? Pushing $90 a barrel. And the world is struggling to get out of this recession. There are many economists who believe that when the world comes out of this recession it's going to demand a lot more oil. But we're up against a peak. We can't produce oil any faster. So when you have this demand for oil, and it cannot be supplied, the price is going to go up. And you know, we, in this country, attributed this recession that we're trying to recover from to the housing bubble. But it was kind of the perfect storm. At the same time that we were doing grossly irrational things with financing these houses, we were also hit by peak oil. And I guess it's an economist debate as to whether it was the cost of energy effect or the housing bubble that was most responsible for bringing us to our knees. Now, you can make any projection you want about the future, but one thing is absolutely certain. You can't pump oil you haven't found and developed. And the probability that we're going to be pumping meaningfully increased amounts of oil in the future is very, very small. The next chart is one you need to be looking at when you're thinking about our taxes and our economy and what we ought to be doing, because this is the world according to oil. And the premise here is, let's draw a world where the size of the country is relative to how much oil in reserve that it has. What would the world look like? And then let's color it, so that those who are using a lot of oil show up as yellow, and then blue and then on down to lesser amounts of oil. Well, you look at us over here. A couple of really interesting things. We don't have much. And we're the only country colored yellow. So we're big users of oil, and we don't have much. Well, we don't. We have only 2 percent of the world's reserves. We use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. Our largest exporter is Canada. Wow, they don't have probably as much oil as we have, and they don't have very many people either, so they can export oil. Until very recently, our second-largest exporter was Mexico. They also have less oil than we. But their people are too poor. They have a lot of people. Their people are too poor to use the oil, and so they're exporting the oil. Within about a decade, by the way, the rate at which they are using the oil and the decline in the rate at which they are producing oil, and that's about a decade, maybe less, Mexico will be an oil importer. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez dwarfs us and Canada and Mexico and all the rest of South America. Huge relative to this side of the Atlantic, huge supplies of oil. Saudi Arabia represents 22 percent of the landscape, if the country was sized relative to the amount of oil it has because it has about 22 percent of the reserves of oil in the world. Iraq and little Kuwait, it looked to Saddam Hussein like an errant province down there on the southeastern border. Tiny. Qatar, even smaller United Arab Emirates, hard to find them on the map, isn't it? Look how big they are as far as oil is concerned. And Iran, a present and growing problem. Now, look at China over there. China's next to the biggest user, blue, next to the biggest user of energy to us. By the way, this lighter blue here in Iran. With their present curve for exporting oil and their present increasing use of oil, within a decade, Iran will cease to be an exporter. And this is one of the problems that we face in the world. All these developing countries have increasing populations that, through the miracle of communication, know the benefits of industrialized society, and they're saying, hey, what about us? There are 900 million people in China, three times our population, that live in rural areas that are making just that request of the Chinese government: What about us? So China has a huge challenge in supplying the energy needs of this developing population. And there's Russia. They are vying now with Saudi Arabia to be the biggest exporter of oil in the world. They have more than us. About the same as Venezuela. They don't have anywhere near as many people as we have, and they don't use, per capita, as much energy as we use. So Russia is a big exporter. As a matter of fact, as I said, they're vying with Saudi Arabia to be biggest exporter in the world India. Can you find India on the map there? A billion people, growing rapidly. Buying oil. So you can see the challenge that this presents. And the recognition that we have got to look at our taxes, and we've got to look at our economy relative to the world situation and energy and what is likely to happen to the price of gasoline, because about 70 percent of all oil is used for transportation, and 90 some percent of all transportation is oil. Relative to this is an interesting statement from Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State: We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word ``warping'' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the ``warping'' now of diplomatic effort by the all out rush for energy supply. I don't have the chart here, but China is now buying oil all over the world. Why would China buy oil when it doesn't make any difference today who owns the oil? The person who comes to the auction with money, as we do every week, because we have only 2 percent of the oil, we use 25 percent of the oil; we simply buy the oil from those who have it because we come with the money to do that. Your government has paid for four studies. Here are the four studies that they paid for starting in 2005, two of them in 2005, 2006, 2007. And one of them had two reports, but there were four studies: The DOE report, the Hirsch study, Army Corps of Engineers, and Government Accountability Office. Oh, and the National Petroleum Council also did a study, but two of these are from the same study, just was reported later. All of these said essentially the same thing, that peaking of oil is either present--we didn't know then; you never know until you look back that it's peaked--or, imminent, with potentially devastating consequences. I just wanted to spend the last few minutes we have in looking at some of the statements in these four reports. I think that we paid for the second, third, and fourth because we weren't happy with what the first report said. That was the Hirsch report. But they ended up all essentially saying the same. Let's just spend the last few minutes we have together looking at some of the comments that were in these reports. This is the Hirsch report: World peaking of oil is going to happen. It is obvious. Oil is finite. One day it will be gone. But before it is gone, we are going to reach our maximum ability to produce oil. Peaking of oil is going to happen. Then they say that the world has never faced a problem like this. Unprecedented. The world has never faced a problem like this. From the same report: 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--$147 a barrel--and without timely mitigation-- which we have not done--the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Now, we need to be thinking about this when we are thinking about taxes and spending. We are going to face some huge challenges. By the way, I find facing a big challenge and meeting it successfully is very exhilarating, so I see these reports as challenging and exhilarating. This next one is from the Army Corps of Engineers' study: Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. And, if you think about it, this is really true. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as a frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. As President Bush said, ``We are hooked on oil.'' That is true. This is a quote from Gene Laherrere, a very early pioneer in this, with Colin Campbell, a Frenchman and Scotsman, I think. But they were a number of years ago predicting that this was going to happen and the world should be paying attention. We have had very optimistic projections of how much oil there is going to be in the future. These people have come down from that, by the way, way down from those hopeful projections. But this is Laherrere's assessment of the USGS Report: The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects. So Laherrere said that what they were proposing was utterly implausible. Now they have come way down from those projections. As we are thinking about our taxes and our economy and what we need to be doing about that, this is a reality that we need to pay attention to. This is the top ten companies on the basis of oil production and reserves. The left one is production. Now, we have some big giants like BP and ExxonMobil and Shell. They have 22 percent of the production. Companies that are owned by--well, they aren't companies, really. They are owned by a country. They have 78 percent of all the production. Now, when it comes to reserves, our three big guys don't even show up among the top ten. They aren't even there. Ninety-eight percent of it is from countries like Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraq National Oil, Kuwait Petroleum, and so forth. LUKOIL, which is kind of private, Russia, is 2 percent. As you are thinking about our taxes and our economy and what we ought to be doing, you really need to factor this in because it is a geopolitical reality that is going to make cutting taxes and reducing spending so that there will be something to buy this energy with, which is really going to go up, or our quality of life is going to plateau and turn down and our economies are going to sour quickly with very difficult recovery. All these charts, by the way, you may have noted, are from the Government Accountability Office, a very respectable nonpartisan organization. Worldwide Proven Oil Reserves by Political Risk. How much of it can we really count on and how much of it has some political risk involved? Well, let's see. Low political risk, 413. These are billion barrels, by the way, and these are going to add up to a bit over 1 trillion, which is a generally accepted number of how much oil is out there. Now, we will add a little to it, but it is not going to be a huge amount we add to it. Medium risk, 314. And high risk, 389. What this says is that only roughly one-third, a little more than one-third of the oil that is out there has low political risk, we could really count on in a pinch that it is going to be there. The other may not be there because there is medium and high political risk. This same dynamic is shown in the next chart here, and this is by investment risk. Where can the big oil companies invest their money? Where can we invest our money? Where do we have low risk? Where do we have high risk? Well, in 384 billion barrels, there is no foreign investment. They own it all. They don't need any money, so there is no foreign investment there. Only 165 billion barrels have low risk; 164, medium; 402, high. So just a whisker over one-fourth of the oil that is out there has low and medium risk. I have been privileged to spend this hour talking about our economy and the impact energy is going to have on that.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Madam Speaker, I have come to this floor nearly 50 times to talk about an energy subject. The last time that I was here in the well addressing this subject was about 2 years ago. During those nearly 50 appearances, I came here as a prophet. And now I return to the floor as a historian, because the event that I was concerned about and predicting has in fact occurred. Let me explain. In the middle of the last century, two speeches were given by men just about a year apart. I am not sure they even knew each other. They both talked about the same subject. The first of those speeches was given in 1956. It was, I think, the most important speech of the last century. It was given by an oil geologist to a group of oil men in San Antonio, Texas, in 1956. At that time, the United States was king of oil. We produced more oil, we exported more oil, we used more oil than any other nation in the world. M. King Hubbert predicted to that audience that in just 14 years the United States would reach its maximum oil production. That would be in 1970. And then we would produce less and less each year after that. Remember the context. The United States is in 1956 the largest oil producer in the world, the largest oil exporter in the world, the largest oil user in the world. This was an absolutely preposterous prediction. And so M. King Hubbert was relegated to the lunatic fringe. Just a year later, about a year later, the father of our nuclear submarine gave a speech in 1957, May 15, I believe, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a group of physicians. The audience is irrelevant. You can Google and get this speech. It was found a few years ago, and it's now on the Internet. If you Google for ``Rickover and energy speech'' it will come up. His speech had nothing to do with the audience that he was talking to, because he could have been talking to any audience. Hyman Rickover noted that we lived in what he called this golden age of oil. We had been about 100 years into that age of oil. And he noted how much of the quality of life that we enjoyed then was a result of having discovered how to exploit this resource that we found under the ground. Every barrel of oil--and when I first heard this statistic I was unbelieving; how can it be?--every barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of effort. That means when oil was $12 a barrel, that wasn't all that long ago, you could buy the energy- enhancing qualities of a person working for you all year long, and you could buy it for $1. Because there are 12 man-years of effort in a barrel of oil. When I first heard that statistic, when I first read it, I thought, gee, that can't be true. And then I thought: I drive a Prius car, and it gets an honest, if you are careful the way you drive, about 50 miles per gallon, a little less in the winter. With the winter blends you don't get quite the same mileage. And you know, if I pushed my Prius 50 miles I could do that, but it would take me a long time to pull and push my Prius 50 miles. And just one gallon of oil, one out of the 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, will take my Prius 50 miles. So I thought, well, gee, that's probably true, isn't it, that there are 25,000 man hours of effort in one barrel of oil. Hyman Rickover made what I think was an obvious statement. He was a scientist, of course, and he made what I think was an obvious statement, and that was that oil would not last forever. And he said that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man that the age of oil would be but a blip. He had no idea how long the age of oil would be. When he spoke, we were about 100 years into the age of oil. He did not know how long it would last, but he was certain that in the 8,000-year recorded year history of man it would be but a recorded blip. We now know how long the age of oil will last. By the way, he made several very meaningful statements. One of them was that 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. We now know how long the age of oil will be. We are now about 150 years into the age of oil, and we are not going to run out of oil for a while. But what we are running out of is our ability to produce oil as fast as we would like to use it. Back to M. King Hubbert and his speech just the year before Hyman Rickover gave his speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fourteen years elapsed; and sure enough in 1970, and we didn't know it in 1970 because we had to look back a few years after that to see that was it really true. But in 1970, we indeed did reach our maximum oil production in the United States. If you look back now at the oil production, it's very obvious that that was true. By 1980, it was conspicuously true. We were really, really now moving down the other side of what is frequently called Hubbert's Peak. And so I tell audiences that we have now blown 30 years when we knew of an absolute certainty that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States: we did peak in oil production in 1970. And he predicted that the world would be peaking about now. Now, it's very rational that the United States would be a microcosm of the world. And if he was right about the United States peaking in 1970, shouldn't we have had some concern that he might just be right about the world peaking about now? We peaked in oil production in spite of the fact that we have found oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico that M. King Hubbert did not include in his prediction. And in spite of the fact that we have now drilled more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together, not only have we peaked in oil production, but we have slid so far down the other side of Hubbert's Peak that we now produce just about half the oil that we produced in 1970. As a matter of fact, we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil. We really know how to pump oil because with that 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, we pump 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that on the average, our wells are going to run dry sooner than the average well around the world, because we are pumping our oil four times faster than the average well in the world. I have some charts here that may illuminate what we have been talking about. I have not seen the sequence of these charts, and so we will just speak to them as they come up. The first chart is what is known as the oil chart, ``Peak Oil, the Growing Gap.'' If you had but a single chart to look at to tell the story of where we have come from and where we are going, this, I think, would be the chart. As you can see it, it's a little out of date, because we were predicting the future back there in, what, about '05 and now we are at 2010. And when we get to that part of the chart, we will see how very correct this chart was in its prediction. The vertical bars here are the discoveries of oil and when we discovered it, and notice that back in the late 1930s and 1940s there were some meaningful discussion and, boy, they just crescendoed through the 1960s and the 1970s and some in the 1980s. Now, this solid black line here is our consumption of oil. And, of course, the area under that curve indicates the total consumption of oil up to that time. So you can see, up until the 1980s, we were discovering oil faster than we were using it. So we were accumulating an ever bigger and bigger reserve of oil. That's all of this oil above that use line. It's a production line and a use line. We didn't store any. We used it as we produced it, so it's both the pumping of oil and the consumption of oil. Now, since the 1980s we have had to dip into these reserves because our discovery of oil has fallen down and down and down since the 1980s. As a matter of fact, we now find only about one barrel for every four or five or six barrels of oil that we pump. Now, you can make some predictions about the future from this oil chart, how much oil would we be using. This is the world, by the way, oil production, and world use of oil and how much reserves do we have left and how long will they take us. You can make some guesses about how much more oil we will find, and we are now finding some meaningful reservoirs of oil. We may find a reservoir of oil that has 10 billion barrels of oil. Wow, that sounds like a lot of oil, doesn't it? And maybe our concerns about the future of oil go away when we find 10 billion barrels of oil. We use 84 million barrels of oil a day in the world, and it's pretty simple arithmetic to figure out how many times 84 million goes into a billion, and it's a bit less than 12. What that means is that in less than 12 days the world uses a billion barrels of oil. What that means is when they tell you that we have discovered a field of 10 billion barrels of oil, that will last the world 120 days. Now, how much more oil will we find? Much of the oil that we are finding now we are not pumping because you can't even develop those fields at, what, $85, $90 a barrel, wherever we are today with oil, because it has got to be more expensive than that before you can afford to develop these fields and pump the oil. And, also in these new fields, which are generally very deep, maybe under 7,000 feet of ocean and 30,000 feet of rock--as some of the big finds in the Gulf of Mexico were--oil has to be a bit higher than it is today before you can afford to develop these fields and then one never knows how much oil you are going to get, in fact, from those fields. Well, back to the oil chart here. If you look at, oh, here's the 1970s, remember the Arab oil embargo and the big shocks that we had in the 1970s? That produced some traumatic and very fortunate changes in the world, and its use of oil. Notice, notice this exponential curve up to the 1980s, to the Arab oil embargo, the 1970s and 1980s. Had that continued, had that exponential curve continued, it would be now off the top of the charts. That was a real shock to the world's economy and to our country, and we developed some more efficient ways of using energy. So now with more people living better, the slope now is very much lower than that previous slope. I just want to pause and reflect for a moment on this exponential function because it is a poorly understood function. When someone tells you that there is enough coal, for instance, to last us 250 years at current use rates, be careful to note that at current use rates. Now the National Academy of Sciences says, in fact, we probably don't have 250 years of coal at current use rates. It's probably closer to 100 years of coal at current use rates because we haven't really looked at those reserves since the 1970s. But let's say that we had 250 years of coal at current use rates, and we are going to increase its use only 2 percent. Now, that's not much. As a matter of fact, our stock market doesn't like an economy that's growing at only, at only 2 percent. But if we increase the use of oil just 2 percent, the 250-year supply drops to 85 years. You see, just 2 percent increase in growth doubles in 35 years; it's four times bigger in 70 years; it's eight times bigger in 105 years; it's 16 times bigger in 140 years. There is a very interesting story about the exponential function. I don't know whether it's true or not, but it's a nice story. Chess was invented in an ancient country, and the king was so impressed with the contribution that he told the inventor of the chess game that he would give him anything he wished up to half his kingdom. And the inventor of the chess game said I am a very simple man, I have simple needs. If you will just take my chess board and put a grain of wheat on the first block and two grains on the second and four on the third and eight on the fourth and just continue doubling those grains of wheat until you have reached the last of those, what, 64 blocks on the chess board, that will be adequate, sir. The king thought to himself, silly fellow. I would have given him anything up to half my kingdom, and all he asked for is a few grains of wheat on his chess board. Had he been able to make that contribution, of course, it would have consumed all, it would have consumed more than a decade of all the world's production of wheat. This is the exponential function, doubling it. So whenever you hear somebody say, we have so much of gas or coal or oil or whatever it is at current use rates, please calibrate that. What does it mean if we increase its use? And by the way, we are going to be needing to use coal for things other than just coal and stoking a furnace and making electricity. We would like to make some oil out of it as Germany did during World War II and South Africa did. And you can make some gas out of coal. And if you use some of the energy from coal to convert it to a gas or a liquid, if you have this 250 years--which we don't--and it drops to 85 years at only 2 percent growth rate, it then drops to 50 years if you use some of the energy and divert it to gas or liquid. And then there's another very interesting reality that you will deal with whether you like it or not. You will share your oil with the world. You can't avoid it because if you were using the oil you've produced from your coal, someone else will be buying the oil from Saudi Arabia that you might have bought. So the reality is that you will share it with the world. Since we use one-fourth of the world's oil, 4 goes into 50 12\1/2\ times. What that means is that now this 250 years of coal, reduced to 85 years with only 2 percent growth, reduce to 50 years if you use some of its energy to convert it to a gas or a liquid, and then it shrinks to 12\1/2\ years as you share it with the world, as you must, because there is no alternative if you use oil produced from your coal; someone else will buy the oil you might have bought from Saudi Arabia or some other oil-producing country. Well since the 1980s we have been consuming some of the reserve because we've not found enough oil to meet our needs. Now this chart, as you can see, the actual known amounts, ended in about 2005. And then you see the lighter shaded part on the other side where it shows their prediction. And they predicted that oil production worldwide was going to peak in about 2010. Here we are. Now I think a little later we will have some charts that show, in fact, that that was true. Now what happens from now on? You can make your own guesses as to what is going to happen from now on, you can make your own assumptions. We have still much of this reserve left that we can pump, fortunately. This amount we've pumped here is just about this amount. So we have about this whole amount here covered by my hand that we can yet pump. Now we're going to find some more oil. The chart here shows an orderly downward progression because the more you find, the less there will be to find in the future, so the less you are going to find in the future. It will not be like that. It will be up and down like this, but it is going to be down and down because most of the large fields that will be found have been found. So you can make your own assumptions about where this is going in the future by assuming how efficient can we get, how much conservation are we going to do, how much more oil will we find. But from this oil chart, you can do a lot of predicting about what the future is going to look like. This next chart is a quote from Admiral Hyman Rickover in this talk that I mentioned that he gave to this group of physicians in 1957, There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago. It 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 that we have to invent ways to live off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift. Now, of course, we have done none of that. We and the world in general have behaved as if all you need to do to find more oil is to go look for more oil and it will just be there if the market incentives are appropriate. I love this next paragraph: 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. This is Hyman Rickover's statement. One might conclude looking at the behavior of our civilization that this is precisely what we have done. I have 10 children, 17 grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. Would it be okay if I wanted to leave them a little oil? We are leaving them a huge debt. And wouldn't it be nice if they had some oil, gas and coal? Now they will have some. But as we will see in future charts, it will not be what they would like to have. This is a fairly new chart, and it shows what I predicted. I said that I was a prophet because nearly 50 times I came to the floor, the last time about 2 years ago, then I was predicting that conventional oil was going to peak. And here they show it. This is the dark blue. Look at it. 2010, it's peaked. And they recognize that the world situation will not be meaningfully different from that in the United States, that it's going to go down, down, down. And here it goes. Now they're making an assumption here that you may or may not agree with. I hope they are right. I doubt that they are right, because what they say here, and this is crude oil fields yet to be developed, and this red is crude oil fields yet to be found. And they believe that by 2030, that's not very far in the future, that by 2030, about two-thirds of all the oil that we will be using will have come from fields yet to be developed and fields yet to be found. Now there are many experts in oil that will tell you that this is a happy dream, that there is little chance that that is going to happen. Now we have some other sources of oil. We have natural liquids, and they see those growing. We have nonconventional oils, and they will grow somewhat. These are heavy, sour oils, for instance, the kind that we get from Venezuela. It's the oils that we get from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada, at considerable expense of energy, environment, and so forth. Well this same chart produced 2 years ago would not have looked like this because just 2 years ago, the same people that give you this chart today would have had conventional oil production going up and up. So now there is a recognition that conventional oil production has, in fact, as predicted by M. King Hubbert, peaked in the world. It peaked in our country in 1970. The next chart shows some detail of that peaking. There are two entities in the world that do a really good job of tracking the production of oil. They do not do as good a job in predicting the future of oil production. They do a very good job in tracking how much oil is being produced. One of those is a part of our Department of Energy, the EIA; the other is a creature of OECD, the IEA, and you see those two curves here, and they both show essentially the same thing, and that is, in the 3 years before the recession, oil production was flat across the world, 84 million barrels, a little over 84, 85 million barrels a day of oil production. Now, pretty simple economics: With flat production and increasing demand, what happened to the price of oil? Oh, here it is. Now this chart only goes to less than 100. You remember it went to $147 a barrel a little bit later off this chart? Well now we had the recession worldwide and demand for oil dropped conspicuously. The price of oil momentarily dropped from $147 a barrel to less than $40 a barrel. The world's economy has begun to recover now, and the price of oil is slowly inching up. It is $85, near $90 a barrel. I am reading a book brought to me by an oil scientist, an engineer from Canada, and he makes a prediction that I have been making, so I have some additional confidence that I can restate that prediction. It is that unless we do something really serious about conservation and about efficiency and about husbanding the fossil fuels that we have remaining, that the next recovery will be short lived; because as the world recovers, it will demand more oil and there will not be more oil because we have plateaued, and so the price will go from $100 to $150 to $200 a barrel and the economy will be squelched. Four years ago I led a codel of nine Members of Congress to China to talk about energy. I was stunned. They began their discussion of energy by talking about ``post oil.'' Now, in our country and in the Congress here we have a lot of trouble thinking beyond the next election because it is really important that you get yourself reelected. And our businesspeople have trouble thinking beyond the next quarterly report because, gee, that better look good or the stockholders are really unhappy and the board of directors may replace you if that doesn't look good. So it came as quite a surprise to me that here are people who are looking a long way down the road. We are not post oil yet. By the way, I say we know how long the age of oil will be, and it will be about 300 years. Hyman Rickover said that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. He had no idea how long it would be in 1957 because we were there on the ascending part of Hubbert's peak. But he knew that it was finite and he knew that it couldn't last forever and knew that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man that the age of oil--the golden age, he called it--would be but a blip. We now know how long the age of oil will be. It will be about 300 years. We are about 150 years into the age of oil, and we are not running out of oil. There is a lot of oil left out there; at least as much more oil to pump as we have pumped in the last 150 years. But for the future, that oil will be ever harder and harder to get and more and more expensive. We are now slipping down the other side of Hubbert's peak. We have talked a lot about Hubbert's peak, and here is some old data on Hubbert's peak. It went up in 1970, and then down. You see where we are today. The actual is the green squares there. We now are down to less than half the oil that we have produced in 1970. That is, again, from drilling more wells than all the rest of the world put together, from finding oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, which we didn't expect to find. There are two other interesting things on this chart. Hubbert's prediction was the little yellow triangles here. The actual production from the lower 48 is the green. If you add the oil we found--and remember the huge find of oil in Canada and Alaska, and I have been there. I have been at the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline. It was just a blip in the downward slope of Hubbert's curve. Now, there are those who would like to convince you that Hubbert didn't know what he was talking about because there is a huge difference, they will tell you, between his actual prediction and those green rectangles. Now, I think the average person looking at that would say, gee, he got it pretty close, didn't he. Now a statistician looking at it might say he kind of missed it. He predicted that we would peak in 1970. We peaked in 1970. We are now about half of what we were producing in 1970. I mentioned, when we put our first chart up, that if you had only one chart, that would be it. I think if you were allowed a second chart to give you some idea of the challenges we face, this would probably be that second chart. This is the world according to oil. This imagines a world in which the surface area of a country is relative to how much oil the country has. So the more oil the country has, the bigger it appears on this map; and the less oil a country has, the smaller it appears on this map. And then the things are colored. The coloring is who uses the oil. Well, you can't read this, but yellow is the biggest users of the oil. That shouldn't surprise you. That is us. The blue is the next biggest users, and green next down the line. Well, look at this chart. Saudi Arabia is pretty big. As a matter of fact, it is 22 percent of all of the land mass in all the world if the surface area of a country is relative to how much oil it had. And look at little Kuwait there. It looked like a little province on the corner of Iraq to Saddam Hussein when he wanted to claim it. Wow, look at how much oil it has--just about as much Iraq has. And Iraq and Kuwait and Iran are big oil producers. By the way, look at Iran there. It is a pretty big oil producer, and notice its color. It is blue. It uses a lot of oil. Not nearly as much as we use, but it uses a lot of oil. The truth is that, within a decade, Iran will be an oil importer if their domestic use continues at its present rate and they do not increase their production. Just looking at production in these OPEC countries, back when the world could produce more oil than it might use, if they produced extra oil, it simply drove the price of oil down. Remember when OPEC got together and decided to reduce the production of oil so we can keep the price up. And then they said the amount of oil that you can pump is a certain percentage of your reserves of oil. So OPEC countries that wanted to pump more oil, they just suddenly had bigger reserves of oil without finding any new oil. They just said they looked at it again, the statistics, and they had more oil than they thought. Well, having said that, they could then pump more oil. So we really aren't sure what the size of these countries are, but they are big. But we aren't sure how big, because we are not sure how truthful they were in what they said about their reserves. By the way, they pumped oil for 10 years, and they still had as much oil to pump as they had 10 years ago, without finding any new oil. So there is a lot of suspicion about how much oil is really there. But there is a lot of oil there, and the size of the countries, the oil reserves are relatively what is shown here. Our biggest importer of oil is Canada. Until a bit ago, our second largest importer of oil was Mexico. That has been replaced now by Saudi Arabia. Look at Canada and Mexico. They don't probably have much more oil than we have. Canada has way less than we have, maybe half to a third, yet they are our biggest importer. They can do that because they don't have very many people in Canada to use the oil. Mexico, which has two-thirds as much as we, they were our biggest exporter of oil. We got the second largest amount of oil from Mexico until recently. They have a lot of people, but they can't afford to buy the oil, so they are exporting the oil. The second-largest oil field in the world was the Cantarell oil field in Mexico. This was an interesting field. There was a Mexican fisherman by the name of Cantarell, who brought his fishing nets in, because they were fouled with oil, and took them up to Pemex, which is the national oil company in Mexico. If your fishing nets are fouled with oil, you know who to go to because all of the oil is owned by the national company there. So they finally said, Gee, where are you finding all this oil? We didn't know we'd spilled that much oil. He said, Come. I'll show you. He showed them, and it was kind of bubbling up out of the ocean, and they had drilled there. For a number of years, it was the second-largest oil field in the world. The largest, of course, is the huge Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia. The Cantarell oil field in Mexico is now in rapid decline, falling about 20 percent a year. Look at Venezuela. Wow, it dwarfs us, doesn't it? Venezuela has-- what?--two, three times the amount of oil that we have. See if you can find Europe on this map. Here they are. They're tiny, tiny little countries. Lots of people. Little oil. Dependent on somebody else. The really remarkable thing, though, is China. It is blue over there. It's getting close to yellow. Just a few months ago, China surpassed us as the largest CO2 emitter in the world. There are 1.3 billion people in China. Look at India. Dwarfed. Dwarfed by China. Here it is. There are a billion people in India. Through the miracle of communications, these people know the benefits of an industrialized society, and they are demanding of their leadership those benefits, so there is a huge, huge demand for energy in China and India, and they have very little. Russia. I think Russia is now the largest exporter of oil in the world. They don't have the most oil, not by a long shot, and most Russians are too poor to use much oil. They are very aggressively developing their oil fields, and so Russia is now a major exporter of oil. But note the relative size of Russia. I would think Kuwait is probably larger than Russia, isn't it? Well, you can imagine all of the geopolitical frictions that are going to occur in the future as the availability of oil becomes less and less, as it is harder and harder to get and as its price goes up and up. What do you think will happen with the demands and the tensions in the world? Well, as I've said, if you had two charts to look at, the oil chart-- the first one we showed, I think--would be the first one. This would be the second one because there is an awful lot that you can conclude and surmise from this chart. Now, this chart was implicit in the last chart that we showed you, but this shows it more dramatically. This left-hand bar is the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil production in 2004. That was a few years ago, and it would be a bit different now. Gee, here are the big boys, those huge corporations that can have a $1 billion profit, which is not excessive because it's a lesser percentage than the smaller, profitable, little company. Here they are: Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP. They have only 22 percent of the top 10 production. Seventy-eight percent of that is all in country- owned oil facilities. Look at them: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela, and so forth. Now, the picture is even more distorted if you look at the right-hand bar. These are the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserves in 2004. The big actors in our country don't even show up on that chart. They own so little oil that they're not even among the top 10. They don't even exist on that curve. There is only one that is only kind of not national, and that's Lukoil, in Russia, which is 2 percent. Otherwise, all of the reserves, the top 10 largest reserves--all of those--are owned by countries rather than companies. I mentioned that I went to China. I led a CODEL there--there were nine of us--to talk about energy. They began their discussion of energy by talking about ``post oil.'' That kind of blew me away that they were thinking this far ahead. Then they had a five-point program, and everybody knew it. It wasn't just the people concerned about energy. Everybody we talked to in China was tuned into this five-point plan: Conservation. You know, there is a lot of conservation back in the Arab world. Do you remember the van pools? We didn't have any cell phones then and no Internet, but we had 1-800 numbers, and you were encouraged to get in van pools. Do you remember the little decals over the light switch? Don't be foolish--turn out the light when you're not in the room. Do you remember the decals over the thermostat? Turn it up in the summertime and down in the wintertime. Do you see any of those things now? We knew then it was only temporary. I am having a lot of trouble understanding our collective response to these two situations. Back then, we knew it was temporary. We didn't have enough oil because the Arabs wouldn't sell us the oil. They had plenty of oil to sell. They just were unhappy with us for the moment, and they wouldn't sell us the oil. Yet we did rational things in conservation: We got more than one person in a car. We, you know, turned off the light switch. We turned up the thermostat in the summertime and down in the wintertime. I have no idea why, collectively now, we don't have this kind of a response when oil is more than $80 a barrel and when there is a growing recognition that the world has reached its maximum production of conventional oil, and we will be more than lucky if we can find enough unconventional oil, or new oil, to make up for the loss that we are going to have in conventional oil as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak. Conservation, what is it? Conservation is using a Prius instead of a gas-guzzling SUV. That's efficiency, I guess, too. If you put two people in it, then it's really conservation, isn't it? I remember driving down the road, with two of us in our Prius, and we passed an SUV. I thought, gee, we're getting--what?--six times the miles per gallon, per person, in this Prius at 50 miles per gallon than that one person is getting in that SUV. We could almost immediately, if we had to, if we had the will to, drastically cut our use of energy for transportation. Drive down the road, and see how many people are in the HOV lane. Look at how many of our people are driving with one person in a pickup truck or an SUV. A bit ago, I was in France, and I was looking at how many people were driving pickup trucks and SUVs for personal transportation. On that trip, I did not see a single SUV. On the trip before, I saw one. They weren't driving it. It was parked in the parking lot up at that church up on the hill. I don't know how long it had been there. As far as I can see, they don't even make in Europe the equivalent of our passenger pickup trucks. They have some little trucks that are about the size of ours, but they aren't vanity kinds of trucks. They are ugly, little things that are really utilitarian. They carry stuff around. It's not something you would buy to carry yourself back and forth to work. There are enormous opportunities for conservation. This is where China says it begins. Then they say: Domestic sources of energy and diversify as much as you can. That's what everybody is trying to do, and many of those domestic sources will be alternative sources of energy. Then the fourth one is very interesting: Be kind to the environment. They recognize that they are a huge polluter, but they have 900 million people in rural areas who, through the miracle of communications, as I mentioned, know the benefit of an industrialized society. They're asking, Hey, what about us? And China, I believe, understands that if they can't meet the needs of those people, that they may see their empire begin to unravel the way the Soviet empire unraveled. So they understand that although there is a huge environmental consideration, there is an even bigger consideration on their part to supply energy for these 900 million people in rural areas. So they build a coal-fired power plant, about one a week--I forget the number, a fairly large number of nuclear power plants that are presently under construction. The fifth part of this is a really interesting one, international cooperation. They know that there is nothing really meaningful that any single country can do, and so they plead for international cooperation. I was so impressed in that picture when they looked back over their shoulder on their way to the Moon, and you saw this little spaceship that we call Earth, and that's it, that's all there is, and there's nearly 7 billion of us living on it. And so they recognize that this has got to be a global, international cooperation; or it's going to be really tough. But while they plead for international cooperation, they plan in the event that there won't be any. Here is a chart, a world energy picture in January--this is '05, so they would have acquired some more oil since then--and you can see the little symbol here for Chinese investment in oil and gas. They are buying oil and gas all over the world. And I asked the State Department, why would they do this because today it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. We own only 2 percent of the oil, and we use 25 percent of the oil; that's because we go to what is in effect a global market for oil and we bid and we get 25 percent of the oil. So today there is no advantage in owning oil. So why would the Chinese be going around the world aggressively buying oil and gas? By the way, they almost bought an oil company in our country. You remember all the furor over that when they almost bought that oil company here. Well, at the same time China is buying gas and oil around the world, they are also buying goodwill. What do you need, an airport? Hospital? Soccer fields? Roads? Watch the newspapers at what China is doing as they go around the world buying this gas and oil. Well, at the same time they are buying gas and oil around the world, they are very aggressively building a blue water navy. Now a major concern of China is Taiwan, a little country the size of Maryland, 23 million people--we have about 5 or so--three-fourths uninhabited because it's mountainous. Oh, gee, you can inhabit mountains. But I went to Taiwan. You don't inhabit those mountains. They are really, really steep. China has 1.3 billion people. Why are they so concerned about Taiwan? I had the privilege of spending about an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half or so and we explored that. The concern of course is that if Taiwan can declare its independence, so can a number of other provinces; and they see their empire unraveling. And so I hope, pray, please, tonight that we can resolve Taiwan issues through diplomacy rather than war. Well, at the same time they are buying all this gas and oil and buying goodwill around the world, they are also aggressively building a blue water navy. They don't need a blue water navy to protect their interests in Taiwan; a brown water navy will be just fine there, thank you. I believe--I hope I'm wrong--I hope I'm wrong about a lot of things, by the way--every time I came to the floor, just about 50 times, and talked about peak oil I said I hope I'm wrong, because if I'm not wrong, the world faces some real challenges. By the way, that's not all bad. There is nothing so exhilarating as meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and the energy future that we face is a huge challenge. So I find it exhilarating. Remember the exhilaration of putting a man on the Moon? We need to have that same kind of exhilaration. What are we going to do so we can continue--not just us, but my 10 kids, my 17 grandkids and my two great-grandkids, so that they can live as well as we're living? We're going to have to be very creative and innovative, and we can do that in our country. I hope that the day does not come when China says, gee, guys, I'm sorry, but it's our oil and we can't share it because we don't have enough for our people, and we have a navy big enough to say that we're not going to share it. I hope that day doesn't come. There are three groups that have common cause in solving three very different problems with exactly the same remedy, and these three groups are forever harping at each other, criticizing each other's premise instead of locking arms and marching forward, because the solution to three very different problems is just about exactly the same solution. One of those groups is the group that these statistics identify that are really concerned about our national security. We have 2 percent of the oil reserves in the world. We pump that oil, I mentioned earlier, really fast. We produce 8 percent of the oil. We have only 5 percent, a little less than 5 percent, of the world's population and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil, importing about two-thirds of what we use. Now what is the solution to this? The solution to this is to develop more of our own oil if we can, but that's really tough because we are now really down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So the ultimate solution to that is alternatives. So those who are concerned about national security want to free ourselves from dependency on foreign oil by using alternatives because of national security interests. A second group we've been talking about all evening are those that are concerned that it just is not going to be there. Of course, the solution to diminishing supplies of fossil fuels is to supplement them with alternatives. And there is a third group that we haven't talked about yet--and I am kind of a card-carrying member in all three of these groups--and that is a group that's concerned about climate change. Now, I don't know if they're right or wrong, but what I do know is that what they want to do about that is exactly the right thing to do from a national security perspective. It's exactly the right thing to do, if you believe in climate change or peak oil. These three groups all have exactly the same solution to very different agendas. What we ought to be doing is stop harping at each other's premise and simply lock arms, because whether you believe that the excessive use of fossil fuels is changing the climate or not is irrelevant because excessive use of fossil fuels is certainly diminishing their supply. And from our perspective, a national security perspective, we don't have enough of them. So the solution to all three of these problems is more dependency on alternative fuels. We are near closing time, and I just want to point out--and we'll come back again because there are some wonderful quotes from these five reports--four studies, but two are reports from one study. Your government has paid for four different studies; all of them were prophetic. As I mentioned, we are now historians because peak oil has occurred. But all four of these studies were saying--they were in '05, '06 and '07. And your government didn't like the conclusions of the first one in '05, and so they had another one in '06, another one in '07. They all said the same thing. The peaking of oil is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences. We still aren't paying much attention to this, are we? With the world's economy still floundering and oil already at more than $80 a barrel, what do you think will happen to the price of oil when the world's economy really starts to come back? Well, let's end our discussion here tonight. I have been pleased to spend these moments with you talking about something that's very important to me but I think even more important to my 10 kids, my 17 grandkids, and my two great grandkids. When we come back again, we're going to talk about these reports and what they said, and we'll have some quotes from these reports. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Mr. BARTLETT

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

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor a constituent of mine who was recently honored by his peers within the trucking industry. Mr. John ``Jack'' Saum was named the 2010 Dealer of the Year by the American Truck Dealers, ATD, and Heavy Duty Trucking magazine during the annual ATD Convention and Expo in Orlando, FL. The award recognizes excellence in dealership performance, industry leadership, civic contributions and community service. The winner was chosen by a panel of distinguished professors from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. Mr. Saum is Chairman of the Board of Beltway Companies, LLC, which is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland in my Congressional district. Beltway Companies LLC is a truck dealership with six locations in Maryland which provide sales, parts and service to a large number of trucking companies and their truck fleets. Two of Jack's dealerships are in the Sixth District. Central Maryland International Truck is in Hagerstown, Maryland. Central Maryland International Truck and Idealease is in Frederick. Mr. Saum has been involved in the truck business for more than 40 years having begun his career with International Harvester as a sales trainee in 1969. He held a series of management positions with International Harvester in the Northeast region of the country before joining Beltway International in 1984. Mr. Saum initially served as general manager at the Beltway dealership and assumed the role of dealer principal in 1997 when he purchased the dealership. Under his leadership, the dealership grew exponentially from a single point location in Baltimore to six locations throughout Maryland. Mr. Saum is also a strong supporter of green technologies both in commercial trucks as well as dealership fixed operations. His innovative business approach is exemplified in his ``A New Truck is a Green Truck'' initiative which focuses on environmentally friendly truck technologies. With support from the National Automobile Dealers Association, NADA, and Navistar, Mr. Saum has led efforts to educate public officials about the environmental and fuel efficiency advantages of new truck design improvements with a focus on new diesel-powered trucks, diesel-electric hybrid trucks, auxiliary power units, APUs, and retrofit programs. Another example of Jack's commitment to being a green truck dealer was his incorporation of ``green'' features at his newest dealership in Frederick. Jack installed a recycled oil heating system at this state-of-the-art facility that reduces the carbon footprint of Beltway's operations. As part of his education outreach, Jack contributed a new class 8 18- wheeler ``green truck'' as an exhibitor at the second annual Go Green Conference that I hosted in Frederick, Maryland on June 7, 2010. This free community service event featured more than 125 exhibitors including over 25 energy efficient, low emissions green vehicles. These exhibitors were mainly small and local businesses, like Jack's, committed to help homeowners and small business owners discover practical ways you can save money, use less energy, protect our environment and go green on any size budget. Jack has been a winner of multiple awards from International for dealership performance, financing, lease and rental and operations excellence. More importantly, Mr. Saum was named International Dealer of the Year for 2004 which is the highest honor an International dealer can earn. Madam Speaker, I am honored to represent Mr. Jack Saum and many of his employees at Beltway Companies, LLC. I ask that you and other Members of Congress join me in congratulating him for this recent honor and for his effort on behalf of his fellow customers, his fellow business owners and all Marylanders. I wish him the best for continued success in the future.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of House Resolution 1153, which recognizes the heroic efforts of the West Virginia National Guard and local responders for rescuing 17 persons from a Navy helicopter that crashed in the wintry mountains of that State in February of this year. I want to commend Representative Nick Rahall for sponsoring this legislation. This incident, precipitated when a Navy helicopter was forced down in remote mountainous terrain, exemplifies all that is best about the National Guard and its ability to work cooperatively and effectively with local civilian responders in crisis situations. Without the rapid, integrated response of the West Virginia Army and Air National Guard, the volunteer efforts of local citizens, the support of local emergency management services, and perseverance of State and local fire and rescue services and agencies, 17 people could have died from their injuries and from exposure. Thankfully, there were people at every level of government who were trained, equipped, and prepared to respond. This resolution specifically honors those citizens of West Virginia, but it should also remind each Member to express appreciation to the people in our own States and districts, selfless Americans who willingly sacrifice their comfort and safety for others. In my own district and State, Guards men and women have adopted a flexible ``plug and play'' organization model that enables members to report to the closest armory in time of emergency, thereby minimizing the overall response time during events like the unprecedented snowfalls we experienced this winter. Their round-the-clock vigilance exemplifies the spirit of the National Guard emergency personnel at all levels of government. Thus it is fitting that we honor and thank the soldiers and airmen of the National Guard as well as the first responders and emergency and rescue personnel across our Nation, who, when disaster and tragedy strike, step forward to save and serve their fellow citizens. I urge all Members to support this resolution. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito), an original sponsor of this resolution.

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the bipartisan bill, H.R. 5026, which has been approved unanimously by a vote of 47-0 by the Energy and Commerce Committee. That doesn't happen very often in today's Congress. According to the National Academy of Sciences, this bill is necessary because there is one event that we will not avoid, and that is solar geomagnetic interference--a solar storm. If--really, when--we have a big one like the Carrington event that occurred in 1859, this will shut down our whole grid. It would cost us only about $100 million to protect the grid from EMP. This investment won't be made without H.R. 5026. The consequences of inaction are dire. If our grid is destroyed by EMP or by a Carrington event, which is an electromagnetic storm, the National Academies warn it will cost us between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in damages, and it will take 4 to 10 years to recover. With the grid's being down, more or less, for 4 to 10 years, one can only imagine the consequences to our society. This is a really important bipartisan bill, and I rise in very strong support.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Chairman, we have noted two concerns relative to the Army Reserve line-haul tractors. The first concern is that they are procuring these tractors sole-source, without the benefits and advantages of full and open competition; and, secondly, their procurement is way, way, behind the need. They are in fact about 1,000 tractors short. So I have a very simple amendment which addresses these two concerns: (A) Congressional encouragement of full and open competition. Congress encourages the Secretary of the Army to use full and open competition for the M915 tractor-trailer program beginning in fiscal year 2012; and, (B) Report. Not later than February 15, 2011, the Secretary of the Army shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report on line-haul tractors, including possible courses of action that would accelerate meeting the line-haul tractor requirement of the Army Reserve. We have vetted this with the Army Reserves, Mr. Chairman, and they are in support of it. I encourage a ``yes'' vote on this. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BARTLETT. I would like to thank our Armed Forces Committee Chairman Skelton, Ranking Member McKeon, Committee chair Smith, and all of our colleagues for their contributions to this Defense Authorization Bill. This bill was voted out of committee by unanimous vote because it maintains our objectives of balancing the health and capability of the current force with the needs of future capability. And I also want to thank, really thank the staff for their professionalism, dedication, and extraordinary hard work this year. As an engineer with 20 patents, 20 years of experience with military R&D programs, and 17 years in the Armed Services Committee, I can assure you that the Defense Department's own data provides the proof that Congress must continue to approve the alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter which will ultimately lead 95 percent of all of fighting aircraft. The competition is crucial for our national security and that of our allies because the original engine awarded under a noncompetitive contract is 21 months behind schedule, and according to GAO is estimated to be $2 billion over budget. That's a 52 percent increase and one of the main reasons with redundancy the committee overwhelmingly supports continued funding of the competitive engine. The Department asked Congress to permit the issue of a sole-source contract for over $100 billion for thousands of engines over the life of this program. I owe it to the American people and warfighters to object to something this irresponsible. And, Mr. Chairman, I urge support of H.R. 5136 as approved unanimously by the Armed Service Committee, but a vote for the Don't Ask, Don't Tell amendment abdicates our Constitutional authority over military policy and gives this authority to the President and unelected executive branch leaders. Congress has yielded far too much of its Constitutional authority to the executive and judiciary. Therefore, if this amendment passes, I cannot support this bill.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I thank the gentleman from Oregon for the opportunity to clarify my amendment on the M915 truck program. It was my intent to submit a request for unanimous consent to consider a revised version of my original amendment that had been made in order by the Rules Committee. In fact, I read the revised version into the official record. The revised amendment only encourages the Secretary of the Army to consider full and open competition for future M915 truck procurements beginning in fiscal year 2012. The revised amendment also requires the Secretary of the Army to provide possible courses of action if it helps to accelerate meeting the Army's current requirement for M915 trucks.

Mr. BARTLETT. As we proceed to conference with the other body, I would welcome the opportunity to work with the gentleman from Oregon on this critical issue.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased and proud to rise today in strong support of H.R. 5013. I join my colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, and I especially want to thank the bill managers--Mr. Andrews, Mr. Conaway, Mr. Skelton, Mr. McKeon, Mr. Ellsworth, Mr. Coffman, and Mr. Hunter-- who worked so diligently on this bipartisan legislation. I am very pleased to join my colleagues Congressman Quigley and Congresswoman Giffords in offering this amendment. This amendment provides the Department of Defense the full support of Congress to use energy efficiency as a key tool toward improving our national security and toward providing more value to taxpayers for our defense dollars. This amendment will send an important and strong signal to defense contractors that their bids will be more competitive if their products and services will use less energy. I urge the support of this bill. I am very pleased that, among all of the institutions in our country, our Defense Department is the most aggressive in pursuing good energy policies. We and the world face a huge crisis in energy, so I am pleased that our Defense Department is leading the way in our country. I am very pleased to be here to support this good amendment and a really good bill.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, during the Clinton years, Washington was telling the American people that we had a budget surplus and that we were paying down the debt. After a number of months of bragging about this budget surplus we had and about how much we were paying down the debt, we had to raise the debt limit ceiling. Now, I asked our leadership, Isn't it going to be a little difficult to explain to the American people why we have to raise the debt limit ceiling if for these many months we have been paying down the debt? Why would you have to raise the debt limit ceiling if you've lowered the debt? Well, you may not be surprised that what comes out of Washington is not always altogether truthful. I have a little chart here that helps to explain what happened and why we had to raise the debt limit ceiling when we had a so-called ``budget surplus'' and were telling the American people that we were paying down the debt. Now, we had surpluses in Social Security and we had surpluses in Medicare, and we had a lockbox. You may remember the lockbox. We had a lockbox on Social Security and Medicare surpluses. The lockbox said that you couldn't transfer those moneys to the general Treasury, that you had to pay down the public debt with those moneys. So what we did was take the surpluses from the Social Security trust fund and the Medicare trust fund--and there were surpluses there--and we paid down the public debt; but for every dollar we paid down on the public debt, we incurred another dollar debt in the trust funds. You see, the national debt, the debt that really counts, is the sum of the public debt and the trust fund debt. So, if you simply decrease the public debt by increasing the trust fund debt, you've done nothing to the national debt. It's a little bit like taking money from your right-hand pocket and putting it into your left-hand pocket. Obviously, if you do that, you are neither richer nor poorer after you've taken money from your right-hand pocket and put it in your left-hand pocket. That is what we were doing. Now, very few people know that there is a difference between the public--oh, the public debt is the Wall Street debt. That's all those instruments that we give to people when they loan us money. The trust fund debts, of course, are debts that we owe to our trust funds because, for many years, we've been taking moneys from the American people for Social Security, for Medicare, and for about 50 other trust funds--the Highway Trust Fund and so forth--and we presumably are taking that money and putting it into trust for them. Is that what happens? No, that is not what happens. What happens is we take that money, and if we have any surplus money after meeting our Social Security and Medicare obligations, we then take that money and immediately convert it into a nonnegotiable U.S. security. We move it over to the general trust fund and we spend it. So there is, in fact, no money in the Social Security trust fund or in the Medicare trust fund. That is really a misnomer. It is not a trust fund. I guess you might call it a ``trust debt'' because there is nothing there but IOUs. Now, this year, for the first time, we've spent more money on Social Security than we took in in Social Security. We didn't expect that to happen for several years, but we still have about, I think, $2.5 trillion of surpluses in the Social Security trust fund, so we'll be paying Social Security for a while if we can collect or can borrow enough money from other places to make up for the money that we took from the Social Security trust fund and spent. So, for those months and a couple of years, we were telling people we were paying down the debt. I talked to the CBO, and I think there was never a moment in time, if we kept our books on the accrual method-- which, by the way, we require every small business to do--when the national debt went down. Now, another thing: The debt will always go up more than the advertised deficit. How can the debt go up more than the advertised deficit? The debt goes up more than the deficit because we make the silly statement that the Social Security surplus and the Medicare surplus offset the debt. Of course, if you take that surplus and spend it, it simply incurs another kind of debt. Well, I hope this helps you to understand. I just thought you'd like to know.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I rise in opposition to this bill.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Health care costs are increasing at two and three times the rate of inflation. Obviously, if this continues, it will bury us. So any health care reform needs to address health care costs. There are two major cost drivers in health care. This bill is silent on one and makes the other worse. The one that it is silent on is tort reform. Some people think the defensive medicine associated with the threat of malpractice suits may account for a fourth of all health care costs. This bill does nothing to address that. A second cost driver is administrative costs, which may again represent a fourth of all costs. This bill makes that worse by proposing to give to poor people a policy and incur all of the health care costs associated with that policy. We need to give poor people health care. Give the doctor, the clinic, the hospital a tax credit for giving them their health care. Then we avoid all of the administrative costs associated with that. This bill fails on both of those counts.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I want to thank him very much for his initiative in this effort. Dr. Ivins was my constituent, the laboratory at which he worked is in my district, indeed, just a few miles from my home, so I was very much involved in this case. His colleagues say that he would not have done it, and the FBI said early on that he could not have done it because the spores were weaponized, and he had no ability to do that. More recently, they have been saying something a bit different than that. I have here some quotes that I think will be relevant here. Jeffrey Adamovicz, the former chief of bacteriology--``former'' is important here, because they would not let the current scientist at Fort Detrick talk to me. He just left. The former chief of bacteriology for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland, where Ivins worked, wrote to The Frederick News-Post expressing serious misgivings about the FBI findings that Ivins sent the deadly letters that killed 5 and sickened 17 in 2001. ``The evidence is still very circumstantial and unconvincing as a whole,'' he wrote. ``I'm curious as to why they closed the case while the National Academy of Science review is still ongoing. Is it because the review is going unfavorable for the FBI? ``Ivins' death came about a month after the Justice Department agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement valued at $5.85 million to scientist Steven Hatfill, who had long been the key suspect in the case. Hatfill had sued the Justice Department, which had labeled him `a person of interest.' He alleged that the Federal Government went on a smear campaign and leaked information that was damaging to his reputation.'' Apparently they agreed they had. They paid him $5.85 million. They subsequently agreed, conceded that he was not involved in the case. Gary Andrews, another former chief of the bacteriology lab in Frederick, said it wouldn't have been unusual for Ivins to work odd hours because he was working with animals, and it was more convenient to do it then. He says that ``Bruce didn't have the skill to make spore preps of that concentration. He never ever could make a spore prep like the ones found in the letters.''

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much for your lead in this. This has been devastating to my constituents and the scientists at Fort Detrick. This needs to be brought to a proper close. They did not believe he would have done it; the FBI said earlier on he couldn't have done it. Thank you very much for leading in this.