Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. What the gentleman has been talking about is more than valid reason for pursuing the development of alternatives, if no other. Why would we want to increase CO2 more? Why would we want to threaten more the quality of life in this world? The Congressman and I have been to Antarctica twice; one of those trips we went together. Down in Antarctica, 90 percent of all the fresh water in the world is locked up in the ice there. It is nearly 2 miles high, and 70 percent of all the world's ice is locked up in Antarctica. Now that hasn't really started to melt yet, although it has threatened. I am told that calculations indicate that if the polarized caps in the Greenland ice shelf, if they were all to melt, the ocean levels would rise 200 feet. Now, if you look around the world you will note that a big percent of the world's population lives within 200 feet of sea level. This would be a monstrous, monstrous change. There are three very good reasons for pursuing alternatives, which is what the bill tomorrow is going to be talking about. One of those is certainly a climate change, because what we are doing now is releasing CO2 that was bound up in these plants and organisms that grew aeons ago, and it took many, many years to tie up the CO2. Now we are releasing it very quickly as we burn these fossil fuels. A second reason, of course, is I just don't think that the oil is going to be there, which is what we are talking about tonight as ``peak oil.'' The third really good reason for doing it is the reason the President advanced, and that is, it really is a big national security risk to be so dependent on foreign oil. What I have here on this chart is another depiction of Hubbert's peak, and this is by the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, commonly referred to as CERA, and they are trying to indicate that one should not have confidence in the predictions of Hubbert because his curve didn't exactly actually follow his prediction. Well, by golly, it is pretty close to actually following his prediction. Here is the U.S. actual production in red. You will see there is a little second peak here, and the next chart will show that is because of Prudhoe Bay. We found a lot of oil there, but that was not in M. King Hubbert's prediction. He hadn't imagined that we would be going to the North Slope of Alaska to drill. So the little yellow ones here are his prediction. Notice that the actual Lower 48 has followed very closely, very closely, his prediction. We are now down to, even with Prudhoe Bay, we are now down to about half, about 5 million barrels a day. That is the red one over there, as compared to roughly 10 million barrels a day at our peak. The next chart shows better where their oil comes from. Hubbert's prediction covered the Lower 48, and that is this gray area here. Now we need to add to that gas liquids. The big find in Alaska here, and that is what causes this little blip here in the downward slope. I remember a number of years ago, these fabulous discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, which is supposed to solve our problem for the foreseeable future, that is the yellow there. Notice it hardly makes a shadow on the downward slope of Hubbert's peak. The next chart is really a chart that we could spend a long while talking about because it has a great deal of information on it. The bars there represent the discoveries, and you notice that we were discovering oil way back in the 1930s, big discoveries in the 1940s, and then lots of discoveries which peaked about 1970, and since then it has been going down, down, down. The solid black line here indicates the amount of oil that we have been using. Notice that for a long while we were accumulating big reserves of oil; everything about this solid black curve is reserves that we have in store that we can use later. But then in about 1980 there, you can see these two curves cross. I say two curves, because obviously you could draw a smooth curve through the peaks here, and these two curves crossed about 1980. Ever since 1980 we have been burning more oil than we found. Today we burn two or three barrels of oil for every barrel of oil that we find. So for this period, between 1980 to the present, we have been using up some of the reserves that we have back here, but still a lot of those reserves remain. Now, what will the future look like? Well, there is a big difference of opinion in what the future will look like. The persons that put this chart together believe that by about 2010, about 3 years or so, the world will peak in oil consumption. Some believe that it has already peaked, others believe it may peak a little after 2010, and then it will go down. Now, they have made some guesses as to how much oil we are going to find. I am not sure I would have drawn that curve exactly that high, because a smooth curve might bring you down about here. I think they have been very generous in the amount of oil that is yet to be discovered. By the way, the world's experts on oil believe that we have, most of them, we have probably found about 95 percent of all the oil that we will ever find. You notice that when we find oil now, we find it in very difficult places to get to. The last big find was in the Gulf of Mexico, through 7,000 feet of water, and then about 30,000 feet of rock and dirt until you get down to the oil. We aren't now developing that field, and I am told, you can be told a lot of things that aren't true and I don't know the veracity of this, but I am told we will be developing that field when oil reaches $211 a barrel, because that is what it will cost to get the oil out of that field. I just want to spend a moment looking at this before we go to the next one. If you draw a smooth curve through these bars, the area under that curve represents the total amount of oil that we have found, and the area under the consumption curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have consumed. Now, it is very obvious that you can't consume oil that you haven't found, and you can make the future, within reason, look anyway you like. But what you can't do is pump oil that you haven't found. Unless you believe that we are going to find a whole lot more oil than indicated by their projection, then you have some choices as to what that downslope is going to look like. You can be very aggressive and use enhanced recovery techniques, you can pump steam down there, you can pump CO2 down there, you can flood it with sea water as the Saudis do to get their oil out. You get it more quickly. But if you get it more quickly, you have less to get later on. So we have choices facing us as to what that downslope will look like. But, remember, you can't pump oil you haven't found, and the area under the consumption curve cannot be larger than the area under the discovery curve. They have to be the same area ultimately, the same volume. Here is a prediction by our Energy Information Agency, and it is a very interesting one, and they use some unusual statistical approaches. But this is a curve through the discovery peaks. Let me put the other one up just quickly so you can see the similarities here. Notice the big peak here in the late 1940s and 1950s and another peak here. They have kind of smoothed that out here. You can see this is the early peak here and then the later peak and then down, down, down. We get to the point we are at now, and they make some very unusual predictions. The yellow line there, they say, is the 95 percent probability, and the green line is the 50 percent probability, and the blue line is the 5 percent probability. And they say that the 50 percent probability is the average, the mean, and, of course, probabilities and means don't mean the same thing, so therefore, that is what our production is more likely to be. Surprisingly, this curve that has been going down for a number of years they thought was going to turn around and go up. But notice for the roughly 5 to 10 years after they drew this first curve, notice the red symbols there. They have been following what you would expect they would follow, and that is the 95 percent probability. Ninety-five percent probably is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable, and that is what it has been following. Here is another chart from CERA, and it shows something very interesting. First, I want to look at the left here. This is the low, they say, is the 95 percent probability. Now, the 95 percent probability is the most probable, so it is not the low, it is the most likely. Then they say the high probability is almost 4,000 gigabarrels. The mean is right in the middle. Most of the experts in the world believe that we have found about a little over 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. I use the term ``giga,'' because a billion in England is a million million, and in our country a billion is a thousand million. So everybody understands giga. A giga is a thousand million. We have consumed about half of that and about 1,000 gigabarrels, maybe a little bit more, but roughly a thousand gigabarrels remains. Several Congresses ago I was privileged to share the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to get some idea of the dimensions of the problem we face, so we had the world's experts come in for a hearing. And I was surprised at the unanimity. It was like from 970 to 1,040 gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world, not a big spread. Now, what they are showing here is that if in fact we find as much more oil as all the oil that now remains discovered, if we find as much more as all the oil that remains discovered, we will still peak at 2016, 9 years from now, if we find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists, that we know exists in the world. If you don't find that, then we peaked about now and it is going to start down this way. Another thing they have shown here is if you aggressively develop these fields and pump life steam down there or put CO2 down there or pump sea water down there, you can get it more quickly. But then look what happens. It falls off more quickly too. Again, the area under this curve has to be the same thing as the area under this curve. You can't pump more because you are pumping it faster. Now, with enhanced oil discovery, you might get a little more, because you might get some oil that you wouldn't have gotten with conventional techniques. Here is another more recent chart from the Oil Information Agency. They have been pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil. They said it was going to be an undulating plateau. I agree, it is going to be an undulating plateau. So they show here with what I think are wildly optimistic estimates of how much oil we are going to find, they believe that we are going to find twice as much more oil as all the oil we now know exists. That just isn't very probable. But even if we find that much oil, they have a peak. Notice it. They say it is an undulating plateau. I agree. With the world's economies and demands and warmer temperatures, which is why oil is down a bit now, because we have warmer temperatures in our country, I agree it is going to be undulating plateau. They are pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil, and they show in this curve peak oil. They show it I think a good many years beyond when it will actually occur. This little curve down here is closer what I think is reality. They have 1.92 trillion, and it is just a bit over 2 trillion, I think, so maybe it would extend a little beyond this. But notice they are showing this peak about now, aren't they? So if we don't find this enormous amount of additional oil, it will be peaking about now. What they are saying is if we have only 2.93 trillion, we will be peaking at this point. I have a quote here from one of the world's experts on oil, Dr. Laherrere, and this is what he says, and I think that it is kind of difficult to argue with his logic. Jean Laherrere made an assessment of the USGS report. Now, it is the USGS report that provides the data that permits CERA to make their prognostications. He concludes that the USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, 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. Today we have 3-D modeling and seismic use, and so we know pretty much what the world's geology looks like. I might take just a moment to talk a little bit about this geology, because it is very important in understanding how much more oil we are likely to find. How did the gas and oil get there? Well, nobody was there when it got there, so we really don't know, but one of the best guess its is that a very long time ago the Earth was very much warmer than it is now. As a matter of fact, there were subtropical seas at the North Shore of Alaska. In the North Sea, there were subtropical seas. And every cycle the vegetation grew, and then when it matured or if there was a fall, and it may have been warm enough there was no true fall, but still there was a cycle of life, and it grew and sank to the bottom as algae does now in the ponds and so forth. And then waters washed erosive materials off the surrounding hills and it mixed with the organic material. This continued for an a large number of years until there was a lot of mixture of organic material and inorganic material there. Then the tectonic plates of the world moved, and we know that happened, and it opened up and sank and went down to a depth where the temperature was appropriate, closer to the molten core of the Earth, and where the pressure was appropriate, and then cooked there under this pressure for who knows how long, and this organic material, mostly plants, maybe a few small animals, gradually became what we know as oil. Now, the oil is made up of molecules of varying lengths. Some are very short and they are in fact gasses, if you let them escape from the oil. Some of them are very long, and that makes the waxes and so forth that we find in oil. Now, if there happened to be a rock dome over top of this deposit way down there that is now being cooked and pressurized for a long while, if there is a rock dome over that, the gas that escapes will be trapped under that rock dome. So when you come along and drill a well through that, and you get down to the oil, the oil is going to be under pressure because of that gas above it. So you have what you call a gusher. The gas pressure above pushes the oil down and up the drill pipe and it continues to gush until that gas pressure has been relieved. Now, this may not be the way that oil and gas were formed, but there isn't any better guess as to how it was formed. And if that is in fact the way it was formed, then we can make some guesses as to how much more oil and gas we are likely to find, because we have done a pretty good job of matching the geology of the Earth. What you need to find is some of this organic material buried deeply for a long while with a rock dome over it so it captures the gas. By the way, if it doesn't capture that gas, you end up with something like the tar pits of California, and you end up with the tar sands, they call them oil sands, they are tar sands, thank you. They flow about as readily as the blacktop driveway out here, unless you heat them up, which is what they do, and combine them with some shorter chain molecules so that when they cool they will still flow. The loss of these gasses has produced what we call our oil shales in the west. By the way, there are huge, huge deposits of these tar sands and oil shales. As a matter of fact, the deposits of each of those represents way more than all the fossil fuels that we now know exist in the world, and the Canadians are making some heroic efforts because their big fields are up in Alberta, Canada, and they have a shovel up there that lifts 100 tons and they dump it into a truck that carries 400 tons and then they carry it and cook it. When it is cooked, why, the oil flows and then they mix it, as I said, with something with shorter molecules, a solvent, so when it cools it will flow and they move it out through pipes. With this heroic effort, they are getting about 1 million barrels a day. That sounds like a lot, 1 million barrels a day, but we use 21 million barrels a day. That is about 5 percent of what we use, and just a bit over 1 percent of what the world uses, because the world uses about 84-85 million barrels a day. And what they are doing is not sustainable, because they are cooking this with natural gas that is what we call stranded. By ``stranded'' we mean there are not very many people there to use it, and natural gas is hard to transport unless you liquefy it and are near a port, so it is cheap. So I understand they may be using more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. But from a dollar and cents perspective, it makes sense, because the gas is really cheap and they are producing that oily understand for $12 to $25 a barrel, again, you get various estimates of this, and they are getting $50 to $60 barrel for it. So dollars and cents-wise, that makes good sense. From an energy profit ratio, it does not make any sense at all. Natural gas is a high quality feed stock for an enormous petrochemical industry. One of the things that we use it for, by the way, is making nitrogen fertilizer, and without our ability to make nitrogen fertilizer, we could not begin to feed the world. It is not just the plant breeder, and he has done marvelous with developing new plants. It is all of the fossil fuel energy we use in agriculture, and a great deal of that is used in making nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas. I have next a little schematic here, and this kind of smoothes out these curves. By the way, the world has been increasing its use of oil about 2 percent. That does not sound like much, does it, 2 percent? But 2 percent exponential growth doubles in about 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years, and it is eight times bigger in 140 years. Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the detonation of the nuclear bomb, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great energy force in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. Exponential growth. I have a namesake, no relative. I wish I had some of his genes. He is really very brilliant. Dr. Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, he gives the most interesting 1-hour lecture I have ever heard on the failure of our industrialized society to understand exponential growth. Just do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and energy, and it will come up and you will be fascinated with this 1-hour lecture. Here we show this little schematic curve. It is a 1 percent growth rate. Remember, that doubles in 35-years. This point is twice as high as this point, and that represents 35 years. Notice that the shortage occurs before we reach the peak. The shape of the bell curve and the exponential growth curve indicate that you are going to have shortfalls in supply, price is going to go up before you might reach the peak, and maybe, just maybe, we are in this time right here. A lot of the evidence indicates that is true. The next chart is one that really gives you some pause when you look at it. Let us just look at the upper one because the bottom one is an expansion of the upper one, separating the gas from the oil here in the red curve. But this shows only what 400 years, a little less than 400 years of more than 5,000 years of recorded history. The use of energy in our world was so small back in 1750 that that brown there which is wood is just about the baseline, is it not? The industrial revolution started with wood. The hills of England were denuded to make charcoal to make steel. Catoctin Furnace, a little historic site up in Frederick County, they denuded the Catoctin Mountains where Camp David now is, thankfully the trees grew back, they denuded that making charcoal for that furnace. The industrial revolution really took off when they discovered coal, and it was stuttering when they finally discovered gas and oil. Then look what happened. The hockey stick, that is the hockey stick that Congressman Gilchrest was talking about, look what it did. It just goes straight up. Notice here what happened in 1970. There was a real oil price shock there, and the world used somewhat less oil. We are now very efficient in the way we use oil in this country. Air conditioners probably are twice as efficient at least as the ones you used in 1970. If it were not for our increased efficiency we would be in even more trouble with energy today. But what I want to point out is that we are about 100, 150 years into the age of oil. That is this. If Hubbert was right, and he was exactly right about the United States, why should he not be right about the world, this is going to be a bell curve. By the way, you can make this thing look steeper or shallower depending upon the dimensions and the ordinates, the absinthe ordinate and abscissa. Here, of course, we have 400 years on the abscissa so it is very compressed so it makes the curve look higher, but that is exactly the same kind of curve we have here. We just spread out the abscissa here so that we spread it out. If you really push these two things, that is going to peak up high in the middle. Out of 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will represent about 200 to 300 years, remaining about 100, 150 years. What will our world look like post age of oil? The next chart shows us something that is alarming a number of people, and this is a little drawing of the world. It has a number of symbols on it, and one of those symbols shows where China is securing rights to buy oil, and they are all over the world. This symbol here was Unocal. They almost bought Unocal, one of our oil companies. They are buying oil all over the world. They are scouring the world for oil. I just came back from a trip to China, and we went there to talk about energy by the way. I was pleasantly surprised when they began their discussion of energy by saying post-oil. They get it. I wish we did. They talk about post-oil. They recognize that they are big polluters. As a matter of fact, I have a reference here that says by 2010, just 3 years from now, they will be a bigger CO2 producer than we are, in just 3 years. Their economy is growing, the last 2 quarters, at more than 10 percent a year. That doubles in 7 years. It is four times bigger in 14 years. It is eight times bigger in 21 years, 1.3 billion people. I saw essentially no bicycles on the street and traffic jams like we have at rush hour here in Washington. Well, the fact that they are scouring the world for oil indicates their understanding that this is going to be a resource in short supply for the future. We can spend a long time talking about China and what they are doing. They are aggressively building a blue water navy. A blue water navy is different than the brown water navy, brown from the silt that comes out the rivers near shore, little navies that protect you from somebody coming from afar. They are rapidly developing a blue water navy. Last year, for instance, we launched one submarine. They launched 14. Now, their submarines are not ours but 14 submarines is 14 submarines. I have here a very interesting statement from our Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.'' I am thankful you recognize that. ``I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way the politics of energy is I will use the word `warping' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something now about the warping now of diplomatic efforts by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' It would be nice if everybody in the administration understood that and we were doing something meaningful about it. So what do we do? Well, I think that any rational person would understand that you need to get busy developing some alternatives if you are going to run out of these fossil fuels. By the way, these fossil fuel are just incredible. The energy in these fossil fuels is just unreal. I have an article, really not an article. It was a speech given by Hyman Rickover in 1957, 50 years ago this year, and I want to read something that he says here which is really interesting. He understood 50 years ago, ``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. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously,'' little more than you are working, but you have got to sleep, ``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.'' And it has gotten even more golden in these last 50 years, has it not? Hyman Rickover understood very well our dependence on fossil fuels. One barrel of oil controls the energy of 12 men working all year for you. If you figure out what that costs, it is less than $10 to purchase the equivalent work of a person all year long. Now, if you have some trouble getting your minds around that, imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel carries your car. And by the way, it is considerably cheaper, a little over $2 a gallon, than water in the grocery store. Now, how long would it take you to pull your SUV or your car or push it as far as that little gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel take it? I own a Prius. We get under normal road driving conditions 51 miles a gallon. It would take me a long time to pull my Prius 51 miles. Another indication of the incredible energy benefit from fossil fuels, if you work really hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. It may be humbling to recognize in terms of fossil fuel that we are worth less than 25 cents a day, but that is the reality, and that is why we live so well. As Hyman Rickover understood 50 years ago, if that was true what he said 50 years ago, it is true in spades today, is it not, because we have even more helpers to make our life quality higher as a result of our use of energy. Well, what do we do if we are going to run short of fossil fuels? Obviously, we have no surplus oil to invest in the development of renewables. If we did, oil would not be $50, $60 a barrel, but we can free up some oil and buy some time with a very aggressive conservation program. Matt Simmons, who has written a really good book on Saudi Arabia called ``Twilight in the Desert,'' and he makes the case that Saudi Arabia has probably peaked in oil production. They will not tell you that, but you notice they cannot make good on any promise to increase oil production so he may very well be right. Then after having freed up this energy and bought some time, we must use it very wisely. We would get a lot of benefits from that. Life is just so easy in this country that we are bored. We are watching awful movies. We are doing drugs because we are bored. There is no exhilaration like facing a big challenge and besting that challenge. There is nothing that puts flavor in pie so much as work, and I can imagine Americans, when they understand the problem we face, going to bed at night saying, gee, today, I used less energy than I did yesterday and I lived just fine, and tomorrow I am going to do better. But we need leadership that is not here yet so that we will do that. By the way, big benefits. We could once again become a major exporter. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. Properly challenged, we will figure ways to get this alternative energy. We could again be a major exporter. Today, we are a big, big importer, as you know, $800 billion trade deficit this year. We are a role model whether we like it or not. When you use 25 percent of the world's energy, you are a role model. Not a very good one today. We profligately use energy, way more energy than the average person in the world. It really is possible to be much more efficient. This is a fascinating chart, such a simple one, but what it shows is the heat that you get out of an incandescent bulb and the light you get out of it. Ninety percent of it is heat which is why I use an electric bulb for brooding little chickens. I am not so much interested in the light as I am the heat from it. Now fluorescents are much better, and I saw there was a Time magazine cover page that had a pile of coal there. I think it was on the cover page, and they have one of these screw-in fluorescent bulbs beside it. Five hundred pounds of coal, that is the amount of coal you save in the life of that one fluorescent bulb, that is here. But notice what you get out of light omitting diodes. I have a little light omitting diode flashlight that I carry. I put two little batteries in it, and I have forgotten when I put them in. It just lasts so long. We have the same amount of light out of each one of these, but notice the enormous amount of heat you are getting out of the incandescent bulb and the tiny amount of heat that you are getting out of the light emitting diode. There are lots of opportunities in our society to live well and comfortably using a lot less energy. I don't have the chart here, but the average Californian uses only about 65 percent as much electricity as the rest of America, and it would be hard to argue that Californians don't live well. This next chart is a really interesting one, and what it shows here on the abscissa is the amount of energy that we are using per person and what it shows on the ordinate here is how good you feel about life. You couldn't feel any better than 100 percent, and notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy in the whole world and we feel pretty good about it; but notice how many countries that use less energy than we feel even better than their quality of life. Let's go way back here to Colombia. They use a fifth as much energy as we; they feel almost as good about their quality of life as we feel. If you drew a curve through this, you need some minimum energy to feel good about life, but once you go up that steep part of the curve, the minimum energy is pretty flat. We can move way back here on the curve and feel just as good as we do now about life. You don't have to use the amount of energy that we use to feel as good about life as we do. The average European, the countries are scattered through there, but the average European uses half the energy we use and, by the way, pays more than twice as much per gallon of gasoline and they have been doing that for a very long time. We are shortly going to run out of our 60 minutes this evening and we will need to come back to finish this, but obviously we have got some finite resources here that we can use. When we come back, we are going to talk about the resources available to us to meet the challenge of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. And, by the way, we will transition either on a time scale that we have chosen or on a time scale chosen by geology. As we run down the other side of Hubbard's Peak and the world has less and less supply of fossil fuels, we will transition. It can be a bumpy ride, or it can be a really bumpy ride. But Americans are up to it. We need leadership and knowledge. And we will be back again to talk about the finite resources available to us and all those fascinating opportunities in renewables.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, in a former life, I received a doctorate in human physiology, I taught medical school, and I had a course in advanced embryology. With this background, my heart just bleeds when these diabetic kids come through my office every year, because I know there are options which have not been discussed on this floor; and I have two charts here which point that out. The assumption is being made by many people that you need to kill embryos to get embryonic stem cells. That just isn't true, and these slides point that out. Let me go quickly to the slide that is really important here. These are several different ways of getting embryonic-like stem cells, and I want to go to the embryonic biopsy. This was a procedure that I had suggested to the President before he came out with his executive order. The medical community has now run past us with this, Mr. Speaker. What I suggested was you ought to be able to take a cell from an early embryo without harming an embryo, because I knew that God or nature, whoever you think does it, does that every day. When identical twins are produced, half the cells are taken away, and each half produces a perfectly normal baby. What the medical community is now doing is what is called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They take a cell from an early embryo and they do a genetic diagnosis on it. If there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells. It may be six or seven cells. Sometimes they get an extra cell. And more than 2,000 times now we have had perfectly normal babies born. There are hundreds of clinics in this country doing that. The procedure started in England. All that we need is that second cell that they inadvertently get when they do the biopsy for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Two professionals have now developed stem cell lines, Verlinski and Lanz have developed stem cell lines from single embryonic cells. Mr. Speaker, we can have embryonic stem cell research without killing embryos. I think that is the real message. Every professional I know believes there ought to be more potential medical applications from embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Many of my colleagues are opposing embryonic stem cell research needlessly because they believe you have to kill embryos to get embryonic stem cells. You don't have to kill embryos. The medical community is doing this every day by the thousands in preimplantation genetic diagnosis with in vitro fertilization.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend Chairman Hunter and Ranking Member Skelton for their exemplary leadership in bringing this conference report. I also want to thank my subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Taylor, for his tireless efforts and dedication in the preparation of this important legislation. I am grateful for our strong and cooperative relationship. In addition, I would like to recognize my fellow colleagues on the subcommittee for their diligence and commitment to a job well done. The intense work involved in preparing this conference report before us has been accomplished with the assistance of our professional and hard-working staff, and I commend their efforts and the quality of the final product. Staff, thank you very much. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this conference report. It strikes an appropriate balance between modernizing and maintaining our existing weapon systems, while investing in replacement capabilities for our future force. In this bill, we move forward with the development of our future fleet by funding the lead replacement amphibious assault ship and the dual lead DDG-1000 destroyers, while also providing advance procurement funds for the next generation aircraft carrier. The bill also continues to build-out our fleet of Virginia class attack submarines, San Antonio class amphibious ships and Littoral Combat Ships. This conference report also contains funds for continuing the refueling and complex overhaul of the USS Carl Vinson and provides funds for the modernization of the Arleigh Burke destroyer and the Air Force's fleet of strategic airlift and bomber aircraft. We have taken action to provide our future force with the capabilities they need to meet future threats. We have also taken steps to ensure that the current capabilities are not retired prematurely. This conference report mandates the Department of Defense maintain a minimum strategic airlift force structure of 299 aircraft and allows limited retirements of KC-135E aerial refueling aircraft and B-2 bombers. One point of concern deals with the submarine force for the future. It is destined to go back to 40 submarines. It is the strong sense of this subcommittee that it ought to go no lower than 48 submarines. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting our sailors, our airmen, our soldiers and marines by voting ``yes'' for the fiscal year 2006 National Defense Authorization Act.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, there have been in the last couple of years two major government-sponsored studies on energy. One was a big SAIC report, commonly called the Hirsch Report. The other was a more recent report by the Corps of Engineers, and both of them reached essentially the same conclusion. The world has either peaked in oil production, conventional oil production, or it will shortly peak in oil production with potentially devastating consequences. The Hirsch report said that the world has never faced a problem like this, that mitigation consequences will be unprecedented. Today I got across my desk a flyer from a group here on the Hill that said that we ought to be cautious about this suspension vote because some new programs were suggested here. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that some new programs are suggested here because the reality is the Hirsch report said if you didn't anticipate the peaking of oil, in 20 years there were going to be economic consequences. We knew 25 years ago that this was a reality. By 1980, 1981, we absolutely knew that M. King Huppert was right. The United States had peaked in 1970. We are well down that slope now. He predicted the world would be peaking about now. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that there are a lot of new programs in here because we don't have 10 years. We don't have 20 years. I think we have essentially run out of time. We have run out of energy. And don't be lulled into complacency by this find of oil in the gulf. Instead of our responding, saying here is some energy and we can invest in alternatives, what we have said is, I don't need to buy that hybrid now; I can now buy an SUV. We have exactly the wrong response to this. Please, this is a great bill. I hope there are new programs in it. My only complaint with the bill is it doesn't have enough new programs in it. Thank you very much for a great bill. Everybody should vote ``yes'' on this.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we have 2 percent of the nonreserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We import almost two-thirds of what we use. Ten years from now when we look back, our regret is going to be that there wasn't ten times as much money in this bill for these programs. This is desperately needed. The market is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It will not solve this problem. If this government does not solve it, it won't be solved because the private sector cannot do it. We need real leadership in this area, and that is a major responsibility of government. And again I say mark it down. Ten years from now you will look back and say why wasn't there ten times as much money in that bill because we really needed it? This falls far short of what we ought to be doing, but at least it is something. Please vote for it.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of order.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, a few days ago we paused to recognize Constitution Day. I thought it would be appropriate this evening if we spent a few moments looking at the Constitution. But in order to really understand the milieu in which the Constitution was created, I think we need to go back 11 years before the Constitution was ratified to the Declaration of Independence. In there we read these words: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Mr. Speaker, we mouth those words today, and then we move on to the next clause, and they mean so little to us compared to what they meant to our Founding Fathers. You see, most of our Founding Fathers came from countries in the British Isles and in Europe that were ruled by a king or an emperor who claimed, and incredibly was granted, divine rights. What that says is that the rights came from God to the king or the emperor, and he would give what rights he wished to the people. And we made a stark departure from that. Fourscore and 7 years later, Abraham Lincoln was to note that this new experiment might not work. He said in his Gettysburg Address that: We are now engaged in a great war testing whether this Nation or any Nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. 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. It took 11 years for the promise of the Declaration of Independence to be fulfilled in the Constitution that was ratified in 1787. The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before our Founding Fathers wondered if it really was clear that they meant to have a very limited Federal Government with essentially all of the rights belonging to the people. And so they wrote 12 amendments; 10 of them made it through that process of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the State legislatures, and we know them as the Bill of Rights. I think we all too seldom review these Bill of Rights. The first eight deal with pretty specific rights that the people have, like the right to worship as they please, and to speak freely, in the first amendment; the right to keep and bear arms, much misunderstood in the second amendment. And then third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eight all deal with specific rights of the people. And then the ninth amendment, seldom referred to, but they wanted to make sure that having enumerated certain rights as belonging to the people, that the reader of the Constitution and these amendments understood that essentially all of the rights belonged to the people. Notice what they said in the ninth amendment. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. In other words, just because we did not mention a right in the Constitution or these amendments as belonging to the people, that is where essentially all of the rights belong. So do not disparage these rights to people. They do belong to the people. And then the most violated amendment in the Constitution, the 10th amendment. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people. What this really says in plain everyday English, without the old English and the legalese, is if you cannot find it Article I, section 8, you cannot do it. Now, we are doing a great many things in this Congress that neither I nor anyone else can find a sound basis for in the Constitution, and this is pretty widely recognized. As evidence of that, I have, and I think this was a joke from Jay Leno, that is one of the places that it was heard. ``They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we are not using it any more.'' Mr. Speaker, this general recognition on the part of the citizenry that we are now largely ignoring the Constitution ought to cause us to rethink what we are doing. I am not saying that the things that we are doing are not things that we ought to be doing. What I am saying is we ought not be ignoring the Constitution. This, I believe, starts us down a very slippery slope. If I can argue it is okay to do these things, like philanthropy, and, by the way, do a Google search for Davy Crockett and farmer, and you will get a great discussion of philanthropy, health care and education, I am not arguing that these are not things that the Federal Government might ought to be doing. I am simply arguing that if we are going to do them, we need to have amended the Constitution, because I am very concerned that if we can ignore the Constitution now, that we can ignore it in the future for some very important civil liberty that we have. Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned that the general malaise on our part in referring to the specifics of the Constitution will serve us no good purpose in the future, and I think that we need to look at every law that we pass to make sure there is a firm basis in the Constitution. This is a wonderful document. We have one person in 22. We have a fourth of all the good things in the world. I think it is because of the milieu that was established by this Constitution, the civil rights. No other constitution, no other bill of rights provides such civil liberties. To remain who we are, I think that we need to stick by our Constitution.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the efforts of one of my constituents, Mr. Leo McHale, of Walkersville, Maryland, to honor the heroes of 9/11. With community support, Mr. McHale created Maryland's first private memorial to remember and honor the heroes who responded to the terrorist attacks and those who perished on September 11, 2001. It was dedicated on May 10, 2003. I personally would like to thank Mr. McHale and the Walkersville residents whose joint efforts and hard work are responsible for the completion of this commemorative project. In spite of the terrible losses on that cataclysmic day, it is important to recognize the astounding community efforts and cooperative response that symbolize the character, pride and unity of the American people. With 9/11's 5th anniversary approaching, it is essential that the American people continue to remember the events that occurred when America was attacked on September 11, 2001. Through the efforts of Mr. Leo McHale--and so many others--we continue to keep the memory alive by honoring the heroes who responded and the men, women and children whose lives were mercilessly and cruelly taken on 9/11.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, among many priorities that the country and the Congress face, our national security is probably preeminent today in the minds of many people and in the Congress and in our administration. And today I would like to talk about one aspect of national security that will probably be unknown to a great many Americans, and to those few who know about and have studied it, this will remind them of the potential for this threat to our country, indeed, to our whole society. Our first glimpse of the possibility of this threat occurred in 1961. It was in the Pacific and we were then doing a series of nuclear tests, and this was our first and last high altitude test. It was over Johnston Island, and the weapon was detonated above the atmosphere the first time that we had done that. No one knew what was going to happen as a result of that test, and the consequences were unexpected and really quite striking. Hawaii was about 800 miles away. If you think back to 1961, we did not have all of the electronics that we have today. We were more in an electrical infrastructure then than we were in an electronic infrastructure, and the electrical infrastructures are very much more robust than an electronic infrastructure because you are dealing with big structures and heavy wires and so forth. Even so, the effects of this detonation above the atmosphere resulted in the shutdown of electrical circuits. There were many disruptions in electrical and certainly in electronic equipment such as existed those days in Hawaii 800 miles away. The Soviets were also doing testing simultaneously with ours and they had more experience with this phenomenon. We now have a name for this phenomenon. We call it electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. And here I have a chart which shows very schematically what is happening. We detonate the weapon above the atmosphere, and there is an immediate distribution of gamma rays that travel at the speed of light that will strike every object within line of sight. And when these gamma rays reach our atmosphere, they produce what is called Compton electrons, all of this essentially at the speed of light, and these Compton electrons then become a force which is very much like a nuclear storm magnified many, many times. And if you think, Mr. Speaker, of the disruptions that a robust solar storm can produce to our communications here, you can get some idea as to the potential impact of an EMP. It is sometimes called high altitude or HEMP. We since have learned a great deal more about that than we knew then, but the feature that we learned then was that wide areas are affected. You can have very high field strengths, and here it says 50 kilovolts per meter. We have since learned, as reported by the Russian generals, and I will come to that report in a few moments, that the Soviets purportedly designed and built electromagnetic weapons that would produce 200 kilovolts per meter; so that is four times larger than the number which is given here in this chart. This was May of 1986. That was 20-some years after the explosion, but a long time before these Russian generals were interviewed. There is a very broad frequency band running from very, very short wavelengths to very long wavelengths. The pulse lasts more than 2 minutes, but it comes on with such abruptness that our surge protectors for your computer and other devices are useless because the pulse is through the surge protector before it sees it. So there is now nothing out there the equivalent of EMP. The next chart shows on the right that just about everything is affected by EMP. It has a missile which is taking off there. We are not even sure that we can launch through a robust EMP laydown. What I am told is that we tested our missiles and we found some deficiencies and we corrected that and we have done that several times, and the last time we corrected the deficiencies, we intentionally did not test again, hoping that we had fixed all the deficiencies. But knowing that if we tested and found deficiencies that that intelligence would probably get out to our enemies and they would know that we were vulnerable, and rather than run that risk, we believe that we had corrected all the deficiencies; so we have not tested, and, hopefully, a potential enemy will also believe that we have corrected all the deficiencies. But that is not a certainty. We do not yet know for certain that we could launch our ballistic missiles through an EMP laydown. It shows effects on automobiles. By the way, if you have a car or truck that has a coil and a distributor, you are probably immune to EMP. But all modern cars, as you know when you take your car for service, has a lot of computers. Indeed, a computer is required for servicing your car. So all of the new vehicles are vulnerable to EMP. Airplanes, only a few of our military airplanes are EMP hardened. All of the other planes are vulnerable to EMP effects. Here on the left it shows the coverage with the height of blast 60 miles and how large an area. That is line of sight, with the simple geometry of the Earth and the height. If you are 200 miles up, you cover a bigger area. And if you are 300 miles high up with the center of that in Iowa, Nebraska, about in that area, it covers our whole country; or the margins of our country in south Florida, northwest Washington State, and Maine, all are covered with a blast of about 300 miles high above Nebraska or Iowa. The next chart is a little more detailed presentation of the blast area. And it shows that it is not simple concentric rings because of the dynamics of the detonation of a nuclear weapon. You have a distribution of intensities; but generally speaking, out at the margins of the country with 480 kilometers, about 300 miles, with a detonation of that blast, you see from the purple here that you have got about 50 percent of maximum at the margins of our country. The level to which we tested is classified, but if the Russian generals are correct that they developed weapons at 200 kilovolts per meter, that would mean 100 kilovolts per meter at the margins of our country. And there is concern that even when we test and harden that we may not have hardened it to an adequate level. The next chart answers an important question that I am sure a lot of people ask at about this point, and that is if there is such enormous vulnerability to EMP, why would you be talking about that and giving our potential adversaries a heads up that we are vulnerable? To help understand that, most Americans may not know about it, but every one of our potential enemies knows about it. I have here just one little chart which, as you can see, is not in English. It is in Russian, as a matter of fact. And although I cannot read Russian, I certainly can look at the sketches here. And what we see is EMP. Here is a weapon detonated above the atmosphere. And here you see the effect of that. This is the EMP pulse here lasting a long time. By the way, the fact that the wavelengths in that pulse go from extremely short to extremely long mean that they can couple with almost everything. I am told that the smallest electronic parts on the warehouse shelf will couple with some of the shortest waves. And long, long lines like railroad tracks will couple with the longest waves. As a matter of fact, they will even couple with wires that are buried several feet underground. Without technical knowledge, what we are talking about almost seems like Buck Rogers and science fiction. A blast of a single weapon up to 300 miles in the sky, and by the way, if it were in the daytime and you were looking away from it, you would not even know it happened. If you were looking at it, obviously, you would see it because it was very bright, and it was line of sight. You are not hurt by it. It has no effect on our bodies. But if you have an electronic watch, that will stop. If you get in your car, that probably will not run. The phones will not work. There will be no power grid. There are literally tens of thousands of what are called SCADA, which are little control devices in our power grid. And they all contain chips, micro-electronics. And many of them were manufactured by organizations that do not even exist now because they have been in the field for a long time. And all of those are gone. Signals traveling through fiber will get there. But if you have anything other than optical switching, if you have electronic switching, the switches will be gone. And so even if you are using fiber, you still cannot transmit your data if you are using other-than-optical switching. So this chart demonstrates very clearly that our enemies know about EMP, because this is from a Russian publication, and it shows the effects of EMP. This is the power grid. They show the transformers going out. By the way, if our big transformers go out, there are no replacements on the shelf. The biggest ones are not even manufactured in this country. We will need to go to Europe or Scandinavia, and you place your order, and in a year to 18 months, they will have the transformer for you. I was concerned about EMP, and I called a friend of mine, Tom Clancy, who I knew had an EMP scenario in one of his books. And he lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I knew him. So I called Tom and asked him for some information on EMP. He said, if you have read my book, you know as much about EMP as I know, but let me refer you to, in his opinion, the smartest man hired by the U.S. Government. And he gave me the name of a Dr. Lowell Wood who worked for Lawrence Livermore Lab, one of our big nuclear labs out in California. Well, this was back, oh, probably 12, 13 years ago, a while ago. And cell phones were not all that popular. You may remember that we were using pagers. If you wanted to communicate with someone, why you paged them. And that went up to a satellite and back down to their pager. And they got the little message, please call so and so. I did that with Lowell Wood. I thought he was in California. And he happened to be in Washington. And of course the same satellite that would have brought the signal down to California brought it down to Washington. Within an hour, he was sitting with me in my office. Dr. Lowell Wood was indeed a font of knowledge on electromagnetic pulse. I was concerned that, because of cost considerations, that our military was waiving EMP hardening on essentially all of its new weapons systems and that that made us vulnerable to an EMP attack. And so I got in legislation the establishment of an EMP commission. And the EMP commission was set up and functioned for 2 years. Normally our commissions work for a year. But because of the details of this legislation, they were able to work for 2 years. They brought forth a big report. This is the executive summary of that report. And this was issued in 2004. This is the Executive Summary of the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse EMP Attack. And here are a number of PowerPoint presentations that they prepared, because they were going around the country briefing a large number of organizations, Federal and State and private, on the results of their study. The next chart shows the commissioners. Here you will see Dr. Johnnie Foster is the developer of almost all of our new atomic weapons. Dr. Bill Graham, who was the chair of this, was Rumsfeld's co-chair when they did that very important study on the emerging ballistic missile threat that came out a few years ago. It is interesting. I spent a couple of days in Moscow with Bill Graham and Rumsfeld when we were briefing members of the Russian Duma so that they would understand that our withdrawal from this treaty that prohibited us from protecting ourselves against intercontinental ballistic missiles had nothing to do with Russia because we cannot imagine that we could produce a robust enough protection system to protect us against the literally thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles that Russia has. But there are some new players on the scene out there, like China and North Korea and Iran and who knows who may get in line. And we could, we felt, with the development of a system, the successful test just a few days ago, be able to take out a few weapons from a country like this. Another very important member of this commission was Dr. Joan Woodward, who is the deputy director of the Sandia Labs out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was out visiting my son there who works at the labs. And he brought me home some material from the lab that led me to believe that they might have some knowledge that would be helpful in this EMP study. So I asked for a briefing. I had not looked at the list and remembered specifically who was on this list of commissioners. And I came in for a 5-hour classified briefing on the commission's work. And Dr. Joan Woodward had at her disposal all of the resources of the Sandia Labs. So they did a really magnificent job of studying the threat, not just to our military but to our national infrastructure. The next chart shows something which alarmed them. This is from their commission report. We have redacted here the names of the Russian generals. But they interviewed two Russian generals who told them that Russia had designed and built a super EMP nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. That is an enormously high pulse. Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea. Now, I am not saying this. I am taking this from the report of the EMP commission. Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the near future. Now, this is the assessment of the EMP commission. The next chart just builds on the point that I made that most of our citizens may not know anything about EMP, because it is really a Buck Rogers Star Wars kind of a phenomena. It almost seems like science fiction. The fact is that, although few of our people know about EMP, all of our potential enemies know about EMP. And I just wanted to make that very clear, because I do not want anybody to have the notion that we are somehow informing a potential enemy of something that he does not know about. This first quote here is a very interesting one. This is not exactly the quote as I remember, but it is a pretty good paraphrase, because I was there. It was May 2nd of 1999. And I was sitting in a hotel in Vienna, Austria, with ten other Members of our Congress and three members of the Russian Duma. I can tell you exactly when we were there. We were there when the three prisoners, hostages, whatever you want to call them were released by Yugoslavia. You may remember that event. They were released to Jesse Jackson as you may remember. For 2 days we sat in that hotel room hammering out a framework for an agreement. Five days later, that was voted by the G-8. Russia joined the G-7, because the only country that the Bosnians had enough respect for to be controlled by them was Russia. And when the G-7 joined with Russia, they used the framework agreement that we had developed. And that ended the hostilities there as you may remember. Well, one of the three Russians there was Vladimir Lukin. He was the ambassador here at the end of Bush 1, the beginning of the Clinton administration. At the time we were there, he was the chair of their equivalent of our International Relations Committee in the Russian Duma. He is a fairly short fellow with even shorter arms. And he was extremely angry. And he sat there for 2 days with his arms folded across his chest looking at the ceiling. And then he made this statement, and what he said was, as I remember it, ``if we really wanted to hurt you with no threat of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM and we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country and shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.'' That was Vladimir Lukin. Another Russian who was there, who was I think the third ranking Communist, and yes, there is still a big Communist Party in Russia, who was the third ranking Communist, Alexander Shurbanov. And he smiled and he said, ``if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares, like I think at least 7,000 spares.'' You see, the reason for no fear of retaliation was that if it was launched from the ocean, we would never know where it came from. Well, that was his comment. Now, all of this is from the EMP commission. None of those are my statements. Chinese military writings describe EMP as the key to victory and describe scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in a conflict over Taiwan. Again, a survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by the commission found widespread knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility, including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea. This next bullet is kind of repeated in the next chart, so I will skip to this one. Iran has tested launching a Scud missile from a surface vessel, a launch mode that could support a national or transnational terrorist EMP attack against the United States. It should be noted that you do not have to be very technically adroit or very competent to launch an EMP weapon, because if you miss by 100 miles that is just about as good as a direct hit because there is a large area that this covers. A Scud missile can launch about 180 miles high. That will not blanket the whole United States, but a Scud missile launched from a ship off our coast could shut down all of New England and much of the mid- Atlantic area with an EMP blast. Now, if you thought recovery from Katrina was difficult, imagine an area many times that large with no remaining infrastructure in terms of communications or power. That is the problem we would have. If it blankets our Nation, of course, we have an essentially irresolvable problem. The next chart continues with what our potential adversaries know about EMP, and again, all of this is from the EMP commission report. If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways, and this is an interesting one from Iranian Journal in 1998, even before the present wild man who is there, if the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. 150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. It is probably more than that now, and if the enemy forces succeeded in infiltrating the information network, which an EMP would do if it shuts us down, then the whole organization would collapse, the American soldiers could not function, nor would they be able to fire a single shot. Now, I am not sure that is totally true, because I think our guns are pretty much immune to the EMP, but it is largely true. We have now about 35,000 people in South Korea. We believe that with the technology we have that we are a match for the million-man North Korean Army, but if the North Koreans were to launch an EMP weapon, just fire straight up, if you will, and detonate a weapon above the atmosphere, our soldiers would, in effect, be no taller in terms of combat capability than the North Korean soldiers who probably are pretty EMP immune because they do not have very sophisticated equipment. Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse. This is the Iranian Journal. Terrorists have attempted to acquire nonnuclear radio frequency weapons. This is a statement from the EMP Commission. So you see that essentially all of our presently believed potential enemies are writing about EMP. It is not that they do not know about it, and my concern is that most Americans do not know about it, which is why we are talking about it. Why would they be interested in EMP? Again, this is from the commission. States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for EMP test offers the greatest utility. We talk about asymmetric warfare. An EMP weapon is the ultimate asymmetric weapon. One little country with a Scud launcher and a crude nuclear weapon and a transsteamer from which they could launch it, and by the way, we cannot see with our satellites through the thinnest canvas. If the Scud launcher is on the deck and covered by a canvas, we could not distinguish it from baled hay or crates of bananas. In fact, there is one interesting story on an EMP attack in our country, and this may be kind of a look at the future. It has our country attacked from the sea, and after the weapon is launched, the ship is sunk. So now even if you find the ships there are no fingerprints. The ship is gone. Well, these are the reasons they may use it. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against U.S. military forces in a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland. There is no way that a nuclear weapon could be used to produce so much damage to our country as with an electromagnetic pulse detection by detonating it at high altitude. If it took out all of Los Angeles or New York City, you would not have done anywhere near as much damage to our country as simply detonating it above the atmosphere and for using an EMP pulse which would shut down all of our communications and all of our power grids. Mr. Speaker, think about a world, and it would not be quite this but nearly this, a world in which the only person you can talk to is the person next to you unless you happen to be a ham operator with a vacuum tube set, and then you could talk to another operator who had a vacuum tube set. By the way, the vacuum tubes are a million times less susceptible to EMPs than the microelectronics that we use now. And in this world, the only way pretty much you can go anywhere is to walk unless you happen to have a friend who has a car that has a coil and distributor, and that car probably will work. The second bullet here is a very interesting one, for two reasons. The country that does this believes they are relatively immune to a massive retaliation with our nuclear weapons. Even if we knew who did it, are we justified in incinerating their grandmothers and their babies because they took out our computers? That is in effect, Mr. Speaker, all they would have done is take out our microelectronics. The consequences of that, of course, are devastating, but the second reason is that we probably would not know who did it. I cannot imagine, except for Russia, any country that would launch a nuclear weapon from their soil. Our satellites are really good. We would certainly detect it. We would know where it came from, and we would retaliate. If they attack us, it is going to be from the sea. They cover three-fourths of the Earth's surface. They are very difficult to monitor. The north Atlantic shipping lanes are crowded with ships. It is essentially impossible to keep track of specific ships in that shipping lane. EMP could, compared to a nuclear attack on the cities, kill many more Americans in the long run from indirect effects of collapsed infrastructure, power, communications, transportation, food and water. I was given a prepublication copy of a novel which I hope comes out because I think Americans need to know what the potential is, and it was the story of a community in the hills of North Carolina after an EMP attack. It goes through the first year; and to give some emphasis to this statement, it could kill many more Americans. This is a novel, but they did a lot of research. They had reason to believe, I think, it was probably pretty close to the truth. If you go to a country that has no communications and no power and will not have any communications or power and essentially no transportation because all of our transportation now except for these old cars and trucks are dependent on microelectronics, the story they told was that at the end of the first year 80 percent of the people in this North Carolina community were dead, most of them from lack of food. The average city has 3 days' supply of food. If the trucks do not keep coming in over the superhighway, and by the way the serving of food on your plate tonight, the average serving traveled 1,500 miles to get there, to give you some idea of how vulnerable we are to transportation losses. They were lucky, because the authors concluded in their book that probably 90 percent of our population would be dead by the end of the year, and in New York City with its millions of people, the novel at the end of the year had them with 25,000 people still alive. These are unimaginable consequences. The effects could be just overwhelmingly devastating, and a little later I will give you some quotes from some very prominent Americans who understand, and you may be surprised of the source of these quotes when you see them. Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military strengths and societal survival, challenge the integrity of allied regional coalitions, and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to the high-tech West than to rogue states. Most of these rogue states have little microelectronics. If we retaliate with EMP laydown, they would be a little discomfited compared to the effect on us. The next chart is an interesting one and far too complex to go through in the few moments we have to look at it here. But they spent a lot of time looking at our national infrastructure and the interdependency of the various aspects of our infrastructure. Their study and conclusions reminded me of the counsel of a very prominent American. This was a number of years ago, Harrison Scott Brown, from CalTech, a geophysicist who I think held a number of seminars called ``The Next Hundred Years,'' and in those seminars, he looked at where the world might be and the various scenarios for the next hundred years. One of the scenarios way back in the 1960s and 1950s that had been looked at was a nuclear war. He cautioned that recovery from a nuclear war would be very difficult, and what he said then is true in spades today. He noted that our very complex infrastructure was developed through an evolutionary process, through the exploitation of high- quality, readily-available raw materials, iron ore in the Midwest, which was so good that you could almost literally have a backyard smelter. There is still one of those little smelters, by the way, not working of course, just a tourist site now up near Thurmont, Maryland, not very many miles from here. He cautioned that since our infrastructure was built with these high- quality, readily-available materials like coal that was exposed by erosion of the soil from the coal, oil that was very shallow and very abundant in Pennsylvania, that if our infrastructure collapsed, that we probably could not reestablish it without heavy industry, and heavy industry would have collapsed. I thought just in the last day or two how appropriate his concerns were when I thought of this recent big, and it is big but it is not going to save the day, oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. How could you ever drill through 7,000 feet of water and I think about 30,000 feet of soil without the products of heavy industry? You could not, of course, and what this chart shows is that all of our infrastructure, like a house of cards, is interrelated. Any one is pulled out and the rest collapse. Of course, the one essential to everything is power. When that is gone, all is gone. Nothing works. They spent a great deal of time, and you can get a copy of this report, and you can read the concerns that they have. One of the few high altitude nuclear detonations, to confuse the EMP, one 300 miles will cover the whole country. Unprecedented cascading failure of our electronics-dependent infrastructure could result. I think, Mr. Speaker, we probably ought to change that verb. It would result. Power energy transport, telecom and financial systems are particularly vulnerable and interdependent. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause large scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the national life. Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these infrastructures without adequate protection, and today, we have essentially none, Mr. Speaker. Without adequate protection, recovery could be prolonged months to years. Mr. Speaker, you cannot hold your breath for months or years. Now, all of this is from the EMP Commission set up by Public Law 106-398, title XIV. These are not my words. These are the words of the people from the EMP Commission. The next chart, again directly from the commission, says that EMP is one of a small number of threats that may, and, boy, are they capable of understatement. These are scientists primarily, and scientists are not preachers or politicians. They are given to understatement. EMP is one of a small number of threats that may hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. That is the way of saying, Mr. Speaker, that EMP could end our civil society. When they say ``hold at risk the continued existence,'' that means discontinue the society, disrupt our military forces and disrupt our ability to project military power. Far too many of our weapons systems are not hardened. At a series of hearings over the last several years, I have frequently asked, after a robust EMP laydown, how much of our war fighting capability remains? And the short answer is, usually not much. Now, that is about to change, because I now understand that a memo is circulating in the Pentagon asking all of our departments there to make an assessment of their EMP vulnerabilities. Hopefully, that will result in a program to correct this deficiency. The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than in the Cold War. Then there was one. Today, who knows how many there are. Any country that has a crude nuclear weapon that they might make or buy, a Scud launcher and a transsteamer they can put it on is capable; not of blanketing our whole country, but taking out the whole northeast and Mid-Atlantic area would be devastating. This would be orders of magnitude greater than Katrina, and we still really haven't recovered from that one. Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP strategic attack option. I read earlier a number of quotes from the commission, from journals in these foreign countries noting that they really know about it, the threat not adequately addressed in U.S. national and homeland security programs. I said, Mr. Speaker, they were capable of gross understatement. We are paying essentially no attention to it. You know, my house is probably not going to burn down, but I wouldn't sleep well tonight, I wouldn't sleep tonight if I knew that I didn't have fire insurance on my home. I would want to call the agent and get a binder. Now, what are the odds that my house is going to burn tonight? Very small. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that in the reality of today's world, there is a bigger probability that there will be an EMP laydown than that any one house or building will burn. Now, if you are uncomfortable being unprotected by fire insurance, you really ought to be uncomfortable being unprotected from EMP. The next chart shows the conclusions of the EMP Commission. The EMP threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. As a matter of fact, there is almost no other single event that you can name, except the impact of a large meteor from space perhaps, that you could note that would have the devastating effects of an EMP laydown. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels. And they have a large number of pages and a lot of recommendations. We just recently extended the life of the EMP Commission for 18 months after their first meeting, and their first meeting was just a few weeks ago. So the EMP Commission, unlike most commissions doing this kind of work, they produce a paper, and then the report just collects dusts, and they go away. But this one is not going away, and I hope we can keep it in existence for a long time. The EMP Commission needs to be there watching our response to make sure that we are doing the right thing. They now have an extension of life of about 18 months. They are a few weeks into that, so they are going around educating people, sectors of government, private sector and so forth. By taking action, this EMP threat could be reduced. It could be reduced to manageable levels. If you are building a device, and EMP hardened, it may increase the cost of the device only 5 or 10 percent, maybe even less. If you wait until after the device is built, it may cost you as much to harden the device as it did to build it. If you are building in the hardening, it is not all that expensive or not all that difficult. The strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, and that is telling other people you do this, you are going to pay for it; preparation, protection and recovery. We need to be looking at all of these. A fascinating study is, what would you do if this happened? What resources do you have available? How would you mobilize those resources? What would you do to provide the most good for the most people with the resources you have available? These are fascinating studies, and essentially nobody is looking at them. Critical military capabilities must be survivable; and they are not today, I hope we are moving to address that; and endurable to underwrite U.S. strategy. The next chart shows a continuation of their conclusions, and this reflects that, in the 2006 Defense Authorization, we extended it for 18 months. Terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of an attack. Vulnerability invites attack. I really am a pacifist. I don't like war. That is why I am a big, big supporter of our military, because I really subscribe to the philosophy that the most certain path to peace is to prepare for war. If you are really prepared for war, you are probably not going to have a war. We are not prepared for this kind of an eventuality, and our very unpreparedness invites this kind of an asymmetric attack. The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical infrastructure. And what do we do to protect it? And what do we do to recover? And it notes here that the power grid is a particularly vulnerable and essential one. Without power, you have essentially nothing. Everything goes down without power. The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan to help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur. What do you do as a family to prepare? What do you do as a community to prepare? What do you do when it happens? Citizens need to become as self-sufficient as possible. I am not telling you this; I am reading this from the report. If you are not as self-sufficient as possible, then you become a liability. You are no longer an asset to your country. You become a liability. So it should be the goal of every American to be as self-sufficient as possible, because then you become an asset and not a liability. The next quote is a really interesting one, and I mentioned some really prominent Americans are concerned about this, and so this is from the Washington Post, ``One Way We Could Lose the War on Terror'' by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl from Arizona. ``Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, which I chair,'' he says, ``held a hearing on a major threat to the United States not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea. An electromagnetic pulse, an EMP attack, is one of only a few ways America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorists or otherwise. Few, if any, people would die right away, but the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Few could conceive of a possibility that terrorists could bring American society to its knees by knocking out our power supply from several miles in the atmosphere, but this time, we've been warned, and we better be prepared to respond.'' Thank you, Senator Kyl. Thank you for your recognition that this is a problem. Thank you for your counsel that we ought to be doing something about it. But, you know, I still don't see us doing much about it. Another article that appeared in the public, ``The Impact of EMP is Asymmetric.'' This is by Major Franz Gayl. ``The impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries. The less developed societies of North Korea, Iran and other potential EMP attack perpetrators are less electromagnetically dependent and less specialized and are more capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern conveniences.'' If you don't have modern conveniences, you are not going to miss modern conveniences. ``Conversely, the United States would be subject to widespread paralysis and doubtful recovery,'' he says. That really is true, doubtful recovery, ``following a surprise EMP attack. Therefore, terrorists and their coincidentally allied state sponsors may determine that, given just a few nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, the subjection of the United States to a potentially nonattributable,'' from the sea, from above, ``nonattributable EMP attack is more desirable than the destruction of selected cities.'' I would think so. ``Delayed mass lethality is assured over time through the cascade of EMPs indirect effects that would bring our highly specialized and urbanized society to a disorderly halt.'' That is a very euphemistic way, Mr. Speaker, of saying that most of us would die. The next chart shows the capability, which we exercised and have now mothballed, where we could put a whole airplane and zap the airplane. Now, this is not quite a realistic simulation of an EMP attack, but it is the best we could do, because there are no long line effects here. You just can't simulate miles of wire and railroad tracks. But we used to have these facilities, and we have now mothballed them. We used to test our airplanes. And some of our most important airplanes are hardened. Indeed, those which are hardened are, obviously, classified. But it is not that we would not have an ability to respond. We would. But to whom? Who did it? And what would be our response? Mr. Speaker, we have spent several minutes now talking about a threat which I suspect few listeners had any idea existed. I hope that quoting this report and high profile people like Jon Kyl has convinced the listener that this is not just science fiction, that this is a real possibility indeed. If there is going to be a conflict, Mr. Speaker, with these powers, I think it is more than a possibility, I think it is a probability that any of these small adversaries that have a nuclear weapon could devastate us more with an EMP laydown than with any other use of that weapon. And the reason I am here in this time that we are talking about national security, Mr. Speaker, is because I believe that, although there are more urgent concerns about national security, like an open border through which 11, 12, 20, who knows how many million illegal immigrants could come, there could just as well have been that many terrorists. By the way, there is an old adage that talks about the tyranny of the urgent. Iraq and what we are doing there is really urgent. Every day it is on the President's plate. The border and the outrage of American citizens that we haven't been able to close that border is really urgent. And it is just a truism for families, for businesses, for countries, the tyranny of the urgent. The urgent always sweeps the important off the table. And one of the really important things that we need to be about is preparing for the eventuality of an EMP laydown. My last chart is a kind of a colorful one. This is a satellite photograph of the Ural Mountains, and it is labeled the Yamantau region in Russia. And this facility is ordinarily spoken of as Yamantau Mountain because it is in a mountain, and you can see from the figure down in the lower right there, it is about 600 miles almost due east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains. Beginning with Brezhnev, in about 1980, the Soviets, and now the Russians, have a closed city there. In our liaison with the Russian Duma, we have become fairly friendly with a number of those Duma members, our counterparts there, and we asked them about closed cities. And they say, oh, yes, we have closed cities. When you draw a map of the region, the city is not even on the map. It is closed. People don't go there unless they are needed to work there, and they do not leave there unless they are no longer needed there. Mezhgorye is the closed city. It happens to be in two little pockets in the mountains, because one valley wasn't big enough to house it, but there were at one time 60,000 people that we could estimate from our satellite living there. That would be about 20,000 workers that were working on Yamantau Mountain. Yamantau Mountain is the largest nuclear secure facility in the world. We have had two defectors from that Yamantau Mountain. They each have told us what they know. What we know from what they told us is that it is enormously large, as large as inside our beltway; it has train tracks running in two directions, so they intend to move a lot of material; and it has enormous rooms carved out of soft rock beneath hard rock. It is an ideal geologic formation for producing this kind of a facility. The number of people at Mezhgorye, since they are finished digging, has now shrunk to about 15,000, as our satellites indicate, which means there are about 5,000 working at Yamantau Mountain. What are they doing there? By the way, this is so secret in Russia that the cost of this, which has to be enormous, does not show in the financial lines of any of the ministries. It is the equivalent of our black programs, for those of you who are familiar with black programs. To give you some idea how important this is to the Russians, continuing work on Yamantau Mountain is more important than paying their military officers, because they have continued work there when they couldn't pay their military officers. It is more important to them than the $200 million for the service module on the International Space Station. That was embarrassing to them when they couldn't fund that and we had to fund the service module, which was their responsibility, on the International Space Station. Now, there is no conceivable use of Yamantau Mountain except during or after a nuclear war. This kind of gives you a little opportunity to get into the heads of the Russian leaders. From their writings and from their actions, it is quite justified to draw the conclusion that they believe that nuclear war is inevitable and winnable. Now, I have no idea, and I have had a number of classified briefings, I have no idea what they plan to do in Yamantau Mountain. But one thing is certain, it has no use except during or after a nuclear war. I wanted to end with this, Mr. Speaker, to bring the message that nuclear war is not unthinkable and therefore it will not happen, because apparently the Russians do not believe that it is unthinkable. By the way, they span 11 time zones. Their enormous country goes almost halfway around the world. They have less than half the people that we have and a geography that size, I think only six cities of more than 1 million people. And if wealth is determined by natural resources and raw materials, Russia is the wealthiest country on the globe. They have everything their heart could desire, except a rational government, their heart could desire for a robust economic system. They could close the door and with their resources live happily ever after. Almost nobody else can do that. We cannot do that. We import about two-thirds of our oil, we have no diamonds, nickel, chromium, tungsten. You would not have these lights in the ceiling without importing things. So I just wanted to end, Mr. Speaker, with this chart which shows that our potential enemies believe that there could be a nuclear war and they are preparing for it by spending money on Yamantau Mountain, scarce money. They were doing this, by the way, when money was scarce. It is not scarce now. They are awash in cash because oil is $65, $70, $75 a barrel. But they were spending money on this before they were flush with money. So my hope is, and I believe we should have time, that the American people in our society and in our military can plan, adapt, design, build, so that we will be immune. We are much more likely to have this attack if we are vulnerable to the attack, and at the moment we are explicitly vulnerable. We don't need to be that way. The creativity and ingenuity of the American people can make us essentially immune to this, Mr. Speaker, and we need to be about it.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, in the last year and a half I have come here to the well of the House a number of times to talk about subjects ranging from embryonic stem cells and the challenge of deriving these cells ethically so that we might hopefully enjoy the great potential medical benefits. I have come here to talk about electromagnetic pulse, a very interesting consequence of the detonation of a nuclear weapon above the atmosphere that produces a surge which is very much like a lightning strike everywhere all at once or an enormously enhanced solar storm. And I have come here I think maybe as many as 18 times in the last year and a half to talk about a problem which we as a country and we as a world face, and that is the peaking of oil. We are shortly, I believe, if we haven't already, going to reach the maximum production rate of oil in the world, and then the world will need to deal with how we substitute renewables. But tonight I come to the floor to talk about something that could very easily become a victim, a casualty of the tyranny of the urgent. All of us are familiar with this phenomenon in our personal lives, in our professional lives; it is true for our country that very frequently the urgent pushes the important off the table. Things you have got to deal with today frequently push things off until tomorrow that you might wait until tomorrow to address. I want to spend a few moments this evening talking about something that concerns me. We have 10 children in our family, I have 15 grandchildren and two great grandchildren, and I am concerned that I leave them a country as good and great as I found when I was born into this country in 1926. The story that I want to spend a few moments on tonight begins with a quote from Benjamin Franklin. There are several versions of this. I have one here from the Dictionary of Quotations, requested from the Congressional Research Service. It says, ``On leaving Independence Hall at the end of the constitutional convention in 1787, Franklin was asked, `Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' '' Of course, they were very used to a monarchy because that is what they lived under as a colony of England. According to Dr. James McHenry, a Maryland delegate, he replied, ``A republic, if you can keep it.'' Another version of this has the question asked by a woman who asked him as he came out of the constitutional convention, ``Mr. Franklin, what have you given us?'' And his reply, ``A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.'' And that is what I want to talk about tonight, a republic, and if you can keep it. So often when I hear people talk about this great country that we live in, they refer to it as a democracy. A speaker can do this after the opening exercises which very frequently may include a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. And you come to that part of the Pledge which says ``and the republic for which it stands.'' And having just recited that, perhaps without thinking about what it means, the person will get up and talk about this great democracy that we live in and will talk about our commitment in keeping the world safe for democracy. What is the difference between a democracy and a republic? And why, in our pledge of allegiance to the flag, does it say a republic? And why did Benjamin Franklin emphasize, ``A republic, Madam, if you can keep it''? An example of a democracy, and I was interested to find that this was a quote from Benjamin Franklin, too. A good example of a democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner. You see, in a pure democracy, the will of the majority controls; and that there are two wolves and one lamb and they cast votes on what they are going to have for dinner, it very well might be lamb. I kind of hesitate to use the next example of a democracy because I really don't want to be misunderstood, Madam Speaker. But if you will just think about it, I think you will realize that a lynch mob is an example of a democracy, because clearly in a lynch mob the will of the majority is being expressed. Are you not glad you live in a republic? What is the difference? A democracy is majority rule. What happens is what the majority wishes. In a pure democracy, there are no elected leaders. The people simply vote, and that is what happens. The laws represent the current opinion of the majority of the people. In a republic, we have the rule of law. One example in our history that helps me understand this is an experience with Harry Truman. Take charge, Harry. You remember the characterization. The steel mills were striking and the economy was already in trouble. In those days, it mattered that the steel mills were striking. Today, much of our steel is made overseas, and it might not matter so much. Then it mattered. Harry Truman wanted to prevent a worsening of the economy as a result of the strike of the steel mills. So he issued an executive order, and what he did was to nationalize the steel mills. What that meant was that the people who now worked for the steel mills were government employees because he had nationalized them, and as such, they could not strike. I remember that was a very popular action. But the Supreme Court met in emergency session, and in effect what they said, by the way, I think this is just one of two times that the Courts have overridden an executive order of the President, and what the Supreme Court said was in effect was, Mr. President, no matter how popular that is, you cannot do it because it violates the Constitution. You see, in a republic, we have the rule of law; and the law in this Republic in which we are privileged to live is fundamentally the Constitution. I have here a small copy of the Constitution. It is not a very big document; but, oh, what an important document it is. I hear us talking about wanting a democracy in Iraq, and I keep asking myself the question, Is that really what we want in Iraq, a democracy? You see, we have three groups there, the Shiia, the Sunni and the Kurds, and the largest of these far and away are the Shiia. They were oppressed for many years under Saddam Hussein by the Sunni, and if we had a pure democracy there, surely the will of the majority would be to oppress the Sunni and maybe the Kurds as they have been oppressed for these number of years under Saddam Hussein. I think what we really want in Iraq is a republic. We want the rule of law, which says that you cannot discriminate against any people, any ethnic group, that you cannot oppress any ethnic group. I thought that what we wanted to do in Iraq represented a pretty steep hill to climb. There is no nation around Iraq that has anything like the government that we would like them to have. They are bordered by countries which are dictatorships. We call them royal families, but they are dictatorships. They have got lots of money, and so they can be benevolent dictators, but nevertheless, they are really dictatorships. Then they have countries that have kings, Jordan and Syria. The only country that comes even close to the kind of government we would like them to have is Turkey, but they have a very interesting situation in Turkey. The most respected institution in Turkey is the military, and three times in the last several years the military has thrown out the government and told them to try again, that they are not doing very well. I have a quote here from Benjamin Franklin that I thought was very interesting and relevant to Iraq. It says only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, and you see the attacks in Iraq, as a nation becomes more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. I went to the Web to see what it had to say about democracies versus republics, and I found this little discussion: in constitutional theory and in historical analyses, especially when considering the Founding Fathers of the United States, the word ``democracy'' refers solely to direct democracy. By that, they mean where the people directly determine what the laws will be, whilst a representative democracy where representatives of the people govern in accordance with a Constitution is referred to as a republic. Using the term ``democracy'' to refer solely to direct democracy retains some popularity in United States conservative and libertarian circles. The original framers of the United States Constitution were notably cognizant of what they perceive as danger of majority rule and oppressing freedom of the individual. For example, James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10 advocates a constitutional republic over a democracy precisely to protect the individual from the majority. However, at the same time, the framers carefully created democratic institutions and major open-society reforms within the United States Constitution and the United States Bill of Rights. They kept what they believed were the best elements of democracy but mitigated by a Constitution, with protections for individual liberty, balance of power and a layered Federal structure forming what we now call a constitutional republic. A couple of interesting observations about some of the limitations of a democracy. I have one here from Benjamin Franklin; and whether he knew it or not, he was paraphrasing Socrates because I think the earliest quote came from Socrates. Benjamin Franklin said when people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. I think he really meant democracy, because if it is truly a republic, then you cannot vote yourself money. Then you could not do it. Socrates wisely observed that a democracy is doomed when its citizens can vote themselves moneys from the public Treasury. This concerns me. When more than half of the American people benefit from big government, I think that will be a tipping point; and if you think our deficits are big now, just watch what they could be when we pass that tipping point. The second part of his statement, if you can keep it, what were his concerns? We cannot get inside Benjamin Franklin's head to know what he was referring to, but we can only kind of surmise by putting this quote in context. In his day, 11 years after the Declaration of Independence, and by the way it took us 11 years to write our Constitution, so let us have a little patience in Iraq, please. Eleven years after writing the Declaration of Independence, the United States of America, this new fledgling country was far away from any other major power. It had just about a decade before defeated the most important power of that day, the superpower, the colonial superpower of that day, England; and so I doubt that Benjamin Franklin was concerned about the loss of this Republic from without. We were isolated by these oceans. We had just defeated a major world power, and so I doubt that Benjamin Franklin was concerned about a threat from without. Today, I have little concern for a threat from without. This one person out of 22 in the world has about exactly half of all the military in all the world. We spend about as much money on the military as all the rest of the world put together, and I do not regret this because I tell you, if we do not get that right, if we do not have a military adequate to protect ourselves, nothing else that we do will matter much, will it? I think that Benjamin Franklin was more concerned about a threat to this republic from within. Just 50-odd years after this, at the beginning of our country, a young Frenchman by the name of Alex de Tocqueville spent several years visiting our country. Already this new country was the envy of the world, and Alex de Tocqueville wrote a thesis on his observation of America. His two-part book, entitled Democracy in America, is still hailed as the most penetrating analysis of the relationship of character to democracy ever written. And this is how he summed up his experience. ``In the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manors, but shapes the intelligence of the people. Christianity there reins without obstacle by universal consequence. The consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle in a moral world is fixed and in force.'' And then this great quote from Alex de Tocqueville. ``I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her great harbors, her fertile fields, and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her universal public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her Democratic Congress and in 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. America,'' he said, ``is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.'' Have you ever asked yourself the question, Madam Speaker, of why we are so fortunate? This one person out of 22 in the world has a fourth of all the good things in the world. How did we get here? We are no longer the hardest working people in the world. That was a characteristic that helped make us great. We no longer have the most respect for technical education in the world. The Chinese this year will graduate more English speaking engineers than we graduate, and a big percent of our graduating engineers will be Chinese students. We no longer have the best work ethic in the world. We no longer have the most respect for the nuclear family. Why are we so fortunate? I think, Mr. Speaker, for two reasons, and I want to spend just a couple of moments talking about these, because I think that if we aren't careful, we could be at risk of losing what our forefathers bequeathed us and Benjamin Franklin's concern ``if you can keep it'' may be realized. I think one of the reasons that we are such a fortunate people is because our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table when they deliberated and wrote the Constitution. I think that they believed that God guided them in what they did. You wouldn't believe from our history books today, which have been bled dry of any reference to our Christian heritage, that our early Congress purchased 20,000 copies of the bible to distribute to its new citizens. You wouldn't believe that for 100 years this Congress voted money for missionaries to the American Indians. President Adams made an interesting observation, which I will just paraphrase. He said that our Constitution was written for a religious people; that it would serve the purposes of no other. He was the President of the American Bible Society, as was his son, John Quincy Adams, who noted in his later years that of those two presidencies, the Presidency of the United States and the Presidency of the American Bible Society, that he valued more the Presidency of the American Bible Society. I don't know if you noted, Mr. Speaker, but in the Declaration of Independence, God is mentioned four or five times, depending upon how you relate these statements. That is of considerable interest to me, because we are now considering whether or not the Supreme Court would look at if it is okay to say ``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Let me read these references in our Declaration of Independence to God. It says, ``the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them.'' And then in the next paragraph, it says, ``we hold these truths,'' and all of us, Mr. Speaker, know these words. We repeat them so often. ``We hold these truths to be self- evident; that all men are created equal.'' Now, if you are created, there is a God somewhere, isn't there? That ``all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.'' Mr. Speaker, never state or assume that the rights that you have come from your government. These rights come from God, and it is the responsibility of your government to make sure that they are not taken away from you. And then I look further through the Declaration of Independence, and there is this one phrase here that when you read this, you just have to smile. You wonder what was in the minds of our Founding Fathers. I have no idea what King George had done that required them to write this complaint, but, you know, it is prophetic. I think there is no better way to describe our regulatory agencies. And they used such poetic language then. What they said was, ``he has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.'' I smiled when I read that, and I thought what better definition could we have of our regulatory agencies. And then near the end of the Declaration of Independence, in the last paragraph, ``we therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world.'' That has to be God, doesn't it? And then in the last sentence of this last paragraph, it says, ``and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.'' Another reference to God. So five times in the Declaration of Independence our Founding Fathers referenced God. He was important in their life. They wanted him to be important in their country. And I don't know if you knew it, Mr. Speaker, or not, because we seldom sing that far, but I have here the Star-Spangled Banner, written by Francis Scott Key. I pass his grave several times a week. It is in Frederick, Maryland. Let me read the third stanza of this. We seldom sing that, and I doubt that one American in fifty could recite it for you. ``And where is that band who so vauntingly swore that the havoc of war and the battle's confusion, a home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave: And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph doth wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.'' And then this last verse: ``O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand between their loved home and the war's desolation; blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: In God is our trust! And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.'' I wonder, Mr. Speaker, if our courts might somehow declare the Star- Spangled Banner and the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because they mention God? Now I have a wonderful quote here from Benjamin Franklin. The time was June 28, 1787. Benjamin Franklin was 81 years old, Governor of Pennsylvania, and probably the most honored member of the Constitutional Convention. The convention was deadlocked over several key issues of State and Federal rights when Franklin rose and reminded them of the Continental Congress in 1776 that shaped the Declaration of Independence. By the way, one of the issues that divided them and almost prevented us from having a Constitution was the concern that they somehow draft a Constitution that would assure that the large States could not trample on the rights of the smaller States. And this is what he said: ``In the days of our contest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle,'' and it was the struggle for independence, ``must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity to establish our Nation. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance?'' And then this part of the quote which I really love: ``I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. ``If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, 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 build it.'' And then a request that set a precedent that we honor to this day. This very day in this Congress we follow the tradition that Benjamin Franklin started with this request: ``I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to any business.'' Mr. Speaker, I often reflect on the fact that the only place in our great country that you cannot pray is in our schools. And I wonder what our Founding Fathers would say about that. So I think that one of the reasons that we are such a blessed country, a blessed people, is because our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table, that He guided their efforts, and I think we put at risk this privileged position that we have in the world if we deny that heritage. And I am concerned as the Ten Commandments come down from the courthouse walls and the nativity scenes disappear from the public square and the Supreme Court is going to take a look at whether it is okay to say ``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. A second reason that I think that we are a great, free country is because of the enormous respect that our Constitution shows for the civil liberties of our people. The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before our Founding Fathers were concerned that it might not be clear that their intent was to have a very limited central government; that essentially most of the rights, most of the power should stay with the people. And so they wrote the first 10 amendments, which we know as the Bill of Rights. They started as 12 in that process of two-thirds vote of the House and two-thirds vote of the Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the State legislatures; and 10 of those 12 made it through, and we know them as the Bill of Rights. And, Mr. Speaker, as you go down through those Bill of Rights, you will see that time after time it talks about the rights of the people. And, by the way, that first amendment, so simple the establishment clause of the first amendment that it really is quite a marvel how it is misinterpreted. You see, our Founding Fathers came here to escape two tyrannies. One was the tyranny of the Church and the other was the tyranny of the Crown. In England there was a state church. It was the Episcopal Church. And in most of the countries on the continent of Europe, there was a state church. It was the Roman Church. And those churches were empowered by the state, and they could, and did, oppress other religions. I have such great respect for our Founding Fathers because when they came here, they did a perfectly human thing. In Old Virginia Roman Catholics could not vote. But when it came time to write these first amendments to the Constitution, they finally had figured it out that that was not what they came here for. They came here to establish a country that provided freedom to worship as you chose. So they wrote a very simple establishment clause, and it meant just what it says: ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.'' Please do not establish a religion. And, furthermore, do not prohibit the free exercise thereof, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That is all it means. Mr. Speaker, our Founding Fathers would be astounded if they could be resurrected and see that we had interpreted this very clear language as requiring freedom from religion. You see, they meant it to assure freedom of religion, and there is a big difference. I mentioned that they came here to escape two tyrannies. The second was the tyranny of the Crown. And I know my liberal friends do not like to reflect on it and they really abbreviate the second amendment, which, they say, reads the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That is in the second amendment, but that is not the second amendment. The second amendment, you see, deals with their concerns that never ever would a small oligarchy in the seat of government be able to take over and oppress the people. So this is what they said: ``A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.'' I asked them, Mr. Speaker, what do you think that means? You know, they do not want to think what that means, so they change the subject. But in most of these first 10 amendments there is explicitly stated or implicitly stated the rights of the people: the right of the people peaceably to assemble; the right of the people to keep and bear arms. And over and over it is talking about the right of the people. Notice, Mr. Speaker, that this does not say ``citizen.'' I am not always pleased with the decisions of our courts, but I really believe that this Republic we live in is so essential to who we are and our favored status in the world that words do matter. And when the Court says that illegal aliens are people, they are protected by the Constitution, Mr. Speaker, maybe we need to amend the Constitution to say when you read ``people'' in the Constitution, please read that as ``citizen.'' But that is not what it said. And I am very concerned that we do not rationalize away the clear wording of the Constitution. I think the enormous respect that we have for the rights of the individual, for the civil liberties of individuals, has established a milieu, a climate, in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish. I think that is one of the reasons that we are such a privileged people. And I think, Mr. Speaker, that if we permit any erosion of these rights given to us by God and guaranteed to us by our Constitution, that we put at risk the favored status that we have in the world. I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, that it may already be happening. I think that Benjamin Franklin may have had a concern when he said if you can keep it, that we might just ignore the Constitution. And I think with all of the best intentions that we are walking that path. We are doing that today. I want to talk about three things that we spend a lot of time on here and we spend a lot of money on in our country. I am not saying, Mr. Speaker, that we shouldn't be doing these things. What I am saying is that if we want to do them, we need to amend the Constitution, because I don't think there is any basis in the Constitution for our involvement in these three things. First, let me note how we rationalize that it is okay to do these three things. First let me mention what they are, because that will relate to the rationalization. The first of these is philanthropy. I have a very interesting quote from Davy Crockett on philanthropy. A second of them is health care. A third one is education. How do we rationalize that it is okay for us to be involved in this? Well, they go to the preamble to the Constitution. They read ``We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare.'' There it is. They say ``welfare,'' so we now can be involved in philanthropy because it is there in the preamble to the Constitution. I would note, Mr. Speaker, if they read on and came to Article I, Section 8, which defines the responsibilities of the Congress, that they would note that it says there ``provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.'' They are talking about the corporate welfare, not welfare as we use it today instead of philanthropy. The second justification they use is the commerce clause, ``to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states and with the Indian Tribes.'' So they rationalize that if it crosses a State line, we can have control. Now, I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if that was the intent of the Founding Fathers, they never, ever, would have written the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. The Tenth Amendment, by the way, is the most violated amendment in the Constitution. The Ninth Amendment, this was written in old English and kind of legalese. ``The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.'' What does that say in everyday English? What it says is that just because the Constitution doesn't identify a right as belonging to the people, unless it specifically is given to government, it belongs to the people. Then the Tenth Amendment, this is a really interesting amendment. ``The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'' In common, everyday English, what this says is if you can't find it in Article 8, the Federal Government can't do it, because Section 8 of this Article enumerates the powers of the Congress. I will read those in just a moment. I had a very interesting experience here in this very spot probably 12, 13 years ago when I first came to the Congress. I was given 3\1/2\ minutes of debate time. That is a long time, as those many viewers who watch C-SPAN recognize. We were voting on something that I thought was unconstitutional. So I took my Constitution and I turned to Article I, Section 8. That is just the words between my two thumbs here, by the way, it is less than 2 pages in this small document, and I went through it summarizing each of the articles there. The Congress has power to lay and collect tax. Boy, we know how to do that. To borrow money. We are doing that big time. To regulate commerce, to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. It goes on. Then I finished my debate and I turned to walk up that center aisle, and the recording clerk, who is recording everything we say here tonight and was then, came walking up the aisle after me and tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, ``What was that you were reading from?'' They take down what we read, but they like to have a written copy if they can. I thought that that was very interesting. The recording clerk, who sits here day after day listening to Members of Congress, heard the Constitution so infrequently that when it was read, the recording clerk didn't know it was the Constitution. When asked that question, I said, ``Oh, it is the Constitution.'' And the clerk said, ``Can I see it?'' And so I had it open like this. ``Can I copy it?'' They took it and copied it on the copy machine. I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that this reflects a trend that we somehow need to deal with. What have we come to? Much of what we do here, as I said before, I don't find any basis in the Constitution for. I am not saying we shouldn't do it. All I am saying, Mr. Speaker, is I have a big concern that when we simply ignore or rationalize the Constitution so that we can do something that is not specifically permitted by the Constitution, I wonder tomorrow how we might be rationalizing away these great civil liberties, these great rights given to us by God and protected by our Constitution. Health care. By the way, we don't really have a very good health care system in our country. We have a really good sick care system. If you think about it, you really don't get involved in that system until you are sick. Maybe, Mr. Speaker, if we had a better health care system, we would be spending less money on our sick care system. Also education. In a moment I am going to read this in the Constitution. It is very short. I want you to stop me, Mr. Speaker, when I come to that part in Article I, Section 8, that says it is okay for us to be involved in health care, that it is okay for us to be involved in education, that it is okay for us to be involved in philanthropy. By the way, I have never met anybody who had a good, warm feeling on April 15 because so much of their tax money goes to philanthropy. I think that is a great tragedy. The Bible says it is more blessed to give than to receive, and yet I find no one who has a good, warm feeling on April 15 because so much of the tax money that is taken from them is used in philanthropy. What a shame, that the government has usurped the role of philanthropist and our people are denied that experience. I had a really interesting experience in our church. Our kids don't go out trick-or-treating, so they went out before Halloween and left bags at the homes and said, ``We will come back on Halloween. If you put some food in there, we will make up some food baskets for Thanksgiving.'' So they did that, and with the ladies in the church, they made up food baskets. Then they called the welfare people and said, ``We need some needy families that we can take these food baskets to.'' The welfare people were indignant. ``What do you mean, needy families? Families that need food? What do you think we are here for?'' And I thought, what a tragedy that government unconstitutionally, I believe, has usurped the role of philanthropist. The Government unconstitutionally, I believe, has usurped the role of philanthropists. I have here a very interesting experience from Davy Crockett, who was a Congressman. And if you will do a web search for just Davy Crockett and farmer, it will come up. Because it is a very interesting story. I was one day in the lobby of the House of Representatives when a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. It seemed to be that everybody favored it. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose. Everybody expected, of course, that he was going to make a speech in support of the bill. And this is what he said: ``Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased and as much sympathy for the suffering to the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House. But we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into argument to prove that Congress has no power under the Constitution to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every Member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but as Members of Congress, we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Now, how did Davy Crockett get to that position? This is a very interesting story. You will find it fascinating reading. We do not have time this evening to go into it. But Davy Crockett, before this, was out campaigning. Before that campaign ride on his horse there was a fire that they could see from the steps of the Capitol in Georgetown. And they went there and several wooden buildings in those days were burning. Davy Crockett and other Members of Congress worked very hard to put out the fire. And when the fire was finally out, there were a number of people who were homeless. And among them were women and children. And, of course, their heart went out to these women and children. So the next morning in the Congress here, the primary item of business was doing something about those poor people who were victims of the fire. And so they voted $20,000 for these victims of the fire. And that done, they went onto other business and Davy Crockett forgot about it. Then about a year later, he was out campaigning. And it was mostly rural then. And he was on his horse. There was a farmer with his team who was plowing. So Davy Crockett times his horse so that he gets to the farmer just as he comes to the end of the row. He speaks to the farmer. And the farmer is very cold. And finally he tells him, he says, ``Yeah, I know who you are, you are Davy Crockett. I voted for you last time you ran, but I cannot vote for you again.'' And then he made a very interesting statement. He said, ``I suppose you are out electioneering now. But you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again.'' Davy Crockett said, ``this was a sockdolager'', I don't know what a sockdolager is, but that is what he said. And this is what the man said: ``You gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have no capacity to understand the Constitution or that you are wanting the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me.'' Well, Davy Crockett was finally convinced that he had not understood the Constitution. He asked the man, gee, I really would like to apologize. I would like to explain to the people that I am now a new man, I understand the Constitution. He said, if you will get a few people together and have a barbecue, I will pay for it. He said, well, we won't need you to pay for it. But if you come a week from this coming Saturday, we will have a barbecue. And Davy Crockett came and there were 1,000 people there that he spoke to and apologized for his vote in the Congress. Now, I want to read from the Constitution. And I want you to stop me, it will not take very long to read. I want you to stop me, Madam Speaker, when I come to that part that says that it is okay for us to be involved in education, in philanthropy, and in health care. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imports and excises, to pay the debts, to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; to regulate commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States; to establish Post Offices and post roads; to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; to constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court; to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the laws of Nations. I will not read the rest of this, because I tell you all of the rest of the Constitution deals with just two things, and read it to affirm that this is correct. All of this part deals with the Congress and its responsibility for the military. We declare war. This is not the King's army. We declare war. Raise and support armies and so forth. Then the last couple of paragraphs here deal with the District of Columbia, and then to make all of the laws necessary to enforce the above. Now, where, Madam Speaker, was there any reference to our right to be involved in these three things? I am not saying that we should not be doing these things, I am simply saying that if we are going to do them, I am very concerned that we should not do them by ignoring the Constitution. If they are good and proper things to do, we should have amended the Constitution. We have done it 27 times. I do not mind doing it again. But I really mind ignoring the Constitution. Because let me tell you why, we are engaged now in a war. I have no idea when the war will end. Civil liberties are always a casualty of war. Abraham Lincoln, my favorite President, suspended habeas corpus. And during World War II, we interred the Japanese Americans. My friend, Norm Minetta, with whom I served in this House, Secretary of Transportation, several years younger than I. He says, ``Roscoe, I remember holding my parents hand as they led us into that concentration camp in Idaho.'' That war is over. And we are now a bit embarrassed that we did that. The civil war is over. And we got back habeas corpus. But I am concerned that we not permit this war to result in an erosion of our civil liberties. I do not know when the war will end. I have a great quote here. It is probably not from Julius Caesar, because it did not appear in print, as far as we know, until what, 01. It probably was not passed down by word of mouth until that time. But this ascribed to Julius Caesar. I think it so reflects this inherent reaction of people to a war situation. ``Beware of the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword, it both emboldens the blood just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch, and the blood boils with hate, and the mind is closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry, rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done, and I am Julius Caesar.'' That is probably not Julius Caesar. But it does, I think, reflect a common tendency on the part of people. Benjamin Franklin, I do not know if he was the first to say it, ``if you will up your freedom to get security, at the end of the day you will neither have freedom nor security, or you will deserve neither freedom nor security.'' We are now at war. When will this war end? I want to make very sure that I bequeath to my kids and my grandkids more than an ever increasing debt, more than an energy deficient world. I want this great free country to be bequeathed to them just as I got it from my fathers. This was a great new experiment. We weren't certain it was going to succeed. I am reading here from the Gettysburg Address, and Abraham Lincoln recognized this as an experiment which might not succeed. I don't know if you have thought about that in this Gettysburg Address. 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. Not so in England and Europe, was the divine right of kings. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this Nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. And then he ended that Gettysburg Address with almost a prayer, that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. This has been a great experiment. We are the most blessed people on the planet. It has been said by a number of people that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. What will our children inherit? Unfortunately, we are going to bequeath to them an enormous debt, the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. We are going to bequeath to them a world with deficient energy to run a society as we run ours. Will we also bequeath to them a Constitution gutted by apathy where the civil liberties of our people are at risk? Mr. Speaker, the world needs the United States and for the United States to be the great free powerful country that it is. I believe that we need to be very vigilant in protecting these great civil liberties given to us by our Creator and guaranteed to us by our Constitution.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, earlier today I attended the President's news conference with snowflake babies and their families at which the President announced his veto of H.R. 810. Snowflake babies were adopted as excess embryos. Excess embryos would be destroyed with taxpayers' dollars under H.R. 810 to produce pluripotent stem cells for science. How can anyone look at these snowflake babies and hear their voices and say that it would be okay to kill them to provide materials for medical research? President Bush transformed what could have been a day of tragedy into a day of triumph by vetoing H.R. 810 and by taking additional steps to support pluripotent stem cell research that does not destroy embryos. To the proponents of H.R. 810, scientists, doctors and the public, pluripotent stem cells hold the most promise for understanding human diseases and treating devastating conditions. That is why pluripotent stem cells are coveted. Yesterday, knowing that the President would veto H.R. 810, this body had the opportunity to approve a bill the President said he would sign to use taxpayer dollars to obtain pluripotent stem cells without destroying embryos. This opportunity is not lost to this Congress. I urge everyone in this Chamber to sustain President Bush's veto and support bringing back for a vote the Bartlett-Santorum bill, S. 2754, which represents common ground into promising ways the Federal Government can support pluripotent stem cell research without sacrificing life for medicine.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, earlier today I participated in a news conference with about a dozen Snowflake babies who were adopted as embryos, along with five colleagues who are medical doctors. Very few media came to see these children and record their smiles, squirms, dancing, and other delightful antics. How can anyone look at them and say that it would have been okay to kill them to produce stem cell lines? I can state unequivocally that it is morally reprehensible and scientifically unnecessary to kill human embryos to provide raw fodder for scientific research. For the vast majority of scientists and medial researchers, pluripotent stem cells hold the most promise for understanding human diseases and treating devastating conditions. That is why they are coveted. To some, the manner in which these pluripotent stem cells would be obtained under the Castle-DeGette bill, by using taxpayers' dollars to kill a human embryo, is secondary to the hope for cures that they represent to sick patients. To me and millions of other Americans, deliberately taking the lives of innocent human embryos is an unacceptable trade-off. A number of scientists have now proven what I have argued for the past 5 years. It is scientifically unnecessary to destroy human embryos to obtain pluripotent stem cells. Indeed, at least one procedure is almost immediately ready for human clinical application. The Bartlett-Santorum bill represents common ground into promising ways the Federal Government can support pluripotent stem cell research without sacrificing life for medicine. The Bartlett-Santorum bill will amend the Public Health Service Act to require NIH to conduct and support basic and applied research to develop techniques for the isolation, derivation, production, or testing of stem cells that have pluripotent or embryonic-like qualities. It was approved by the Senate earlier today by a unanimous recorded vote of 100-0. ``It's surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit.'' Ronald Reagan, 1989. President Bush will sign the Bartlett-Santorum bill into law because it meets his ethical standards for promoting pluripotent stem cell research without the creation of human embryos for research purposes or discarding, destroying, or knowingly harming a human embryo or fetus. I am proud of President Bush's unwavering defense of the sanctity of life. I am grateful for his support and the support of my colleagues for ethical pluripotent stem cell research.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we have appeared here on the floor several times to talk about a subject which is very important to a number of Americans, particularly those with some debilitating diseases that they believe might be cured with technology developed from embryonic stem cells. I have had the privilege of having several Members of the House to work with me in developing the legislation that we are going to talk about tonight. And one of those Members is Congressman Tom Osborne from Nebraska, who is here with us this evening. And I would like to yield to him.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his support, for his leadership on this, and for his kind words. I was fortunate in another life, before I came to the Congress, to have the privilege of working in this general area. I have a doctorate in human physiology, and I had the privilege of teaching medical school for 5 years and doing biomedical research. And when I came to the Congress and learned of the interest in stem cells, with my background I saw some opportunities for applications here that may not have been apparent to others, and I have been pursuing this now for some 5 years with the White House and with the National Institutes of Health. We are here tonight, Mr. Speaker, because it is our understanding that within a few days, probably next week and maybe early next week, the Senate is going to be voting on three bills, two of them relevant to this, the third somewhat tangential to it. One of the bills they will be voting on is the bill that we passed here in the Congress here in the House some time ago. It is known as the Castle bill here generally, Castle-DeGette bill. This is the bill that the President says that if it gets to his desk, as Congressman Osborne indicated, he will veto it because this is a bill that would use surplus embryos from the fertility clinics, and they would be destroyed in the process of securing cells from them to produce these stem cell lines, although there is the anticipation, the hope, that a great deal of medical good might come from embryonic stem cell applications. There is a concern of many in our society, which I share, that it is not morally acceptable to destroy one life in the hopes that you will help another life. So I had hoped that there would be an alternative to this, that we could look forward to enjoying the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell applications without having to kill embryos. And that is what we are here to talk about this evening, because the second bill that the Senate will be voting on next week is a bill that is essentially identical to the one that we have been working on and developing now for these 5 years. The bill that we will vote on in the House, we hope, shortly after it is voted on in the Senate, will be a companion bill to the Senate bill and essentially the bill that we have been working on for these 5 years. I would first like to take a look at a chart here which shows, in very gross form, the developmental sequence and the origin of what we call stem cells so that we can get a little appreciation of what a stem cell is so that we can understand the difference between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells and the potential that these hold. Here we have a very abbreviated development process. It begins with what is called the zygote. The zygote is produced by the union of two sex cells, which technically are called gametes. And the zygote then goes to a number of cell divisions. And, boy, did they skip a lot here because we have just one cell and here we have several hundred cells; so it is divided again and again before you get to this point. And this is the point of the inner cell mass. And in that inner cell mass which will become the embryo, we have the first differentiation of these very primordial cells here into three distinct cell types: one is the ectoderm and another is the mesoderm and the third one is the endoderm. There is a fourth cell type there, limited in number and location, and these are the germ cells. These will be the ova, produced in the female, and the sperm, produced in the male. What we have here depicted is the embryo implanted in the wall of the uterus. This is the uterus and this is the embryo and the so-called dissidua, the tissues that surround and support the embryo. Only this part of it here will become the baby. The rest of this will be the supporting tissues, the amnion and the corion, that support the baby. In each of these germ layers, and we call these germ layers because they are three layers, three types of cells from which all of the tissues and organs of the body will develop, the ectoderm will produce our skin and our nervous system, and the mesoderm will produce the great bulk of our bodies. It will produce all of the muscle cells, our heart, the blood system, the smooth muscle cells of our gut and so forth. All of these will be produced from the so-called mesoderm. The endoderm, much limited in quantity in the body but not in importance, our lungs, much of our lungs, the lining of our intestines, and so forth are produced from the endoderm. Every student in even a pretty elementary biology class will be familiar with one type of stem cell, and these are the stem cells that produce our blood cells because you can see those very readily in the adult. They are located in bone marrow, in the shafts of our ribs and so forth, and they produce our red blood cells, the little thrombocytes that produce the clotting of blood, and the polymorphonuclear leukocytes. These are the leukocytes with a funny shaped nucleus. And they are called stem cells because from a single cell type, this will differentiate into several types of blood cells, most of the blood cells. There are a couple of white blood cells that are produced in lymphatic tissue, but most of the blood cells are produced from these single stem cells. Most of the other tissues here are also produced from stem cells because it is a single cell, the ectodermal cell, the differentiations of these several types of cells. All of these types of cells are adult stem cells, and they have the limitation of already having differentiated. They already are differentiated so that under ordinary circumstances only certain tissues will ever be produced from them. If you can go into the body and take out an ectodermal stem cell, unless you are clever and make that cell believe that it is something that it is not, it will produce only tissues that relate to the ectoderm, cells of our nervous system and cells of our integument, or our skin. Similarly for the mesodermal cells, if you can get a stem cell even before it is a stem cell for blood, back here you can get a stem cell from which all of these mesodermal tissues will develop, but you could never get ectodermal tissue from that nor could you get entodermal tissue from that; so you are somewhat limited as to the types of tissues that you might develop from an adult stem cell. But if you could go back to the embryonic stem cell, and you may have to go back even before this stage of development, when the embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated, which means they haven't started to become a specific type of cell, you then could theoretically produce from those cells any and all of the tissues of the body. So there are a number of different diseases where the medical profession treating them and the loved ones of the families believe that there could be dramatic applications made from embryonic stem cells. Every year I look forward to the juvenile diabetic people coming through my office. These are such heroic little kids that I see. Some of them so brittle that they have an insulin pump and they have to puncture their fingers or their earlobe a dozen times a day or more to keep track of their insulin because they are so fragile, so brittle, they can go from very low glucose to very high glucose with life- threatening changes. Then the people come through the office who have friends and relatives who have Parkinson's disease, who have Alzheimer's disease, and any of the autoimmune diseases where the body's defenses have been confused so that the body is attacking its own tissues. And it is believed that in all of these different kinds of diseases that embryonic stem cell applications might produce dramatic effects. I just returned from a family reunion. And my cousin's husband, who was a pathologist here in the Washington area, Washington Adventist Hospital in Shady Grove, for years, retired and went to Florida and very shortly came down with Parkinson's disease. I recognized him from his smile. Other than that, it would have been hard to recognize him because of the wasting of his body that has occurred with Parkinson's disease. And the mind, of course, is still very alert. It is just the mechanical part of the body that is deteriorating. And Dr. Teske, Johnny Teske, we were talking about stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and he says, ``Time is of the essence.'' And I kind of choked up a little when he said that because here is a person who really understands this. He is a pathologist. He knows what he has got, and he knows what his future is going to be, and what he was telling me is that if I am going to benefit from this, you have got to do it quickly. So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that we are able to move quickly on this in the House. It is our understanding that the Senate will be moving quickly on it. I mentioned that several of our colleagues here have been working with us and helping on it. And one that I am very pleased has been helping us is someone who is really familiar with this subject because he is a physician who has delivered a lot of babies. He gets involved down the line from here after all of these tissues have been developed and we have that little baby at 9 months in the womb. And this is Dr. Gingrey from Georgia. I am very pleased that he has joined us and would like to yield to him.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. Not only do these snowflake babies speak to us, the snowflake babies are the babies that were produced by the parents of the excess embryos, giving these embryos to a mother who could not have a baby. They were implanted in her womb, and we now have more than 100 of those. They were here, by the way, a year or so ago. A number of snowflake babies were here in the Congress and in the White House. But I think there is something else that speaks to us, too, and that is that before you would harvest the cells from one of these embryos by destroying the embryo, you would want to know that it was a healthy embryo, and you would have it under the microscope and you are looking at it. You want to make sure it is a healthy embryo because you want to have stem cell lines that will be really healthy. When you are looking at that embryo under there, it ought to occur to you that that could be the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven, and you are not now looking at 400,000 surplus embryos in the fertility clinics. You are looking at that one embryo under your microscope. That embryo ought to speak to you. It could be the next Albert Einstein. It could be the next Beethoven, and how could you kill the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven? Fortunately, as Dr. Gingrey said, there is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. The President was not unmindful of the potential for embryonic stem cell research, and he really wanted the medical community to benefit from embryonic stem cell research. So, quite immediately after he issued his executive order saying that they could use Federal money only for research on those stem cell lines that had already been established, those stem cell lines now are running out, as we knew they would, and a few weeks, months ago, there were 21, 22 or so left, maybe fewer than that left now. We started out with maybe 60. Very shortly after the President issued his executive order, he set up a council on bioethics, and they issued a report. I have here a copy of that report, and they detailed and discussed at quite some length, it is very interesting reading, and I think even the layman could appreciate most of it. They discussed four different potential ways of getting embryonic stem cells as the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell without destroying or hurting an embryo. The second one of those that they talked about, you will see a little asterisk there, and you go to the bottom of the page, and you will see the notation that Congressman Bartlett suggested this technique before the bioethics committee met. A little later, I will indicate to you how I came to have my first discussion with the President on this and how we now made that 5-year journey from then to now. What I have here in this slide is a depiction of the reproductive tract of the female, and what we will be talking about is what goes on in a dish in the laboratory that I think is a whole lot easier to understand what is going on if we look at this process in this depiction of the mother's reproductive tract. Here in the corner here we see the total reproductive tract which has the vagina and the cervix and the uterus and the two fallopian tubes, and each fallopian tube ending in a funnel-like structure called infundibulum, and there is the ovary and the blow-up here is only one- half of this reproductive tract. So there is a mirror image on the other half of it. This shows what happens in the fertilization and the early development of the embryo. Once a month ordinarily, an ovum ripens and is released from the ovary, and if sperm had been deposited in the reproductive tract, they then travel up the reproductive tract. The egg is fertilized very quickly, very soon after it is released from the ovary. Now, sometimes the egg is not picked up by the infundibulum, and it floats out into the body. Many of these sperm will make it clear through the reproductive tract and go out into the body where they will simply be absorbed later, but they may find the ovum out there and fertilize the ovum. Then the ovum will do what it does in the reproductive tract. It will divide again and again, and we will look at that in a moment. At the appropriate time, it will find someplace to implant, and since it is out here in the body cavity, it will implant on one of the body tissues, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy, and that pregnancy will threaten the life of the mother. The baby cannot develop fully there, and the baby will die and the mother, too, if this is not interrupted. At other times, as the egg, fertilized egg goes down the reproductive track here, it may implant along the tube here. And we call that a tubal pregnancy. And that tube is nowhere near big enough to accommodate a baby growing. So the baby will die, and the mother possibly too if we do not interrupt that pregnancy. But most of the time, and nature is really quite a marvel, most of the time the egg is fertilized here high up in the fallopian tube and then it begins a several day journey. And here we have the days marked. Day 4, day 5 and day 6 and 7 and day 8 and 9. It is a bit more than a week after it is released from the ovum and fertilized, and day zero here begins the fertilization. It makes its way down the reproductive track. No motility of its own, it is moved along by little cilia, little hair-like projections on the wall of the oviduct, which move in wavelike fashion and move the ovum down. As it moves down, it divides. First into two cells, then four cells, and then into 8 cells, and we will come back to that 8-cell stage, because that is an important one. Then it goes on to divide further to a number of cells, and finally to the inner sell mass that we found on that first slide. And then it implants in the uterus. And the mother's uterus produces some tissue and the little embryo produces some tissues, we call these the decidua. And they develop the placenta and the amnion. They are filled with fluids and support the baby and protect it during its development. When eggs are taken from the laboratory, and all of this by the way can happen in the laboratory in a Petri dish, they simply take the egg from the mother, generally produced by hormone treatment that causes multiple ovulations, so that there are a number of eggs. There may be 6, 8, 10 eggs are produced by the mother. They will fertilize those in a dish in the laboratory, a Petri dish, in vitro, that means in glass. This is in vivo, that means in life. The in vitro fertilization, they then will divide and the doctors watch them divide. And if they are going to harvest these for stem cells they generally wait to the inner cell mass stage down here and take them out. And the reason for that is that these cells do not like to be alone. And you have to be clever to get one of them to divide. So they take them when they have lots of company after there is a number of cells in the inner cell mass. They take these cells and destroy the embryo in the process. There is a technique used, first in laboratories in England, and then in this country, and I spent more than a half hour on the phone with two of the physicians in the one here in Virginia, where they go to the 8-cell stage, and this is all in a Petri dish in a laboratory now. And they take a cell, and sometimes they get 2 cells from the 8-cell stage, and they do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that to make sure that the baby is not going to have some genetic deficiencies like Trisomy 21. You generally know it as Mongolism. And that is when just one of the chromosomes, there are three of them there. And if there are three of those chromosomes there, there are various degrees of Trisomy 21, but the baby then will be affected by that. And you would like to have, most parents would like to have a normal baby. So they can do a preimplementation genetic diagnosis, and then they implant the remaining seven and sometimes six cells. And more than 2,000 times now, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby has been produced from that. I will have a slide a little later to show this. But I would just like to note for now that that is no big surprise. In fact, the big surprise to me would be that the baby was not normal, because nature, for as long as we have had people here, and happens in animals too, but nature has been doing exactly this, but they take not just one or two cells away, nature takes half the cells away. And from each half, nature grows a perfectly normal baby, and we call them identical twins. So if nature can take half of the cells away and each half develops into a perfectly normal baby, it ought to be that you can take a cell or two away and the embryo would not even know it. If it does not know that half of the cells are gone, if it goes on and develops into a perfectly normal baby, each half does, why should it be affected at all if you take only one or two cells? So the big surprise to me would have been if there was any effect of this on the baby. And it is that technique which had occurred to me earlier. But to kind of put this in perspective, I would like to look at the next slide. And this next slide, this next chart up depicts some of things that we have been talking about and some additional ones. This is the fertilization process. We saw that in that former slide. But we did not see there the early development of the gametes or the sex cells. And they develop in the seminiferous tubules in the male, and in the ova of the female, those cells divide and divide again. And most of these divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, that the chromosomes split so that the same number of chromosomes remain in the daughter cells. But in one of these processes there is a meiotic division called meiosis where the chromosomes do not divide, so that when the cells split, each daughter cell has only half as many chromosomes. You see, that is necessary because the chromosomes are going to be joined from the female and from the male, and you now need to end up with the right number of chromosomes, not twice as many chromosomes. Because if that happened, the embryo would certainly die. By the way, it is really interesting that in plants, when you have what is called polyploidy, that is what this is called when you have polyploidy, which is more than the diploid, which is the double, and there is a haploid number here, and there is a diploid number when the two haploids come together. In plants it just makes them bigger and prettier, and the flowers brighter colored and so forth. That works well for plants, but for humans and all other animals, by the way it is fatal. So this depicts the fertilization process and they combine to form the embryo, and then the embryo divides again and again. And we see there the same types of depictions that we saw previously. The second little sequence here shows cloning. And Dolly the sheep was the first clone that the public knew about anyway that was produced. In cloning what happens is, that you take an egg cell, and you take the nucleus from the egg cell. You remove the nucleus, so now you have an egg cell with no nucleus there. And then you take a nucleus from a donor cell. This is a general somatic. By soma, that means body, somatic cell. You take the nucleus from that cell, and you put it inside the egg cell. Now all of the genetic material is not in the nucleus. Most of the genetic material that determines who you are, whether you are male or female, tall or short, blond or brunette, going to be tall and thin or short and stout, most of that is in the nucleus. But in the cytoplasm here are a lot of control factors. Ribonucleic Acid, so called RNA and then messages are sent back and forth between the cytoplasm and the nucleus. And so there are a lot of control factors here in the cytoplasm that when this nucleus from a skin cell or whatever is put inside this egg cell, it is controlled by these control factors in the cytoplasm under appropriate circumstances, so that it now behaves as if it were an embryonic cell. And that is because of the control factors here. Of course, what the offspring is going to look like now is what the individual looked like from which the donor cell was taken. I was privileged to go to a little dairy in my district that is probably unique in all of the world. He happened to have the best Holstein cow in America, which probably means the best Holstein cow in the world, because we have some of the best cattle in the world. Her name was Zena. And a cloning company wanted to work with him. And so he cloned two daughters of Zena. And then Zena broke her back and she had to be put down. But he had Zena's daughters. It was very interesting. The daughters did not look exactly like Zena. Why shouldn't they? And that is because of the black and white pigment, the general distribution, whether they are mostly white or mostly black is controlled by the genes. But the actual pattern is kind of an accident of development. And so the two daughters had exactly the same genetic composition as their mother, looked somewhat different. They both had roughly the same amount of black and white, but it was distributed a little differently. And so you could see there the effects of the factors at work during the development of the embryo. The third little sequence down here shows us parthogenesis. Parthogenesis is when an offspring develops just from the ova. That can only happen if this meiotic division does not occur, because the ovum has to, and it says that here, induce the egg to keep all of its chromosomes. This is kind of easy to do with salamanders and frogs and so forth. There is a lot of parthenogenic embryonic studies that are done with these, with these animals. But now of course it is going to have exactly the same genetic makeup as the mother. I do not know if we ever have a documented case of this happening in humans. But you can certainly induce it in some of the lower animals. The next chart now shows us the four processes, the potential sources of stem cells that were described here in the white paper produced by the President's Council on Bioethics, called alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Gingrey used the term pluripotent. I would like to note just for a moment what that means. The embryo itself, when it is first fertilized, is totipotent, it can produce any and all cells, including the decidua. These are the cells that will produce the amnion and corion to support the embryo. By the time it gets to several divisions, even the eight-cell stage, it has now become only pluripotent. A single cell will not be able to produce all of the tissues of the body. If it could produce everything, maybe produce all of the issues of the body, but not the decidua, if it could produce all of those, it would simply, as Dr. Gingrey mentioned, be another embryo and the ethical argument would start all over. But it is my understanding, and I was pleased to learn this, because I did not know before I got involved in this, I do not think that we knew until very recently with research, when the embryo went from totipotent to pluripotent, but you do not want totipotent cells, you want only pluripotent cells; that is why the name of this article. There are several different techniques, four of them, and three of them are shown here. The last one will be on the next slide. Altered nuclear transfer. This is an interesting one. You will see that it looks very much like the cloning. But what they do before they put the donor cell is they turn out, turn off some of the genes in the donor cell. Generally they are the genes that would produce the decidua. So you do not end up with an embryo, you end up with a mass of dividing cells that have all of the cell types the embryo would have, but they are not organized as an embryo. So the argument is made that since it is not an embryo, you can take the cells from it. And then you turn the gene back on, because in your stem cell line, you want to have a normal cell, so you turn the gene back on. There is another variant of this, which is interesting and might have less ethical arguments. Because the ethical argument here might be that you are simply producing a deformed fetus. If a fetus is born deformed, you do not take it and kill it, so why should you kill this? You have intentionally deformed it. Now the proponents of this will argue that it is really not a fetus because it has no chance of ever developing into a baby. But that argument kind of goes away if you use this technique. Because what they do here is to enhance the cells that produce the embryonic stem cell growth so that it cannot produce the whole baby. You haven't disrupted, changed the embryonic makeup; you simply enhanced the activity of some of the cells. So this altered nuclear transfer oocyte-assisted reprogramming is what it is called. And obviously we need a lot of animal experimentation, which is what the bill provides for. This is the technique that I had suggested to the President. I met him at an event shortly after I went to NIH, and I talked to some of the doctors there. They had an open laboratory there and invited the staff out and Members out. I think I was probably the only Member that was there. But they were talking about the potential of embryonic stem cell research. They didn't know what position the President was going to take; and of course you can't get inside their head, but my feeling was that they believed that the President was going to permit the use of surplus embryos and use Federal money for that. He, of course, did not do that. But I asked them during this discussion, if in the development of identical twins you can take half the cells away and each half produces a perfectly normal baby, why shouldn't you be able to take one or two cells away to produce a stem cell line from, and then the rest of the embryo would produce a perfectly normal baby? And they said, yes, that ought to be possible. And this is just depicted here. You have taken a cell away and you developed it into an embryonic stem cell line. That is easier said than done, because these cells don't like to be alone. And now two doctors say they have done it; Verlinksy and Lanza both say that they have successfully developed a stem cell line from a single cell. But both of them did it creatively by giving this cell some company, and after developing a sufficient number of like cells, they then could take the company cells away, and they had a pure embryonic stem cell line. The last one here is a really interesting one, and that is the idea that you could take cells from an embryo which was clinically dead, like a person could be clinically dead but their organs are still good; that is how we do organ transplants. So maybe there is a time when an embryo is clinically dead, but the cells are still alive. It does not have the organizational capacity to produce an embryo, but yet the cells are still alive. There has been a lot of research on this, and, yes, that is a possibility. The argument might be, gee, what kind of confidence could you have? You have got a good stem cell line from an embryo that was dead? But the counterargument would be, and one of our colleagues has a lung transplant here in the House and one of my very good friends here had a double lung transplant and lived with it for a long number of years, and both of those came from people who were clinically dead. The next chart shows a really interesting one. And if this could be made to work, it is better than any of the others because you now would end up with embryonic stem cells that were a genetic match for the person that you were going to treat. And we won't take the time to go through these, but these are all techniques of trying to convince the donor cell, this is the donor, this is the guy with Parkinson's disease or the child with diabetes. You take the donor cell now and you use embryonic stem cell, the cytoplasm of the embryonic stem cell to confuse the donor cell nucleus so that it thinks it is an embryonic stem cell. And if you can do that, it is called de-differentiation, you have now taken the de-differentiated state, if you could do that, this would be the best of all worlds, because not only do you have a stem cell, you have a stem cell that is generically identical to the person you are going to treat so you don't have any rejection. Now, we don't know if this is going to work or not, and what this bill does is to authorize the NIH to expend Federal funds to explore all of these techniques. The next slide shows a phenomenon, and I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey to make a brief comment. We will be closing here in about 7 minutes, but this is what led me to believe that you could take cells from an early embryo without hurting it, because nature does this all the time. It is called identical twinning. Sometimes they divide at the two-cell stage and sometimes as late as the inner-cell mass stage. And my understanding is that you can tell when the division occurred by how they present. If they present at birth in a common amnion, the division probably occurred at the two-cell stage. If they present in the uterus with two different amnions, the division probably occurred at the inner-cell mass stage. And I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey, in his many deliveries, if he has had a chance to verify if this was true.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I thank the gentleman very much. I had forgotten that he had identical twins and is very familiar with this, not just as a physician but as a father. I want to close with a note that a very fortuitous thing has happened, and let me put the next chart up that simply is a page from this White Paper that refers to this technique and that credits me with this proposal early in this process. After I suggested this to the President, a very interesting thing had happened after that with a dialogue between Karl Rove and the White House, and they were, in effect, carrying out simultaneous monologues and thought they were dialoguing. And that very frequently happens, one of our big problems in this world, which is why, I guess, we have a State Department, because sometimes people think they are dialoguing and they really are carrying on simultaneous monologues. But during this 5 years this technology has developed to the point that the British now are doing this preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And I am sure he won't mind if I mention his name. Richard Doerflinger made one of the greatest contributions to this dialogue of anybody when he suggested, ``Roscoe, the first thing that you need to do with that cell that you take from this eight-cell stage is to establish a repair kit for the baby.'' Now, we are kind of trying to do that with freezing cord blood. That is the reason you freeze cord blood, because later you may need it. That, by the way, is not embryonic stem cell; those are the adult stem cells. The baby's is an adult when it is born. As a matter of fact, the day you are born, you start to die. You are an adult when you are born. The embryonic is when you are first starting to develop; it is not an embryo, it is a fetus at that time. And the tissues are really in terms of the genetic development; they are adult tissues. But if now the first thing that a parent does with that cell that is taken is to establish a repair kit and take a second cell, because the six cells that were implanted do just as well as the seven that were implanted, with the second cell, do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, if they wish. But the critical thing is that we would get the stem cell lines now from the surplus cells, from the repair kit. So now I think that all ethical arguments disappear, because the parents are making two decisions that we are not a part of; we don't even get involved. They make a decision to have in vitro fertilization; then they make the decision to establish a repair kit. And only after the repair kit is established do we ask for some surplus cells from the repair kit. I am very pleased that there is this possibility, because I understand, and I have a number of prolife friends who have decided that since these surplus embryos are going to be thrown away anyhow that you may as well try to get some medical benefit from them. That may be, for some, a compelling argument. And if I didn't believe that there was an alternative to that, it might be a more compelling argument. But since there is an alternative to that and we don't have to offend the sensibilities of a large number of people in the country, and I am one of them; I am a little different, I guess, because I am a scientist and understand these things a little from that perspective, too. But I am devoutly prolife. And I am just so pleased, Mr. Speaker, that we will have the opportunity shortly in the House as they are doing in the Senate to vote on a bill that can go to the President's desk, where he can sign the bill and say, I am really happy that we have here a bill that gives all of the promise of embryonic stem cell research without destroying or even hurting embryos.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, today oil is above $70 a barrel. The world has either peaked or will very shortly peak in oil production. We will, of necessity, have to transition to renewables. I am not going to vote for any drilling anywhere until we have a rational plan for transitioning to renewables. We have now run out of time and run out of energy. Additional drilling will buy us a little time to give us a little energy, but I will not vote for that until we have a rational plan. Secondly, Mr. Chairman, we are now leaving our kids the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. In all conscience, can we also deny them the oil and the gas that they are going to need for their civilization? There is a true moral element to this. I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids and two great grandchildren. I want to leave them a little oil, please. Vote ``no.''

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 42) to ensure that the right of an individual to display the flag of the United States on residential property not be abridged.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I have a constituent and a friend, Hugh Warner, who runs American Flag Service. He sells a lot of flags, one of the biggest flag salespersons in the country; and Hugh several years ago pointed out to me a problem that some of his buyers had. These were purchasers who were members of a homeowner's association or a condominium association who, when they flew their flag, were admonished by the association that they could not fly a flag on their condo or on their townhouse or home. So, as a result of those problems that Mr. Warner found several of his people had, as a result of some research that we did, we filed H.R. 42. This is a very simple bill. We believe that it is a reasonable compromise between the rights of an association, homeowner's association, condominium association, to maintain the value of their properties and the rights of the individual to fly his country's flag. We are not alone in being advised of this problem, because I have here in my hand newspaper reports from a number of newspapers that are reporting actions, there must be six or eight here, by States that were addressing this same problem; and they each one have passed bills that says that the homeowner's association may place reasonable limits on flying the flag, but they cannot prohibit the flying of the flag. I will make these a part of the Record. We have here some letters from several organizations who are supporting this bill. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, AMVETS, the Military Officers Association of America, and the Gold Star Wives of America are all in support of this bill. It is a very simple bill. It simply says that a homeowner or condominium owner cannot be prohibited from flying the flag of his country. It also says that the association may place reasonable limits on the time and the manner of displaying the flag. We think that this is a commonsense accommodation of the rights of the associations to maintain the value of their properties and the rights of Americans to fly the flag. Mr. Speaker, it is hard for me to understand how a flag outside my condo could depreciate the value of my condo. I would just think that Americans flying flags should increase the value of whatever it flies on. Veterans of foreign Wars of the United States, Washington, DC, June 26, 2006. Hon. Roscoe Bartlett, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Dear Congressman Bartlett: On behalf of the 2.4 million members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, VFW, and our Auxiliaries, I wish to express our views on the preservation and proper display of our national flag. The VFW views our national banner as a living symbol. Flags and flag education are a hallmark of our Citizenship Education program. We promote frequent display of the flag, especially on national holidays and days of remembrance. The flag should only be flown during daylight hours, unless illuminated. For a complete guide to the proper display of our national colors, please view our Web site: www.vfw.org. In addition to proper national flag display guidelines maintained on our Web site, we believe that any display of the flag should keep with local traditions and norms. The bearer of the flag should consider the impact to the community and the flag. The flag should be the correct size for the method of display, thus keeping it from becoming an obstruction. The damage to the flag needs to be considered such as displaying a flag on a highway, which exposes the flag to stains and fabric rips. Congressman Bartlett, I thank you for your addressing this issue. Your recognition of America's current and future veterans is very much appreciated by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. If any member of my staff or I may be of assistance, do not hesitate to contact me. Sincerely, Dennis Cullinan, Director, National Legislative Service.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, there is a present and growing interest in our country in the potential for the materials created from stem cells to produce quite miraculous cures. Indeed, we have been working with adult stem cells for more than 30 years, and there are a large number of applications in medicine. We have been working with embryonic stem cells for far less than that, but because of their primordial nature, the experts in the research field and the medical field believe that there ought to be more potential from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem cells. But the way we now create embryonic stem cell lines presents ethical problems for a large number of American citizens, indeed, I believe, more than half of them, because all embryonic stem cells lines now are produced by destroying embryos. But because of the potentially vast potential for application of embryonic stem cells to medical cures, there is an increasing interest in the possibility of ethically creating embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic cell-like lines of tissues. And that is what we are going to spend a few moments talking about this evening. I am joined on the floor this evening by Representative Osborne, who has a longstanding interest in this subject. And I would like to recognize him now and to commend him for his knowledge and interest in this subject. Congressman Osborne.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you. I appreciate you mentioning that recent article on the application of stem cell therapy to these paralyzed mice and the quite miraculous response. It is kind of ironic and teleologically difficult to explain, to understand why the nerve tissue outside the central nervous system can heal itself. If you cut your hand or your leg, and you lose feeling in your finger or your foot, by and by that feeling will return as the nerves grow. If you cut a nerve in the central nervous system, it doesn't regrow, which is why there are so many paralyzed people from spinal cord injuries and from diseases like multiple sclerosis and so forth. Stem cell applications provide the hope that we might be able to grow nerve cells and implant them in these patients so that they could recover some activity. And this paper that Congressman Osborne referred to in mice gives us hope that that is a real possibility. Mr. Speaker, I have here in this chart a very abbreviated sequence in the fertilization and the development of the embryo. It begins here with what is called a zygote. A zygote is made up of the two germ cells which have united up here before this one is shown. And then it goes through several developments, through the morula stage and the blastula stage. The blastula is shown here. And finally, the gastrula. And these are sequence. And you will see more of this in the next chart. But when we get to the gastrula stage, we now have the production of what is called three germ layers. This cell that began up here as a single cell produced by the chromosomes that came from the ovum, the female sex cell, and the sperm, the male sex cell, have now divided again and again and again, and finally these cells begin a process which we call differentiation. They are now differentiating into what will ultimately become all the organ systems of the body. In this early differentiation, we have what we call the three stem cell lines. We have the ectoderm, which is the external layer; the mesoderm, meaning middle; and we have the endoderm. These we refer to as the three germ layers. And then, of course, we have also the quite unique germ cells themselves. In the female that will, of course, be the ovum from the ovary. In the male it will be the sperm from the testicle. Now, in each of these three basic germ cell lines, we have a stem cell, which in the ectoderm, it will differentiate into your skin, it will differentiate into your nervous system, the central nervous system, the spinal cord and all the nerves in your body. The mesoderm, the stem cells there will differentiate into the major part of your body. All the muscle, the cardiac muscle, the skeletal muscle, all of the bones, and all of the blood develops from the mesoderm. The blood is particularly interesting because persisting even in the adult are stem cells for producing blood cells because we keep producing blood cells. They keep breaking down and are removed from the circulation by the liver and the kidney; so we keep producing new ones. So even in the adult, you can see these stem cells, which produce a great variety of blood cells. In the bone marrow, it produces the erythrocytes and the thrombocytes and what we call the polymorphonuclear leukocytes, which are part of the white cells. And then we have the entoderm. There is not much mass of entoderm in our body. That doesn't mean it is not important. The pancreas, the thyroid gland, and the lining of our intestinal system and the lungs and so forth all originate from entoderm. It is very interesting that these cells retain their original inheritance kind of even in the adult. When you are 50, 60 years old, if you get a cancer and that cancer metastasizes, if it is a cancer on mesodermal tissue, it will metastasize only to other tissues that develop from mesoderm. That is really quite interesting that they have retained that much of their original characteristics, of their original selectivity. The next chart shows in a little more detail the fertilization process and the development of the embryo. And I am spending a couple of minutes on this, Mr. Speaker, because I think it is important to understand what is being done in the scientific world and what the ethical problems are for those who believe that the embryo is a person in miniature with all of the genetic capabilities to produce a complete human person and therefore it ought not be destroyed. This is a reproductive tract of the female here, and it shows the vagina and the uterus, and then it shows the two fallopian tubes. And the little square here indicates what is shown in this big chart here. It is just one half of the reproductive system. Here the uterus is split in half. There would be another mirror image of this on the other side. And it shows here that the ovary, they mature roughly one a month in a female, once every 28 days. And then the ovum erupts from the ovary, and it is almost always, not always but almost always, picked up by a kind of a funnel end of the fallopian tube, which is called the infundibulum. Once in a while it is not picked up and the ovum will go on out here in the body cavity, and the sperm, which are released, of course, down in the vagina. They go up into the uterus, and then they swim against the current, by the way, because there is some little cilia in here. This ovum has no motility on its own, and it slowly moves down the fallopian tube by cilia in the walls not shown here, which are beating and moving it down, and the sperm swim against that. And some of them will make it out the end of the fallopian tube clear out into body cavity, and if there is an ovum out there, they may fertilize it. And then the fertilized ovum will implant on some adjacent body tissue, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy. Of course, the body is not meant to develop a baby out there; so that needs to be interrupted by surgery or the mother may die. But as the little diagram here shows, here are the sperm coming up and they fertilize the egg way up into the fallopian tube several days before it will implant down in the uterus. There is quite a miracle that happens here. There are millions of those sperm, and as soon as one of them makes it through the wall of the ovum to fertilize it, there is immediate chemical change in the wall of the ovum and no other sperm can get through because it would be absolutely disastrous if another sperm got through. That would produce when we call polyploidy, and that would result in the death of the embryo. Now, polyploidy reacts very differently in the plant world because that is how we make giant flowers and super fruits and vegetables and so forth. We simply produce polyploidy, and that makes everything brighter and better and sweeter smelling. But in animals, humans and all other animals, this polyploidy would produce death. So now the egg is fertilized, and we call it a zygote. So now here is the zygote. It begins its trek down the fallopian tube, and it takes several days. Here we have day 4 and day 5 and day 6 and 7, and you see it is going up around day 7, 8, or 9 before it finally implants in the wall of the uterus. But as it goes down the fallopian tube here, it divides to produce two cells. Then it divides again to produce four cells and then eight cells, and we will come back to talk about this eight-cell stage because it has a special significance in one of the techniques that may be exploited to produce some ethically generated embryonic stem cell lines, and then it goes on to divide. Again, it goes through the morula stage and then it goes to the blastula stage and then the gastrula stage, and we saw that on the previous chart. I would like to note that it is about here at the inner-cell mass stage, about at this stage, that the embryo is generally taken, not, of course, from the reproductive tract because all of this can also be done in a petri dish in the laboratory. You simply superovulate the mother and she may produce a dozen or so eggs, and you wash those eggs out, and then you put them in a petri dish and expose them to the sperm, and they fertilize. And then they begin to develop, and they grow and develop into all of the different stages that we see here. And so in the petri dish when they have developed to the inner-cell mass stage, which, remember, is the stage where we saw that they were going to develop into the three germ lines, this is the stage at which they take the cells. They simply kill the embryo, and they take the cells from the embryo to produce an embryonic stem cell line. Several years ago the President issued an executive order that said that we could not use Federal money if we were getting our stem cell lines from destroying these embryos but we could use Federal money in continuing with research on stem cell lines that were then in existence. The President said, and some may have indicated that that was the case, that there were probably 60 or so stem cell lines in existence then. If there were, they have now dwindled to about 20, more or less, stem cell lines, all of which are contaminated with mouse feeder cells. I might spend just a moment to indicate what these feeder cells are. When we take these cells out of the inner-cell mass, these cells really do not like being alone or even nearly alone. They like company. And so they frequently put them in the company of other cells so that they can reproduce because, if separated, it is more difficult to get them to reproduce. So taking them from the fellowship they find in the embryo and putting them in a petri dish to tissue culture them, many of them will refuse to divide. But if you put them in the company of other cells, in this case the mouse feeder cells, then they divide. Well, this has now contaminated these present stem cell lines so that none of them can be used for therapy. It does not disqualify them for research; so some meaningful research is still going on. There are four different potential approaches to producing embryonic stem cells without harming embryos or embryonic stem cell-like cells that could produce tissue cultures. And we have a bill, H.R. 5526. This is a companion bill to the Santorum-Specter bill in the Senate. Mr. Speaker, as you know, the politics of this is that we have a bill that has been in the Senate for quite a while known as the Castle bill, Mike Castle from Delaware. What this bill does is to permit the use of Federal money to take some of those surplus embryos which are in our reproduction clinics. When a mother goes in to have in vitro fertilization, as I indicated, they will superovulate the mother with hormones. They get a number of eggs, they will fertilize them in a petri dish, and then they get a dozen, more or less, embryos. They then look at these embryos under a microscope, and they choose the best two or three and implant them in the mother's uterus because they do not all take. My daughter-in-law has just gone through a procedure, and at first, we thought that she had twins, and now it is just a single baby, for which we are very thankful. The fertilized eggs which are left which have now become embryos are frequently refrozen. The parents pay to refreeze them to keep them, because something may happen to this baby and maybe they will want a second child or a third child, and they will stay frozen for quite a while; so they put them in the freezer. But by and by, they will decide that they do not want more children; so they will no longer pay for keeping the eggs frozen in which case, the fertilized eggs, they are simply discarded. And what the Castle bill says is that parents donate these embryos that are going to discarded anyhow to medical research and to the development of stem cell lines that, hopefully, will provide miraculous cures of many diseases that Congressman Osborne mentioned, for which we now hold out high hopes. The problem that pro-life people have with this is if you are looking generically at 400,000 surplus embryos, and that is about what is out there, about 400,000, you may make the argument that if they are going to be discarded anyhow, why not get some medical good from them? But there are two problems that pro-life people have ethically with this. One is that before you decide to destroy the embryo, you are going to look at it under the microscope to make sure it is healthy because you are going to want to get cells from a healthy embryo. So it is not 400,000 embryos that you are concerned with now. It is one embryo under the microscope. And when you are looking at that embryo under the microscope, it could be the next Albert Einstein, it could be the next Beethoven. And, again, we are not dealing with the 400,000 out there. We are dealing with the one under the microscope. That is the one for which we have responsibility, and how could you kill the next Einstein or Beethoven? And another concern that the pro-life community has is that if we permit the destruction of these surplus embryos, who knows, but what we may be producing more surplus embryos so we will have more embryos to use for establishing stem cell lines? So there is a real need, Mr. Speaker, to develop techniques to ethically get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic stem cell-like lines that will have the potential of embryonic stem cells. Just a moment to talk about how embryonic stem cells are different from adult stem cells. Adult stem cells have already gone through a lot of differentiation. They are either of ectodermal, mesodermal, or entodermal origin. They are already destined to become nerve tissue or muscle or blood or the lining of the gut or something like that. And it is true that we can sometimes kind of reverse that differentiation, and we will talk about that in a few moments. And it is also true that even without doing that, you can make some applications to the development of tissues for that specific part of the body. But because of their primordial nature, because of their ability, we call it pluripotency. They can produce any tissue in the body. Totipotency means that they cannot only produce every tissue in the body, but they can produce every tissue that the embryo needs so that it can develop into a full baby. See, the embryo is not just an embryo because about half of the tissues of the early embryo end up with what we call trophoblast or the amnion and corion which attaches the baby to the mother's wall, protects the baby in an enclosed, warm fluid environment while it develops during its 9 months. These ethical concerns have resulted in a lot of study by a lot of people to see if there is a way of doing it, where we can get the potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, which any one line can produce any and every tissue in the body theoretically. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not there yet, because these embryonic stem cells, much like an energetic teenager, just want to divide. They want to do things. They want to grow. There are some who feel that their tendency to just grow and divide is going to be very hard to control and you are going to end up producing tumors and cancers and that sort of thing when you put them in the body. But there are a lot of knowledgeable, professional people out there who believe that we can control that, that there is incredible potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, so we are trying to get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic-like stem cell lines that avoid these ethical confrontations. The next chart shows us three of the four that were looked at by a special commission that the President set up on bioethics. Several years ago they looked at the various possibilities out there and they looked at the pros and cons, and they have a little white paper on this subject which is worth the hour or so that it takes to read it because it goes through all of these techniques and it looks at the pros and the cons of these techniques. First, we have here kind of a recapitulation of some things that we have been talking about. This shows the development of the gammies. They go through a process of division, and they divide again and again. Most of those divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, where the chromosomes split and the daughter cells have as many chromosomes as the original cell. But once in that process there is a division which we call a meiotic division, called meiosis, and in that division the chromosomes split and half of them go to one cell and half to another cell, and that produces a gamete or a sex cell which has only half the requisite number of chromosomes, which we call the haploid number of chromosomes. Of course, the design now is that these two cells will come together in a process which we call fertilization, when the sperm will fertilize the egg, and then we have the single cell embryo, and then it divides and here we have the 3-day and the 5- to 7-day embryo, which we saw in more detail in previous charts. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot these days about cloning. Dolly the Sheep was the first cloned mammal, and this little sequence here shows how they do cloning. What they do in cloning is to take an egg cell, and this egg cell has a big cytoplasm, this is what is outside the nucleus, and it has the nucleus. The nucleus contains a lot of genetic material. It contains most of the genetic material that determines whether you are going to be a person or a frog, or whether you are going to be a male or a female. But out in the cytoplasm are other proteins, protein-like substances, that have a lot of genetic capability too. What they do is pretty much control what goes on in the nucleus. So we have these RNA, ribonucleic acid out there, and these factors now control what goes on in the nucleus. So if you take an egg and you take the nucleus out of the egg and then you take a donor cell, this is a somatic, which means body, take a cell from the body, and you now combine, you fuse these two cells, you take the cytoplasm from the egg nucleus from the donor cell, and you now have the nucleus from the donor cell in the environment of a cytoplasm from the egg and the factors in that cytoplasm now which control what happens inside the nucleus, with--everything is not detailed here. We kind of shocked this a little bit so the nucleus from the donor cell forgets it is the nucleus from a donor cell, so it now can be controlled by these control factors out in the cytoplasm. This is now called cloning. So now we have an organism produced that looks nothing like the egg from which you took the nucleus. It now looks like the adult from which you took the somatic cell. So this is what cloning is. By the way, we will have a chart a little later which shows this. Nature has been cloning for a very long time in a way, because every time we have a set of identical twins, one of them is a clone. I guess you could choose which one of the two you wanted to say was the clone. We will have a chart on that in a few minutes. The next chart here shows three of the four techniques that are outlined in this report put out by the President's Bioethics Council. Altered nuclear transfer. I showed the cloning one, because this is very much like cloning. As a matter of fact, the techniques you go through are the same laboratory techniques you go through with cloning. But what you do here is to knock out a gene for normal development, and you do that before you put the nucleus in the sex cell from which you have removed the nucleus. So you now have deactivated a gene which is necessary for the complete development of the embryo. That gene happens to control the development of what we call decidua, which is the amnion and the chorian. This cannot develop into a baby because it can't produce an amnion and a chorian, and so it is just a growth of tissues, all the kinds of tissues that are in a baby but not a baby, because you deactivated the gene necessary for the normal development. What you do later, then, is turn that gene back on. It can never begin a baby. You turn that gene back on so the cells are normal cells, and then you can take cells from that to establish an embryonic stem cell line. One can imagine, Mr. Speaker, the ethical objections which may be raised to this. But this is simply kind of a crippled child that you have produced here. We don't kill crippled children after they are out of the womb. Why should we kill crippled children produced in the laboratory? Mr. Speaker, there is almost no technique against which some ethical objection could not be levied. In life, we are always making choices. When you look at the potential good from embryonic stem cell research, there is a level of risk that one is willing to take. Every time I get in my car and drive down here to the Hill there is a risk involved. Not everybody who drives from Frederick down here makes it down. Every once in awhile there is a fatal accident on the way down here. But the value of what I am doing here I believe exceeds the risk that is involved in coming here, and so I come. It is that way with this nuclear transfer. The second one of these is embryo biopsy, and I will come back to that in a little more detail later, because this is one I have been personally involved with for a number of years now. I spoke to the President about this before he came out with his executive order and have been working with people at NIH. So I will reserve more discussion of this until we come to a couple of charts a little later. But let me just indicate that what one does here is to envision removing cells from an embryo without harming the embryo and then using the cell which you have removed to produce a tissue culture of embryonic stem cells. Then if you implant the cells remaining in a mother, they go on to produce what appears to be a perfectly normal baby. When I first suggested this several years ago, I did not know in the meantime there were going to be laboratories which were doing precisely this. It started in England, and now there are more than 2,000 babies born worldwide where a cell is taken, generally from the eight cell stage. Generally they get two cells, and they have taken that cell to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. This is to make sure the baby is not going to be mongoloid or have a genetic defect. If they find no defect from that single cell they have taken out, they implant the remaining cells in the mother, and more than 2,000 times now we have a perfectly normal baby, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born. Mr. Speaker, I would be surprised if there was any effect. In a former life, I was privileged to get a doctorate in human physiology. I taught in medical school. I had a course in advanced embryology, and I knew that whenever we had identical twins, that half of the cells were taken away from the original embryo and each half became a perfectly normal baby. So I argued and asked the researchers at NIH 4 or 5 years ago, was this a rational argument? I argued that if you could take half the cells away from the embryo and each half produced a perfectly normal baby, certainly you could take one or two cells away from the embryo and the embryo wouldn't even know it. Now we have the potential for something which really is quite exciting, which we will come to a slide a little later and discuss that in more detail. The last one here of these three, this altered nuclear transfer here and the embryo biopsy and cells from dead embryos, I have several slides in a few moments that we will go over cells from a dead embryo. Many of these embryos are just not going to make it, which is why the clinician looks at them under the microscope before he implants them in the mother. They now have done a lot of observation and research to determine how early you can identify an embryo which is in effect dead. But like the person who is dead, you can still take organs from the person that are perfectly good for implanting in another person, and we do that all the time. So it occurred to the researchers in this area that maybe when the embryo was dead, and by that we mean it did not have the ability to further divide, it was not going to become a baby and you could clearly identify that state, that maybe the cells in the embryo, at least some of them, were still quite normal and quite viable. So this whole procedure now presumes that we can identify dead embryos that are not going to make it, but they still have life, good cells in them. So this procedure would be very analogous to taking organs from that young fellow who rides the motorcycle, my wife calls them ``donorcycles,'' and he has an accident and he is brain dead, but his tissues are still quite good, so they take the tissues from this dead person and implant them. We do that all the time. So there was a thought, and research, observations, seem to verify that indeed there is the possibility of doing that. The next chart shows us a fourth technique, which is a very exciting one. If, in fact, we can do this, this holds enormous potential, because now we can avoid all of the rejection phenomena. You see, if you develop a tissue from a embryonic stem cell line or an adult stem cell line and you now put that tissue in a person, it is foreign to them and it will be rejected. So we have a lot of medicines we give which makes them very susceptible to infections and so forth. We have medicines we give them now so they won't reject this tissue. But in this reprogramming, you now could potentially take a cell from the patient and you could reprogram that cell. What they are doing here to reprogram is exploiting these very fascinating and powerful control factors which are out in the cytoplasm. Here we have an embryonic cell and it has a cytoplasm, and you can crush the cell and you can now put the nucleus of the donor cell in, or infuse it with this stuff from the embryonic stem cell, and it will now control the nucleus and de-differentiate it and take it back to its primordial state so it now behaves as if it were a embryonic stem cell. The only possible ethical criticism of this is that where do you get these sex cells to begin with? Well, if you get them by superovulation of the mother, there is some medical risk in superovulation. There is also the possibility, though, that we could dedifferentiate by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical, which would have the same effect on them as these control factors in the cytoplasm here; it is referred to as cell soup, and there are these little polypeptides in there that, like polypeptides that are in a ribonucleic acid which can control what happens in the nucleus. But you may also be able to affect what they do by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical which would kind of reprogram them. And then the last thing here at the bottom simply looks at stem cells from mature organs. And the one that I mentioned, which is one frequently used, is from the bone marrow, because even in the adult, even today I still have stem cells in my bone marrow because my bone marrow is always making white blood cells and red blood cells and thrombocytes. They are the little cells that are responsible for the clotting of your blood. Next, I have a chart, and I think there are several of these that look in more detail at Dr. Landry. And Dr. Landry is the one who first made the suggestion. He has proceeded with some vigor to explore the potential here for getting cells, good cells, from a clinically dead embryo. And, of course, the first thing you had to do was to develop a criteria for embryonic death. You need a dead embryo that still has good cells. And, again, let me use the analogy of the dead person from the auto accident who still has good organs. So this is a dead embryo who still has good cells. And it says here that we need a diagnostic test for embryonic death, because if one researcher is going to use cells from an embryo that he says was dead, there has to be some verifiable basis for declaring that the embryo was dead so other people would understand. So obviously it would be dead if he kills it, but it needs to be dead before he takes the cells from it. Death is a question of medical fact, not law. We can't write a law that says what death is. And, indeed, clinical death now is not defined by law, it is defined by medical fact. And these embryo do die, and they watch them. They are not dividing. They watch them for several days. They do not divide, and ultimately they just deteriorate, and they are gone. So the argument is that if you can identify when, in fact, they will never go on to develop an embryo, that at that point they are dead as far as any ability to produce a baby is concerned, and if you now do not wait for the several extra days to which deterioration would occur, the point of death, like the point of death from an auto accident where you can get good organs, at the point of death of the embryo, and when it will no longer develop into a baby, you now can take cells from which you can just have the stem cell lines. The next chart shows a little more detail of this, and what it shows is that embryo 2 is dead. It shows that you can look at the embryo, and they look different, and it can be documented that, in fact, the embryos that are not going to go on to divide at a certain stage in their development look different. You can identify, you can say of a certainty this embryo will go on to divide, this embryo will not go on to divide. And so you can now make that determination. And when we have developed the techniques for this, and when we have determined that, in fact, we can develop stem cell lines from these, then we will have potentially a technique for getting embryonic stem cells without the destruction of an embryo because the embryo is already dead. The next chart just is more detail of this. We can look at that quickly. New criteria for embryonic death and natural history study of arrested embryos. They are arrested; that is, that the development stops at a certain stage. It won't continue beyond that. They observed 444 nonviable in vitro fertilized embryos; 142 were arrested at the stage of an immature morula, about day 5, and we saw it in one of the previous charts. And they determined that these embryos were not going to divide because they just kept looking at them, and they ultimately deteriorated. So if they, in fact, have good cells, and they have taken cells from these embryos, and then cells, in fact, are viable, and they can be cultured, and so with more research on this, this is a possibility for getting embryonic stem cell lines. The next chart shows what happens in twinning. And it was this knowledge about I guess it was 5 years ago now when before the President gave his Executive Order, there was an open house at NIH, and staff and members were invited out to talk with the researchers at NIH about the potential for embryonic stem cell research. And there were a lot of staff members there; I think I was the only Member there. And I remember thinking as we were talking about embryonic stem cell research that this is what happened. And it doesn't always happen at this stage, by the way, but this shows the development of twins splitting at the inner cell mass stage. The inner cell mass splits; now the embryo splits in half, and now you have two babies. This also could occur at the two-cell stage. It splits in half at the two-cell stage. And you know roughly when it split by how the babies present. In this case, the babies present in two separate amnions. If it is split here at the two- cell stage, they present in a single amnion. But what this told me was that obviously you could take cells from an embryo and not hurt the embryo, because in this case half the cells are taken from the embryo. This half went on to produce a baby, and this half went on to produce a baby. So if you could take half the cells from the embryo, and each half produced a normal baby, then why couldn't you take a cell or two from the embryo without hurting the embryo? And I asked the researchers at NIH shouldn't that be a possibility? And they told me, yes, that should be a possibility. And I was in an event with the President and mentioned this conversation to him, and a couple of days later Karl Rove called and said that he had followed up on this at the President's request, and they couldn't do that. I said, ``Karl, either they didn't understand your question, or they are funning you, because these are the same people that can go inside of a cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in the cell. And they are telling you they can't take a cell or two out of these big embryos? Of course they can.'' And a female sex cell is big. That ovum is a giant cell compared to the somatic cells that they are taking a nucleus out of. So he said, ``I will go ask them again.'' And so he went back and asked them again. He came back and said, ``Roscoe, they tell me they can't do that.'' So the President came down with his Executive Order which says that the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money to do research on are those that are now already in existence. It was a couple of years after that when NIH researchers were sitting in my office that I learned what had happened. Mr. Speaker, this is illustrative of what happens so many times in our society. When we think we are carrying on a dialogue, we are really carrying on simultaneous monologues, and there was just a misunderstanding. What they told him was that they weren't sure that they could develop a stem cell line from a single cell taken from an early embryo. And that was true. He interpreted it as saying that they couldn't take the cell from the early embryo. Well, what we wanted to do with our research was animal experimentation, which would determine whether or not you could develop a stem cell line from a single embryo. And, as luck would have it, Mr. Speaker, the medical community has kind of almost passed us by now, because in the 5 years since I first started exploring this with NIH and then the White House and then a number of meetings with NIH since then, as I mentioned, in England they have developed techniques for taking a cell from an early embryo, the H cell stage, in the laboratory, doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, making sure there was no genetic defect, and then implanting the remaining cells, the embryo, in the mother, and more than 2,000 times worldwide now we have what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born. I keep saying what appears to be because we haven't watched these babies for 60, 80, 90 years, however long they will live, to make sure there is no defect. But I would be enormously surprised, and so would the professional community, enormously surprised, if there are any defects. Because if there were, then every twin ought to have a big defect because they represent only half the cells from the original embryo. In our conversations with a number of people, we were talking with Richard Doerflinger, who represents the Council of Catholic Bishops. And I really want to credit him with making an incredible contribution to this dialogue, because what he said was, ``Roscoe, what you do with that first cell you take is not a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. What you do with that cell is to establish a repair kit.'' So that now any time during the life of this baby, 1 year, 10 years, 50 years, 80 years old, when they have a medical problem that could benefit from the development of tissues from embryonic stem cell line, it can be developed from their embryonic stem cell line because you have got this repair kit available for them. What this did, Mr. Speaker, is to open up the possibility when we are using Federal funds of avoiding, I think, any ethical concern, because the parents will have already made two decisions: one, to do in vitro fertilization; and, secondly, to take a cell to establish a repair kit and maybe to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis if they want to take a second cell. And frequently they get two cells rather than one from this early embryo, and it doesn't matter if you take one or two, the other cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So if this is a potential for the future, the stem cell lines could be achieved by simply asking the parents to donate a few cells from their repair kit. So now the decisions made to get to the repair kit have been decisions that parents make in what they think is the best interest of their child. They want to have one, they can't have one naturally, so they do in vitro fertilization, and they want to make sure that the child has the protection of a repair kit. And, by the way, we kind of do that now when we freeze cord blood. Cord blood has nowhere near the potential of a cell taken from this early embryo, but it is that person, and for whatever you can get from it, at least there are going to be no rejection phenomena. The next chart shows a bit of one of the pages of the white paper on the President's Council on Bioethics, and I have highlighted here. It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. Again, this was written now in about late 2001 or 2002, but since that time we have had two researchers, Verlinsky and Landry, both of whom claim that they have developed a stem cell line from a single cell. That was what NIH thought might be difficult to do, but there are now two researchers who say they have done that. They say it may be some time that stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells, extracted from early embryos, and in ways that do no harm to the embryo. Well, they have more than 2,000 babies born by extracting these cells. But, again, if we simply use surplus cells from a repair kit, we have avoided, I think, any meaningful ethical objection. But the initial success of the Verlinsky group's efforts, I mentioned Verlinsky and now Landry more recently, and note here an asterisk. And they say, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett as far back as 2001.'' And you can see it has been for 5 years since I have been pursuing this possibility. The next chart and our last chart kind of is a summary, Mr. Speaker, of what we have been talking about. And what this does is to look at the classical development when you go to the eight-cell stage, and then it develops into a blastula, and you can now either implant that in the uterus, or you can kill it to get stem cell lines. You can now either implant that in the uterus or you can kill it to get stem cell lines. Ethically, that is not something that I am comfortable with. It is not something I think a majority of our people are comfortable with, or you can go through what we have just gone through, take a single cell from this blastom here and implant the remaining cells, let them develop, implant them and then develop a stem cell line from this single cell, then the altered nuclear transfer that we talked about. This kind of summarizes the potential from those two techniques, and again, what we have done to make this ethical is altered nuclear transfer. We have shut off one of the genes in the cytoplasm so that the nucleus now cannot be induced to make all of the tissue necessary to produce a baby. It produces all of the tissues necessary for baby, but not the tissue necessary for growth of the baby in the womb, the amnion and the chorion. The important thing, Mr. Speaker, is, and I want to be politically correct for just a moment here. It is not just that we want to do things that are politically popular. We certainly do not want to do things that are politically unpopular because we all like to get reelected and return here, but we want to do things which have medical meaning. The Senate, I believe, very shortly is going to vote on the Castle bill. The President has said that he will veto that. Many people, and they come to our offices, these children with diabetes and so forth, people who have relatives who have Parkinson's disease or any one of the wasting diseases of the nervous system that might be treated with this, and they are incensed we are not doing something about this and using their money to develop what they think is enormous potential from these stem cell lines. The President will veto because he is devoutly pro-life for which I respect him. He will veto the Castle bill. We need to have on the President's desk not just for political purposes, although I think that is important, but because of the enormous potential from embryonic stem cell lifelines, we need to have a bill on his desk that will permit the use, the ethical use, of Federal funds to produce these stem cell lines from which we might get enormous good. The miracles of medicine have increased lifelines. I just passed my 80th birthday. I am wondering when I am going to enter mid-life. My grandfather would have never thought of entering mid-life after his 80th year, but we have really miracles of medicine today, and this provides miracles greater than we have seen. Now we have enormous potential here, and I hope, Mr. Speaker, we have the political courage to do the right thing for the American people and get this bill, along with the Castle bill on the President's desk so that the President has a bill which promises the miracles, potential miracles of embryonic stem cell research ethically.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, today I had a very pleasant visit with a very important person. Matt Simmons came by and we spent about an hour and a half talking. Now, who is Matt Simmons and why should we be interested in a discussion with Matt Simmons? Matt Simmons is the President's personal energy adviser. He was the primary architect of his energy policy for his first campaign, continued with him through his second campaign. Matt Simmons is the president and CEO of one of the largest energy investment banks in the world, out of Houston, Texas, and he has written a book which I have here, ``Twilight in the Desert.'' I would like to read just a little bit from the dust cover of the book: Saudi Arabia is the most important oil-producing nation in history. The secretive Saudi Government repeatedly assures the world that its oil fields are healthy beyond reproach, and that they can maintain and even increase output at will to meet the skyrocketing global demand. But what if they can't? ``Twilight in the Desert'' looks behind the curtain to reveal a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline. In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his own three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations. What he uncovers is a story about Saudi Arabia's troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability which differs sharply from the globally accepted Saudi version. It's a story that is provocative and disturbing, based on undeniable facts but until now never told in its entirety. ``Twilight in the Desert'' examines numerous aspects of Saudi Arabia and its looming oil crisis. Mr. Speaker, we had a discussion, as I mentioned, that was about an hour and a half long. Matt Simmons shared with me his concern that the world is reaching a very critical point in its history, a point at which the oil production of the world will reach a peak, after which it will inevitably decline. This is a message that I first started talking about exactly 15 months from today. It was March 14 last year, and I have here the exact charts that we used in our discussion, and I would like to go through a few of those charts. These aren't all of them, but all of these charts are charts from that first discussion. We started with this chart. Recent headlines. This is Washington Post, the third day of February 2005, just a few weeks before our March 14 first discussion of this subject, and the subject was Peak Oil. You see that is pasted on because we were discussing what should we call this discussion. The Great Rollover was one possibility, and the Great Rollover refers to that time in which there will be a rollover from a consumer's market to a producer's market when you have reached the peak and roll over the top. We finally decided to call it Peak Oil, and that is how most everybody who is talking about this phenomenon refers to it now. These are headlines, and they could be headlines from today's paper, or yesterday's, because the Dow went up a little today. This reads, ``The Dow dropped 174 points, driven by economic damage from rising oil prices,'' and they were relatively low 15 months ago compared to what they are today, ``the plunging dollar,'' and the dollar is still plunging, ``and growing worries about consumer spending.'' It could be today's headlines. ``Recent oil price rise of 20 percent is continues to crunch the profits of struggling airlines and is believed to be a factor in disappointing retail sales.'' ``Dollar slides against the euro and the yen,'' and it is still sliding. ``Consumer confidence slips in February.'' These were the headlines of the paper. What are they talking about? They are talking about some statistics that resulted in 30 of our prominent citizens writing a letter to the President, saying Mr. President, the fact that the United States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserve and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. We have just got to do something about that. We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We are one person out of 22 in the world, and that one person uses 25 percent of the world's energy and we import almost two-thirds of what we use. Now we are really good at pumping oil. We have drilled about 530,000 wells in our country. There are on the order of magnitude, and I can't get the exact number, a thousand, more or less, in Saudi Arabia. We have 530,000, and I think there may be 3- or 400 in Iraq. Two percent of oil reserves are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. I think today we are still the world's third largest oil producer. We are far and away the world's largest oil consumer. How did we get here? To find out how we got here we have to go back about six decades. The next chart shows us a prediction that was made by a scientist of the Shell Oil Company by the name of the M. King Hubbert. He worked for the Shell Oil Company. He observed a phenomenon in oil fields when they were pumped and finally exhausted, that appeared to be a characteristic of oil fields generally, and that was you reached a maximum after which the production dropped off and finally tailed off to near nothing. He rationalized if he could know how many oil fields there were total in the United States and guess at how many more we would find, that he could then predict when the United States would peak in oil production. He made that prediction in 1956 and on the 8th day of March, just 50 years ago, this last March 8, he gave what would become a very famous speech in San Antonio, Texas to an oil conference and it was published as a paper. In that he predicted that the United States would reach its maximum oil production in 1970. In those days he was talking only about the lower 48. Shell Oil Company asked him not to give that talk and publish that paper because it would embarrass him and them. He went ahead and did it; and, of course, we did peak in oil production in 1970 and so M. King Hubbert became an institution in his own time. The smooth green curve here is his prediction. The more ragged green curve is the actual date and you see, right on schedule, it peaked in 1970, and then began falling off. The red curve here is the former Soviet Union. They have more oil than we. They peaked a bit after us, and then the Soviet Union fell apart and their production capacity did not meet expectations so they are now having a second small peak. Of the 48 major countries that produce oil, 33 of them have already reached their peak. The next chart shows us where we have gotten the oil in our country. M. King Hubbert was predicting the production of oil in only the lower 48 and that would be this curve here that I am tracing, because he did not look at Alaska and did not include oil from that source. Notice that we did peak in 1970 and then it starts downhill. And the very large discoveries in Prudhoe Bay and Dead Horse, Alaska just caused a little blip in the slide down the other side in Hubbert's peak. It did not reverse that. I have been to Dead Horse and Prudhoe Bay. I have seen the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which, for a number of years now, a full fourth of our oil production has flowed. In spite of enormous production from Prudoe Bay, and in spite of a lot of production from the Gulf of Mexico, that is the yellow there. And you may remember, Mr. Speaker, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. They were so large that it would put any worries about oil far, far behind us. That is all the contribution they have made. And by the way, we really are exploiting those fields because we have 4,000 oil wells out there in the Gulf of Mexico. We had reason to reflect on that last year when the hurricanes went through. Now, these are the charts, Mr. Speaker, that I used. I had some additional ones too, but these are the charts that I used exactly 15 months ago today. It was the 14th of March. Two very significant things have happened since then. Two major reports paid for by the government have been published. One of those is the Hirsch report. It actually is dated February of 2005. That is just a month before I gave my first floor speech here on this subject. Neither I nor anyone else in the public knew that that research had been done and that report was available because it did not become available for several months after that. This is frequently called the Hirsch report. It is called Peaking of World Oil Production, Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. And in just a moment, I will show you a few quotes from that very important study. Then a little later than that, dated last September but not available publicly until just a few months ago, was another major study paid for by the Army, done by the Corps of Engineers, called Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations. M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. And the point I made 15 months ago, Mr. Speaker, was that if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and he was right on target, certainly, we are a microcosm of the world. And if he was right about the United States, shouldn't there have been some concern that he might be right about the world? And if in fact he was right about the world, shouldn't we have anticipated that and done something about it? We did not. Let me show you, now, one of the quotes from the Hirsch report. That is from page 24. We cannot conceive of any affordable government sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules. What they are saying is that if the world has peaked in oil production, and they said that it certainly would peak. It wasn't if, it was when. And they weren't really certain when it would peak because you wouldn't know that it had peaked until you were a bit past the peak and looked back. And that is very true. And they looked at all of the things that the government might do to mitigate the consequences of a shortage of liquid fuels. This is not so much an energy crisis as it is a liquid fuels crisis. And they said they could not conceive of any affordable government sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules. The next chart has some very interesting and disturbing words in it. World oil production is going to peak, they said. It will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. They said that it is not if, it is when. It is going to peak. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. And I have highlighted it here. The world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent. We cannot look back in history and find any time when the world has faced a problem like this. This is a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this. And as a consequence of that, the next chart says that the peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. Just a few years ago it was $10 a barrel. Now it is $70 a barrel and has been as high as $75 a barrel, will increase dramatically and without timely mitigation. The economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. These, Mr. Speaker, are quite strong words, unprecedented risk management problem and economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. The second report that I mentioned by the Corps of Engineers and the next chart has a quote from their study, reaches the same conclusion; that oil production will peak, that peak is either now present or imminent. And they say oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. Just a moment's reflection on how important that source of energy is. 70 percent of all of the oil that we use in our country is used in transportation. There is no realistic alternative to liquid fuels for transportation. Now, we can take oil and make other liquid fuels like ethanol, but for every gallon of ethanol that we burn, we have used at least \3/4\ of a gallon of liquid fuels, gasoline and diesel, oil to produce that energy. Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today, and the energy density in oil is just incredible. One barrel of oil, 42 gallons, the energy in that represents the work output of 12 people working all year. So for just a little over $100, $3 a gallon, 42 gallons, a little over $100, you can buy the workout of 12 people working all year for you. To get some idea that that is probably a realistic number, reflect on how far a gallon of gasoline or a gallon of diesel, by the way, still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you buy it in those little bottles that you drink from, how far that will carry your SUV or your car. You may get 10 miles from a heavy SUV, but try pulling that SUV those 10 miles and see how long it will take you. You can do that with a come-along and trees and guardrail beside the road, but it would take you quite some time to pull it the 10 miles. I drive a Prius. It gets 52 miles per gallon. And how long would it take me to pull my Prius 52 miles? Another indication, Mr. Speaker, of the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels is the energy density in electricity. You can work very hard in your yard all day long this weekend, and I will get more work out of an electric motor, more mechanical work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now, it may be kind of humbling to recognize that we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuels. But that incredible energy density and the really large supply of this energy source resulted in this statement by the Corps of Engineers. 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 a front line energy source for the industrial world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil is absolutely essential to our way of life. The next chart notes some very prominent people. Colin Campbell, more than any other person, he probably inherited the mantle from M. King Hubbert, Jean LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett. Not a relative of mine, but if you go to the web and pull up Albert Bartlett you can get his speech that he has given more than 1,600 times. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I think you will agree with me it is the most interesting 1-hour lecture you will ever hear. All of these people have estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. And then they quote some corporations that have reached a similar conclusion. The next chart is another quote from this very important study by the Corps of Engineers. In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve, just as M. King Hubbert said 50 years ago. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak and then declines at a rapid pace, similar to its initial increase. The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when. There are many estimates. Most of the authorities agree that it is either now or imminent. Very few push it off more than a decade into the future. The next chart is really interesting. Now, this is dated just last September. The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per barrel range. Now it is $70 to $75, a little under $70 today. But it has been in the $70 to $75 range. And it is expected to stay in that range for several years. It is less than a year later and it is now $70 a barrel. They expected it to stay in the range of $45 to $57 a barrel for 7 years. So even the experts have underestimated the relationship between production and consumption. Oil prices may go significantly higher. Indeed, they have gone up to $75 just a few weeks ago. And some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Now, the next chart shows that not everybody agrees with this. And this is a very interesting chart. This is a chart from our Energy Information Agency, and we have had the two top officials of that agency in our office to talk about these subjects. And this is a chart which shows historically what production has been, and it shows what they think the future looks like. Now, they use a very interesting and, one might say, bizarre use of statistics. In statistics there is a 95 percent probability; that is, you are 95 percent certain about what is going to happen in the future, and then there is a 50 percent probability, which is obviously less certainty about what is going to happen into the future. And then finally, a 5 percent probability. And boy, that is really uncertain. There is just a big, big envelope out there. Could be anything in a broad field. Well, what they have done in this chart is really very interesting. They have taken the 95 percent probability, which is the yellow line here, and then they have taken the 50 percent probability, which is the green line. But they took the 50 percent probability only on the plus side of the 95 percent probability. You need to draw another green line that is just as far on the other side of the yellow line. Then they draw the blue line there, which is the 5 percent probability, but they should have drawn another one, which is just as far on this side of the yellow. In other words, the 5 percent probability says you are very uncertain about the future. There could be a whole lot more oil in the future, or there could be a whole lot less oil in the future. But they look at only the whole lot more oil in the future. And then they make a very interesting designation. They say that the 50 percent probability is the mean. The 50 percent probability, Mr. Speaker, has nothing to do with the mean. And I wanted to make certain, and I did have a course in statistics many years ago. I wanted to make certain that I had not forgotten and was misinterpreting this, so we had experts from the Congressional Research Service come over and discuss this with them. And they said that they agreed that this was a very unusual, one might say bizarre, use of statistics. Well, Mr. Speaker, you see what has happened since they made this prediction. Here they predicted these three different scenarios, the 95 percent probability, the 50 percent probability, which they said was the mean, the most probable. 95 percent probability is far more probable than 50 percent probability. But look what reality has been. Look what the red line, look what the actual data points have been. They have been following, as you would suspect they would, the 95 percent probability. The next chart shows a somewhat expanded application of this use of statistics. A couple of Congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had the world's experts come in. And they just about all agreed fairly unanimously that we probably had about a thousand gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world, 940 to 1,030, something in that range. Now, we use gigabarrels because, surprisingly, a billion in our country is different than a billion in England. Apparently, a billion in England is a million million. One billion in our country is a thousand million. But everybody knows what a giga is; so we talk about gigabarrels. They now, using what they call the mean, and 50 percent probability, Mr. Speaker, is not the mean, but they say that if that is the mean, then they expect to find roughly another thousand gigabarrels of oil. Mr. Speaker, even if that is true, this chart shows us a very interesting thing. The black curve here shows the actual production, and we are about at a peak here, and most of the experts believe that it will level off and then fall down, following a curve very much like the upslope here. They believe that there is another thousand gigabarrels of oil out there, roughly, that we are going to find. Eight hundred, roughly, gigabarrels of oil that we are going to find. If that is true, that pushes the peak only to 2016. That is only 10 years from now, Mr. Speaker, even if they are right. And the odds that they are right are very, very small. There is almost nobody else who agrees that this is a proper use of statistics. Even if they are true, it pushes the peak out only 10 years. In the Hirsch Report, they said that if you did not plan for this peaking at least 20 years ahead that you were going to have rather serious economic consequences of that. Obviously, even if they are right, it is only 10 years ahead; so we do not have 20 years to plan. This curve shows another very interesting thing, and that is what would happen if you really were very clever and worked very hard and had some breakthroughs so that you could pump the oil more quickly? And what they show there is that that might push the peak out to 2037, roughly another 20 years. But look at the consequences of that, Mr. Speaker. Notice the drop-off. It drops off almost like you have fallen off a cliff. You obviously cannot pump oil that you have not found. And if you pump it now, you cannot pump it later. Let us read on the next chart what one of the world's experts on energy says about the assumptions that they make here. Now, that was a chart from the Energy Information Agency, but they get their basic data from USGS. And this is what Gene Laherrere says about that: ``The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery,'' to give you that, roughly, extra 800, 1,000 gigabarrels of oil, ``and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technology achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.'' We now are very good. We have computer modeling. We have 3-D seismic, and there is not much quarrel among the world's experts as to how much oil remains and where it will be. The people actually out there looking for oil do not have the wild disagreements that those who are back modeling with computers have who are using what I think is an unusual application of statistics. The next chart shows us something that Albert Einstein would encourage you to reflect on. He was asked, after he discovered nuclear energy, ``Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great energy force in the world after nuclear energy?'' And his response was that the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound interest. And that is exponential growth, and these several curves here look at exponential growth. The lower straight line there is not exponential growth. It is 2 percent growth, and you extrapolate that out. In other words, it is like putting your money in the bank and it gets some interest, and every time you get some interest, you take the interest out. That is this growth. This curve line that starts out at the same place is what happens if you leave your money in the bank and you are getting interest on interest. It gets ever steeper and steeper and steeper because the principal on which you are collecting interest grows and grows and grows. This is a 4 percent curve. This is a 5 percent curve. And, Mr. Speaker, this is a 10 percent curve. It doubles in 7 years. A good rule of thumb, by the way, is if you take the rate of growth and divide it into 70, that will give you the doubling time. So 2 percent growth into 70 gives you 35 years doubling time. This, by the way, is almost exactly the rate at which China and India are growing. And they are going to need oil, Mr. Speaker, for that growth. The next chart is a simple schematic which presents us with several realities that we really need to reflect on. This is the 2 percent growth curve. Now, I can make that growth very steep by compressing the abscissa and expanding the ordinate here. But this is a 2 percent growth curve. That yellow area represents the difference between what you will have if we peak here and what you would like to have because this is demand. That is that 2 percent demand curve from the previous chart. And you see that you actually start to have a deficiency some time before peaking. By the way, that yellow area covers 35 years. We know that because this point is half as high as that point, and that is a 35-year period. It doubles in 35 years. So most of the world's experts believe that we are at or near peaking. Now, this presents us with a couple of real challenges, Mr. Speaker. We now have no surplus energy to invest in alternatives. Every bit of the oil that we are producing is needed by the world's economies. As a matter of fact, they would like to have more. Because there is hardly enough oil to meet the demands, the price has gone from $10 a barrel just a few years ago to $70 a barrel now. So if we are going to have any energy to invest in alternatives, we are either going to have to find a lot more energy somewhere else, and the next chart will show how unlikely that is, or we are going to have to free up some energy by not using all the energy we are using now. In other words, an aggressive conservation program to push this peak down so that we have a little bit of energy here to invest in alternatives. By the way, that maybe is not a little bit. Let me give you just one example of this investment. If you build a nuclear power plant, it may take you 10 years to permit and build it. Maybe we can shrink that, and I hope we can, to 5 years. That would be pretty quick, Mr. Speaker, to shrink that to 5 years. Our present nuclear power plants, you must operate them 20 years before you get back the energy that you have put into them. Lots of fossil fuel energy is used in making these nuclear power plants. What that means is that with today's permitting and with today's nuclear power plant efficiencies, it would be 30 years, if you started today, before you would get any net energy. Now, maybe we can do better and shrink the permitting and construction to 5 years, and maybe we can have more efficient nuclear power plants so that it only takes 15 years for payback. But even that, Mr. Speaker, 5 plus 15 is 20 years. What that means is if you started today to build nuclear power plants, it would be 20 years, best case, before you had net energy, and in the meantime you are going to have to get the energy to produce the nuclear power plants by depressing the present use of energy because we do not have any spare energy. There is no surplus energy if, in fact, we are at peak oil. That is what it means. That is peak. There is not going to be any more. The next chart is a really interesting one and shows essentially the same things here. The bar graphs here show the discovery. And you notice that we made some pretty big discoveries way back in the 1940s, some really big ones in about 1950. And, boy, we really learned how to find oil in the 1960s and the 1970s. But at about 1980 our discovery of oil became less than our use of oil. The heavy black line here represents the consumption of oil, how much oil we have used. So for all of these years up until we get to about 1980, we are always finding more oil than we use. We use this much of it under the curve, but all this above the curve is now surplus oil. It is reserve oil that we have to use in the future. We have been eating into that reserve since about 1980 because, you see here, we have found just this amount of oil, but we have consumed this amount of oil; so this shaded area in between them represents the amount of the reserves back here that we have used. Now, you can within limits make the future look about any way you wish, within some very realistic limits. First of all, you have to decide how much more oil you are probably going to find. The world's experts believe that we have probably found about 95 percent of the oil that we are going to find. As a matter of fact, if I was extrapolating and smoothing this curve, I would come out at a lower curve than they would come out at. But that shaded area there, it is not going to be that smooth, obviously. It has never been smooth. It is up and down. But on average they believe that is the kind of oil that we are going to find in the future. There is one thing that is an absolute certainty. The area under the consumption curve will not be greater than the area under the discovery curve. That is the quantity that you consumed. If you take the area under that curve, that is the total amount that you have consumed. It is like adding up a whole bunch of little bar graphs. That is what we have here is a bunch of bar graphs. And the area under the discovery curve represents the oil that has been discovered. It is obvious, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot pump what you have not discovered. So if you are going to make the future look much difference than this, you are going to have to make some different assumptions about how much oil you are going to find in the future. Now, you can get the oil a little more quickly by using some aggressive techniques, enhance the oil recovery by injecting COG, pumping seawater in it. And, by the way, the Saudis are now pumping about almost two-thirds seawater, and they have always pumped some. They flood the periphery of the fields with seawater to push the oil into the center, and then they pump it out, and now they are getting about two-thirds seawater. But never mind. Oil is different from water and separates from water, usually lighter than water; although the heavy crude may not be lighter than water, as the name implies. But it is easily separated from water. So you now, Mr. Speaker, can kind of predict what you think the future will be by looking at this curve, remembering that you cannot pump what you have not found. I would like to go back for just a moment to the previous chart I showed that shows a challenge that we have, and that is the challenge of the gap. The gap is the difference between what is available and what you would like to use. Now, people have been focusing on filling the gap. I would like to suggest, Mr. Speaker, that for a couple of reasons that ought not be our focus. First of all, I am not sure that we can fill the gap. And, secondly, since there is a finite amount of fossil fuels in the world, if we fill the gap now, there will be less to use later. I am beginning, Mr. Speaker, to be more and more concerned about a moral element to this discussion. We now are passing on to our children and our grandchildren, not with my vote, but we are now passing on to our children and our grandchildren the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. We cannot run our government on current revenues. And we are now going to not only require our children and grandchildren to run their government on current revenues, they are going to have to pay back all of the money that we have borrowed from their generation. Now, Mr. Speaker, should we compound the problems that we are bequeathing to them by pumping now the oil and the gas that they would need to sustain their economy? There is only so much there, Mr. Speaker. If you pump it today, it will not be there tomorrow. I am opposed to drilling in ANWR, not because of environmental concerns necessarily. I think they do a very good job. They build roads in the winter out of crushed ice. When spring comes, you cannot see where the road was. They have a very small footprint. But, Mr. Speaker, I am having a lot of trouble understanding how it is in our national security interest. If we have only 2 percent of the world's oil and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we use, I am having a lot of trouble understanding how it is in our long-term national security interest to pump that little bit of oil we have got as soon as we can. If we could pump ANWR tomorrow, what would we do the day after tomorrow? And the day after tomorrow is when our kids and our grandkids are going to be faced with the necessity of supporting the economy and paying back the enormous amounts of money that we have borrowed from their generation. So I am having a problem, Mr. Speaker, with trying to fill that gap. The next chart shows us what the SAIC study, the Hirsch Report, suggested as a way to fill the gap. But notice that if you start now, and zero is now, that you don't have hardly anything for at least 5 years. And then it slowly grows. They are going to fill it with enhanced oil recovery. If we pump it, our kids can't pump it. They are going to fill it with coal liquids. If we use the coal, our kids won't have the coal. They are going to fill it with heavy oil--oil is like the tar sands in Canada and the oil shales in our country--and gas to liquids. If we use those things, our kids aren't going to have those things. You notice they don't have wind here. They don't have solar there. That is because these now, although they in the future will be enormously important, they provide minuscule contributions now. To ramp those up is going to take more time than they thought was available. And so you could get there quicker in filling the gap with exploiting these finite resources that when they are gone, they are gone. The only one which is sustainable is efficient vehicles. The average car and light truck is in the fleet about 16 years, the average 18- wheeler for 28 years. And so if you start using more fuel-efficient cars, it takes a long time to turn over that fleet. You notice, they didn't see a thing for about 5 years nearly, and then slowly increasing the contribution that it made. The next chart, Mr. Speaker, looks at what the options are that we have. Obviously we are going to get our energy from somewhere. As we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, the world will be looking for energy from other sources. What will they be? Well, we have listed here, at least generically I think, all of the potential sources. We have some finite resources: the tar sands, the oil shales, coal, nuclear, two kinds of fission and fusion. Just a word about the tar sands. Canada calls them oil sands. It is really tar. Its quality is little better than the asphalt parking lot out here which, by the way, if you put a blowtorch on it will flow. They now are mining that with shovels that have 100 tons in one shovel, dump it in a truck that hauls 400 tons and then they cook it, heat it up, to get the oil out. You are told a lot of things, Mr. Speaker, and what we really need is an honest broker so that we can have facts that we agree on. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I am told that they are using more energy from stranded gas; stranded gas is gas where there is nobody nearby to use it and it is hard to ship so it is very cheap when it is stranded. They are using more energy from natural gas than they are getting out of the oil that they produce. Dollarwise, it's a good bet. Eighteen dollars a barrel to produce it. They're getting $70. That is really a moneymaker. But in terms of energy-profit ratio, it obviously wouldn't be something that you would want to do indefinitely. The oil shales in our country are very difficult to exploit. Shell Oil Company has been there. It will be 2013, they tell us, before they will even decide whether it is economically feasible to get that oil. There is an incredible amount of oil there, more reserves there than all of the Middle East. But there is probably also more energy in the tides than all the oil energy in the Middle East, but because it is so diffuse, it is difficult to get out and that is kind of the problem with these tar sands and oil shales. Ultimately we will get them out, but we are not going to get them out in large enough quantities quick enough to fill that gap. Coal. Let's put the next one up, then I will come back to this. I just want to talk about coal for just a moment, because many people will tell you not to worry about the future because we have got 250 years of coal out there. That is true; 250 years at current use rates. But, Mr. Speaker, you remember those exponential curves we showed and what happens with exponential growth. Albert Einstein says it's the most powerful force in the universe. If you increase your use of coal only 2 percent, and I will submit that when oil starts running down, we are going to increase the use of coal far more than 2 percent to make up that difference. By the way, it is pretty easy to liquefy it with a Fischer-Tropsch technique. Hitler used it. We denied him access to oil, which is, by the way, one of the reasons that he went to a second front in Russia that lost him the war, because he was running out of coal. He needed Russian oil, so he went to that second front in Russia. With a 2 percent growth, that 250 years now shrinks to about 85 years. But you can't fill the trunk of your car with coal, so if you are going to make a liquid of it or a gas of it, you are going to have to use some energy to do that. So now that shrinks to 50 years. So we have got 50 years of coal left, with only a 2 percent increase in growth if you are going to convert it to a gas or a liquid. By the way, with either a big economic penalty for cleaning it up or a big environmental penalty if you don't clean it up, because almost all the coal we have left in our country and in the world, for that matter, is pretty dirty coal with high sulfur. The good clean stuff we have pretty much used. Now back to the first chart we were looking at, which goes through the other things that we might use. These are the finite resources. They are there. You need to husband them and use them wisely. We could go to nuclear lightwater reactors, the kind we have now. There is a big argument, by the way, as to whether we ought to go to more nuclear or not. Twenty percent of all of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy but 20 percent of our electricity is produced by nuclear. In France, that is about 85 percent produced by nuclear. You can either have the lightwater reactors, but there is a finite amount of fissionable uranium in the world, so by and by we will go to breeder reactors, of which we have none. And in transporting that stuff and enriching it, you produce some bomb-grade materials and so you have to be very careful with that. You buy some problems with it. But breeder reactors are what the name implies, breeder reactors, and they make more fuel than they may use. Then there is fusion. Mr. Speaker, if we get there, we're home free. The analogy I use is if you think you're going to solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery, then we are probably going to solve our energy problems with fusion. I think the odds are about the same. That doesn't keep me from supporting that. We put about $250 million a year in it. I would vote more if there were more capability out there, because it is the only energy source for the future where we are really home free. So we need to explore it, but I wouldn't bet the ranch that we're going to get there. Then we have the truly renewable resources. They now are pretty much in the noise level. Solar. Today, 1 percent. That is up. It is growing. It grew 60 percent last year. Wind. I think that grew about 35 percent last year. Geothermal. That is real geothermal, tapping down into the molten core of the Earth and getting water that is close enough to there that it is hot. There is not a chimney in Iceland, I think, because they have enough geothermal power. Ocean energy. A lot of energy there. The tides, the waves, ocean thermal gradients. But it is very diffuse. Very hard to harness. We are trying. We need to do more there. Agricultural resources. Soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass. In a couple of moments we will come back to talk a little more about those and what confidence you ought to have that they are going to make a really big contribution to our energy supply. Waste energy is a really good one. That is burning trash instead of burying it out there. There are places doing that. We have a great facility up here in Montgomery County at Dickerson. They will be happy to show you that. It really is very current state of the art. Hydrogen from renewables. Just a quick word about hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. We will always use more energy producing hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Else, we will have to suspend the second law of thermodynamics and if we can do that, we can suspend gravity, and then we have lots of opportunities. Always we will use more energy producing the hydrogen than we get out of it. So why should we even bother? For two reasons. One is when you finally burn it, you get only water. That is really not a pollutant. The second reason is that if we are ever able to perfect economically supportable fuel cells, hydrogen is very convenient to use in a fuel cell. I drove a fuel cell car the other day. We had an energy-efficient car showcase out in Frederick, Maryland. The major manufacturers came out there and brought their cars. I drove a fuel cell car. It cost a million dollars. The fuel cell will last a couple of hundred hours. We are working on fuel cells, but it will be a while before we get there. But if we get there, and I think we will, then they have at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine. That is why we look at hydrogen. It is not a savior. It will help. The next chart looks at ethanol. This is an interesting chart. It shows on the top that you need about 1.23 million Btus of fossil fuel energy to get 1 million Btus in the tank of your car. Obviously it takes energy to drill a hole and pump it out and refine it and transport it and so forth. This slide looks at energy from corn, from ethanol. This is about as good as we will ever get. Many people tell me this is wildly optimistic, but I think we can get there. What this says is that to get 1 million Btus of ethanol energy, you have got to put in .74, three- fourths as many Btus as you get out. What that means, Mr. Speaker, is that every gallon of ethanol that you burn in your car represents three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuel that it took to make the ethanol. So a gallon of ethanol doesn't offset a gallon of gasoline. If you make ethanol from corn, 13 percent of our corn crop will produce enough ethanol to displace 2 percent of our gasoline. But you have used a lot of fossil fuel energy producing, growing the corn. This little chart at the bottom shows the energy input in producing a bushel of corn. The big purple slice here, 40-odd percent, is nitrogen fertilizer which today is made from natural gas. Mr. Speaker, I suspect there is almost nobody off the farm who knows that when they are eating broccoli that they are eating recycled natural gas, because that is where the nitrogen came from to grow the broccoli. These are all the other energy inputs from oil. Planting it, harvesting, building the tractor, making the tires for the tractor. If we were going to grow corn with the energy from corn, using that, 13 percent of the corn crop would replace 2 percent of our gasoline. We would have to double our corn crop and use all of it for ethanol if we were going to replace just 10 percent of our gasoline. Mr. Speaker, this gives you something of the dimensions of the problem that we face. There is a lot of talk about ethanol. Brazil makes a lot of it from sugar cane. It is more efficient than corn. You use the whole stock rather than just the kernel and they don't use much fossil fuel energy. You see people down there planting it by hand, harvesting it by hand, and so forth. So they do not have anywhere near the fossil fuel energy input into their ethanol that we have. By the way, we will never make ethanol from sugar cane in our country because sugar is so high. I don't know how expensive gasoline would have to be before we could afford to make ethanol from sugar, and that is what it is made from. It is made by fermenting sugar. I have a really interesting analogy that helps us understand this chart. We are very much in our country like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents have died and they have a big inheritance and they have now established a lavish life-style, where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income; but their income is going to give out before they retire so they have obviously got to do something. They have got to make more or spend less. That is exactly where we are. Eighty-five percent of our energy, some people say 86, 85 percent of our energy comes from natural gas, petroleum, and coal and only 15 percent from other sources. A bit more than half of that comes from nuclear. That could and maybe should grow. We need to talk about the pros. By the way, I have friends who were devoutly anti-nuclear. These were bright people. But when they considered the alternative, which may be shivering in the dark, nuclear is beginning to look better. Seven percent of the total, and this is year 2000, we are a little better than that today, but only 1 percent of 7 percent, that is .07 percent. That is a trifling amount that came from solar. That has been growing. Last year it was maybe 60, so now it is not up to .07 percent, but maybe it is 1 percent. But it is still a very small amount. Wood, that is the paper industry and timber industry wisely using a waste product that probably is not available to the rest of us and probably can't grow much to maintain our woodlands. Waste energy that ought to go and could go. Wind again, 1 percent, that has grown some. That is 1 percent of 7 percent, by the way. It has to get seven times bigger, to be 1 percent of a whole thing. Congressional hydroelectric, that is not going to grow in our country. Micro-hydro might. China is really exploding in their use of micro-hydro. That is using little streams where you probably don't have the environmental impact that you probably do in the large streams. That could grow in our country. We have not even begun to exploit that here. Down here is agriculture, alcohol, fuel. That was about 20.07 percent. That is more now. That is growing, but still is very small compared to the total amount of energy used. Then geothermal. The next chart shows something really challenging. The next chart shows the challenge we have of being more efficient. Most energy you get out of an incandescent bulb is heat. That is the blue here, the dark blue. The light is this little bit on top. Now to get the same amount of light from a fluorescent, you produce only this much heat. But look what happens when you go to a light emitting diode. This is the light that is the heat. If you think, that is why if you buy an LED flashlight you will forget when you put the batteries in it, because they will last so long compared to the length of time they last, where with the conventional incandescent bulb, what, 90 percent of the energy goes to heat. The next chart shows an interesting one. I wanted to show this, because many people say not to worry, the market will take care of it. There are many market worshippers out there who believe that the market is both omniscient and omnipotent. This is a little example of what has happened in this market. This was the oil price by hike that didn't produce any commensurate increase in production of oil. It is because it just wasn't there. The market will work if there are infinite resources. Mr. Speaker, there are not infinite resources here. The next chart shows that you can live on less and live well. The average Californian only uses about 65 percent of the energy of the rest of us. That is because of the many regulations they have out there with more demand, efficiency. The next chart shows a very interesting one. This shows a satisfaction with life. This shows satisfaction with life relative to a GDP. Here we are. We have the highest GDP. But we don't have the highest satisfaction with life. There are a dozen countries that have a much smaller GDP per capita, who are happier with life than we are. It is obvious that you can be happy using less energy than we use. The next chart is one that just is stunning when you first see it. This is a history of the world. Only of 5,000 years recorded, this is the last 400. We entered industrial age, wood, coal, appropriately black, and then gas and oil. Look what happened with gas and oil. It just explodes. It is standing on its end. By the way, the population followed that. Half a billion to a billion people here, nearly 7 billion people there. Now, it will come down the other side as fast as it has gone up that side. What will we do? The age of oil will be about another 100, 150 years, and then we will be through the age of oil. The next and last chart shows what we have got to do. We have got to buy time. We must depress our use of energy efficiency conservation so we have some energy to invest in alternatives and some time in which to do it. Then we must use it wisely. We need something equivalent of DARPA. ARPA-E is a suggestion, some organization that looks at that time energy we have got and the resources we have got. What is the best bet. Where could we use it to get the most good. There will be a number of benefits in that. America could again become the industrial capital of the world. We could be exporting this technology. Whether we like it or not, we are a role model. We are one person out of 22. We use 25 percent of the world's energy. I genuinely believe that if Americans understood the problem they face today they would rise to the challenge. I lived through World War II. Everybody was involved. I believe we are creative and innovative, and we can solve this problem. I think you could sleep really good when you went to bed tonight, recognizing you used less energy today than you were yesterday, and you were happier today than you were yesterday. We need to face this challenge. We will face it. I think the earlier we face it, the better off we will be.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we must encourage the development of new mine safety technologies and not hinder advances. Remember that when an accident occurs underground all power is shut off and our miners are working in the dark, perhaps unaware of what has taken place, and under stressful conditions. Recent discussions about advancing mine safety technology have focused on a few distinct areas including self-contained self-rescuers, emergency shelters, two-way communications equipment, tracking devices, and lifelines. Specifically, Mr. Speaker, I would like to address the references to self-contained self-rescuers in section 2 and section 6 of S. 2803. It is important to clarify that in no way should the requirements under section 2 discourage improving the design of self-contained self- rescuers. A self-contained self-rescuer, SCSR, is a respiratory device used by miners for the purpose of escape during mine fires and explosions; it provides the wearer a closed-circuit supply of breathable air for a period of time that varies from model to model. While the current MSHA regulations require that miners be provided with SCSRs that protect for a least 1 hour, some SCSRs on the market provide longer protection, approaching 2 hours, and research is under way to develop longer lasting SCSRs. Mr. Speaker, in a 2001 study, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH, reported that out of 214 miners surveyed 38 percent had been notified to evacuate a mine because of fire or explosion during their career. Data provided by the U.S. Mine Rescue Association indicates that the depletion of oxygen and the production of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide cause more fatalities than all other causes combined. Access to and proper operation of SCSRs is a matter of life and death to miners. The Office of Mine Safety and Health is established by section 6 of S. 2803, the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act of 2006. The purpose of this office is to enhance the development of new mine safety technology and to expedite its commercial availability and implementations. Mr. Speaker, section 2 of S. 2803 describes the components of an emergency response plan every coal mine must follow should an accident occur. Section 2(E)(iii)(II), refers to the hour of breathable air required by MSHA's new emergency temporary standard in addition to the hour already required by the mandatory SCSR standard. Beyond that, Mr. Speaker, the provision requires additional ``caches of self-rescuers providing in the aggregate not less than 2 hours per miner to be kept in escapeways from the deepest work area to the surface at a distance of no further than an average miner could walk in 30 minutes.'' Mr. Speaker, my concern is that in placing the SCSRs the average distance that a miner can walk in 30 minutes may unintentionally discourage technical advances. I am also worried that the provision in this act may unintentionally result in less safety should it result in encouraging miners in emergency situations to remove SCSRs before they are depleted and struggle to don new SCSRs in smoke-filled or other toxic atmospheres. It is not our intention to lock, either, the Secretary of Labor, miners, or their employers into a misguided one- size-fits-all solution. It is my intent that the Secretary would accommodate performance-based determinations of self-contained self- rescuer locations, and not discourage development and deployment of advanced self-contained self-rescuer technologies that provide greater amounts of breathable air than currently available devices, which would protect miners for longer and would require fewer changes from a depleted unit to a fresh unit in hazardous atmospheres. Mr. Speaker, I would also encourage the Secretary to allow the use of appropriately constructed self-rescue transfer stations to be built in common locations between two parallel and adjacent escapeways. Providing a safe place to abandon old SCSRs and don new equipment during an evacuation will also improve the survivability of the miner.