John Carter

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. I must insist upon my point of order.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. I rise today in support of the fiscal year 2012 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act. This bill cuts $1.1 billion from last year's level and $3 billion from the President's request while still providing the resources needed to ensure that our borders are safe and secure and our homeland is safe and secure. All frontline defenders, including the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Coast Guard, military personnel, and Secret Service agents are fully funded. In fact, this measure substantially increases funding for many of these frontline defenders over the President's budget request while eliminating waste in other areas. It ensures our borders will be secure by providing both CBP and ICE with all necessary resources. It ensures our homeland will be protected from terrorist threats by giving TSA additional funds to conduct air cargo screening. It ensures that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, will have the flexibility of funds needed to respond to disasters, including the floods along the Mississippi River Valley, the tornados that have swept the Nation, and the ongoing wildfires that have devastated my home State of Texas. This bill also includes 169 oversight actions which will force the Obama administration to be accountable to the Congress and ultimately to the people of the United States. At a time when China owns $1.1 trillion of our publicly held debt, we must make hard choices on spending here in D.C. during these difficult economic times, just like families across this country do every day. I would like to commend Chairman Aderholt and Ranking Member Price for their leadership on this critical measure, and I urge my colleagues to join in supporting this very important bill.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. CARTER. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Madam Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. CARTER. Madam Chair, this is an amendment to extend whistleblower protection for American soldiers for the protection of American soldiers both at home and abroad. The bottom line is this amendment would extend protected communications covered under the Whistleblower Protection Acts to include ideologically based threats or actions; that if a servicemember reasonably believes that the actions of an individual could be counterproductive or detrimental to the United States' interests or security, they would be able to report these under the Whistleblower Protection Act. The Fort Hood shooting, which unfortunately was in my district, taught us that servicemembers are becoming increasingly afraid to report questionable incidents for fear of reprisal. Despite numerous red flags concerning Major Hasan and his dangerous tendencies, no negative personnel action was taken. He was promoted to the rank of major, and he was allowed to provide psychological counseling to battle weary soldiers. Our military personnel asserted that because of Major Hasan's Muslim heritage, that they feared adverse actions would be held against them and that they would be accused of profiling Major Hasan. Coming forward about potentially dangerous situations should never be considered profiling. While no one should be targeted solely on their religious affiliation, all servicemembers should feel free and safe to report dangerous behavior. And I will tell you that it was reported to me by more than a dozen soldiers in the training command and in medical school that this dangerous behavior was discussed constantly, and they were all concerned about reporting it. The Whistleblower Act already provides for guidance on what should be reported in terms of violations. It extends to military personnel protection from negative reporting. It protects the servicemembers on their ability to communicate dangerous behavior, mismanagement of funds, abuses of authority to Congress and to an IG or to the chain of command. This amendment would further extend protective communications to include ``ideologically based threats or actions'' that the reporting servicemember ``reasonably believes could be counterproductive or detrimental to the United States' interests or security.'' This amendment does not target any specific belief, religious or otherwise. This amendment seeks to instill the confidence necessary to protect our Armed Forces from further attacks from within. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CARTER. I would point out to my friend that 13 American soldiers died, 13 people died, 12 American soldiers and one civilian, and 43 people were wounded by an individual whose ideological preaching was well-known in the medical community, in the school community where he studied and at Fort Hood. To almost every soldier that he talked to, he preached his ideological belief about the wrongness of the American action. But it's clear that each of these servicemembers were concerned enough to talk to other servicemembers about it, but they were afraid to go up the chain of command strictly because of the nature of the environment we function in today, and we need to make it clear to them. It doesn't matter what the ideological bent of anybody is, if they are talking about things that are detrimental to the American serviceman, they have a duty to report that--and know that the Whistleblower Act will protect them. They knew about the Whistleblower Act, but they were afraid it would not protect them because there happened to be a politically correct, if you will, faction in this whole issue that they were afraid would change the view of their superior officers on their promotions. I don't like the idea of having to do it this way either, but I also don't like the idea that there are dozens--and I would say more than dozens of American soldiers--that could have prevented this if they had stepped forward. And all of them feared, because of the environment of political correctness that seems to be rampant in this country, they were afraid to come forward. Therefore, I think we ought to clarify it, and I don't care who you are or what your background is: If you are talking something that's detrimental to the American soldier or his mission, it has to be reported, and there will not be sanctions against you. That's the purpose of my amendment.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I agree with you 100 percent. It's the same thing when we took over this House floor 3 years ago in the dark because they turned out the lights on us, turned off the mics, and we talked for about 2 or 3 weeks on, what we want is all of the above. We are for every energy resource that is available, but we want that energy resource to be as available as possible to be competitive in the market. I mean, everybody's got their own little bailiwick. And corn farmers love ethanol, but it's got to compete. Sun has to compete. Wind has to compete. They invariably call us oil and gas guys ``anti-wind people.'' Wrong. Texas has the largest wind farm in the United States. There's no State with more of those wind turbines than the State of Texas because out in the West, the wind blows all the time. It's like a gold mine for wind. What do you think Boone Pickens is talking about when he's talking about all that wind energy out there? And his idea of putting natural gas-burning cars on the road is a good idea. I support it. Because when we hear that now with the discovery of shale gas and the ability--we just started to tap it. It is just a small part of the future. By the way, it would be real interesting to find out if some of our colleagues that are so opposed to natural gas, if they knocked on his door and said, Sir, we would like to talk to you about making a lease for a share of the profits on drilling for natural gas on your property. And I wonder if they would say, Oh, no. I wouldn't take that, those hundreds of thousands of dollars that I might make from you developing that resource. No, I don't believe in that stuff. I don't think so. Whenever you produce wealth, wealth enhances a nation. And your natural resources are a part of the wealth of the Nation, always have been and, my friend, they always will be.

Mr. CARTER. Within the last 3 years, I have met two different individuals--one of them very recently--who have a scientific plan to refine garbage at your garbage dump, solid waste, normal throw-it-in- your-garbage-can stuff, go out there and, through a multiple process, produce gasoline and capture all the CO2 to be used--in Texas we take CO2, put it back down in the ground in old wells, and reenergize those wells to bring more oil to the surface. And the leftovers, after this burning process to create the gasoline, refine the gasoline out of garbage, leaves an ash that is good to plow into fields in certain parts of the country to refurbish the fields. That's the kind of thinking we want. That's great. That's a good idea. And because we're talking energy and we're having energy policy, those good ideas come to the fore. That's what we want. That's how we're going to solve this problem. But we're not going to solve it by shutting down what we have now in hopes that there is going to be this miraculous overnight discovery that's just going to make everything great, like we find some kryptonite or something, and it runs the whole country. Wrong. It ain't going to happen. This is a frustrating time for those of us that are in energy- producing States because we have people that literally don't like the production of energy, but they complain about the production of energy. They want to tax it. By the way, the majors, the big boys, they don't get subsidies on their stuff. That's for wildcatters. They drilled, but most of their production is overseas. And we, to some extent, by having bad energy policy in the United States, we have driven people to the benefit of other people in the world. Nobody thought about drilling off the coast of Australia or drilling off the coast of Indonesia, which is a very unstable volcanic area over there, until they were kind of pushed out of American waters. And then they started looking in places like the North Sea, off the coast of Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia; and these are now major production fields. They've benefited from our lack of foresight under some administrations to continue to enhance our native industry. More power to them. That's good for them. But we have it here too. I still think there is plenty of oil in Alaska and lots of it. And they haven't even started looking for natural gas up there. They probably have got as much natural gas as anybody. There's an international thing going on; most people don't even know about it. I learned it from the Coast Guard. Because of the receding ice from the North Pole--and I won't get off into global warming here today, if that's it--whatever it is, because it's receding, there is now a waterway. There is now a northwest passage across the top of North America. You can sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Also, if that water stays open, you can drill for natural resources there. The unclaimed international water gets claimed by who puts the most activity in that water. And one of the questions is, the Russians are pouring in ships and trawlers and other things into that whole area up there, the part we claim is so much. The Canadians claim so much. But there is a lot more that seems to be developing. And why are they after it? It's not for fish, my friend. It's oil and gas. I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for joining me.

Mr. CARTER. Because of the burdensome rules we've come up with and the fact that we can't permit them. So they look at refining capacity and they look at the other issue, and they say, wait a minute, if there's not a shortage now, there's going to be, and they run the price up. Then when that opens up, hey, the market gets back to normal again, and every time that happens the driving public of America suffers. They're suffering today, and they're suffering on top of the highest unemployment, longest period of high unemployment in modern times just about. This is one of those what we call kitchen-table issues, when the family gathers around the kitchen table to figure out how they're going to make the budget work especially if Mom or Dad are laid off. One of the things they're looking at is the cost of that fuel, fuel to heat their homes or cool their homes. Down where we come from, we want it cool. They look to see how much it's going to cost them to get to and from school, to and from work, how they're going to conserve energy, maybe they're going to car pool. They're making these kinds of decisions, and yet the government seems to be making these gigantic decisions to shut off supply and then wonder why we have an energy crisis in this country. This is not rocket science. This is the law of supply and demand. We have the biggest demand. If we can't meet our demand, we've got to go to foreign oil. If there's a fight in Libya, we may not use much of that foreign oil right now, but somebody else does; and if it's at risk, then they are going into another market to get their oil and that makes our market go up. It's all worldwide market in our oil and gas. I don't understand why people think they're gouging you. They're making excessive profits, and I understand the payment on CEOs and I am not defending any payment on CEOs in any industry. It's not just the oil industry that pays big bucks for CEOs; but if you look at the history of the oil and gas industry, their percentage on investment is lower than most average manufacturing facilities, somewhere between 6 and 8 percent return on their investment. And you say what investments? Well, I think I said earlier, those offshore drilling rigs that drill in the Gulf of Mexico and now have all been moved off the coast of Africa, Indonesia and off the coast of Brazil, those rigs cost $1 billion, and they can cost you operational-wise in a 24-day period almost $1 million to operate. They are expensive. And if you hit nothing but dust when you get down to the bottom of that well, you have blown a whole lot of money out the door, and that's just lost. Then you drill the next well to try to get it back. We've gotten better at looking for it and finding it, but it's still a gambler's business when you get down to it. But this is caused by the government to a great extent. You can't create an environment of uncertainty in any market, I don't care what the market is. If you create the idea of uncertainty, it affects the market. It also affects the psyche of the people, and that's kind of what I don't think they're getting. So their solution is to tax it. If it moves, tax it. The problem with that is do you really think the CEO of Exxon is going to pay the taxes if we increase taxes on the oil and gas industry? No. You and I are going to pay those taxes when we fill up our tank. If you go and ask the question, they will tell you at your local filling station. They used to publish it in Texas on the pump how much of a gallon of gasoline was taxed. It's a whole bunch. Direct and indirect tax make up a large amount of the cost of gasoline, always have, and I come from a time where we used to have 19 cents a gallon gasoline in Texas. Try that on for size. I could go buy a dollar's worth of gas and drive all week. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. CARTER. If my friend would yield just for a minute, what is the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania right now?

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time for just a moment, a lot of people don't realize that, when you're talking about the production of oil and gas, there is much more to putting up a rig on a piece of land than just driving out there and putting it up. You build roads. You build fences. Road builders don't drill a single drop of oil or gas, but they build the roads. That's a job. That's multiple jobs. In Louisiana, in the marshy parts of the country, they used to build wooden roads to get out to these rigs. All this creates jobs for all the side industries of the oil and gas industry. Just like any other industry, there are side industries that feed the big industry, and they all create jobs in a country that dropped below 9 percent but has now jumped back this month above 9 percent again, after one of the longest stretches of high unemployment in the country. I'll just use my family as an example. My daddy was born in Kentucky, and my mother was born in Tennessee. In fact, where my mother lived may be pretty close to being underwater right now. In fact, she lived right close to the river in Tennessee. In the Great Depression, there were no jobs in their part of the country, but there were jobs in Texas because of the oil industry, so they both came down to Texas to get jobs in the oil industry. Now, they both ended up in the oil industry, but they started out where my mother was in the secretarial pool for business and my daddy was a teacher, an accounting professor; but they got jobs in the oil business, and it was always good to our family. I don't lay any bones about it. I was raised in an oil and gas family, and my dad was a gas man. I've seen it make our State prosper, and of all the producing States that I've ever visited, they've prospered. Look at what it has done for Alaska. Look at Louisiana. Look at New Mexico and Oklahoma and what it has done for those States and those economies. To take and target an industry and go after that industry the way this administration has done--but not only that, I don't even understand the Yucca Mountain deal. I don't understand the no uranium leases. Now the President, in a couple of speeches, said we'll switch to nuclear. I think that may have changed now since the Japan disaster. But we can't do it without uranium. There's a new process, you maybe could, but that's a different story. Historically, you can't do without uranium. You've got to have the location to store spent fuel. Americans need to wake up and say, wait a minute, we need energy. I just was talking to people today that said the EPA was going to try their best to shut down wood-burning fireplaces. My gosh, I mean, how are we going to get warm? You guys up north, how are you going to get warm in the winter time if you're going to take away your coal and your natural gas and the price of oil is going to be through the roof and you can't afford that? You can't even burn wood in your own fireplace? What's wrong with this picture?

Mr. CARTER. The great surge in the cost of gasoline that we were just talking about, that surge was the result of basically two things. You named one of them. The other one was they had a small fire in an Illinois refinery, but the speculators look and they say, we're fighting capacity shutdown and we have a limited refining capacity because we haven't built a major refinery in this country in 25 years.

Mr. CARTER. It's because of those new jobs that were created by this marvelous find in Pennsylvania.

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, with all the issues that we deal with here in Congress, the American people deal with other issues at home. Some of those issues are connected, and some of those issues they don't see the connection. But they do wonder about something. They wonder about the fact that gas prices in some places in this country January of 2009, when the President came into office, were unleaded $1.32 a gallon; mid-range, $1.42; super range, $1.52. Gas prices in April of 2011 over here somewhere in this country, looks like it could be Texas because our numbers are about there, $3.99 for regular, $4.09 for mid-range, $4.19 for the super, the ethyl, as they used to say in the old days. So since the President has taken office, something that affects every life in this country: the price of gasoline. Because whether we like it or not, whether we come up with alternative energy sources or not, whether we have new ideas about high-speed trains, subways, elevated railways, buses, the majority of the people in the United States move around by automobile; and the majority of those automobiles are driven using one of two fuels, either gasoline or diesel. Now, neither one of these charts shows a diesel price; but amazingly enough, back when I was a youngster, diesel was the cheapest fuel we had available. But diesel prices are no longer cheap. Diesel prices are competitive, usually around the mid-range price of gasoline. But there are people who have good reasons to drive diesel vehicles. And so whether we like it or not, whether it fits our congressional legislative program or not to have gasoline and diesel being the fuel that moves people around this country, it is a fact. And you may think otherwise all you wish, but it is a fact. There are no wind cars where you hook a sail up and hope that the wind is blowing towards Washington, DC tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock so everybody can get to work. It is not happening. So everybody gets up and everybody goes out, and most everybody, unless they have one of the brand-new electric cars, starts their vehicle with gasoline or maybe diesel, and they go to work or they go on vacation or they travel to see their relatives, or whatever the purpose of their trip. So let's be frank. Until we come up with alternative sources that move people from point A to point B in the United States of America, we are bound to gasoline and diesel. And in the 3-year track record of this administration, we have seen, I understand it is reported, the highest gasoline prices in the history of the country, even higher than the famous Jimmy Carter days when Jimmy Carter had us waiting in long, long ration lines and paying extremely high gasoline prices. At $4 a gallon, I think we topped even the numbers that came under President Carter almost two decades ago. So here we are, we have gone full circle in a Democrat Presidency, and here we are back with the issue of gas prices. Now, why are gas prices so important to people? Because it is how we get where we are going to go. If you are taking your kid to soccer game or to baseball practice or football practice or lacrosse up here in the East, or track and field, or whatever your young people are doing, you have got to get them there; and in most instances they can't walk and they can't ride a bike. They have to go in an automobile. And when you move them from game to game, they go in automobiles. And when they go to take their tests for entry into college, they have to go to an independent location. Many times they travel there by automobile. You have to pick up the laundry. You have to pick up the groceries. You have to do a million things; get the kids to school on time, get the kids home from school, take the wife out on a date. Unmarried people are dating, and that's part of their date costs. And at a time when we have some of the highest unemployment in modern times, we bumped back above 9 percent, I understand now, so there is a lot of people out of work. Those people who are out of work, some of them are drawing unemployment, and some of them are just trying to figure out a way to make do until they can find another job. And to have a roughly $3 increase per gallon in the cost of their fuel to move them around the country, people feel that immediately. It is literally sticker shock to go in and start filling up your tank. I have a fairly small tank in my car. My wife's got a little larger tank, so more of a sticker shock. I drive a hybrid, so I'm getting some pretty good gas mileage. But still, I watch that thing go up to $54 to fill up my tank and watch my wife's go up to $65, $70 to drive. I have a daughter who is working part time and going to college. Sometimes she has to go for testing; in fact, today she went for testing in a town about 40 miles from where we live to take a test, and it is a full tank of gasoline up there and back for her in the little car she drives, or almost. And she works hard. She will work all day and maybe 2 days at her job to pay for a tank of gasoline. So it immediately affects your budget. But it is not just the cost of this fuel to the individual. It is the fact that it is killing the recovery in this country, this new increase in gasoline costs and fuel costs. Now, we move goods from one place to the other. In Texas we are blessed to have the Rio Grande Valley where we produce wonderful fruits and vegetables, and we compete around the country with our fruit and vegetable crops. But the prices of those things are going up, and they are going up very quickly. All of a sudden, you are seeing tomatoes are $2.50 a pound. Now, you say how do you know this? One of the great questions they always like to ask a Congressman is, what is the price of bread in your town? What is the price of milk? Because they think that we don't know. Well, I can assure you, my wife will back me up on this, I have shopped for our family in the grocery store since the day I got married, and I continue to do so. We live away from town, and usually I would be leaving my work in town and it was easier for me to grab the groceries than for my wife to drive 8 or 10 miles from where we live out in the country into town. So I can honestly say I watched avocados go from $1 apiece to $2 apiece in 2 days in Round Rock, Texas, at one of the better stores where the prices are kept low where we regularly shop. I'm fortunate enough to have a job, but there are people who don't. And avocados may be a luxury to some people. That's just an example that I noticed because it shocked me to see them double in price in a 48-hour period, and so I thought about it. But that's not all. The price of everything is going up. Now, why is that? Transportation costs. We move our products to market and we move our products to wholesalers, retailers, and it all takes transportation, and that transportation has now almost trebled in costs in a very short period of time. People say, why? We hear from our Democrat colleagues here in the Congress, the ``why'' is the evil oil companies, the evil major oil companies, and they name names; ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron. I will not use all the names. There are a bunch of them, and they get used every day in this Congress. They are making horrendous profits and they are the cause of gasoline going up. But the price of oil is going up, and that is part of why prices go up. The thing is we don't know. We all speculate to some extent. But I think it is a pretty easy, commonsense position to take that the more supply we have with the demand, and we are the demand capital of the world on burning gasoline and diesel. We outshine anybody else on the face of this globe in the use of those products. And we have relatively cheap prices as compared to the other countries, especially those countries that have no production. They can get very expensive very quickly. Until very recently, there was no oil or gas at all to amount to anything in what we now call Western Europe. Today, there is. They have found it offshore. They have found it on the land in Holland, in Norway and other places. Norway is, I think, something like the third biggest producer of offshore oil in the world now. They are doing extremely well and running their economy in a very frugal manner. They are very smart people and they should be commended. We should do so well. I happened to go to Norway with Chairman Obey with the Appropriations Committee when the Democrats were in control, and we went to see the offshore production in Norway. They are doing a good job. But the prices for gasoline are probably three times as much in Europe as they are here, and in other places even more. But it makes sense that the law of supply and demand always works. It's kind of like gravity, the law of gravity. If you drop something, it's going down. Well, the law of supply and demand has been proven over and over and over to be what drives the market for anything. So if we have the opportunity to increase our supply in this country and we have the demand, then why wouldn't that have an effect on our price? I think that is a reasonable thing to talk about. The Obama administration has, I would say, a dismal record in assisting us in finding oil and gas. Of course, we are all familiar with the fact that we had a bad oil leak in the gulf, and nobody in any way is saying that was good. In fact, that was a terrible, terrible thing to our environment, a terrible thing that panicked the country to some extent, especially some of the southern States that border on the Gulf of Mexico, and it messed up some beaches pretty nastily and probably had some effect on the wildlife and sea life in the ocean. We will probably be learning in the future how much. As a result of that, we put a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But oil and gas is found in the Gulf of Mexico, especially oil, but to some extent natural gas, in abundance in some places, and many of those places are deepwater. Deepwater drilling is extremely expensive. The rigs are $1 billion, with a ``b,'' piece of equipment, and the cost of drilling those wells is very expensive. But they are successful. We have had wells, even the BP well that blew out was putting out a phenomenal amount of oil. If that had been sealed and that production had been put into play, it would have had an effect on the availability of oil in the United States. Just that one well would have had an effect. But they put a moratorium on that, and the decrease in oil production from this decreased the amount of production by 360,000 barrels of domestic oil per day. The Obama administration has leased less offshore and onshore acres for energy production than any other President since Ronald Reagan. In 2009, the administration indefinitely delayed leases for oil shale in the West, which kept these resources off limits. Over 2 trillion barrels of oil from oil shale are currently sitting idle due to these delays. The Obama administration has kept all new offshore exploration off limits until at least 2017. That is over 80 billion barrels of oil in the Atlantic, Pacific, Alaska and Gulf of Mexico. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which could be transporting 2.2 million barrels of oil per day, is running at less than one-third capacity because companies cannot get permits to produce oil in Alaska. The administration has essentially shut down production in the State by withholding the necessary permits. The Keystone XL pipeline, which could eventually bring 1.5 million barrels of oil per day to America, is being prevented by endless delays by the State Department. America is the third largest oil producing Nation in the world. The above actions are a clear sign to the world that we are closed for business. If we are closed for business and we are number three, then how much more valuable does that make the product that number two and number one and those behind us are producing, therefore driving up the cost of that product? The less you have in the market, the higher the cost, if there is a demand, and there is clearly a demand worldwide. In fact, one of the things you are seeing on the price of oil is the fact that at one time we were the biggest market by far. In fact, the Europeans really didn't even come close to being the market for oil and gas that the United States is. But today these booming new upcoming economies, China, the fastest growing economy in the world right now, do you think they can have that fast growing economy without energy? Of course not. Energy is the driving force behind manufacturing. It is the driving force behind development of a nation. Those folks need to get where they need to go just like everybody else does, and they have many of the innovative things that America is starting to talk about today. The Secretary of Transportation has just let out a bunch of money to build some high-speed rail. China already has high-speed rail, the highest speed rail in the world. They have speeds of up to 250 miles per hour. We are not even going to come close to that on our rail projects. But they are still now the biggest competitor for trying to make forward purchases. They are trying to buy future purchases so they can ensure they have the fuel they need in the future to meet their demands. We have a product that we sell for that. They are called ``futures'' on the exchange, and you are buying oil to be delivered at a later time at a set price. And when futures become in big demand and when the price of oil in the future is looked at by countries and by industries to make these purchases ahead of time to get cheaper fuel to run your industry, then it drives up the costs in the market. The market goes up. Something is in demand and the market needs it not only today, but sees a projection to need it in 6 months, in a year, in 5 years and in 10 years, and they are willing to pay for the right to purchase it at a certain price, the prices go up. That's the market. So I think that, first off, we're not ever going to get anywhere if we don't have an energy plan that is about all energy in the United States. And I would argue that with the use of the regulations and the failure to lease and the failure to lift moratoriums, and even after you lift moratoriums, failure to give drilling permits, all the things that this administration has done, it has been an anti-oil and gas industry--and I'm sure coal, also--and anti-hydrocarbon administration. They don't deny that at all. They are anti-hydrocarbons. They don't like coal. They don't like oil and gas. They are opposed to them. And through regulations and through failure to do the necessary leasing they are keeping closed natural resources that are available to Americans. And, hey, let's get this straight. Before the Middle East; before Russia, and the Soviet Union prior to that; before offshore Norway, before onshore Holland; before the North Sea; before the Gulf of Mexico; before Indonesia; before all these places where we now produce oil and gas, we started out by producing oil in Pennsylvania. We later made a huge gigantic oil find in Texas. And Texas is now defined by oil and gas by many. We are the pioneers of oil and gas in the world, the United States of America. All the improvements in drilling procedures and in closing down wells, in saving oil without blowouts, in fighting oil fires, in any category you can come up with to do with oil and gas, the United States of America has led, as it usually leads in all things, but it has led in the oil and gas industry. We are the experts. In fact, when we went to Norway and asked the Norwegians what they would do if they had a blowout like the British Petroleum blowout, they said, We'd call the experts; the people in the United States. The companies that are drilling the wells, they're the experts, not us. Then why all of a sudden in this administration have we decided that a major industry in this country is of no consequences because you want to change the way the American people get around, and you want to change the way we do business in this country? So you hold votes on the floor of this House, whether it's something called cap-and-trade, and it fails--passes the House; can't get through the Senate. Dies. So you do it with regulations. Just get the regulators to shut them down and that will do just as good as passing cap-and-trade. You want to know what this does to you folks that are looking for a job. Well, Texas, at one time in the very near past, within the last year, had the lowest unemployment in the Nation until we shut down drilling offshore and along the gulf coast, and we lost tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people, that are connected with this industry. And it's not just the greasy drillers that drill the oil wells. It's the food service people that bring it out there. It's the helicopter people that transport people. It's the shipping industry that transports the fuel. It's the pipeline industry that puts it in the pipeline and delivers it. It's the refining industry. All of these people are affected when you shut down the local source, which is what this administration has done. And then we say to ourselves, Why has the price of gasoline gone up? Well, it seems to me part of the problem has got to be an administration hostile to this very industry. It's awfully hard when the regulators, EPA and others, have painted a target on your back to prevent you from producing. We've made a phenomenal natural gas find in this country. We have found, which if I had told you this 4 years ago that we would bust up rocks and find natural gas, you would say that I needed to have some serious psychiatric examination, because it makes no sense to anybody that you can bust up rocks and produce natural gas. But we've discovered shale gas. And now, although we've got shale gas in Texas-- and we're mighty proud of it--this shale gas now touches multiple States in this country. It goes right up through the South, right up through the Midwest, right up into Pennsylvania, where they have already done some serious shale oil work. And I know there's some up in New York State, although they don't seem to be interested in producing it. So a belt of product stretches all the way across our country. Natural gas. And yet immediately there's some people who are telling you, I can smell that gas in my water well. Well, I've got news for you. Natural gas doesn't smell. So if you smell that gas in your water well, you've got a city gas line leaking someplace in your house, because you put the smell in the gas when you sell it to the retail customer so you can smell the gas if it's leaking in your house. But there's no smell of natural gas. But people have come up here to Congress and said, They drilled a well right around the corner from me, and now my water smells like natural gas. It doesn't make sense because natural gas doesn't smell. I can tell you that from personal experience it does not smell because I have dug up the machine on a job I had that smells. That was one of the nastiest jobs I ever had, because you got that smell all over you, but that's a different story. We need an energy policy that works, not an anti-energy policy. Let's look at an anti-energy policy. Year One, 2009. February 4, 77 Utah oil and gas lease areas withdrawn from development. One of the things we talk about is Alaska, we talk about Texas, we talk now about Pennsylvania, we talk about many other places where there is now production. But what we don't talk about because we haven't been able to get in there to do it is the basin which Utah sits in the middle of, but it goes up into Idaho, it goes over into Wyoming, it goes up into Montana. There's a large potential field and discovered field in North Dakota of oil and gas. But the Utah oil leases were withdrawn from development. February 10. These were all actions of the administration. Offshore leasing plan delayed for 6 months. February 25, shale oil research and development leases delayed in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. March 30, 3 million acres of Federal land removed from energy production by Omnibus Public Lands Management Act passed by a Democratic Congress. June 29, 29 million acres of Federal land removed from solar energy development plans, leaving just 670,000 solar acres. So even the so-called clean energy is having roadblocks by this administration. Uranium mining blocked for 2 years on 1 million acres of land in Arizona. That was in July. August, 24,000 acres in Wyoming oil and gas leases withdrawn. September, new Outer Continental Shelf lease plan postponed until 2012. October, 60 of the 77 Utah oil and gas leases permanently canceled. November, Obama administration found to have approved the least oil and gas leases annually ever recorded in the United States history. So in the first year of this administration they started out with a clear policy of getting rid of our energy, not going after our energy. Even solar. Year Two. January 6, new regs issued to restrict oil and gas development on Federal lands. January 26, Virginia offshore leases delayed. January 28, restricted shale oil lease terms, cutting industry offers 85 percent. February 1, $40 billion in oil and gas industry tax and fee increases introduced in FY 2011 budget proposal. February 17, the administration unilaterally shuts down Yucca Mountain, the Nation's only repository for spent nuclear fuel, jeopardizing the future of nuclear energy. That's not oil and gas, but that's energy. March 12, 61 Montana oil leases withdrawn. March 31, majority of Outer Continental Shelf closed to future production. May 6, ban on all gulf drilling over BP spill. July 12, President defies Federal court order overturning the gulf drilling ban. October 12, the President finally says gulf drilling ban lifted, but refuses to issue new permits, keeping a de facto ban in place in contempt of Federal court. November 18, Interior Department plans no new gulf leases until 2012. December 1, the administration reinstates the illegal gulf drilling ban to introduce the entire Pacific/Atlantic Coasts, Eastern Gulf, and parts of Alaska. So they reinstated the ban to cover the whole coasts of the country. Oh, yes, we've got one more here--year three, 2011. January 14, revoked West Virginia coal mine permit, costing 250 American jobs. February 2, a Federal judge finds Interior Department in contempt of court over de facto drilling ban. February 15, announced further delays to U.S. oil shale production by deciding to re-review the current rules for commercial oil shale leasing. February 28, continued the de facto drilling ban while issuing a token deepwater permit. March 4, the President appealed the Federal court ruling to issue stalled deepwater permits. When I saw that shale oil, I saw my friend from Pennsylvania stand up. I yield to my good friend whatever time he may need to talk about the great things that are happening in Pennsylvania.

Mr. CARTER

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

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman. And reclaiming my time, as an expansion of what you just said, let's talk about some of the things that the Democrats in this House and the President have talked about as the solution to the high price of gasoline. And that is they're going to cut the tax breaks for the oil producers, and they named Chevron, Exxon, BP--what they call the majors. They're going to cut those tax breaks. Therefore, they're going to make sure that those billion dollars worth of profit are not going to be there because they're going to reduce these tax breaks they have given, which they say are billions of dollars. Well, let's just stop and look at what these tax breaks are about. All the oil and gas produced offshore in other countries is not subject to American taxation, and that's where the majors now produce somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all their production. In fact, those drilling inside the continental United States, almost all those people drilling shallow water offshore and a few of those people drilling deepwater offshore, none of those people are majors. They're all from, as you were talking about, the entrepreneurial spirit of the wildcatter and the small producer who is going out in an attempt to expand domestic production. By the way, they're the only ones that take advantage of any tax breaks that are there, and they're not billion dollar companies that we use as examples. So the cuts, the way I understand it, are not even going to affect ExxonMobil or affect Chevron or these big producers from overseas because those tax breaks don't pertain to that production. They only pertain to production in the United States. And those are done by independents. Almost the vast majority are done by independents. So the only people that get hurt again by the tax policies of the Barack Obama administration are the small business men. Just like everything we see coming down the pike at us seems to be targeted at the small, independent entrepreneur who is trying to make it go. So don't be misled to think that the majors, where we see all these massive amounts of money they're making, are the targets that are really going to be hit by the shot that our colleagues on the Democrat side of the aisle have proposed that we should take in getting rid of, as they call them, subsidies, which are really tax breaks, to the producers of domestic production. By the way, all production offshore, they've shut it down. Just recently, Shell Oil Company, after dumping a couple of billion dollars in an offshore operation off the coast of Alaska, pulled out completely because, before they could even get started, after dumping a couple of billion dollars, with a ``b,'' into that production field out there, the EPA came in with more and more stops and stop orders and other things, and they finally threw up their hands and said, We're going someplace else. We're not drilling in American waters anymore. It's not worth it. So right now where we know we have production for oil and gas, we have an administration that is fighting that production tooth and nail. This has cost jobs in the industry, as we pointed out. This has made our dependence on foreign oil bigger. Here's the skyrocketing price of the Obama administration since he's been in office. Here is another chart that shows you the offshore field production of crude oil, thousands of barrels per day. And look at this. This is where that production was: 250,000 barrels up to 400,000 barrels; down again, and I guess that was in 1999 during the Clinton administration that it went down; and back up in the Bush administration. The end of the Bush administration, down to 100,000 barrels of offshore production today. From 400,000 to 100,000 since the Obama administration. Nobody can argue that the Obama administration is anything but violently opposed to the oil and gas industry. And they are doing everything they can to throw big roadblocks in front of production. Then you wonder why the speculators are saying the price of a barrel of oil is going up. Because they're speculating. Do you know how many millions of gallons of aviation fuel a company like American Airlines or United Airlines or Continental Airlines, any of these major airlines, burn every week? Do you know what they have to do in order to stay ahead of increasing prices on fuel? They have to speculate on futures on the cost of fuel. And I'm not blaming the airlines. There are plenty of other people that are speculating because they say, Let's see, what's going on in the world? We're finishing up a war in Iraq, which is one of the major producers, but it's been out of the market for years and is barely getting back in. We're sitting here with a moratorium on all the offshore domestic production. We're not opening up any Federal lands for production anywhere in this country. The Obama administration has shut down the leasing practices on any public lands. By the way, Texas is the only State in the Union that didn't turn their public lands over to the Federal Government. But the rest of the country, in areas like Idaho, Utah, we know there's production up there, up in Wyoming, up in Montana--all that stuff that the Canadians are now producing across the border, the fields on our side of the border are being curtailed by the administration. They just don't want to produce oil. They just want to buy it from foreign sources. And about these foreign sources, the people who study the market say, My gosh, Libya is not available anymore; Iraq's not available, and what happens if we've got no production at home? The market looks shaky. We better buy futures on oil. And guess what, the price goes up. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to say they see a shortage coming down the pike, that competing with India and China, two of the biggest competitors we've got for any kind of energy that's out there, and then we're going to sit here and we're not going to buy the chance to buy fuel at a cheaper price now than what it might be 6 months down the road? Of course, speculators are going to do that. Of course, industry is going to do that. So as my friend, Blake, was pointing out, the lack of production, the lack of faith in what this government is going to do to this industry, and the fear that the shutdown will be complete, it just sets up any situation for the price to go up. When the price goes up, then the price of gasoline goes up; and by the way, if you either add more taxes to the cost of the oil production or you take away the tax breaks for oil production, who do you think's going to pay that increase in cost for the oil industry? Well, I will tell you. It's going to be the guys and the gals that are filling their cars up with gasoline at the pump. To the extent that any business has an increase in cost of their production, they do the very best they can to pass that cost on to the consumer. That's the way any company whether it's steel, whether it's widgets, whether it's buggy whips, whatever it is that you do produce, if your cost goes up, the manufacturer passes on, to the extent that he can and still stay within the price limits that are set not by the government but by the demand of the consumer, then the price goes up. So you're not going to lower prices by taking away subsidies to the oil and gas industry. The only thing you can do is raise prices. They don't want more prices to discourage production. That's ridiculous. If you have the law of supply and demand and we've got a short supply and you are discouraging production, the price is going up. You learned that in the eighth grade, as Blake pointed out. This is not hard stuff. This is easy stuff to figure out. Sometimes I think some of these folks that don't understand the oil business, the only oil they know is what's on the end of their dipstick in the crank case. But the facts are this product is a major product of the modern society of the American public, and I think the American publics know it, and I don't think they're going to get fooled by demagoguery on these prices. Does my colleague wish to have more comments?

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, we just got off two weeks of working in our districts around this country. At least I held about 10 town hall meetings, and I am sure many of my colleagues held more. We talked about the debt, we talked about the deficit, but one of the things that almost every one of these town halls insisted upon talking about was the high price of gasoline. Let's start with this first exhibit we have here. This just gives the comparison of what the gas prices were somewhere in the United States, I can't tell where. January of 2009: Unleaded, $1.32; mid-range, $1.42; super, $1.52. Here is a picture taken in April of 2011: Regular, $3.99; mid-range, $4.09; the high powered stuff, $4.19 a gallon. Mr. Speaker, the only party that can be blamed for this, unfortunately, is the Democratic Party, through the leadership of Barack Obama, President of the United States, because a vicious combination of the Obama administration's moratorium on offshore drilling and the devaluation of the American dollar through the administration's quantitative easing have resulted in the highest seasonal gasoline prices in U.S. history. We have reached a point where if we don't pay attention, we are going to give up our ability to produce our own natural resources and be, as the President said to Brazil when he loaned them $2 billion or more, ``We will be glad to be good customers of yours when you find some oil out in the Gulf.'' Mr. Speaker, this is a broken energy policy. In fact, this is no energy policy at all. We are quite aware now that we have found substantial reserves that were unfound in the area of natural gas. In fact, there are those who report that the production of shale gas in the United States could result in us having enough natural gas to operate in this country for at least 100 to 150 years at present or projected usages, and yet we seem to have roadblocks thrown up in front of that production at every step. We had a deep water accident, a terrible deep water accident, in the Gulf of Mexico. The President and the Energy Department put down a moratorium on drilling in the gulf, both deep water and shallow water. Even though the shallow water, they had had no massive oil leaks in the shallow water, it was included. So the Gulf of Mexico, one of the largest potential oil and gas fields in the world, was shut down for American production. Not for Chinese production, not for Brazilian production, not for anybody else who had an ability to make a deal with Cuba to get a lease offshore to drill, but for American production. But he promised that after they got all of the cleanup done and after they examined what happened in the BP case, that they would lift the moratorium, and with a lot of outcry from the Gulf States, because for the first time, at least in the State of Texas, until the moratorium on drilling in the gulf, the State of Texas was looking pretty good on unemployment. We were still in the 6 percent range as the rest of the Nation was in the 10 percent range. But when you shut down potentially 250,000 jobs that relate to the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, I don't know how many of those jobs are actually lost, but those were the ones at risk. And as a result of that and other factors, we're now up in the 8 percent unemployment range, which is still better than the rest of the country, but still a really direct cause of the moratorium in the gulf. When the moratorium was lifted, they refused to issue permits. But first, because the Federal court told them to lift the moratorium, they lifted that moratorium and issued a new one the next day, or maybe 2 days later, which was, I would say, fairly much in contempt of the order of the Federal court in Louisiana. That Federal judge, in turn, made several comments about contempt of court. And so, finally, after years, the moratorium was lifted and another 6 months later, or 8 months later, a few permits were issued so that drilling could begin. Remember this: Barack Obama, when he became President of the United States, President Obama promised that he was going to open up offshore exploration and enhance nuclear energy. He's failed to do both. The only energy policy that he's dealt with is one that we certainly need to develop. And no one here doesn't want to seek alternatives that are economically viable to make this country run. This country is an energy-driven country. Just look at the lights in this room. Think of the amount of windmills it would take just to power up this room almost 24 hours a day. But we're for--and, in fact, I would say the great State of Texas has the largest wind farm in the entire United States. So when it comes to energy, we don't shy away from any kind of energy in our State. We are an energy State. We have been producing oil and gas in the State of Texas for I guess close to a hundred years, clear back to Spindletop. We are not the experts, but we're as close to experts as you're going to run into because we've been doing it through generations of Americans. I remember when I was 17 years old, my big desire was to go work on an oil rig because the great pay those people got paid. My daddy wanted me to keep all my fingers so he told me I couldn't do it. But I always wished I could. It is something we grow up with. We don't think oil and gas are evil products, and we don't think that they are the curse of this country. We think they are the primary clean power source in competition with other power sources of the petroleum age. We think we do a good job of producing clean energy--and energy, we think, that is the cause of the great modern expansion of American Government. Remember, when we're talking about petroleum products, we're not just talking about power for your automobiles and power for your trucks and power for your power stations and all the other things that we use with oil and gas. We're talking about plastic, we're talking about lifesaving chemicals, we're talking about clothing. There's a list of a hundred different products--I can't even list them all--that have come from the production of petroleum. And now, for some reason, we have an administration that treats petroleum and treats petroleum products like natural gas as if they were some kind of horrible evil poison because of this issue which is unresolved of carbon dioxide. So we are sitting here on the verge of something that will ultimately shut down our economy. I can tell you from personal experience, because my wife sent me to the grocery store three Sundays ago and one of the things on her list was avocados. And this is in Texas. We're pretty close to Mexico. We're pretty close to California. Two avocados cost a dollar and a quarter. The next week she sent me back to get two more and they were a dollar apiece. So I started watching those things, and holy cow, they have gone up three times since that first purchase of avocados. And you wonder why. Maybe it's weather; maybe it's crop failure. Maybe it's the fact that the cost of energy is going up daily to power the fleet of trucks, to power the diesel-driven trains, to power the automobiles of America. As gas prices go up or diesel prices go up, so do the prices of food. And now the two inflationary prices that we see going forward are food and energy. This is serious stuff. I'm very pleased to have a fellow Texan join me here today, Blake Farenthold. He's a new Member from down on the Texas gulf coast in a city that grew up with petroleum surrounding it, Corpus Christi, Texas. I'm going to yield to my good friend, Mr. Farenthold, whatever time he needs to talk about his views on energy.

Mr. CARTER. There are consequences to any action that you take in this town. I wanted to point out something I said in a committee hearing one time when we were having this debate. I said those people who want to do away with oil and gas and have a wind industry as the solution better strap a sail on their Volkswagen and hope the wind is blowing towards Washington, or tomorrow morning we're going to have a severe employment shortage in the U.S. Capitol; but, seriously, it's more than that. Look at this quote from the Heritage Foundation. How many jobs does the anti-drilling agenda of this administration cost? The cost in jobs is startling. A new analysis by Louisiana State University Professor Joseph Mason projects national job losses at 19,000 from the drilling moratorium with wage losses at $1.1 billion. About one-third of those jobs are located outside the gulf region. So not only did the people in the gulf lose jobs and do they continue to lose jobs, but these jobs, believe me, there is somebody somewhere within a hundred-mile radius of where we are right now that is producing something that goes into the production of oil and gas because it is a nationwide and a worldwide industry. And all of the machinery, and all of the other complicated gauges and all the modernization of the production of petroleum, all of that is far beyond just the State of Texas and Louisiana and the other Gulf States. It actually circumvents the whole globe. So jobs is another important reason why we have got to do something about this whole concept that this administration seems to have that we are evil because we produce oil and gas; and yet, guess what, States that were criticizing us for production of natural gas 2 years ago are dancing around campfires in their States now that they learned they've got shale oil in their States and some of our Midwest and eastern friends seem to all of the sudden be really excited about the fact that they've discovered they've got shale gas beneath their land and they can produce good, clean natural gas. I say, more power to them. And I hope they can, and I hope their States and this Federal Government don't throw up roadblocks to the production of that shale gas because it is safe. This fear of fracking is a hoax because we have been doing fracking in the oil industry for 50 years. It's just amazing how all of a sudden a process that is almost normal to production, to get the second round of production out of almost any oil well that was drilled in Texas is using some form of H2O fracking, water fracking, to get that second round of production out of a well. And people rework and rework and rework existing wells with all types of processes like fracking. Fracturing is what that means. But are there solutions that can bring the price of oil and gas down? Yes, I think there are. Here is one that my good friend Doc Hastings has proposed: reversing President Obama's offshore moratorium, establishing a national domestic oil and natural gas offshore production goal to ensure a continued development of America's offshore energy sources. That's H.R. 1231. Hopefully, we are going to have that bill on the floor of the House this week or next week. This is important. This is showing real leadership in real energy production. And you see, nothing on there says let's shut down windmill production or let's shut down solar production or let's shut down nuclear production or hydroelectric or anything else. It's saying, let's produce energy in the form of petroleum products. Another real gas price solution, Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now, H.R. 1230, Doc Hastings again. Require the sale of specific offshore leases within set time limits instead of continued administration delays. It is proposed: central gulf leases in the Gulf of Mexico within 4 months, western gulf within 8 months, offshore Virginia within 1 year, additional central Gulf of Mexico by June 1, 2012. This bill sets out a road map to leasing for production in what we consider our Gulf of Mexico. You know, when it comes to producing products offshore, the first place it ever happened was offshore Texas. And we have considered that gulf to be sort of our little saltwater lake out there ever since. That's not exactly true. In fact, it's not true at all. But the point is, to stop the production that's been going on in the gulf, oh, since I was a small child--and I am no young whipper snapper--well, this starts us back to doing what we do well, producing offshore. Another Doc Hastings bill: this is one, Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work, requiring new safety permits to prevent and combat blowouts before drilling. No one in the industry--and I have talked to literally hundreds of people from the industry--everybody agrees. They were very proud of the fact that until the BP oil spill, oil spills looked like they were going to be a thing of the far ancient past because that Mexico blowout was, what, 20-something years old.

Mr. CARTER. It would require the Secretary to decide on issuing a permit within 30 days of the application with two 15-day extensions possibly being allowed and provide drilling companies with speedy Fifth Circuit Court access if the government violates the law in denying or ignoring the permitting process. Those are good solutions because not only does it set a standard that the Congress should impose upon the Secretary. In addition, it gives a recourse, the kind of recourse we're supposed to have on these issues of whether or not to drill, and that is to go to the courthouse and let the justice system prevail. So let's go to the Fifth Circuit, who has already spoken once, pretty loudly, and let them speak again. There is one more that I don't seem to have and that is, we need to open up the leasing for our public lands in the West. The States of Utah and Idaho and Wyoming and Montana, we are well aware and are very knowledgeable about the amount of a certain kind of heavy petroleum that is available in those areas, North Dakota, probably South Dakota. We are already finding a lot in North Dakota. But all of a sudden, it too is struggling to get permits to continue to drill on federally owned public land. And let's always remember those words ``public land.'' It's not the U.S. Government's land. The U.S. Government is holding it for the American public. And if we need to lower our prices and have efficient production, we should go where the oil is. I had one of my colleagues one day who said, I don't know why you Texans always just want to drill anywhere. If you want to drill, why don't you just drill in your own backyard where you have a say about it? Well, if there was oil down beneath my backyard, you could bet your soul I would drill back there in a heartbeat because I am not worried about--in fact, I would be glad to cut the grass around a producing oil well all day long in my backyard. It won't hurt my feelings at all. And I don't think anybody that knows anything about the industry would feel any way other than that. It's almost a comment on the industry. When you pull out of Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport, the DFW Airport, at the entrance, right to your right is a pumping oil and gas well that was drilled within the last 3 years. Right there, practically downtown Dallas, because they have discovered a field out their way. So we know it can be done and done safely. We have to get on it. The New York Times--certainly not any bastion of conservative values--has a little article here: U.S. consumer prices are up 5 percent, pushed mainly by food and gas. They will reaffirm they are going to finish quantitative easing--that's this dollar thing I was talking about--but the central bank would remain concerned about the inflation expectation of consumers who would demand higher wages for businesses. And it could raise prices and perhaps cut spending. What that's all about is, one of the price gauging things that you got that they are accusing the industry of doing is the fact that we have dumped trillions of dollars into our economy for this quantitative easing of the economy. You know, as you've heard from this very House floor, is how much this body has spent in stimulus and in TARP and in other things in the last couple of years, trillions and trillions of dollars. More money has this organization spent, the Congress of the United States, signed by the President, than in the history of the country. And yet besides that, our Treasury has been printing money to supposedly ease the economy; and they are literally putting more dollars in circulation which, in turn, devalues the value of the American dollar. When the value of the American dollar goes down, the price goes up because an apple has a worth. There is a worth, a cost to that apple, and there is a value to that apple on the market. And if the value before we dumped cash into the system was $2, and you dump all this, then it will be $3 or maybe $4, not because the apple's changed but because the dollar's changed, and the dollar is worth less. Why do you think--and by the way, nobody goes to Mexico in Texas anymore. But if you did, and you went across the border, like some idiot who got shot by the terrorists over there--but if you did, you would find that they won't even take American dollars in border towns anymore in Mexico. This was written up in some of the border papers. The American dollar is not wanted in Mexico because they are concerned about it losing its value. It used to be the peso that we worried about losing its value. Something has gone haywire. But as we devalue our dollar and we create a shortage of our gas and oil, it's no surprise at all that the byproducts of those two products, which is gasoline and diesel, is going up. And it has gone up. And if we don't do something about getting back into domestic production, it's going to go up some more. And if the world perceives that the greatest consumer of energy on this Earth is going to have a huge demand when the supply goes down, and they've bought futures on that supply, they're going to get rich. That's not the oil companies we're talking about; that's the people who speculate and the people who cover their energy needs. And by the way, these same speculators are buying futures on oil and gas from China, from Russia, from India, and from other people and from Western Europe to compete for the world market. We have the golden opportunity to at least produce what we can produce. And I'm not in any way cutting down any other energy source. I'm saying all of the above is the solution. But drilling anywhere that it is effective, and drilling now is the important thing. And those people who think that anywhere you stick an oil well down there's oil just don't understand oil. They think there's natural gas under any ground; they just don't understand natural gas. And by the way, when Blake was talking about these independents that drill an oil well, the average cost of an oil well that is not that deep is about a million bucks. So when you go out and gamble $1 million and come up dry, and you have to drill another well and gamble another million dollars, you know, these guys are the true entrepreneurs of this country, and they can lose their shirt and then get lucky and find an oil well and get their shirt back, but that's the world they live in. That's the world of exploration for energy. And we're not ashamed of it. We're proud of it. We're proud that we still have people who are willing to take the risks that it takes to prosper in America. Our economy, our world of commerce in this country is built upon the risk takers. It's those who invest their capital and their labor into trying to produce a product and how they, between those two, they have some successes and they live through their failures. And, unfortunately, we've become a world that thinks anybody that slips up on any form or fashion, we need to bail them out. I've got problems with that. Finally, another newspaper article. The Examiner says: oil imports spike as Obama oil ban decreases domestic production. This was April 29, 2011. This isn't very far past. While oil production in the gulf is down more than 10 percent from April 2010, it estimates net crude oil imports are up by 5 percent. More imported oil also means higher prices at the pumps. So direct result of the actions of the Obama administration. We have the price of oil going up. So tomorrow morning, when you go out there and you fill up whatever you're driving, whether it's a SmartCar or a hybrid that runs on both electricity and gasoline, or whether you're filling up your Suburban, you know, we've got fleets of Suburbans in this town. This is supposed to be the conservation capital of the world. Look around Washington, D.C. There's a black Suburban on every corner. Sometimes a whole parade of black Suburbans goes by. Not picking on Suburbans. I've owned five of them. Good cars, but they burn a lot of gas. And you fill one up you'd better have a pretty good size pocket because you fill up an empty Suburban at $5 a gallon gasoline and you're going to need a bank loan because that sucker will take $100-something to fill that thing up. And that's the consequences of trying to curtail one industry to enhance another. And that's not the way Americans are supposed to operate. Let's take our going concern and keep it going, and let's build up these alternative energies, and when they are competitive in the world market, turn them loose, stop subsidizing everybody and let them compete. And may God bless every one of them. That's the way Americans are supposed to operate. Until we get back to operating that way, we're going to find ourselves in this up-and-down world of shortages. And we're going to find ourselves also in a final world of unemployment because since this recession, there's only one place on Earth in the U.S. where jobs are increasing, and that's right here where we're standing. Federal employment is up 11.7 percent, and the private economy is down 6.1 percent. These are changes of employment since 2007. So the only people creating jobs are Federal jobs. And I would argue that's not the way it's supposed to work. It's all part of a policy which is misdirected. And I would say, because they don't understand the nature of the industries they're dealing with and they really don't realize how many BTUs of energy it takes to run these lights in this building, but it's a ton of them. And I could tell you, my daddy sold natural gas for 40 years of his life, and he sold it cheap. If he was alive today, he'd crawl out of his grave. If he knew about the price today, he'd crawl out of his grave and start selling natural gas. But that price has been driven up by the demand. We've got this resource. This resource, we can use it cleanly. We can protect our environment. We can live a good life, and we can live the American Dream. But you can't do it by trying to kill one industry to enhance another. And I would argue that that is what we've been doing under the Obama administration. And I have a fervent hope that they see the light and back off and let us go back into production of oil and gas and the other natural resources of this great Nation so that we can maintain our status as the best country on Earth and the best country that cares about the average guy and tries to keep prices affordable to the average guy. The price gouging that they are accusing of is nothing more than a misinterpretation of the law of supply and demand. And that misinterpretation is hurting the little man in America. It's time to change the policy, and let's all hope and pray that this administration wakes up to many things, but this is one of them. And if they'll wake up to an energy policy that makes sense, we will see the future bright. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Madam Speaker, this past week or so ago, we had the NCOs of all the Services come in to appear before the MilCon Subcommittee. The question was asked, I believe, by my friends on the other side: What is the number one concern of the United States military, of those who are fighting our wars today--our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Libya? What is their number one concern? The top NCO of every Service said: Losing their paychecks and not being able to care for their families back home. Now, the Democrats are holding our poor troops hostage so that they can have this agenda that is going to result in shutting down the government. Let's make this clear. What we are offering today is to continue the government in action for the next week but to make sure that our troops know that their pay is going to be solid because we are going to fund the Defense Department for the next 5 months. This is intolerable. We offered in H.R. 1 to fund the entire government and to fund our troops. The Democrats rejected it. We offered again today to fund our troops--to make sure that they're going to get paid and to make sure that the contracts are met and that essential training services are there. They refused it. We have a backup bill, H.R. 1297, which will just guarantee that the troops get paid. They've refused it. Now the Commander in Chief of the military in this country has announced that he is going to veto a bill that would see to it that our soldiers get paid. The number one worry of men and women in combat today: Will my folks back home have a paycheck? Now, that's not me saying that. That's the highest NCOs in the Army. We need to respect that and we need to pass this.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I now yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Hayworth).

Mr. CARTER. It tells me that they are marching in route step to the commands of the majority leader, Harry Reid. And unfortunately, we didn't get elected to march route step in that fashion. We got elected, Senators included, to make decisions that are good for the American people. Scott, my friend from Virginia, I will recognize you for the amount of time you need. We have 9 minutes.

Mr. CARTER. Yes.

Mr. CARTER. I don't know how much time is left, but I yield to my good friend, the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Black).