Larry Craig

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. I ask unanimous consent to dispense with the reading.

Mr. CRAIG. I object.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I withdraw my objection. Amendment No. 3003 (Purpose: To establish a reserve fund for early learning and parent support programs)

Mr. CRAIG. If that is the pending business, my second-degree amendment is the pending business. I believe it is appropriate then that I now speak for 1 minute in support of the second-degree amendment.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I rise today in honor of National Student Employment Week. I would like to show appreciation for the good work that the past and present interns in my office have done, and say a few words about the mutual benefits of a congressional student internship program. These days, as people turn to government more frequently for answers, it is especially important for young people to learn about government. If is crucial that they know how it affects their lives and the lives of others and what they can do to improve it. There is no better way for a student to discover how government works than by participating in the legislative process. Real-world experience helps a student develop optimistic, practical expectations of government. An internship is often a student's first brush with the professional world. The congressional office gives them an opportunity to develop their professional skills. Each year, after working on Capitol Hill or in a state or district office, thousands of former student interns commit themselves to public service or choose a career path in the private sector. These young people bring the high standards with which they were trained to their first job. Internships also allow students to gain experience specific to jobs in a congressional office. They allow students to try out different tasks, which gives them the chance to discover jobs they are well suited for and would not know about without hands-on office experience. Many of us who hold office today credit a student internship as the inspiration for our commitment to public service. In fact, I believe that right now there are many young people who are planning to devote part of their careers to public service because of their student internships. Although not all former interns pursue a public service career, these young people are usually left with an ongoing interest in politics. The result of a student intership, is at the very least, an informed and thoughtful citizen. I have the great fortune to work with some of the sharpest and most eager minds to come out of our colleges and universities. Among them this spring are Melissa Simpson of Blackfoot and Boise State University, Richard Andrus of Rexburg and Utah State University, Sarah Bonzer of Boise and Boise State University, Laura Atchely of Ashton and the University of Idaho, Melynda Topelian of Herndon High, Herndon, Virginia, and Holly Sonneland of Hailey and The Community School in Sun Valley, in my personal office in Washington, DC. The interns in my Republican Policy Committee office include Elisha Tiplett from Woodbridge, Virginia, and James Madison University, Nathan Johnson of Lewiston, Maine, and Brigham Young University, Carolyn Laird of Edmonton, Alberta Canada and the University of Alberta. The interns in my state offices are: Jose Melendez, a student from Northwest Nazarene University in the Boise office; Angela Nyland of Idaho State University and Mark H. Liedtke of Century High School in the Pocatello office; Kjersta Baum of Ricks College and Kristina Pack of Skyline High School in the Idaho Falls office. Past interns in the Idaho Falls office whom I would like to recognize include Pricilla Giddings of Salmon River, Jr./Sr. High School and Jared Lords of Idaho State University. These interns are a welcome addition to my Idaho and Washington, DC, offices. They have brought their energy and scholastic ability with them and helped make my office more responsive to constituents at home. In return for their effort, these students gain the satisfaction of helping their fellow citizens, the reward of being a well-trained worker, and the opportunity to make lifelong political contacts. Some have incorporated their study into their curriculum and will receive academic credit for their endeavors. For these reasons, I will continue to provide internship opportunities to Idaho students. Student internship programs are an excellent example that student employment is pivotal in the continuation of a well-trained work force. I commend my colleagues who have done their part by opening their offices to interns. I hope that they have seen, as I have, that student internships offer numerous benefits to both the congressional office and the student. I thank the students who have participated in an internship. Their time as interns has made them knowledgeable citizens on the subject of government, and their participation has enriched our nation's legislative process.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I would like to announce for the public that a hearing has been scheduled before the Subcommittee on Forests and Public Land Management of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The hearing will take place on Thursday, April 13, 2000, at 2:30 p.m. in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. The purpose of this hearing is to conduct oversight on the United States Forest Service's proposed revisions to the regulations governing National Forest Planning. This hearing will be in lieu of the previously scheduled hearing for S. 2034, a bill to establish the Canyons of the Ancients National Conservation Area. Those who wish to submit written statements should write to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510. For further information, please call Mark Rey or Bill Eby at (202) 224-6170.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I want to be brief, but I think it is important to respond for the record because we have had a Senator stand up and suggest we ought to instruct the judiciary committees that are in conference now over juvenile justice--and he is doing it based on guns and guns alone. So for a few moments let me talk about what is in the juvenile justice bill that has been covered up by the debate that has produced no results for this country and, most importantly, should not. I know the Senator has not talked about the alcohol prevention for minors that is in the bill or the cultural violence issues or the gangs or the juvenile Brady bill and the gun safety provisions that were already in a bill before Columbine and before Senators came to the floor and began to muck up the process of a very well thought out juvenile crime bill. There are provisions for juvenile offenders to allow the U.S. attorney to prosecute juveniles as adults for violent felonies and serious drug offenses. It treats Federal delinquency records for serious crimes such as murder and rape and armed robbery and assault similar to records of adults and other offenders. Why are we stymied? Why has the Congress not rushed to judgment on gun laws? More gun laws--adding more to the 35,000 gun laws that are already on the books of America's cities, counties, State, and Federal Government. Let me tell you why. In a recent poll by Zogby, recognized by most as a very creditable pollster, here was the question asked of the American citizens: Which of the following is the best way to solve the gun violence in America? Mr. President, 52 percent said prosecuting criminals who use a gun in the commission of a crime--well over a majority of the American people are saying no more laws; Attorney General Janet Reno, go after the criminal who misuses his or her rights under the Constitution. Then 15 percent said having parents and schools teach self-control. Now we are up to 67 percent of the American people who, when asked the question, are saying: Don't pass more laws; enforce the ones you have. Work on the cultural problems that America has. Only 2 percent of the American people say Congress should legislate more gun laws--only 2 percent. So when the Senator from California brought this amendment to the floor some time ago, and it was defeated, that was the reason it was defeated. Now the Senator from Connecticut comes forward with the identical amendment and is going to ask the Senate to repeat the action. A political ``gotcha'' is what they think it is. America is very aware of what we are doing here. It is not what we are not doing here. They know we are not passing more gun laws. They know the reason is because that does not work. Only 2 percent of the American public are willing to suggest that somehow the Congress can miraculously change the culture of our society or the violence in America. The juvenile justice bill itself, absent what was put on it by this Senate, will go a great deal further in curbing juvenile crime than anything else. The Senate will vote its will on this issue, and it should. That is appropriate. But it will not be voting the will of America, an America that is saying to this Justice Department: Get busy and enforce the law; saying to the parents of school-age children of America: Get involved in the lives of your children. Work with them in developing self-control. Work with your schools and your communities. That is not passing a law. That is changing your schedule as a parent. That is taking time out of your busy lives to get involved with your kids. That was the tragedy of Columbine and that is the tragedy of America today. Somehow we have become so busy we cannot give our children time. When violence erupts in America as a result of a juvenile offender and a misdirected child, we run to the Congress of the United States and say: Fix it. We cannot fix these kinds of things, and the American people innately know it. That is why they so clearly said to the Senator from California or to the Senator from Connecticut or to other Senators: Stacking up laws and stacking up law books does not a safer world make. That is why the Senate has rejected it. That is why the House has rejected it. That is why my colleagues on the other side of the aisle gain absolutely no value and political traction on this issue--because the American people have it figured out. I am not surprised. The American people are collectively much brighter than most of us. I ask the Senate to reject this amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRAIG. I ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 474, H.R. 1374.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 475, H.R. 3189.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I thought I would come to the floor today to speak again about energy and the current energy cost crisis in which this Nation finds itself. Many of us have been to the floor numerous times over the last several weeks comparing our current situation and the tremendous runup in gas prices with this administration's lack of an energy policy and how they correlate--or if they relate. I have said, most critically, over the last several weeks, the only policy in town is the ``tin cup'' policy: Give our Secretary of Energy a tin cup, and send him to foreign oil-producing nations to beg for a little crude. He has been begging. He wanted a lot more. He begged for 2 million barrels a day in additional production. He got considerably less than that. I think it is now a wait-and-see: How does this level out? What do the markets say? What is the consumer going to pay at the gas pump in July? My guess is, the consumer is going to be paying near $2 a gallon for regular gasoline, depending on where they are in the country. The reason for this situation is what I would like to talk about this afternoon. Congress can respond in some ways. But we cannot increase oil production in the short term because, largely, we have had a policy of reducing oil production in this country for the last two decades, and it takes time to bring that production back on line. A great many people out there are opposed to increasing domestic production--all in the name of the environment or all in opposition to using hydrocarbons or some other issue that has helped shape the Clinton/Gore energy policy over the last 8 years. When the Clinton-Gore administration came to town in 1993, its announced intention was to drastically alter the way the Nation used energy, especially fossil fuels. The President and the Vice President determined that a broad-based Btu tax would force us away from coal and oil and natural gas to renewable energies, such as solar and wind and biomass. That objective has remained the hallmark of this administration's energy policy--until now; that is, until the day before yesterday, when the President was blaming the Congress, saying we had failed to reauthorize the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--the salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico, where we have stored about 570 million barrels of crude oil. The President promised his Btu tax would raise nearly $72 billion over 5 years, from 1994 to 1998, and marketed it as fair, helpful to the environment, that it would force down our dependence on foreign oil, and that it would have trivial impacts on consumers. Congress did not pass the Btu tax because we thought it would be damaging to the consumer. And over the years we have become increasingly more dependent upon foreign oil. I doubt the President can declare a victory because he was unable to suck $72 billion out of the back pockets of Americans while at the same time he advanced policies that slowed down crude oil production in our country. In fact, the Btu tax would have unfairly punished energy-intensive States and industries. Estimates by the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers predicted the tax would hurt exports, reduce GDP by $38 billion, and destroy 700,000 American jobs. That is why the Congress finally refused to pass the tax, over the President's and the Vice President's objection. Vice President Gore and President Clinton claimed the tax was needed to balance the budget and fund large new spending programs to offset the negative impact of the tax. They also claimed that use of crude oil imports would be reduced by 400,000 barrels a day. At that time, DOE's own projections predicted--this is the President's own Department of Energy--that the tax would shave oil import growth by less than one-tenth in 10 years. DOE also predicted that by the year 2000, Americans would depend on foreign oil for three- fifths of their total crude oil requirements. So quite the opposite was going on inside the administration. The President was talking politics, and his own Department of Energy was analyzing the matter and coming up with some very interesting facts. The American Petroleum Institute, in testimony, said: . . . even if imports were to fall by the full 400,000 barrels a day claimed by the Administration, the cost of $34 billion in lost GDP is excessive relative to other alternatives for improving energy security. Using the Administration's optimistic predictions, the cost of the Btu tax works out to about $230 per barrel. Of course, that would have been devastating to an economy that is highly dependent upon fossil fuels that not only make our cars and trucks go, but feed the whole petrochemical industry which manufactures carpeting, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, and plastics, all of those things that make up our very large, integrated economy-- therefore, the 700,000 estimated jobs lost if we were to raise the price of crude oil to $230 a barrel. In the end, Congress did the right thing; we refused the President's and the Vice President's policy and said it would simply create havoc in our economy. Congress did agree to raise taxes on transportation fuels by 4.3 cents--the first time the Congress has actually put a tax on fuel--and then put it into the general fund of the Treasury. Of course, it was argued to be a deficit reduction tax. A couple of years ago, we finally pulled that tax out of the general fund and put it back in the surface transportation fund, where all highway fuels taxes have gone historically, to fund the construction of roads, highways, and bridges. The Clinton-Gore administration's obsession with fossil fuel use reduction has actually put us in the position we find ourselves today. The President, on March 7, 2000, at the White House said: Americans should not want them [oil prices] to drop to $12 or $10 a barrel again because that. . .takes our mind off our business, which should be alternative fuels, energy conservation, reducing the impact of all this on global warming. He is referring again to the cost of fuel. He simply said it would move us away from a desire for alternative fuels if we were to see low gasoline and fuel prices. Isn't that terrible? The alternative fuels were synthetics, highly subsidized by as much as $25 to $30 a barrel by tax money and, of course, alternative energy and electricity by solar voltaic cells and by wind machines. The only problem is, I have not yet seen a car, or a truck for that matter, going down the road with a solar cell on the top of it. I don't think they run very well that way. Somehow the President and the Vice President, in their hatred of fossil fuels, have forgotten that point. That is kind of an overview of 1993 to the present. What has happened during this administration? Domestic oil production is down 17 percent, and our crude oil consumption is up 14 percent. Dependence on foreign sources of crude oil has risen to 56 percent of our total crude requirements. In 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, our dependency was only 36 percent. I can remember that time. I am sure some listening this afternoon will remember the gas lines, the frustration and even the violence that occurred when Americans found out for the first time there wasn't an abundance of energy. There was a shortage. They couldn't get what they needed for their commuting or the running of their businesses. Since that time, while this country has struggled to put a policy together, other policies of our Government, largely environmental policies--some for the right reason--have progressively reduced our overall ability to produce and use domestic energy sources. That, coupled with the fixation of this administration on eliminating fossil fuels, now brings us to that point where we are now over 56-percent dependent. We all remember in the early 1990s we were fighting a war in the Middle East. Why? Well, to help some of our allies. Those allies were large producers of crude oil, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. We were fighting Iraq because the Iraqis had crossed the border and started the war. In the end, as they retreated and we were victorious, they set fire to many oil wells in Kuwait. We remember that phenomenal picture from the Middle East of black clouds of smoke as those oil wells burned. Many of our oil field workers went in and put the fires out for our neighbors. Now, what is the irony of that? Today, the very enemy we fought is selling over 700,000 barrels of crude oil each day to the United States. Something is wrong about that. Something is wrong about an absence of foreign policy that has allowed that to happen. That is the reality of where we are. Americans grow angry when they understand this administration only has excuses and solar cells and windmills for an energy policy. They understand that the Clinton/Gore foreign policy, working hand in glove with its non-energy policy, now tolerates that we buy Iraqi oil. Of course, we are not sure where that money goes and what it is used for. Is Saddam Hussein being allowed to build another war machine with the millions of dollars a day that pour out of the pockets of our consumers into the treasury of Iraq? The Clinton-Gore administration, while making much of increased appliance efficiency, greater use of renewables from biomass and other ideas, ignores a very fundamental fact. A large part of our energy use cannot be addressed by these measures. I am not suggesting we not pursue new technologies and alternatives. Where a solar cell fits, put one up; where wind farms work, we ought to have them. We ought to be striving to build the efficiencies of the new wind turbines. At the same time, those will not fuel a nation that produces the kind of growth we produce and builds its efficiencies based on flexible transportation and the ability to send our people and our products in an integrated way around the Nation and around the world. The administration's failure to encourage domestic oil production and production of coal and natural gas has led us to this point of near crisis. This Congress will engage in the very near future in debating the issue to see what we can do in the short term to help solve the pressure being placed on our consumers, but we also will be looking at long-term policy to see if we can't begin to produce more of our own resources again. For example, if we have the right tax incentives and if we were able and willing to build a floor for the small 15-barrel-or-less producer, we are not talking about the major oil companies. We are talking farmers and ranchers and private property owners spread all across the mid to lower south central part of our country and southwest that are known as stripper well producers. Their break even is about $17 a barrel. When gas oil crude prices went to $10 a barrel last year, many of those wells were shut in. If we would help encourage that production once again, we could produce well over a million barrels of oil back into our economy that is not producing today. I think that is tremendously good policy, if the tradeoff is putting money in Saddam Hussein's hand to build a new war machine versus helping subsidize or provide incentives for the small producer across this country to bring back on line a million barrels a day of domestic crude oil. The administration has refused to acknowledge the vast oil reserves and gas reserves we have offshore and in ANWR, the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. We know we can explore and produce in these areas in an environmentally sound way. ANWR is an area about the size of Dulles Airport relative to the whole State of Virginia. Those opposed to exploring ANWR would have you believe that if we drilled inside Dulles Airport that it would pollute the whole State of Virginia. How foolish can some of these people get who make those kinds of arguments? The President listened. The Vice President listened. They have refused to promote a policy that would allow safe and sound drilling to provide the energy for our country. The Clinton-Gore administration recently announced a ban on future exploration for most of the Federal Outer Continental Shelf through the year 2012. That is where the real big oil reserves are left in this country, offshore. I know we all remember the oil spills of 20 years ago on the coast of California. What no one is talking about is the tremendous new technology that has been applied to the gulf and other areas where drilling goes on, where wells don't leak today and blowouts don't happen. If they do occur accidentally, they are immediately shut down. All of those technologies are in existence. I think anyone who has looked at the record of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico recognizes that it is clean and it is sound. It is extracting the resource and is having almost a zero impact on the environment of the gulf area and its coast lines. In 1996, the administration resorted to the little used 1906 Antiquities Act. The President argued it was a major emergency and he had to lock up these millions of acres in Utah. What he was really locking up, for fear that it might be mined, was 23 billion tons of low-sulfur, high-value coal that could have been used to generate electricity in our country today and well into the future. All of these areas that would have been mined--and they were a very small part of the over 1 million acres that the President locked up in the Grand Starcase/Escalante National Monument--would have been reclaimed in a natural way because that is part of the environmental policy of our country today. If you are going to disturb the land, once you have done so, you must put it back in as near a natural way as is possible. The Clinton-Gore administration has vetoed legislation that would have opened the Coastal Plain of the remote Alaskan national wildlife reserve. It is estimated that there are 15 billion barrels of domestic crude oil up there. The administration also has ignored a report prepared by the National Petroleum Council, requested by the Energy Secretary, explaining how the Nation can increase production and use of domestic natural gas resources from about 22 trillion cubic feet per year to more than 30 trillion cubic feet per year over the next 10 to 12 years. In other words, we could add nearly 10 trillion cubic feet of new domestic gas to our energy mix. That would allow the Northeast, which is tremendously dependent upon oil for space heat, to convert to a much cleaner fuel, a much more efficient fuel, a fuel of natural gas, and bring down their dependency on oil fuel for home heat and space heat. The Clinton-Gore administration has shown little interest in solving our domestic energy problems until now, as the foreign oil producers have forced crude up to over $30 a barrel last month. Gasoline prices, last week, were $2 a gallon in San Francisco. Mr. President, I argue that the Clinton-Gore administration has acted in other ways designed to force us away from the use of a reliable, available, relatively inexpensive fossil fuel, and the only argument the President had this weekend during his radio address was: Congress, you are to blame. Yet I have listed numerous vetoes or efforts to block our administrative and rulemaking processes that have actually blocked production in our country. That is why many of us have suggested to this President that he needs to step back and work with Congress to define a national energy policy that promotes increased domestic crude oil and natural gas production, while looking at all of the other alternatives we have and the new technologies, especially clean coal technology. Nothing should be done in isolation of the other. It ought to well be a total package that we would want to work on. My distinguished friend from West Virginia, Senator Robert Byrd, spoke eloquently last week on the subject. I want to add a few thoughts to his comments. The U.S. has the world's largest demonstrated coal reserve base and more than 90 percent of our total fossil fuel energy reserves are in coal. Yet this administration has downplayed new coal- burning and clean coal technologies--the very kind of thing we ought to want to bring online as much of our electricity is generated by coal, and as we define and refine the science of global warming and attempt to understand the cause or causes and how to respond. At present rates of consumption our coal will last for up to 270 years. In other words, we blessed with huge coal reserves. Yet this administration's lack of policy has forced us into near crisis. Coal is used to generate 56 percent of our electrical supply and about 88 percent of the Midwest's electrical needs. Coal use for electrical power has risen more than 250 percent since 1970, while sulfur dioxide emissions has decreased by 21 percent due to technology and, in part, due to some of the money we put into research sponsored here that has moved that kind of technology. Now, as my colleagues think about all of this, here is a quote I found by the President over the weekend. Remember, I was talking about coal. I was talking about our tremendous need for production of electricity. Here is what the President was saying over the weekend: I think to a much greater degree, then, we have a commitment to the notion that we can improve the environment while we grow the economy-- None of us disagrees with that. But he goes on, . . . that is what the whole global warming issue is about. All over the world, there are people who just don't believe that you can get rich unless you put more stuff in the air that heats up the earth. They think you have got to burn more coal and oil in the digital economy. That is not true. Mr. President, what you have said isn't true. What runs the digital economy of our country? What turns on the computer? What fires up the Internet? A solar cell? A wind mill? I don't think so, Mr. President. It is the abundance of electrical power. Let me repeat: Coal use for electrical power has risen more than 250 percent since 1970, and the sulfur dioxide emissions during that time have actually decreased by 21 percent. Furthermore, the gas the Clinton/Gore administration blames for global warming, carbon dioxide, isn't a poisonous gas and isn't regulated under the Clean Air Act. The point I am making is simply this: An abundant economy--the kind we are experiencing today that has us at or near full employment--is a direct result of an abundance of relatively inexpensive energy. The history of our country has been based on the availability of energy. That is why we are the wealthy Nation we are today. Look at the rest of the countries of the world; as they strive to grow and provide an economy for their people, they develop their energy base. My wife and I and a group of business people from Idaho were in China in December. The skies were so dark there in Beijing that you could hardly see because they don't have the clean coal technology we have. Yet they are growing very rapidly and they need an abundant source of energy. They are building dams and nuclear reactors, and they are searching for a cleaner way to burn their coal because they know if they are to grow and provide their country and their citizens with opportunity, they are going to have to use coal to generate electric energy. President Clinton, I don't think you really get it. Do you think this new hi-tech, digital economy happens out there on its own? It is, in fact, a product of a nation who has an abundant energy base. In November of 1999, the EPA sued several coal-burning utilities, claiming they had made major modifications in their facilities without applying for new resource review permits. Utilities maintained that these were modifications made during routine maintenance. They were still providing high-quality energy with less emissions. Why is EPA out there suing at this moment, at a time when there is a deficiency of energy in this country and we ought to be promoting more? Certainly, we ought to be promoting it with all of the newest technology. But you don't do that by suing; you do that with policies that encourage people to do the right thing. Lastly--and this is the irony of this administration which likes to think it has an energy policy--this morning, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt is out looking for a dam to tear down. Eight years ago, he said he would like to knock down a really big dam while he is Secretary of Interior. Really big dams produce a lot of big power, Mr. Secretary, or haven't you figured that out? Big renewable power, hydropower. It doesn't have emissions; it is very clean. Yes, our fathers and forefathers chose to dam some rivers to generate electricity. Those were efficient ways to do it then, and they are finding out they are environmentally sound ways to do it now. Yet Mr. Babbitt wants to tear down one, two, or three dams, or I guess as many as he can get his hands on, or find a policies that make it difficult to keep these dams running. Why don't we simply work to improve those dams? Why don't we make them more efficient by adding new technology to the dams, putting new turbines in them that are friendly and more efficient. It is beginning to happen nationwide. Why should we deny our country 20 percent of its energy base, or bad mouth that energy source, or attempt to tear it down? No, what I am trying to say this afternoon in this collection of thoughts is, Mr. President, I don't think you get away by just pointing a finger at a single action of the Congress and saying you didn't give me emergency authority over the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, so therefore our energy crisis is your fault, Congress. I think I have named 15 or 20 issues on which this administration has taken a strong anti-energy, anti-production approach toward dealing with energy policy in this country. Mr. President, we can solve our energy problems. We are a marvelously creative Nation. But we don't do it by simply saying no. We do it by producing where we can produce, by creating less dependency on foreign sources, while at the same time building the kind of science and technology that allows us ever increasing energy efficiency and environmental improvement. I think in the coming years we are going to debate the global climate change issue. Getting rid of hydrocarbons isn't the answer. Getting rid of fossil fuels isn't the answer. It is finding better and more efficient ways to use them, and then allowing our technology to be sold and transferred to the world at large. If our clean coal technology were at use in China today, China would be a healthier, more environmentally clean place to live. Someday they will be able to afford that technology, and they will want it. It is our businesses and our companies that develop it that ought to be encouraged to sell it to them. That is called leadership. It simply isn't crawling into a cave and getting a candle to light your way and heat your space. It is building an efficient system recognizing that all sources of energy ought to be at play at this moment so that we can truly develop an abundant energy package for ourselves and our Nation's future. Thank you Mr. President.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I will then proceed for the next few moments in morning business. I believe that when I am done, I will also conclude the Senate for the day and take us out, as others who had been planning morning business comments for the day are not going to be with us.

Mr. CRAIG. I inquire of the Chair, what is the business on the floor at this moment?

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Special Committee on Aging be permitted to meet on April 3, 2000, from 1 p.m.-4 p.m. in Dirksen 562 for the purpose of conducting a hearing.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until the hour of 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, April 4. I further ask unanimous consent that on Tuesday immediately following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate then begin consideration of the Senate Concurrent Resolution 101, the budget resolution. I further ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in recess from the hours of 12:30 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. for the weekly policy conferences to meet.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, for the information of all Senators, the Senate will begin debate on the budget resolution at 9:30 tomorrow. Amendments are expected to be offered, debated, and voted on throughout the day and into the evening. Senators who have amendments are encouraged to work with the Budget Committee on a time to offer and debate those amendments. As previously announced, votes will occur throughout the week so that action on the budget resolution can be completed no later than Friday's session of the Senate.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I join in this debate with mixed feelings. On one hand, I am very frustrated we are here yet again, as we have been year after year for so long, trying to secure approval for this very important amendment so that it can be sent to the states for ratification. Time after time, we have come within just a few votes of success. But, for whatever reason, those few votes have eluded us, and we have had to go back to square one and begin the legislative process again. So I cannot approach this debate without a good measure of frustration. But on the other hand, the very fact that we are here again debating this measure is reassuring. It is proof positive of the American people's continuing belief in the importance of flag protection. Imagine that. In spite of all the editorials about the erosion of ideals, in spite of all the speeches, some on this very Senate floor, about the loss of values in America, in spite of the dire predictions about moral decline--in spite of all that, there is a strong and growing grassroots movement demanding protection of our Nation's most important symbol: our flag. Why would we even hesitate to answer that call? Millions of our fellow citizens are telling us that the sight or mention of our flag still has the power to awaken the spirit of the American patriot. State legislatures are clamoring for the opportunity to protect the symbol of our national aspirations and values. To those of my colleagues who are searching for signs of spring in a winter of moral decay, let me say: look no further. Here is the sign. This is the call. Now is the time to take a stand and support this amendment. I do not minimize the fears of those on the other side of this debate. However, it is worth remembering that the U.S. Supreme Court has not hesitated to draw constitutional lines around the kinds of speech that are protected or not protected by the First Amendment. They have found that in some cases, certain interests may outweigh the citizen's right to free expression. As a result, laws may be enacted to restrict those kinds of speech, such as ``fighting words'' or obscenity. The Court chose not to exempt the behavior that came under scrutiny in the flag case. Frankly, I think they could have, and should have, reached a different result. But my point is that the Congress need not shrink from applying its own judgment to balancing the interests involved. In my opinion, flag protection serves a number of compelling interests but would not prevent the expression of a single idea or message. I do not think the First Amendment must be or would be compromised by protecting the flag from desecration. Even so, it is also worth noting that what we do here today is only the first step in a long process. This amendment must be ratified by the states, and only after that will Congress fashion an actual flag protection statute. Even if some of my colleagues are uncertain about how to go about crafting legislation to protect the flag, I hope they will all agree that it is appropriate to pass this resolution and give the American people the opportunity they have demanded to consider this issue in the legislatures and town halls and across the kitchen tables of this great country. Yesterday morning, I had the honor of addressing our Nation's veterans. As I stood before them, I thought of the long line of patriots throughout our history who have defended our flag--some with the supreme sacrifice. Suddenly, the legal hairsplitting and fear- mongering over this issue seemed both trivial and insulting. Millions of Americans understand, as these veterans do, that the flag is more than a scrap of cloth. It weaves people of diverse cultures together to form our Nation, just as surely as its threads are woven into a pattern that stands for freedom throughout the world. It deserves protection and can be protected without endangering any of the fundamental ideals it symbolizes. Today, we can send a signal that we understand, that we agree, that we honor the values that the American people have attached to our flag. I hope all our colleagues will join in voting in favor of this resolution and moving the flag protection constitutional amendment to the states for ratification.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I would like to announce for the public that a hearing has been scheduled before the Subcommittee on Forests and Public Land Management of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The hearing will take place Wednesday, April 5, 2000, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. The purpose of this oversight hearing is to receive testimony on the proposed 5-year strategic plan of the U.S. Forest Service in compliance with Government Results and Performance Act. Those who wish to submit written statements should write to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510. For further information, please call Mark Rey at (202) 224-6170. Subcommittee on National Parks, Historic Preservation, and Recreation

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to join my colleague from Wyoming who has so clearly outlined in the last few moments part of the problems our country faces at this time in our history relating to energy policy, or a lack thereof. As I speak on the floor, as my colleague has just completed his comments, all eyes are turned on Vienna. That is not Vienna, NY, that is Vienna, Austria, where the OPEC nation members are meeting to decide whether they will be generous enough to turn their valves on a little more and increase crude oil production to a million or a million and a half barrels a day so that our gas prices will come down at the pump. How can a great nation such as ours now find itself so dependent upon a group of nations, almost all of them quite small but all of them very rich in crude oil? How do we find ourselves dependent on their thinking? What is the reason we find ourselves dependent? This is part of what my colleague from Wyoming was talking about. It is the loss of production units and the drop in number of rigs out exploring, and that is all our fault, our fault collectively as a nation, for having failed over the last several decades to put in place an energy policy that had, as its first criterion, relative independence from other nations of the world as suppliers of our fundamental energy-based need for crude oil, crude oil production for our petrochemical industry. I have been to the floor several times in the last couple of weeks to speak about this because the price at the pump today is not an aberration. It is not something that was just quick in coming. We, as a country, have known for some time this day would be at hand. Several years ago, we asked our Government to investigate whether a lack of domestic production would put us at some form of vulnerability as to our ability to defend ourselves. The answer was yes. Those studies were placed on the desk of our President, Bill Clinton. Nothing was done. A year ago similar studies were done, and they reside on the President's desk as we speak. They have been there since last November, and nothing has been done. Only in the last month has the President sent his Secretary of Energy out and about the world, with his tin cup in hand, begging--begging producing nations to turn their valves on a little bit. What is the consequence of turning your valve on at the pump? The consequence is a reduction in the overall world spot price of crude oil. When you do that, the cash-flow pouring out of this country to the OPEC nations of the world declines; oil production goes up, cash-flow declines. Why would they want to do that? Out of the generosity of their hearts? For the last year-and-a-half or 2, they have been in political disarray. During that time, they were largely pumping at will into the world market. A year ago, we saw crude oil prices at $10 a barrel on the world market. Today, they are over $30. Now $10 a barrel is probably too low, but $30 is a huge and bountiful cash-flow to the treasuries of these countries--Saddam Hussein's country, the man whose country we fought against to free Kuwait and the Kuwaiti oil fields less than a decade ago. In fact, it was Northeastern Senators who, some months ago, wrote a letter to our President asking him to become sensitive to this issue because they were aware, with the run-up in oil prices--and we knew it was coming the minute the OPEC nations got their act together--the Northeastern Senators would see their States hit by heavy home heating oil costs. Sure enough, that is what happened. It happened because of the run-up in price. It also happened because of a loss of refinery capacity that has been going on for some time. What was going on in the Northeast, 2 and 3 months ago, is now going on across America. I come from the West, where energy prices are extremely high and the impact on goods and services, and our citizens, can be dramatic. So even if the OPEC oil countries decide to raise crude oil output, my guess is it will be just a little bit. It may sound like a lot to the average listener--a million, million-and-a-half barrels a day--and it could bring crude oil prices down a little bit. But the OPEC nations' goal is to keep crude oil prices above $20 a barrel and therefore keep regular gas at the pumps at somewhere in the $1.40 to $1.50 range. That is still a dramatic increase, nearly doubling east coast prices. It will be even higher on the west coast. The failure of the Clinton-Gore administration to recognize it, to understand it, and therefore to deal with it, is one of the great domestic and foreign policy tragedies of the decade. I say that from an economic point of view, but it is true also from a defense point of view--our ability to defend ourselves and stand as an independent nation in a community of nations around the world. Here are some statistics. Probably everyone's eyes glaze over a little bit when you use statistics, but it is important for the record. U.S. crude oil production is down by 17 percent since 1992. We have actually had wells shut off and shut in. What does that mean? The price of oil got so low, they could not afford to pump them. It cost money to produce. So they turn the well off and they shut the well in, meaning it no longer has the capability of producing. U.S. crude oil consumption during that same period of time went up 14 percent: 17 percent down in production, 14 percent up in consumption. It sounds like a ready-made situation for a crisis, and that is exactly where we find ourselves today. The United States is 55-percent dependent upon those nations that are meeting in Vienna at this moment; 55-percent dependent for so much of what we do. That is dramatically up from just a couple of decades ago when we were in the mid-30s, relating to dependency. While all of this is going on and nothing is being done by this administration, and most of what we are trying to do here has either been denied or vetoed or blocked by this administration, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates we will have a 65-percent dependency on foreign producers by the year 2020. Some would say that is good because we will not have the environmental risks in this country; we will not be drilling and we will not be refining as much, and therefore the environmental risks will be gone. What they did not tell you is, it puts hundreds of new supertankers out there on the open ocean on a daily basis--even if our foreign neighbors will produce and even if they will sell to us, hundreds more of those huge supertankers out there in the open ocean, coming into our ports, offloading. Let me tell you, there are greater environmental consequences for that than the use of today's technology on our land or out in our oceans, drilling, finding, and shipping to our refineries. The United States is spending $300 million a day on imported crude oil. That is $100 billion a year flowing out of this country to the coffers of the OPEC nations. That is big money, huge money, in any sense of the words. We sit here and wring our hands over a balance of payments, yet we do nothing to bring that production back to our shores and to be able to control our own destiny in the production of crude oil. As I mentioned, the world oil price reached over $30, about $34 a barrel on March 7. It is down a little bit now on speculation that the OPEC nations today will make decisions that will increase production. But, of course, we already know energy prices on the west coast are at nearly $2 a gallon at the pump and are certainly extremely high here. More than half of all crude oil we use, about 18 million barrels per day, goes directly into home heating oil, motor gasoline, diesel fuel, and other transportation fuels. The Clinton-Gore administration has failed to do one single thing to develop more of our Nation's crude oil reserves, of which we have an abundance. In fact, I was watching CNN a few moments ago. Some people in the oil industry would suggest only about half of the crude oil capability of this Nation has been used since we first discovered crude oil. Only about half of it has been used. The rest of it is under the ground. It is more difficult to find, more expensive to produce, but it is still there, and the great tragedy is we are not producing it. In fact, we are doing quite the opposite. Since this administration has come to town, there has been an anti- oil attitude from a standpoint of domestic production. From the very beginning, they pushed through a 4.3 percent gas tax increase. They argued it was for deficit reduction. But when one listens to the soundings of the Vice President when he talks about crude oil and combustion engines and how negative they are to the environment and we ought to tax them out of existence--and he has said all of those things; I am paraphrasing, but it is not new; he has been replete in those expressions over the years--it is not unexpected that he cast the single vote that broke the tie between Democrats and Republicans on this floor that put the gas tax in place. We now are looking to try to take that gas tax off in the very near future, at least roll it back a ways, and give our consumers some flexibility. We are going to balance the budget this year and have surpluses. Why not use some of that surplus money to offset the runup in expenses that consumers are now feeling at the gas pump at this moment and that certainly our transportation industry is feeling? It ought to be something we do. I argue that we hold the highway trust fund fully offset. That is the trust fund that funds the pouring of concrete for our roads and our bridges and creates hundreds of thousands of jobs a year in the building and rebuilding of our infrastructure. Those need to be funded. I do not argue they should not be. But here we are dealing with a surplus, fighting with our Democrat colleagues over whether we should give tax relief to the taxpayers this year. What better way to give some of it back than to reduce the cost at the pumps? Most Americans today who drive cars find themselves paying increasingly higher fuel bills. For the next few moments, I will talk about rural America. I come from a rural State. Many of us do. While runups in energy costs are dramatically impacting urban America, it is even greater in rural America. Why? It is quite simple. Many of my friends in Idaho drive 50, 60, 70 miles a day to just get their kids to school or just to shop at the local grocery store. That is not unusual in rural America. All of the goods and services that flow to our farms and from our farms travel on the backs of 18-wheeler trucks, all consuming diesel oil. Diesel oil is now being acquired by farmers across the Nation as they enter our fields for the spring farming season. All of that is going to drive up the overall cost of the farmers this year. In agriculture, farmers have experienced a 4-year run of very low commodity prices and have found most of their farms and ranches below break even. Now, because of an absence of a national energy policy, they find their cost of production could double, at least in the energy field. Many of the tools they use--the insecticides, the pesticides, and the herbicides that are made up of oil bases--are going to go up dramatically in cost. In my State of Idaho, farming and ranching, logging and mining are also an important part of the rural economy. All of them very energy intensive. Those industries have found themselves nearly on their backs from the last few years at a time when we see energy costs ready to double or triple. We have heard it from the homeowner and the apartment dweller in the Northeast for the last several months, that their fuel costs have doubled, their heating bills have doubled. Some are having to choose food over warmth or warmth over food. Many are senior citizens on fixed incomes. While we have tried to offset that some with help from Washington, we have not been able to do it all. And in the next month and a half, we are going to hear it from the farmers and the ranchers as their fuel bills skyrocket. We have already heard from the truckers. They have been to town several times, and many of our independent truckers are literally driving their trucks into their driveways, shutting them down, and not turning them back on, therefore, risking bankruptcy and the loss of that income-making property because they cannot afford to pay the fuel bills. Why? It is time we ask why, as a country, and it is time Congress dealt with at least some short-term provisions while we look at and strive for some long-term energy policy. I do not think one can expect the Clinton-Gore administration to be very helpful, except begging at the doorsteps of the palaces of the sheiks of the OPEC nations, because that is their only energy policy. Those are the kinds of things we are going to look at and abide by. I think this Congress will attempt to respond and respond in a positive way for the short-term provisions while we look at long-term policy to increase production of crude oil inside the 50 States of our Nation in a way that we can control it, we can shape our energy future without a group of energy nations meeting in Vienna having a choke hold around our very neck. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt is talking about taking down valuable hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest--the administration does not consider hydropower a renewable resource. Electricity from hydro meets about 10 to 12 percent of U.S. needs. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner is trying to shut down coal fired electric generating plants in the midwest-- which depends on those plants for 88 percent of its electricity. The U.S. depends on coal for 55 percent of its electricity needs. While the Clinton-Gore administration tried to kill off the use of coal fired electricity it is doing nothing to increase the availability of domestic natural gas which is the fuel generators will use if they cannot use coal. To replace coal the U.S. must increase its use of natural gas by about 10 trillion cubic feet per year. Federal land in the Rocky Mountain West could contain as much as 137 billion cubic feet of natural gas but the Clinton-Gore administration refuses to allow any oil and gas exploration on those lands. Last week the President announced his plans for dealing with our current energy problem. Once again, his emphasis focused on conservation and renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biomass. We cannot put windmills on trucks or solar panels on trains or barges. The Clinton-Gore administration has refused to even consider allowing exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge which could contain up to 16 billion barrels of domestic crude oil which could easily be moved to refineries in the lower 48 through the Alaska pipeline. The Vice President has vowed to prohibit any future exploration for oil and natural gas on the Federal outer continental shelf when there are clearly areas that have great potential for new domestic energy supplies. The President recently closed most of the Federal OCS to any exploration until 2012. The Clinton-Gore administration embraces the Kyoto Protocol which would impose staggering economic costs on the United States. The Protocol would require the U.S. to vastly reduce its use of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal to achieve reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide--which is not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and has not yet been proven to be the cause of climate change. The U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to reject it. Clearly, there is a pattern. It started in 1993 when the Clinton-Gore administration proposed a $73 billion 5-year tax to force U.S. use of fossil fuels down. It continues with misguided Federal land use policies, environmental policies designed not necessarily to protect the environment but to kill fossil fuel use, and continues with administration support for the economically punitive Kyoto Protocol. This administration hates the fossil fuel industry and apparently the economic well-being these abundant and relatively cheap fuels have helped the U.S. economy achieve. These are the words of the Vice President: Higher taxes on fossil fuels . . . is one of the logical first steps in changing our policies in a manner consistent with a more responsible approach to the environment. That is by Senator Al Gore, from ``Earth in the Balance,'' 1992, page 173. To me it is pretty clear that this administration is unwilling to commit to a rational energy policy that will help America's families. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today, as has the Senator from Maine, to speak about the energy crisis our country finds itself in. Let me use those words again: energy crisis. A week and a half ago, Senator Snowe was before my subcommittee testifying on some key legislation she has introduced. The Senator from Maine recognizes the phenomenal impact high energy costs have on her State. Whether it is home heating or the transportation systems that drive her industries, she has recognized it clearly and early on announced to this administration there was a problem coming and encouraged them to change their policy. Yet they have done nothing. As I listened to the Senator from Maine this morning, she spoke very clearly about what this country needs to do. I strongly support the words she has stated for the Record. When the Clinton-Gore administration came to town in 1993, it announced its intent to drastically alter the way the Nation used energy, especially fossil fuels. Remember, briefly, the President and the Vice President determined that through the use of a broad-based Btu tax, they would drive us away from our most abundant and economical fuels to a renewable solar wind or biomass system. The objective has remained a hallmark of this administration's energy policy. That is all they have wanted to talk about until now. Their policy now is to send the Secretary of Energy abroad with a tin cup, begging at the wells of foreign energy producers, asking them to please turn on their tap. We will know next Monday whether the begging of Bill Richardson and the energy policy of this administration has worked. President Clinton promised early when he came to town that the tax he proposed, $72 billion over 5 years, was going to be fair, it was going to be healthful, it was going to force down dependency on foreign oil, and do the right things for consumers. In fact, it would have unfairly punished energy-intensive States such as mine, Western States where transportation needs and movements spread across broad expanses in agricultural States such as mine. The American Petroleum Insurance Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers predicted the tax would hurt exports, reduce GDP in this country by $38 billion, and destroy some 700,000 jobs. Yet the administration wouldn't listen. They drove on, pushing the tax issue. Clinton and Gore claimed the tax was needed to balance the budget and fund large new spending programs to offset the negative impact of the tax. They also claimed the use of crude oil imports would fall dramatically, by 400,000 barrels a day. At that time, DOE's own projections predicted the tax would shave oil import growth by less than one-tenth after 10 years. DOE predicted by the year 2000, Americans would depend on foreign oil for three-fifths of their total crude oil requirements. The American Petroleum Institute testified before the Energy Committee on which I sit. It said: . . . even if imports were to fall by the full 400,000 barrels a day claimed by the administration, the cost of $34 billion in lost GDP is excessive relative to other alternatives for improving energy security. Using the administration's optimistic predictions, the cost of the Btu tax works out to be about $230 a barrel. That is right, $230 a barrel. In the end, Congress refused. Thank goodness we listened to the experts. We didn't listen to the politics of the Clinton-Gore administration, and we said no. Hopefully, in the next few days we will also reverse something that was largely a Clinton-Gore initiative and that was the 4.3-cent-per-gallon gas tax that our consumers are now paying. The Clinton-Gore administration's obsession with the use of fossil fuel reduction has actually put us in the position we find ourselves today. What does our President say? On March 7 of this year, he said: Americans should not want them [oil prices] to drop to $10 or $12 again because that . . . takes our mind off the business of . . . alternative fuels, energy conservation, reducing the impact of all of this on global warming. Mr. President, we should not take our minds off energy conservation. That is good policy. We should not take our minds off alternative fuels, that is also good policy. But saying you are going to tax hydrocarbons out of existence and now finding this Nation pushing itself into an inflationary mode, finding our costs going up dramatically because of your policies, it was wrongheaded then and it is wrongheaded now. And we know it. What has happened since 1993? Domestic oil production is down 17 percent. Domestic crude oil consumption is up 14 percent. Dependence on foreign oil sources of crude oil has risen to 56 percent of our total crude requirements. In 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, our dependence on foreign crude was 36 percent of our crude oil requirement. Iraq is our fastest growing source for U.S. crude imports, about 700,000 barrels a day. I have one thing to say to the President: Shame on you. Shame on you for the absence of policy and the clear knowledge that you had, that all of us had, that this kind of dependency would ultimately result if we did not push and we did not drive toward a more effective domestic policy to increase production and find all the other effective conservation uses we could find. The Clinton-Gore administration, while making much of the increase in efficiency, greater use of renewables from biomass, and other things, ignores the very fundamental fact that a large part of our energy use cannot be addressed by these measures. Sure, it is an important part of the blend but a very small percentage of what is absolutely and necessarily needed. Of course, those of us who come from agriculture recognize the importance of crude oil feed stocks to the chemical industry and the products they produce, which results in the high quality of agriculture production in our country. The administration fails to encourage domestic oil production and the production of coal and natural gas that now leads us to this point. The administration has refused to acknowledge the vast reserves of oil and gas offshore, in Alaska and the Rocky Mountain overthrust area. Of course, we, the consumers, are now paying the price. The Clinton-Gore administration recently announced a ban on future exploration on most of the Federal Outer Continental Shelf until the year 2012. Can you imagine that? Here we are, increasingly dependent on foreign sources, and the President turns his back on some of the largest reserves left in this country to be explored by some of the finest technology in environmentally sensitive ways that we now know, to bring oil into production in the Outer Continental Shelf. In 1996, the administration resorted to the use of the Antiquities Act to lock up 23 billion tons of mineable low-sulfur, high-quality coal in Utah. The story goes on and on. I would argue the Clinton-Gore administration has acted in other ways designed to force us away from the use of all of these resources that are so abundant and so available to us and wise for us to use. At the present rate, we are now demonstrating our unwillingness to produce at the local, national level. We will be 56-percent dependent, moving into 60-percent dependent in very short order. The U.S. Forest Service has issued road construction policies that are designed to restrict the energy industry's ability to explore for oil and gas on Forest Service lands. The Clinton-Gore administration has vetoed legislation that would have opened the coastal plain of the remote Alaska National Wildlife Reserve denying the Nation access to an estimated 16 billion barrels of domestic crude oil. The administration has ignored a report prepared by the National Petroleum Council, requested by the Energy Secretary, explaining how the Nation can increase production and use of domestic natural gas resources from about 22 trillion cubic feet per year to more than 30 trillion cubic feet per year over the next 10 to 12 years. The Clinton-Gore administration has shown little interest in solving our domestic energy problems until now as foreign oil producers have forced crude oil prices to over $30 per barrel and gasoline prices to almost $2 per gallon--double prices of only little more than a year ago. I would argue that the Clinton-Gore administration has acted in other ways designed to force us away from the use of readily available, relatively inexpensive fossil fuels. It has chosen especially to vilify and deny the use of our most abundant national energy resource--coal. My distinguished friend from West Virginia, Senator Robert Byrd spoke eloquently yesterday on this subject and I want to add a few thoughts to his. The U.S. has the world's largest demonstrated coal reserve base and accounts for more than 90 percent of our total fossil energy reserves. At present rates of recovery and use, U.S. reserves will last more than 270 years. Coal is used to generate over 56 percent of our electricity supply-- and about 88 percent of the Midwest's electricity needs. Coal use for electric power has risen more than 250 percent since 1970 while sulfur dioxide emissions have decreased to 21 percent below 1970 levels and introduction of new cleaner coal combustion technologies will continue to push emissions of all types down. Electricity from hydro represents about 10 to 12 percent of our electricity needs. Nuclear powerplants meet about 20 percent of our total electricity demand. Yet the Clinton-Gore administration takes a dim view of these sources and has taken steps to reduce their use. In November 1999 the Environmental Protection Agency sued several coal burning utilities claiming they made major modifications to their facilities without applying for New Source Review permits. Utilities maintain that the modifications fall within the ``routine maintenance'' exception to the new source rule, and that EPA had routinely approved such actions in the past. EPA is discussing the notion that new source review should include ``voluntary'' regulation of CO2--which is not a poisonous gas and which is not regulated by any part of the Clear Air Act. EPA recently changed the toxics release inventory to require electric utilities to report chemical release data. The level at which reporting is required for Mercury was lowered by an order of magnitude. In making these changes EPA presented no studies or supporting rationale for why nearby communities should suddenly be concerned about such releases. Nevertheless, the reports will be widely published thereby placing utilities at the top of the list of ``dirty'' facilities. In 1993, EPA concluded that coal combustion wastes (fly ash, bottom ash, slag waste, and other combustion products) from electric utility generation do not warrant hazardous waste regulation. EPA appears now to be prepared to reverse an EPA staff decision that coal combustion wastes do not warrant regulation as ``hazardous.'' In 1998, EPA issued revised Nitrogen Oxides New Source Performance Standards for all new and existing utility and industrial boilers. It based its standard on a single, very expensive control system regardless of boiler and fuel type. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has talked openly about ``tearing down dams'' in the West to restore habitat for fish, ignoring the power and transportation benefits they provide. And, the administration is imposing new, often impossible criteria that must be met before federal licenses can be reissued. Many existing hydro projects will seek relicensing over the next several decades. Finally, the Clinton-Gore administration continues to threaten veto of legislation designed to create a permanent nuclear waste storage facility and which fulfills a longstanding promise by the federal government to create such a facility. Without a federal storage facility, U.S. nuclear generating stations, which are running out of on-site storage capacity may be forced to shut down their operations. There are too many more examples of the Clinton-Gore administration's failure to produce a coherent, balanced national energy plan. It almost seems they are trying to create crisis after crisis in the hope that a magical solution will rise from the chaos--fat chance. Solving these problems requires tough choices and I suggest that we begin now by pursuing a number of short to long term objectives. We should work with our Western Hemisphere neighbors to help them increase their crude oil production. We should provide relief to consumers by cutting taxes on fuels derived from crude oil, such as the 4.3-cents a gallon tax and the 24- cent a gallon tax on highway diesel fuel and taxes on fuels for air, rail and barge transportation. We need to step away from punitive, command and control environmental regulations and move toward performance based regulatory concepts that offer the regulated community opportunities to find flexible approaches to reducing emissions of legally regulated contaminants. Finally, we need to face up to the fact that we are part of the problem. Our unwillingness to develop our own abundant oil, gas and coal resources dooms us to greater dependence on foreign sources, especially for crude oil. We must make the conscious choice to carefully find and develop our resources while protecting our environment.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, earlier today I came to the floor, as did several of my colleagues, to discuss what I believe is now nearing a crisis in our country; that is, the tremendous runup in the price of energy that we have watched for well over 3 months creep up on the reader boards at the local gas station or in fuel bills for those in homes heated with fuel oil. A lot of Americans are scratching their heads and saying: What is happening? Last year, at this time out in Northern Virginia, I purchased regular gasoline for 78 cents a gallon. There was a bit of a price war going on at that time that probably bid the price down 10 or 12 cents, but there is no question that America's driving public a year ago was paying at least 100 percent less, in some instances, than they are paying today. It is right and reasonable to ask why? What has happened? What happened is obvious to many who watched the energy issue. I serve on the Energy Committee. For the last several years, we have become quite nervous about the fact that we as Americans have grown increasingly dependent on foreign sources of crude oil to fuel the economy of this country. Several speakers on the floor today, and over the past several days, have talked about a dependency that has gone up from 30-plus percent in the 1970s to over 55 percent today for oil flowing in from outside the United States. Why is that happening? Why don't we have a policy stopping it? Why are all these things happening at a time when our economy is doing so well? This morning I joined some of my colleagues to discuss some of the whys. This country, for at least the last 8 years, has been without an energy policy. When the current Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, came to that seat, I asked him in his confirmation hearing: If we don't have an energy program, can't we at least have an energy policy that looks at all aspects of the energy basket--both, of course, crude oil for the hydrocarbons and for all that it provides for our country, a recognition of electrical generation in this country, both nuclear, hydro, and certainly coal fired and oil fired? He assured me that would be the case. Of course, today, that simply isn't the case. In the budgets this Department of Energy has presented to this Congress in the last 2 years, there has been a tremendous increase in the money the Clinton- Gore administration has wanted to allocate for solar and wind, but they have constantly dropped the research dollars on hydro production or clean coal production for the use of coal in the firing of our electrical generating facilities. While all of that has been going on, there has been something else that I find fascinating and extremely disturbing: a progressive effort to lock up exploration and development of our public lands and public areas where the last of our oil reserves exist. The administration has not tried to encourage domestic production. In most instances, they have openly discouraged it or they have set the environmental bar so high that no one company can afford to jump over it. Over the course of the last 5 or 6 years, we have seen a tremendous number of our production companies leave this country. In fact, the CEO of one company sat in my office 5 years ago in a rather embarrassing way saying: Senator, after having been in this country drilling, developing, and producing oil and gas for almost 100 years, my company is being forced to leave the United States if we want to stay profitable or productive. Of course, that company did largely go overseas. That is an American company and they will be producing oil and gas. But they are, in most instances, producing for a foreign government, and they don't control their supply. Most importantly, that supply is not a U.S. supply. It is a foreign supply being brought into this country, dramatically changing our balance of trade. Of course, many of those nations are members of OPEC or are other oil-producing nations that are, in part, causing the problems our consumers are currently experiencing. I have found it fascinating over the last several years as we have watched this administration refuse to acknowledge our vast reserves of oil and gas, offshore, and in Alaska. The Senator from Alaska, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was on the floor to speak for the last hour about one of the great remaining reserves in northern Alaska that could be tapped, and tapped in a sound and safe environmental way so the beautiful area would not be damaged. Literally, tens of thousands of barrels a day of oil could be produced from that region of our country and brought into the lower 48 to be refined and sold. The Rocky Mountain overthrust belt in my area of the country is largely now off limits to further exploration and production. Yet in the 1970s and the early 1980s a lot of the new domestic production in our country came from the overthrust belt areas of Wyoming and Colorado. We have seen the Clinton administration recently announced a ban on any future exploration of many areas of the Outer Continental Shelf, where some of the largest oil reserves exist today, all in the name of the environment. Even though some of the great new technologies have allowed the kind of development in the Gulf of Mexico and other areas where the chance of a spill is almost nonexistent today. In fact, the greatest concern for a spill is not drilling and development and transfer onshore of crude oil; it is the shipping in the great supertankers from all around the world. That is where the greater risk to our oceans exist, not offshore oil production. Yet this administration, all in the name of the environment, says, no, we will not develop our offshore capabilities. In 1996, the administration resorted to the little-used Antiquities Act. I mentioned that earlier this morning. They made 23 billion tons of low-sulpher mineable coal off limits to production in southern Utah. The U.S. Forest Service issued road construction policies designed to restrict the energy industry's ability to explore for gas and oil on Forest Service lands. The Clinton-Gore administration has vetoed legislation that would have opened the coastal plain, as I mentioned, in the remote Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, where an estimated 16 billion barrels of domestic oil may be found. The administration has ignored a report prepared by the National Petroleum Council requested by the Energy Secretary explaining how the Nation can increase production and use of domestic natural gas resources from about 22 trillion cubic feet per year to more than 30 trillion cubic feet per year over the next 10 to 12 years. Doable? Yes. Environmentally sound? Yes. A clean fuel source? Yes. Then why aren't we doing it? Because we have an administration that is hostile to the idea of actually producing in this country and providing for this country, and their 8 years of record clearly show that. The Clinton-Gore administration has shown little interest in solving these kinds of domestic problems and, as a result, as I mentioned earlier, we have watched our dependence on foreign crude tick up to 56 percent of our total crude demand. The price last year of a barrel of crude was around $10 and peaked last week at somewhere near $34 a barrel. Did we see it coming? You bet we did. Has the administration known it? Yes, they have. On two different occasions, and in two very well- developed reports over the last several years, that message has been so clearly sent to this administration. Why would they ignore it? There are probably a lot of reasons, and I have already expressed some of those reasons why this country cannot use its energy resources. Yesterday, my distinguished friend from West Virginia, Senator Robert Byrd, spoke eloquently on the floor on this very subject. Of course, his State of West Virginia is a great coal State, a great producing State. The United States has the world's largest demonstrated coal reserve base and accounts for more than 90 percent of our total fossil energy reserve. In other words, we have more coal than any other country. Yet we have an administration that truly wants to deny the use of it or the development of technologies that will cause it to be burned in an ever increasingly clean way. At the present rate of recovery and use, U.S. coal reserves can last us for more than 270 years. Let me repeat that. For 270 years, we can be self-sufficient at our current level of coal consumption. Of course, we all know the technology that will develop over that period of time that might well make the use of fossil fuels unnecessary at some point in the distant future. Coal is used to generate over 56 percent of our electrical supply and about 88 percent of the Midwest's electrical needs. Coal use for electrical power has risen more than 250 percent since 1970, while sulfur dioxide emissions has decreased to 21 percent below the 1970 level. While there has been a dramatic increase in the use of coal, there has been a dramatic drop in coal-fired emissions. Why? Technology, the application of technology, the kind of combustion technology that has continued to drive down emissions and make continued use of coal economically attractive. Why shouldn't we be putting more research dollars into even better technology? Of course, we should, but it does not show up in this administration's budget. Not at all. They want windmills and solar cells. The last I checked, to provide electricity for Los Angeles with solar energy, one has to cover the whole State of Arizona with solar panels. President Clinton, don't you understand that would be environmentally unsound? It would not make a lot of sense and would not be a very, shall we say, aesthetically valuable thing to do. Somehow they are caught in this mythical illusion: Pop up a solar cell, put a propeller on the end of a stick, tie a generator to it, and the world is going to light up. We simply know that is not the case when it comes to the kinds of energy we need to fuel our households and drive our industries. That kind of energy has to be of large capacity. It has to have the ability to peak and supply our needs during high- demand periods. Of course, it says little for the need of America's farmers and ranchers when they go to the pump this year to find out their energy costs have now doubled. What about nuclear? Nuclear drives 20 percent of our electrical needs, and yet this administration is the most antinuclear administration in the history of this country. They have on every occasion attempted to block the effective storage of nuclear waste, high-level waste, the kind that comes from nuclear generation of electricity. They are basically saying to the electricity industry, the power industry, at least the generating industry: Don't build any more nuclear plants, even though there are no emissions from such plants. If you want to strive to get to the clean air standards that we want in our unattainment areas, you cannot do it any other way than to assure that we at least maintain the 20 percent of our electricity being generated by nuclear power. What does that mean? It means we have to bring newer reactors online, safer reactors with new technology. Yet this administration will not invest in the necessary research. In November of 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency sued several coal-burning utilities claiming they made major modifications in their facilities without applying for new source review permits. Utilities maintain that the modifications fell within the routine maintenance provisions that had been provided and grandfathered into the Clean Air Act in 1990. What kind of a message does a central government send to the generating industries of this Nation? It tells them: We will not stick by the rules; we will not play by the rules; we are interested in politics at this moment, EPA politics, environmental politics; we are not interested in the pocketbooks of the consumer or, more important, the strength of the economy, even though the utility industries are providing ever cleaner sources of energy. EPA is discussing the notion that new-source review should include voluntary regulation of CO2, which is not a poisonous gas and which is not regulated under the Clean Air Act. President Clinton, don't you understand that you cannot keep beating this economy and our energy supplies over the head with these silly notions and expect the economy to remain productive? EPA recently changed the toxic release inventory, or the TRI, to require electric utilities to report chemical release data. The level at which reporting is required for mercury was lowered by an order of magnitude. In making these changes, EPA presented no studies or supporting rationale for why nearby communities should suddenly be concerned about such releases. Nevertheless, the reports will be widely published, thereby placing utilities at the top of the ``dirty'' facilities list. Again I say to the President: From where are you coming? What is the game? Because it appears you are attempting to game this issue. In 1993, EPA staff concluded that coal combustion waste, or fly ash, bottom ash, slag waste, or other combustion products, from electric utility generation do not warrant hazardous waste regulation. Yet, EPA at the behest of the environmental community seems to be about to overrule the staff recommendation. The story goes on and on. Here is the other message. Out in my area of the country, a very large portion of the electric generating capacity comes from hydropower. We dam up rivers and we put generators in the face of the dams and we generate large quantities of renewable clean electricity. Ever since Secretary Babbitt took office, he has been running around the country trying to find a dam to blow up. On numerous occasions, he said: I would like to blow up a really big dam. That is what the Secretary of Interior wants as his legacy. What kind of a legacy is that? I think it is called a cave man mentality legacy. Give everybody a candle and send them to a cave? Come on, Bruce Babbitt. You know the tremendous value of clean hydroelectric generation. Some 15 to 18 percent of our market blend today is hydro. In my area, it is much larger than that. Do we need to modify our dams to save fish? Do we need to make them operate more efficiently with new technology? Absolutely we do. And we are doing that. Already we are putting in new fish-friendly turbines at Bonneville Dam at the lower end of the Columbia River. We are going to work our way up the Columbia-Snake Rivers system and that marvelous hydro facility that fuels the States of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. No, Mr. Babbitt, we ``ain't'' going to blow up any really big dams. It is going to be kind of refreshing when that man leaves office to leave that silly mentality by the wayside. Technology? Yes, you bet. Bring on the new technology. But shouldn't we be encouraging clean fuel, renewable resource technology of the kind that is so abundant in the West today? I could talk a good deal more about this, but what I hope we accomplish is a reduction in the overall fuel cost of this country by eliminating the 4.3-cent Gore tax. That is right, that is Al Gore's tax. He is the one who sat in the Chair and broke the tie and caused the tax to become law. I want him to get the credit for raising the cost of energy in this country by that vote. Here is something else I want to close with today that is added frustration as to why this country finds itself increasingly in an energy dilemma. The Clinton-Gore administration embraces the Kyoto Protocol. What is the Kyoto Protocol? It is the misguided result of concern by scientists around the world--and by all of us--that our world may be getting warmer as a result of the generation of greenhouse gases. We all know that we have phenomenal long-term cycles in our country of warming and cooling. Once upon a time ago, there was an ice age. Prior to that, there was a warm period. Those 5,000- to 10,000-year cycles are very evident throughout geologic time. We know, as a fact, we get warmer. We know, as a fact, we get colder. Right now we are getting warmer. The question is, Does the presence of man on the globe and what we are doing to our climate cause us to get warmer or does it cause us to get a little warmer under a normal warming cycle? We don't know that yet. Yet this administration, in the absence of science, and in the full-blown presentation of world environmental politics, said: Let me tell you what we are going to do. We are going to put all kinds of restrictions on the United States and other developed nations. We are going to tax the use of hydrocarbons. We want those lessened in their use. To do that, we are going to drive up the cost. Al Gore thinks the internal combustion engine is a really bad idea. He's said so on numerous occasions. But what they did not recognize was the double kind of impact that would result from driving up the costs through taxes and limiting production at a time when the world was not ready to shift away from conventional forms of energy. The Kyoto Protocol would require the United States to vastly reduce the use of oil, natural gas and coal, and achieve emission reduction standards when, frankly, the rest of the world would not have to play--or at least the rest of the newly developing world that will be the largest generators of greenhouse gases. Thank goodness this Senate, in July of 1997, stood up, in a very bipartisan way, and said: No, Mr. President. No, Mr. Vice President. Your idea and the protocol is wrongheaded. We are going to stand together as a nation. More importantly, we are going to convince the rest of the world to go with us. If we are going to develop this kind of policy, we will all share equally. What we ought to be doing, with our tremendous talents, is developing the technology for the rest of the world to use to clean up their air and to clean up their water. We should not ask them to sacrifice. We should not ask the people of developing nations to live with less than we have simply because we do not want them to use their resources for the purpose of advancing their economies. Yet that is exactly what this President and this Vice President have said by the proposal of and the endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. Our Senate said no, on a vote of 95-0. Thank goodness we did. It had a chilling effect. In fact, I have not heard Al Gore mention Kyoto once in the last 6 months. Why? Because he knows he has created a tremendous liability for himself politically, when the American public really understands what would have happened if the protocol had become law, and those kinds of standards and those kinds of taxes had been placed on the American consumer on the eve of a dramatic runup in the cost of crude oil that has resulted from our OPEC neighbors getting their political act together. We will be back next week. Stay tuned. On Monday of this coming week, on the 27th, the OPEC nations meet. Bill Richardson has been running around, all over the world, with his tin cup, begging them to turn on the oil. They turned them off 6, 8 months ago--or turned them down by several millions of barrels of production a day. They may open them a little bit. But my guess is, their goal is to keep crude oil prices well above $20 a barrel, which means the price at the pump will remain high. It may come down some this summer--and I hope it does. I hope we can jawbone them. I hope we can convince them, through good foreign policy, that wise economic policy dictates that they ought to increase production. Yesterday, the House spoke very clearly. It said to the OPEC nations: If we are going to provide for your defense, as we have in the past, maybe you need to help us provide for some of our energy needs. All of that is a part, in combination, of what we ought to be involved in and what we ought to be talking about. I think our consumers would expect nothing less of us because, clearly, energy policy is a Government responsibility in this country, especially if there is policy that is negative in its impact on the ability of the private sector to produce an abundant source of low-cost energy to the consuming public. This is an issue that will not go away because every day, when the consumer goes to the gas pump, and sticks his or her credit card in it, and pulls out 10, 12, 15, 20 gallons of gas, they are going to feel the impact. If you go out to buy new carpeting, if you go out, as a farmer, to buy pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides--all with a hydrocarbon base--you are going to find out that this runup in cost is having a dramatic impact on the economy and, ultimately, could have an impact on the lifestyle of all American citizens. We must act. I hope we act both with short-term and long-term policy that is sensible, environmentally sound, but recognizes that energy abundance in this country has been the key to our tremendous economic successes down through the decades. With that, I yield the floor.