Chris Cannon

Mr. CANNON

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, this map shows that. We have some pretty significant reserves off the coast of California, the West Coast, and off the East Coast. But the yellow or orange sticker underneath here points out that 100 percent off the coast on either side of the map are tied up. We cannot tap that. We have a pretty sizable reserve down in the Gulf of Mexico, but 56 percent of that is off limits, we cannot tap that. There are other areas, and I will point out the gentleman is correct, there is a great deal of gas under the Great Lakes where we are not now drilling and have prohibited ourselves from drilling, and so that leaves the bulk of the gas that we are going to use to heat homes. And somebody said 95 percent of our new generating capacity is gas, and it is gas because people say it is clean and we can get away with it environmentally. But where is the gas going to come from? Texas, which is a big producer of oil and gas, is building just gas generators. They are not going to export any gas in the future because they are going to run their own generators in Texas with that gas. Unless we take that 40 percent locked up now and make that available and make the rest reasonably available in the near mountain west, we are not going to have gas to heat our homes and to generate this huge amount of new power that we are going to be generating with gas-run turbines in America.

Mr. CANNON. Reclaiming my time for a moment, Mr. Speaker. Everybody in America knows we are struggling. We are paying a lot higher prices for our gas. That really bugs me personally. If we go over there four or five points, and if the camera will focus on that chart, we see the red piece there. That is the amount of oil that we get from Iraq, and that looks to me like it is less than a third of the amount of oil that we would get daily from this new area in ANWR. Am I reading that correctly?

Mr. CANNON. If I have what the gentleman is saying, and again focusing the camera on that chart, ANWR produces almost as much gas or oil as Saudi Arabia does. The next largest importer of gas or oil to the United States is Canada, and that would be about the same amount we would bring in from ANWR. And then the next largest exporter of oil and gas to America would be Mexico, and that is a little less than the amount of gas that we would bring down from ANWR if we did that drilling. And then the next largest supplier, which is significantly less than what we would get out of ANWR, is Venezuela. Now, of course, part of our problems today, and I should not blame this all on the war in Iraq, because Venezuela has had its problems in recent times, but we can replace virtually any one of those suppliers with just the oil we get out of ANWR. And when we get to the next step, we drop way down on that chart, to the point where Nigeria is only giving us a quarter, or a third of the oil that we would get from ANWR. So ANWR represents a pretty huge step in energy independence in America. Is that what I am seeing here?

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, it sounds sort of like what we in America might call a stewardship.

Mr. CANNON. Since the gentleman was just there, let me ask him a couple more questions. In the first place, my understanding is that where we have had the transAlaska pipeline, and where we have drilled, the caribou herds have increased significantly; is that correct?

Mr. CANNON. Warm mating is always better than cold mating, I suspect.

Mr. CANNON. Let me ask one other question, because the gentleman has been there recently, and he said it was 20 degrees below zero. My understanding is you drill in the wintertime there. You create an ice sheet and then drill down through that sheet, so that when you finish drilling and have the equipment gone, when the springtime comes the ice sheet melts and it is like it was never there in the first place. And, in addition, you only have a little bit of a box that protrudes where the oil goes through.

Mr. CANNON. Well, I thank the gentleman, Mr. Speaker, and I think the gentleman from Utah is now going to shift to some charts that actually gives us a sense of the proportions that are involved. Does the gentleman have the chart that shows Alaska as part of the United States? Because if I could ask the gentleman a few questions. Alaska appears to me to be about a third of the land mass of the United States. And then we have that little yellow area up there that represents ANWR essentially.

Mr. CANNON. Does the gentleman have the chart that shows what portion of ANWR we would have drilling in?

Mr. CANNON. And if we could focus the camera on that, we would appreciate it. So we have all of Alaska, representing about a third of the land mass of the United States. We have ANWR, which represents the little green peace, which expanded out indicates what is ANWR and then what would be the coastal plain. That coastal plain is tiny in comparison to Alaska, and the gentleman is actually touching that dot there, if the camera is focusing there at the top of his finger, a little tiny dot which represents the ANWR footprint, and down below there is a little square that represents about 2,000 acres. That is how much land we are going to disturb; is that about right?

Mr. CANNON. And that was for the coastal plane?

Mr. CANNON. If I am reading this chart correctly, we have Dulles Airport, and I am not sure we understand what is going on in Alaska, but most Members of Congress know Dulles Airport, and that is a total of 13,000 acres. So ANWR is less than a sixth. The area that would be disturbed in ANWR for drilling is less than a sixth of the size of Dulles Airport. It is all right for us to have an airport and mess up 13,000 acres of trees, but we cannot let the people of Alaska or the people in the coastal area have a couple thousand acres that would develop jobs and energy for America that would displace 4 times over our dependence of oil on Iraq. That seems to me to be a no-brainer.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), and then I will speak about oil and gas and we will conclude at that point.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, Members can see on this chart that we have the biggest amount of use of energy being petroleum. Natural gas is second; coal third; nuclear, unless we do something significant there, and I remind Members of the fact that we have dozens of nuclear reactors on battle ships, on aircraft carriers and on submarines that have been operating for 30 or 40 more years without an accident, and they have been run by 18 year olds. We know a lot about nuclear, and we are going to have to come back and consider that. To the gentleman's point on hydropower, we have dammed all of the rivers that we are going to be able to dam. We will not have alternative power from hydropower. What we see is even if we doubled what we are anticipating, it would be irrelevant. We are not going to be able to do much with the huge increases in demand that we have in the future based on renewables. This is a graphic form to show what the gentleman is showing.

Mr. CANNON

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, that appears to me to be the fact of our life today, that we do not have the gas coming out of the ground. Now, the fact is, we have lots of gas. I mean, we could probably drill 50,000 gas wells in Wyoming alone today on where we know those reserves are; and between Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, in known reserves, we could probably drill a total of 100,000 wells that would make gas available to everybody and reduce that cost so we are not at $5.70, but back to $2 or so per therm that has been typical of the last 10 years.

Mr. CANNON. Yes. They are locked up by policy. I might just point out that the Constitution gives this body the control of policy. Anything the administration does is based on delegation from this body to the administration; and that is what we need to look at, and that is what this bill does. It takes great strides in turning that around so that we get that locked-up gas flowing to the homes of people who only should be paying $2 per therm instead of $5.70 per therm.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I could not help but think today about some of the things that the gentleman from Pennsylvania just pointed out. When one of my staffers came in and told me that gas prices today are up to $5.70 per therm, this is an amazing amount and an amazing jump in the springtime when energy demand is down for households, but forced up by this steady demand from large production, energy production facilities.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from New Mexico yielding his time back so that we can take a few minutes to talk about energy policy issues. I would like to immediately turn the time over to our colleague, the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rehberg).

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Montana for his interest, intensity, and clarity on this issue that is so important to the American people right now. I could not help but think as he spoke that, in fact, in America, the cost of energy is as regressive as any tax could be. That is that poor people drive cars and rich people drive cars. Sometimes the cars that are driven by the rich, though the car may cost more, uses the same kind of gas or even less gas than an old beater uses. The fact is, the cost of energy is significant to the people, even in a regressive way, to all segments of our society. We are speaking today as the Western Caucus. I want to thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), a member of the caucus who spoke earlier, and the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce). I hope we can get back to him. We also are joined by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), who is the communications Chair for the Western Caucus and also by the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop), who is the secretary of the Western Caucus. I would like to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson).

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the gentleman from Utah, and I would like to thank all my colleagues from the Western Caucus for the relatively short time we have taken on the floor today. I can assure my colleagues we will be back in future special orders, trying to flesh out for the people of America these issues and how important they are to the future of America, to the future of jobs, half a million jobs based on a decision made by this body whether or not we will open up a small area in Alaska for drilling. I think that is an important issue. The gentleman from Utah did a little magic trick with the chart and made it disappear for a moment. There is no magic, there is no magic for solving this problem of energy in America. We need to deal with the realities of these policy issues. We need to get away from demagoguery and toward the very important issue of the price of gasoline for our cars, the price of gas for heating our homes, the price of energy for running our factories and creating jobs for the American people.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I think we are in fact dependent for heating our homes with gas on the gas we produce here incrementally in America. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop).

Mr. CANNON

Mr. CANNON. I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1104, the Child Abduction Prevention Act. I would like to commend Chairman Sensenbrenner for crafting such thoughtful and meaningful legislation to help protect our children from the sick people who would do them harm. It is essential that we enact legislation to help prevent kidnapping and recover abducted children. Over 70 percent of abducted children who are murdered are killed within the first 3 hours after they are taken, and almost two-thirds of the killers have had prior records of violent crimes. This legislation goes a long way toward providing protections by establishing the means to help prevent abductions and to aid in the quick return of children who have been kidnapped. With this bill, we enhance the operation of the AMBER Alert communications network to facilitate the recovery of abducted children. As it now stands, AMBER Alert is in place in 38 States. I hope that every State will implement this program. We are all aware of the important role that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has played in the search for abducted children for nearly 20 years. This bill helps ensure it will continue to play a crucial role by reauthorizing and doubling its annual grant to $20 million each year. Another important provision of this legislation will help prevent repeat offenses by child abductors. In addition to mandating a minimum 20-year sentence for kidnapping or abducting a person under the age of 18 years, it contains a ``two strikes and you're out'' provision that requires a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment for twice-convicted child offenders. I would like to say once again how blessed we are for the return of Elizabeth Smart in my home State of Utah. Many prayers were answered, including those of my 5-year-old daughter. It is a miracle. We are all thrilled and grateful with this wonderful news. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth's father, Ed Smart, about the importance of this legislation. He is supportive and appreciative of the work Chairman Sensenbrenner and the House have done to protect our children. Ed hopes, as I do, that today's child protection legislation will be sent to the President's desk and signed into law as soon as possible. Mr. Chairman, I support all of the provisions of this bill. I urge my colleagues to join with us in voting for it.

Mr. CANNON

Mr. CANNON. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding me this time. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 788. This bill has two purposes: first, it will revise the boundary of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah by exchanging 152 acres of land owned by Page One LLC for approximately 370 acres of land within the National Recreation Area. This exchange will enable both entities to consolidate the properties and make it possible for the Park Service to better protect the area around Lake Powell and Highway 89. The second purpose of the bill is to increase the acreage ceiling for the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The park's enabling legislation incorrectly identified the total acreage within the park boundary. H.R. 788 will correct that error. The bill is the result of years of discussion and negotiation between Page One and the National Park Service. The Park Service has been involved from day one. The local communities have also voiced their support for this bill. In addition, the Kane County Planning and Zoning Commission, the Southern Utah Planning Advisory Council, and the National Parks Conservation Association all endorse this land exchange. H.R. 788 is a noncontroversial piece of legislation that is beneficial to the park, to the private developer, and to the public at large. I urge its support.

Mr. CANNON

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me the time to talk about this issue. I would urge support of our Members for this rule and the underlying bill. Over the last three Congresses, the House has passed this bill on six different occasions. We hope that today we can do it for the seventh time. From about the 105th Congress to the present Congress, the House Committee on the Judiciary has held hearings at which more than 130 witnesses have appeared representing nearly every constituency that is affected in the bankruptcy and business community. H.R. 975 is virtually identical to the bankruptcy reform legislation that the House passed just 4 months ago, which was essentially the bankruptcy conference report, without the so-called Schumer amendment, so we have eliminated that controversy that we had last year. Last year's bankruptcy conference report was the product of nearly a year of extensive negotiations and compromises that were bipartisan and bicameral. Let me just point out some of the things that this bill does. H.R. 975 consists of a comprehensive package of reform measures pertaining to both consumer and business bankruptcy cases. It improves bankruptcy law and practice by restoring personal responsibility and integrity in the bankruptcy system and by closing loopholes for abuse. It responds to many of the factors contributing to the increase in consumer bankruptcy filings, such as lack of personal financial accountability and ineffective oversight with respect to deterring abuse in the system. It ensures that consumer debtors repay creditors to the maximum that they can afford. It also includes consumer protection reforms that prioritize the payment of spousal and child support, for instance, making sure that the deadbeat parents cannot use bankruptcy to avoid their support responsibilities. It also protects a debtor's retirement pension and educational IRAs for the debtor's children from the claims of creditors. And it requires debtors to receive credit counseling before they can be eligible for bankruptcy relief so that they will be able to make an informed choice about bankruptcy, its alternatives and its consequences. We find that many people today are taking out bankruptcy and then finding out how brutal it is to have done so after the fact. We have also touched on many other issues. We help family farmers and fishermen who are facing financial distress. This is a program we have reauthorized several times independently last year. We authorize the creation of 28 additional bankruptcy judgeships. One of the things we do that is really quite important is we reduce the systemic risk in the financial marketplace in this enactment, which Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan has described as ``extremely important'' for our system today. In addition to the base bill, we have in the rule a Cannon-Delahunt amendment. If I can speak to that for just a moment, this amendment is identical to H.R. 5525, a bill that our former colleague George Gekas from Pennsylvania introduced in the 107th Congress. This really deals with some of the issues that our colleague from Massachusetts has been pounding on here recently, where we have had Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and other corporations that have shown us how bad a company can actually be. This bill would provide heightened protections for employees by increasing the monetary cap on wage and employee benefit claims that are entitled to priority under the Bankruptcy Code from $4,650 to $10,000. In addition, it would lengthen the reach-back period for wage claims from 90 days to 180 days. Secondly, the amendment increases the reach-back period during which fraudulent transfers can be rescinded from 1 year to 2 years and provides that outrageous compensation payments and bonuses and other perks given to a corporation's insiders during the reach-back period which we have now doubled can be rescinded and the payments returned to the bankruptcy estate for distribution to its employees and creditors. Third, it requires the court to reinstate retiree benefits that a corporate debtor modified within 180 days preceding the bankruptcy filing unless the balance of the equities justifies the modification. This amendment reflects sound bankruptcy policy and will effectuate meaningful reforms. I hope that the Members of this body will support this rule and the underlying bill and amendment. I would like to thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for working with us on this amendment, which I think is going to be very effective in reaching the core problem of companies and insiders who do illegal, wrongful things and then walk away scot- free with a lot of money. Not only should those people be criminalized, they should be put in jail and their assets taken back and put back in the estate so that employees and creditors can have the benefit of that transaction. I thank the gentleman for his work on this issue.

Mr. CANNON

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment in the nature of a substitute offered by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), the distinguished member of the Committee on the Judiciary. As I emphasized in my statement earlier today during the general debate on this legislation, the Congress has extensively debated and carefully considered bankruptcy reform legislation over the past 6 years. H.R. 975 represents a consensus, which has sustained overwhelming majorities in both bodies. The substitute has not been subjected to the same kind of careful consideration from the House that characterizes H.R. 975. It injects an uncertainty into the means test which undercuts the major purpose of the bill, which is to promote uniformity and predictability in the bankruptcy process. Rather than strengthening the integrity of the bankruptcy system and restoring personal responsibility, the substitute endangers these goals. In addition, the substitute contains provisions relating to abortion which are extraneous to bankruptcy, which the House has rejected, and which compromise the objectives of true bankruptcy reform. Mr. Chairman, we have come too far to turn back now. I appreciate the gentleman's engagement on this issue. However, the substitute truly does take us back. Rather than seizing a historic opportunity to confront a growing problem and restore confidence in a failing system, the substitute merely rearranges the flaws that have drawn us to this point. Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``no'' vote on the substitute.