Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I want to thank my friend for joining me. This is absolutely a bipartisan issue. I don't know that energy and oil knows the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. So I am very pleased that you joined me on the floor. I might say just a word about these two philosophies that are keeping us from really focusing on this issue. One is an almost reference for the marketplace. There are many people who believe that the marketplace is both omniscient, it knows everything; and it is omnipotent, it is all powerful and it will solve everything. Well, I believe the market is really very powerful. But, you know, there are some things that even God can't do. God can't make a square circle, can he? So there are some things that the marketplace won't be able to do. I do not think that the market signals will be able to be responded to quickly enough to meet this challenge. If there were infinite resources, then this blind faith in the market might have some relevance. But there clearly are not infinite resources. The amount of oil out there is, in fact, finite. The other is the near worship of scientists and technology: Don't worry, they will fix it. I mentioned to one of our really high officials in government that peak oil was a reality and that it just wasn't going to be there in the future in the amounts that we need for our economy. And he said, Well, I guess when that happens, the price will go up and people will use less and they will find something else and that solves the problem. Don't worry about it, they will fix it. Well, I point to two different societies: The Mayan society down in Central America. That didn't get fixed and they are gone. Our cliff dwellers out in the West. I am sure that a number of folks have been there and seen those cliffs, and their world is gone. And I am sure when it was deteriorating, they were saying to each other, Don't worry, they will take care of it. Easter Island, a vigorous civilization there, and when we finally found the last survivors of it they were living in caves. They were eating rats and each other because they had done, in that little part of the planet, what we may one day do to our total planet; that is, they were living beyond the renewable resources of their little island there in Easter Island and somebody didn't fix it. There wasn't somebody there to fix it. The next chart looks at a number of the experts and what their predictions are as to when this peak oil that Mr. Markey was talking about is going to occur. And we are now here in 2007 and notice that there is a large number of them here: Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, Matt Simmons. Several of these I know personally. And their predictions are all in the very, very near timeframe. As a matter of fact, Deffeyes believes that we now have passed peak oil. He said he used to be a prognosticator and now he is an historian. He is now looking back at the event of peak oil. And then we have a few that believe it will be between 2010 and 2016. And then CERA. CERA is the largest one here. Shell. No visible peak. Very few who believe that it may be some time off in the future. We will have an opportunity in a few moments to talk about CERA and some of their projections. But notice that most, the large percentage of all of those who have been looking at this and studying this believe that peak oil is either present or imminent. The next chart is a really interesting one. And if you had only one chart to look at, this I think is the most instructive of all of the charts that we have because on this one chart, it shows the discovery, and that is the large bars here. And you see that back in the 1940s we were discovering lots and in the 1950s, and, boy, in the 1960s and 1970s huge amounts of oil. But notice what has happened. Since about 1980 it has been down, down, down. And that is in spite of ever better technologies for discovering oil and ever better incentives. When Reagan came to office, that was in 1980, and we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak; so we knew darn well that M. King Hubbert was right, that the United States had reached its peak and we were sliding down the other side of the peak. And I really liked Ronald Reagan. I can like a person without liking everything that they do. And I thought then and I am more convinced now that his solution to this oil problem was totally the wrong solution. His belief was that if you gave them a profit incentive they would go out there and find it. So they gave them a profit incentive, and, boy, did they drill. And I don't have it with me, but I have a chart that shows the number of wells that were drilled and how much oil was found. And drilling didn't help. You can't find what is not there and you can't pump what you haven't found. So in spite of ever better techniques like 3D seismic and computer modeling, we now pretty much know what the whole globe looks like geologically except maybe we would like to know a little more about Saudi Arabia and some of the countries around the Caspian. But largely we are pretty aware of what the geology is, and we know that gas and oil can occur in only certain unique geological formations. The dark line here represents the use of oil. And you see that for a long while we were finding enormously more oil than we were using. But from about 1980 on, we were finding less and less and using more and more. By the way, notice this little blip here in the 1970s. This is the result of the Arab oil embargo, and had this curve kept going up at the rate it was before, where would it be? There was a stunning statistic up through the Carter years, through this time; every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Wow. What that says is that when you have used half of all the oil in the world, there would be what, one decade left at current use rates? Now, obviously, that couldn't happen because you are not going to use it and then fall off a cliff at the end because the last remaining oil is going to be harder and harder to get. But since about 1980 on, we have now been eating into or reserves, and you will have to take some of this surplus here and fill in this area here. And then what will the future look like? This chart presumes that it will peak in about 2010. And you can make the future, within limits, look differently, depending upon how aggressive you want to be in using enhanced oil recovery and if you want to drill everywhere in the world the equivalent of the half million wells that we have drilled in this country. If you drilled 10 wells rather than one in the Oil Patch, you obviously would get the oil out quicker. You are not going to get any more oil out probably, but you will get it out more quickly. So there may be some argument about what the future looks like, but there can be no argument that you can't pump what you haven't found. Now, if you put a smooth curve over this discovery curve, the area under that curve represents the total amount of our discoveries. That is the equivalent of adding up all these little individual bars. And if you look at the area under the use curve, that will be the amount of oil that we have used. Now, obviously, at the end of the day, those two areas are going to be the same. So unless you think that we are going to reverse this discovery curve and find a lot more oil, and some people do think that, by the way, and we will talk about that in a few moments, but unless you think that we are going to find a lot more oil, the future cannot look very much different than this because you can't pump what you haven't found. Because you can't pump what you haven't found, and the area under this discovery curve cannot be different than the area under the use curve. There are many people who are projecting uses that would just indicate that we are going to have to find enormously more oil in the future. One of those projections is in the next chart. This is from our Energy Information Agency, and this is projections of discoveries. Now, they didn't draw a really smooth curve. They took in some of the big humps, but they could have smoothed this whole thing out. This is the discovery curve we were just looking at. I think you can recognize that, way up here in the seventies and down, down, down since then. Back in about 2000 they were projecting what we would find in the future. Now, they used some very interesting assumptions here. The USGS has done a series of simulations. They have some computer modeling, and they have done a whole series of computer modelings, thousands of these, with different inputs. If this was true, if that was true, then what would the likely amount of yet-to-be-discovered oil be. And they have charted those things, and they have the frequency on the ordinate, and on the abscissa they have the amount of oil yet to be found. Now, this is all a computer game. They simply are making some guesses, assumptions; and they are putting those into this computer model and they are running that model; and as they change the assumptions, they will change the amount of oil they think we will find. So they have gone to the midpoint of that, and they have said that was F, they call it F, and somehow that got distorted to P and they are now talking about probabilities, which is just bizarre, because these are not probabilities. But this is the fraction of oil that you will find more or find less than this. So what did they have here? Three of these curves. They have the P- 95, that is 95 percent probability they say. Then they have the P-50. That is really F-50 in the data they took this from. And then they have the 5. What they are saying is that since 50 is halfway between 5 and 95 it is the mean and therefore that is the most probable. So their projection when they made the chart was that this downward slope was now going to be reversed and we were going to start going up. Of course, if they really are probabilities, and it didn't start as that, it started as these fractional things, but it ended up being projected here as probabilities, if they really are probabilities, there should be another green line down here and another blue line down here. It is like that little funnel-shaped thing you see from the hurricane. Tomorrow you are pretty certain where it is going to be. The day after tomorrow, you are less certain, so that gets to be a big funnel as you go out. So that is what these various probabilities are. Now, not surprisingly, the actual data points have followed the 95 percent probability. If you say those are probabilities, obviously this 95 percent probable is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable. But for what it is worth, the actual data points for a decade or so have been following the 95 percent probability. The next chart, this is from the Hirsch Report. I might digress for a moment to note what the Hirsch Report is. There have been two major studies that are financed by our government. One was financed by the Department of Energy and that was SAIC report. Dr. Hirsch, which is why this is called the Hirsch Report, Dr. Hirsch was the leading investigator on that, and this came out, oh, a year-and-a-half ago roughly. I think we will have some quotes from it a little later. But they looked at this situation, peaking of world oil production, impacts, mitigation and risk management. It is going to peak. What should we do about it, what can we do about it, is what was in this report. This is one of the charts from this report, and these are USGS estimates of ultimate recovery. This is the F that I was talking about. They somehow changed it to P. But this is low, 95 percent; high, 5 percent; and the mean, or expected value, 3,000. Just a word about what these numbers are. These are thousand gigabarrels. Now, we use gigabarrel because a billion in England, I understand, is a million million. A billion in this country is a thousand million. So if you are talking about billions, you may confuse some people. But apparently everybody knows what a giga is, and a giga is our billion. So we are talking about gigabarrels of oil. So this is 2,248 gigabarrels of oil. That is about, what, 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. That, by the way, is roughly the amount of oil that most of the world's experts believe we have found, and we have used about half of that. We have used about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil, so there are about another 1,000 that we have yet to use. But what this prognostication indicates is that we are going to find as much more oil, another roughly 1,000 gigabarrels to bring this 2 up to 3, we are going to find as much more oil as all the oil that is still left in the world. Now, that is conceivable. I think it is about as likely as winning the lottery. I don't think there is much probability of that happening. But even if that was true, and that is the stunning thing that this chart shows, even if that is true, that only takes the peak out to 2016. That is just around the corner. That is 9 years away, even if that is true. This is the power of the exponential function. One of the most interesting lectures I have ever heard was given by Dr. Albert Bartlett, emeritus, University of Colorado, no relative of mine. I wish he were. I wish I had some of his genes. He gives some fascinating explanations of the exponential function. One of them I think is worth spending just a moment on. The story is told that chess was developed in an ancient kingdom, and the king was so pleased at the invention of chess that he asked the inventor to come in and he promised him any reasonable thing. And the inventor of the chess game said, O, king, I am a very simple person. I have simple needs. If you will just take my chess board and put a grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the fourth square and keep doubling until you have filled all of the 64 squares on my chess board, that will be reward enough. The king said to himself, simple fellow. He could have asked for something meaningful, and all he has asked for is a few grains of wheat on a chess board. Of course, the king could not deliver, because it is my understanding that it would take the world's harvest today of a decade to fill the chess board. That is the power of exponential growth. Albert Einstein was asked about what the next great power in the universe would be after the discovery of nuclear energy, and he said the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound interest. Well, Dr. Albert Bartlett's fascinating 1-hour lecture, and just do a Google search for Dr. Bartlett, Albert Bartlett and energy, and you can pull it up, and he has some very interesting illustrations in there. He says the biggest failure of our industrialized society is the failure to understand the exponential growth. But even if we were to find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists, it would push the peak out to only 2016. Now, if you use enhanced oil recovery and pump a lot of CO2 down there and live steam and so forth, maybe you can push it out to 2037, but look what happens after that. Then you fall off a cliff, is what they say in this prognostication. The next chart is an interesting chart from CERA. In an article entitled ``Undulating Plateau Versus Peak Oil,'' it says there is not going to be any peak. I looked at this, and, by golly, it looks like a peak to me. It goes up and then it comes down. Now, they have several different assumptions in here, and they are pretty easy to sort out, I think. This is roughly that 2 trillion, the current known amount of oil; and if that is all the oil there is, they agree that the peak is pretty imminent. But they believe that we are going to find about as much more conventional oil as still exists in reserves. If that is true, then the peak moves out only this far. Then they think we are going to get a lot of oil from the unconventional oil sources, like the Canadian tar sands and our western oil shales and the really heavy oil from Venezuela; and if we get that, then we are going to go up that high plateau. But this is still a plateau I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids and 2 great grandkids. Wouldn't it be nice if we left a little energy for them? We are bequeathing them, not with my votes, but we are bequeathing them the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. I would like to leave them a little energy, thank you, which is why I don't vote to drill in ANWR and I don't vote to drill offshore. I think there is a real moral element to this discussion. If we are going to bequeath them this horrendous debt, which I think is immoral in itself, then I think it is doubly immoral that we give them a world from which we have raped all the readily available energy. Someone suggested in the future they may look back at what we have done and say to themselves, how could the monsters have done that? I hope that they won't be able to say that about this generation, because I hope that we will do better. Well, this curve that they meant to repudiate, peak oil, I think confirms there will be a peak oil. The next chart here is a statement from one of the experts in this field, Dr. Laherrere, and this is what he says. The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery, to reverse the current trend, which is going down, and it is going to go up, 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, he says, 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. And we found a pretty big one just recently out in the Gulf of Mexico, under, what, 7,000 feet of water, roughly 30,000 feet of rock. If you notice, they aren't developing that yet. I am told, and not everything I am told is true because it is sometimes hard to get the correct facts, but I am told that they will start developing that when oil is $211 a barrel, because that is what it is going to cost to get it out of there. I am not sure whether that is true or not. The next chart, I mentioned the oil chart that we showed before as being the single chart I would use if I had only one. If I was awarded two charts to use to talk about this, this would be the second one I would use, the upper part of it. This is a really revealing chart. This goes back through about 400 years of, I generally say 5,000 years of, recorded history. Hyman Rickover referred to it as 8,000 years of recorded history. I might digress for just a moment. I hope to come to the floor the 15th of this May to talk about a really, really interesting speech that Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, gave to a group of physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 50 years ago the 15th of this May. He notes that we have 8,000 years of recorded history. He said at that time, 50 years ago, we were about 100 years into the age of oil. This now introduces us to that age of oil. It was introduced, of course, by the Industrial Revolution which started with wood, the hills of New England, the mountains that were denuded, taking charcoal to England to make iron. Up in Frederick County, which I have the honor of representing, there is Catoctin Furnace up there, which is a little smelter up there, and they denuded the hills up in Gambro where Camp David is. They denuded those hills to make charcoal for that furnace. It is now a historic site. The Industrial Revolution began with the use of wood. The Stanley Steamer used wood. On the ordinate here is the quadrillion BTUs. This is a measure of the total amount of energy produced. Notice that is pretty far down here. Then we found coal. Boy, then the Industrial Revolution took off. But it really took off when we found gas and oil. And notice how that is standing up on end. And notice what happened at the Arab oil embargo here in the seventies. Where would we be if that hadn't happened? That was really a wake-up call. As a result of that, we have enormously more efficient appliances than we had then. Your air conditioner is probably three times as efficient as it was then. Too bad our cars didn't follow that path, isn't it? Well, the interesting thing is that the world's population just about followed this curve. For these 8,000 years of recorded history, we had half a billion to a billion people worldwide. Now with the industrial revolution, the population has exploded. We now have almost 7 billion people in the world. There is, in Hyman Rickover's speech to those physicians 50 years ago, a fascinating discussion of the contribution of energy to the development of civilization. I hope to come to the floor on May 15 and we will spend the whole hour talking about his speech. It was so prophetic. As a matter of fact, he predicted that if we start making too much energy from a food substance, the price of food will go up. We have made trifling amounts of ethanol from corn, and we have doubled the price of corn. We are hurting the poor people who use tortillas because they are made out of corn. My dairymen are financially dying because the price of corn has doubled and the price of milk does not justify that feed cost. They are losing money month by month. Well, this is striking symbolism here. In another 100-150 years, we will be down the other side of the age of oil. This is going to fall off. Is there any reason that the world shouldn't follow the microcosm of the United States? M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956 that we would peak in 1970. We did. He predicted the world would be peaking about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world, and why shouldn't we have been doing something about that? Since 1980, we have known very well that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. If he was right about the United States, maybe he would be right about the world. If it is true that the world's oil production would peak about now, then no matter what we do, drill a half million wells, like we drill in the United States, which would be millions worldwide, it still goes downhill no matter what we have done. Our production is downhill. Very interesting, in 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a blip: 300 years. What will our world look like? Our next chart introduces us to that. Sooner or later, whether we like it or not, we will transition from fossil fuels because they will one day be gone. We will transition from fossil fuels to renewables. This chart looks at the options that we have. We have some finite sources, and we need to come back for another hour and talk in detail about some of these finite sources that we have here and what their potential is, and then let the listener judge as to what contribution they think will be made from this. One of the challenges we have is the fantastic density of energy in our fossil fuels. One barrel of oil has in it the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year long. Hyman Rickover gives some fascinating examples in his speech to those physicians nearly 50 years ago. He said that each worker in the factory had at his disposal the power equivalent of 244 men turning the wheels and so forth; that every family had the mechanical system, stoves and vacuum cleaners, toasters, that represented the work of 33 full-time faithful household servants. He said 100,000 men pushed your car down the road, and the equivalent energy of 700,000 men pushed a jet plane through the sky. Two little examples to help realize this, just think how far one gallon of gasoline or diesel, how far that one gallon of gasoline or diesel takes you. I drive a Prius. It drives 50 miles on a gallon. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles? If you go out and work really hard all day, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now energy-wise electricity is about half the cost of gasoline, but about 25 cents worth of electricity, and that may be humbling to represent that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel, but that is the reality. And that is why we have such an incredibly high standard of living, we have this incredible energy source at our disposal. The challenge is to transition to renewable forms of energy that will provide the same quality of life. We have some finite resources that we can go through. The tar sands, the oil shales, the coal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion. We don't have time today to talk about these in detail. We will come back and talk about those in detail. And then all of the renewables. These will one day be gone, except for nuclear. We will talk about nuclear. If we ever get fusion, we are home free. I think that is most unlikely. If we go to breeder reactors, we buy some problems, but then we have relatively secure energy if you can handle the waste, and so forth, from that. But there are only so much tar sands, oil shale, and coal. They come at great expense. They are pretty polluting processes. Ultimately, we will be down here, getting all of our energy from these resources: Solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy, agricultural resources, soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass. Now there is a lot of talk about cellulosic ethanol. I understand the President on television was saying that there is going to be limited amounts of energy we can get from ethanol because already we have doubled the price of corn. So now we need to turn to biomass, to cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is liberating the glucose that is so tightly bound in the starch molecule that enzymes in our body can't liberate it, but there are microbes that live in the guts of the wood-eating cockroach, cryptocercus, and in the stomach of cows and sheep and goats and so forth that does that for them. So the cellulosic ethanol is liberating the glucose from the big cellulose molecule. Waste energy. Just a word of caution, that huge stream of waste we have is the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. In an energy deficient world, there will be nowhere near as much waste as we have now. We jolly well ought to be using the waste energy now. It is a much better use of this waste than burying it in a landfill, but it will not be the ultimate solution to our problem. Hydrogen. I want to make sure that everyone understands that hydrogen is not an energy source. We talk about it because when you burn it you get water that is pretty darn clean, and it is a great candidate for fuel cells, if we ever get fuel cells. Think of hydrogen as a battery, something to carry energy from one source to another. We have only a few moments remaining, and I would like to put the last chart up. That will introduce us to a longer discussion we will have next time. We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and they have inherited a lot of money. They have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from what they are earning. Here we are getting 85 percent of our energy from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from anything else, and the fossil fuels are not going to last. The kids look at what they are doing and say gee, that is going to run out. We have to do something. Either we have to make more or use less. That is exactly where we are. A bit more than half of all of this other than fossil fuel energy is nuclear power: 8 percent of total use in our country, 20 percent of electricity, it probably could and should be more than that, and then 7 percent. That is going to have to grow until it is 100 percent, but some don't have much potential for growth. Conventional hydroelectric, that is peaked out. We will come back and spend a full hour talking about the potential of these. There are exciting challenges here, and I think it will inspire the best of America

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I come to the floor this evening to talk about embryonic stem cells. With all of the pressing issues of global importance that our country and the Congress is dealing with, you might ask, why are you going the talk about embryonic stem cells this evening; why are you not talking about the potential for global warming and what that might hold in store for our world. We might be talking about the pending energy crisis and the concept of peak oil, and certainly we might be talking about the war in Iraq and the funding resolution that will shortly come before the House. Or we could be talking about a very interesting subject: the debt limit ceiling and why we have to increase the debt limit ceiling and what is that and how does it relate to the debt and the deficit and so forth? We come to the floor this evening to talk about stem cells because a stem cell bill will very shortly come up in the Senate, perhaps even this week. Very probably if not this week, next week. But to put this in context, we have got to go back to last year when there were two embryonic stem cell bills that came before the House and the Senate. One of those started in the House and was known as the Castle-DeGette bill. This was a bill that would permit Federal funding for cells taken from embryos that were surplus in the fertility clinics across the country, and I understand there may be as many as 400,000 surplus embryos that are now frozen in these fertility clinics. This would result in the death of the embryo, and a meaningful percentage of our population does not believe that it is appropriate to destroy one life in the hopes that you might help another. So although this bill got a positive vote in the House last year, it was nowhere near enough to override a presidential veto. There was a second bill that was introduced. I introduced that second bill along with my friend Dr. Gingrey, and that bill garnered 273 votes in the House. You might say that is enough to win, but it was brought up under suspension, which means we need two-thirds majority, and that day that would have been 286 votes; so we failed by 13 votes to get the necessary majority, the two-thirds majority, to pass it. Both of those bills were our bills, the Senate 2754 and the House bill 5526. And along with the Castle-DeGette bill and the alternative bill, which would not result in the destruction of embryos, our bill got 100 percent of the Senators. That is, 100 Senators voting for the bill. It is interesting that there were 63 Senators that voted for both of these bills. They included Senator Arlen Specter, who introduced both of these bills in the Senate; and it also included Senators Reid, Harkin, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, and Schumer. Those Senators voted for all of these bills. We have now passed, essentially, the Castle-DeGette bill again in the House with 253 ayes and 174 noes, and that is nowhere near close to the number that it would take to override a presidential veto. And in the last Congress, the President vetoed the Castle-DeGette bill, and he has promised to and certainly will veto it this time should it get to his desk. This is the bill that the Senate will be voting on next week. So that is why we are on the floor today talking about this bill. By the way, our bill is 322, and it has been cosponsored so far by 34, truly bipartisan support for which I am very pleased. I thought to begin this discussion of embryonic stem cells we might go back to the basic physiology of what we are talking about here. And the first chart I have here shows half of the reproductive tract in a woman. There is another half to this on the other side, a mirror image of this. Most things in our body are mirror images. Things like the liver are not and the stomach. We have two arms and two eyes, and the lady has two ovaducts and two ovaries and so forth. And this shows the stages of development of the embryo. And, of course, what we will be talking about is not what happens in the body but what happens in a petri dish in the laboratory. But the embryo goes through the same stages of development in the petri dish in the laboratory as it does in the ovaduct of the prospective mother. Here we have the ovary, and it contains a very large number of primary cells, which when they develop will become ova. And once a month typically, every 4 weeks, typically, one of the ova matures and the little follicle then ruptures and the ovum comes out. And it is interesting that the ovary is not connected to the rest of the reproductive tract of the female. But there is a funnel-like thing, and we see only a part of the funnel here. This part and this part goes clearly around it. And it is called the infundibulum, and this process is called ovulation. The egg now is released from the mature follicle, and it is usually picked up by the infundibulum and directed into the ovaduct. On occasion it may not be and it may escape out into the body cavity or the celium, which simply means the cavity. And these sperm, millions of which were released in the uterus and they make their way into the fallopian tubes, and some of those sperm actually get out into the body cavity. And this egg that is not picked up by the infundibulum may be out of the body cavity and it may be fertilized by the sperm that gets there, and this is called an ectopic pregnancy. And it is very bad news for the mother and the embryo, and it has to be terminated with surgery. But usually, most of the time, the ovum is picked up by the fallopian tube and it begins its way down the fallopian tube. Notice that fertilization takes place, and that is when the clock starts running, called DZero. Fertilization takes place well up into the ovaduct. And there is a several-day journey. You see them here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, on down. And the fertilized egg now is called a zygote, and it begins to divide. And here you see it is at a two-cell stage, and a little later we will have some charts that show what can happen at this two-cell stage and even later. But frequently these two cells will simply separate until you have two cells that look like the original one you started with here, and that is what we called identical twins. Then they will make their way down the fallopian tube together and implant in an interesting way in the uterus as we will see later. And then the two cells divide and develop into four cells and then the four cells into eight cells. And we will come back and talk about this eight-cell stage because that is the time at which some procedures are done in the petri dish which promise that we can get true embryonic stem cells from embryos without harming the embryo. Well, the cell then goes on to divide beyond the eight-cell stage. And you now have a morula, a ball of cells which may be a fairly large number of cells, maybe 100 or fewer cells. And then it goes on to divide into a very large number of cells, and that is the gastrula stage. The morula and the blastula and then on to the gastrula down here. The gastrula stage develops into three germ layers. The next chart shows a little more clearly what is happening. And here it started with a zygote and it skipped all of the stages that we talked about here, the two-cell, four-cell, eight-cell stage and so forth. And it goes directly now down to the blastocyst and then on down to the gastrula. And then the gastrula, we see the three germ layers developing. And notice that most of what we have here is not going to end up as an embryo. What is going to end up as an embryo is this little bit of material here, and the rest of it is going to end up as supporting tissue, the amnion and the chorion and the fetal contribution to the placenta and so forth. But at this stage, just about the time the egg is implanting, as you saw, and by ``implanting'' we mean it connects itself to the uterus, this cell is implanting at about the time that the three germ layers are developed. From these three germ layers will develop all of the tissues of the body. These three germ layers are called the outer germ layer, or the ectoderm; the middle germ layer, or the mesoderm; and the inner germ layer, or the entoderm. From the ectoderm develops our skin, the integumen, which is defined as an organ. It is about the biggest organ in the body, actually, and a very complex and interesting one. And then the brain and spinal cord all of our nervous system develops from the ectoderm. From the mesoderm develops most of the mass of our body, the muscles and the bones and the blood. Here you see the blood, which is a tissue that develops from the mesoderm. From the entoderm develops the lining of the gut and the lining of the lungs and so forth, although the mass of the entodermal tissue is nowhere near as large as the mesoderm and the ectoderm. In some organs they play a very essential role. It is interesting that when you have a cancer and it metastasizes, it metastasizes usually only two tissues of common embryonic origin. What that means is that if you have a cancer on mesodermal tissue, when these cells break loose and float through the lymph system, it will metastasize only to tissues that develop from mesoderm. So it is very interesting that all through the life of the person, these tissues retain some of the original characteristics of these three germ layers. And the body cells, the T cells and so forth are programmed to know the difference between these body tissues. I mentioned T cells. I shouldn't do that without explaining a little bit of what they are. Very early in our embryonic development, there are some unique cells that will end up in the blood. Some unique cells are developed, and they are now imprinted with who you are, and this is very early in development. And it is their role all through your life after that to keep track of who you are and identify any invader that is not you. So if a virus or a bacterium or something like that gets in, the T cells immediately detect that as being foreign and they now alert the leukocytes, which are the white blood cells, which have phagocytic, which means they can envelope and ingest. These organisms have phagocytic activity, alert them that that is an enemy and you need to take him out. And that is called our response system to infections and so forth. And, by the way, if you have a little pus pocket, that is the remains of thousands, maybe millions of these leukocytes that have come to do battle for you, and they have died in the process. But not to worry. Your bone marrow and lymph system are making a whole lot more lymphocytes. Sometimes these T cells get confused, and it is not really clear to them what is you and what is not you. And sometimes they will falsely identify some of your tissues as being foreign to you, and then the leukocytes will come in and attack the other body defenses will come in and attack these tissues. We refer to these diseases, and there are a whole long list of them, as being autoimmune diseases. I have one of those diseases, and many, many people have that. Some types of arthritis is an autoimmune disease. You have the arthritis because your T cells have inappropriately identified these joint tissues in your body as not being used, so they are now being attacked by the body defenses. I want to look at just one more slide and then call on a colleague of mine, Dr. Gingrey, who has joined me in filing this bill. This is a little illustration of what happens with monozygotic twins. Mono means one, and you saw what the zygote was. That is the fertilized ovum. Monozygotic twins, we call them identical twins. It begins with the fertilized egg, the zygote, the two-cell stage, then it may develop to two inner masses. Actually, the division can occur at the two-cell stage. The division, we have some reason to believe it can occur as the two inner cell mass stages. These will later develop into the three germ layers we talked about. You can differentiate when that division occurred by how the babies present themselves at birth, whether they are in two amnions or in a common amnion. They, of course, should always be in a common chorion. The chorion is the big tough sac on the outside. The amnion is the thinner sac on the inside filled with the fluid called the amniotic fluid that protects the baby during its development. I would like to note, by the way, that one of these two identical twins is a clone. I didn't think the sky was going to fall when we talked about cloning, because nature has been doing it for a very long time. But sometimes we should let nature do things and not mimic or interfere in what nature is doing, and I understand the concerns relative to cloning. But it is just of interest to note that nature has been doing this for a very long time. Dr. Gingrey has joined us. Let me now yield to him.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much. I am very appreciative of the contribution that Dr. Gingrey is making. Being a physician and having delivered a very large number of babies, he obviously brings a level of authenticity and credibility to this discussion. On this chart, we have another couple of sequences which shows--the previous one we looked at showed the development of identical twins-- this one shows the production of paternal twins. The mother may slough two eggs. As a matter of fact, with the in vitro fertilization, since we aren't sure that any one of them is going to be potent to implant properly, frequently the doctor will place several in the uterus and more than one may implant. I have a good colleague here, Dana Rohrabacher, whose wife had three babies. That is nice. That gets the bottle feeding and diaper changing all over pretty quickly, doesn't it? But this is what happens when the mother sloughs more than one egg naturally. Both of these eggs will be fertilized, because there are millions of sperm there, and they start to divide, and this is what is going down that little C-shaped fallopian tube in the uterus that we saw before. Then at the blastula stage, it gets down to the uterus, and usually they will be somewhat separated and they will implant some little distance from each other, so when they present at birth the doctor will know immediately they are fraternal twins, because they have separate amniotic sacs and separate placentas, just two different babies, one attached to one side of the uterus and the other perhaps attached to the other side of the uterus. But sometimes if they implant very close together in the uterus, they will develop with a fused chorionic sac which may mimic the single chorionic sac that is produced with identical twins. Then, of course, you will know whether they are identical or not, whether they look alike or not; and if you aren't really certain of that, you can do DNA to determine if they are identical twins. Madam Speaker, President Bush appointed a council on bioethics to look at this whole embryonic stem cell debate. When he came to office, of course, money was being spent on a number of embryonic stem cell lines, and all of those stem cell lines were produced by destroying embryos, and the President was faced with a dilemma, was it right to take one life because when you destroy an embryo you are taking a life, to hopefully help another. His own personal ethics would not permit him to do this, so he set up a council on bioethics to determine were there techniques where one could get embryonic stem cells without killing embryos or harming embryos. This is from page 25 in this white paper. It said, ``Thus, apparently normal children have been born following removal of one or two blastomeres from the six to eight cell embryo. However, long-term studies to determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later developing injury in children born following PGD,'' preimplantation genetic diagnosis, ``have been recommended and are sorely needed.'' Well, maybe we need those studies, but I think nature through the years has conducted a very large number of studies for us. I want to show you this identical twin slide because in identical twins, half the cells of the embryo are taken away, and each half produces a perfectly normal child as far as we can tell, and it has been going on for roughly 8,000 years of recorded history. No one has ever suggested there is anything deficient in an identical twin. As a matter of fact, when President Clinton appointed a commission to look at this, it was an identical twin who chaired the commission, and I asked him when he was on the Hill here if he felt less a person because he was only half the original embryo. Of course, that is a silly question because he certainly doesn't feel any less a person. But that is what many people would have you believe. That somehow taking a cell or two from this early embryo, if you take two cells from an eight-cell embryo, the result will be three-fourths of a person because you took a fourth of his cells away. Well, no identical twin feels half a person because the other half of that original embryo produced his or her identical twin. So one would be enormously surprised if this had any effect because, as I say, in 8,000 years of recorded history with millions and millions of identical twins produced, no one has ever hinted that there is any deficiency in an identical twin because they shared the cells from an original embryo with their mate. It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. These are the single cells that are taken out up here, extracted from early embryos, and in ways that do no harm to the embryo. Now medicine has marched on, and as I will explain, we have the evidence that we can do this. The initial success of the Verlinksy group efforts raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells, which means the pluri is many. It is not totipotent. Totipotent is totally potent. That is the cell can produce anything and everything, including another embryo. When I first started exploring this potential, I had the nagging concern that the single cell I took from that early embryo would be totipotent and what I was dealing with was just another embryo, in other words I was king of making identical twins. But I am very pleased that no one out there believes that the cells taken from the 8-cell stage are totipotent. What this means is you shouldn't be able to get an identical twin from something beyond the 8-cell stage, and clearly you can, so there are some things going on here that we may not be totally familiar with. But there are a lot of things going on in the body that we can't explain. As an example, if you remove part of your liver, and there are very few organs in the body that have this potential, but the liver will now regenerate what you have taken out. The question I have always asked myself, as long ago as 50 years ago when I first had these courses, no, 60 years ago now when I first had these courses, how did those cells in the liver know, millions of them, how did they know enough was enough, that the liver was now reconstituted to its original size so they could quit dividing. I have asked that question of current physiologists, and no one knows the answer to that. And if you have a bone broken, in the healing process you have a callus developing on that bone. There is a thickening of the bone, and then gradually that is taken away and the bone is returned pretty much to its original shape. How do those cells know they have taken enough away? Or how do they know that they have developed enough of a callus to strengthen the bone until it is well calcified, until it is strong enough. What we are going to be talking about is this and a number of other techniques that are included in the legislation that I talked about, H.R. 322, and the one that was passed in the last Congress. The next slide shows some of the techniques that were reported by the President's Council on Bioethics as potentially offering the hope that we could get embryonic stem cells from an embryo without killing the embryo. Our first depiction here is normal fertilization. The cells divide and grow in the mother. One of the last divisions is what we call a meiotic division. The usual division is a mitotic division. Before the mitotic division, the chromosomes divide so when the cells separate, each cell has the normal number of chromosomes called the diploid number, and the single unit of chromosomes is called the haploid number. Well, obviously if you are going to have a human being who has the normal number of chromosomes, you have to end up with half as many of those chromosomes in the egg and half as many in the sperm, and that is accomplished by a process known as miosis. So in the egg and in the sperm cell, there are only the haploid number of chromosomes, only half the full complement of chromosomes, and they now join in the egg. There is quite a miraculous process that occurs there. There may be millions of sperms trying to fertilize the egg, but essentially instantaneously when one cell makes it into the egg, then the covering of the egg becomes absolutely impervious to any other sperm. If that wasn't true, you would end up with two sperm getting in, and then you would have triploid, or three, and that would be fatal for humans. Trisomy 21, for instance, is what happens to a human when just one of those chromosomes, mongolism, when only one of those chromosomes is three in nature, and sometimes that happens in the division of the cells, and that is called trisomy 21 or mongolism. It is very interesting in plants that many replications of the chromosome, or polyploid, is a very beneficial effect. The flowers get bigger with better colors, and that is one of the things that plant breeders do is use a chemical to produce polyploid, bigger and better plants, and some that aren't any good but you can just discard them. That is how we have gotten many of miracle crops, by polyploid. The second depiction here is of cloning. In cloning, you take an egg cell and you take the nucleus out of the egg cell so now you have an egg cell without a nucleus. And then you have a donor cell, and you can get the nucleus from this donor cell into the egg two different ways. One, you can fuse the two and the nucleus will then migrate to the egg; or you can simply take the nucleus out of the donor cell and put it in the egg. Now all of the controlling material in the egg is not in the nucleus. There are a number of cytoplasmic factors that control what the genes, what the chromosomes and the nucleus does. So this goes on to what appears to be a fairly normal birth. In parthenogenesis, that is an interesting one, in parthenogenesis, miosis does not occur and the egg retains its diploid number of chromosomes and the egg goes on and divides. And some animals, by the way, reproduce by parthenogenesis. That rarely happens in humans. Some animals reproduce almost exclusively by parthenogenesis. The next slide is another depiction of some of these same techniques, and it goes just a little further. Here we have the classical development and embryonic stem cell derivation. What they do here is when you get to this blastocyst area, you have two choices. One, you either implant it or freeze it to keep it for implantation later; or you destroy it and get your embryonic stem cells. This is classic technique for getting embryonic stem cells. This was the technique that the President had ethical concerns about which is why he issued his executive order which said that Federal money could be used to support research using the embryonic stem cell lines in existence at that time, what, 60 or more, now down to 20 or 22, and we knew that they would eventually run out, and now we are faced with a crisis because what do we do, these stem cell lines are running out. There is a big hope in the medical community that we can get some fairly dramatic cures from embryonic stem cells. Here are embryonic stem cells from a single blastomere. This is what we have been talking about. You take a single blastomere cell from the embryo, and you can implant what is remaining. They have done that more than 2,000 times. They have done what is called a PGD. It started in England. There are a number of those labs in our country, and the parents would like to know whether or not their baby is going to have a genetic defect. So they take a single cell out and they do a genetic diagnosis. If there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells in the mother, and more than 2,000 times now we have had what appears to be a perfectly normal baby. Indeed, the big surprise would be if it wasn't a perfectly normal baby because in nature in producing normal identical twins, half the cells are taken away and nobody argues that identical twins are not normal people. Then the process of nuclear transfer, and one of the techniques that is suggested here is a modification of that, modification of that cloning, and this is altered nuclear transfer. This is the modification. In this one they make sure that you are not going to have a clone because they deactivate one of the genes. CDX2 I think it is called there. They deactivate one of the genes so that it will simply develop into a cell mass with no organization. You can now get from that cell mass the cells that you wish, but there is no organization and it is not an embryo. You can see some obvious objections to this. You are just producing a freak and why would you want to do that to a perfectly normal zygote that you started with. The next chart shows this altered nuclear transfer in a little more detail. We have seen this one before. Altered nuclear transfer is where you knock out the gene for normal development so when you have taken the nucleus from the egg and replaced that with a nucleus from the donor cell, you now have knocked out the gene in this nucleus for normal development, so you are simply going to get a growth of cells. It is not going to be an embryo, and there obviously some ethical questions about this, but this is being debated. This is an oocyte-assisted reprogramming. What this says is that in the oocyte, and I mentioned the factors that are out in the cytoplasm, and if you intensify those and let them work, they will assist in this and it increases the genes for embryonic stem cell growth without producing an organized embryo. And this is the technique which I suggested, embryo biopsy. I went to NIH way before the President issued his executive order, and having had a course in advanced embryology nearly 50 years ago, and recognizing what identical twins were, it occurred to me you ought to be able to take a cell from the early embryo without hurting the embryo. I asked the NIH researchers when they had an open house out there one day while the President was making up his mind, and they invited Members of Congress and staff to come out. I do not remember any other Members of Congress. There was a lot of staff there. I asked them should this not be possible? They said, well, it certainly should be possible. In fact, you know, it is certainly easier just to take the embryo and disaggregate, they call it. That means stir it all up. Disaggregate it and take your embryonic stem cells from what grows from that. There is another interesting proposal of how to get embryonic stem cells without killing embryos. If you deal with in vitro fertilization, you produce a number of embryos and you have eight of them that you have thawed out and you are going to look at them to see which ones look strong enough to be fertilized to place in the woman. There are some of these embryos that will not make it. They appear to be alive, but they will not go on and divide. So, in just a little while, they are going to decompose and die, and the proponents of this technique argue that they are a bit like the brain-dead person, that is, an individual that is not going to make it but the parts. We take body parts from brain-dead people for transplant. So they argue you ought to be able to get good cells from an embryo that is not going to divide any further. I have several slides, and I did not bring all of them, which show the criteria which are fairly reproducible and verifiable that the embryo is, in fact, dead--because you would not want somebody to say, gee, I think that embryo is going to die so I am going to take it because I would like to get a embryonic stem cell line from that embryo. The next slide slow shows a bit of an expansion on this. Embryonic stem cell assisted reprogramming, and the acronyms, particularly DOD and much of the other professional societies have lots of acronyms. I guess that is so they appear more erudite and you cannot figure out what they are saying. Differentiation using cell proteins, this is the assisted development I mentioned because this cell suite, this is from the cytoplasm, and this contains factors that controls what happens in the nucleus. They turn on genes and turn off genes and so forth during the development of the embryo. You can modify that. Differentiation, a new term, should not use these terms without describing what they are. When you start out with the cell mass and the developing embryo, so forth, those cells are undifferentiated, they are all the same. They then begin the differentiation process where you have an ectoderm, a mesoderm, and an intaderm. Then it goes on to differentiate from that. You can get bone from mesoderm. You can get muscle from mesoderm. You can get blood cells from mesoderm. So the differentiation goes on from that. Then there are postnatal tissues, and these are the tissues from which we can get adult stem cells. It might be worth just a moment to mention the dialogue that is going on between the enthusiasts for adult stem cells and the proponents of embryonic stem cell research. Most of the medical applications have been made from adult stem cells, and that is because we have been working with adult stem cells for more than 3 decades. It just takes a while for something to go from the laboratory to the hospital, and we have had that time for the adult stem cells. We have not had that time for embryonic stem cells because we have been working on them for only a few years. Now, this permits some people who are very zealous for protection of the embryo to say, gee, we really should not be looking at embryonic stem cell research because all of the contributions so far have been from adult stem cells and so, therefore, why would you want to go this route because presumably all the applications in the future are also going to come from adult stem cells. That may be true but I will tell you that there is nobody that I know of in the professional community who believes that that ought to be true. These embryonic stem cells may be like the rambunctious teenager. They can be somewhat uncontrollable, and in some of the early experiments, they have gone on to produce cancers and growths and so forth, and who knows what the ultimate will be. But I will tell you, and you know from what you see in the papers and hear on television and so forth that there are a number of people who believe that diseases like Parkinson's disease and diabetes and spinal cord injuries and so forth could maybe be cured with the application of embryonic stem cell research and medical developments. It is true that theoretically, philosophically, there ought to be more applications from embryonic stem cells just because of what they are. They are pluripotent cells. They can make any and every cell in the body. We have some adult stem cells, and we generally get them from the bone marrow, the blood, and there are stem cells with a variety of blood cells that are produced and you can sometimes trick them into believing they are not what they are so they can also make some other tissues. The next slide shows the little schematic on the dead embryo, and what this shows is that you can tell--and these are reproducible and verifiable--you can tell that an embryo is probably--well, not probably--is not going to make it, and then the argument is that you ought to be able to take cells from that embryo ethically. Of course, the other argument would be if the embryo is about to die, why would I want a stem cell line from cells that are suspect. Clearly, clearly, if we can make the altered nuclear transfer work, where you can take the donor cell which is a cell from the patient, if you can make embryonic stem cells from that, that is the route we want to go because then the organ you are making, whatever you are making for that person, is going to be them, and you can implant it in them. There is not going to be any rejection. If it comes from any other source, you are going to have a rejection phenomena, but we have developed clinical techniques for handling that. There are lots of people with organ transplants, and they lead productive, comfortable lives for quite a number of years. When I first started this discussion, we conferenced with a lot of individuals, and one of those was a representative of the Conference of Catholic Bishops. Sometimes in life, you see something or somebody says something, you say to yourself, gee, why did I not think of that; it is so obvious and so right and so productive. That happened in this dialogue. We were talking about taking cells from the early embryo that would not hurt the embryo, but then you get the idea that, gee, it might. You can make the argument and certainly should not because you can take half the cells away in identical twins and obviously it has not hurt the embryo at all, so why should taking a cell out of the embryo make any, yeah, I know, but it just might. So you need to do some work with that to make sure it does not hurt the embryos. There is always an outside chance that the person lives to be 90 and they determine some defect that was as a result of taking the cell out earlier. So the suggestion was made by Mr. Dortlinger that, gee, the first thing you do with that cell you take out is to make a repair kit. Wow, why did I not think about that? It is obviously such a right thing to do. What you do to that cell now is to make your replacement, which by the way is what parents are hoping to sort of do when they freeze umbilical cord blood. Now, those are not embryonic stem cells in umbilical cord blood. They are adult. So when the baby is born it is an adult. As a matter of fact, the day you are born is the day you start to die. Things start to go downhill from the day you are born. So these are adult stem cells, but they have characteristics that may be more amenable to alterations, to modifications than adult stem cells taken from a 50-year-old. By the way, there has been a new technique which some heralded, now we do not need to think about embryonic stem cells because you can take amniotic fluid, and as the baby is growing from the earliest stages on, but it has to be in amnion before you can get these cells in the amniotic fluid. You can get some embryonic stem cells there, and so a big push was made, gee, let us stop talking about embryonic stem cell research because now we have got these stem cells from amniotic fluid. But the person who discovered that made the observation that this was complementary to embryonic stem cells and should not be considered in place of embryonic stem cells. It is certainly a good place to get cells that are more easily reprogrammed to believe that they are not what they are at that stage of development, but he said that it should be considered complementary to embryonic stem cells and not in place of stem cells. Well, the Senate is going to vote on this in a few days now; that is, they are going to vote on the Castle-DeGette bill. It will certainly pass, and I think they are voting on exactly the same bill. So it does not even need to go to conference. It will then go to the President, and the President will do what he did in the last Congress. He will veto the bill. So here we will be with only a few embryonic stem cell lines running out. They are all contaminated with mouse feeder cells, and so they may or may not be amenable to actual therapy, but in any event, these stem cell lines do run out. With the enormous potential that many people believe embryonic stem cells have, we will be in a situation where there is only a few embryonic stem cell lines which are running out and a public out there which is demanding and they come to our office. One of those compelling things are these kids with this big thing in their body like a hockey puck which is pushing insulin because they have juvenile diabetes, and they are very brittle and they have to trickle that in little by little during the day to maintain the status quo. So here we will be with embryonic stem cell lines running out, with a cry from the public and the professional part of the public that we need to move on with this. My hope is that when the President has vetoed this bill, the Castle-DeGette bill, he will, he did last time and he will again, that then they pass our bill which was passed 100-0 in the Senate last year, by 273 votes in this House. In fact, they got more votes than the one that is being sent on to the President from this House. So, hopefully, that bill will come up next and can move to the President's desk, and he will certainly sign that bill and we can get on with ethical embryonic stem cell research. Mr. Speaker, I would hope that all of our listeners out there who have a Representative that they believe may not be supportive of this, would they please contact that Representative and urge them to support this bill. It will provide ethical embryonic stem cell research. Neither I nor any of the others know what the ultimate result of this will be, but I will tell you the potential for clinical cures and application because of embryonic stem cells being what they are has to be greater than adult stem cells. Mr. Speaker, let us hope that we can move this clock very quickly because there are a lot of people out there that need this kind of help.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

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

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to share with my colleagues a recent column by a constituent that offers timeless advice about healthy eating for healthy living. [From the The Tentacle, Feb. 14, 2007] Our Government, Our Health, Ourselves (By Patricia A. Kelly) There's a movement underway to ban the use of trans fats, but New Orleans isn't going along. Their chefs don't use them much anyway. They choose real foods, like butter, for their renowned cuisine. Eating margarine began during World War II with bags of lard and coloring packets that you mixed in. There was a shortage of butter because of the war. Margarine use continued in my Washington suburban family because of price, I think, and, of course, the government said it was okay. I started eating butter when in my 20s. I read something in health food literature that said butter was actually better for you than margarine. Hydrogenated (trans, polyunsaturated, hardened) fats have extra molecules attached to their chains by clever scientists. They are harder for the body to break down than natural, softer, animal fat molecules, or minimally-processed vegetable oils. They are thus more harmful to, and persistent in, the body. Of course, the recommendations included other things, but actually allowed in the diet the star of the government nutrition wars--the infamous, then out, now in, but only a little in, egg. Drum roll, please. . . . We've been paying taxes for this: for government nutrition experts to tell us that we should be eating margarine; that we should, or should not, eat eggs; that we should only eat special margarines; that we should not eat the margarine they were saying we should eat last week--for the past 35 years, at least. The truth was available to me, a reasonably intelligent person and an ordinary mom of limited means, surfing around in the health food literature, looking for the best way to feed my family. I read it. It seemed logical. I believed it. If you eat artificially altered foods, you are taking a risk, because we don't yet know the long term effects, or whether there is alteration in the nutrition available from these foods, or contamination. We do all know how convenient it is for large food producers to grow cornstalks that are the same height, tomatoes that don't spoil, and apples that last, unchanged, for a year in storage. We also know how these wonder foods taste. If you can't remember the difference, go to another country and taste the fresh produce. You can fool your vegetarian cow into eating the ground-up bones of dead animals in her feed. That doesn't make them good for her. She's not a vulture. She would never eat them on her own. If you eat her meat, it might not be too good for you either. You might not know this for 20 years, of course, until you get Jacob-Crutchfeld disease, and die horribly. Ground-up bones are really cheap, though, and our government said they were safe. Animals raised in close quarters with processed feed do better if they're given antibiotics. You might do better with them, too, if you were standing in your next-door neighbor's poop. Our government says there aren't any antibiotics left in the meat that might increase antibiotic resistance and endanger our population. Our government also thinks it is safe to use bovine growth hormone on cows; and I'm sure the cows don't mind tripping on their own udders. We are wondering why so many nine-year-old girls are reaching puberty now, though. I'm sure it can't be due to anything they're exposed to. If you're wondering, just ask our government. Logic dictates that, if you eat a balanced diet, you have a better chance of getting the nutrients you need. If you live on sugar and caffeine and fast, high-fat, overly refined foods, your spirit might be happier for the moment, but your body will suffer in the long run. These foods are being advertised to make money, not to help you. Eating less meat and a greater variety of whole plant foods reduces the impact of people on the environment because it takes so much more grain to feed a cow than to feed a person. Eating a variety of seeds, grains, fruits, nuts and vegetables increases your chances of getting all the micronutrients you need. Cow's milk is really good for cows. If you eat more calories than you need, you will gain weight. Reading the labels will tell you what's in your food. Nobody reading this column would have any trouble figuring any of this out. We don't need to, though. We have the government. Don't get me started on HPV vaccine, and how girls mostly get the virus from boys, and boys from girls; but it's only recommended for girls. Whatever you do, don't ask my opinion on the recent, widely publicized estrogen replacement study. It reported the outcome of giving a specific combination of mare's urine estrogen/progesterone pill to 64-year-old women who were way past menopause with no prior hormone replacement. Huge numbers of litigation conscious doctors withdrew every form of hormone replacement from virtually all of their female patients because of this one. Our government thought it was safe to take Prempro, and then, suddenly, not safe at all. I think it would be a good idea for our government to narrow its focus back to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To me that means keeping us safe and free and unbothered with expensive nonsense, paid for with our tax dollars. Maybe our nutrition scientists could spend their time making sure there's no poop in the ground beef, and that the cows are dead before they're skinned. I know I'd sleep better.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I believe this is the 24th time since the 14th day of last March that I have come to this floor to talk about a subject which is growing in importance. That subject is energy. I had the privilege of leading a codel to China. We left just after Christmas and we spent New Year's in Shanghai. There were nine of us who went there, and the primary purpose of that congressional delegation was to talk to the Chinese primarily about energy. I was both surprised, shocked, and really pleasantly surprised that they began their conversation about energy by talking about post oil. This just wasn't the energy people in China, it was high officials in other parts of the government. Everywhere we went and spoke with them, they talked about post-oil, a recognition that oil cannot be forever, and they talked about a five-point program. The first point of this program was conservation, a recognition that the world has no surplus energy to invest in developing alternatives. If there was any surplus energy, we wouldn't be paying $60 a barrel for oil. Conservation not only frees up oil, but it buys some time because if we in fact are producing oil at the rate at which it is consumed and we cannot easily increase that production, then we have not only run out of surplus energy, we have also run out of time. So an aggressive conservation program will buy some time and free up some energy that we can invest in alternatives. So the first part of their five-point plan was conservation. The second and third points was diversify, get energy from as many other nonfossil fuel sources as you can, and get as much of it as you can from your own country. From a national security perspective, that makes good sense. The fourth point in their five-point program, and again, it wasn't just the energy people in China talking about this, it was leaders in government in several other parts of the government, the fourth part of their five-point plan was be kind to the environment. You think, gee, that is strange they would say that since they are the world's biggest polluter. They are the world's biggest country. Their economy grew at 11.4 percent for the last quarter. And they know they are a big polluter. They are apologetic. They have 1.3 billion people, and they don't know how to use energy wisely, and they are asking for cooperation so they might use their energy as efficiently as we use ours. The fifth point was that we need international cooperation because this planet is a little spaceship, not all that big. It once seemed absolutely enormous when we sailed the ocean in sailing ships, but now with airplanes it seems much smaller. We are here together, so we have a global responsibility. I thought of this attitude on the part of the Chinese when I read an article that appeared in the New York Times on page 1 on March 5. It says, ``Oil innovations pump new life into old fields.'' Bakersfield, California. That is out in the desert. I used to teach medical school out there and drove through Bakersfield coming east. This states the Kern River oil field, discovered in 1899, revived when Chevron engineers here started injecting high-pressure steam to pump out more oil. The field, whose production had slumped to 10,000 barrels a day in the 1960s now has a daily output of 85,000 barrels. In Indonesia, Chevron has applied the same technology to the giant Duri oil field discovered in 1941, increasing production there to more than 200,000 barrels a day, up from 65,000 barrels a day in the mid-1980s. And in Texas, ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, expects to double the amount of oil it extracts in its Means field which dates back to the 1930s. Exxon, like Chevron, will use three-dimensional imaging of the underground field and the injection of gas, in this case carbon dioxide, to flush out the oil. I might pause to interject here that this is a very appropriate use of carbon dioxide. It is a greenhouse gas. Its concentration in the atmosphere has about doubled in the last couple hundred years, and most of the world's scientists who study weather believe that the Earth's temperature is increasing and that the greenhouse gases, chief among them carbon dioxide, are responsible. So sequestering the carbon dioxide and pumping it down into these wells to force the oil out is a doubly good thing. It keeps it from going into the atmosphere, and it gets some additional oil. This article continues, within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and at the same time higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world's reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil will be found than ever before. Well, I have a chart here which looks at the oil discoveries back through the last number of years, last 70 years, and we see here in the bar graph the discoveries of oil and we see there were some big discoveries in the 1940s and 1950s and 1970s and down in the 1980s. And ever since that time, it has been down, down, down. That is in spite of ever-better technology for discovering oil. They mention the 3-D seismic computer modeling they are using. We now have a pretty good idea of the Earth's geology, and so we know where we might find gas and oil. Some very unique geological conditions are necessary in order to have gas and oil. We don't really know how the oil and gas got there, but there are some reasonable conjectures, and if you understand these conjectures and if they are correct, it gives you some clue as to how much more gas and oil we are likely to find. The most popular theory goes that a long time ago when the Earth was more uniformly warm than today, there did not appear to be the torrid equator or the frigid poles, and because there were subtropical seas at the North Slope and in ANWR and in Prudhoe Bay, and those subtropical seas had a seasonal growth and then death of algae-like organisms and maybe some small, animal organisms with them like the algae that grows on your pond today. I don't know that they had winters, but they had seasonal growth, and each season it would mature and die and then sink to the bottom, and Earth runoff would mix in and overlay it, and then the next year another layer of the organic material was deposited. This continued until there was big buildup, a lot like at the bottom of a lake. Then the theory says that the tectonic plates of the Earth moved and surface seas with all of the organic material mixed with the inorganic, rock and sand, were now submerged down under considerable pressure and near enough to the molten core of the Earth there was just the right combination of pressure and temperature. And with time, this organic material was converted into what we know as gas and oil. Now the products were some very short-chain products such as gases, methane, the shortest of the chains; and then very long chain ones which end up as Vasoline or waxes or something like that. If there was not a rock dome over this, kind of an umbrella of rock, then the gases would have escaped through the years and what would be left was some tarry stuff that you couldn't pump because you would have to heat it up. That is known as heavy oil where it exists today. You have to heat it up or mix it with volatiles to get it moving. This dome keeps the gas from escaping. This was the explanation why for many oil wells when you finally pump down into the oil, it is not a pocket of oil that you are sucking out like a soda through a straw. It is all mixed with sand and rock, fractured rock and so forth, but it will flow. For wells that were gushers, this gas pressure that accumulated under the rock dome was now pushing down on this oil, and it pushed it up the well pipe. So we had these gushers. Well, this may not have been the way that oil and gas was produced, but it certainly sounds logical because that is where we find it, where we have these rock domes and so forth. What that means is, of course, that with these current techniques that we have of mapping the world, we can find those areas which have rock domes, which were likely to and with the location relative to the edges of the tectonic place, we can now identify where it is probable that you might find gas and oil production. And with ever-increased capabilities, computer modeling and 3-D seismic, we have found less and less oil through the years. Now, this chart has another curve on it, and that is the consumption curve. Interesting curve. You will notice for a long time we were finding enormously more oil than we were using, because we were using this much, but we had found that much. But from about 1980 on, increasingly we have found less and less oil and used more and more oil. I would like you to note the interesting change in the curve here in the 1970s. There was a stunning statistic up until the seventies, the Carter years, with this rate of increase and use. Every decade the world was using as much oil as it had used in all of previous history. Now that is a stunning statistic. What that means is that when you have used half the world's oil, there would then be 10 years left at current use rates. Well, we had a big shock in the 1970s at the Arab oil embargo, and we learned how to be much more efficient. For, what, 10 years or so here, there was essentially no increase in oil, and now it is slowly going up again as the world's economies grow. In China, bicycles are banned on some of their streets. I was late getting to one of the appointments there because of traffic jams in Beijing. I was, a couple of years ago, in Moscow, and traffic jams in Moscow. I was there in 1973, and the streets were essentially deserted. The only cars I saw there were a few government cars. So all over the world there is a surge in interest in automobiles, and they are now being bought by the Indians. And not very long, the Indian middle class will be as big as our whole population. Information technology, which they excel, is increasing this middle class. Now, this chart looks at what the future may hold. This article that I just read, ``Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells'' says that we are going to have more oil than we have ever found. Now, we are not really finding new oil, most of this is oil that is in some of these fields, and these bars will go up higher here because now, with enhanced recovery, we are able to get more oil out. And they are making the projection that we are going to find as much more oil as we have remaining. And one projection is, and I will come to that in a few moments, that we are going to find as much more oil as we have ever found. The next chart shows an interesting picture. This is the same consumption curve that you saw there with the same perturbations between the seventies and the eighties as a result of the Arab oil embargo. Now, this chart, which is from our Energy Information Agency, is assuming something that I think is not rational to assume, and that is that we are going to find as much more oil as all of the reserves which we now know to exist. A couple of congresses ago, I chaired the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and one of the first things I wanted to do was to determine the dimensions of the problem, and so we had oil experts from all over the world come in. How much oil did we find? How much of what we found is still there? And there was surprising unanimity from just under 2,000 giga barrels to just over 2,000 giga barrels. That is their figure here of 2.248,000 billion barrels. Now, we use giga barrels. They said billion barrels here, that is because it is for an American audience. But if you were in England, a billion is a million million, in this country it is a thousand million. So you may confuse the audience when you are talking about billions. If you use giga, apparently gigs is a billion the world around. But what I want to point out in this chart is that even if they are correct, that the main amount, expected amount of oil that we will find, is 3,000 giga barrels, that moves the peak out from the present to only 2016. So even if they are right, and I think the probability that they are right is small, and I will give you several evidences of that as we go along, but even if they are right, even if we find as much more oil as all the reserves that we now know to exist out there, that will move the peak out only from about now, when most of those who work in this area believe that peaking has occurred or will shortly occur. If we find there is much more as that which remains, and by the way, of this 2,248,000 giga barrels, we have used about half of that, and about half of it remains. Now, with this enhanced oil recovery that this article is talking about from the New York Times, we will get a bit more of that. How much more remains to be seen. But if we find this extra roughly thousand giga barrels, that will only move the peak out to 2016. Now, one of the authorities in this area believes that we will find another thousand giga barrels, and we will be up around 4,000 giga barrels total. If that is true, since this is an exponential curve, and this was only, what, 16 years? The next may be only 12 years. So that moves the peak out only to about 2028. And that assumes that we are going to find as much more oil as all the oil that has ever been found. The next chart shows an interesting prediction, and the data that was collected following the prediction. This shows the discovery curves. What this does here is to kind of round out those big bars that you saw in the previous one. And here they have done a very interesting thing. They have taken the F-5, F-50 and F-95, which was fractional, and I don't have the chart to how they got there, but I can tell you how they got there. What they did is run a lot of simulations. And they had the number of simulations on the ordinate, and they had the amount of oil that the simulation indicated would be found on the abscissa. So, they put these numbers into their computer simulation, and they got numbers out, and they graft all those numbers. And then they found the mean of those numbers, and they found that 95 percent, which meant that 95 percent of the predictions indicate you would find more oil than that and so forth. And so they assumed that the most likely thing would be the mean. Now, it was a mean of their projections. But somehow that F got translated when it went from USGS to the Energy Information Agency, it got translated to P, which is the probability. Now, if this is really probability, this is a bizarre use of statistics. So they show here three probabilities. They show the P-95 probability, the P-50 probability and the P-5 probability. Now, if these really are probabilities, there should be another green line coming down this way; because if you are only 50 percent certain, obviously that is a pretty broad funnel you create out there. If you are only 5 percent certain, it is really broad. It is like the path of the hurricane. For the next 24 hours, they know pretty well where it will be, so that is pretty narrow. But as you go out in time, 2, 3 and 4 days, why it gets wider and wider because you are less and less certain of where it is going. So there should have been another green line down here and another blue line down here because you have a broad uncertainty if you are only 5 percent certain. But notice what the actual data points have been doing. They have been following, as you might suspect, the 95 percent probability, if in fact it is probability. Obviously 95 percent probable is a lot more probable than 50 percent probable. In a wide-ranging study published in 2000, a U.S. Geological Survey estimated that ultimately recoverable sources of conventional oil total about 3.3 trillion barrels, that was this little mean number in the previous chart right here, of which a third has already been produced. What has been produced is a half of what we have discovered. They are predicting that we will discover for that mean, as they call it, as much more oil as all of the reserves that we now know to exist. More recently, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultant, estimates the total base of recoverable oil, and here they have 4.8 trillion. The little chart I showed you before had that at just under 4 trillion, you will remember. But notice from the peaking chart that even if that is true, that will push peaking out to only a bit before 2030. That is not all that far into the future. Then they say there is a minority view held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some Members of Congress, that would be me, that oil production has peaked, but the theory they say has been fading. Well, they should have told that to T. Boone Pickens, because an Associated Press article, March 1 of this year, just a few days ago, this is from Doha, Qatar, he is over there talking about oil. And by the way, I didn't know until I read this article that he started his professional life as a petroleum geologist. We know him as a very wise investor on Wall Street. Legendary Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens sees today's stubbornly high price as evidence that daily global production capacity is at or very near its peak. If demand for crude rises beyond the current global output of roughly 85 million barrels a day, Pickens told the Associated Press, prices will rise to compensate, and alternative sources of energy will begin to replace petroleum. If I am right, T. Boone Pickens says, we are already at the peak. If that is true, the price will have to go up. And then he makes this statement: ``I think there are less reserves around the world than are being reported.'' Well, the two sources I mention are reporting greatly increased reserves. T. Boone Pickens says that he believes that they are over-reporting, said the 78-year-old former--by the way, young people can be very bright, but wisdom comes with age, and so T. Boone Pickens has 78 years of wisdom--who now heads the Dallas-based Hedge Fund BP Capital. There are no audited reserves in the Mid East. It makes me suspicious, he says. We really don't know how much oil is in the Mideast because they do not open their books for us to see. Forbes publisher, Steve Forbes, challenged Pickens' assumptions during an exchange during the conference saying political, not technological or geological, road blocks stood in the way of increasing the world's oil production. Now, I know Steve Forbes, and I admire him very much, but I think that he gives far too much credit to the marketplace. Many people believe that the market is both omniscient, that is, all knowledgeable, and omnipotent, all powerful. If we had unlimited resources, the market might do what Steve Forbes has confidence that it will do. With the right incentives in places, such as Mexico, more oil could be brought to market and prices could drop, Forbes said. Pickens responded by saying that Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries, indeed. Thirty- five out of the top 43 oil-producing countries in the world have already reached peak. Pickens responded by saying that Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries, naming the United States, Norway, Britain and soon Russia. By the way, Russia did peak once already, and then they kind of fell apart with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They are reaching a second peak, which I believe will be less than the first peak. ``The world has been looked at,'' Pickens told Forbes. ``There is still oil to be found, but not in the quantities we have seen in the past. The big fields have been found and the smaller fields, well, there is just not enough of them to replenish the base. Global consumers, led by the United States, have already pumped 1.1 trillion barrels of oil, roughly half of the 2.2 trillion barrels that have been discovered,'' or what Pickens describes as nearly half of the world's estimate. He thinks we will find a little more, 2.5 trillion barrels of oil. Other experts put reserves at 3 trillion, Energy Information Agency; or 4 trillion barrels of oil, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. ``From now on,'' Pickens said, ``rising demand will be met by higher prices, rather than ever larger crude oil production. Alternative energy sources will begin to take a share of the energy market until the world evolves from a hydrocarbon-based economy to something that is a mix of hydrocarbons and something else. Everything from nuclear, coal, wind, solar, hydrogen and biofuels stands a chance to assuage growing demand for energy.'' I would just like to make a comment about hydrogen. All the others are truly energy sources. Nuclear, coal, wind, solar, biofuels are energy sources. Hydrogen is not an energy source. So why do we list it there? You can't mine hydrogen; you can't pump hydrogen. The only way you can get hydrogen is to make it from something else. Unless you are going to violate the second law of thermodynamics, it will always take more energy to make hydrogen than you will get out of hydrogen. It is made today largely from natural gas. It can also be made by electromagnetizing water, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Well, if you will always use more energy to make the hydrogen than you get out of the hydrogen, why would we be interested in hydrogen? Well, for two reasons. One is that when you finally burn it, you get water. Water is the oxide of hydrogen. When you burn hydrogen, you get hydrogen oxide. We commonly call it water. That is pretty nonpolluting. The second reason we are interested is that it is a great candidate for fuel cells if we ever get economically supportable fuel cells. We have been working on them for a long time, experts tell us, maybe 20 years. We will have economically supportable fuel cells, but that's the reason we talk about hydrogen. A lot of people believe hydrogen is an energy source. Hydrogen, think of it as a battery, is something that carries energy from one place to another place. You can't put the falling water in your car and run it, nor can you put the electricity, unless you have a lot of batteries in your car to run the car, but you can take the electricity you get from the hydroelectric plant, split water, compress the hydrogen, put the hydrogen in your car. So you are really running your car on the energy from the waterfall. But secondhand you produce hydrogen with it, and if you have a fuel cell in your car, now you will not only be running your car, polluting, just with water, which is pretty nonpolluting, but you will also get at least twice the efficiency out of that as you get out of the reciprocating engine. The next chart is a very interesting one that shows us the sources to which one might turn to get energy other than the energy we get from fossil fuels. This chart reminds me very much of a young couple whose grandmother has died and left them a big inheritance, and they now have established a pretty lavish lifestyle. Eighty-five percent of all the money they spent came from their grandmother's inheritance and only 15 percent of the money they spend comes from what they earn. They look at their grandmother's inheritance and how old they are, and, gee, this money is not going to last until we retire, so obviously we have got to do something, and that something is going to be either make more money or spend less money. That is pretty much exactly where we are relative to energy. Eighty-five percent, some people will tell you 86 percent, but 85 percent of all the energy that we are expending today comes from natural gas, from petroleum, and from coal; and that leaves only 15 percent of the gas to come from other sources, of energy to come from other sources. A bit more than half of that 15 is nuclear energy. That is 20 percent of our electricity, and in France, by the way, about 80 or 85 percent of their electricity comes from nuclear; and in our country, about 20 percent, but it is 8 percent of our total energy. So when you look at the true renewables, only 7 percent now, it is a little different that this today, because this is a 2000 chart, and we have been really ramping up with solar cells, for instance, producing solar electricity. That market has been growing at about 30 percent a year. That is incredible growth. But this started out as 1 percent of 7 percent, that is .07 percent. Suppose it is four times bigger today, that is .28 percent, less than a third of a percent, big deal. We have got a long way to go. Thirty-eight percent of this renewable energy comes from wood, but that is not the person heating their house with wood so much as it is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product to produce energy. Waste to energy, 8 percent of this 7 percent. There is a really state-of-the-art plant up here in Dickerson. They will be happy to have you come visit. It is really a showcase, and they are burning waste to produce electricity. Now, one word of caution about waste: that huge stream of waste represents a big investment of fossil fuels, and don't count on having that big stream of waste in an energy-deficient world. We will live comfortably, we can live comfortably, but we will be producing far less waste in the future because all of that waste represents the use of fossil fuels. If T. Boone Pickens is correct, and, by the way, he is not the only one, there are a number of experts out there who believe that we have peaked or are about to peak, there will be less and less of this waste. But at least for a moment it is a great use of this waste material, much better, I think, than putting it in a landfill. Recycle what you can; what you can't recycle, why, burn it to produce energy. Wind. That is growing; it is really efficient. Our big wind machines today are producing electricity at about 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. By the way, none of those big ones are made in our country. I hope we can change that, but Norway makes them, for instance. These are huge machines with blades that turn very slowly. You have to be a really sick bird or bat that flew into those. These aren't the little ones they had first where the blades twirled around quickly and did kill some birds and bats. You may have seen them. They are really quite large, and, I think, quite handsome. That could and should grow. It is really growing in California. It is a totally renewable resource. By the way, the wind is simply secondhand sun. The wind blows because the sun heats the Earth unequally and so it is differential temperatures on the surface that cause the winds to blow. Then the big chunk of these renewables are conventional hydroelectric. Now, in our country we have pretty much tapped out on the conventional hydroelectric. We probably dammed every river that should have been dammed and maybe a few that shouldn't have been dammed. They are now building fish ladders, and we are blowing up some of those dams because we think that the environmental pressures are greater than the relatively small amount of electricity we get from some of those. That probably can't grow much in our country, conventional, but microhydro produces far less environmental impact and some believe might be as big as conventional hydro. This is a little dam and small amounts of electricity, maybe only watts, but 100 watts, 24/7, that will produce a fair amount of light for your reading, for instance. At this 2000 chart, alcohol fuel represented 1 percent of 7 percent, that is .07 percent. Today it represents more than that. We have a number of ethanol plants; it is growing very rapidly. There is a very interesting speech given by Hyman Rickover to an audience of physicians. The 50th anniversary of that will be in just a few days, few weeks, the 14th day of May. In that article he noted, that speech, really, we used to have a transcript of it, he noted that one day there would be competition between energy and food for our biological crops. I thought of that when I spent some time on a couple of occasions recently with our dairymen; and what has happened is that with the relatively small amount of ethanol we have made from corn, the supply demand has been so changed that in September of last year corn was $2.11 a bushel, and in December it was $4.08 a bushel, nearly double. The price of tortillas in Mexico has gone up, which is hurting poor people there, and our dairymen are going bankrupt because of the high cost of feed. Now, this is a boon to the corn producer, but it is anything but that to the animal feeder, because with the relatively small amount of ethanol that we have made, we have doubled the price of corn. Well, this pretty much is where we are going to have to find alternative energy sources, and it is quite obvious, if you stop and think about it. You may want to put this off into the future, but at some point we will reach peak oil. I think we are there or nearly there for conventional oil. Then at some point in the future, oil and gas will be so hard to find, and so expensive, that other sources of energy will be more attractive. We will look back in the future at the age of oil, and what an incredible age it was. If you do a Google search for Hyman Rickover and energy, you will pull up the transcript of this fascinating talk that he gave almost 50 years ago. He, in that talk, goes through a very interesting history of the development of civilization and the role that energy played in the development of that civilization. All one has to do is kind of reverse the tape, as you may see, when somebody jumps into a swimming pool, and you reverse the tape and they jump back out of the swimming pool. So we can see the contributions energy made to the development of civilization, and you reverse that tape, you can get some idea as to what would happen to our civilization if we are not able to derive energy from other sources equivalent to that, which we are getting from fossil fuels. The next chart is a very interesting one from CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and this has several projections of peaking on it. Now, the title of this article is ``Undulating Plateau Versus Peaking,'' and what they are contending in the article is that those who believe in peaking probably also believe in the tooth fairy, that they are about as probable. But in that article they have this graph which shows a peak. I agree with them that it will not be a smooth plateau, that it will be undulating. I disagree that it will be that far in the future and it will be that broad. But let's look at this chart. They agree that if we find no additional large quantities of oil, that's the roughly 2 trillion barrels that will have been found, that's the current discovered oil in the previous charts, the peaking will be occurring fairly soon. If we find another, roughly another trillion barrels by enhanced recovery and going under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock, as that last oil find in the Gulf of Mexico was, that we can get that much more conventional oil. So peaking will be pushed out to about this point. And then they are looking at unconventional oil. And just a word about some of that unconventional oil. There are incredibly large potential reserves of unconventional oil. For instance, the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, contain more potential oil than all the oil that has been discovered so far. The same thing is true of our oil shales out in Utah and Colorado. So why aren't we resting easy then that there is no problem for the immediate future because there is this incredible reserve of oil? Now, they believe that we are going to tap a pretty large amount of that. In Alberta, Canada, they are exploiting this field. They have a shovel which lifts 100 tons at a time. It dumps into a truck which hauls 400 tons, and they carry this 400 tons to a cooker. They have what is called stranded natural gas in Alberta, a lot of gas and not many people. And since gas is hard to transport, it is not worth much because there is not many people there to use it, so we call it stranded. So its value is low. And from a dollar and cents perspective, they are making a lot of money in Alberta. It is costing between $18 and $25 a barrel; that is bringing $60 a barrel. That is a very handsome profit, so they are aggressively exploiting this field. They are using natural gas to cook the oil. The natural gas will not last forever. They know that, so now they are looking at the possibility of building a nuclear power plant there. I have asked: How long do you have to operate a nuclear power plant before you get back to the fossil fuel energy it took to build the nuclear power plant? I get wildly divergent estimates of how long that is, which makes the point that we really need for this dialogue, which we really need to have, we really need an honest broker to help us agree on the facts, because it is very difficult to have an enlightened discussion when you can't agree on the facts. That honest broker might very well be the National Academy of Sciences. They are very knowledgeable. They are highly respected, and I think that they would assume this responsibility and I hope that we can find the resources so that they can do that. Now, the Canadians know that this is not sustainable. The gas will run out. And, in addition to that, this vein, if you think of it as a vein which has now pretty much surfaced, it will shortly duck under a heavy underlay so there will be a lot of material to remove above it, so much so that they could not economically continue to mine it and carry it to the cooker. So then they will have to develop it in situ, in place. They really don't know yet how they would do that. Now, the real profit that you need to look at in any of these things is what is called energy-profit ratio, how much energy you put in and how much energy you get out. In the big oil fields, and we have no giant oil fields in our country. We have never had one. The Ghawar War Field, perhaps the grand daddy of all oil fields in Saudi Arabia, has been producing oil for a very long time, and for much of its life, it was producing $100 worth of oil for $1 worth of investment, energy- profit ratio of 100. Our oil was never that good. It started out maybe 10 or 20, and now it is down to 1 or 2 energy-profit ratio, how much energy you have to put in compared to how much energy you get out. And so although there are very large potential reserves in these unconventional oil fields, the net that you get out will be very much less. Even if it is feasible to get it out, the net will be very much less than the amount of oil which is there. Now, they are working very hard in Canada. It is a huge enterprise. They are producing about 1 million barrels a day. That is a lot. But that is less than 5 percent of what we use in this country, and just a bit more than 1 percent of the 85 million barrels a day that the world uses. So even though this is a tremendous effort and a lot of oil produced, it still is making a fairly small contribution to the total amount of oil in the world. Now, I would ask the listener, Mr. Speaker, to draw their own conclusions: How much additional oil do you think we will get from current fields with enhanced oil recovery? Even if we get as much more as all of the present projected reserves, that will only push the peak by their own chart, which we saw a bit ago, out to 2016. And if we find double the amount of oil that we have ever found, it pushes it out only to about 2027 or 2028. That is not the distant future. The next chart is really an interesting one, and I think graphically this kind of presents the dilemma that the world is in, and this is what the geography of world would look like if the size of a country was relative to the amount of oil reserves that it has. It is a really interesting map; isn't it? Saudi Arabia dwarfs everything else. And notice little Kuwait, a tiny corner of Iraq. You can see now why Saddam Hussein was interested in Kuwait, a tiny province down there at the southeastern corner of Iraq, just a fraction of the geography of Iraq, but nearly as big as Iraq. It dwarfs the United States. Here we are; we would fit five times into Kuwait. They have five times the reserves that we have. Notice the two largest countries in the world, China and India; 1,300,000,000 people in China; 1 billion in India and growing. They don't have the birth control, the population control they have in China, and it won't be very long until India's population is equal to that of China. I mentioned a bit ago that it won't be too long before the middle class in India is the size of our total population, 300 million people. They all want cars. They all want heated and air conditioned homes. All of this takes energy. So the traditional roughly 2 percent increase per year in energy demand is going to pick up with the development of countries like China and like India. Russia, which is now a huge exporter of oil, notice, they are only four times the size of the United States, a fraction of the size of Saudi Arabia, probably a bit smaller than Kuwait. Notice where most of the world's oil is. There is some in this hemisphere, in Venezuela, but the rest of it is all northern Africa and the Middle East. Someone had noted that it is very strange that the world of Islam has most of the oil and the Christian world has most of the arable land. It seems to me there ought to be some opportunity for partnering. We can produce the food; they can produce the energy. But those kind of relationships in this confrontational world are hard to achieve. The next chart is one that further develops this picture. And what this shows is the world, not as that would be proportioned by oil but as it is, and it shows what the symbols here, who is buying oil where. And these symbols for China, you notice one here, they almost bought Unocal in our country, and China is now buying up oil around the world very aggressively, not just buying oil, but in the process making friends. ``Would you like a hospital? How about a soccer field?'' And the Chinese are doing this all over the world. You can see their symbols where they are all over the world, and notice many of them in that oil rich crest of Africa and the Middle East. Why are they doing this? The Chinese economy is growing at over 10 percent. The last quarter for which I saw data was 11.4 percent. They have to have observed that oil is fungible; that it really doesn't matter who owns the oil, which is why I didn't have any big problem with them buying Unocal. It doesn't really matter who owns the oil. The country, the company that gets the oil is the high bidder because oil moves in a global marketplace. Today, it was roughly $61 a barrel. So it doesn't make one bit of difference who owns the oil. The person who has the money, who bids the highest, gets the oil. So, if this is how oil moves on the world market, why would China be buying up all of this oil? We happen to have one of the largest reserves of coal. We have 250 years of coal at current use rates. But if you increase the use of coal only 2 percent; by the way, this exponential growth is poorly understood by most people. After the discovery of nuclear energy, Dr. Einstein was asked what the next great energy source in the world would be, and he kind of jokingly responded that there was nothing quite like the power of compound interest. Let me tell you just a little story to help understand this. The story is told that chess was developed in an ancient small kingdom. And the king was very appreciative, and he told the inventor of chess that, ``You have made such a contribution to our culture that I will give you anything reasonable that you ask.'' And so the inventor said, ``Oh, king. I am a very simple man. I have simple needs. If you would just take my chess board with, what, 64 squares on it, and if you put a grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the fourth and so forth until you filled all of the squares of the chess board, that will be an adequate compensation.'' The king said to himself, ``Foolish fellow. I would have given him anything reasonable. All he is asked for is a little wheat on his chess board.'' The king of course could not do that, because the amount of wheat that would have been on that chess board I understand represents a decade of world harvest of wheat. That is what exponential increase does. Well, the world has been increasing at about 2 percent a year. That rate of growth will increase. There is an easy formula that you can use. If you divide the percentage growth into 70, it will give you doubling time. So 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years; 10 percent growth doubles in 7 years. So you can now get doubling time if you divide the percent into 70. This coal that would last us 250 years, if you have only 2 percent increase in growth, that exponential function decreases the duration of its use to just 85 years. And since coal will not be useful for many of the uses of energy that we have, we are going to have to convert it into a gas or a liquid. And the energy to do that if you take it from coal will now reduce the amount of time that that 250 years of coal will last to 50 years. But since energy sources move on a world market, we might be expected to share that liquid from coal or gas from coal with the rest of the world. And since we use \1/4\ of the world's energy, that 50 years divided by 4 comes down to 12\1/2\ years. So this amazing 250 years of coal suddenly shrinks to just 12\1/2\ years at only 2 percent growth if we are sharing it with the rest of the world. Well, we may decide that, since the coal is ours, that we won't need to share it with the rest of the world if there is an acute energy shortage here. That would be a logical decision that a country would make. Now, if we, if there is a possibility we would not want to share our coal with the rest of the world, is there a possibility that China might not want to share their oil, which they have now bought in all of these countries around the world; that they would not want to share their oil with the rest of the world? Mr. Speaker, with that thought in your mind, you might reflect on the fact that China today is aggressively building a blue water navy. Some I think 60 percent of their oil goes through the Straits of Moloch. We now could cut off that oil. From a national security perspective, I can understand why they would have a meaningful interest in a blue water navy large enough to protect their supply lines for oil. By the way, talking about choke points for oil, I think 40 percent of the world's oil moves through the Straits of Hormuz. And if that were mined, or if super tankers were sunk there to block that, 40 percent decrease in the amount of oil would bring all of the world's economies to their knees, essentially overnight. I hope that we are guarding well the Straits of Hormuz because that would, indeed, be the ultimate in asymmetric attack. I have here a little article called, ``Corn Based Plastic Coming Soon.'' Now, of course, we live in a plastic world. And all of these plastics are made from oil. If you will look at your car, if you look at your home, you look at your television set, you look at almost anything in your environment, and I suspect this rug was made out of oil. Our pesticides, our herbicides, our pharmaceuticals, our make up, this is all made out of oil or a great part of it is made out of oil. So there is an interest in getting the things we make out of oil, much of our clothing is made out of oil, interested in being able to get these fibers, this material from something else, and so this is an article, ``Corn Based Plastic Coming Soon.'' Every bushel of corn that we produce requires a lot of fossil fuel energy. And almost half that energy comes from natural gas, which currently is used to make nitrogen fertilizer. Corn, as a plant, is a pig. It requires and uses incredible amounts of nutrients. And we have now engineered hybrid corn so that it can be planted close together. It grows rapidly. It uses the sunlight efficiently, and it uses enormous amounts of energy. And so, this corn based plastic that they are talking about, I don't know what the efficiency there is. But if it is no better than the efficiency of making ethanol, and ethanol, remember, every gallon of ethanol represents at least three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuel to make it. Some, Dr. Pimenthal, for instance, believes that if you really cost-account all the energy that goes into producing corn, that you use more fossil fuel energy to produce the corn than you get out of the corn. I hope he is wrong. I believe he is wrong. Anyway, after you have produced the ethanol from the corn, you still have a pretty good feed left, and I don't think his calculation took that into effect. So this corn based plastic really is, in large measure, just recycling fossil fuels. It may make you feel good to say that my shirt is made from corn. But when you recognize the incredible amounts of fossil fuel energy, if it is the same efficiency as using ethanol, at least three-fourths of the fiber of your shirt might just as well have been made from oil because that oil or some fossil fuel source was used in growing the corn from which the plastic was made. Mr. Speaker, we will continue next week.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, there is a question that often comes to my mind, as I sit here in these Chambers. I have spoken about it often, what made America great. I have been reminded of this question in my past speeches on this topic as the debate evolved regarding the inappropriately named Employee Free Choice Act, H.R. 800. We had a debate that I never thought would take place here in the Chambers of the House of Representatives of the United States, questioning the use of the secret ballot. Now, I am asking myself again, what keeps America great? It is what our military is fighting for in Iraq, it is what they fought for in our American Revolution, our Civil War, World War I and World War II and every war great and small when our country has put our greatest treasure, the lives of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen at risk. What keeps America great is our commitment to the vigilant defense of the cause of freedom as expressed by the will of the people. Expressing their will by voting with secret ballots is integral to keeping America great. Our Constitution guarantees us freedom of speech and of religion. These are precious freedoms that allow us to prosper, to learn, to own property, to start a business, to teach our moral and civic values and build a legacy of wealth and knowledge for the next generation. But it is the greatest freedom for citizens to decide or to vote using a secret ballot that sets our Republican forum of government apart. Secret ballots allow people to freely make decisions through our elected process, decisions made about not only who will represent them here in the Congress but also in their hometowns, decisions about what new amendments will be made to the Constitution, State or Federal. There are codicils in the contracts we have with our government about how we want to be governed. Voting is a basic tool of a free society. Thomas Paine said in his dissertation on first principles of government that, and I quote, ``the right of voting for representatives is the primary right which other rights are protected.'' Voting is basic and natural to us. We have learned from an early age as school children voting for class presidents, and we expect it in adulthood as we elect representatives to our local, state and Federal elections. It took a long time in this country to universally use secret ballot to make freedom's choices. But once in use, the secret ballot is not only the norm, but also the pinnacle tool which permits our countrymen to make these decisions, great and small, freely, without fear of intimidation or reprisal. Mr. Speaker, we surely can't be serious when we pursue taking away from the rank and file worker the use of the secret ballot as the main vehicle for making decisions to unionize or remain an open shop. There may be problems with the unionizing process, but voting by secret ballot, I can assure you, is not one of them. We here in the United States have acted as counselor to other governments and governing bodies on the requirements of a free and fair election. After all, we are the longest enduring republic in the history of the world. I am going to reference such advice given on the U.S. Department of State Web site. If you search for principles of free and fair elections, you will find the requirements of an election. We here in Congress can benefit from relying upon this advice when considering the path to conducting union recognition process. And I quote, ``universal suffrage for all eligible men and women to vote, democracies do not restrict this right for minorities, the disabled, or give it only to those who are literate or who own property.'' Obviously, we want all people affected by union decision to have a right to vote. I am going to add a few words about American history's path to universal suffrage here, because it is useful to understand our painful evolution to reach a point where voting went from the select few to every adult. It has only been in my lifetime that true universal suffrage has been realized in our great country. We fought a great civil war that only put us on the path toward universal suffrage. We still had many battles to come. From 1865 to 1870 the Constitution was amended three times to guarantee equal voting rights to black Americans, but still the struggle continued. There were setbacks as States and localities undermined this Federal guarantee. At the turn of the last century, there were barriers to achieving universal suffrage. Poll taxes and literacy tests denied many black American men the ability to exercise their right to vote. Jim Crow laws protected segregation. Not until the 1950s did our laws begin to change to put an end to segregation. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the means to the Federal Government to ensure the ability to vote by black citizens that is guaranteed under our Constitution. Suffrage for women was long in coming. In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote, to her husband, John, who was attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, she asked that he and other men who were working on the Declaration of Independence remember the ladies. John responded with humor but got his point across; that the Declaration says that all men are created equal applied equally to women, he told her. After the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association, an organization for white and black women and men dedicated to the goal of universal suffrage. Other organizations followed. Still, in 1868, 3 years after the end of the Civil War, the 14th amendment was ratified but only provided for male suffrage. It was not until 1920, after many struggles, and only 86 years ago, that the 19th amendment was ratified and women in this country achieved the right to vote. Let me go back now to that Web site of the U.S. State Department. Principles of free and fair elections: And I quote again, ``freedom to register a voter or to run for public office, these are the qualities, the characteristics that society must have if they want to have free people and fair elections. ``Freedom of speech for candidates and political parties: Democracies do not restrict candidates or political parties from criticizing the performance of the incumbent. ``Numerous opportunities for the electorate to receive objective information from a free press: Freedom to assemble for political rallies and campaigns. ``Rules that require party representatives to maintain a distance from polling places on election day: Election officials, volunteer poll workers and international monitors may assist voters with the voting process, but not the voting choice. ``An impartial or balanced system of conducting elections and verifying election results: Trained election officials must either be politically independent, or those overseeing elections should be representatives of the parties in the election.'' And now, the next two points, especially the last, are points that we really should well remember. ``Accessible polling places: Private voting space, secure ballot boxes and transparent ballot counting.'' And then this one, Mr. Speaker. ``Secret ballots.'' This is our advice on our State Department Web site to those who would like to emulate us and establish a government as free and fair and great as ours. This is what it says. ``Secret ballots. Voting by secret ballot insures that an individual's choice of party or candidate cannot be used against him or her.'' It is only through the use of the secret ballot allowing for privacy voting without fear of reprisal that we can determine the true will of the people or the true will of workers. Do they want to be represented by a union or not? If we keep in mind the advice that we so freely give to those outside our country, we can create a system for America's labor which will work for them. And frankly, who should be more protective of this basic tool of our society? Who should understand that the secret ballot should be the tool of choice for the members and their political members, but the union leadership themselves? The union history is as painful as the struggle for the basic right to vote endured by blacks and women. The Industrial Revolution did usher in one of the most ugly periods of our history. Worker abuse, child labor abuse was, in fact, a huge problem. Brave men and women who formed unions led the efforts that addressed intolerable working conditions. There will always be a place for employee unions. However, employee abuse by employers should not be replaced by employee abuse by unions. In today's Los Angeles Times, not, I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, a conservative paper, in today's Los Angeles Times, there is an editorial entitled ``Keep Union Ballots Secret. Doing away with Voting Secrecy Would Give Unions Too Much Power Over Workers.'' This is the title of their article. This editorial outlines the issue well and, I believe, reflects the sentiment of the country. Indeed, in recent polls, 87 percent of the American people believed that we should have secret ballot elections for determining whether a group of employees wanted to unionize or not. We, in this body, are privileged to serve, because we were elected to represent our constituents in secret ballot elections. We took an oath, and we have the obligation to serve not big labor or big business. Our sole obligation is to uphold the Constitution and serve the individual residents of our districts. I agree with Los Angeles Times editorialist. In part, I would like to quote that editorial, with which I wholeheartedly agree. And this is what it says. ``Unfair labor practices deserve tougher penalties. But improper influence can work both ways. As a rule, union membership improves worker prosperity and safety. Even so, the bedrock of Federal labor law is not unionism under any conditions, but the right of workers to choose whether they want to affiliate with a union.'' This, from the very liberal Los Angeles Times. ``Unions once supported the secret ballot for organization elections. They were right then and are wrong now. Unions have every right to a fair hearing. And the National Labor Relations Board should be more vigilant about attempts by employers to game the system. In the end, however, whether to unionize is up to the workers. A secret ballot insures that their choice will be a free one.'' Mr. Speaker, I ask again, in conclusion to these remarks, what keeps America great? It is our commitment to a vigilant defense of the cause of freedom as expressed by the will of the people, and the will of the people is best and freely expressed by secret ballot elections. As I read this, Mr. Speaker, my mind goes back to a comment made by Benjamin Franklin as he came out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Many copies of the Constitution may have this little quote on the front leaf page. He was asked, tradition has it, by a woman, who said, Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? And his answer was, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. There are two things about this statement, Mr. Speaker, that deserve some reflection. The first is a republic. We do the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and we note the republic for which it stands. And then we all too often get up and talk about the great democracy in which we live. What is the fundamental difference between a democracy and a republic? And why was Mr. Franklin explicit in a republic, madam; if you can keep it? A couple of examples of a democracy may be helpful in permitting us to understand why Benjamin Franklin was so specific. A somewhat humorous example of a democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner. You see, in a democracy, the will of the majority controls. And if these two wolves and a lamb were in a true democracy and they were voting on what they should have for dinner, I suspect that the result might be lamb. Let me give you another example of a democracy. And I kind of hesitate to do this because I don't want to be misunderstood. But I think it says very clearly what the difference between a republic and a democracy is. If you will stop and think about it, I think you will agree that a lynch mob is an example of a democracy. Surely, in a lynch mob, the will of the majority is being expressed. Aren't you glad, Mr. Speaker, that you live in a republic? Now, what's the fundamental difference? To help me understand this, I reflect back on an experience in our country with a President, Harry Truman, ``Take Charge Harry,'' who made a very abrupt decision when the steel mills were going to strike. Then we did some manufacturing in this country, and it would have mattered. And our economy was already in trouble and was going to be in bigger trouble if the strike occurred. And so President Truman nationalized the steel mills. What that meant was that the workers at the steel mills were now Federal employees, and as such, by law, they could not strike. And so this averted the strike. This was a very popular action. The Supreme Court met in emergency session and, in effect, what they said was, and by the way, Mr. Speaker, this is just one of two times in our history that the Supreme Court has set aside an executive order of the President. This is in layman's language what the Supreme Court said to the President: Mr. President, you can't do that. You can't nationalize the steel mills because that is unconstitutional. You see, in a Republic we have the rule of law, no matter what the majority wanted, and clearly then the vast majority of Americans wanted what their President did. They were approving of nationalizing the steel mills, which avoided the strike. But the Supreme Court said you cannot do that because, you see, that is unconstitutional. The fundamental difference between a republic and a democracy is that in a Republic, we have the rule of law. This Constitution that I hold in my hand is the fundamental law against which all other laws are measured. Now, we can change it. We have done it 27 times. But that is a very thoughtful process. It is two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate and it bypasses the President and goes to the State legislatures, and three-fourths of the State legislatures must ratify it. It has been quite a while since we amended the Constitution. The last time we tried to amend the Constitution, it was the so-called ``equal rights amendment.'' Nobody argued that women should not have equal rights, and nobody argued that we didn't need to do something to assure that women had equal rights. And that amendment almost made it through the three-fourths of the State legislatures. But suddenly it began to dawn on people that what that amendment required was not quite what we wanted. What the amendment required was that you could not differentiate between men and women. If you are going to have a draft for the military, you would need to draft women as well as men. And so ultimately the equal rights amendment failed. It did not pass. I think that if we could be so fortunate as to have some of these Framers of our Constitution be resurrected and join us here that they would counsel, as Benjamin Franklin did when he answered the woman's question by saying ``A republic, madam, if you can keep it.'' Abraham Lincoln understood that this was a new experiment that might not work: ``Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new Nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.'' We read those words and we slide through them so easily: ``that all men are created equal.'' Of course, they are, you say. But to most at that time this was a revelation because most of the pioneers that established this great country came from either the British Isles or the European continent. And in almost every one of those countries there was a king or an emperor who incredibly, from our perspective, demanded and was granted divine rights, which said that the rights came from God to the king or the emperor and he would give what rights he wished to the people. Sometimes they were few, and sometimes there were more than a few rights that were given to the people. But our Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator. Mr. Speaker, do you think our courts might declare the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it mentions God, it mentions our creator? Endowed by our creator with inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I don't know what was in Benjamin Franklin's head when he made the second part of that statement to the lady: ``A republic, madam, if you can keep it.'' Do you think he was concerned about some foreign power coming and conquering our country and taking our Republican form of government away from us? I doubt it. We are on the other side of a really big ocean. It took a lot of ships and a long time to gain any meaningful number of troops here. I suspect that he was more concerned about the threat to our Republic from within. It has been said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You just can't ever, ever let down your guard. We are the longest enduring Republic in the history of the world. And I have asked myself many times how did we get here and why are we so fortunate, this one person out of 22, or less than 5 percent of the world's population, and we have fully one-fourth of all the good things in the world? I think very often about this question as I recognize that we no longer have a population with the best work ethic in the world. I just came from China about 6 weeks ago. We no longer have a population that is focused on science, math, and technology. We no longer have a country that prizes the nuclear family. We no longer have a society that prizes that. Nearly half our kids are born out of wedlock today. I would suggest today society is at risk when half of the kids are born out of wedlock. So what is it about this great country that makes us so special that we have a fourth of all the good things in the world? I think there are two things, and I want to focus for just a couple minutes on one of them, and that is the incredible protection that our Constitution gives to our civil liberties. There is no other constitution, there is no other country that has such respect for civil liberties. I think that in large measure it was this respect for our civil liberties that established a climate in which creativity and entrepreneurship could flourish. And I rise tonight because I am concerned about any threat to these civil liberties, and I think when we change the way we vote for any process from the traditional secret ballot process to something where your vote is exposed that in some little way you put at risk the civil liberties and start down a path that I don't think America needs to go down or wants to go down. Civil liberties are always a casualty of war, and I guess I am a little sensitive now because we are in a war. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. In World War II, my friend Norm Mineta, with whom I served here, a few years younger than I, a Japanese American, now Secretary of Transportation, told me, he said, ``Roscoe, I remember holding my parents' hand when they led us into that concentration camp in Idaho.'' That war is over and we are embarrassed we did that. Civil liberties are frequently, perhaps always, a casualty of war. And I remember that counsel that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. So excuse me, Mr. Speaker, if I seem to have maybe a bit overreacted to the dialogue that occurred here today because I am just so jealous of who we are and the great privileges that we have. And now I want to turn our attention in the remaining time to a subject that I have come to the floor 22 previous times to talk about. And I think the great freedoms that we have are going to be tested as we meet the challenges that are ahead. I want to begin this discussion and will be discussing energy and one particular aspect of energy which is now fairly conventionally referred to as peak oil. I would like to note that it was the 14th day of last March that I gave my first speech on the floor here on peak oil. What I wanted to talk about was the probability that the world was about to reach its maximum ability to produce oil. Obviously, that had to come at some point. The Earth isn't made out of oil. The amount of oil is finite. At some point we would reach our maximum capacity for producing oil. Few people ever thought about that because oil was just so ubiquitous. It was everywhere. Thousands of cars on the road. Electricity, heat whenever you needed it. And I was trying to decide what to call this and to label the charts, and you may see in the charts we use in a few moments some labels on top of the charts and they are put on with scotch tape because I wasn't sure what to call it. I was debating between the ``great rollover.'' You see, when you have reached your maximum production of oil, you then roll over and start down a slope where you produce less oil, and it becomes harder and harder to get. So I thought maybe I would refer to it as the ``great rollover'' and finally decided that I would refer to it as ``peak oil.'' It is a good thing because now everybody is referring to it as ``peak oil,'' and I would have been a little out of step talking about the ``great rollover.'' I have here an article that appeared today from the Associated Press published March 1, 2007. That is today. And it is an interview. T. Boone Pickens says global oil production has reached its peak. T. Boone Pickens. I didn't really know who he was. I knew he was a very rich and capable man who had an incredible talent at deciding where the market was going and has become very rich as a result of that. I didn't know that Pickens started his career in the 1950s as a petroleum geologist. I don't know if in 1956 on March 8, and we are coming up to the 51st anniversary in a few days, I don't know if he was in that audience in San Antonio or not when a very, very famous speech was given by M. King Hubbert that I will refer to in a few moments. The article begins by saying: ``Legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens sees today's stubbornly high oil price as evidence that daily global production capacity is at or very near its peak. `If demand for crude oil rises beyond the current global output of roughly 85 million barrels per day,' Pickens told the Associated Press, `prices will rise to compensate and alternative sources of energy will begin to replace petroleum. If I'm right,' he says, `we are already at the peak. And if I'm right, the price of gas will go up. I think there are less reserves around the world than are being reported. There are no audited reserves in the Mid East. It makes me suspicious,' he said.'' Now, he was challenged in this by a friend of mine, a person that I really admire, Steve Forbes. Forbes publisher Steve Forbes challenged Pickens' assumptions during an exchange in the conference, saying political, not technological or geological, roadblocks stood in the way of increasing the world's oil output. Just give them an incentive to go drill and they will find more oil. With the right incentives in place, more oil could be brought to market and prices could drop, Forbes said. Forbes referred to Mexico and what was happening there. Pickens responded by saying Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries. Indeed, 33, I think, out of the 45 oil-producing countries have already reached their peak and are already in decline. Pickens responded by saying that Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries, naming the United States, Norway, Britain and soon Russia. Indeed, I think Russia now has a second peak that they are declining from. They had an earlier peak, the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union fell apart, and they now have recovered from that and are reaching a second but smaller peak. The world has been looked at, Pickens told Forbes. There is still oil to be found, but not in the quantities we have seen in the past. The big fields have been found, and the smaller fields, well, there are not enough of them to replenish the base. This is T. Boone Pickens. Pickens predicted oil prices will rise this year to an annual average of around $70 per barrel. It was $62 a barrel today. Global consumers led by the United States have already burned through 1.1 trillion barrels of oil, or what Pickens described as nearly half. Many observers will tell you it is half of the world's estimated 2.5 trillion barrels of oil. This is his prediction. This is a man who has been able to make really good predictions, because he has gotten incredibly wealthy doing it. From now on, Pickens said, rising demand will be met by higher prices rather than ever larger crude production. He says the days of meeting the demand with producing more are ending. Alternative energy sources will begin to take a share of the energy market until the world evolves from a hydrocarbon-based economy to something that is a mix of hydrocarbons and something else. Now, since hydrocarbons are not infinite, they are finite, ultimately everything will be the something else. Everything from nuclear, coal, wind, solar, hydrogen and biofuels, stands a chance to assuage growing demand for energy, Pickens said. I will put up the first chart now. What this chart does is to list the predictions of many of the world's experts, and T. Boone Pickens is not on here because he just made this prediction today and this is a chart made some time ago. It shows here a number of authorities, their background and references and the projected peaking date. What you can see here is that most of the authorities believe that peaking will occur quite soon. I would like to digress for just a moment to talk about what we mean by ``peaking.'' Traditionally, peaking has meant to refer to conventional oil sources, the kind of oil you will get by drilling a hole in the ground and then pumping it out. It is almost certain that the production of conventional crude oil has peaked, but we now are able to get the equivalent of crude oil from other sources, like gas to liquids, like oil from the tar sands of Canada, where it is really thick. It won't flow. They lift it up in a shovel that lifts 100 tons, they dump it into a truck that carries 400 tons, and then they cook it, add some volatiles to it so it will flow, and then you have the equivalent of oil. Or really heavy oil, like some of the oil that Venezuela is producing. Then you might also include an unconventional oil, oil that is in places that is really, really hard to get to, like that last find in the Gulf of Mexico, which I think was under 7,000 feet of water, more than a mile of water, and several miles of dirt. They aren't pumping that yet. I have been told, and you are told a lot of things that may or may not be true, but I have been told that we will start pumping that oil when oil is $211 a barrel, because that is what it will take to get it out. There are some who believe that the peak is a bit down the road, but you see that they all are pretty close. There are several others who have made predictions about when peaking will occur. I have been talking about T. Boone Pickens and his prediction that it is now, that we are here. I noted all of these. I have some remarks here from one of those, and we will look at the next chart now, and this is the chart from a study that was done at the request of the Energy Department and paid for by the Energy Department, by the SAIC, big SAIC organization. The principal investigator was Robert Hirsch, so it is frequently referred to as the Hirsch Report. In this report, and I have highlighted here something that I thought was significant, he says, the world has never faced a problem like this. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters, I have just shown you a list of those, project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Predictions of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity and political influences. Peaking will happen, and he should have really underlined that, peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain. The next chart shows some additional quotes from the Hirsch Report. The peaking of oil presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management. Remember in the previous chart it said the world had never faced a problem like this. As peaking is approached, and note how similar this is to what T. Boone Pickens said in the article today, as peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and without timely mitigation, and then he says this, economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. Another chart from the same Hirsch Report makes reference to another projection of when oil will peak, and this is a projection made by our own Energy Information Agency using data from USGS. I will spend just a moment on this chart because it holds the essence of a pretty big debate that is going on out there. The black curve here represents our use. Notice what happened in the 70s, the Arab oil embargo. If that line had kept on going up, as it had been going up for years, it would be way up there, wouldn't it, and there wouldn't be anywhere near enough oil. Eighty-five million barrels wouldn't begin to meet the world's demand if that were true. There was a stunning statistic during this rapid rise up to the seventies. In every decade up until the Carter years, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That is stunning. What that means is that when we had used half the oil, there would only be 10 years left. That is not 10 years at that use rate, because it is going to be harder and harder to get, so it is going to fall off in what can be pumped. But, fortunately, we had a wake-up shock, and we found out how to do a lot of things a lot more efficiently. Your refrigerator and air conditioner today may be three times more efficient than it was at the time of the Arab oil embargo. I don't think anybody will argue that we aren't living as well today as we did in the seventies, and we are using precious little more oil than we did in the seventies with a fair sized increase in the population. So efficiently really is possible, isn't it? Well, back to this chart. USGS uses a very interesting technique for predicting how much oil is yet to be discovered. They have some very elaborate computer simulations, and they make some assumptions, and they put these assumptions into the computer simulations and then run these simulations. And they change the assumptions, because it might be a little higher or might be a little lower. So they have done this a very large number of times. Then they graph the frequency of certain predictions, of how much oil will be produced against the quantity that will be produced. Then they pick the mean of this. This is the mean of their computer projections. They pick the mean of this and they say that that mean is the expected value. This is simply the result of putting some assumptions into some computer models and then running it a number of times. Now, this says probability, but in their charts it says frequency. I don't know how frequency got translated to P for probability, but there is a bit of miscommunication here. They say that the low probability is the 95 percent probability. Of course, this was the number where there was 5 percent of predictions on one side and 95 percent of predictions on the other side of this point on their graph. Now, what they called the 95 percent probability is what T. Boone Pickens said, you remember he had 2.3, that is slightly different from this, 2.5, something like that, slightly different from that, as the total amount of oil that had been discovered in the world, a little over 1,000 gigabarrels. And we use ``giga'' rather than billion, because a billion in England I think is a million million, and a billion here is 1,000 million. So if you use billion you may be misunderstood, but giga apparently around the world means a billion, and, of course, 1,000 gigabarrels is a trillion gigabarrels, and this is 2.248 trillion gigabarrels, 248,000, which is 2.248 gigabarrels of oil. Now, their mean, they say, reflects the probability that we are going to find half as much oil as we have ever found, half as much more oil as we have ever found in the past. And they even have a high 5 percent probability where they say we might find twice as much oil as all the oil we ever found in the past. Now, even with this assumption, and this is really important, even with this assumption of the mean, and that is the red line here, you see, the mean, even with the assumption that we are going to find half as much more oil as we ever found, or to put it another way, we are going to find as much more oil as all of the reserves that now exist, even with that assumption, look where peaking occurs. 2016. That is just around the corner. Now, if we don't find that additional oil, then the peaking would occur here. This is 2000. We are now in 2007, slightly after that, which is when T. Boone Pickens said it has occurred. The second part of this chart shows another interesting thing, and that is if you use enhanced oil recovery, you will certainly get the oil more quickly. You may get some more oil, too; but the primary thing you will do is get it quicker. But if you pump it now, it won't be available later; and so they show a very steep drop there. The next chart shows a comment by one of the giants in this field, James Laherrere, and he made an assessment of the USGS report which was the basis for this prediction of our Energy Information Agency that we are going to find this incredible amount of new oil. This is what he says: ``The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented,'' no evidence other than their computer modeling. ``Such an improvement in performance is 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.'' We now have vastly better discovery techniques. We have computer modeling. We have 3-D seismic, and we pretty much have mapped the world. And oil and gas can occur only in fairly unique geological formations, and we know what those formations are, and we know pretty much where they are. The next chart is very interesting. It shows the EIA projections of discovery, how much oil we were going to discover. This is the discovery peak, not the use peak because we in the past discovered enormously more oil than we used. But this is the discovery peak. They made this chart in about 2000 and this red line was the discovery peak in the past up to that time. Then they made three projections for the future. One was their 50 percent probability. The mean, which is the 50 percent; the P 95 which is the yellow one; and the blue one, which is the 5 percent probability. They said there was a 5 percent probability we would find an incredible amount of oil, and they said there was a 95 percent probability that we would find only this tiny little bit done here. And the mean was this green line, and they saw it going up better and better. But look at what happened. The red data points show that the discoveries were precisely what you would have predicted them to be if in fact it is a probability, 95 percent probable, it is certainly a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable, and the actual production curve has followed the 95 percent probability. All of this has given rise to a statement by Condoleezza Rice, and this is a very insightful statement on April 5, 2006: ``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 diplomat effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' Let me put the next chart up, and this chart comes from an incredible speech given by Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine. I just want to quote a couple of things. By the way, if you do a Google search, Mr. Speaker, and ask for Hyman Rickover and energy, I think you can probably pull up this speech he gave on May 14, 1957. He gave this speech at a banquet of the annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota. Let me just read a couple of things that he says in this speech because he was so prophetic: ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living.'' And this was 50 years ago. What would he say today? ``Thus, the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or \1/20\th horsepower. Machines, therefore, furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by may well seem like a golden age.'' Then he says: ``Whether this golden age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.'' And if all of these experts that I have quoted are right and if T. Boone Pickens is right, we have now reached the maximum production of oil, which means that we are going to have to learn to live with what we have got for the moment, and then there will be a time when it is going to be harder and harder, and less and less will be found. Ultimately the nation which controls the largest energy sources will become dominant. We don't own them, but we control them with our dollars because we now are buying a fourth of all of the oil in the world. China is buying oil around the world. Why would they do that? You don't need to own a single oil well and will get all of the oil you want if you simply have the dollars to pay for it. I think it is an interesting exercise to reflect on why China might be buying these oil wells. If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have, I have a notice we haven't been doing much of that, and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country. What are these people talking about? What is peak oil, the next chart, and this chart is a chart from the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and you will see them referred to as one of the major authorities in this area. They do not believe what T. Boone Pickens said today. They think that peaking is quite a ways out, and they created this little chart to ridicule the scientists who predicted that the United States would peak in 1970 and we did peak in 1970. By the way, he predicted the world would be peaking about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? They used this chart to ridicule him, and I think it gives credibility to what he said. The total U.S. production is the red curve. M. King Hubbert predicted that we would peak in 1970. In 1970 we reached a peak. He was making that prediction only from the lower 48. He couldn't have known that we were going to find a lot of oil in Alaska, and we did. What that lot of oil in Alaska did was to produce this little bump here. I have been at zero miles of that 4-foot pipeline that for many years produced a fourth of all the oil that we produced, and it only made this little blip in the downslope of Hubbert's peak. CERA says because this was the curve rather than the predicted curve of Hubbert here, he was therefore a fraud and not to be believed. I think there is reasonable concurrence between these. The actual, by the way, for the lower 48 which he produced follows pretty well his prediction, and we found the additional oil in Alaska which kicked it up a little. But in spite of everything that we have done, we now are producing half the oil that we produced in 1970. My last chart, and this chart, I could spend the whole hour talking about this, and I may do that some evening, but this chart has an enormous amount of information on it. These are the discoveries. This is when we discovered it. The black curve is how much we used. For many years we found very much more than we used. But starting in 1980, we started finding less and less and less, and our use rate went up and up and up. Here is the 1970 blip, and it keeps on going up. For all of this time we were dipping into reserves. We have a lot of reserves left. What will the future look like? One thing is certain, you cannot bump what you have not found. These graphs, the area under these curves represents the volume, the amount. So the area, if you put a smooth curve over this one, the area under that curve would represent the amount of oil that we have found. The area under this consumption curve would represent the amount of oil that we use. You can't use oil you haven't found. Within some limits we can make the future look like we want it to look with enhanced recovery and feverish drilling and so forth. But I would submit that you can't pump what you haven't found, and I would like the listener to make his own judgment as to how much we can change what they predict here will be the future production of oil.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

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

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, when the original resolution that brought our military to intervention in Iraq came to the Congress, I interpreted it as asking the Congress to turn over to the President our military to use anytime he wished, anywhere he wished, against any country he wished, now and forever more. Feeling that this was patently unconstitutional, I was very pleased when the International Relations Committee, chaired at that time by Henry Hyde, revised the resolution and narrowly focused it on Iraq. That resolution had strong encouragement for the President to obtain a U.N. resolution so that when we went into Iraq it would be a part of a U.N. coalition. The U.N. would own that war; we wouldn't own it. When the President did not get the U.N. resolution so strongly encouraged by that original resolution that we voted on, I then voted for the Spratt substitute because I felt that if we were going to send our young men and women into war, that it needed to be with the full support of the American people through their elected officials, and we needed to have that additional debate. That didn't happen. I felt that we went in with unrealistic expectations. There is no country around Iraq that has anything like the government that we would like for them to have. Several of the countries have dictatorships. We call them royal families. Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, but they are dictatorships. Several countries, Jordan and Syria, have kings. Iran is essentially a theocracy ruled by the mullahs. The only country that comes even close is the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, where they have a sort of democracy, but several times in the last few years the military has thrown out the civilian government, telling them they need to start over, hardly the kind of government that we have in this country and that we envision for Iraq. So I thought that there were very unrealistic expectations. That was a very steep hill to climb; that success was unlikely, and therefore, I wanted to go in under a U.N. resolution. What now? I hope I am wrong, but I believe that there will be one of two likely outcomes, either another strong man, hopefully more benevolent, than Saddam Hussein, or three loosely federated states with an overarching entity that pumps the oil and distributes the revenues on a per capita basis. Now, we have a resolution before us and how should one vote? If you believe that the President is the Commander in Chief and has a right to pursue the war in the way he chooses, then you would vote ``no'' on this resolution. If you believe that this resolution sends the wrong message to the enemy that we are losing our resolution, our resolve, then you would vote ``no.'' If you believe this sends the wrong message to the troops, I know the first clause says we support our troops, but then one might argue that the right hand is taking away what the left hand gave because in the second clause we say that we do not support the surge, which some may interpret as not supporting our troops; then you would vote ``no.'' But if you believe that the Iraqis need to stand up so that we can stand down, then you would vote ``yes.'' If you believe that the surge will not help, which is very likely, then I think you need to vote ``yes.'' If you believe the surge might actually hurt by placing more of our brave young men and women in harm's way, I understand that a fair percentage of the violence over there is directed against us, if that is true, then how do we reduce the violence by putting more of us there, then you would vote ``yes.'' If you want to send a message to the President, the Congress and the American people, that this war can't go on forever, then you would vote ``yes.'' If you want to send a message to the troops that we are watching, that you won't be there forever, that you have the support of your citizens and your Congress, then you would vote ``yes.'' This is obviously a very complex vote. Whether you vote ``yes'' or whether you vote ``no,'' there will be unintended, unwanted messages that will be sent. Being required to vote either ``yes'' or ``no'' on a resolution like this is a little bit like requiring the husband to answer the question, ``yes'' or ``no,'' ``Have you stopped beating your wife?'' If that is true, then perhaps the best vote on this is a ``present'' vote. It is so true here that what you see depends on where you stand. There has been a lot of quite intemperate rhetoric on both sides. It is hard sometimes to imagine that we are debating the same resolution. It is so true here that he who frames the question determines the answer. Mr. Speaker, we shouldn't be here. After the debate, this vote is somewhat irrelevant. Indeed, the listening Americans have each cast their own vote. In spite of all the divisive rhetoric, I want one thing to be certain, that all 435 of us want only what is best for America, what is best for our troops, a good and bright future for the Iraqis and especially want to assure our brave young men and women there that they have the total thanks of a grateful Nation.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, there are three different groups in our country and indeed worldwide at least for some of these issues that have common cause in campaigning for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. These three groups come from very different perspectives, but as you will see from our discussions this evening they really do have common cause. Because to solve the problems that brings them to this dialogue, all three of these groups are advocating essentially the same thing. That is, a reduction in our use of fossil fuels. The first of these groups is a very large group which has genuine concern about national security interests. Probably 2 years ago now, or nearly that, 30 of our prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, McFarland, Jim Woolsey and 27 others, some of them senior retired military people, wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that in our country we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of world oil and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, importing almost two-thirds of what we use, represents a totally unacceptable national security risk. The President himself recognized this in his State of the Union a year ago when he noted that we get some of this oil from countries, as he said, that don't even like us very much. That is a bit of an understatement for some of those countries. The next chart shows a recognition of this on the part of our Secretary of State. This was April 5 of last year. 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 am sure that in her head she had a mental picture of this really interesting map of the world. This shows what our world would look like if the size of each country was determined by its reserves of oil. And you can see how in America right here, tiny on this map of the world, we represent about less than 5 percent of the people of the world and we have only about 2 percent of the oil in the world, but we are using 25 percent of the oil. Look how small we are. We would fit many times in Saudi Arabia. We are about the size of Qatar here. We would fit four times in Kuwait, if the size of Kuwait, if the land mass of Kuwait was relative to how much oil they have. Russia up there, they are a big exporter now, but they can be a big exporter because they aren't using anywhere near as much as we have. You see Russia is two or three times as large as we are. Well, that large community in our country which is genuinely concerned about national security interests understands our problems that come from this distribution of oil. Many of these oil reserves are in countries that, what we call the royal families. They are really dictatorships, aren't they? And Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. And then in Iran, that is run as a theocracy pretty much totally controlled by the Mullahs. And here we have Venezuela, a Communist state. The President very wisely said in that State of the Union message a year ago that we are getting oil, many of the reserves are in countries that don't even like us very much. Now, fortunately, our imported oil doesn't come from the mix as we see it here, because we are getting oil where it is cheaper to ship it and so forth. So a lot of our oil comes from Canada. They are pretty tiny in terms of total reserves, but there aren't many people there, so they are an exporter. We get oil from Mexico, and we get oil from Venezuela simply because of economics. It is just cheaper to ship it the short distances around the world. So this is one group that has common cause in wanting to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, particularly oil, because we are so dependent on the rest of the world which, as Condoleezza Rice says, presents a very real national security problem. A second group that is interested in reducing our use of these fossil fuels, particularly oil, is the group that believes that, whereas the United States reached its maximum production of oil in 1970, that the world is about to approach that point now. And if you aren't concerned about national security risks and if you aren't concerned about climate change, which is going to be the third one that we talk about, you would really be concerned about oil if you recognized that there is not going to be enough of it in the future. It is going to be a real economic problem. What we have here, it says here, the United States production Hubbert versus Actual. This is a report from CERA, the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who were trying to point out that M. King Hubbert was not very accurate in his prediction of what the United States would do, and therefore you shouldn't take him very seriously when he predicted the world would be peaking about now. The average person looking at this would say that they were kind of nitpicking, because this is the Hubbert's Lower 48 Projection, this yellow line here, and the red is the actual. And of course added to the Lower 48 was our big discovery in Dead Horse and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and our oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, I think that these two curves here run pretty darned close together; and for that growing community of people that have a genuine concern about the availability of oil in the future, this chart has real meaning. I might look at the next chart here before we move to those who are concerned about climate change. This is a chart which presents the challenge that we face from what is called peak oil, and these bars here represent the discoveries of oil. You note that the big discoveries were back in the 1960s and 1970s; and ever since 1980, on average, the discoveries have been reducing, going down, down, down. Now, anyone who has had any math and charting and so forth in school knows that if you draw a smooth curve over this, the area under the curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have found. Indeed, each of these represents a reservoir of oil. If you add up all these little bars, why you have the total; and that is what you do when you smooth them out. You, in effect, add them all up. The solid dark line here represents the amount of oil that we have been using. We started out really rich, didn't we? We found this much oil, and we are just using this tiny bit down here. It looked like oil was going to be forever. When would it run out? Look at how little we are using and how much there is out there. But now look what happened. We continued to use more and more as the industrial revolution grew and as our population grew and we found more ways to use energy to make our lives comfortable. The use continued to grow and grow, but the discovery started falling off. In 1965 or so, they started falling off, down, down, down, and that is in spite of ever better techniques for finding oil, computer modeling, 3-D seismic and so forth. We now have a pretty good idea of what the geology of the world looks like, and we will find gas and oil in only very unique geological formations. Maybe a little later this evening we will have a little chance to talk about those so you have some expectation of what we might find in the future. Here we are now, and this is about 2007, and we have been using more oil ever since about 1980 than we have been finding. Of course, we have had lots of reserve, and we have been eating up that reserve now, until we have taken some of this to fill in this space. Now you look to the future, and what does the future look like? We have some options of what the future looks like. One of the options we do not have, though, is pumping oil we have not found. So unless you think we are going to find more oil than this chart indicates, and of course it will not be a smooth, down curve like that. It will be up and down but generally it will be down most people recognize. Well, we can use all sorts of enhanced oil recovery techniques and pump it sooner, and you may get a little more from those enhanced recovery techniques, but you cannot pump what you have not found. So this shows you very graphically. If you had only one graph to look at to help you understand what we are facing in terms of peak oil, this would be the graph. So you understand now why this second group is really concerned about our use of fossil fuels, particularly oil, because it is very probable that the world is going to reach its maximum production of oil, maybe has already, but if not now, very soon, and the demand for oil, which has been going up at a roughly 2 percent per year growth is going to continue. So it is going to be an ever increasing difference between the available oil and the demand for oil. Of course, when that happens, of course when demand exceeds supply, price goes up, and we have seen oil prices go up relatively few years ago from $10 a barrel to $60 a barrel now. It was just a few months ago $78 a barrel. Kind of fear factor in that way, it went away, and it dropped very quickly $18 a barrel. But very volatile market, up and down $1 or more a day. Another fear factor, it could jump another $18. The next chart I have here is one that shows the concerns that this third group has, and that is those who are concerned about climate change. I have something I want to read here. This chart comes from this document by the way, ``Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change.'' It says here, ``The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response. ``Climate change is global in its causes and consequences, and international collective action will be critical in driving an effective, efficient and equitable response on the scale required.'' This international cooperation reminds me of a visit we just made. I came back just about a month ago from China. Nine of us, nine Members of Congress went over and the primary reason of the trip was to talk to them about energy. I was surprised and pleased when they began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Gee, I says, they get it. Somehow a civilization that was a golden civilization when my Fore Fathers were barbarians running around Europe has a longer view of things than we seem to have. We have trouble seeing beyond the next quarterly report in our industry. We have real trouble here seeing beyond the next election. But they are looking post-oil they say. They recognize that there will be a post-oil period. A thousand years of recorded history, we have been in the age of oil about 100, 150 years. If it is half gone and if it follows a bell curve, as it did in our country and it probably will in the world, you have probably got another 100, 150 years of oil, with ever increasing costs and ever decreasing amounts as we get the oil, which is harder and harder to get. Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics. It is the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen. The benefits of strong, early action on climate change outweigh the costs they say. So this is a little chart that shows where these gases come from. Just a moment of explanation as to why the use of oil and so forth produces climate change. When you go out into your car this evening, if you go out, if it is parked outside and the sun is shining in, and if you go out before dark, your car will be very much warmer inside than it is outside, and we call that the greenhouse effect. What happens is the light from the sun comes in in a very broad wavelength spectrum from very long waves to very short waves, and they go easily through your car, most of them through the car window, and then that sun heats up the material inside your car, and that reradiates in the infrared. Well, the glass is relatively impervious to infrared so it simply reflects it back, and that is called the greenhouse effect, and your car then gets warmer and warmer. You see it especially on a summer day when it may be 80 outside and 120 inside your car which is why you should not leave your children and animals inside the car when you leave it. Well, there are gases in the atmosphere that essentially do the same thing as the glass in your automobile. You may remember riding in the airplane and you are very comfortable sitting in there at 38, 40,000 feet and the pilot tells you it is minus 40 degrees centigrade outside. That is really cold. The reason you could be so warm down here and you are so cold up here is the reflection of all this heat which is radiated back from the earth, long infrared rays, and they are reflected back. One of the things that reflects them back are gases up in the atmosphere. There a number of those gases, methane, and carbon dioxide is one of the major ones. Of course, carbon dioxide, absolutely essential for plant life, and they are so efficient. Our oxygen is about 21 percent. We can do with maybe half of that. If you are at 18,000 feet, that is all you have got because of the atmospheric pressure there. But these plants make due on .04 percent. Do you not wish you could be as efficient as these plants? You could get by on the top of Mt. Everest very easily. You would not need to pressurize the cockpit in the aircraft you are riding in. What stunned me in this report was when I read that our earth now is only 5 degrees centigrade, that is 9 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than it was in the last ice age. Wow, what a huge change in climate, a relatively small change in temperature makes, just 9 degrees cooler Fahrenheit, and we had glaciers that came down to southeast Ohio. They came down that far, scooping up the dirt and from it you can see where it melted and left the mounds of gravel and dirt there where they came down that far. Well, I am very pleased to be joined by one of the Nation's leading voices and authorities on climate change, my colleague, also from the great State of Maryland, Congressman Gilchrest.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I want to thank my colleague very much for joining us here. Congressman Gilchrest mentioned market forces. They are, indeed, very powerful. They have served us very well in this country. They have provided for us the highest quality of life of any place in the world. But market forces are limited. They cannot do what they cannot do. As I noted somewhat humorously, there are even some things that God cannot do. God can't make a square circle, for instance. The market forces are very powerful. As long as there are unlimited forces, market forces will work. I remember mentioning to one of our very high government officials the problem of limited oil supply in the future. The response was, gee, I guess the market will take care of that. I guess when oil gets more expensive, we will use less of it, and then we will find alternatives. That is true. When oil prices get higher, we will use less of it, and we will look for alternatives. But when you look at the potential for exploiting these alternatives, you see that a large amount of time and energy must be invested in these alternatives before they yield any meaningful amount of replacement for the fossil fuels, which are so abundant and so energy rich. Let me give you just one little example of some of the unintended consequences of trying to do this. This is a big push to make ethanol from corn in our country. We have noted that the Brazilians are making ethanol from sugar cane, and they now don't have to import any oil. We would like to emulate them and make enough ethanol from corn that we will not have to import oil. That, by the way, is the impossible dream. That will not happen. With the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are now making, and there aren't very many E-85 pumps or blends of ethanol in gasoline in this part of the country, there are in the Midwest, but with the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are making, the demand for corn raised the price of corn from $2.11 a bushel in September to $4.08 in December. That is causing a huge problem for our people that raise animals. We are having a meeting in a few days with a number of our dairy people from Maryland. Unless milk goes up to more, I think it is about $14 per 100, now it needs to be at least $18 before they can break even. With this kind of a price for food for their animals, they will go bankrupt. So the relatively small demand for corn to make the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are making now has essentially doubled the price of corn. What this does is to reflect the enormous amount of energy that is in these fossil fuels. There they are really energy dense. This chart shows something about what has happened to our world as a result of the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels. Hyman Rickover, and let me get a copy of his paper, it was not really a paper, it was a talk that he gave to a group of physicians 50 years ago. The anniversary of that will be May 14 of this year, and that was at a banquet of the annual scientific assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association. This talk had nothing to do with medicine. He apologized for that at the beginning of his talk. But he thought that the physicians might enjoy some diversion. He was talking about the enormous fossil energy in these fuels. Hyman Rickover, of course, is the father of our nuclear submarine. I had no idea that he had given this talk. It just appeared in the Energy Bulletin December 2 of last year, 2006. So it has only been out in the general public for these couple of months. I noted this the other night that we need to hear this again, because this is just so revealing as to what this energy has done for us. With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Does the enormous fossil fuel energy in this country which we control feed machines which makes each of us a master of an army of mechanical slaves? Now at that time we didn't import any, so he could say we controlled it. Now we import almost two-thirds of what we use. Another writer has indicated the incredible amount of energy in fossil fuels in oil. Let me give you the analogies he uses, and then I will read the ones that Hyman Rickover gave in that speech 50 years ago. One barrel of oil produces the energy equivalent of 12 men working all year for you. If you figure the price that you could hire a man, the equivalent a man to work for you, by buying $10 of fossil fuel, of oil, it will work a full year for you. Now let me read what Hyman Rickover said 50 years ago and more so today. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, \1/20\ of a horse power. That is 24/7. You can do a little better than that when you are working, but you have to eat, sleep, so forth. Machines, therefore, furnish every American and industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men. Wow. How many man-months of work without any energy from fossil fuels would it have taken to build your automobile? While at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer, he says, controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men. Each jet pilot of 700,000 men. You know, thinking of that jet pilot in that plane up there just the other day, and I look at those contrails and sometimes they are the only cloud-like things in the sky, it finally occurred to me the dynamics of this CO2 thing that Congressman Gilchrest was talking about, carbon; and that is what is in these fuels, is largely carbon and hydrogen. Carbon has a molecular weight of 12, and hydrogen has a molecular weight of 1. It is the lightest element in the universe. When you burn this carbon, it combines with oxygen, one molecule of carbon with two molecules of oxygen. Oxygen weighs 16. So what that says is, Congressman Gilchrest, that if you weigh the gasoline that goes in your car, you produce three times that weight in carbon dioxide. That is incredible. Now, all of that carbon dioxide was taken out of the atmosphere a very long time ago. I didn't know, as a little boy, where oil came from; but I did know where coal came from, because we had a coal furnace in our house, and I would have to break those big lumps of coal. We bought it just as it came out of the mine. When I would break a lump of coal open, there would be a fern leaf. Nobody had to tell me where coal came from. I knew very well where it came from. It came from plants that grew a very long time ago, they fell over under pressure and in time and they became coal. So we were releasing incredible amounts of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, which will change the acidity of the ocean. Fortunately carbon dioxide is very soluble in water. But it still changes the pH of the water because it forms a very weak acid, carbonic acid, when it gets in the water. Truly, the humblest American, Admiral Rickover says, enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and live better than most ancient kings. In retrospect and despite wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by, that was 1950, that is right here, the 100 years just gone by, may well seem like a Golden Age. And what this chart shows here is the history of the world, energy wise, for only about 400 years out of that 8,000 years that Admiral Rickover talks about. And the industrial revolution began with wood, the brown curve here, and it did not produce very many quadrillion BtUs of energy, and then coal, and boy did the economy grow with coal and trains and so forth. But then look what happened. It exploded when we found gas and oil. And that is because gas and oil are so easy to change into compounds that we can readily get energy from. And they are much more adaptable and flexible than coal. Although you can get gas and oil from coal. Hitler had to do that when we cut off his oil supplies, and under embargoes South Africa had to do that. We may be turning to that again shortly. As I mentioned, Madam Speaker, there are three groups that really have common cause in talking about the use of these fossil fuels. One is that very large and growing group of people, including our Secretary of State, who are concerned that our growing dependence on foreign oil is a very serious national security risk. Well, what do we do? We obviously need to use less of it. The President says we are hooked on it, we need to use less of it. And we can use less of it two ways. One. We can simply conserve and be more efficient. And we have done some of that. We can do a great deal more of that. The second thing that we can do is to get energy from alternatives. As this chart shows, and as Dr. Rickover mentioned, there will come a time when the world will be getting less and less energy from fossil fuels, and finally at some point in history down the road, we will be getting essentially no energy from fossil fuels, because obviously they are not infinite in their supply and they will not last forever. In 8,000 years of recorded history, the Age of Oil will represent but a blip in terms of energy production, a pretty big blip. But we are probably about halfway through the age of oil. In another 100, 150 years if M. King Hubbert is correct and we are now at the peak, and it will be tailing off and going down the other side of what is commonly called Hubbert's Peak, oil will be ever more difficult to get and ever more costly. In another 100, 150 years we will have transition to renewables, we will be steady-state, having used up the coal we have, having gotten all of the energy we can from these unconventional oil sources, like the tar sands of Canada and the oil shales of the United States. The next chart looks at what obviously we need to be about. And that is addressing this problem. Now, whether you believe that we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels because it is a national security problem, whether you believe we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels because it is causing climate change, or whether you believe we need to reduce the use of fossil fuels because they are just not going to be there in the quantities that we are using today in the future, you still must do the same things. Well, the first thing that you need to do is to buy some time. We now, knowing that we should have known at least by 1980 that we were going to be here today, because we were already 10 years down the other side of our Hubbert's Peak in this country, and M. King Hubbert had already predicted that the world would be peaking about now. For these last 27 years, we should have been addressing this problem and investing energy and time in alternatives. Unfortunately, we in large measure have not done that. And so today we are faced with a problem. We have no excess oil, no excess oil energy to invest in alternatives. If there were any excess it would not be $55, $60 a barrel. And we have essentially run out of time. Now, we can buy some time and free up some oil with an aggressive program in conservation. And you really can do that. Europe is using half the energy that we use. It would be hard to argue that they do not live as comfortably as we do. The average Californian uses 65 percent of the electricity that we use. And there are 50 some of those in our Congress. I doubt that any would agree that they live less well than we do, and they still use a lot less energy than we use. What we need to do then is use it wisely. What will we do with this energy that we freed up and the time that we have bought by this aggressive conservation program? We have to invest that wisely in alternatives. Now whichever of these camps that you come from, whether it is the climate change camp, or the camp that is concerned that we are too dependent on foreign oils, that is going to be a big national security risk, or whether you believe that we need to move from fossil fuels to alternatives simply because there are going to be less and less, and more and more expensive fossil fuels in the future, you still want to do essentially the same thing. Enormous benefits can accrue from this. Congressman Gilchrest mentioned the enormous creativity and entrepreneurship of our people. We put a man on the moon in less than a decade. When you realize where we started from, that was a really big feat. We can do this. We were challenged to do that. Today, the average American does not know that oil is probably limited in its future supply. They probably are unaware, today is an interesting day to talk about the potential for global warming, because it is the coldest day that we have had this winter. But I understand it is 20 degree above normal in Alaska and 20 degrees above normal today in Russia. I just wanted to make a comment about some of the potentially unexpected consequences of this climate change. If you look at a globe, you will see that England is way up there, about mid Canada. And I had to stop for a refueling flight in Ireland. That really is the Emerald Isle, it is so green. And that has a climate like, what, South Carolina. How can you have a climate like South Carolina at a latitude of central Canada? The reason for that is a huge conveyor belt that carries heat from the tropics to the British Isles and Europe. And that huge conveyor belt is called the Gulf Stream. And the Gulf Stream picks up heat in the Gulf area near the equator, and it then carries that like a giant conveyor belt up to the British Isles and Europe. They have a very moderate climate compared to what they would have in the absence of the Gulf Stream. Now, water is not piling up up there around Europe and England, so it is obvious that if it flows up there and carries that heat up there, it has got to come back. It comes back by going down. And why does it go down? We will talk about that in just a moment. Then it comes back flowing in just a large as volume and just as fast, it comes back to the lower part of this big conveyor belt. Again in the tropics, picking up more heat, and continues this transfer of heat to the British Isles and England. Well, a very interesting thing is happening to this conveyor belt. The waters as they flow north, they are warm. And the sun shines on them, and water evaporates. And when the water evaporates, it leaves the salt there. And that makes the water more salty and heavier. And of course that is what produces the rains that then drops in our mountains and produces the indirect solar energy from the waterfalls that we use the turbines in to produce electricity. Well, two things are happening. A major one is the fact that the polar ice cap is melting. And a lot of that fresh water, water without saline in it, very light compared to this heavy water, it is in addition to the general global warming of the oceans, it is the effect of this polar ice cap melting. And strangely the melting of the polar ice cap may so dilute the waters in the Gulf Stream that they do not become dense enough to drop down to continue this conveyor belt on back down to the tropics. The Gulf Stream could stop. If the Gulf Stream slows down appreciably, or if it stopped, the climate in the British Isles and in Europe would be very, very different than it is today. Now, if we were in Siberia talking about global warming and so forth, we may have a very different view of it. It might be hard to convince me that a little global warming might not be good if I lived in Siberia. But noting that just this 9-degree Fahrenheit, 5 degrees Centigrade change from the Ice Age has produced the incredible climate changes that we see from that time to this, you see the potential for really devastating climate changes as a result of very modest changes in temperature. Congressman Gilchrest.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, Congressman Gilchrest and I have both been twice to Antarctica. One of those trips we made together. We are on the Science Committee. We have a large experiment station down there right at the pole. When you go to Antarctica, that is a continent that nobody owns. I think Argentina claims they own it, and Russia claims they own it, but nobody honors those statements. It is an international area. It has got ice piled nearly 2 miles high. So high and so heavy that it has actually pushed the continent down a little bit under it. 90 percent of all the world's ice is in Antarctica, and 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. You take our Great Lakes and all of the relatively thin ice at the North Pole and Greenland, that is relatively thin compared to nearly 2 miles in Antarctica. So we have 90 percent of the ice down there and 70 percent of the fresh water. And Congressman Gilchrest mentioned that the oceans would rise maybe 3 feet with the melting of the glacial cap in Greenland and so forth and in the Arctic. If all of the ice melted, that would take a very long time, that is not going to happen tomorrow because there is a whole lot of it there. But if all of the ice melted in Antarctica, I am told that the oceans would rise 200 feet. Now, that would really, really change our world because I don't know what percent of our population lives within 200 feet altitude of the ocean. I suspect it is more than 50 percent, if you look around the world of the people that live at less than 200 feet altitude. Now, there is an interesting ocean current that goes around Antarctica, talking about ocean currents and their affect on climates, that is the circumpolar current. And what it does is it keeps the, like our gulf stream, it will either let the cold air down if it is further south or keep it from coming down if it is further north. This circumpolar stream around the Pole keeps the northern, down there, of course, it is northern waters that are warm, it keeps the northern waters from coming down into Antarctica. And if something happened that stopped that circumpolar stream, the Antarctica polar ice cap might melt much more quickly than we anticipate that it might melt. As an indication of how much these ocean currents affect climate, about 5 years ago, I guess it was, an iceberg broke off down in Antarctica, which was the size of Delaware. And in spite of the circumpolar current, some northern warm waters do get through it and down there to temper the climate a little, and that usually melts the sea ice enough so that they could get a boat in that is full of diesel file to McMurdo, which is where the main station is. You fly from there to the Pole. And because that big iceberg the size of Delaware blocked the flow of this water that year, and that was 4 years ago, it was so cold there that the sea ice didn't melt, and the closest they could get, with the help, by the way, of a Russian ice-breaker, the closest they could get was 3 miles out, so they laid a hose 3 miles across the ice to fill their tanks at McMurdo. By the way, Congressman, one of the things that amazed me there, when I was down there the sun was shining all day long and the wind blew incessantly. I didn't see any solar panels down there, and I didn't see any wind machines down there. In the summer down there, in their summer, our winter, they could clearly make all of their energy from the wind and from solar. It just reflects the President's wise observation that we are hooked on oil. We are so hooked on oil that we are really quite irrational in our use of it. You had a comment?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. They have a very interesting rookery down there; we enjoyed seeing it. Both times I was down we went out to the rookery to see the penguins. The big Emperor penguins, they didn't like us; they waddled off. And they scoot along on their bellies when they are moving fast, by the way, rather than marching. I am very pleased to have been joined by Congressman Gilchrest. And again I want to emphasize that we have three groups that have a common cause: those that are concerned about oil and national security, those that are concerned about the excessive use of fossil fuels and the climate change that may very well result from that, and those of us, and I am with all of those groups actually, but I am particularly concerned about the fact that we may muddle through the national security thing and somehow God may save us from the global warming, but nothing is going to save us if there really is a limited supply of oil. So, I am very pleased to be joined by my colleague, and I join all of those in these three camps. We really do have common cause. Please join and help us do the right thing.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

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

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, there is a question that often comes to my mind. I wonder to how many Americans this comes to their mind. We are a great superpower, the undisputed economic and military superpower of this world. Have you ever asked yourself why? What is so special about us that we have this privileged position in the world? We no longer have the most oil in the world or gold or silver or diamonds. We no longer have the best work ethic in the world. We no longer have the most respect for technical education. We no longer have the most respect for the nuclear family. Nearly half of our children are born out of wedlock. What makes us so special? I have asked myself that question a lot of times, and I think there are two reasons. There may be others, but I have noted for myself two reasons I think. One of those is the enormous respect that this country, that this government, has for our civil liberties. There is no other Constitution, there is no other government, that has this great respect for civil liberties. The Constitution written in 1787 was hardly dry before our Founding Fathers wondered if it was clear that most of the rights, most of the power, should belong to the people, and so they wrote what we call the Bill of Rights, those first 10 amendments which delineated very clearly that most of the rights belonged to the people. Civil liberties are always a casualty of war. Abraham Lincoln, my favorite President, violated our civil liberties in the civil war. In World War II, we interred the Japanese Americans. I served here with Norm Mineta, former Secretary of Transportation. Japanese Americans. He told me, ``Roscoe, as a little boy, I remember holding my parents' hands when they ushered us into that concentration camp in Idaho.'' Those wars were ended and we got back the habeas corpus that was denied during the civil war, and the Japanese Americans were released from those interment camps. We are now engaged in a great war, a war like no other that we have ever fought. I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, that in our zeal to catch terrorists that we may threaten the civil liberties that I think are largely responsible for making us this great, free Nation. I think these civil liberties have established a climate and milieu in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish, and I think we put at risk who we are in our superior position in the world if we put at risk these civil liberties. We need to be very careful, and actions like the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretaps, detention without either charging or giving counsel to the accused, we must be very careful, Mr. Speaker, that we do not put at risk those things that have made us such a great Nation. But this is a subject for another day. A second reason, which is the subject for today that I believe that we are such a great, free Nation, undisputed superpower in the world, I believe that our Founding Fathers understood that God sat with them at the table when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I have here in the front of the little Constitution that I carry a statement from Alexander Hamilton one year before they wrote the Declaration of Independence, and I think that it kind of epitomizes the belief that most of our Founding Fathers had. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hands of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. Is there any better evidence that our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table when they wrote these great documents? I would like to read something from the Declaration of Independence, that first document, in 1776. ``We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' Five times in the Declaration of Independence God is mentioned. Do you think, Mr. Speaker, that our courts may declare the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it mentions God? As I mentioned earlier, the Constitution, which was the fulfillment of the promise made in the Declaration of Independence, written, by the way, 11 years later in 1787, this Constitution sought to assure the permanence of these God-given rights noted in the Declaration of Independence to the citizens of this new country. They did that by delineating a very limited Federal Government. If the Federal Government is limited, obviously the powers, the rights that it does not have belong to the people, but the ink was hardly dry on this document before they wondered was it really clear, would people really understand from this Constitution. It is certainly implicit there in the fact that our Federal Government is given very few powers. You would need never believe they meant that today, Mr. Speaker, by the size of our Federal Government. We really need to take a look at that because we are doing a lot of things that I think that if our Founding Fathers were resurrected would be quite surprised that we thought their Constitution permitted the Federal Government to do. They were concerned that maybe it was not clear that these precious rights given to us by God were to be secured to the people and not to the government, and so they started 10 amendments through the process of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the State legislatures, and 10 of them made it through, and we know them as the Bill of Rights. The rights of the people are so frequently mentioned in these Bill of Rights, which is why we call them the Bill of Rights. The first amendment, the right of the people peaceably to assemble. The second amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The third amendment does not mention rights, but it certainly delineates the right of the people not to have the military quartered in their houses except in time of war. The fourth amendment begins with the words the right of the people. Mr. Speaker, I would like to note that this does not say the rights of the citizens. It says the rights of the people, and our Founding Fathers did differentiate in this great Constitution between people and citizens because when they are delineating the requirements for the presidency or other offices they note the requirement for citizenship. The fifth amendment, which delineates a lot of rights, begins with the delineation of a right which is frequently denied to us by our governments, both local, State and Federal. I think it is the most violated part of our Constitution. The last part of the fifth amendment, a lot of rights in there, the right of the people not to have to testify against themselves, the right of the people not to have to stand trial twice for the same offense, but this last right, little noted, violated every day by all levels of government, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. We need to take a serious look at that. If we can start denying one right of the people in this great Constitution, arguing that times have changed, are not all of these rights at risk? The sixth amendment, enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial; the seventh amendment, the right by trial; and then the eighth amendment, the people have the right not to have excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishment. The ninth amendment, the lost amendment, the amendment that almost nobody reads, the amendment that I think very few people understand, it is a very simple one. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. This is written in old English and legalese. What does it mean? What it means is that just because a right is not given to the people specifically in the Constitution, don't disparage that right to the people, to whom that right belongs. Fundamentally, all rights belong to the people. They choose, they choose to give certain power, certain rights to their government. Because when there are a lot of people who need government, the government must have some rights. Our Founding Fathers wanted our government to have little power and few rights. The tenth amendment, the power is not delegated. They might just as well have said, rights not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by the States or reserved to the States respectively or to the people. If you were writing this in everyday English, and not using legalese, you would say, if you cannot find it in article 1, section 8, the Federal Government cannot do it. There is a whole lot of what we do that I can't find in article 1, section 8. I would submit that we have amended our Constitution 27 times. If we think it is outdated, we ought to be doing something that this Constitution prohibits us from doing, then, sir, we need to amend the Constitution. We don't need to ignore it. Essential to our understanding of our origins is an understanding of what our government really is. I am afraid, sir, that too few understand this. When Benjamin Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention in 1797, as the story goes, he was asked by a woman who was sitting there, Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? This quote is in the front of many copies of the Constitution. His answer was, a republic, madam, if you can keep it, a republic. But I thought we have a democracy. I don't know if we cite that Pledge of Allegiance just from rote and never think about what it says. But you remember those words in there, the republic for which it stands, not the democracy, but the republic for which it stands. What is the difference between a republic and a democracy and why did Benjamin Franklin make a point of telling this lady, a republic, madam, if you can keep it? Let me give you a couple of examples of a democracy that will help you understand why he didn't say that they had given us a democracy. An example of a democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner. You may smile a little because you know that if two wolves and a lamb are voting on what you are going to have for dinner, it is not going to be clover. Another sample, and this is a very sad example, but if you think about it, this is really an apt example of a democracy, and that is a lynch mob. Because, clearly, in a lynch mob the will of the majority is being expressed, and that is what people say democracy is, that the majority rules. So what is a republic? There is an incident in our history that helps me understand the difference between a republic and a democracy, and this happened during the Truman administration. The steel mills were going on strike, our economy was already in trouble, and it was going to be in bigger trouble if that strike occurred. Then we did some manufacturing, and we made some steel, and it mattered. Today, it probably wouldn't matter, because so little manufacturing in steel is made here, but it mattered then. Harry Truman in his take-charge style issued an executive order, one of only two, by the way, that the Supreme Court has set aside. What he said in that executive order was that he nationalized the steel mills that made the steel mill workers civil servants, employees of the government. As employees to the government, they couldn't strike. That was a very popular action that had very high approval from the American people. In a democracy, that would have been just fine. But the Supreme Court met in an emergency session and, in effect, what they said, Mr. President, no matter how popular that is, you cannot do it because it violates the Constitution. You see, the fundamental difference between a democracy and a republic is a rule of law. In a democracy, what the majority wants prevails. In a republic, it is a rule of law that prevails. Now, we can change that law. We have changed it 27 times. But it takes a very deliberative process, two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and then three-fourths of the State legislature. This is a long-time process. It gives a lot of time for reflection. The last time we tried to amend the Constitution it didn't quite make it, the Equal Rights Amendment, you remember. Nobody denies that women should have equal rights with men. But what that amendment says, that you couldn't differentiate between men and women. If you had a draft, you would have to draft women. We can change this Constitution, but it takes a very deliberative process and a super majority vote. Then the last half of that statement, if you can keep it, I wonder what was in Benjamin Franklin's head, in his mind. Was he concerned about threats from outside our country? We were a long ocean away with sailing ships from any potential enemy. I doubt that his concern was a threat from without. I think that he was more concerned about a threat from within, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. This needs a longer discussion, but that, too, is a discussion for another day. To really understand who we are, we need to go back to our origins and how our Founding Fathers came here. Most of them in our early days came from the British Isles and the European continent, and they came here to escape two tyrannies. One was the tyranny of the crown, and the other was the tyranny of the church. Most of them came from countries where there was a king or an emperor who incredibly, from our perspective, claimed and was granted divine rights. What that says was the rights came from God to the king or the emperor, and he would give what rights he wished to his people. That is incomprehensible to us that for hundreds of years people could have lived under that kind of government. Well, those who chose not to live that way came to this country. When they wrote the Bill of Rights, their concern about the tyranny of the crown gave rise to the second amendment. Now, you may ask people what the second amendment is, and almost all of them will tell you that it says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That is about half of the second amendment. Let me read the first part that puts that second part in perspective. A well-regulated militia, that is every citizen with a gun, that is the militia, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. I asked some of my friends, who wants to limit the right to keep and bear arms? What do you think that means? Remember, they came here to escape the tyranny of the crown. If we have a citizenry who have the right to keep and bear arms, never, ever could a small oligarchy at the seat of government take over and oppress the people. The second tyranny that they came here to escape was the tyranny of the church. In England, it was the Episcopal church. On the continent, it was the Roman church. In England, it was a state church, supported by the state, empowered by the state. On the continent, the Roman Catholic Church was the state church for many states, supported by the state and powered by the state, and these religions could and did oppress other religions. Our Founding Fathers were so repulsed by this that when they came here in old Virginia they would not let Roman Catholics vote. But, to their great credit, when it came time to write these precious 10 amendments, they recognized that is not really what they came here to do. So they wrote the establishment clause of the first amendment, and it is very clear. I have no idea why people have trouble understanding it. It says, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Don't make any law establishing a state religion. Then they went on to say, and let everybody worship as they please, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That is a really misunderstood establishment clause. Early history books will present a very different picture of our origins than that which really existed. If you go back to a history book of 50 years ago, it will be unrecognizable as compared to the history book of today. The history books of today have been bled dry of any reference to our Christian heritage. I would like to pause here for just a moment to note that I am going to quote from a lot of our Founding Fathers, and they are going to use the word ``Christian.'' That was the lexicon of the day. If they were here today, they would be saying Judeo-Christian. Every time I read the word ``Christian,'' please translate that Judeo-Christian, because that is the context in which they used that word. Current history books, and indeed our culture, contains three great lies. The first of these lies is that our Founding Fathers were atheist and deist. Now an atheist is someone who does not believe in God. Deist, God, atheist, the alpha primitive, don't believe in God. A deist is someone who believes there is a God. They believe he created the world, but don't bother trying to talk to him or pray to him, because when he created the world he also put in place several laws, and your destiny will be determined by how you relate yourself to your laws. Although they believed in a supreme being, they didn't believe he was a personal God or made any difference whether you tried to talk to him or not, and he certainly was not going to talk to you. The second great lie is that our Founding Fathers did not want to establish a Christian Nation. The third great lie is that they established a wall of separation between the church and the state. Our national freedom was not free. It was enormously costly. Five of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were captured and executed by the British, nine of them died on the battlefield of the Revolutionary War, and another dozen lost their homes and their possessions and their fortunes to British occupation. Our birth as a Nation was not cheap for these men. What beliefs and convictions motivated them to do what they did? Of these three great lies, that is the wall of separation, it is very easy to dispense with a third of those because the words ``separation,'' ``church,'' and ``State'' never exist in relationship to each other in either our Constitution or the amendments. But they do occur in one constitution. Interestingly, that is the constitution of the old Soviet empire, the constitution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Article 124 says: ``In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the USSR is separated from the state and the schools from the church.'' Now, many people would like to interpret the establishment clause of our first amendment as if it was written in these words that are found only in the constitution of the old Soviet Union. To refute the first two lies, that is, that our Founding Fathers were athiests and deists and that they did not mean to establish a Christian nation, I want to do four things. First of all, I want to let the Founding Fathers speak for themselves. I am going to cite only a few quotes from the many, many that you could find. Then we are going to take a look at what the courts said and you will be astounded at what our courts said in our early years. And then we will take a look at what the Congress did. The institution permits me to speak here in the well of the Congress. And then we will take a look at our schools. Patrick Henry was the firebrand of the Revolution. Every school child knows his words: ``Give me liberty or give me death.'' But I will wager, Mr. Speaker, that you will not find in any current textbooks the circumstances in which he uttered these words: They were in a church in Richmond, Virginia, St. John's Church in Richmond Virginia March 23, 1775, and this is what he said: ``An appeal to arms and the God of Hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle, sir, is not to the strong. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.'' Did your children ever bring home to you this full quote from Patrick Henry? Was Patrick Henry a Christian? The following year, 1776, he wrote this: ``It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this great Nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians,'' or in today's vernacular, Judeo Christians, ``not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, peoples of other faiths have been afforded'' . . . ``freedom of worship here.'' Benjamin Franklin was said to be a deist; that is, he believed there was a God who created the Earth but then he just let the Earth and its inhabitants determine their destiny by how they related themselves to laws that he had established. Let me read to you something that Benjamin Franklin said. This was in 1787. We had a deadlocked convention. It wasn't certain that after 11 years, we were going to be able to write a Constitution that would protect all of the rights, big States and little States and people, that we wanted to protect. And this is what he said: ``In the days of our conquest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity to establish our Nation. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Do we imagine we no longer need his assistance?'' And then I love this quote: ``I have lived, sir, a long time.'' I believe he was 81 years old, the oldest member of the Constitutional Convention, revered Governor of Pennsylvania. ``I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, it is probable that a new nation cannot rise without his aid. We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that built it. I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to any business.'' That, Mr. Speaker, established a precedent that we honored this morning when we opened this day and this Congress with prayer. We have a chaplain; so does the Senate. There is a chaplain of every religious persuasion, or many, including Muslims, who serve our military. As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, the only place today we cannot offer a prayer is in our schools. I have often asked myself the rationality of this. Thomas Jefferson was also said to be a deist. Let me read what he says and see if you believe he was a deist: ``I am a real Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our creator and, I hope, to the pure doctrine of Jesus also.'' On slavery Jefferson wrote: ``Almighty God has created men's minds free. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.'' George Washington, the founder our country, a deeply religious person. We think of him often as commander of the Army. This is his quote: ``It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible.'' Boy, are we trying to do that? ``Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, our religion and morality are the indispensable supporters. Let us with caution indulge the supposition,'' that is, the idea, ``that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect our national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.'' And in his prayer book, George Washington wrote this: ``Oh, eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words, and work. Wash away my sins in the emaculate blood of the lamb and purge my heart by the Holy Spirit. Daily, frame me more and more in the likeness of they son, Jesus Christ, that living in thy fear, and dying in thy favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind and let the world be filled with the knowledge of thee and thy son, Jesus Christ.'' John Adams, our second President and President of the American Bible Society, this is what he said: ``We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion.'' Mr. Speaker, I wonder if maybe this can be a factor in our problems in Iraq. ``Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.'' This by the second President of the United States. John Jay, our first Supreme Court Justice, said ``Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian Nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.'' This from John Jay, the first Supreme Court Justice. John Quincy Adams, also, like his father, President of the American Bible Society. As a matter of fact, I think it was he who said that he valued the presidency of the American Bible Society more than he valued the presidency of the United States. This is what he said: ``The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. From the day of the Declaration, the day'' the Founding Fathers ``were bound by the Laws of God, which they all acknowledged as their rules of conduct.'' And later Calvin Coolidge, ``Silent Cal.'' An interesting story is told of him. He was a man of few words. It was hard to get him to talk. He was sitting at dinner with a lady who said, ``I have a wager that I will get you to say three words tonight.'' And the only words he uttered that whole evening were ``You lose.'' Calvin Coolidge said this: ``America seeks no empires built on blood and forces. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.'' He later wrote: ``The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teaching would cease to be practically universal in our country.'' President Coolidge, they have ceased to be practically universal in our country. What now? I think, Mr. Speaker, you see from these quotes from just a few of our Founding Fathers, and there are dozens of others I could have brought, that certainly our Founding Fathers were deeply religious people. They were not deists and athiests. Now let us move to the Supreme Court. Some of these quotes will shock you. The People versus Ruggles. He had publicly slandered the Bible, and somehow this came to the Supreme Court in 1811. ``You have attacked the Bible.'' This is what the Supreme Court said: ``You have attacked the Bible. In attacking the Bible, you have attacked Jesus Christ. In attacking Jesus Christ, you have attacked the roots of our Nation.'' Did they intend this to be a Godless Nation? ``Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity manifests itself in the dissolving of our civil government. This was the Supreme Court. And then the same Court a little later, in 1885, in Vida versus Gerrard, they were using the Bible in teaching one of our schools, and somehow that got to the Supreme Court. And this is what they said: ``Why not use the Bible, especially the New Testament? It should be read and taught as the divine revelation in the schools. Where can the purist principles of morality be learned so clearly and so perfectly as from the New Testament?'' Can you imagine anything like that coming from our Court today? And then in 1892, and this was in a suit involving the Church of the Holy Spirit in which they contended Christianity was not the faith of the people, and this is what the Supreme Court said in 1892: ``Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the redeemer of mankind. It is impossible to demand that they should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent, our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. No purpose of action against our religion can be imputed to any legislation, State or national, because this is a religious people.'' This is the Supreme Court. ``This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to this present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.'' And then they go on to cite 87 different legal precedents to affirm that America was formed as a Christian Nation by believing Christians. And then in 1947, our Court did an about face, 180 degrees, repudiating everything they have they had done for 160 years. And you will see no Supreme Court reference today going back beyond 1947 because if you went back beyond that, every one would be consistent with the quotes that I have read here. We are having trouble understanding that what our Founding Fathers meant in this great establishment clause in the first amendment was to ensure that there would be freedom of religion. We are ever more interpreting this as requiring freedom from religion. Our Founding Fathers would be astounded if they could be resurrected and see how we have interpreted their Constitution. In the early 1850s, Humanism and Darwinism was sweeping our country. And there was the assertion that America was not a Christian Nation. After a year's study, now we are turning to the Congress. After a year's study, this is what the Senate Judiciary Committee said in its final report in March 27, 1854. ``The First Amendment clause speaks against an establishment of religion. The founding fathers intended by this amendment to prohibit an establishment of religion, such as the Church of England presented or anything like it. But they had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us an illreligious people.'' And I love the language that our founding fathers used, so poetic. ``They did not intend to spread over the public authorities and the whole public action of the Nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistic apathy. Had the people during the revolution had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that revolution would have been strangled in its cradle.'' At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, not just any one sect or denomination. The object was not to substitute Judaism, or Islam or infidelity, but to prevent rivalry among the Christian denominations to the exclusion of others. Christianity must be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure rests. ``Laws will not have permanence or power without the sanction of religious sentiment, without the firm belief that there is power above us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices.'' This is what our Congress said. The Continental Congress bought 20,000 copies of the Bible to distribute to its new citizens. And for the first 100 years of our country, every year our Congress voted monies to send missionaries to the American Indians. Continuing the Senate Judiciary Committee's 1854 reading. ``In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity. By its general principles, the Christian faith is the great conserving element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of our free institutions.'' That was the religion of our founding fathers, or the Republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendents. Well, there is little question, little question how the Congress felt, and the courts. Let us turn now to our schools. Oh, by the way. The same Congress in 1854 passed this resolution. Can you imagine this today? ``The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in our schools.'' The New England Primer used for 200 years. This is how they taught the alphabet. A. A wise son makes a glad father but a foolish son is heaviness to his mother. B. Better is little with the fear of the Lord than abundance apart from him. C. Come unto Christ, all you who are weary and heavily laden. D. Do not do the abominable thing, which I hate, sayeth the Lord. E. Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God. Clearly religion was important in our early schools. The McGuffey Reader, used for a hundred years. A few years ago they brought it back with the hope that if kids used that, they could read, because what they were doing today they were not learning to read. This is what McGuffey said. ``The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our notions of the character of God, on the great moral Governor of universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions. From no source has the author drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred Scriptures. For all of those extracts from the Bible, I make no apology.'' Of the first 108 universities in our country, 106 were distinctly religious. Harvard University, the first university. This was in their student handbook. Let me read it. ``Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.'' For more than 100 years, more than 50 percent of all Harvard's graduates were pastors. We now have exposed these three great lies from our founding fathers, from our courts, from our Congress, from our schools. Our founding fathers have all spoken. Clearly we were founded by religious people intending to be a religious Nation. What have we reaped in the way we have changed? America 100 years ago had the highest literacy rate of any nation. Today we spend more on education than any nation in the world. And yet since 1987 we have graduated more than one million high school students who could not even read their diploma. We have spent more money than any other Nation in the industrialized world to educate our children, and yet SAT scores fell for 24 straight years before finally leveling off at the bottom, where they still are compared with others in the world in the 1990s. In a 1960 survey 53 percent of America's teenagers had never kissed. 57 percent said they had never necked, that is kissing and hugging, and 92 percent of teenagers in America said they were virgins in 1960. Before that, more than a decade before that, I was getting my doctorate at the University of Maryland. The girls dorm was right down the hill from Moral Hall where I did my work. The Dean of Women would not let the girls go barefoot because she said that bare feet were too sexy. There are far too many coed dorms and coed rooms in the University of Maryland today. By 1990, just 30 years later, 75 percent of American high school students are sexually active, by 18. In the next 5 years, we spent $4 billion to educate them on how to be immoral, to trumpeting the solutions of safe sex, and it worked. One in five teenagers in America today lose their virginity before their 13th birthday. 19 percent of America's teenagers say they have had more than four sexual partners before graduation. The result: Every day 2,700 students get pregnant, 1,100 get abortions, 1,200 give birth. Every day another 900 contract a sexually transmitted disease, many incurable. AIDS infections among high school students climbed 700 percent between 1990 and 1995. We have 3.3 million problem drinkers in our high school campuses, over half a million alcoholics, and in any given weekend in America, 30 percent of the student population may spend some time drunk. A few years ago a young woman in a high school in Oklahoma wrote this poem as a new school prayer. ``Now I sit me down in school where praying is against the rule, for this great Nation under God finds mention of him very odd. ``The Scripture now the class recites, it violates the Bill of Rights. And any time my head I bow, becomes a Federal matter now. Our hair can be purple, orange or green, that is no offense, it is a freedom scene. The law is specific, the law is precise, only prayers spoken out loud are a serious vice. ``For praying in a public hall might offend someone with no faith at all, in silence alone we must meditate, God's name is prohibited by the State. We are allowed to cuss and dress like freaks, and pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks, they have outlawed guns but first the Bible. ``To quote the Good Book makes me liable. We can elect a pregnant senior queen, and the unwed daddy our senior king. It is inappropriate to teach right from wrong, we are taught that such judgments do not belong. ``We can get our condoms and birth control, study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles, but the Ten Commandments are not allowed. No word of God must reach this crowd. It is scary here I must confess, when chaos reins the school is a mess. ``So Lord this silent plea I make, should I be shot my soul please take.'' Our Nation which used to lead the world in every arena now leads the world in these areas. Number one in violent crime. We are number one in divorce. We are number one in teenage pregnancies. We are number one in volunteer abortions. We are number one in illegal drug abuse. And we are number one in the industrialized world for illiteracy. Alexis de Tocqueville, a great, young Frenchman, toured our country for 5 years. He wrote a great two-volume treatise on democracy, which is still a classic. And this is what he said. ``In the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but shapes the intelligence of the people. Christianity, therefore reigns without obstacle, by universal consequence. The consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle in a moral world is fixed and enforced.'' And this great quote. ``I sought for the key to the greatness of and genius of America in her great harbors, her fertile fields and boundless forests, in her rich minds and vast world commerce, in her universal public school system and institutions of learning. ``I sought for it in her Democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution. But not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.'' He said, ``America is great, because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.'' In 1963, Abraham Lincoln declared a National Day of Humiliation. And this is what he said. ``We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers and wealth and power, as no other Nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched us. ``And we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self- sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace. ``Too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us then to humble us ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.'' Abraham Lincoln understood that this was a new experiment that might not succeed. In the Gettysburg Address he says this. ``Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth in this continent a new Nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.'' That may sound very strange to us, and this should be unusual. But remember, they came from countries that had a king or an Emperor. ``We are now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that Nation or any Nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.'' We have forgotten from whence we came. Actually this generation has not forgotten, it never knew. I think, Mr. Speaker, that this great free country, the undisputed economic and military super power of the world is at risk if we have forgotten from whence we came. Abraham Lincoln said this to our Nation, and I will close with this. We need to hear it again. ``For all those who have died in all of our wars, it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great tasks remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause to which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vein, that this Nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.'' Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 41, 110th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, this is the 22nd time, I believe, that I have come here to the well of the House to talk about a subject which I think will be the overarching concern of our world for the next decades and several decades beyond that. That subject is energy and specifically the energy that we get from oil. As an illustration of the problems we face, I have here a map of the world as it would be drawn if each country was sized relative to the amount of oil reserves that it had. So this is the world according to oil. And you see here Saudi Arabia, and it would swallow up the United States. How many times would it swallow us up, a dozen, 15 times? Notice the incredible wealth of oil in the Middle East. Venezuela looms, what, two, three times the size of the United States as far as reserves of oil are concerned. The little United Arab Emirates, you can hardly find them on a map. They are kind of a little pinpoint on a usual map, and there they are six, eight times larger than the United States with their reserves of oil. The famed reserves of Russia up there. Notice that the United Arab Emirates have more oil than Russia has. And Saudi Arabia, of course, and Iraq. And little Kuwait, a little province that Saddam Hussein thought ought to belong to Iraq when he invaded it more than a decade ago, has many times as much oil as the United States and more oil than Russia has. Remember this map when we put the next map of the world up here because this is an interesting map. And this is a map with the continents, the countries drawn relative to their actual size. And you will notice here the little symbols that represent several things, and one of them is oil that China has bought around the world. And this is Unocal, which they almost bought in our country. Everywhere you see this little symbol, the Chinese have bought rights to oil. They are scouring the world for oil. And the next chart shows a statement by Condoleezza Rice, who recognized this. And this is a pretty interesting statement made by our Secretary of State: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.'' Thank you. I am pleased that you recognize that. ``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 wharping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the wharping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' And, of course, China has been preeminent in this. Several days ago I came upon an article. I have no idea why it took so long to come to light. It really is not an article. It really is the script of a speech that was given by Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine. And he gave this speech, it will be 50 years this coming May 14, 1957. He gave this speech to a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota. And we will recognize, celebrate the 50th anniversary of that here in a relatively few months. That speech, by the way, was just 14 months and 6 days after a really famous speech that was given by M. King Hubbert in San Antonio, Texas, to a group of oil people in which he made a prediction that we will be talking about this evening, and that is that the United States would reach its maximum oil production just 14 years after that in 1970. And right on target, that is exactly what happened. And no matter what we have done since then, we have pumped less oil than before until now we are pumping about half the oil that we pumped in 1970. He predicted that the world would be peaking about now, and that is the subject that brings us here tonight. I have a few excerpts here from this speech that he gave: ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever smaller number of countries. Ultimately the nation which controls the largest energy resource will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.'' He said this 50 years ago: ``If we act wisely and in time,'' he says 50 years ago, ``to conserve what we have and prepare well for the necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.'' We have done nothing in the last 50 years except try to find more and more gas and oil and coal and use more and more of what we have found. Another quote from this very interesting speech: ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion . . .'' Now, he missed it a little because we are at nearly 7 billion now. `` . . . with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent . . . '' Way more than 90 percent taking place during the last 5 percent of that period. `` . . . in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.'' And it occurred well before that because we are now at nearly 7 billion people. The next chart shows what he says in chart 4. If you were to plot population on this chart, it would pretty much follow the curve here for the increased use of gas and oil. This is only about 400 years of the 8,000 years that he spoke of, of recorded history. So you can move this way, way back a great long distance here to see the whole history of the world. In the long history of the world, 8,000 years of recorded history, the Age of Oil will last but about 300 years. We are about 150 years into the Age of Oil from when we started to where we are now. And if M. King Hubbert was correct, and he was correct about the United States, but if he is correct about the world, for the next 150 years there will be less and less oil pumped at higher and higher prices until finally, roughly 150 years from now, there will be little or no more gas, oil, and coal which is economically recoverable. This is an astounding picture, and future generations looking back at this Age of Oil may very well ask themselves how could they have done that, this incredible wealth? In a few minutes I am going to read a fascinating history, a very brief history of the world and energy that Hyman Rickover gave to those lucky physicians that night nearly 50 years. They will ask themselves how could they have done that when they found this incredible wealth under the ground? Couldn't they have understood that it couldn't last forever? Wouldn't they have asked themselves what can we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? But instead of that, we simply have used that energy as rapidly as we could with little or no thought for the future. Another quote from this very interesting talk: ``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.'' And he recognized 50 years ago that there would be a Fossil Fuel Age. ``We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.'' Less than a month ago I came back from China. Nine of us went there, nine Members of Congress. We went there primarily to talk about energy. We met with a number of relatively high officials in the Chinese Government. I was surprised in our discussions first with the energy people and then with others that they began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago anticipated that there would be a world without fossil fuels when we had gone through the Age of Oil. The next chart is another quote from this very interesting speech: ``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuels reserves. They were created by solar energy.'' He says: ``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 of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.'' What a speech. Fifty years ago when the United States was king of oil, the biggest consumer in the world, biggest producer in the world, and he recognized, as I think any rational person would recognize, that gas and oil and coal cannot be forever. It is finite. It one day will be gone. The only question is when, which is what we are here to talk about. And this is a great quote here: ``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.'' I will suggest that this is precisely what our offspring will accuse us of doing. You know, there are only a few places that we believe there are any meaningful amounts of oil left. One of those is in ANWR and the other is in offshore drilling. The vast majority of experts in the world believe that we have probably found 95 percent of all the oil we will ever find. And notice that the new finds of oil are way out there, difficult to get, expensive to get. That big find in the Gulf of Mexico under 7,000 feet of water, roughly 50,000 feet of rock and dirt under that. I am told, and I don't know whether this is true or not, you can hear a lot of things, that when oil is $211 a barrel, they will be able to develop that because it will cost that much to get that oil out. What I would like to do now is to take a look at some of the thoughts in this speech given by Hyman Rickover. I wish I had been a physician 50 years ago. I would have been 30 years old at that time sitting in that audience. He predated me by about 10 years in thinking about this problem. It was probably 40 years, and maybe because I am a scientist that I started asking myself the question: you know, Roscoe, oil and gas and coal are finite. They are not an inexhaustible supply. At some point in time, we will have to be concerned about those supplies. Is that 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I had no idea, when I first asked myself this question, how long that time would be, but I knew that a time had to come when we would be asking ourselves the question isn't it time that we should start thinking about this. Just a few excerpts from this really interesting speech: ``Each American has at his disposal each year energy equivalent to that obtainable from eight tons of coal.'' Then coal was the primary energy source, a primary energy source, much less important now. Eight tons of coal, that is a lot of energy. ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus enormous fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which makes each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves.'' And notice these numbers, and these were 50 years ago. You decide how much this has changed today. ``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or one twentieth horsepower.'' Now, you can do more than that in working, but you can't do it 24 hours a day, and this is a 24/7 figure. ``Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles and lives better than most ancient kings.'' ``In retrospect'', he says, and this is 50 years ago, ``and despite wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by'', 150 now, ``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.'' And well they will when we look back on this. ``Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.'' He thought it would grow to 4 billion by this time. It is nearly 7 billion. Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations. And I found this part of his speech just captivating, fascinating. ``Possessant of surplus energy is of course a requisite for any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must exhaust all of his strength, mental and physical, to obtain the bare necessities of life. ``Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized living: A comfortable and tasteful home, instead of a bare shelter; attractive clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing food instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom from toil without which there can be no art, music, literature or learning. ``There is no need to belabor this point. What lifted man, one of the weaker animals'', an interesting observation. We are really weak in muscle power. A chimpanzee the size of a man has four or five times the strength of a man. A dog has enormously better smell than you, the eagle infinitely better eyesight than you. Man is indeed one of the weaker animals. ``What lifted man, one of the weaker animals above the animal world was that he could devise with his brain ways to increase the energy at his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely on the energy of his own body he can sustain only the most meager existence. ``Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from the discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy resources, he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization, he needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor of the pendent members of large patriarchal families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this type of energy, less today thankfully than there were 50 years ago. ``Slave labor was necessary for the city states and the empires of antiquity. They frequently had slave populations larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were lacking. ``This may well have been the single most important reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times. A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization, and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.'' I would like to pause for just a moment to reflect on that. If all of the energy available to the United States was the energy from the United States, we would now be living on half of the energy that we had available in 1970. If you believe that the United States is a microcosm of the world, and if you believe that M. King Hubbert's analyses, which were so right on for the United States, are probably pretty good for the world, then the world now or very shortly will reach its maximum oil production. After that, no matter what we do, there will be less and less oil available. And finally over the next 150 years, if the second half of the age of oil is as long as the first half, and M. King Hubbert found a bell curve in the exploitation and exhaustion of each of these oil fields, then we will have available to us less and less fossil fuel energy. Now, unless we can contrive to replace that fossil fuel energy by alternative energy sources, we will have available to us year by year less energy than we had the year before. And I was fascinated by Hyman Rickover's discussion of how energy contributed to the development of civilizations. And then he notes here, ``That a reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.'' Will we be able to avoid that? Will we be able to create enough energy sources, other than fossil fuels, that we can replace the energy that will not be available from fossil fuels as we exhaust, slowly exhaust their supplies in the world? For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the primary reason for the fall of the Mayan civilization on this continent, and of the decline of once flourishing civilizations in Asia. India and China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East. Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a further disastrous effect. Lacking plant cover, soil washed away, and with soil erosion the nutritional national base was reduced as well. It is a sobering thought to recognize that life on this planet is largely dependent on about the upper, on average, 8 inches of our soil. That is the top soils which grow our crops. And then he notes something that few people want to talk about, I am glad he had the courage to mention, that another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure of population on available land. No matter how clever we are at developing other energy sources, if population continues to grow, and I will say that I am a 100 percent pro-life person. I think there are ways to control population without killing the preborn. And so when I read this, do not think that I am advocating that we need abortion to control population. ``A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally, even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man, who is 2\1/2\ times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agriculture machines increase productivity for man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation. ``It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia--'' now this is less true today with a booming economy in China and a good economy in India, but this was true in that day. ``It is a sobering thought that the impoverished peoples of Asia who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger completely satisfied,'' 20 percent of the world will go to bed tonight hungry, ``were once far more civilized and lived much better than the people of the west.'' And not so very long ago either. It was a story brought back by Marco Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes to the riches of the East and induced the adventurous sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels searching for direct routes to the fabulous Orient, which, of course, brought Columbus to our shores. The wealth of the Indies is a phrase still used. But whatever wealth may be there is certainly not evident in the lives of the people today. Now, the last 50 years have seen meaningful industrialization in that part of the world, which just has consumed increasing amounts of energy. Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has become again the primary source of energy. That was true then, it is still true in rural areas in these countries. Since other energy convertors have become too expensive, this might be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more primitive stage of civilization, with all that implies for human dignity and happiness. Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow creeping along a cobblestone street, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java, the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads. Anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone realizes the degradations of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded. Let me skip now to a little later in this very interesting talk. I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests on the technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. True 50 years ago, truer today. And then this statement. Now, underline this. Use red ink. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer is, in the long run, none. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations, which is why the Hirsch report says that man has never faced, the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more effervescent than metals. Metals too are nonrenewable resources, threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap. And there is nothing that man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy, he says, 500 millions years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. I might pause here to note that those who belief in a literal flood believe that all of this occurred with the upheavals that occurred during the flood and the time since then. But most people believe that it took a very, very long time. 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, and I am repeating one of the charts I had. But you know we need to hear this again because this is so significant. The longer they last the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources, and to adjust our economy to the vast changes that we can expect from such a shift. Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. And I am going to repeat this again. This needs to be heard again too. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly. Now have we been using this energy capital sparingly? Anything but. In order to pass onto 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. I am afraid that that is exactly what our children and our children's children will say of us when they recognize how little attention we paid to the warnings that we have been given for a very long time. This is Hyman Rickover 5 years ago, and just a year before that, M. King Hubbert and his prediction. Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics, far- seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor which must enter into all planning for the future, responsible governments who realize that the wellbeing of their citizens and the political power of their countries depend on an adequate energy supply, all of these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. Gee, I wish that were true. If they began, then they stopped. Because I notice hardly anybody today is concerned about this problem. In this country especially, many studies have been made in the past few years. 50 years ago, seeking to discover accurate information on fossil fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs. Now he may have been referring to the studies that were made by M. King Hubbert just the year before when he predicted that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970. The chart that I have here kind of indicates to us the dimensions of the problem that Hyman Rickover was talking about and the problem we face. The little analogy I use for this is that we are very much like a young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance. And they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. And they look at how old they are and how large the inheritance is and they recognize, gee, it is not going to last till we retire, so, obviously, we have got to do something. Either we have got to spend less or we have got to make more. I use that analogy because that is precisely where we are. Today, 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural gas, and just 15 percent of it from other sources. Now, you may lump all of those as renewables, but they are not quite because a bit over half of that, 8 percent of the 15, comes from nuclear power. In this country, that is 8 percent of our energy, but it is 20 percent of our electricity, so as you drive home tonight, imagine that every fifth home and every fifth business and every fifth street light was dark. That is what our country would be without nuclear power. Now, we have had not a single death, no meaningful accidents. By the way, 3-Mile Island, and I lived within the drift zone of that, that worked. The containment facility worked. Too bad we had the accident, but good that we had prepared for it. A lot of people are concerned about nuclear energy. But they really don't reflect on how many people die from coal, all the black lung disease. I remember a number of years ago when I worked for NIH and had a contract to look at respiratory support devices, and one of the places I went to was West Virginia, where they had a lot of black lung disease. And I talked to the physicians there that were dealing with these patients, and each year thousands died from black lung disease. It wasn't so much, and this is not really related to energy, but the real problem there was silicosis. But the lungs were black from the coal, and so it was called black lung disease, but it was really rock dust primarily which was the offender there. How many miners are killed when the mine caves in or when it explodes? How many people are killed at the railroad crossing when the coal train goes by? We just seem to accept that as a part of the cost of having coal to use. There have been no injuries, I remind the listeners, from our use of nuclear. We have had no Chernobyls, aren't going to have any because we have designed them much better, so this could and probably should grow. Then we come to the true renewables. And there we see them, solar, and I am a big supporter of solar. I have a second home beyond the grid and we have only solar power. We are shortly putting up a wind machine because very frequently when the sun is not shining, the wind is blowing and so they complement each other very nicely. But notice how tiny they were. This was 2000. Now we are better today because they have been growing very rapidly. So they are several times bigger today. But that was 1 percent of 7 percent, .07 percent. Suppose it is four times bigger today, .28 percent. Big deal. We have a long, long way to go. Notice the contribution of wood. That is the timber industry and paper industry wisely using that waste product. Conventional hydro. We have pretty much peaked out on that. There is maybe as much as we could get from unconventional hydro, microhydro, small streams where it wouldn't have the environmental effect that big dams have. The waste to energy here, that is 8 percent of the 7 percent. That could certainly grow. It is probably a whole lot better to burn it than it is to put it in the land fill. But note that this is really kind of recycling fossil fuel energy because, in an energy deficient world, there would be no enormous piles of municipal waste. They are all produced with energy; and as we have less and less energy, we will be able to live with less and less waste. So that will be a diminishing source of energy in an energy deficient world. I want to take just a moment here to talk about ethanol. There are a couple of bills, and I will have it up here in a few moments, that look at developing ethanol. The price of corn, from which most ethanol is made in this country, was $2.11 a bushel in September. It was $4.08 a bushel in December. And that was because of the pressure of the demand for corn for producing ethanol. Now, I didn't read it in this speech, but Hyman Rickover cautioned that if you are going to get energy from agriculture, please note that you will be competing with two things for that energy. One, you will be competing with food. We eat some corn meal. Most of the corn goes to our animals, and our dairy farmers are really hurting now, because milk has not gone up much and their feed has gone up enormously because of the pressures put on corn by ethanol. Every gallon of ethanol that we burn represents at least three- quarters of a gallon of fossil fuel to produce it. Almost half the energy in producing corn comes from the natural gas that produces the nitrogen fertilizer. If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, which is the only fair way to look at corn as an energy source, otherwise you are simply recycling fossil fuels and growing the corn and making ethanol from it. If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, and if you wanted to replace just 10 percent of our current gasoline consumption, I checked these figures with CRS, I think they are correct, you would have to double our corn crop and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 percent of our gasoline. What is very likely to happen now that corn has doubled in price is that farmers, recognizing that, gee, if I planted more corn I would make more money, they are going to take land out of agricultural preserve where it has been reserved by putting it in a bank, and it is land that probably shouldn't have been farmed anyhow, which is why they took it out, and the government helps pay them for that, which I am supportive of, by the way, because it helps preserve that land. If they take that out and plant it to corn, corn is one of the worst crops for erosion. It is one of the heaviest feeders that we have, demanding more fertilizer than almost anything else. The insult to our environment by the erosion and so forth of this land as the result of more corn cropping, may off-balance, offset the benefit we get from the small decreased production of carbon dioxide, which is the primary reason most people are thinking about ethanol today, because of global warming and greenhouse gases. And if you are simply releasing the carbon dioxide that the plant picked up, you have not increased the amount of carbon dioxide up there, because the plant took it out of the air. You are burning it and putting it back into the air. So it is a balance. Hyman Rickover also cautioned, be careful about your expectations for energy from biomass. And today you will hear a lot of hype about energy from cellulosic ethanol. And this is a fascinating pursuit. Cellulose is made up of a lot of glucose molecules, simple sugar, half of the sucrose which is your table sugar. But they are so tightly bound together that there are no enzymes in our body which will separate them. In fact, the cow and the goat don't have any either. But they harbor in their gut some little critters that do have enzymes that do that. And so this is a great example of symbiosis. They both benefit from that relationship. These little microbes split the cellulose into the glucose molecules, and then they are absorbed by the host animals. Hyman Rickover cautioned, be careful how much of this biomass you think you can take from the soil because it is biomass, organic material, which makes top soil different from subsoil. There were three men from the Department of Agriculture in my office several months ago talking excitedly about the potential for cellulosic ethanol. And I asked them if our top soils were increasing in quantity and quality. And the answer is obviously, no. We are really good today compared to how we were 20, 30 years ago. But I am told that for every bushel of corn you grow in Iowa, three bushels of Iowa top soil go down the Mississippi River, which is why we have such a big delta down in Louisiana. Well, these little microbes that exist in the gut of these animals we have now learned to bioengineer so we can do this in the laboratory. So we can now turn newspaper into alcohol and run your car on newspaper. That is doable. But be careful how much energy you expect to get from that because for a few years you may mine the top soil, but soon you will decrease the product activity of the top soil. So there is a limit to that. So what do we do? The next chart, we buy time. How do you do that? I mentioned that I have been to China, came back 3 or so weeks ago. And they begin all of their discussions by talking about post-oil. And they have a 5-point plan. And it is not just the energy people. It is every member of government we talked to talked about this 5-point plan. So they recognize that energy is a real challenge for them. The 5-point plan begins with conservation. You see, today there is no surplus oil. There is no surplus energy to invest in developing alternatives. If there was any surplus oil, it wouldn't be $55 a barrel. So we have run out of time. We have run out of energy, but we can buy some time and free up some energy if we have an aggressive program in conservation. This is where they began their 5-point program: conservation. Two and three were produce as much of your own energy as you can, and diversity will help. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And the fourth one, a really good one, especially for them, be kind to the environment. They were apologetic. They are not kind to the environment, but they have 1.3 billion people who are clamoring for the kind of life style we have and want to go climb up that economic ladder and they aren't using energy very efficiently, and we need to help them. The fifth point, a really interesting one, international cooperation. They recognize that this isn't a U.S. problem or a Chinese problem. This is a global problem because oil moves on a global marketplace. It doesn't really matter who owns the oil. The person who has the highest bid gets the oil. It sells to the people who have the money to buy it. And when it is in short supply, there is more demand for it, so the price goes up. Once we have bought some time and freed up some energy, then we need to use it wisely. I think one of the things that we need is an ARPA-E. Many people know what DARPA is. It is an agency in our Defense Department that looks at far-out, really interesting things. They developed the Net, for one thing. And they invest in things that industry couldn't invest in because there is no imminent payoff, not even certain there will be any long-term payoff. You are running down a lot of dead roads. But, boy, when you hit it, you hit it big. And DARPA has been very creative. And we need something like that in the energy world because there are some things that may be big, big producers tomorrow, which may not be attractive to investors today. I am a big fan of the marketplace, but the marketplace is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and there is a role for government here. And I am one of the biggest small government people in Washington. But, you know, we ought to get the government out of things that are not productive and put them into things where they are productive. And looking ahead and wisely deciding what some reasonable risk is and investing the taxpayer money has paid big dividends in DARPA, and I think it would in ARPA-E. Big benefits to this. We are now an incredible importer. I think this year the trade deficit we were $800 billion or something like that. We could again become a major exporter. The world is going to be clamoring for these renewable technologies, and we could be a leader in this. Whether we like it or not, we are a role model. We are one person out of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's energy. So we are a witness, we are a role model whether we like it or not. There are a couple of bills that I wanted to mention. This is our bill, and I am proud of this bill because if we can't do this, we are in for a really rough ride. This is a bill that encourages our farms to become energy independent. Not just energy independent, because if that is all they did, then the people who live in the cities would be in a world of hurt when we run out of fossil fuels. But the farmer must be able not only to produce enough energy to run his farm, but have some leftover energy, and I think this challenges him to produce as much leftover energy as he uses on his farm. And there are some rewards for farmers who can do this. There are a lot of creative ways we can do this, and we hope that these awards will challenge people to be as creative and innovative as Americans have always been, and I am looking forward to some very exciting developments here. The next chart has some data on it that I referred to previously. There is nothing like seeing it in a pretty colored chart. We can look at the top part of the chart. And petroleum, of course, if you start out with 1 million Btus, you won't have 1 million Btus to burn because you have got to pump it and refine it and transport it and put it in your car and so forth. So to get 1 million, you must start out 1.23 million. Here we look at ethanol, and there is a big advantage here because you get solar energy. These, I am told, are very optimistic figures. Dr. Pimental believes that if you look at all the energy input into producing corn, that more energy goes into producing corn than you get out of corn. I hope that is not true. Most people believe that it is energy positive. You know, even if it were just balanced, once you have taken the ethanol out, you have left some really good feed. Tragically, many of the ethanol plants today carry that to the landfill. What a shame, almost a crime, because all the fat is left, all the corn oil is left, and all the protein is left. All we have taken out is the carbohydrate. What this says is, as I have mentioned previously, for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you are burning at least three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuels. That is a fossil fuel input. Now, this down here depicts the fossil fuel input. I mentioned that almost half of it, this big purple area here, comes from the natural gas that produced the nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learn how to do that, by the way, the only nitrogen fertilizer--as a little kid I remember that pretty much the only nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manures and guano. And you took the manure out of your barnyard, you spread it out on your fields, and the fertilizer attachment on your tractor was about three times as big as the seed, the corn bin. You put very little fertilizer on it. But now we have learned to make enormous--we mine the phosphate rock and the potash and we make nitrogen fertilizer as incredibly energy intensive, as you can see. All of these are other fossil fuel energy inputs, making the tractor, fueling the tractor, putting the tires on the tractor, harvesting the grain, hauling it to market, drying it, the chemicals that go into killing the bugs and so forth on it. An incredible amount of energy goes into producing a bushel of corn. And if you were going to grow corn with energy from corn--I gave you the statistics a little bit earlier--I believe that you would have to double your corn and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 percent of our gasoline. That is an illustration of the huge challenge that we face. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day in this country, 70 percent of it in transportation. Each barrel of oil, as Hyman Rickover so graphically described, represents an enormous amount of human energy. One barrel of oil represents the work of 12 people working all year. For less than $10 you can hire a guy who is going to work all year for you. These are part of those 33 faithful household servants that Hyman Rickover said our energy use provided to the average family. The next chart shows another energy bill, the DRIVE bill. This was dropped just very recently. We love acronyms down here, and this is a bill that has to do with transportation fuels, Dependable Reduction through Innovation and Vehicles and Energy Act, H.R. 670. I didn't sign on to any energy bills last year. There were some pretty good bills, but somewhat, not just somewhat, enormously exaggerated claims were made for them; and I did not want to give credibility to unrealistic expectations from these bills. The next chart here quotes several people: Petroleum expert Colin Campbell. By the way, he kind of inherited the mantle from M. King Hubbert. He is kind of the godfather today of all of these scientists. Jean Laherrare, Ryan Fleeley, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Albert Bartlett, no relative of mine. But if you put Albert Bartlett, do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and Energy, and you will put out the most fascinating 1-hour lecture I have ever listened to. He has given it more than 1,600 times. I will tell you, there will be no thriller on television that will be as interesting as Albert Bartlett's 1-hour lecture on energy. You will be captivated by it. They have all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur at around 2005. This is now 2007. By the way, the world oil production has been roughly 84 million, 85 million barrels a day for the last several years. That may or may not mean we have reached peak, but at least there has been a plateau. And if it weren't for a fact that there has been a 40 percent reduction of gasoline use in many South American countries, for instance, because it has just gotten too expensive, the price of oil would be far greater than roughly $55 a barrel today. This has been what they call demand destruction. If you can destroy demand, you can reduce the price. And when it got too expensive to use, they just quit using it, so the price of oil has dropped because there is less pressure. The next chart shows a number of experts and what they have predicted, and here are some of them there, Campbell and Goldstein and Deffeyes, Skrebowski, Simmons. Matt Simmons is an investment banker, a personal energy adviser to the President. They all believe that it is going to occur very shortly. The previous list had it in roughly 2005, these in the next decade and these further down. Now, CERA is one here that says it is going to be after 2020. I want to show you the next chart here, and this is a CERA chart; and CERA believes that we will find maybe several times as much more energy as all the energy that now is known, all the oil that we now know is out there. They think we will find two or three times that much more oil. Now, if we find only 5 percent more oil, then this will be when it peaks. If we find as much more oil as all that exist out there, this will be when it peaks. It still is not forever, it still is about 2040. And if we now are able to get enormous amounts of oil from these unconventional sources, the Canadian tar sands; and don't call it oil, please, it is tar, and the oil sands out in our west, and I don't know that we will ever achieve this, by the way. The Canadians are getting 1 million barrels a day, just a little over 1 percent of production, using incredible amounts of energy, incredible amounts of water, producing a big lake that they call tailing water; it is really toxic water, and they know that what they are doing is not sustainable because they don't have enough natural gas to produce the energy. They are thinking about putting in a power plant. The vein, I understand, dips under an overlay so they will have to develop in situ, and they don't know how to do that. Enormous reserves, more than all the oil in the world potentially, are out in our West. Shell Oil Company had a little experiment out there. They said it would be 2013, I think, before they said they could even make a decision as to whether it was economically feasible to get that. So this is a huge ``if'' here. The next chart is an interesting one. One of the world's experts in this, Jean Laherrare, made an assessment of the USGS report. What I was looking at was not a USGS report, but they were basing their prognosis on USGS data, so this comment is appropriate to that chart as well. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition through which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technical achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate efforts to find the largest remaining prospect. We have computer modeling in 3-D seismic and enormously improved techniques for finding oil, and still every year we find on the average less oil than we found the year before. This is a very heartening chart. As we face an energy-deficient world, I often think of this chart and the promise that it gives us. On the abscissa here we have energy consumption per capita here, and on the ordinate we have perception of how good life is. Now, it is not perfect for anybody, but there are a whole bunch of people who think that it is about 85 to 95 percent as good as paradise can be. And notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy. Little Switzerland is close behind us. But what this chart tells me is that you can use far less energy and be pretty happy with where you are. These many people, by the way, use less energy than we and are happier with their lives than we are, everybody above this imaginary line. And notice that if you have very little energy, it is tough to feel good about life. As soon as you reach 25 percent, as much as we use, then you can feel pretty good, 80 percent compared to 90 percent, not much improvement for an incredibly large increase in energy. So this gives us hope. Europe uses per capita about half as much energy as we use, and if you have traveled to Europe, nobody who has traveled to Europe believes that they live less well or are less content with their life than we are. The next chart shows an interesting, and this is one of many, many, opportunities for efficiency, but this is such a dramatic one. This is the efficiency of getting light. And this is the old incandescent bulb, a red hot hairpin hung up in a bottle is the way one old farmer described it. And this is the amount of heat you produce, which is why you use it as a brooder for fish and to keep them warm, and baby chickens, and this is the light you get, 90 percent heat, 10 percent light. This is fluorescence, which is why you have the little screw in fluorescence. A great Time magazine article that showed that each one of those bulbs saved a quarter of a ton of coal. And here is the light- emitting diode. I have a light-emitting diode flashlight; I have forgotten when I put the batteries in. They just last and last. I have a couple of charts here, and we have only a few minutes remaining, and I just want to show a couple of them to refer you to very big studies paid for by our government, ignored by our government. One is the Corps of Engineers, and this is the Corps of Engineers study, and the other is the big Hirsch Report. You can find all of those on the Web. In fact, you can go to our Web site and either find these or find the link to it. In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace, remember, to its initial increase. The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years. This was paid for by the Army, essentially ignored by everybody. The next one, a bigger study, paid for by our Department of Energy, SAIC, a big, prestigious organization: We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate the normal replacement schedules to fill the gap created by a decline in oil production. I won't use any more of these charts because the others, I have a dozen or so more, simply say the same thing, that one way or the other, in different words, we are either at or shortly will be at peak oil with potentially devastating consequences. There is hope with leadership. We are an enormously creative society. I think that we can meet the challenge, but it is going to require a program I believe that has a total commitment of World War II, I lived through that, that has the technology challenge of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We can do that. It needs the help of every American, and leadership; our children and grandchildren are counting on it.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

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

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thought that there was only one speech given in the last century that would become very famous in the few years just ahead of us, and that was the speech given on the 8th day of March in San Antonio, Texas, by M. King Hubbert in 1956, but I just discovered a few days ago a speech which I think may become just about as famous. This was a speech that was given by the father of the nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover, and he gave this speech in May 1957. So soon we will reach the 50th anniversary of this very famous speech by the father of the nuclear submarine. I just wanted to start by reading a couple of things from this speech that he gave. He gave the speech, by the way, to a group of physicians at a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 14, 1957. The title of the speech had nothing to do with medicine. The title of the speech is ``Energy Resources and Our Future.'' He says early on in the speech that, ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves.'' Now, this was 50 years ago and can you imagine what has happened since then? ``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously,'' that is, 24/7. Of course, you need to sleep and eat and so forth, and so when you are working, you are working at more than 35 watts, but 35 watts continuously, which is one-twentieth of horsepower. ``Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men.'' So all of those things that we enjoy in our life, the automobile, the refrigerator, the microwave, all of these represent the equivalent of 244 men in place of just the one that can turn these things out with the aid of this fossil fuel energy. Then he goes on to say, ``While at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road,'' probably more than that for an SUV, ``and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly,'' he says, ``the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by,'' that was the 100 years up to 1957, it is now 150 years, ``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.'' Others have commented on this incredible energy density in these fossil fuels by noting that just one barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 12 men working all year. If you look at the cost of that at the pump, that is roughly $10 a year. For $10 a year, you can have a servant work for you all year long. You may have some trouble getting your mind around that, but imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel, still cheaper, by the way, than water in the grocery store, how far that takes your SUV or your car or your truck and how long it would take you to pull your SUV or truck or car the distance that that gallon of diesel fuel or gasoline takes it. I drive a Prius. We get about 50 miles per gallon. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles? Let me give another little example to help you understand the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels and how much they have improved our life and how totally dependent we are on them. If a big man goes outside and is working really hard all day long doing physical work, I can get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. That may be humbling to recognize that in terms of fossil fuel energy, our muscle power is worth less than 25 cents a day, but understanding that helps us to understand how totally dependent we have come to be on these fossil fuels. A little later in his speech, Hyman Rickover said, ``I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels?'' And then this answer, 50 years ago, when we were king of oil, biggest producers, biggest consumers in the world, I think biggest exporters in the world, ``The answer is,'' he says, ``in the long run, none.'' There is no assurance that we can have these fossil fuels for the long term. ``The earth is finite,'' he says. ``Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation,'' when we got our energy from the soil. ``We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are nonrenewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy,'' he says, ``500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.'' Another quote from his talk. ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion.'' Actually, he missed it a little. It is now 7 billion, as you will see in a moment, ``with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.'' As a matter of fact, it required less than that, because today we have about nearly 7 billion people in the world rather than just 4 billion. Another quote from his talk. ``High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power . . . Ultimately,'' he says, ``the Nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.'' Have we done that? In no way have we done that. Another quote from his talk. ``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age . . . We might even, if we wanted, give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption,'' this was 50 years ago, ``by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.'' I just came back about 3 weeks ago from a trip to China. Nine Members of Congress went. We met with a number of the top officials in China, and I was pleased and surprised. We went to talk about energy primarily, and they began every discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago understood that one day we would be talking about post-oil. The Chinese now are talking about post-oil. By the way, they do not mean that there is not going to be anymore oil in the world. Nobody is telling you that. What they mean by post-oil is that it will be post the peak production of oil, where we can no longer produce additional oil so we are going to have to make do with what we have. As a matter of fact, each year after that there would be less and less oil available for us to use. The next chart. There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves, and this is part of the quote I just made. They were created by solar energy a very long time ago and took eons to grow into their present volume. In the face of the basic factor, fossil fuel reserves are finite. The exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. The longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift. This is 50 years ago. He is saying the same thing that our President said last night in the State of the Union message, that we should get busy with preparing for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Then I really love this quote. I am a father of 10, a grandfather of 15 and a great-grandfather of two. ``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.'' Do you think, Mr. Speaker, that we have been using fossil fuel energy sparingly? I doubt that you would find very much concurrence for this anywhere in this country, and certainly worldwide. When you look from other places to this country and see this one person out of 22 using 25 percent of all of the world's energy, you will have nobody over there saying we have used our energy sparingly. ``A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fair.'' I have characterized our relationship with energy as the equivalent of the pig who found the feed room door open and just went in and pigged out. That is what we have been doing. When our children and our grandchildren and great grandchildren look back in a world with diminishing fossil fuel availability, and, by the way, saddled with a huge debt that we are passing on to them, they may well ask themselves the question, how could they have done it? When we found this incredible wealth under the ground, that provides the equivalent of 33 servants, 100,000 people pushing your train, 244 people pushing your automobile down the road, when we found this incredible fuel fossil fuel energy under the ground, why didn't somebody stop and ask the question, what should we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did. What we did was to extract this oil from the ground as quickly as possible; to use it as prolifically as possible; to develop a lifestyle ever more and more dependent on fossil fuel; to develop an agriculture where one person out of 50 feeds the rest and much of the world; where the man sits on top of a 150 horsepower tractor and uses fertilizers produced from natural gas to grow his crops. The next chart here is a really interesting one. Suppose the size of the countries in the world was determined by how much oil they have. This is the world according to oil. If you look at our military might, if you look at our economic might, we are really big. But when you look at the oil we have, here we are, itty-bitty United States. Notice Alaska is pretty big here, a fair amount of oil up there. But look at Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait. Little Kuwait. Look at a map and see how little Kuwait is. But look at the oil they have. This is what the world would like look like if the countries were sized relative to the amount of oil they have. Look at Russia there. People talk about the huge reserves in Russia. It is dwarfed by Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and even little Kuwait has more oil than Russia. Look at Venezuela down here. It is probably twice the size of the United States in terms of what they have in oil. Look at some of the African countries here. Nigeria, what, way bigger than the United States. Libya, bigger than the United States in terms of the amount of oil that they have. The next chart, this was predicted by that second famous speech that I mentioned that was given in the last century, and that is the talk given by M. King Hubbard on the 8th day of March, 1956, to a group of petroleum engineers in San Antonio, Texas, and a lot of other oilmen there. This was the time, you remember, when the United States was the biggest oil producer in the world, the biggest consumer of oil in the world, and I think maybe the biggest exporter of oil in the world. What M. King Hubbard told hose assembled people was that in just about 14 years, the United States would reach its maximum oil production and then, no matter what we did, the oil production would drop off after that. How did he know that that was going to happen? He had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and each one of them followed what we call a bell curve. That is a curve that goes ever up and up and reaches a peak and comes down the other side. You get a bell curve if you weigh people and see how much they weigh. There will be a few very light people, a few very heavy people. Most of them are in the middle. How tall people are, how many mice are in a litter of mice and so forth, most of the things in a natural world follow a bell curve. He predicted that we would follow a bell curve. When he noticed each one of these little fields, he saw when they reached a peak, they had pumped about half of all the oil they would ever pump. So he theorized if he knew how many little fields we had, little bell curves, and how many more we were likely to find, and if you added all those up, you could predict when we would reach the peak. So he did that, and he said that was going to be about 1970. And the Shell Oil Company, for whom he worked, said, please don't do that and embarrass us. You make a fool of yourself and embarrass yourself. He gave the talk and for a while he was kind of a humorous person. But then he became an icon in his own time, because right on schedule in 1970, we peaked in oil production. Now, this curve that I have here is one that is taken from the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and I use this especially because you may hear from these people, they are called CERA, and they are predicting that there is lots more oil out there, we are going to find a whole lot more oil, not to worry. They use this to make the point that M. King Hubbard really didn't know what he was talking about and he really was wrong. They are saying that because the total U.S. production, and this, by the way, is with Prudo Bay and the Gulf of Mexico in, if you put only the lower 48 in, which is what M. King Hubbard was predicting, this was the actual on the green, and his prediction was the yellow here, and they said, gee, he was off. That doesn't look like it is very far off to me. Let's look at another chart which shows the same data. This shows two peaks here. The smooth green symbols here are the prediction of M. King Hubbard. The more ragged ones are the actual data points. You see right on schedule we peaked in 1970. We have been going down ever since. The red one is the former Soviet Union, FSU, and they kind of fell apart and didn't reach their potential. They are having a second little peak now and are going down. Do you remember from that chart of the world according to oil, they were maybe twice the United States? They aren't using anywhere near as much oil as we are, so now they are a major exporter. But they don't have all that much oil. As you can see here, the area under this curve represents how much oil they have, the area under this curve represents how much oil we have, and you can see the general relationships there. The next chart shows where our oil has come from. M. King Hubbard predicted only Texas and the rest of the United States, and that was his prediction and that was the actual data points. Then we found oil in Alaska and we learned to make oil from gas, non-gas liquids, natural gas liquids. This is the oil that we found in the Gulf of Mexico. You remember those fabled discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico? I remember them. We were home free. They were going to solve our oil problem for the foreseeable future. You can hardly see their contributions as we slid down the other side of Hubbard's peak. The next chart shows another depiction of peak oil, and this is one again from Energy Information Area, the EIA, quoted in the Hirsch Report. Let me spend a moment on what the Hirsch Report is. Our government has paid for two big studies of the fossil fuel energy situation. One of those was financed by the Department of Energy, done by SAIC, a very prestigious, large scientific organization, and Dr. Hirsch was the principal investigator there, so it is frequently referred to as the Hirsch Report. He here is reporting this information that came from our Energy Information Agency, which is a part of our Department of Energy. Here they are using some very interesting statistical terms, but they aren't true statistical term. I have had the EIA people come in and talk with them at the office about this, because I had some trouble understanding it. A couple of Congresses ago, I was the Chair of the Energy Subcommittee on Science and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had experts come in from around the world to tell us how much oil they thought remained in the world and how much more oil they thought we would find. I was quite surprised at the relative unanimity. They all were pretty close to 1,000 gigabarrels, maybe 970 to 1,040. Now, I use gigabarrels instead of million barrels and that is because the British billion is not our billion. The British billion is a million million. Our billion is a thousand million. But everybody understands a giga. So when you hear ``giga'' used, you know that is an international term. A thousand gigabarrels, which is 1 trillion barrels of oil, that is what remains. You remember at the peak of that curve, M. King Hubbard said about half of the oil would be used, so that means we have used about 1,000 gigabarrels, and here they have the total of 2,248 gigabarrels. So about half of that has been used and about half of that remains. Now, they are using some very interesting techniques here, and they did some simulations, and I have no idea what the inputs were into the simulations, but they have convinced themselves that there is a high probability that we will find twice as much more oil as all the oil that now exists out there unpumped. So they said gee, halfway between what they say is the low probability and the high probability is the mean, which is the expected yield. So they believe we are going to get, this is a total of 3,000, so we are going to get another 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. That is this red curve here. What they show is that even if that is true, Mr. Speaker, even if that is true, and I think the odds that that is true are very small, but even if that is true, that pushes the peak out only to 2016. What the dotted curve here shows is what you might be able to do with enhanced oil recovery, pump live steam down there and a bunch of solvents and push water in there, and maybe you can get it quicker. But if you get it quicker look what happens to the other side. Just a demonstration that you can't pump what is not there, and the total volume you will pump is the area under this curve. If you get it sooner, you won't have it later. Notice how quickly that curve drops down. If they don't find the additional enormous quantities of oil that they believe they will find, then we are about here and the peak will occur at about 2005 or so, which is where M. King Hubbard said that the peak would occur. By the way, he predicted it in 1969, a year before the United States peak. He was confident enough of his analytical techniques that he predicted the world would be peaking about now. The next chart is another chart from CERA, and it depicts some of the same information on that chart a little differently. This is the curve, the peaking curve, if there is a roughly 2 trillion, 2000 gigabarrels. You will notice slightly different figures between these, because there is not unanimity on how much is there, but it is roughly 1.9 to 2.2. This is in the same ballpark. If that is the case, then peaking according to them is going to occur fairly soon according to them. But if you find another 1 trillion barrels of oil, that pushes peaking out only to what, 2035, something like that. That is not all that far off. And the probability we are going to find that oil is very, very small, as we will see in a few moments. Now he has piled on top of that, CERA has piled on top of that, an enormous amount of oil that they think we are going to get from unconventional oil sources. This is like the Canadian tar sands and like our oil shales out in the West. We may or may not get enormous quantities of oil from that. There are potentially huge quantities there. There is more potential oil in the tar sands of Canada than all of the known reserves in the world. That big map we saw, there is more potential oil there. But there is also an incredible amount of potential energy in the tides, but we have not been very successful in harnessing that energy from the tides. Canada is now getting about 1 million barrels of oil with a shovel that lifts 100 tons and dumps it into a truck that hauls 400 tons. They then haul it and cook it with enormous amounts of energy from natural gas, which is stranded. By ``stranded'' we mean there are not very many people there to use it. Since it is expensive to ship, why, it is cheaper there, and so they are producing that oil at about 18 to 25 dollars a barrel. I understand they are getting 55, today, dollars a barrel for it. That is a pretty good dollar profit ratio. But they know this is not sustainable for several reasons. One is they are using water faster than they can supply it. The energy from the gas will run out. They are thinking of building a nuclear power plant, and they have a huge, relatively huge, lake there of tailing water they call it. It is really very toxic water, so there are huge environmental impacts of it. And furthermore, this vein of the tar sands will shortly duck under an overlay so that they will no longer be able to deadlift it or surface mine it, whatever you want to call it. They will now have to develop it in situ, and they have not even experimented with how they are going to do that. The next chart has a little simple schematic. And by the way, you can make this peak look very hard and sharp or spread it out by the scale you use on the abscissa and the ordinate. Here we have spread it out because we have an expanded scale on the abscissa and a restricted one on the ordinate here. But that yellow area represents the additional oil we would like to have, because growth is exponential at about 2 percent. And if we reach the peak, I think we are about here. We are now having some problems with meeting the demand, which is why oil is going from 50 to 60 to 78 at the highest a few months ago. And by the way, they showed undulating plateau in that last big chart I showed, and I agree with them. May I put that chart up for just another moment? That is a very interesting one. I want to focus on this. They are saying that there is no such thing as peak oil. And this is what they show. Tell me that is not a peak. This is from their publication. And it is an article where they are kind of pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil, and they are showing peak oil. For every potential level of oil that they think will be there, they are showing a peak. They are just showing it, and I agree with them that it is going to be undulating plateau. It is not going to be a smooth thing. The curve just under it shows it very smooth because we have simplified it. And what it shows is, and, by the way, the 2 percent growth, it doubles in 35 years. This point is doubled this point, so that is a 35- year period there. So you see it takes a while to get through that peak. The next chart is one that if you had only one chart to look at and talk about relative to oil, this would be the chart. And you could spend a very long time looking at this chart and talking about it. The big bars here show the discoveries. And you notice that there was a rash of discoveries way back in the 1940s, 16 years before M. King Hubbert made his prediction. By the way, he made that prediction here in 1956, about here. Wow. Look how much more we discovered after that. And he was able to predict how much more we would discover and correctly predict when we would reach peak oil production. The solid line here shows the consumption. And obviously up until about 1980 we were always finding more than we were consuming. Now, remember, underneath this curve represents all that we have used. So we have used this much of what we found. But this much of what we found was left over that we could use in the future. So ever since 1980, now, we have been finding less and less oil and using more and more oil. Notice a little stuttering here in the 1970s. The Arab oil embargo. The oil price spike hikes, the big push for efficiency in our country. Your air conditioner now uses about half the energy that it used in 1970. Well, what will the future look like? The folks who put this chart together believe that peaking will occur at about 2010. Who knows? We really won't know until after it has peaked and you look back and see the data. It could be peaking now. It could be 5 years from now, it could be 10 years from now. But both of these are very, very short term in terms of what we need to do to address this. What will the future look like? They have predicted that future oil discoveries will follow, and of course they won't be smooth like that, but on the average they will follow the curve like that. And you can't pump what you haven't found. And if you were to put a smooth curve over this discovery curve, and you have an area under that which will equal the amount which will be the total amount of oil you have found, that is adding up all these little bars here, and the area under that discovery curve cannot be different than the area ultimately under the consumption curve. So you can make this curve go, within limits, any way you want, within reason. You can use vigorous enhanced oil recovery techniques and get it out quicker, and you can maybe delay the peak a little bit. But you can't pump what is not there. And so it ultimately is going to fall off much, much faster. This is a very interesting chart. We could spend a lot of time looking at this. But what you cannot do is pump oil that you have not found. Now, what CERA is predicting is that you are going to find as much more oil as all of the reserves that now exist. The reserves that exist, and I calculated this, I think that this area pretty much fills in this. So the reserve that exists is this. They think we are going to find that much more oil? What do you think when you look at this chart? Do you think it is reasonable that they are going to find that much more oil? Mr. Speaker, this is a chart which kind of smooths out those big different bar graphs that we saw before. Now, as early finds in the 19, here, they have a little spike here and a big spike here. You can smooth that whole thing out, of course. But this is roughly a graph drawn through the bar graphs on that previous chart. And now we are down here at this point in time. And the Energy Information Agency, using those three numbers that we used before, the 95 percent, which they say is low, the 50 percent, which they say is the mean, and the 5 percent, which they say is high, and they think that because the 50 percentile is halfway between the 95 and the 5, that that is the most likely thing. Well, anybody in statistics knows that if it is 95 percent more probable, it is more probable than 50 percent probable. That is pretty simple to understand, I think. Well, the red dots here indicate what the actual data have been. Now, their projection was that this discovery line would follow the green. Clearly it has been following what you would expect it to follow, the 95 percent probability. The next chart is an interesting one, and Hyman Rickover referred to this. He referred to 8,000 years of recorded history. And he, at that time, noted that they were about 100 years into the age of oil. Today we are about 150 years into the age of oil. And ultimately, out of 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a blip in the history of man. It will occupy maybe 300 years from when we first found it and started to really exploit it until it becomes so difficult to get and so expensive that we won't be getting much of it again. This is a little chart that shows the development of the industrial revolution. It started with wood. Brown, here. The hills of New England were denuded carrying charcoal to England to make steel there. Come up to Frederick County where I live, and we have a little historic site up there, Catoctin Furnace. We denuded the hills up there where Camp David is now to make charcoal to make steel at Catoctin Furnace. Then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here, it is a quadrillion Btus, how much energy we were producing. Look how much more energy we were able to produce with coal. The coal locomotive. Lots more energy in coal than there is in wood, so we could do a lot more things with. The industrial revolution was kind of stuttering when we discovered gas and oil, and then look what happened. And if you could superimpose on this a chart of the population growth in the world, it would look just about like this. Remember Hyman Rickover said that it was going to grow from that half billion back here to 4 billion? It really grew to almost 7 billion, which is where we are today. So that population curve with appropriate dimensions would just about follow exactly the energy use curve. This is an incredible amount of energy we are using that obviously could not continue. A really interesting statistic. Up until the Carter years, every decade, the world used as much oil as it had used in all of previous history. That is this curve. Now, in the 1970s you see what happened. We really had a shock, and we stopped and took some sense of where we were. And we drove smaller cars, and we developed more efficient refrigerators and air conditioners, and we reduced energy. We had a big recession, a big worldwide recession as a result of that. So energy use went down. But now look. It is climbing back up again. Three hundred years, the age of oil, it will be but a blip in the history of man. Again, I ask, what will future people think when they look back at this and say, why didn't we stop when we found this incredible wealth under the ground to ask what could we do with this to get the most good for the most people for the longer time? That is obviously the question that almost nobody asked. What we asked was, how can we use more and more of this to improve more and more our quality of life, as if it were forever. Obviously, as Hyman Rickover said 50 years ago, it can't be forever. The next chart is a really interesting one. As I mentioned, we are 1 person out of 22, and we use a fourth of the world's energy. Energy use is on the abscissa here, and how good you feel about life is on the ordinate. And notice that we are way out there. We feel pretty good about life, but not as good as many others. We are just here. There are all of those who feel better about life. And we clearly are using the most energy. Only little Switzerland comes close to us in using energy. Interesting chart here. If you could draw a line through this, you would see that with little energy it is really tough to feel good about life. But when you come up here to what, a fifth of the amount of energy we use, a lot of people, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, China, they feel about as good about life as we do. If you look at the countries in Europe here, you will find that many of those use about half the energy we use, and they feel just as good about life as we feel. What this points out is that it is possible to live a quality life using much less energy than we use, and all you have to do is to look at these countries that use very much less energy than we do and feel just about as good, and some of them better. All of these above my arm here feel better about life than we feel about life. And they are using less energy than we are using. Well, what now? Well, obviously, we must transition. Geology will assure it, as anticipated by Hyman Rickover in that very fascinating speech to the physicians 50 years ago. We will transition ultimately as we go through the age of oil from the fossil fuels to renewables. We have available to us some finite sources, and I mentioned the tar sands, and we have about as large a potential supply of energy in our West called the oil shales, a little bit different. They aren't really oil. You put a solvent in, they won't flow out. But if you cook them, they will turn to oil, and you can then refine it. And there is potentially a huge amount of energy there. But can we get it? The Shell Oil Company has gone there doing some experimentation. And a year or so ago I was a speaker out in Denver, Colorado, at the American chapter of the Peak Oil Association. And the investigator for the Shell Oil Company that conducted this little experiment was there and reported on it. And what he said in his report there was very different than the stories you read in the papers. The stories in the papers said, you know, don't worry about energy. We have this huge potential amount there, and we have found a way to get it. That is not what he said. Let me tell you what they did. What they did was, and I am not sure of the reasoning because I hear two reasons for it. One was that there was an aquifer there they didn't want to contaminate. And the other had something to do with the mechanics of sequestering the oil. But they drilled a series of holes around the periphery, and then they froze the ground, and they froze it for a year so that now they had, in effect, a frozen vessel. The second argument was that they did that to contain the heat. That is a little hard for me to understand how a frozen vessel contains heat, but that is the argument that I was given. Then at the end of the year they went in and drilled a second set of holes, and then they pumped heat down there, and they cooked it for a year. And then they drilled a third set of holes, and then when they got to the bottom of those holes, they turned it sideways, which they can do now, and drilled it horizontally. So the oil that was loosened by cooking it in the second set of wells they drilled now flowed down through the shale and was picked up by those horizontal channels from the third set of wells they drilled. And they pumped for several years a really meaningful amount of oil from that. So there is potentially a lot of oil there. But what the investigator told us was that it would be, I think he said, something like 2013 before they could even decide whether it was economically feasible to develop those fields. So there is huge potential there. There are also huge challenges there. But it is energy. We will develop some of it. But it is finite. It will not last forever either. And there is going to be enormous cost in developing it, both economic cost and environmental costs. Now, you can trade the environmental cost for economic cost. If you do not mind polluting the environment you can develop it for less money. At the moment, most of us believe we should not be polluting our environment so we spend the money necessary that we do not, although they are not really doing that in Alberta, Canada. They are using up precious water, and they have a relatively huge lake of tailing water as they call it, which is really pretty toxic stuff. Coal. We and China have a lot of coal. China was suffocating themselves with coal smoke. They closed down some of their coal-fired power plants. People will tell you that we have 500 years of coal. That is just not true. It is true that we have 250 years of coal at current use rates. We will put the next chart up in front of this one. Be very careful when people tell you we have so much of something at current use rates. When Albert Einstein was asked what the next big force in the universe was going to be after nuclear energy, which had such a dramatic increase over any kind of energy we had before that, his answer was, compound interest, he said was the most powerful force in the universe. And there is a really interesting talk given, he is not my relative, I wish he were so I had some of his genes, but Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado has given a talk on energy I think some 1,600 times. Just do Albert Bartlett and energy and you will pull it up. It was the most fascinating 1-hour talk I ever listened to, and I am sure you will agree. But he says that the biggest failure of our industrialized society is our inability to understand the exponential function. You see this coal that will last us 250 years at current use rates if we increase its use only 2 percent, and we will have to do better than that. By the way, coal has been in the past a big source of gas and oil. Hitler ran his whole country and his whole military on it. And when we were limiting the opportunities for trade in South Africa, they were making gas and oil from coal. When I was a little boy, it was coal oil. And I thought it was all one word, coal oil that replaced whale oil in the lamps. I kept calling it coal oil a long time after they were getting it from kerosene rather than coal. But if you increase it just 2 percent, that shrinks its usable duration to about 85 years. But obviously for many of our uses you cannot use coal, you have got to use it as a gas or liquid. If you use some of the energy from the coal to make it into a gas or liquid you have now shrunk it to 50 years. But the reality is that it does not matter who owns the resource today, it is all traded in a global marketplace. And the guy who has the dollars buys the oil or the gas. And so whether we like it or not, there is no alternative that we are going to share our oil with the world. Because, you see if we use oil from our coal, that just frees up some oil from pumping it out of the ground that somebody else can use. So the effect is as if we were sharing our oil with the world so that 50 years from now, we use a fourth, you remember the rest of the world uses the other three-fourths, that means that now shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. So that marvelous 200 years of coal at no growth for us now shrinks to 50 years when we increase its growth to only 2 percent, and use some of it, the energy, to convert it to gas and oil. And then we realize that we are going to have to share this, no alternative, unless we have a big enough Navy to say, it is ours and we can keep you from coming and getting it. We are going to have to share it with the world so now it lasts 12\1/2\ years. Let's go back to this chart. Going just for a few moments about nuclear. If you were in France, you would get about 80, 85 percent of all of your electricity from nuclear. We get in our country 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear, that is a lot. When you go home tonight look out your window, and every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if it were not for nuclear energy. We have never had an accident. We have never had a fatality. Three Mile Island, it behaved just as it was supposed to behave. I lived within the radiation zone of that. And we contained that. That was not a disaster. It was just a demonstration that we were building them right, because when we had the meltdown at Three Mile Island we contained that. There was little effect from it. There are three different ways you can get nuclear energy. One is the way we get it from lightwater reactors. That uses fissionable uranium. There is a finite supply of fissionable uranium in the world. And I get wildly divergent estimates of how long it will last, 15 years, 100 years. Again, this is at that current use rate. So you have to ask the person, what rate of use are you assuming when you make this projection? This reminds me, by the way, that we need an honest broker to help us agree on the facts. It is hard to have a rational discussion when you cannot agree on the facts. And I think the right candidate to do this is the National Academy of Sciences. Enormously respected, very competent. And I have talked with them, and they would be interested in doing this. We just need to fund them so they can do it. We need to have a rational discussion of this. And we cannot have that when there is big differences of opinion as to what the facts are. Well, ultimately one day sooner or later, there will not be enough fissionable uranium to go to lightwater reactors. So then we are going to have to go to the second type of fission reactors, that is the breeder reactor. France already uses those. The only ones we had we used for making weapons. We now do not do that anymore. They have problems. The big advantage, of course, is they are what the name implies, they are breeder reactors, they make more fuel that they use. The problems are that they have a byproduct that we must store away for a quarter of a million years. I cannot even imagine that. A quarter of a million years. I think there is a challenge here. Anything that is so hot that has no much energy in it that I cannot get near it for a quarter of a million years, don't you think ought to have enough energy there that we can do something meaningful with it? Now we have been profligate in our use of energy, all energy including nuclear energy. And we use only a tiny fraction of the nuclear energy in the isotope when we say it is no longer good for our reactors, so we put some more in. But I think there is a big challenge there. I think there is a potential source of energy from these byproducts. If it is so hot, such high radiation that I cannot get near it for a quarter of a million years, it ought to have some usable energy in it. We have very creative, innovative people. I think that we can find that if we realize that we need to. The third type of nuclear energy is the type that is represented in the sun and every other star out there in the Milky Way. The sun is a nuclear reactor. And it is fusion reaction, it is like our hydrogen bomb. By the way, it will one day run down too. But that will be in millions of years in the future, so in our context we do not need to think about that. We have been spending money on fusion, about $250 million a year. We are always about 30 years away from a solution. I gladly would vote for the money that we spend there. I think that we have got to do that. If we can conquer the enormous engineering challenges then we are home free. That is the only energy source out there that can take the place of fossil fuels. But I think the odds of doing that are about the same as the odds of winning the lottery. And if you are satisfied that you are going to meet your financial obligations by playing the lottery, then you are probably satisfied that we are going to meet our energy needs with nuclear fusion. Please do not bet the ranch on it. Well, once we have gone through these finite sources and we have done what we can with nuclear, I have friends that have been devoutly antinuclear, but they are very bright people. And when they are looking at a very probable alternative, that is, shivering in the dark, not enough energy to keep warm, not enough energy to run the lights, nuclear does not look all that bad to many people who before were not enthusiastic about it when the alternative might be shivering in the dark. Well, then we have renewable resources. And as Dr. Rickover said, by and by, we will have transitioned to these renewable resources. There will come a day when the fossil fuels are so scarce, so hard to get, so expensive, that we are getting little or none of them. And we will have, by that time, have transitioned, like it or not, we will have transitioned to these renewables. What are they? There is the sun. As I look at what the sun does, I am not surprised that the ancients worshiped the sun. Almost all of the energy that we have been talking about here came from the sun. It was the sun that permitted the organic materials to grow in those subtropical seas that existed. The Earth, a long time ago, was much warmer than the Earth today. They were up there in the North Shore of Alaska, and in the North Sea off England producing these organic materials that settled to the bottom, infiltrated by runoff from the adjacent hills, probably. This is all theory. As good an explanation as I have heard as to how it got there. Tectonic moved. It opened up. It sank down. Near enough, proper pressure, proper heat, enough time, and by and by it becomes gas and oil, with a dome over so the gas cannot escape. Then you have a good field. You get gas from it. You get oil from it. And if you drill into the oil and seal off the gas, the gas pressure above is putting pressure on the oil, so you have a gusher, it just pushes it up the pipe. So you see that this is the way it was formed. We have an explanation for what we find when we drill out there. So all of the gas and oil came from the sun. When I was a little boy, we had a coal furnace. And we had run a mined coal from dust to big lumps, and some lumps so big that you could not put them in the furnace. And there was a sledgehammer by the wall, and we would break the lumps so we could get them in the furnace. I remember as a little kid the feelings that I had, and I still get a chill when I think of this. I would break open the lump of that coal and there would be a fern leaf. You did not have to tell me where the coal came from. I knew where the coal came from. It came from ancient vegetation that grew and fell over and was covered up and ultimately became coal. We can see this process in the making in England, of the bogs there, it is not coal yet but you can take it out and burn it. Wind. The wind blows because the sun shines. It is differential heating of the Earth that makes the wind blow. Here is one that is not due to the sun. This is geothermal. True geothermal, not tying your heat pump to groundwater or earth, which makes a whole lot more sense than trying to coal the winter air and heat the summer air, which is what your radiational air conditioner and heat system, heat pump does. But this is tapping into the heat from the molten core of the Earth. You go to Iceland, there is not a single chimney because they have a lot of geothermal, that is where they get their energy. Ocean energy. Except for the tides, all of ocean energy is really a second-hand sun energy. It is the sun which differentially heats the waters. It is the sun which produces ultimately the Gulf Stream and the Japanese current, which carries so much warmth to northern Europe. Look at England on a globe. You will see that England is about mid-Canada, that is certainly not their climate, that is because of what the sun does in heating that water and setting up this conveyor belt. The tides, of course, are produced by the Moon. There a lot of potential energy there. And then a very popular potential source of energy today, the President talked about it last night in his State of the Union, energy sources from agriculture. Hyman Rickover in his speech here talked about that. And he said that ultimately, if you are getting energy from agriculture, you are going to be competing with one of two things, either you compete with food, and today corn is over $4 a barrel, it is ordinarily about $2 a barrel so that our dairy farmers and chicken farmers and hog farmers are now having a hard time making ends meet, because corn has about doubled in price, and that is because using corn for ethanol is competing with corn for food. If we all became vegetarians, by the way, we would all have a whole lot more corn to use for energy. Soy diesel, biodiesel, these are all attractive sources. The second potential source of energy from agriculture was biomass. And the President talked a lot about that last night. But Hyman Rickover very astutely noted that today's crops grow because last year's crops died and are fertilizing them. He noted that you will need to return the biomass to the soils if you are going to keep productivity going. Now, we can get some energy from ethanol, and we can get some energy from biomass by burning it or fermenting it, but there are limits as to how much we can get there. And the incredible amount of energy that we use from fossil fuels presents a huge challenge to try to find enough disparate sources of energy to add up to equal the energy that we get there. Waste energy, that is an interesting one, and we ought to be doing more of that. It is a very good idea. But remember, that big pile of waste that you see at the city dump is the result of profligate use of energy. In an energy-deficient world, we are not going to have those huge piles of waste. That is really secondhand use of fossil fuels because that is how the waste got there. Hydrogen. Hydrogen is not an energy source. We must make hydrogen. The second law of thermal dynamics says you will always get less energy out of hydrogen than it took to make it. So why are we talking about hydrogen? For two reasons. One, when you burn it, it is really clean. You get water. Secondly, if we ever get an economically feasible fuel cell, hydrogen is a great candidate for the fuel cell. But minus a good fuel cell, there will not be a viable hydrogen economy because you will always get less energy out of hydrogen than it took to make it. If you are simply burning the hydrogen, you could have gotten more energy by burning the gas from which you got the electricity which you used to split the water to get hydrogen. So that is why there is such a focus on fuel cells, because it opens up the promise of a really clean fuel with at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine. The next chart, and I would like to talk about this one in terms of a young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance, and they have now established a life-style. Hyman Rickover described that life-style with 33 servants, or the equivalent. They have established a life-style where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent comes from their income. It is not going to last long enough for them to retire. They have to do something. They have to spend less money or make more money. That is exactly where we are energywise. Eighty-five percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, natural gas. Only 15 percent comes from other sources, and a bit more than half of that comes from nuclear. That could grow, and probably should grow. And that leaves 7 percent, and this is in 2000. We are a little better today than we were in 2000, but the challenges are huge. Even with 30 percent growth, when you are going from 0.07 percent, in 2000 that is the contribution that solar made to our energy supply. It is minuscule. And the noise level. We are doing much better today, and it is growing rapidly, but it is still a tiny fraction of the energy we use. Notice wood here, more than a third of all of the renewables. That is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using a by-product. Waste to energy we talked about. Wind is just another way to use sun energy. Conventional hydro, we have maxed out on that. We can maybe get some microhydro. We have about maxed out on that. The next chart, briefly, what do we need to do. We need a program, if we are going to have a relatively smooth ride, and we have waited too long to address this problem, but we need a program that has the total commitment of World War II, that has the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, and has the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We need a vigorous conservation time to buy time, free up some energy, buy some time, use it wisely, invest it in those things that will do the most good for the most people. We could become a major exporter. We have a very innovative society. We have a farm bill that is challenging our farmers. And if a farm can't be energy independent, we have big problems because that is where a lot of energy could be produced. This is challenging our farm people to develop a farm where they produce twice as much energy as they use so there is some for the city person. Mr. Speaker, www.bartlett.house.gov will get you access to all of this material. Mr. Speaker, I submit into the Congressional Record the entire speech ``Energy Resources and Our Future,'' by Admiral Hyman Rickover, Chief, Naval Reactors Branch, Division of Reactor Development, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Ships for Nuclear Propulsion, Navy Department, prepared for delivery at a Banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association, St. Paul, Minnesota on May 14, 1957. Energy Resources and Our Future I am honored to be here tonight, though it is no easy thing, I assure you, for a layman to face up to an audience of physicians. A single one of you, sitting behind his desk, can be quite formidable. My speech has no medical connotations. This may be a relief to you after the solid professional fare you have been absorbing. I should like to discuss a matter which will, I hope, be of interest to you as responsible citizens: the significance of energy resources in the shaping of our future. We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the world's energy; water power accounts for only 1%; and the labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6%. This is a startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850--only a century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world's energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal, oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel Age has been burned up in the last 55 years. These fuels have been known to man for more than 3,000 years. In parts of China, coal was used for domestic heating and cooking, and natural gas for lighting as early as 1000 B.C. The Babylonians burned asphalt a thousand years earlier. But these early uses were sporadic and of no economic significance. Fossil fuels did not become a major source of energy until machines running on coal, gas, or oil were invented. Wood, for example, was the most important fuel until 1880 when it was replaced by coal; coal, in turn, has only recently been surpassed by oil in this country. Once in full swing, fossil fuel consumption has accelerated at phenomenal rates. All the fossil fuels used before 1900 would not last five years at today's rates of consumption. Nowhere are these rates higher and growing faster than in the United States. Our country, with only 6% of the world's population, uses one third of the world's total energy input; this proportion would be even greater except that we use energy more efficiently than other countries. Each American has at his disposal, each year, energy equivalent to that obtainable from eight tons of coal. This is six times the world's per capita energy consumption. Though not quite so spectacular, corresponding figures for other highly industrialized countries also show above average consumption figures. The United Kingdom, for example, uses more than three times as much energy as the world average. With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or one-twentieth horsepower. Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age. Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population. Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations. Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength-- mental and physical--to obtain the bare necessities of life. Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized living--a comfortable and tasteful home instead of a bare shelter; attractive clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing food instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom from toil without which there can be no art, music, literature, or learning. There is no need to belabor the point. What lifted man--one of the weaker mammals--above the animal world was that he could devise, with his brain, ways to increase the energy at his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely solely on the energy of his own body, he can sustain only the most meager existence. Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from his discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy resources he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization he needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor of dependent members of large patriarchal families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this type of energy. Slave labor was necessary for the city-states and the empires of antiquity; they frequently had slave populations larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were lacking; this may well have been the single most important reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times. A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life. For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the primary reason for the fall of the Mayan Civilization on this continent and of the decline of once flourishing civilizations in Asia. India and China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East. Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a further disastrous effect: lacking plant cover, soil washed away, and with soil erosion the nutritional base was reduced as well. Another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure of population on available land. A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man who is two and one half times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agricultural machines increase productivity per man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation. It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia, who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger completely satisfied, were once far more civilized and lived much better than the people of the West. And not so very long ago, either. It was the stories brought back by Marco Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes to the riches of the East, and induced adventurous sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels searching for a direct route to the fabulous Orient. The ``wealth of the Indies'' is a phrase still used, but whatever wealth may be there it certainly is not evident in the life of the people today. Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has become again the primary source of energy, since other energy converters have become too expensive. This must be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more primitive stage of civilization with all that it implies for human dignity and happiness. Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java--the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads--anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded. Where slavery represented a major source of energy, its abolition had the immediate effect of reducing energy consumption. Thus when this time-honored institution came under moral censure by Christianity, civilization declined until other sources of energy could be found. Slavery is incompatible with Christian belief in the worth of the humblest individual as a child of God. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire and masters freed their slaves--in obedience to the teaching of the Church--the energy base of Roman civilization crumbled. This, some historians believe, may have been a major factor in the decline of Rome and the temporary reversion to a more primitive way of life during the Dark Ages. Slavery gradually disappeared throughout the Western world, except in its milder form of serfdom. That it was revived a thousand years later merely shows man's ability to stifle his conscience-- at least for a while--when his economic needs are great. Eventually, even the needs of overseas plantation economies did not suffice to keep alive a practice so deeply repugnant to Western man's deepest convictions. It may well be that it was unwillingness to depend on slave labor for their energy needs which turned the minds of medieval Europeans to search for alternate sources of energy, thus sparking the Power Revolution of the Middle Ages which, in turn, paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. When slavery disappeared in the West engineering advanced. Men began to harness the power of nature by utilizing water and wind as energy sources. The sailing ship, in particular, which replaced the slave-driven galley of antiquity, was vastly improved by medieval shipbuilders and became the first machine enabling man to control large amounts of inanimate energy. The next important high-energy converter used by Europeans was gunpowder--an energy source far superior to the muscular strength of the strongest bowman or lancer. With ships that could navigate the high seas and arms that could outfire any hand weapon, Europe was now powerful enough to preempt for herself the vast empty areas of the Western Hemisphere into which she poured her surplus populations to build new nations of European stock. With these ships and arms she also gained political control over populous areas in Africa and Asia from which she drew the raw materials needed to speed her industrialization, thus complementing her naval and military dominance with economic and commercial supremacy. When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high- energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter. The Europeans not only achieved standards of living vastly higher than those of the rest of the world, but they did this while their population was growing at rates far surpassing those of other peoples. In fact, they doubled their share of total world population in the short span of three centuries. From one sixth in 1650, the people of European stock increased to almost one third of total world population by 1950. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world did not even keep energy sources in balance with population growth. Per capita energy consumption actually diminished in large areas. It is this difference in energy consumption which has resulted in an ever-widening gap between the one-third minority who live in high-energy countries and the two-thirds majority who live in low-energy areas. These so-called underdeveloped countries are now finding it far more difficult to catch up with the fortunate minority than it was for Europe to initiate transition from low-energy to high-energy consumption. For one thing, their ratio of land to people is much less favorable; for another, they have no outlet for surplus populations to ease the transition since all the empty spaces have already been taken over by people of European stock. Almost all of today's low-energy countries have a population density so great that it perpetuates dependence on intensive manual agriculture which alone can yield barely enough food for their people. They do not have enough acreage, per capita, to justify using domestic animals or farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil management, and better hand tools could bring some improvement. A very large part of their working population must nevertheless remain on the land, and this limits the amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these countries must choose between using this small energy surplus to raise their very low standard of living or postpone present rewards for the sake of future gain by investing the surplus in new industries. The choice is difficult because there is no guarantee that today's denial may not prove to have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity with which public health measures have reduced mortality rates, resulting in population growth as high or even higher than that of the high-energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice; it accounts for much of their anti-Western feeling and may well portend a prolonged period of world instability. How closely energy consumption is related to standards of living may be illustrated by the example of India. Despite intelligent and sustained efforts made since independence, India's per capita income is still only 20 cents daily; her infant mortality is four times ours; and the life expectance of her people is less than one half that of the industrialized countries of the West. These are ultimate consequences of India's very low energy consumption: one- fourteenth of world average; one-eightieth of ours. Ominous, too, is the fact that while world food production increased 9% in the six years from 1945-51, world population increased by 12%. Not only is world population increasing faster than world food production, but unfortunately, increases in food production tend to occur in the already well-fed, high-energy countries rather than in the undernourished, low-energy countries where food is most lacking. I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is--in the long run--none. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift. 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. Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics; far-seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor which must enter into all planning for the future; responsible governments who realize that the well-being of their citizens and the political power of their countries depend on adequate energy supplies--all these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. In this country, especially, many studies have been made in the last few years, seeking to discover accurate information on fossil-fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs. Statistics involving the human factor are, of course, never exact. The size of usable reserves depends on the ability of engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and use. It also depends on discovery of new methods to obtain energy from inferior resources at costs which can be borne without unduly depressing the standard of living. Estimates of future needs, in turn, rely heavily on population figures which must always allow for a large element of uncertainty, particularly as man reaches a point where he is more and more able to control his own way of life. Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an astonishing degree. In part this is because the results differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded or if in calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals will force us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal. But the most significant distinction between optimistic and pessimistic fuel reserve statistics is that the optimists generally speak of the immediate future--the next twenty-five years or so--while the pessimists think in terms of a century from now. A century or even two is a short span in the history of a great people. It seems sensible to me to take a long view, even if this involves facing unpleasant facts. For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights, so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically. For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever growing numbers of machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, tractors, ships, planes, and homes without giving a thought to the future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra has been raised only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can be expected in the future, especially in industrialized countries where extensive mapping of resources has been done. Yet the popularizers of scientific news would have us believe that there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last thousands of years, and that before they run out science will have produced miracles. Our past history and security have given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will never really happen--that everything turns out right in the end. But, prudent men will reject these tranquilizers and prefer to face the facts so that they can plan intelligently for the needs of their posterity. Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of living will of a certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel certain that when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone science will have learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy sources? I believe it would be wise to assume that the principal renewable fuel sources which we can expect to tap before fossil reserves run out will supply only 7 to 15% of future energy needs. The five most important of these renewable sources are wood fuel, farm wastes, wind, water power, and solar heat. Wood fuel and farm wastes are dubious as substitutes because of growing food requirements to be anticipated. Land is more likely to be used for food production than for tree crops; farm wastes may be more urgently needed to fertilize the soil than to fuel machines. Wind and water power can furnish only a very small percentage of our energy needs. Moreover, as with solar energy, expensive structures would be required, making use of land and metals which will also be in short supply. Nor would anything we know today justify putting too much reliance on solar energy though it will probably prove feasible for home heating in favorable localities and for cooking in hot countries which lack wood, such as India. More promising is the outlook for nuclear fuels. These are not, properly speaking, renewable energy sources, at least not in the present state of technology, but their capacity to ``breed'' and the very high energy output from small quantities of fissionable material, as well as the fact that such materials are relatively abundant, do seem to put nuclear fuels into a separate category from exhaustible fossil fuels. The disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants is, however, a problem which must be solved before there can be any widespread use of nuclear power. Another limit in the use of nuclear power is that we do not know today how to employ it otherwise than in large units to produce electricity or to supply heating. Because of its inherent characteristics, nuclear fuel cannot be used directly in small machines, such as cars, trucks, or tractors. It is doubtful that it could in the foreseeable future furnish economical fuel for civilian airplanes or ships, except very large ones. Rather than nuclear locomotives, it might prove advantageous to move trains by electricity produced in nuclear central stations. We are only at the beginning of nuclear technology, so it is difficult to predict what we may expect. Transportation--the lifeblood of all technically advanced civilizations--seems to be assured, once we have borne the initial high cost of electrifying railroads and replacing buses with streetcars or interurban electric trains. But, unless science can perform the miracle of synthesizing automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown or unless trolley wires power electric automobiles on all streets and highways, it will be wise to face up to the possibility of the ultimate disappearance of automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors. Before all the oil is gone and hydrogenation of coal for synthetic liquid fuels has come to an end, the cost of automotive fuel may have risen to a point where private cars will be too expensive to run and public transportation again becomes a profitable business. Today the automobile is the most uneconomical user of energy. Its efficiency is 5 percent compared with 23 percent for the Diesel-electric railway. It is the most ravenous devourer of fossil fuels, accounting for over half of the total oil consumption in this country. And the oil we use in the United States in one year took nature about 14 million years to create. Curiously, the automobile, which is the greatest single cause of the rapid exhaustion of oil reserves, may eventually be the first fuel consumer to suffer. Reduction in automotive use would necessitate an extraordinarily costly reorganization of the pattern of living in industrialized nations, particularly in the United States. It would seem prudent to bear this in mind in future planning of cities and industrial locations. Our present known reserves of fissionable materials are many times as large as our net economically recoverable reserves of coal. A point will be reached before this century is over when fossil fuel costs will have risen high enough to make nuclear fuels economically competitive. Before that time comes we shall have to make great efforts to raise our entire body of engineering and scientific knowledge to a higher plateau. We must also induce many more young Americans to become metallurgical and nuclear engineers. Else we shall not have the knowledge or the people to build and run the nuclear power plants which ultimately may have to furnish the major part of our energy needs. If we start to plan now, we may be able to achieve the requisite level of scientific and engineering knowledge before our fossil fuel reserves give out, but the margin of safety is not large. This is also based on the assumption that atomic war can be avoided and that population growth will not exceed that now calculated by demographic experts. War, of course, cancels all man's expectations. Even growing world tension just short of war could have far- reaching effects. In this country it might, on the one hand, lead to greater conservation of domestic fuels, to increased oil imports, and to an acceleration in scientific research which might turn up unexpected new energy sources. On the other hand, the resulting armaments race would deplete metal reserves more rapidly, hastening the day when inferior metals must be utilized with consequent greater expenditure of energy. Underdeveloped nations with fossil fuel deposits might be coerced into withholding them from the free world or may themselves decide to retain them for their own future use. The effect on Europe, which depends on coal and oil imports, would be disastrous and we would have to share our own supplies or lose our allies. Barring atomic war or unexpected changes in the population curve, we can count on an increase in world population from two and one half billion today to four billion in the year 2000; six to eight billion by 2050. The United States is expected to quadruple its population during the 20th Century--from 75 million in 1900 to 300 million in 2000--and to reach at least 375 million in 2050. This would almost exactly equal India's present population which she supports on just a little under half of our land area. It is an awesome thing to contemplate a graph of world population growth from prehistoric times--tens of thousands of years ago--to the day after tomorrow--let us say the year 2000 AD. If we visualize the population curve as a road which starts at sea level and rises in proportion as world population increases, we should see it stretching endlessly, almost level, for 99 percent of the time that man has inhabited the earth. In 6000 B.C., when recorded history begins, the road is running at a height of about 70 feet above sea level, which corresponds to a population of 10 million. Seven thousand years later--in 1000 AD.--the road has reached an elevation of 1,600 feet; the gradation now becomes steeper, and 600 years later the road is 2,900 feet high. During the short span of the next 400 years--from 1600 to 2000--it suddenly turns sharply upward at an almost perpendicular inclination and goes straight up to an elevation of 29,000 feet--the height of Mt. Everest, the world's tallest mountain. In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 AD. world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion, with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years. Calculations give us the astonishing estimate that one out of every 20 human beings born into this world is alive today. The rapidity of population growth has not given us enough time to readjust our thinking. Not much more than a century ago our country--the very spot on which I now stand was a wilderness in which a pioneer could find complete freedom from men and from government. If things became too crowded-- if he saw his neighbor's chimney smoke--he could, and often did, pack up and move west. We began life in 1776 as a nation of less than four million people--spread over a vast continent--with seemingly inexhaustible riches of nature all about. We conserved what was scarce--human labor--and squandered what seemed abundant--natural resources--and we are still doing the same today. Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic in the American character has now been buried under cities, factories and suburban developments where each picture window looks out on nothing more inspiring than the neighbor's back yard with the smoke of his fire in the wire basket clearly visible. Life in crowded communities cannot be the same as life on the frontier. We are no longer free, as was the pioneer--to work for our own immediate needs regardless of the future. We are no longer as independent of men and of government as were Americans two or three generations ago. An ever larger share of what we earn must go to solve problems caused by crowded living--bigger governments; bigger city, state, and federal budgets to pay for more public services. Merely to supply us with enough water and to carry away our waste products becomes more difficult and expansive daily. More laws and law enforcement agencies are needed to regulate human relations in urban industrial communities and on crowded highways than in the America of Thomas Jefferson. Certainly no one likes taxes, but we must become reconciled to larger taxes in the larger America of tomorrow. I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendents--those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to give America's youngsters the best possible education. We need the best teachers and enough of them to prepare our young people for a future immeasurably more complex than the present, and calling for ever larger numbers of competent and highly trained men and women. This means that we must not delay building more schools, colleges, and playgrounds. It means that we must reconcile ourselves to continuing higher taxes to build up and maintain at decent salaries a greatly enlarged corps of much better trained teachers, even at the cost of denying ourselves such momentary pleasures as buying a bigger new car, or a TV set, or household gadget. We should find--I believe--that these small self-denials would be far more than offset by the benefits they would buy for tomorrow's America. We might even--if we wanted--give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels. One final thought I should like to leave with you. High- energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 41, 110th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I rise as a proud conservative and Republican, as well as a cosponsor, to urge support of H.R. 6. Oil and natural gas are not forever. When we burn them, they are gone. The U.S. has only 2 percent of known oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we are using. We pump our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world. I just returned from a trip to China. China is preparing for a post- oil world. There are three reasons to pursue renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. One is climate change. A second reason is preparing for peak oil. A third reason is for national security risk of our dependence on foreign oil. As predicted by M. King Hubbert, and ratified by a recent SAIC report, the world either has or will shortly reach peak oil. As a cofounder and cochairman of the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, I can assure you that halfway through the age of oil, there is an urgent need for the U.S. to pursue conservation efficiency and alternative renewable sources of domestic energy. We have a moral obligation to leave younger generations some oil. I urge support of this bill.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, last evening we were here just about this time talking about this same subject, the subject we have been talking about for the last hour. We had been discussing the phenomenon known as peak oil. That is the term given to a prediction that a geologist made, M. King Hubbert, working for the Shell Oil Company in 1956. He gave a speech in San Antonio, Texas, which I believe within a decade will be recognized as the most significant, most important speech given in the last century. What he predicted was that the United States, which at that time was king of oil, we were producing more oil than any other country. We were using more oil than any other country, and we were exporting more oil than any other country. M. King Hubbert had the audacity in San Antonio, Texas, in 1956 to predict that in just a bit less than a decade-and-a-half, by about 1970, he said that the United States would reach its maximum oil production, and after that, inevitably, no matter what we did, oil production would tail off. That prediction came true. Surprisingly, in 1970, some may say 1971, we peaked in oil production. In 1969, using this same analysis technique, he predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. So last night we had come in our discussion to the point that we were looking at the potential for the alternatives that we and the world would need to turn to as we slide down the other side of what is referred to as Hubbert's peak. We noted that there were some finite resources, some nuclear resources and then the true renewables. There are three justifications one might use for moving to alternatives. One is peak oil, and we will transition from fossil fuels to alternatives. Oil, gas and coal obviously will not last forever, and as the earth at some point runs down the other side of what we call Hubbert's peak and there is not enough oil, gas and coal to meet our energy needs in the world, we will transition to alternatives. The only question is whether we do that on a time scale that we control so that it is a pretty easy ride, or whether we do it as dictated by geology, where it may be a very difficult ride. Two other reasons for moving to alternatives. One is our dependence on foreign oil. Today, we have only about 2 percent of the known reserves of the oil in our country. We use about one-fourth of all the oil in the world, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. Obviously, if M. King Hubbert was right about the world, and there is every reason to believe he will be right about the world, we will need to transition to alternatives. From a national security perspective, we ought to have been doing this a long while ago. A couple of years ago, 30 prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, wrote a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, and they used the statistics I just used, the fact that the United States has only 2 percent of the known reserves and uses 25 percent of the world's oil and imports almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we really need to do something about that. So even if you think that there is a whole lot of oil and gas out there, you still may be very incentivized to look for alternatives if you are concerned about our national security. There is another reason to look for alternatives, and that is, if you believe that we have global warming, and I think there is an increasing body of evidence that suggests that that is probably true, and that we are probably contributing to that, although in the past the earth has been very much warmer, this is in a very distant past. Ordinarily, the past that we are talking about is from the last ice age, which is like some 10,000 years back. It is now the warmest we have ever been since that last ice age, but sometime way in the past the earth has been very much warmer because there were apparently subtropical seas in what is now the north slope of Alaska and the North Sea because we are finding oil and gas there. The general belief is that this oil and gas was produced by organic material that grew in these subtropical seas, that every season it matured and fell to the bottom and was covered and mixed with sediment that was washed off of the adjacent hills, and then that built up for a very long time. Finally, with moving, the tectonic plates was submersed down with enough pressure and enough heat from the molten core of the earth and enough time that this finally was processed into gas and oil, and then if there was a rock dome over it which would hold the gas, now you have a very fertile place in which to drill. It took a very long time to grow all of that organic material and to turn it into gas and oil. We are now in a relatively few years releasing all of the carbon dioxide that was sequestered in this organic material over quite a long time, until we are driving up the CO2 of the world, which in the last century or so is nearly twice now what it was a century or so ago. This is what we call a greenhouse gas. You can get some idea as to the greenhouse effect. If tomorrow is a sunny day and a cold day, and if your car is parked outside with the sun shining on the windshield, you may find quite a warm car when you go out there. That is because of what we call the greenhouse effect. The light that comes in from the sun, call it white light, it comes in over a long spectrum of wave lengths, and it goes through the glass of your car. Then it warms up the material of your car and it reradiates only in the infrared. Well, the glass of your car is pretty much opaque to the infrared. It keeps the heat inside. It reflects it back, and that is why your car gets so warm. The greenhouse gases out there, you may remember being in an airplane, you are 44,000 feet, and the pilot tells you it is 70 degrees below zero, when down just below you may be flying over south Florida where it is very warm, and this is because of the greenhouse effect. The energy coming in from the sun heats up things in the earth, and when that heat is reflected back out, emanated back out, it is reflected by what we call the greenhouse gases and CO2 as one of those. So there is increasing evidence that we have global warming, and there may be a need to move to the alternatives because many of these alternatives, although they will produce CO2 when you burn them like ethanol, that CO2 was taken out of the atmosphere by the corn plant when it grew. So you are not contributing any more CO2 to the atmosphere if you are using a product that just last year or so took the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Now, what you would want to do in these last 2 cases is a little different in moving to alternatives. We have a essentially run out of time and run out of energy to invest in alternatives. We absolutely knew by 1980 that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We had peaked in 1970. We have done nothing in the ensuing years. If M. King Hubbert is right about the world, we have no excess energy to invest or oil would not be $50, $60 barrel, which means we have essentially run out of time and have no energy to invest. Now, we could buy some time and free up some energy with a very aggressive conservation program. Now, if your concern is foreign oil, then you could also get some additional energy from such things as tar sands and oil shales and coal. But if your concern is global warming, this will be a very bad place to get energy to invest in the alternatives that we will ultimately have to transition to because it take a lot of energy to get energy out of tar sands, and that energy is fossil fuel energy and that releases CO2 into the atmosphere. So you are making a bad situation worse if your concern is global warming and you think CO2 is the cause of that and you want to transition to renewables, and you are going to get the energy to transition to renewables from tar sands and oil shales and particularly in coal somewhat. You will simply be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But let's look at these, because if the other two incentives are your incentives, then these are good bets. If you are simply concerned that we have got to transition to renewables, then you will use whatever energy is available, and there is potentially enormous amounts of energy available in these tar sands and oil shales. And if you are concerned about dependence on foreign oil, then this is a good place to begin. The tar sands. Some may call them oil sands; they are tar, thank you. It doesn't flow; it is really very much like tar. It is, I guess, a bit better than the asphalt parking lot out here, but not much better. If you put a blow torch on the parking lot, that will flow, too, which is pretty much what we have to do with the tar sands. They exist in Canada around Alberta, Canada. There is an incredible amount of potential energy there. There is more energy in these tar sands than in all the known reserves of oil in the world. But why aren't we resting easy, then, that we have got an easy transition, a big source of energy? Because this energy is not all that easy to get out of the tar sands. The Canadians are now getting about a million barrels of oil a day. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is a lot. It is a little less than 5 percent of what we use in our country and just a bit more than 1 percent of the 84 million, 85 million barrels a day that the world uses; but they are using an incredible amount of energy to get this. They are mining this, if you will. They have a shovel there that lifts 100 tons at a time, they dump it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and then they take it and they cook it, and they are cooking it at the present with natural gas. They have what is called stranded natural gas there. There are not very many people in Alberta, Canada, that use it and gas is very difficult to move long distances; and so they are using this gas to produce oil from the tar sands. I am told, and you can be told a lot of things that aren't true, but I am told that they may be using more energy from the natural gas than they are getting out of the oil that they produce. But from an economy perspective, that is okay, because the gas is very cheap and the oil is very expensive. And I understand it costs them $18 to $25 a barrel to produce the oil; and if it is selling for $50, $60 a barrel, obviously there is a big profit there. But this natural gas will not last forever. And where will the next energy come from? They are talking about building a nuclear power plant there so they will have additional energy for cooking this oil. And they have another problem. The vein I understand, if you think of this as a vein, it now ducks under a big overlay of rock and soil, so that they will not be able to continue to develop this by mining it which is what they are doing now. They will have to develop it in situ, and I don't know that they have any economically feasible way of developing it in situ. So although there is an incredibly large amount of potential energy available there, it will take a lot of energy to get it out, so what you really need to be thinking about is the net energy or the energy- profit ratio that you get out of this. Who knows what new technologies we may come up with, what the engineers may be able to do, but one should not be too sanguine that this will be a savior, that we will get enormous amounts of energy from this, because of the difficulty of getting the oil out. The oil shales. The name might better be called tar shales, but we refer to oil shales, and they are found in our western United States, in Utah and Colorado and so forth. And, again, there is absolutely an incredible potential amount of oil that could be extracted from these oil shales, or tar shales. Probably more than all of the known reserves of oil in the world, if we could get it all out. There have been a couple of attempts to do that. The most recent one was by the Shell Oil Company, and there was some glowing reports in the papers about what they did there. But there are aquifers associated with this shale that they need to protect, and so what they do to develop this is to go in and drill a bunch of holes around the perimeter and then freeze it. So they in effect have a frozen vessel, and the oil will not move through that frozen vessel. And then they drill wells in the middle of it and they cook it, and they cook it for a year. And then they drill a third set of wells, and then when they get to the bottom, they go horizontally. They are very good at doing that now. So the oil that they cooked, loosened up by the second set of wells they drilled, now flows down through the shale, into the well that they drilled that finally went horizontal, and then they pump it out of those wells, and then they pump it for several years and they get a really meaningful amount of oil out. A couple of years ago I was out in Denver, Colorado, speaking to a peak oil conference there, and the engineer, the scientist who did this little experiment cautioned that it would be several years before Shell Oil Company decided whether it was even economically feasible to get any oil out of the oil shales using that technique. Now, there may be other techniques, but at present to my knowledge nobody has any big exploitation of the oil shales. The one that got the most publicity was this experiment by the Shell Oil Company, and they have indicated it would be several years before they can determine whether $60 a barrel is even feasible to get that oil. The next one here is coal, and we will put another chart up in front of this one, because we hear a lot about coal. And you may hear it said that we have 250 years, 500 years of coal. We don't have 500 years, but we do have 250 years of coal at current use rates. Be very careful when people are telling you how much we have of some resource. If it is at current use rates, you have to factor in how long it will last you if you have an increased use rate. After the development of atomic energy, and the world was amazed by that, Dr. Albert Einstein was asked: What will be the next great energy source in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the world was the power of compound interest. And when you look at exponential growth, if you increase the use of coal just 2 percent, and I submit that we will have to dig into coal much more than just 2 percent increase per year over what we now use, but if it is only 2 percent, that 250 years immediately shrinks to about 85 years; and then you can't fill your trunk with coal and go down the roads. You have to convert it to a gas or liquid. And, by the way, we have been doing this for decades. Hitler ran his whole military and his whole country on oil from coal. When I was a little kid, the lamps that you now call a kerosene lamp we called coal oil lamp because it was coal oil that replaced whale oil in the lamps, and long after we were using kerosene I still called it coal oil. But if you use some of the energy from the coal to convert the rest of the coal into a gas or a liquid, now you are down to 50 years with just 2 percent growth rate. And there is something else to look at. Because oil is fungible and moves on a world market, and it really doesn't matter in today's world who owns the oil, the guy who bids the highest gets the oil. It all moves on a global marketplace. And since we use one-fourth of the world's oil, our 50-year supply at only 2 percent growth rate will last the world just one-fourth of 50, or 12\1/ 2\ years. So the coal is there. It is the most readily developed, unconventional fossil fuel energy source, and we need to husband it. But it is dirty. You will pay an environmental penalty if you use it without cleaning it up, or you will pay a big economic penalty if you clean it up. Let's go back to the original chart we were looking at. And the previous speakers talked about nuclear, and indeed today we produce about 20 percent of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy from nuclear. We could and maybe should do more. There is no energy source that is without its drawbacks. When you burn any fossil fuel, you release CO2 into the atmosphere and that produces greenhouse effects, which might very well produce global warming. There are potential drawbacks to nuclear, but so are there drawbacks to not having enough energy for your civilization. There are three ways in which we can get energy from nuclear materials. One of them is the lightwater reactor, which is the only kind of reactor that we have in our country that uses fissionable uranium, and there is not an inexhaustible amount of fissionable uranium in the world. And one of the big problems in this whole dialogue is agreement on what the facts are. When I ask how much fissionable uranium remains in the world, and I guess you have to say at current use rates, I get numbers that range from 15 years to 100 years. We desperately need an honest broker to help us agree as to what the facts are so that we can have a meaningful dialogue. I have thought a lot about this, and perhaps the National Academy of Sciences, which is highly respected and very knowledgeable, would be this honest broker. Because when we sit at the table discussing where we are and where we need to go, you can't have a rational discussion without agreeing on the facts. But nobody disagrees that there is an inexhaustible supply of fissionable uranium. So obviously at some point in a few years, or a few more years with building more nuclear power plants, and China wants to build a lot more nuclear power plants, we will run out of fissionable uranium. And then we will have to move to the second type of energy released with nuclear fission, and that is the breeder reactor. The only breeder reactors we ever had were those that were used for producing nuclear weapons. France produces about 80 percent, 85 percent of its electricity from nuclears, and they have some breeder reactors. The breeder reactor does what its name implies, it breeds fuel, so you now will have essentially a replaceable and therefore inexhaustible amount of fuel. But there are problems that go with the breeder reactor. It has waste products that you have to somehow store away for maybe one-quarter of a million years. Now, we have only 5,000 years of recorded history. It is hard for us to imagine one-quarter of a million years. Something that is so hot that I have to store it away somewhere for one-quarter of a million years I think ought to have enough energy in it that we ought to be able to do something productive with that energy. As a matter of fact, the usual nuclear power plant gets only a tiny percentage of all the potential energy out of the nucleus. So I would like to challenge our engineers to look at a way to make something good out of what is now a big problem when you have breeder reactors, and that is a byproduct that you need to store away for very long time periods. The second type of nuclear energy release is what is called fusion. And we have a great fusion reactor; it is called our Sun, which is a mediocre star over near one end of the Milky Way. By the way, if you go someplace where the air is not so polluted and you look up at night, you can see across the sky that great Milky Way. It looks like you have taken a brush across the sky. There are just billions and billions of stars out there. All of the stars are the equivalent of our sun, by the way. Nuclear fusion, power plants, if you will, and we are kind of a mediocre one near one end of the Milky Way. We invest about $250 million a year in nuclear fusion. I happily support that. I wish there was a technology out there to and a technologist to use more money. I would happily vote for that. But if you think that we are going to solve our energy problems with nuclear fusion, you probably have some confidence you are going to solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery. The gamble is about the same. I think there are huge, huge engineering challenges with nuclear fusion. We have been working for many years, and we are always about 20-30 years away from a solution. We have been 20-30 years away from a solution for the last 20-30 years. We may get there. But it is not the kind of thing that you would want to bet the ranch on. By the way, we are home free if we get that. That would be an inexhaustible source of energy, essentially pollution free except for thermal pollution. I would like to talk about thermal pollution in our power plants. We have had the luxury in this rich country we live in to put our nuclear power plants away from where we live, and the heat energy that comes out of them, we dissipate. If you drive, you see the big cooling towers for the nuclear power plants. What we are doing is we are evaporating drinking water to cool these power plants. Almost everywhere else in the world, whether it is nuclear or coal, no matter what it is, unless it is hydro, then it is where the water is, but every other power plant is pretty much in the city right where people live, and they use the heat from that for what they call district heating. They pipe it to homes and businesses, and they use it in the wintertime to heat. In the summertime, you can use the heat to cool by the ammonia refrigeration, ammonia cycle refrigeration system, which used to be very popular in this country. But now you have to buy one from Argentina if you want one, for some reason. They have no moving parts and last a very long time. You can get cooling out of heat. So you can both heat and air conditioning with the excess heat from these power plants if you simply sited them nearer where people live. Once you have used these finite resources, and they are finite, except for the nuclear that we have discussed. The others are finite. They will not last forever, then we will have only the true renewables left. They are such things as solar and wind and geothermal. This is true geothermal. You may have people talk to you about geothermal and they are talking about connecting your heat pump to the earth or a well. What you are doing with your heat pump in the summertime, your air conditioner is really trying to heat up the outside air, that is how it cools the inside. And in the wintertime, your heat pump is keeping you warm by trying to cool down the outside air. If you are working against groundwater, and here it is about 56 degrees, groundwater looks very cool in the summertime, and it looks very warm in the wintertime. I remember as a little boy we had a springhouse on our farm, and that is where our food was kept cool. I used to wonder how does that happen. In the summertime I went into the springhouse and it was so cool. And in the wintertime, it felt so warm. Of course it was essentially the same temperature. But in contrast with the hot summer air it felt cool, and in contrast with the cold winter air it felt warm. True geothermal is where we are connected to the heat from the molten core of the Earth. If you have been to Iceland, there is not a chimney in all of Iceland because they have geothermal and they get all of their heat sources from that. Several places in our country we can tap that, and wherever we can we should. It is not really inexhaustible. The molten core of the Earth will not be there forever, but it will be there for millions and millions of years, so from our perspective that is an inexhaustible source of heat so we include it under renewables. Then we have a number of sources of energy from the oceans. There is huge potential from the oceans. The tides, and by the way, the tides are one of the few energy sources that are not either the direct or indirect result of the sun. All of the fossil fuels that we are burning, gas and oil, and all of these tar, sands and oil shale were all produced by organic material that grew because the sun was shining a very long time ago. I knew that when I was a little boy for coal because we lived on a farm in western Pennsylvania, and there was a coal mine on our farm. There had been a cave-in and they simply took the mules and the people out an air shaft that had a walkout slope, and so there was still some coal left. There was not enough to open the mine, but we partnered with a miner from the local town but he opened the mine and they drug coal with a pick and a shovel and a wheelbarrow. So we had what was called run-a-mine coal. We had a coal furnace, as did everybody in western Pennsylvania. Some of the lumps were too big to get in the furnace. Leaning against the cellar wall was a sledge hammer. If the lump was too big, you would break it. I remember breaking those lumps of coal and they would break open and there would be the imprint of a fern leaf. I still get a chill when I think about that. Here I am looking at something that grew who knew how many eons ago. So I knew very well where coal came from, it came from vegetation that had fallen and was overlaid with Earth. You can see coal in the process of production, by the way, in the bogs of England. It is not yet coal but it is on the way to coal. And if you take it out, it will burn. The sun produces most of the energy that you can get from the oceans. It produces thermal gradients. It produces the waves. How does it do that, by producing wind. The wind is the result of the differential heating of the Earth, and that therefore is sun driven. There is one big potential source of energy in the ocean that is not sun generated, and that is the tides. They are generated by the gravitational pull of the Moon, which lifts the whole ocean 2 to 3 feet. Can you imagine the incredible amount of energy it takes to lift three-fourths of the earth's surface 2 or 3 feet a day. We have tried to get meaningful energy from the tides without a whole lot of success, and it is simply because they are so disperse. There is an old axiom, energy or power to be effective must be concentrated, and the tides are anything but concentrated. They are spread over huge, huge expanses. We get some meaningful energy from the tides in the fjords where because of funneling effects you may have a 60-foot tide. You let it come in and then you wall it off and let it flow out through a generator when the tide goes out. There is another potential source of energy from the oceans, it is not really oceans but you find most of it there, and that is gas hydrites. There is more potential energy in the gas hydrites I understand than in all of the fossil fuels in all of the Earth, but we have been singularly unsuccessful in trying to collect those little nodules of gas hydrites and get the energy from them because they are dispersed largely on the ocean bottom over enormous expanses of the ocean. Well, these are all challenges. And one day when energy becomes less and less available from fossil fuels and more and more expensive, some of these other sources will be more exploitable. And then the agricultural resource, and let me put the next chart up here. I would like to start on the left-hand side of this because it really shows us where we are and the challenges we face. We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a pretty big inheritance, and so they have established a life-style, pretty lavish life-style where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent, some people will say 14, 15 percent comes from their income. They look at how old they are and how much they are spending, gee, it is going to run out before they die, before they retire, as a matter of fact. So they obviously have to do one of two things, or both: They have to make more money or spend less money. That is pretty much where we are with energy. Three-fourths of all of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels: Petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Only 15 percent of it comes from something other than fossil fuels. Eight percent comes from nuclear power, and that is 8 percent of our total energy. Nuclear power represents 20 percent of our electricity. If you don't like nuclear power, imagine when you go home tonight that every fifth business and every fifth home doesn't have any electricity because that's what the picture would be if we didn't have nuclear power. So 8 percent. And this is data from 2000. It is a little different because we have been trying to do something since then. Seven percent of the energy represents the true renewables, like solar and wood and waste and wind, conventional hydro. Agriculture, here we have alcohol fuel and then the geothermal that we talked about where you are truly tapping into the heat from the molten core of the Earth. These numbers would have to be a little bigger now, but they would have to be a lot bigger to be relevant because in 2000, solar was 0.07 percent. That is trifling. It has been growing at 30 percent a year so it is several times larger than it was in 2000. But still, it is minuscule compared to the 21 million barrels of oil that we use per day. And 38 percent of this comes from wood and that's largely the paper and timber industry burning waste product. Then a very interesting one, waste to energy. A lot of people look at the incredible amount of waste we have and say if we could just burn that waste, we could get a lot of energy from that. That's true. As you go up into Montgomery County, they have a very nice one, I would be proud to have it beside my church. You don't even know it is a waste to energy power plant. It is a nice looking building and the train or the truck comes in and the waste is all in containers and you don't even see it. But let me remind you that almost all of this waste is the result of profligate use of fossil fuel energy. What you are really doing when you burn that waste to produce electricity is you are kind of burning secondhand fossil fuels because that's what was used to produce this waste. In an energy deficient world, there will be far, far less waste because waste is a by-product of large energy use, and in an energy- deficient world we would be using nowhere near as much energy. Wind. Wind is really growing. Our previous hour talked about wind. The wind machines today are huge. You may see the blades for them go down the highway. They may be 60 feet long, as big as an airplane wing. They are huge, and produce megawatts of electricity. They are producing them at about 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. By the way, because we did not have the proper incentives in our country, we have now forfeited the manufacture of this product. Almost all I understand of the new big what I think are handsome wind machines are made overseas. Most are made in Denmark. The cheapest electricity costs several times the 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour, so wind machines are now really competitive with other ways of producing electricity. There are a lot of siting problems, a lot of nimby kinds of reactions. That is, not in my backyard. My wife says these are really bananas, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, she says is the attitude of many of these people. You know, pretty is as pretty does, and if your alternative is shivering in the dark in an energy deficient fossil fuel world, that may be what we are coming to, and wind machines may start to look a whole lot better. I know some people who live along the coast would mind wind machines if they couldn't see them, so they are trying to site them out in the ocean beyond the horizon so they won't see the wind machines. Conventional hydroelectric. You see, that is the biggest sector of these renewables. We have about maxed out on that. We have dammed every river we should have dammed and maybe some we shouldn't. The migratory path of fishes, and I saw a big article the other day about eels, we are now building some ladders so that eels, which are snake-like fish, can get back to their spawning grounds, but there is a huge potential, I understand, maybe as big as that, from something called microhydro. And that is using the water flow and drop in small streams. And there you can use it without the big impacts on the environment that you have when you dam up a big river. By the way, if you have dammed that river up for water for a downstream city, that will become less and less effective as it gradually fills in with silt, and it will. And by and by, who knows how many years later, there will be little water there because it will be mostly filled with silt that came down from further up in the watershed. If you are just interested in electricity, it still, when it comes over the dam, falls the same distance. So that silting in won't really effect how much electricity you can produce, but it will affect how much you can vary the height of the reservoir so as to always maintain some reserve for producing the electricity. I would like to spend a few moments talking about energy from agriculture. There is an awful lot of hype about energy from agriculture. I read the other day, and I don't know why it took us so long to find this, but in 1957, 50 years ago this year, Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine, gave a talk to a group of physicians. It is an incredible speech. He was so prophetic. He understood that gas and oil were not forever. That, I think, is obvious. Maybe it is because I am a scientist, but probably 40 years ago I started asking myself the question, you know, since gas and oil obviously are finite, they are not infinite, they will not last forever, at what point do we need to start being concerned about what is left? Is it a year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I didn't know when I first started asking this question. But I knew that at some point in time the world would have to start thinking about, gee, what do we do when gas and oil and coal are gone? Because one day gas and oil and coal will be gone. So there is a lot of hype about energy from agriculture. But Hyman Rickover, very, very astutely observed that as our population increased, the ground would be more used for producing food than it would be something you burned or fermented. And he also noted, talking about biomass, that biomass might be more valuable returning it to the soil so that you still had soil rather than taking it off to either burn or ferment. We will get some energy from agriculture, but every bit of corn you use to make ethanol is corn that is not used as a food. We are well fed in this country, many of us more than well fed, but tonight, about 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry. But as our population continues to increase, there will be less and less opportunity to use agriculture products for energy rather than food. By the way, there is one way we could free up a lot of agricultural products for energy. If you will eat the corn and the soybeans rather than the pig and the cow that ate the corn and the soybeans, then you could free up a lot of corn for ethanol and soybeans for biodiesel. The animal breeder may brag he has a pig or a chicken that is so efficient that three pounds of corn will make one pound of pig. That is true. But that is three pounds of dry corn and one pound of wet pig; maybe 90 percent dry matter in the corn and for sure 70 percent water in the pig. And you can't eat his bones. And so on a dry matter to dry matter basis, it takes at least 10 pounds of dry matter in corn to make one pound of dry matter in the pig or the chicken, and probably 20 in the steer. You get very much more efficient conversion of these grains and beans into good food if you use milk. A cow will today produce 20,000 pounds of milk in a year with a ton of dry matter. She doesn't weigh a ton, but you have a ton of dry matter in her milk for the year, which has very high food value. There is no protein that is as good as milk protein. We determine the quality of protein by feeding young rats. It may not be complimentary that the animal has dietary requirements nearer us than any other, rats, but they do. And they are also omnivorous. And we determine how good their protein is by how fast young rats grow. If you assign a value of 100 to milk protein, eggs come in at about 96, and the meats on down. And that shouldn't surprise you. God or nature, or whoever you think did it, obviously designed milk to grow young animals. A 100-pound sheep will put a pound each on twin lambs just from her milk. Enormously efficient. And eggs are very efficiently produced compared to producing the chicken that you eat. So we can free up a lot of these food crops for energy if we will simply eat the food crops rather than processing them through animals. The next chart shows one of the challenges in producing ethanol. Indeed, there are some scientists who believe that we use more energy in producing ethanol, more fossil fuel energy in producing ethanol than we get out of it. I hope they are wrong. I believe that it can be possible. But even after you have made the ethanol, you still have all of the protein and all of the fat left in the corn, and that is pretty good feed. Just an observation about what we eat and give to our animals. If you go to the Orient, the main protein source there for people is what is called tofu, and that is soybean protein. In this country, we take the soybean and we express the oil, which is the least valuable nutritionally, and we use the oil and we feed what is left of it to our pigs and chickens. No wonder that they are healthier than many of us. Here is a little comparison of the energy inputs in producing ethanol and in producing gasoline. Obviously, you expend some energy. You don't get all the energy from the oil in your gas tank. You expend some of that in drilling it, in pumping it, transporting it, refining it and hauling it to the service station, and so forth. So you use 1.23 million Btu's to get 1 million Btu's. Well, what is the story with corn? Now, you have a lot of free energy with corn. You have the solar energy, the photosynthesis that makes the corn grow. And this is about as good as it is going to get. To get 1 million Btu's of energy out of corn, you are going to have to spend about three-fourths of a million Btus in growing the corn, harvesting it, processing the ethanol, and so forth. Down at the bottom here is a very interesting pie chart, and it shows something that very few people know, and that is that almost half the energy that goes into producing corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer, which is now made from natural gas. So this is a fossil fuel input. This is all fossil fuel input, by the way. You just go around this little pie here and you are talking about mining the potash, and mining the phosphate, and mining the lime that makes the soil sweeter so that the nutrients can be absorbed. The diesel fuel in the tractor, the gasoline, the liquid propane gas, the electricity you use is produced by fossil fuels. The natural gas you use for drying your crops, for instance, the custom work, the guy you hire to come. And then all of the chemicals, something that we rarely, rarely reflect on. Gas and oil are huge feedstocks for a very important petrochemical industry. Most of our insecticides, most of our herbicides and so forth are made from gas and oil. And this is the contribution they make to growing corn. It is really, really quite large there, isn't it? I have been told that 13 percent of our corn crop would displace 2 percent of our gasoline. But the only fair way to look at the contribution ethanol can make is to grow corn with energy from corn, and you can do that. But if you grow corn with energy from corn, to get a bushel of corn to use here, you have to use three bushels of corn. Remember, the 750,000 Btu inputs to get a million? You need three bushels going in to get one out, which means that it is one to four. You only get a fourth of it out, which means that you are going to have to use 52 percent of your corn crop to displace just 2 percent of our gasoline. So when you are hearing the euphemistic projections of how much of our gasoline we are going to displace with ethanol, just remember these numbers. Now, some people are even more enthusiastic about what is called cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose and lignin, particularly cellulose, we can't digest. It is made up of a whole long string of glucose molecules, which is a simple sugar; half of what we call sucrose, which is a double sugar disaccharide. But they are so tightly bound together, we don't have any enzymes in our gut which will release them. And neither does any other animal, by the way. So, gee, you might say, how do cows, sheep, goats, horses, and guinea pigs make do eating grass and hay? They make do because they have in their gut what are called comincils, animals or little critters that live in there, some of them multi-cellular, some single cells, that have chemicals, enzymes that can split the cellulose into the requisite glucose molecules and then the host simply absorbs those. We are now able to bioengineer some little organisms that can do that. So now, when you look at the huge piles of beet pulp, look at the corn fields with all the corn fodder out there, people are saying, gee, look how much energy we could get from this agricultural waste. You can get it by burning it, or you can use it by making cellulosic ethanol from it. But, you know, topsoil is topsoil because it has organic material. It gives it tilth. Why does it have to be there? Because without the organic material, the soils can't hold the nutrients and they can't hold the water necessary for growing things. You can't grow plants in stone dust and you can't grow plants in sand. So you have to have organic material there. For a few years, we might be able to mine the organic material and still grow some crops, but there will be diminishing returns. I don't know steady state how much we can take. Some people are euphemistic about how much we are going to get from sawgrass, prairie grass. They see it growing in huge amounts. But I suspect this year's prairie grass is growing because last year's prairie grass died and is fertilizing it. Now, we certainly can get something from this biomass, from agricultural waste and from growing trees and so forth, but it will not be enormous. Let me give you some idea of what the challenge is. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day. Each barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. Hyman Rickover used data which showed the average family in 1957 used fossil fuel energy resulting in the equivalent of having 33, he said, full-time servants. If you have some trouble getting your mind around this one barrel of oil and 12 people working all year, and by the way, that is costing you less than $10 per person per year, think how far a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel, I appreciate the chart from the previous hour which showed how cheap oil was. It costs considerable less than water in the grocery store, by the way. But think how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel carries your car and how long it would take you to pull the car there. And that gives you some idea of the challenge we face. Another little example: if you are a strong man and work hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. Now, that may be humbling to recognize that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel energy, but that is the reality. There are two publications. We have only a few moments remaining. I want to go quickly through some slides here. We have two major studies, one of them is a Corps of Engineers study and these first few slides will be from their study. The second one is the big SAIC study, commonly known as the Hirsch Report. I just want to read quickly some of the things they said. These are paid for by our government. They are out there. You may be asking the question, Gee, why aren't people talking about this and why aren't we doing something about it? Good question. This is from the Corps of Engineers: the current price of oil is in the 45 to 57 per barrel range and is expected to stay in that range for several years. When they wrote this, by the way, it was about 65. Oil prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. And then this quote: In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve, getting more and more till you reach a peak and then falling down the other side. And they are concurring, a careful estimate of all the estimates lead to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease. And the last one from this source: Petroleum experts indicate that peaking is either present or imminent; will occur around 2005. And now some charts from the Hirsch Report. This is very widely publicized. They concluded that we would have unprecedented risk management problems as we face the problem of transitioning from declining quantities of gas and oil and moving to alternatives. The economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. And then they state, We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules. They said we should have started 20 years before peaking. If it is here, we are 20 years too late, aren't we? And then this quote: The world has never faced a problem like this. There is a third report out there and that is by the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and they believe that peaking will occur sometime in the future. And they present this little chart. This shows Hubbert's peak here, by the way, and because the actual data points didn't exactly follow his prediction, they are saying that you can't rely on his analysis. The little peak here, by the way, and the next chart will show us, that is from the Alaska oil find. Just a blip and the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak. And then in the couple of minutes remaining to us, the last slide we will have a chance to look at here. And this shows several predictions, depending upon whether you think the world will find enormously more oil than we now have found. And I will tell you that most of the experts that I have talked to believe we have found 95 percent of all the oil we will ever find. That is this curve. If you think we are going to double the amount of oil that we have now found, then that is this curve. And the one on top here, and by the way, they say that they don't believe in peaking, but they present this curve which shows peaking. This is unconventional oil. Make up your own mind how much of that we are going to get, remembering the discussion we had earlier of the difficulty of getting this oil. Mr. Speaker, we in the world face a huge challenge. I just returned from China. They are talking about post oil. They get it. I wish we did.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

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

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we vote here in the House on an energy bill. And I thought it might be appropriate to spend a bit of time this evening looking at where we and the world are relative to energy. I have here a chart with some numbers on it that inspired 30 of our prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, among them retired four star admirals and generals, to write to the President a letter which said, ``Mr. President, we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. We consume 25 percent of the world's oil, almost two-thirds of which we import. And that presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that to free ourselves from the necessity of buying foreign oil.'' The President recognizes that this is a problem. In his recent State of the Union message he said that we are hooked on oil. There are a couple of other interesting numbers here. We represent actually a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We represent about one person in 22 in the world. And with only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the rest of the world. We have been pumping less oil each year now for several years, and with this high pumping rate that decline will accelerate. How did we get here? To find how we got here, you have really got to go back about 6 decades. I didn't know last year on the 14th day of March, when I gave the first speech here on the floor about peak oil, that I was just 6 days beyond the 50th anniversary of what I think will come to be seen as the most important speech given in the last century. This was a speech given by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil company geologist, to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas. At that time, if you look back in your history books, you will see that we were the largest producer of oil in the world. We were the largest consumer of oil in the world, and we were the largest exporter of oil in the world. And M. King Hubbert shocked his audience by telling them that in just about a decade and a half, roughly 1970, the United States would peak in oil production. And no matter what we did after that, our production of oil would decline. I have here a curve which shows his prediction. His prediction is the small green symbols here, and the actual data points are the larger green symbols. And you see they reasonably followed his predicted curve. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office, we were already well down the other side of Hubbert's peak, and we knew very well that M. King Hubbert had been right about the United States. Now, in 1969, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would follow the United States in peaking in oil production about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? It has now been 27 years since we knew, in 1980. We are already 10 years down the other side of what is called Hubbert's peak. And we knew that he was right about the United States and he had predicted that the world would be peaking about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? And shouldn't we have been doing something about anticipating this world peaking oil production? The red symbols there, by the way, are a similar curve for the former Soviet Union, now today, Russia. And you see that when they fell apart they did not meet their expectation, so they are now having a second little peak, but they will follow the general downward trend. How was M. King Hubbert able to predict this? We had already been producing oil for quite a while in 1956, and M. King Hubbert had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of some individual oil fields, and he found that they always followed what we call a bell curve. Small production at first, and then increasing and finally reaching a maximum, and then falling off the other side. This bell curve is very familiar. If you weigh people, some will be very light and some will be very heavy, but most of them are somewhere in the middle and they follow a bell curve. If you measure the heights of people, they will follow a similar curve, or the number of mice in a mouse's litter. There are just a great many things that follow this kind of a curve. So he noted two things, one, that most of the fields tended to be exploited and exhausted in a bell curve, and when they had reached a maximum, for the average field, half of the oil had been pumped. And so he rationalized that if he knew how many fields the United States had, and how many more we would discover, if he added up all the little bell curves he would have one big bell curve which would indicate when the United States would peak in oil production. He did that. His math may be difficult to follow, but his reasoning is pretty simple. He did that, and he predicted it would be 1970. And right on schedule, we peaked in 1970. I have been joined on the floor by my good friend, also from Maryland, Wayne Gilchrest. And before I yield to him, I would just like to introduce what he is going to talk about by quoting here from the International Energy Agency. This is a recent press release. And what they say here, ``The energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive. But it also shows how new government policies can create an alternative energy future which is clean, clever and competitive.'' They go on to say that ``energy demand increases by 53 percent between now and 2030.'' Well, it may. The demand may increase by 53 percent, but the use will not increase by 53 percent because, as you will see when we develop the subject this evening, the oil almost certainly will not be there to meet this demand. Over 70 percent of this increase comes from developing countries led by China and India. World oil demand reaches 116 million barrels per day in 2030, up from 84 million barrels today in 2005 and 2006 and 2007. That number really hasn't changed. We have been on a plateau for the last 3 years of about 84, 85 million barrels of oil per day. By the way, we use about 21 million barrels a day, about exactly one- fourth of that. Most of the increase in oil supply is met by a small number of major OPEC producers. Non-OPEC conventional crude oil output peaks, they say, by the middle of the next decade. Most observers believe that that has now peaked and, as a matter of fact, the world is about to peak. These trends would accentuate consuming nations' vulnerabilities to a severe supply disruption and resulting price shocks. They would also amplify the magnitude of global climate change. Mr. Gilchrest, I am pleased to yield to you. They introduce the subject that I know you are very much concerned about, and that is what our increased use of fossil fuels is doing to our climate and how it is affecting global climate change and global warming.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I think that would be very instructive for our audience. Please do.