Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 20 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was on one of the Sunday weekend shows and was joined by one of my colleagues on the Republican side. The discussion on that program was about oil and gas prices and energy development. My colleague on the Republican side quite predictably said: Well, the problem is the Democrats do not want to produce any more oil. They stand in the way of producing oil. It is such a canard. I wanted to come to the floor to talk about that a bit and also to talk about the fact that we are going to vote at 5:30 today on energy tax credits for renewables. Then we will see who in this Chamber does want to produce some energy, because we have had chances before, and the Republican side of the aisle, the minority side, has blocked our ability to produce. I want to talk a little bit about that. I know they tend to think that unless you are sinking a hole in the ground someplace and sucking oil out someplace on the planet, you are not producing. Well, I happen to believe there are plenty of places to begin producing additional oil in this country. But drilling alone is not going to solve our problem. There are other things we must do that represent change that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle simply cannot embrace; that is, being aggressive on renewable forms of energy, wind energy, solar energy, biomass, and biofuels. It goes on and on. They do not consider that additional production, I guess. Let me talk first about this issue of the alternative and renewable forms of energy. In 1916 this country put in place robust, permanent tax incentives to say to people: If you go looking for oil and gas, good for you, we want you to do it. We are going to give you some big tax breaks. That was put in place almost a century ago. Here is what this country has done for renewable energy. In 1992 they put in place a production tax credit, a short-term, fairly shallow tax incentive if you want to produce renewable energy. It has been extended five times since 1992, short term. It has been allowed to expire three times. So we have had the stutter-stop, stutter-start approach to dealing with the production tax credit for renewable energy. This chart shows what happens every single time it has not been extended. The investment falls off the shelf. Last year, last June, we had a bill on the floor of the Senate that said, let us extend this for a long period. I have a bill I introduced that said, I think the Congress and this country should say here is where we are headed. For 10 years we have been so dependent on the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Iraqis, the Venezuelans, and others for oil. Sixty percent of our oil comes from off our shores. We need to be less dependent, and one way to do that is to produce renewable energy right here at home. So last June we put a bill on the floor of the Senate that said, for 5 years you can count on the production tax credit to pursue incentives for wind and solar and all of those kinds of renewable energies that are available to us. Here is the tax incentive for you for the next half of a decade. Guess what. Thirty-four Republicans voted against it and killed it. They did not want to do that. Now they are talking about how much they want to produce energy. Well, let me talk about this production of energy. I happen to think, one voice here, we ought to produce in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. If you take a look at where the oil is, the hood ornament for their discussion is always ``ANWR,'' one of the most pristine areas in America, set aside in legislation signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The other side always says, well, ANWR, we have got to produce in ANWR. Even John McCain votes against producing in ANWR. John McCain said, I do not think you ought to produce in the Everglades, in the Grand Canyon, I do not think you ought to drill in ANWR. So enough about that. If you take a look at where the oil is, on the outer continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico, off the west coast, off of Alaska, by far the most significant reserves of oil are in the Gulf of Mexico, both the western gulf and the eastern gulf. The area off of Florida in the eastern gulf ought to be open, in my judgment. But even more interesting are the Cuban waters just south of Florida. Many countries have leases to drill off Cuba's coast, including Spain, Canada, India. China is actually drilling onshore in Cuba, but we expect China to be wanting to drill offshore also. Our oil companies want to drill there. There is estimated to be half a million barrels a day production off Cuba. But we cannot produce there. Our companies cannot go in because we have this embargo with respect to Cuba, and the Bush administration is insistent on tightening the embargo rather than loosening the embargo. So there are half a million barrels a day of production there that our companies cannot go get. Now, my colleagues introduced a piece of legislation on the Republican side for additional production, but it does not include producing in the eastern Gulf or off of Cuba. They do not want to produce there. So are they for production? Is that what they are talking about, or is this a big sham? We know they do not want to produce sustainable amounts of renewable energy because they have voted against it. They say they are voting against it because the bill increases taxes. Let me tell you what it increases. It says to big hedge fund managers that they should invest in renewable energy because the government is going to invest in them over the long-term. By the way, the person who runs hedge funds and made the most income last year made $3.7 billion. If you are wondering, that is going home to say: Honey, I had a pretty good month, I made $308 million this month. That is making enough so that 4 minutes of work equals the average working man's salary for an entire year. By the way, they get to pay a 15-percent income tax rate, which I think is an outrage. But even more than that, they have a game in which they defer a portion of their income tax by moving it offshore. This legislation shuts that down and thereby raises the money to pay for some of our investment in renewable energy. The other side is upset about that. We are shutting down a tax scam for the wealthiest individuals. It is pretty unbelievable. I don't want to hear any more noise, deep sounds from the chest masquerading as thoughtful symbols from the brain, about production. The fact is, I believe in production. That is one part of addressing the issue. One part of it is producing oil. But a much more important part is renewable energy because we need to change the way we have been doing things. We are so unbelievably dependent on Saudi oil and oil coming from troubled parts of the world. It makes no sense. We have an enormous appetite for oil. We sink little straws in this planet every single day and suck oil out. We suck out 85 million barrels a day, and we use one- fourth of it in a little place called the United States. Sixty percent of what we use comes from off our shores, much of it from troubled parts of the world, and almost 70 percent of that we use in vehicles. We need to do a lot of things here, and we need to do a lot of things right to make us less dependent on foreign sources of oil. We need to make our vehicles more efficient, to conserve energy in every single way, to make all of our appliances more efficient. There is so much we have to do right, including produce more renewable energy. We will have a chance in an hour and 15 minutes to vote once again on funding renewable energy. Most of my colleagues voted against it just days ago. I hope they have had some kind of epiphany recently and will decide that was the wrong vote and today they will cast the right vote. Let me talk for a moment about what people are doing today as they drive up to the gas pump with their vehicles. They are driving their car up to the pump trying to figure out: How much can I afford? I have to stop at the grocery store on the way home. Or: I just bought medicine. How much can I afford to put in the gas tank? They put whatever they can in that tank. And by the way, the OPEC nations smile all the way to the bank as they deposit our money. The big oil companies smile all the way to the bank as they deposit the rest of our money. But there is no justification for the current price of gas and oil. None. This market system is broken. It doesn't work. There are three things that are making oil more expensive: No. 1, we have OPEC which is a cartel. That would be illegal in our country. But a bunch of oil ministers get together in a closed room and make judgments as a cartel. No. 2, we have big oil companies--much bigger because they were all given the green light to merge in recent years. They all now have two names--ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips. They are bigger and stronger. Finally, what I want to talk about is the issue of the futures market, which is the third piece that is simply broken. The futures market is an unbelievable carnival of speculation. It is supposed to be an orderly market by which people can hedge who are involved in the oil business. Now we have hedge funds, investment banks. We have all kinds of speculators, who will never be interested in ever taking delivery of oil, engaged in the futures market and driving up the price of oil and gas in a way that makes it at least 20 to 30 percent higher priced than a normal supply-demand market would justify. In every month but one since January of this year, our crude oil stocks have increased. Let me say that again. In every month but one since January of this year, our inventory of crude oil stocks has increased. So supply is increasing. On the other hand, people are driving slightly less, and there is a decrease in demand. So since January, you have both an increase in supply and a decrease in demand. What has happened to the price of oil and gas? It has gone up like a Roman candle. That means the market is broken. Let me talk a little bit about what I think is happening in this market. Let me put up a picture of NYMEX. This is where they trade some of these oil commodity stocks. Some of it is what I call dark money, traded on exchanges that are not regulated or over the counter and can't be seen. This is the way it looks. Let me quote Clarence Cazalot, CEO of Marathon Oil. He said last year: $100 oil is not justified by the physical demand in the market. Stephen Simon, senior vice president of Exxon said: The price of oil should be about $50-$55 a barrel. Right now oil is flirting with $140 a barrel. Let me say, when Exxon is going to the bank with our money to make a deposit, they have to be happy. But they are not using that money to invest in new production. In 2007, they used $31 billion of profit to buy back their stock and only $15 billion to invest in new drilling. They used twice as much money to buy back their stock in the stock market as they did to explore for new oil. From the New Jersey Star Ledger: Experts, including the former head of Exxon Mobil, say financial speculation in the energy markets has grown so much over the last 30 years it now adds 20 to 30 percent or more to the price of a barrel of oil. A man named Fidel Gheit, who testified before the Energy Committee, has worked for 30 years with Oppenheimer Company. He is the senior energy person at Oppenheimer. He says: There is absolutely no shortage of oil. I'm absolutely convinced that oil prices shouldn't be a dime above $55 a barrel. I call it the world's largest gambling hall . . . It's open 24/7. Unfortunately, it's totally unregulated. This is like a highway with no cops and no speed limit and everybody is going 120 miles an hour. With that backdrop, here is what has happened to the amount of speculation in the commodities market. It has gone up, up, and up just exactly like the price of oil and gas. The question is, should the Congress do nothing about this or should the Congress do something? If the answer is the Congress should do something, then what? My belief is we have a responsibility to do something. Many of my colleagues believe it as well. There is nothing wrong with speculation. Markets often work with speculators. But when speculation becomes excessive, there is something wrong because the market then doesn't work. Will Rogers described this sort of thing 80 years ago. He described people buying things they will never get from people who never had it and making money on both sides of the transaction. I guess that is all right if the speculation is not doing something that damages the American economy or injures most American consumers. But these are not free markets. There is no free market. I hear all these folks talking about: You have a free market. What you really need is more production. Sink a few wells here and there. But they are not even genuine about that, as I just described to you. They are not very interested in sinking wells off the coast of Florida, for example. Let me show that chart again. I know why, when the minority party put up their proposal, they didn't want to sink wells in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, which offers a significant opportunity. One of their Members, one of their Senators, is concerned about drilling off of Florida, so they leave that off their list. I know why they don't want to suggest that we should be able to drill for oil off of Cuba. Spain has a lease to drill off of Cuba. Canada also has a lease. India has a lease to drill off of Cuba. I know why the minority isn't pushing to allow American companies to drill off of Cuba. President George W. Bush is the one who says we can't do that. So they don't want to talk about subjects that are uncomfortable. They just want to bleat about the issue of ``production'' from their standpoint. Production means a number of things. Production means, yes, producing some more oil. The largest assessment in history of the lower 48 States of recoverable oil was made 2 months ago by the U.S. Geological Survey at my request. They studied what is called the Bakken shale in Montana and North Dakota. There is dramatic new drilling and a lot of additional production there right now. They concluded that 3.6 to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, using today's technology, exists. I support drilling in the Bakken. We are drilling. We have some 70 to 80 drilling rigs active in the Bakken shale right now. But we are going to vote at 5:30 on another question of production. Then I want to see who comes to the floor to talk about production in the future. Do they really want to produce enough renewable energy to help us reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq and Venezuela? I hope so. We have to get over this notion that the only kind of production that matters is sinking a well someplace. We could produce, and have been producing, billions of gallons of fuel for vehicles in farm fields. We are now up very close to 9 billion gallons, and we are headed much higher than that. We also can produce substantial electricity from wind, except that when we try to do anything other than increase the production tax credit by 12 months, the other side objects. Again, whether it is a production tax credit for wind or solar energy or other renewable energy sources, this Congress and this country ought to not just talk about 12 months. We ought to say: Here is where America is headed. We understand this is a serious problem. We believe we are going to produce substantial amounts of renewable energy. Other countries have done it. Brazil is an example. We are going to do this in a way that allows all of us to understand we must be less dependent on foreign sources of oil. We can do that. We went to the Moon in 9 years. Do you think we can't find a way to be less dependent on foreign oil? I believe we can. But we can't do it, if at 5:30 today the minority still objects to having hedge fund managers who make billions pay their fair share of taxes and objects to what we would use that money to pay for, and that is extending the renewable energy tax credits so that we become less dependent on foreign oil and produce more energy from renewable forms of energy. That is just a fact. At 5:30 today we will have plenty of opportunity to see who really supports additional production. I hope, on a bipartisan basis, we might be joined by the minority and see if we can't put this country on a track to produce much more energy from renewable sources. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was just visiting with my colleague from New Mexico. I was unaware of the Supreme Court decision this morning. But the decision by which they have overturned some legislation that retracted the right of habeas corpus for those who might be suspected of some sort of illegal activity and so on in this country, that decision by the Supreme Court is a very important decision. I could not believe when the Senate passed a piece of legislation saying that someone who is apprehended or detained in this country would not have the right of habeas corpus. That is a different kind of country than I know. There are countries in this world where they can pick you up right off the streets and say: Do you have papers? Even if you have papers they can throw you in jail, and you have no right to anything, including filing a writ to say: A government cannot hold me. A government must prove there is reason to hold me. That is unbelievable that this Congress it--not with my vote. But I commend the Supreme Court. I haven't had much opportunity to do that recently, I must say. But their ruling this morning gives me some hope. Mr. President, we have a cloture vote at 3 o'clock this afternoon. I wanted to mention the important subject of the cloture vote is dealing with some Medicare changes. Medicare is an unbelievably important program. Prior to Medicare, not many people look back and remember this because most of us have lived our lives with Medicare in existence. Before Medicare, one-half of the American senior citizens had no health insurance at all. Does anybody think that an insurance company says: You know what. We have a new business plan. Our plan is we want to find people who are old and provide health insurance for them. That is not the way a business plan works. If you are selling insurance, you like to find somebody young and healthy. As a result, if you go back to the 1950s, early 1960s, you will find that one-half of senior citizens of this country had no health coverage. Now, it is a very small percentage that have no health coverage. The vast majority of American senior citizens are covered by Medicare. It is a good program. I grew up in a little town of 300 people. We had a guy named Doc Hill, Dr. Simon W. Hill. He came into town and he stayed until he died. He practiced medicine. We did not have a Medicare Program, but he tried to give everybody whatever health care they needed. He tried the best he could. We had no lawyer in our town, so he was never sued. He pulled the tooth of my neighbor. He was not a dentist, but he was a doctor. The neighbor had a terrible toothache, we were 50 miles from the nearest dentist, so Doc Hill pulled his tooth. It turns out he pulled the wrong tooth. But, you know, the fact is, Doc Hill did the best he could. He practiced medicine in my hometown. I think he delivered close to 2,000 babies decade after decade after decade. He ran his own Medicare and Medicaid Program. If you did not have any money, you got health care to the best he could give it. If you had money, he would charge you an arm and a leg. If you had 24 fryer chickens, he would take that; maybe a quarter beef, maybe half of a hog--whatever it was, he ran a program in a little town. Well, that is all gone. That does not exist anymore. The fact is, we now have a Medicare Program that serves America's senior citizens with health care and says to them: If you get sick, here is a program that is to provide some help to you. Now, my colleague, Senator Baucus, and the Finance Committee have brought a piece of legislation to the Senate floor, and we have to have a cloture vote on it this afternoon because the other side is objecting. My hope is that we will have sufficient votes this afternoon to advance this bill. It makes some changes in Medicare that need to be made because we are bumping up against a deadline at the end of this month. Among other things, it reauthorizes the special diabetes program. That is something in which Senator Domenici from New Mexico and I have been involved. We have introduced some reauthorization legislation here. The diabetes issue is a scourge in this country. I chair the Indian Affairs Committee in the Senate, and the fact is, we have some areas on Indian reservations in this country where 40 or 50 percent of the adult population are affected by diabetes. Go there and go to their dialysis units and see all of them sitting hooked up to dialysis units. Then see how many have lost their legs through amputation. See how many of them have early heart disease as a result of their diabetes. This piece of legislation by Senator Baucus and the Finance Committee begins to address some of those issues. It also makes reforms to what is called the Medicare Advantage Program. Now, some of my colleagues have come to the floor and said, well, this bill cuts Medicare. That is total rubbish. This does not cut Medicare. It takes one portion of Medicare, called the Medicare Advantage Program, which pays more for healthcare as opposed traditional Medicare. This is one of those little pilot programs that some in this Chamber wanted, so they seeded it with extra funding. Well, the extra funding has been a waste of money, a tragic waste of money. And this gets some of the waste and abuse out of it. If my colleagues are upset about getting rid of waste and abuse, I am sorry. Maybe they will not sleep very well if we pass this bill. But the fact is, when we see waste and abuse, we ought to go after that. That is what the Finance Committee and Senator Baucus have done. They have used that funding they have achieved by getting rid of some waste and abuse in the Medicare Advantage Program. They have used that funding to address some other urgent issues. If we do not do anything by the end of this month, we will see a 10- percent cut to physician payments. Well, physicians in my State are already at the bottom of the wage index on physician payments. And the fact is, a 10-percent cut would be devastating to senior citizens in my state who rely on Medicare. It seems to me we should not be doing things that will predict a degradation of health care. We should not be doing those things. The Finance bill and Senator Baucus have brought a piece of legislation to the floor that avoids that 10-percent payment cut and establishes a 1.1-percent increase instead through fiscal year 2009. It is the right thing to do. Now, if you decide you do not want to vote for cloture, to even allow this to proceed, then you are saying: You know what, just whack these programs. It does not matter what kind of health care exists in our States. It does not matter what happens to the senior citizens. If that is your view, you know, God bless you. But it is sure a far cry from my view. I think we have responsibilities to make Medicare work, to provide decent funds for the providers so that our senior citizens have health care that all of us can be proud of. There are many other features in this piece of legislation that are important. It talks about prompt payment to Main Street pharmacies. We have drugstores and pharmacists on the Main Streets across this country that are not getting the kind of prompt payment they should get. And some of them are threatened with the closure of their business because we have a system that is not reimbursing them as it should. It improves access to telehealth, which is very important. This is a rather new form of delivery of health care, and Medicare is a part of it. It works. I have been in clinics, and I have seen the delivery of very sophisticated CAT scans and the delivery of x rays to a radiologist 150 miles away to get a reading and to be sent back to that rural clinic. All of that makes a lot of sense. It gives us access to some of the best in the country through telemedicine. Then, in addition, the telemental health part of that is an opportunity for psychologists and psychiatrists to be engaged in telemental health, particularly on Indian reservations and elsewhere, where we have some of the highest rates of suicide any place in the country. Accessing telemental health services can be very important. On the northern Great Plains--I know the Presiding Officer is from Montana. In Montana, North Dakota, on the northern Great Plains, the rate of suicide among Indian youth--I am talking about Indian teens--is not double, triple, or quadruple the rate across the country, it is 10 times the national rate. That is why telemental health is so important for all elements of our population, but also especially in Medicare for senior citizens. We are doing it in other areas. Extending it to Medicare makes a great deal of sense. The improvement of the quality of health care in Medicare, the prevention of the 10 percent in payment cuts to physicians, the diabetes prevention program, the elimination of the wasteful payments to Medicare Advantage, are just a few of the examples of why we must expect our colleagues will vote for cloture at 3 o'clock this afternoon. This is the right vote. It is an important vote. Now, we have been through--yesterday it was energy, with gas at $4 a gallon, and oil at somewhere around $130, $140 a barrel, the minority decided to embrace once again their just-say-no policy on everything. It does not matter what it is, just say no. It reminds me of an old codger in his eighties who was once asked by a news reporter who said: Well, you have been around a long time. You must have seen a lot of changes in your life. He said: Yeah, I have been against all of them. We have people on the floor of the Senate who have decided they are against everything--just say no. My hope is after just saying no yesterday to energy issues at a time when gas is $4 a gallon, it is unbelievable to me they would just say no to begin addressing that, but they did. My hope is that today, on behalf of health care for senior citizens, they would finally decide to just say yes. If they will do that at 3 o'clock, we will pass this cloture petition and we will take what the Finance Committee and Senator Baucus have offered in the spirit of improving Medicare and saying to senior citizens and saying to their health care providers: We are going to do the right thing. There is a time urgency. By the end of June we have to solve this matter. And I hope my colleagues will be listening and understand that we need this cloture petition to prevail at 3 o'clock this afternoon. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. What remaining time exists?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I will not object if an additional 3 minutes is added to the time on this side following the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, how much time remains on our side?

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to use 23 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a lot of helium in this Chamber in recent hours. I have been watching and listening and heard a lot of discussion about why we cannot produce more energy. Well, in fact, we are producing more energy. I announced about two months ago, with the U.S. Geological Survey, their assessment of the largest assessment of recoverable oil they have ever announced in the lower 48. That is called the Bakken shale, which underlies eastern Montana and western North Dakota. They say it has up to 3.65 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in it. The fact is, we are producing more oil and gas. My colleagues who talk about the need to produce more should understand that I and three others, two Democrats and two Republicans, from the Senate who lead the effort to open what is called lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico in the 109th Congress. Substantial oil and gas reserves exist there, and we have opened a portion of that--not nearly enough by the way. I notice that, in the Republican offshore proposal offered by my colleagues on the other side, they carve out opening the area in eastern Gulf of Mexico where there is substantial opportunity to achieve new oil and gas reserves. In fact, companies from India and companies from China are now exploring for oil in Cuban waters. Our companies want to go there, but American companies are not allowed access in that area. They are not allowed to drill in waters off of Cuba because of the embargo against Cuba. So this administration has decided, well, we do not want to produce oil off of Cuba despite the fact those waters are open. My understanding is some wells drilled by India have now struck oil. The Chinese are there too, but we cannot drill just miles away from Florida in Cuban waters. So next time I hear about people saying, well, people on this side of the aisle do not want to support additional production, we have supported additional production. That is a fact. The hood ornament on that argument from them is always about ANWR, a pristine area set aside in legislation signed by President Dwight Eisenhower. Well, the fact is, ANWR should never be a first resort; perhaps a last resort in a critical time. But there is much we can and should do. I am going to talk about some of it this afternoon to address these issues. Yes, produce more, and I have described how I and others have supported more production. We need conservation and greater efficiency. We waste a prodigious amount of oil and energy in this country. We can conserve much more. With everything we do, every switch we touch from the morning until the evening, all of the appliances that we use, dramatic new efficiency is important. We also need more focus on renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal. There are so many different forms of energy that need to be a part of the solution, including the biofuels which are a part of our future. Having said all of that, I want to go though a couple of charts because what is happening today is almost unbelievable. We have people driving to the gas pumps this afternoon, and we have people who have ordered a load of gas delivered to their farm this afternoon. We have airlines that pull the airline up to the gate and then have to load up with fuel. We have truckers at the truckstop trying to figure out at the next truckstop how they stop and get a load of fuel and afford it. Look at what has happened. Oil prices have doubled in a year. There is not one justification in the fundamentals of oil supply and demand for a doubling in price in a year. There is no justification for it. In fact, this country has had an economic slowdown, and we are using slightly less energy than we did before. So demand is slightly down in this country. Since January, the oil and gas inventories in this country have been up slightly. Demand is down slightly down, and production is up slightly. Yet, the price of oil doubles. There is nothing in the fundamentals to justify what has happened to this oil market. Now, I think I understand what has happened to this market, and here is the line that describes it. It is called speculation. We all know what speculators are. We have lived among speculators. Perhaps our neighbors speculate. We all know speculators. Will Rogers described them about 80 years ago. He said that these are people who buy what they will never get from people who never had it and expect to make money on both sides of the trade. That is speculation. Speculators in the oil market are not people who want oil. These are not people who ever want to take delivery of oil. They are not people who would know about the viscosity of oil or perhaps how to drill for oil, nor would they care. They are interested in trading in a commodities market for the purpose of making big profits. They are not ever wanting to take delivery of anything. They are simply speculators for the purpose of making a profit. Now, that is not why the commodities markets were established. They were established for hedging purposes, legitimate reasons to have a market. You should have, and must have, a market for commodities. For hedging purposes you need some liquidity in the market. But what has happened in this market is a perversion. We have speculators in this market who have driven the price way up. In fact, I have just spent an hour today with the head of an organization called New York Mercantile Exchange, NYMEX, in New York. He came down and we talked for about an hour. We agree on some things and do not agree on others. This is a pit in which they trade commodities in NYMEX. Well, they trade the crude oil on the NYMEX. One of them is West Texas intermediate crude, for example. You have people who wear these jackets, they bid. As you see, they throw paper on the floor. At the end of the day, people who have never touched a quart of oil, let alone a barrel of oil, have decided what the price is going to be for the coming days and months. It is not the only commodities exchange. This is also occurring on the Intercontinental Exchange in London and Dubai. It is a large, global market, but only part of it is regulated. Only part of it is available for us to inspect and see. Much of it is out of our view. Much of it I call dark money. It exists out there, but you cannot see it. It is not transparent or regulated. It has a profound impact on the price of oil, and therefore, it has a tremendous impact on what it is going to cost consumers to fill a car with gas, a farmer to order a load of fuel, airlines to buy jet fuel. We have airlines and trucking companies going bankrupt and many more struggling to make it through this. Now, I understand we have had 12 airlines in recent months declare bankruptcy. We have a lot of trucking companies, mom-and-pop trucking companies, who are going belly up because they cannot afford to buy fuel for their trucks. The airlines are barely able to afford to buy the jet fuel for their airplanes. Drivers pulling up to the gas pump are having a difficult time trying to figure out how to pay $60 or $70 for a tank of gas. I pulled up behind an old car about 30 miles north of Minot, ND, one day some while ago. It was pretty much a wreck. The back bumper was hanging down about halfway. It had a lot of dents and rust. And it had an old, faded sticker on the bumper which said: We fought the gas war and gas won. Probably not surprising. Gas won. Well, gas is sure winning these days, $4-plus a gallon, diesel well above $4 a gallon, and oil flirting with $140 a barrel. Now, some say, well, that is just the market at work. There is no market at work here. This is a perversion. Let me talk about the oil market. You have ministers representing nationalized companies under the banner of OPEC. Now, this is a cartel. Cartels are illegal in this country. It is a crime. It is criminal. So you have a cartel of countries that go behind closed doors and have their oil ministers make judgments about how much they are going to produce and what price they want to get for it in the international marketplace. That is No. 1. There is no free market aspect to a cartel. I expect most people would agree. Second, the major integrated companies are all much bigger and much stronger with much more muscle in the marketplace. Why? Because they have all merged. They all got romantically entangled, decided they want to pair up. Pretty soon, Exxon is not just Exxon; it is ExxonMobil. Phillips Oil is now ConocoPhillips. They all have two names and a lot more muscle. They are bigger, stronger, and more powerful forces in the marketplace. Third, you have a futures market that has become an unbelievable amount of speculation, driving up prices. So you have a cartel with OPEC; bigger, stronger oil companies; and a futures market that is rife speculation. Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst, who worked 35 years with the Oppenheimer & Co., said: There is absolutely no shortage of oil. I am convinced that oil prices shouldn't be a dime above $55 a barrel. I call it the world's largest gambling hall. It's open 24/7. Unfortunately, it's totally unregulated. This is like a highway with no cops, no speed limit, and everybody is going 120 miles an hour. I have talked to Mr. Gheit by telephone. He was a witness at a hearing in December 2007. I have a sense of what he is about and what he thinks. He believes this market is a complete perversion. It is rife speculation, with people driving up the price of oil, having nothing to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand. It is not just Mr. Gheit from the Oppenheimer and Co. We see this in the New Jersey Star Ledger: Experts, including the former head of ExxonMobil, say financial speculation in the energy markets has grown so much over the last 30 years that it now adds 20 to 30 percent or more to the price of a barrel of oil. If the former head of ExxonMobil is saying there is so much speculation that it has added 20 to 30 percent to the price of a barrel of oil, the question is whether that is credible? From the senior Vice President of ExxonMobil: The price of oil should be about $50 or $55 a barrel. The president of Marathon Oil, Clarence Cazalot, Jr.: $100 oil isn't justified by the physical demand in the market. During a question-and-answer period with reporters, he suggested a more reasonable range for crude oil prices would be between $55 and $60 a barrel. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is supposed to be the regulating body. I know regulation is a four-letter word in this Chamber for some. It is not for me. A free market works only when it is open and free. When the arteries get clogged, bad things happen. We have seen a lot of clogging of the arteries in this so-called free market system. But we have a referee for the free market system. It is called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC. The CFTC is supposed to be a regulator, but like a lot of regulators, it seems to be pretty much asleep at the switch. I will describe why and how in a minute. I have some experience with this because I chaired the hearings in the Senate over in the Commerce Committee on the Enron scandal. I had Ken Lay, now deceased, come to our hearings. He was the CEO of Enron. He raised his hand, took an oath, sat down, and took the fifth amendment. He was subsequently sentenced to prison but died before he went there. Once exposed, several in the Enron Corporation went to prison because we discovered it was a criminal enterprise. Among other things, it soaked billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains, particularly out of consumers on the west coast through wholesale electricity prices. That happened under the nose of what was supposed to have been a Federal regulator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. During that time, I raised the question about the speculation and the manipulation of the marketplace by Enron and others. Vice President Cheney scoffed and said: There is nothing going on here. Shame on all of you for suggesting there is something nefarious happening. It turns out Dick Cheney was dead wrong, supporting the energy interests ahead of the public interest. We found out later it was a criminal enterprise. We found out later that the regulator did nothing other than sat by and watched what was happening. Now we have a regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to be wearing the referee's shirt with stripes that calls the fouls with respect to energy trading. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has actually allowed a lot of this to occur, this speculation, by issuing what are called no-action letters so that a number of commodity trades can move to the dark side so they can't be seen and regulated by the regulator. In fact, the regulator is saying that it is OK for us not to see you or understand what you are doing which is kind of unbelievable. It defies credibility to hear a regulatory body say: We don't want the information with which to regulate you. Let me describe what Mr. Lukken, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body, has been saying. I am using the description that he is ``parroting'' the assertion by those involved in the market. These are the very speculators who make a lot of money in these markets and want us to believe that nothing is really happening. There is not substantial speculation. This is just a lot of good people selling and buying back and forth. Here is what Mr. Lukken says: Based on our surveillance efforts to date, we believe that energy futures markets have been reflecting the underlying fundamentals of those markets. That was last July. Mr. Lukken says: Gosh, things are fine. Don't worry. Be happy. Everything is OK. The fundamentals justify whatever is going on. That was last July. The acting Chairman of the Commission, Mr. Lukken, again said in January of this year: Based on our surveillance efforts to date, we believe that energy futures markets have been largely reflecting the underlying fundamentals of these markets. You will note he said in January exactly what he said in July, but he changed one word. It must have been a mistake. He changed one word. He essentially says: Hey, don't worry about the price of oil and gas. This is all about fundamentals. So the Chairman of the regulatory body says things are OK once again. In February, acting Chairman Lukken says: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is confident that U.S. futures exchanges and clearinghouses are functioning well, especially during these turbulent economic times. Don't worry. We regulators have our hands on it. We have it all figured out. On May 7, the acting Chairman of the regulatory body says: We can say with a high degree of confidence that people are not manipulating the energy markets. That is really interesting because just two weeks ago this same person, Mr. Lukken, who has told us now for a year, while the price of oil has doubled, there is really no speculation, this is just supply and demand at work. The fundamentals of the marketplace are working. Don't worry, be happy. Nothing nefarious is going on. There is no manipulation, then all of a sudden, two weeks ago, this man must have had some sort of epiphany. I don't know what he ate for dinner, but suddenly he woke up and made an announcement that the CFTC wants to find out what is going on in this marketplace and for the last 7 months they have been investigating it. Really? That is interesting. What about his statements during the last year they had already concluded nothing was wrong? I wonder at what point Americans should be relying on the word of Mr. Lukken when he was telling us in January there is nothing going on. It is just the fundamentals at work. Yet, he was reassuring us in early May there was nothing happening. Perhaps a couple weeks ago, he apparently, in some startling 180-degree turn decided to figure out what is happening. Mr. Lukken, the acting Chairman, and his nomination is before this body, said we are now going to something called the Intercontinental Exchange and others. Incidentally, it is a foreign exchange but an exchange in London, largely founded by American companies, trading on computer terminals in Atlanta, GA, and other places in the U.S. but allowed to do it without oversight or regulation by the CFTC because they exempted them with a letter of no action. It basically is saying we are not going to find out what is going on. Really? I thought you knew what was going on. You have been assuring us all along that you knew what was happening. Turns out now he admits they don't have nearly the information with which to judge whether there was excessive speculation. By the way, the Administration, to the extent it was doing anything, called for the creation of a task force of several agencies, including the CFTC. They act as if the barn is on fire at the moment. They go from no motion to slow motion to some sort of hyperspeed, I guess. But I have almost no confidence in statements for 6 or 8 months saying that the doubling of the price of oil is just fine, and it is unrelated to either manipulation or speculation. I had one of the presidents of one of the largest investment banking firms come to my office. I think we spent an hour speaking. At the end of the hour, he answered every question except the one he couldn't answer, the one I kept asking: If you say fundamentals are at the root of why the price of oil has doubled, then tell me what those fundamentals are that justify the doubling of the price of oil. Is it that supply is down and demand is up? If that is not the case, what are the fundamentals? Those who argue that this speculative binge cannot answer the question, what fundamentals justify doubling the price of oil? The importance of that is this: I used to teach a little economics-- not very much--in college. I taught economics briefly. I tell people I was able to overcome that experience and go on to lead, nonetheless, somewhat of a productive life. Economics is psychology pumped up with helium. That is all it is. Everybody says they know this, that, or the other thing. Economics is about human behavior. But I understand enough about the economics of this issue to understand you have binges of excess and speculation, and we have seen them in history. You can find books about them. They will take you back to the days when tulip bulbs were sold for $25,000 for one bulb in a binge of speculation that is still written about today, 400 or 500 years ago. We have bubbles of speculation that occur. In most cases, it is not terribly damaging to a country or an economy. Who cares if you can buy a tulip bulb? Who cares if you can afford it? Consider this. The price of oil jumps to $135 a barrel. The price of gas goes to $4 a gallon. You have OPEC countries going to the bank depositing our money in their accounts. The major oil companies going to the bank depositing our money in their accounts. Airlines are going broke, and trucking companies not able to afford to run their trucks. The average American family is trying to figure out how they can afford to put gas in the car and get to work. When all of that occurs, it is long past time for this country to say: What on Earth is happening and how do we fix it? When you have a market that doesn't work, there is a responsibility for the regulator and the Government to take a step and fix that market. This futures market is not the market that was established many decades ago. That market was established for a specific purpose, a laudable purpose. It was to allow orderly trading for delivery of petroleum commodities. It has now become an unbelievable cesspool of speculation that has driven up the price of oil in ways that deeply damage this country. This Congress has a responsibility to deal with it. I am working on legislation that would mandate the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to take the steps that are necessary to shut that speculation down, to stop the dark money and markets, to put it all on the regulated side and then to increase margin requirements in order to wring the speculators out of this market. I believe that could decrease the price of oil and gas by 20, 30, 40 percent. It is not just me. I have quoted those who run some of America's major oil companies and experts involved in some of the trading at some of the largest institutions who believe speculation now has driven up the price of oil and gas by 20, 30, 40 percent. There is a lot to say about what is happening in our country and a lot to say about the need for regulators to begin doing what we pay them to do. I will describe the legislation I am working on at greater length. I appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wish to talk just for a moment today about the cloture vote on climate change legislation earlier today, but first, while I am getting some charts together, I wanted to mention also that this is the 40th anniversary that was yesterday of the death of Robert Kennedy. I was driving to the Capitol listening to a news report about that day 40 years ago when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, CA, and I was thinking about the fact that I was a very young man back then working on the Robert Kennedy Presidential campaign in my State when I heard that he had been assassinated. It was such an unbelievable blow to me and to all of the others who worked on the campaign and to so many other Americans who believed his campaign for the Presidency held such great promise. Most young people in this country today know nothing about a 1968 Presidential campaign by Robert F. Kennedy. It was an extraordinary time, and he was an extraordinary man. I wish to read just a couple of comments by the late Robert F. Kennedy, who was, by the way, a Senator and served in this body, as well as served as Attorney General of this country. He gave a speech once that I have often quoted. It was a speech he gave in South Africa. Many will know these words. In his speech he said this: Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of a generation . . . it is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. He gave that speech June 6, 1966, at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. People often talk about those ripples of hope that can sweep down the mightiest walls of resistance and oppression, and that passion and that dream and belief still exist today. I reread this morning the speech Robert Kennedy gave during his Presidential campaign in Indianapolis, IN, on the evening of April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. The crowd that had gathered for Robert Kennedy's appearance did not know that Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated and Robert Kennedy came to that area of Indianapolis. He was asked not to go because of concerns about his safety. He went anyway and he gave one of the most wonderful speeches. It was without a note, just an extemporaneous speech that had so much passion. I shall not read it today, but I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record at this point.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleague, Senator Lautenberg from New Jersey, just described something that is very important. He described the role of himself and others, and particularly the occupant of the chair as Presiding Officer, in working on the new GI bill. I was proud to be a cosponsor. I join him in hoping that President Bush will agree with the majority of the House and the Senate to look favorably upon this bill and agree to sign legislation that includes this bill. We owe it to America's veterans. I appreciate the comments made by my colleague from New Jersey.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the vote this morning was a vote dealing with climate change. This vote, however, was not a yes or no on climate change legislation; the vote was on a cloture motion to invoke cloture. I voted against invoking cloture. I wish to make sure those who have worked so hard on the legislation we were considering do not feel that vote diminishes the work they have done. I believe there is something happening to the climate of this planet. I believe there is something dealing with global warming that threatens our future. I believe we have a responsibility to address it. I commend those who worked on the legislation and brought it to the floor of the Senate. It was a good start. It was not perfect and needed amendments in my judgment. A tangled web was created on the floor of the Senate through no fault of the majority leader who brought this to the floor. He indicated at the first moment that he wished this to be an open process with open debate and open opportunity for amendments. The tangled web that then ensued was a web that led us to a cloture motion and the filing of a cloture motion. Voting for cloture meant that we would be prevented from offering an amendment post cloture. I did not believe I wanted to put myself in that position because I have two amendments that have been filed. I had two amendments which I wished to offer and get them pending. Because of procedural hurdles, I was prevented from doing so because I was prevented from calling up amendments, even though they were filed. I wasn't very interested in supporting a cloture motion which would then prevent me from having the amendments considered by the Senate as we move forward to finish the piece of legislation. So that represents my view of why I would not support cloture. I filed an amendment dealing with additional funding for coal and carbon capture and storage programs. I think we need to do a couple of things if we are going to have a global climate change bill work. First of all, at the front end, for the first 5, 10, 12 and 14 years, we have to have a kind of Manhattan Project in which we decide for renewable, efficiency and clean coal energy resources that we are going to break out of the box and move forward very, very, very aggressively. If we are going to deal with this issue, we have to move solar and be serious about developing substantial capabilities in solar energy. That requires a massive amount of research and development. We have to be serious about wind energy and geothermal and biomass as well. We have to be serious about a whole range of renewable energy resources. We have not been serious in this country. In 1916 we said to oil and gas companies: If you want to go find oil and gas, good for you, God bless you. We want to provide big tax breaks for you for doing it. These permanent tax breaks have lasted forever regarding oil and gas. What did we do with those who were pursuing renewable energy? In 1992 we said: We will give you some tax incentives. By the way, they will be temporary and kind of shallow, and we will extend them five times for a very short term, and we will let them expire three times. That is a pathetic, anemic response for a country that ought to, in my judgment, gallop full speed ahead toward the use of renewable energy. But you have to have conservation and renewable energy research and development commitments to achieve that goal. In addition to that, we are going to have to continue to use coal in our future. Forty-eight percent of our electricity comes from coal. We are not in a position where we can simply say we are not going to use coal. At the front end of this bill, we need to create a substantial amount of resources to engage in the research and development, demonstration and commercial deployment of projects that allow us to use coal to produce electricity without injuring our environment. That means capturing carbon and sequestering carbon. That is central to the future use of coal and other fossil fuels. Now, it is not as if it can't be done. We are doing it in some areas, but we need so much more work on the research and development end. This is a plant in North Dakota. It is the only one like it in North America. We produce synthetic natural gas from lignite coal. We take pieces of coal, and we produce synthetic gas from it. It works very well. In fact, it is one of the world's largest demonstrations for capturing and storing carbon. We capture 50 percent of the carbon from this plant; put it in a pipeline; move it to Saskatchewan, Canada; and invest it underground into Canadian oil wells to pump up and produce more oil. Most oil that is drilled from underground pools only provides about 30 percent of its potential. The rest remains in the ground. If you can use CO2 from fossil fuels at electric power plants and other facilities, that CO2 would not be released into the atmosphere to impact the climate. At the same time, you can use that CO2 instead for beneficial purposes and invest into an oil well. Thus, you not only put the CO2 underground and sequester it, you also enhance domestic oil development and production. There are a lot of things going on. But the underlying bill didn't have nearly enough funding at the front end, in my judgment, for the research and development component. My filed amendment would shift $20 billion in funding in the bill to say we are going to get serious. This is going to be a Manhattan-type project to find ways to continue to use our most abundant resource and do so without spoiling our environment. There is research going on but not nearly enough. I can give you a couple of examples. A Texas company came to see me. They are taking coal for electricity. They have a couple of small demonstration projects which burn coal to produce electricity. They are treating the effluent that comes from the plant chemically, and as it comes out of the plant, they are capturing the CO2 and producing byproducts, including hydrogen, chloride, and baking soda. The baking soda contains CO2. In fact, this company brought me some cookies and said these come from coal. They are making the point that, by capturing the CO2 from a coal plant, you can end up with baking soda used for baking cookies. It is a clever way to describe that there are innovative ways to capture CO2 and protect our environment, even as we use our most abundant domestic resource. This photo is of single-cell pond scum, called algae. I was in Arizona recently and saw a demonstration plant that is producing algae by taking CO2 off of a plant and putting it in greenhouses that produce algae. Algae is produced in water which need sunlight and CO2 to grow. So it consumes CO2 by producing algae, single celled pond scum. It grows quickly, increasing its bulk in hours. They can harvest it for diesel fuel. So you actually capture the CO2 and produce a beneficial use which is a biodiesel fuel. There are ways for us to do this. My point is that if we are going to have a bill that works, you need to have dramatic funding commitment for research, development and demonstration up front. That was not the case with the pending bill. I know some will argue that it is. This is known as the kick-start fund for coal and is largely for demonstration and deployment. That is different from the massive need for additional research we need. We need a Manhattan Project to make these investments. That is a different kind of funding than the research and technology we need if we are going to decide that we are going to unlock the mystery and use our most abundant resource in the future. We continue to need investments in research and development as well as demonstration and deployment programs for coal to thrive in a carbon constrained world. I am also a fan of wind energy, energy from the wind, for producing electricity. It makes sense. That doesn't contribute environmental problems like emitting greenhouse gases. Also, there is geothermal and biomass, the production of ethanol, and hopefully cellulosic ethanol in the future. I was visited by Dr. Craig Venter the other day who is working to create microbes and bacteria that would essentially eat the coal or convert it into liquid fuels as it is being processed by these microbes while underground. That is pretty exciting. I also mentioned the other day that we are studying termites in the science area of our Government. These are the kinds of things people might ridicule. They say why are we spending all this money to study termites. Termites eat your house. When they eat wood, we understand now they produce methane gas, as a lot of living things do. We are trying to figure out what in the 200 microbes in the gut of a termite might allow them to eat your house. If we can figure out how to break down woody products, it is important in terms of producing future energy from cellulosic ethanol. There is a lot to do. If we are going to be serious about climate change and global warming--and we should be, in my judgment--two things are necessary: One, we need to have kind of a Manhattan Project that in a very short period of time is going to find ways to dramatically increase the use of renewables. Second, we are going to dramatically accelerate our effort to determine how we can use coal and other fossil fuels and still protect our environment by capturing and sequestering carbon or providing a beneficial use of carbon. That is expensive, but we can get that done. That was the amendment I had, which would shift $20 billion to the front end of this to say: Let's do this in a serious manner. I wanted to indicate that my vote on cloture earlier today should not diminish the work and effort and intent of others with respect to climate change. I think something is happening in our climate. Most of us believe we will be seeing climate change legislation passing through the Congress at some point in the near future--perhaps as early as next year. When it is done, it needs to be done in a manner that is reflective of all of strengths and resources of our country to move ahead in unison in doing the right thing in the right way.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I spent part of this morning visiting with some experts about the issue of energy speculation and the price of gasoline. I am very concerned about the price of gasoline. I come from a State that not only produces a lot of energy but uses a lot of petroleum products. We are a farm State and a big State with a sparse population. North Dakota is spread over the equivalent of 10 Massachusettses in landmass. We use a lot of energy per capita. When the price does what it has been doing recently, it is very harmful to a rural State that does a lot of family farming and requires people to travel a lot because of its sheer size. Here is what happened to oil prices in the last year: They have doubled. There is no justification for that--none. There is no justification for this at all. Get this, crude oil futures hit a record $139 per barrel today. I used to teach a little economics in college--not in a serious way. I taught the supply and demand intersection and what happens to price. I understand all that. If we take a look at supply and demand, there is nothing that justifies what is happening in the futures market with respect to oil prices. Now back up 14 months, in fact, to the time prior to the price of oil doubling and ask yourself what happened in this world. Were we oblivious then to the fact that India and China were going to want more fuel in their economies? I understand there are probably 150 million Chinese who want to drive cars. Where are they going to get the fuel? A lot of folks in India want to drive cars too. I understand all of that. These signals were already in the market 16 and 18 months ago. That is not different. Here is also what I understand. Since the first part of this year, our inventories of petroleum stocks have been going up in this country and use has been going down. People are driving slightly less and using less. So what is happening to price? It has doubled. I will tell you what I think is happening. On the oil commodity markets, we have a dramatic orgy of speculation and carnival of greed. Are all of the speculators who are neck deep in these markets there because they want oil or want to hold oil? Have they tried to lift a 42-gallon drum? I don't think so. They want to make money speculating. As a result all of this excess speculation, they are driving up the price of a commodity. That damages this country and injures most Americans. This is what has happened to speculation. This Congress and this President have a responsibility to stop it. When excess speculation damages an economy, damages the country and its people, we have a responsibility to stop excess speculation. This is a picture of NYMEX, where they trade commodities. Most people have seen pictures of the floor of a trading session like this. In fact, I think it was 80 years ago when Will Rogers talked about these guys buying things they will never get from people who never had it. At NYMEX, they trade futures contracts. Let me describe what one fellow testified before the Energy Committee. By the way, he has had 30 or 35 years as an executive analyst in these markets. Fadel Gheit said this: There is absolutely no shortage of oil. I am absolutely convinced that oil prices shouldn't be a dime above $55 a barrel. I called it the world's largest gambling hall. It's open 24/7. Unfortunately, it is totally unregulated. This is like a highway with no cops and no speed limits, and everybody is going 120 miles an hour. Mr. President, the New Jersey Star Ledger wrote: Experts, including the former head of ExxonMobil, say financial speculation in the energy markets has grown so much over the last 30 years that it now adds 20 to 30 percent to the cost of a barrel of oil. The president of Marathon Oil, Clarence Cazalot, Jr., said: $100 oil isn't justified by the physical demand in the market. Here is an oil executive saying this price isn't justified. Stephen Simon, a senior vice president at Exxon, said on April 1, 2008: The price of oil should be about $50 to $55 per barrel. Mr. President, how did we get here? On December 15, 2000, in this Chamber, one of our colleagues, Senator Gramm from Texas, stuck a little provision into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which was included in a very big piece of legislation that was being enacted. I believe it was the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2000, a large supplemental bill being done. That little provision changed everything. Prior to that time, prior to Senator Gramm from Texas putting this provision into law, every futures contract in this country was subject to regulation and oversight. Senator Gramm stuck a provision in a very big piece of legislation that said essentially certain commodity provisions need not be subject to regulation and oversight. Then it started. That was called the Enron loophole. I know something about that because I chaired the hearings at which the late Ken Lay, the CEO and president of Enron Corporation, testified. He raised his hand, took an oath, sat down, and then took the fifth amendment. He ran one of the biggest energy companies in this country. We found out that at least part of it was a criminal enterprise. It benefitted greatly by the actions of the Congress, and only a few in the Congress knew what they were trying to do. That created this loophole by which Enron and others down the road could create an energy market that was unregulated, outside of the view of regulators and of the grasp of regulators. So now, going forward from December 15, 2000, to today, what is happening is that we have seen, outside of the purview of regulators, a dramatic amount, an obscene amount of speculation in energy markets. I have met with experts who have said that there is no speculation here. Yesterday, I met with a person yesterday, someone who is an expert in this area and runs a major corporation, who said there is no speculation here. That is just wrong. That is false on its face. All one has to do is look at what is happening in these markets. Can anybody, anyplace, anytime, anywhere tell us that something has happened in the last 14 months in terms of the market fundamentals that justifies doubling the price of oil or gasoline? There is nothing that justifies that. This Congress cannot sit around any longer. I know the President and the Vice President opposed responding to the electricity crisis out West when they first came to office. I recall when some of us in Congress were trying to take some action against what was happening to hijack wholesale electric prices on the West Coast by the Enron Corporation that they stood by idly. I and others pushed and pushed. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said there is nothing going on there. Dick Cheney made fun of us, saying these markets are working, we just don't like markets. The President didn't want to do anything. We finally found out what was something illegal happening. Every day was criminal. They were manipulating supply in a criminal way, and there are people sitting in prison for it. Ken Lay died beforehand, but he was on his way to prison because it was a criminal enterprise he was conducting. And the Vice President was belittling those of us in Congress who were trying to do something about it. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was dead asleep, very content to do nothing. That cannot continue to be replicated now. We have to do something to soak the speculation out of these futures markets. There needs to be a futures market for energy, I support that. There are legitimate hedging requirements, I understand that. There needs to be liquidity, I understand that. But when you have excessive speculation that damages this country and runs up the price of oil to double the price when, in fact, the market fundamentals do not justify it. Hedge funds, investment banks, and many others rush into these markets in order to make profits through speculation and the public be damned. It doesn't matter what it does to the country, then something is wrong, and it is the responsibility of the Congress to act. It is our responsibility and requirement. We cannot sit around and ignore this any longer. I had a call from the owner of a trucking company in North Dakota the other day. They have been running a trucking firm for years. His dad ran it, and his family has been running it for four or five decades. He said: I don't think we can continue. We can't afford the price of diesel fuel. I understand we have had 12 airlines that have gone into bankruptcy. I know of five in the last 6 or 8 weeks. The fact is, this country cannot exist without a vibrant aviation industry. We have to have airline companies that are able to move Americans back and forth across the country. The price of jet fuel is even worse than the description I just offered with respect to gasoline and oil. We need to work on this issue in a very aggressive and urgent way, and we need to do something that shuts down this speculation. I indicated yesterday that I am working on legislation to try to do that and to try to make certain we have a completely regulated system with respect to the trading of these contracts. First of all, they ought to be regulated. Some say that, if we try to regulate them here, they will move offshore. We ought to be able to regulate it. If you are in this country, you want to play games in the commodities markets as a speculator, if you are picking up a telephone and trade commodities in this country, as far as I am concerned, you ought to be regulated with respect to your order of commodities contract. A lot of work is being done. As I said, I spent part of this morning with experts who understand the complexities and the vagaries of these commodity markets and especially the oil markets and the speculation that is occurring. I side with those who believe there is excessive speculation and that there is a requirement that we do something about it. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the consensus among scientists, whose expertise I respect, is that there's something happening to the climate of this planet that we need to be concerned about. As a result, I believe that the Congress needs to enact climate change legislation to address global warming It is one of the significant challenges of our time. Addressing the issue of climate change will require a national commitment of all the resources that are available to us to change course and protect our planet. I voted no on the motion to invoke cloture today, but this should not be seen as a statement of my opposition to enact mandatory, climate change legislation in the future. The specific proposal that has been brought to the floor of the U.S. Congress by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, Warner, Kerry, and others is a legitimate and thoughtful piece of legislation. The Senate has voted on climate change legislation in 2003, 2005, and now in 2008. In all three cases, many Members have expressed their opposition to any mandatory legislation. Yet, during this 5-year period, there has been a significant shift in public awareness, the certainty of the science, and the demand for legislative action. I hope that industry in this country will understand what we are required to do and start preparing for it. When there is a new President and a new Congress in 2009, I predict that there will be another debate, and there will be passage of landmark U.S. climate change legislation. Major pieces of landmark legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, Superfund, and others took several Congresses to be refined and enacted. I believe that time for climate change legislation will be in the 111th Congress. In order for our country to dramatically shift our energy use to a lower greenhouse gas emitting blend, a strong commitment from all sectors of the economy is needed. We need a ``moon shot'' approach to increasing energy efficiency and conservation, renewable energy production and technologies that allow us to capture and sequester carbon emissions from fossil fuel energy generation. I am a big fan of renewable energy, including wind, solar and geothermal energy as well as biofuels. In order for these energy sources to become a larger portion of the energy used in this country, however, we need to demonstrate a robust commitment to funding research and development to increase the efficiency of renewable energy and drive the costs down so they are competitive with fossil energy sources. Until they are cost-competitive, we need to provide long-term incentives that signal certainty to potential investors. Even as we strongly support our renewable energy research, development and deployment, we also need to understand that in order to meet our energy needs we will need to continue to use fossil fuels--but use them in a different way. For example, we use coal to produce about 50 percent of the electricity we now use in this country. Coal is going to continue to be a significant part of our energy future, so that means we must make a major research push to find ways to the capture the carbon and sequester the carbon. The climate change bill that is now on the floor includes what is called ``kick start'' funding and ``bonus'' funding that its authors say addresses the needs of the industry to get carbon capture and storage. However, the bill does not provide any funding for the substantial research and development that will be necessary to find ways to capture the carbon and safely sequester it. Similarly, advancing renewable energy will require substantial funding, of which there is not enough in the underlying bill. There is money in the underlying bill for demonstration and commercialization of technologies, both in the renewable area and carbon capture and storage. But there is not the kind of funding that will be necessary to fund the research and development at the front end of the process for both carbon capture and renewables. I prepared and filed amendments to address those two deficiencies. Together, my amendments would add $30 billion in the first 12 years to carbon capture and storage and renewable energy. The amendments provide a full commitment by our country to fund the necessary research and provide the opportunity to succeed in both areas on the front end. We will not succeed in our quest to address global warming unless we invest in these areas of research. The product of research for the environmentally safe use of coal and the expanded use of renewables is what will allow us to meet the targets in the global warming bill. Today, however, we find a tangled procedure in the United States Senate by which we are asked to vote to shut off debate and vote cloture on the Boxer substitute. This means that my amendment and others designed to improve the bill will not be allowed to even be offered. That is because the minority blocked the process when the bill came to the floor, so no amendments have been allowed to be offered. Therefore, none are pending, and post cloture, only pending amendments can be voted upon. In short, voting for cloture means I would be voting to deny myself the opportunity to offer the important amendments I have just described. I am not prepared to do that. I am prepared to seriously address global warming. I will count myself as someone who is going to vote to advance appropriate legislation to address global warming. But I am not going to vote this morning to prevent myself from offering the amendments that I think are necessary to make this legislation work. Let me state again, I think my colleagues that have brought the Warner-Lieberman-Boxer bill to the floor today have done some good work, and I am appreciative of their effort. The bill in its current state is not ready to become the law of the land. We need to have a serious debate about this legislation, amendments need to be considered, the bill needs to be modified in significant ways before it should be passed by this Congress. Let me repeat, a piece of legislation that will have some of the most significant consequences for the environment, for the economy, and for a way of life than anything we have done in many decades in this Congress has been brought to the floor and will now be subject to a cloture vote without any opportunity to offer an amendment. That is not a process that I can support.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I heard my colleague on the other side of the aisle, from Louisiana, on the floor of the Senate, with the usual sharp partisan scalpel, talking about what the price of gasoline was when this Congress was seated, the new Congress--presumably with a Democratic majority was his point--and what the price of gasoline is now, suggesting somehow that the Congress has conspired in increasing the price of gasoline. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. But I want to explain my concern about what is happening with the price of gasoline and the price of energy in this country. I also want to make the point while I do this that those, including perhaps my colleague who was speaking earlier this morning, who have always felt that regulation was a four-letter word, ought to understand that part of what we are experiencing today is regulatory agencies in the Federal Government taking a Rip van Winkle nap while they ought to be regulating, while they ought to be watching on behalf of the public interest what is going on. We have people who came to Government who did not like Government, who aspired not to do anything. A good example of that is the folks who were put in place prior to Enron, running roughshod on wholesale electricity prices--which we later found out was a criminal enterprise. People on the west coast were bilked out of billions and billions of dollars. Why? Because regulators were not watching and didn't care, because they were regulators who were selected by the very companies they were regulating. In fact, I am told that Ken Lay actually was conducting some interviews on behalf of the administration. Ken Lay is dead. He is gone. He came before my committee. I chaired the hearings on the Enron scandal over in the Commerce Committee. He came before the committee. We subpoenaed him. He raised his hand, took an oath, sat down and took the fifth amendment. He has now died but many of his colleagues in Enron are spending years at minimum security prisons somewhere around the country. Effective regulatory oversight is very important. It is unbelievably important. Let me explain why that is the case with respect to the price of gasoline and the price of oil. Here is what has happened to the price of gasoline. These are oil prices, but gasoline prices track them. This is the price of a first month contract on the NYMEX. You can see what is happening--up, up, and up. Is there a reason that oil prices should go up like that? Let's explore that a bit. Stephen Simon, senior vice president of ExxonMobil, testified a month and a half ago before the House of Representatives. Here is what he said: The price of oil should be about $50-55 per barrel. A big oil executive saying the price of oil ought to be about $50 or $55 a barrel. Here is Clarence Cazalot, the CEO of Marathon Oil. He says: $100 oil isn't justified by the physical demand in the market. An oil executive saying the current price at $100--it is much higher now--$100 is not justified. During a question-and-answer period he suggested a more reasonable range for crude oil prices was between $55 and $60 a barrel. This is from the Newark Star Ledger on January 8. Experts, including the former head of ExxonMobil, say financial speculation in the energy markets has grown so much over the last 30 years that it now adds 20 to 30 percent or more to the price of a barrel of oil. Again, an oil company executive. Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer, with 30 to 35 years experience: There is absolutely no shortage of oil. I'm convinced that oil prices shouldn't be a dime above $55 a barrel. I call it the world's largest gambling hall. . . . He is talking about the futures market now, for oil. I call it the world's largest gambling hall . . . It's open 24/7 . . . Unfortunately, it's totally unregulated . . . This is like a highway with no cops and no speed limit and everybody's going 120 miles an hour. Fadel Gheit came and testified before our Energy subcommittee and said the same thing. There is no justification for the current price of oil. Then what is happening? This is what a market looks like at NYMEX. It is hard to see much order there, but I have actually visited that market. It is a bunch of traders on the floor who wear colored jackets and logos and have pieces of paper. It doesn't look like anybody can keep track of what they are doing. They apparently are doing it well. At any rate, in this market, which is supposed to provide liquidity for the price of oil--that is you have a market where you have people who hedge and people who buy contracts and so on--there is now an orgy of speculation, an unbelievable amount of speculation. Let me show what has happened with respect to speculation. This line shows the percentage of oil owned by speculators, January 1996 to April 2008. This is oil purchased by people who do not have any interest in having oil. These are speculators. They buy things they will never get from people who never had it, expecting to make money on both sides of the trade. This market is now infested with speculators. We heard testimony yesterday that said the largest holder of home heating fuel in the Northeast, in the United States of America, is Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. Does anybody here think that Morgan Stanley decided as part of its corporate charter we aspire to gather a bunch of heating oil because we want to be in the heating oil business? No. It is an investment bank that is in the speculative business. Hedge funds and investment banks are deep into speculation in these futures markets, very deep. Investment banks for the first time, as I understand it, are actually buying storage capacity to take energy, that is heating fuel and oil, off of the market and put it in storage to keep it in the market. They believe it would be more valuable in the future than to convert it to dollars, which they think will depreciate. So they buy oil and store oil because they are speculating. The question is, What do we do about that? If, in fact, the fundamentals aren't at work here--and, by the way, there is no free market. Everybody says: What about the free market? Let the free market work. There is no free market. That is absurd. You have a cartel, a bunch of folks who represent the OPEC countries. They all have ministers--Mr. Minister this, Mr. Minister that. They go lock a door someplace and this cartel decides how much they are going to produce and what price point they want. You have a cartel at the front end. Second, you have bigger oil companies. They have all merged. They all like each other so they all married and the fact is nobody cared much how big they got and now they have two names, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, the list goes on. So they are bigger, stronger, and they have more muscle in the marketplace. Cartel, bigger oil companies--and third and most important you have an unbelievable amount of speculation in a market that ought to work but doesn't work anymore at all. Who is injured? The country is damaged. Our economy is damaged. Everybody who drives up to a service station and wants to use a gas pump to fill their car with gas is now actually siphoning money right out of their pocketbook right into the bank account of the major oil companies, right into the bank account of the OPEC countries. They have ``permagrin.'' They love this. They smile all the way to the bank because they are depositing our money. But it is injuring our country, damaging our economy, and hurting American consumers. So if this is not just about fundamentals, and if the fundamentals don't justify the current price, what then can we do? We have done at least a couple of little things. I introduced a bill we have now passed and the President has now signed it--he didn't like to sign it, but he signed it--that said at least stop putting 70,000 barrels a day underground of sweet light crude. That is a law. They have not stopped doing it because they are filling out the current contract until the end of June, but 70,000 barrels of sweet light crude will go into the supply line when that goes into effect at the end of this month. What can we do to end and wring out the speculation? Let me say, first, we need oil. I am not here to trash oil. We need oil. I understand that. We put in place in 1960 generous tax breaks that are permanent to say: If you are looking for oil or gas, we want to give you some tax incentives to do that. That is what this country did a long time ago. I was on an oil rig about 2 weeks ago in the area of our country that has the largest oil play, I believe. It is called the Bakkan Shale in western North Dakota and eastern Montana. It is fascinating what they are doing. The reason I say we need oil--I encourage drilling. I was one of four Senators who helped open up Lease 181 off the Gulf of Mexico. We are now going to get more oil and gas off of that area and still protect our environment. Let me talk about the sophistication of the drilling rig I visited 2 weeks ago. They drill down 10,000 feet, make a big curve with the same rig, and drill out 10,000 feet. They are searching for a seam that is 100 feet wide called the shale seam. They divide that seam into three parts--the upper part, middle part, and lower part. They go down 2 miles with a drilling rig, make a big curve, go out 2 miles, and they are targeting only the middle part of a 100-foot seam to get oil and they end up 2 to 4 feet from where they expect to be with their drill bit. It is unbelievable technology. There is a lot going on and I commend them for it. We want to encourage them. We want more production, but we cannot sit around here, as a Congress, and say it doesn't matter what the current price is. If the price at the pump is $4, the price of a barrel of oil is $125 or $130 or $135, it doesn't matter. It matters to the airlines that went belly up recently. I had a discussion yesterday with an executive who told me the name of an airline he thinks may well be liquidated in the next couple of weeks. I was flabbergasted. We have had a good many airlines file for bankruptcy recently. We have trucking companies all across this country, especially mom-and-pop truck businesses, that cannot afford to buy fuel and have gone belly up and many others will. We have people who can't afford to put gas in their tank to drive to work. That is unbelievable to me. If it were about fundamentals, I would understand this, but this has nothing to do with fundamentals of supply and demand or the free market. It has to do with an unbelievable amount of speculation. We have a right, in my judgment, we have a responsibility, to begin wringing that speculation out of those futures markets. There are a number of ways to do that. I have talked before about a piece of legislation that would increase margin requirements for those who want to engage in speculation. If you want to buy stock on margin, you have to put up 50 percent of the money. That is a requirement--50 percent of the money. If you want to go buy an oil contract, 5 to 7 percent. If you want to control $100,000 worth of oil, it will cost you $5,000 to $7,000. If you want to control $100,000 worth of stock on margin, it will cost you $50,000. It seems to me first we ought to identify a way to decide what is speculation and what is not and then go after a way to wring out the speculation from these markets. I understand markets need to work, they need liquidity, they need to have an opportunity for legitimate hedging. I understand all of that. But I also understand what has happened here is we have galloped into this box canyon with speculators making massive amounts of money. The other day I was on the floor and I talked about a man who has been involved in hedging and betting--mostly betting, not hedging--and has made a massive amount of money. He doesn't have any interest in oil. He has never had oil run through his fingers. He has probably never changed the oil in his car, let alone wanting to buy oil. He wouldn't have a place to store it if he got it. He is very interested in gambling on the contracts, back and forth, to make money. That is what Mr. Gates said. As I indicated, Mr. Gates is a fellow who has over 30 years' experience. I have talked to him by telephone a number of times. Mr. Gates says: This is the world's largest gambling hall. It is open 24/7, totally unregulated. Now, we have seen speculation and bubbles exist in our country before. We have seen them in history. There are books written about bubbles and speculation. You know when tulips were sold for $25,000 a piece, 400 and 500 years ago, it did not matter so much, nobody needed to have a tulip to do well during the day. But oil is different. The price of oil affects every American, every consumer, every business. It affects our economy. What are we going to do if this price keeps moving and if we do not find a way to wring the speculation out of this and bring it back to where supply and demand or where a real marketplace would render the price to be? How many airlines will go bankrupt? Will trucking companies be able to purchase fuel? What will consumers do? What will it mean to the economic growth potential of this country? I am working on a piece of legislation that does a couple things, that addresses this speculation in a way to free it, to wring it out of the futures market. The futures market should exist. It is a legitimate market. The futures market for oil is necessary. You need to hedge. But we need to find a way to have complete transparency, to be able to regulate both here and also on the intercontinental exchanges. We probably need to increase the margin requirements and say to speculators: Your day is over. Your day is done. This market will exist, but it will exist without you. I intend to work on that amendment with my colleagues in the coming days and offer it and hope we push it to a conclusion. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, how much time remains in morning business?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my understanding is that I am recognized for 20 minutes. I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for 20 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we will be once again taking up the pending bill dealing with global warming. It is a substantial piece of legislation. I am planning to speak later in the day as well, but I wish to take some time during morning business to talk about the overall bill as well as an amendment I may file later today on this legislation. In terms of the issue of global warming, first let me say that there is little question left that something significant is happening to our planet. There is something happening to our climate that sometimes we don't quite understand. But among almost all scientists, there is nearly universal consensus that in the last 100 years, the temperature of the Earth has slightly warmed by 1.1 to 1.6 degrees. Through 2050, we expect further temperature increases unless we begin to address the continued concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We are seeing evidence of these impacts. While no specific event is directly linked, we see droughts occurring more often, and this is certainly happening in my State of North Dakota. Heat waves are becoming more frequent, more intense, and more damaging. Further, the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes has nearly doubled in the past 50 years. It is quite clear something is happening that we have not seen before. I think the consensus of scientists now is at a point regarding this climate change that is beyond natural change, and we certainly ought to take some no-regret steps. At least at the very minimum, we should be taking more substantial steps to try to respond to it and deal with it. Now, one of the interesting things about this bill that is on the floor of the Senate is that it requires a commitment to emission reductions, technology investments and other actions through 2050. It is sometimes hard to see ahead 5 years or 10 years, let alone 30 or 40 or 50 years. We have economists who can't remember their own phone numbers who make predictions 10 and 15 years into the future. At the same time, we still have to be seriously thinking about our future pathway for action. What is our destination? What do we aspire to achieve for this country? What do we want to have happen as we move ahead? Let me say that almost everyone believes that our present energy course is unsustainable. Energy use primarily from fossil fuel combustion in the U.S. and around the world is a significant contributor to climate change, according to most energy and climate change experts. We cannot maintain the current path. So what do we have to do? Well, the legislation in front of us is significant. It says that we ought to do a lot of things. Yes, some of the proposals here are controversial. Some will likely be changed during this debate or future deliberations, but the reality is that a debate on mandatory emissions cuts must occur. I will offer an amendment I will describe a little later, but chief among the things we need to do are the more rapid development of new sources of energy, especially with advanced technology. There are renewable sources of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases or other pollutants. They produce no effluents or no carbon dioxide. This includes wind, geothermal, and solar energy, and we ought to be moving much more aggressively on these and other opportunities. This has not been what the U.S. has done historically though. We have initially been early leaders in cutting edge energy technologies and then fallen behind. Let me give an example of how pathetic this country's response has been in recent years and how much more aggressive it must be in future years. When the U.S. started exploring for oil and natural gas at the start of the last century, this Congress adopted, in 1916, long-term, permanent, very substantial tax incentives to encourage that development. It gave a clear signal that, if you go out and discover oil and gas, then we have big tax incentives for you. Industry understood that it was beneficial to find oil and gas through these long-term, permanent tax incentives. What do we do for wind energy, solar and other renewable energy technologies? The Congress put in place a production tax credit in 1992. These ended up being very short term and rather shallow. It has been extended for the short term, in many cases by 1 year, five times since we first passed it. It is a stutter step approach--start, stop; start, stop. It has been a pathetic, anemic, and weak response by a country that should be much more aggressive and bold in providing a direction to develop our renewable energy resources. There are substantial renewable energy resources available in this country, and we need to get about the business of providing the funding for research and the aggressive incentives for a long-term determination of where we are going to head with renewables. In 2007, I introduced legislation to encourage a broad range of renewable and clean energy approaches as well as additional infrastructure. That legislation signaled that our country should be on a course to say to the investors in the U.S. and around the world, where we are headed for a decade. Count on it. Believe in it. The production tax credit which will expire at the end of this year should be extended not for 1 year, it ought to be extended for a full decade to let America know where we are headed. We want more renewable energy that is not polluting. Now, having said all of that, there are so many things we can do. We need much more extensive deployment of conservation and efficiency, including more efficient vehicles and buildings. We are going to increase fuel economy standards with a 10-mile-per-gallon increase in 10 years that we required with the Energy Independence and Security Act passed by Congress in December 2007. I was proud to be a part of that effort to increase fuel economy standards. We are doing a lot of things that make it easier to move forward with efficiency and conservation measures. Further, I wish to talk for a moment about an amendment that I am going to offer with respect to the advancement of clean coal technologies. Now, I understand some say that, in order to deal with climate change, you are going to have to find a way to wean yourself off of fossil fuels. I understand they say that, but I also understand that is not going to happen in the very near term. Let me tell my colleagues what is happening with respect to energy use in this country. Almost 50 percent of our electricity comes from coal. Without questioning it, we get up in the morning, flick on a switch, turn a knob, and turn a dial. We do all of these things with our hands, and energy flows. One-half of those activities are made possible because of the electricity that comes from coal. Does anybody really think we are not going to use coal in the future? The problem is, when we use coal, we have CO2 that is emitted into the air. This CO2 and other greenhouse gases contribute significantly to cause global climate change. So we need to find a way to capture that CO2 and to store or sequester CO2 in geological formations or other means. How do we use coal in the future? We use coal in the future by being able to capture this emitted CO2. So how do we do that? The question isn't whether we are going to use coal. The question is how are we going to use coal in the future. There are some who say: Well, it is not possible to capture CO2. It is possible. Of course it is possible. At this point the technology isn't fully proven, and it is expensive. Yet, we can see several technology options ahead. Let me describe to my colleagues a plant in North Dakota, the only one of its kind in North America. It produces synthetic gasoline from lignite coal. Let me tell my colleagues what we do with the CO2 in that plant. We capture the CO2 and use it for enhanced oil recovery. It is one of the world's largest examples of CO2 capture at an industrial facility. Half of the CO2 produced at this facility is now captured. This CO2 is put in a pipeline under pressure and sent to Saskatchewan, Canada. Oil industry interests there pump it underground to enhance oil recovery. We are successfully using CO2 by capturing it, keeping it out of the atmosphere, investing it underground in Canada, and enhancing their oil recovery. That makes a lot of sense, and we need more of these types of projects. Is it possible? It is very possible. That one of the world's largest applications is being demonstrated in Beulah, North Dakota. Now, what else can we do dealing with carbon and the capturing of CO2? If you are going to unlock the mystery of how you continue to use fossil fuels that we must use without impacting our environment and our planet, we need to have kind of a moonshot approach. We can't just tiptoe around the issue. We have to decide we are going to significantly commit funding--billions of dollars--to the research and demonstrations in science and technology. Let me give you some examples. I was in Phoenix, Arizona recently, and I toured an electric utility called the Arizona Public Service. The organization in Arizona is producing CO2 at a coal-fired electric generating plant. What they are doing with it is very interesting. They are taking a stream of CO2 off their stack in a coal-fired electric generating plant and putting it in very long greenhouses, and they are producing algae. This pictures shows one example of greenhouses where they are doing it in tubes. Most of us know what algae is. Algae is single-cell pond scum. Every kid knows what that is. You have been to a little pond where stagnant water has hung around for a while and you see green slime or single- cell pond scum called algae. Algae grows in water. What does it need to grow? It needs two things--sunlight and CO2. When I became chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee on the Senate side, I discovered that the research that used to go on with respect to algae was discontinued nearly 15 years ago. Last year, for the first time, I reestablished funding to continue algae research. Let me tell you what they are doing in Arizona. In Arizona, they are trying to demonstrate growing algae in these greenhouses which are next to a coal-fired electric generating plant. They take the CO2 from the plant and use it to grow this pond scum. In these very long greenhouses where they are producing algae from the plant's CO2, they harvest the algae and produce diesel fuel. So what they are doing is taking something that we want to get rid of to grow single-cell pond scum called algae, which increases its bulk in hours. By the way, an equivalent acre of corn produces, in terms of ethanol fuel, about 300 or 400 gallons. An equivalent acre of soybeans I believe is around 80 to 100 gallons. An equivalent acre of algae harvested for diesel fuel produces 3,000 to 4,000 gallons. Think of this. We use much coal to produce electricity and that increased manmade CO2 is destructive to the atmosphere. Yet capturing the CO2 and producing fuel is very beneficial. An Austin, TX, company came to see me. They have two demonstration projects in Texas. They are taking flue gas off a coal plant, and they are producing several byproducts hydrogen, chloride, and baking soda. Isn't that interesting? These small demonstration projects take the flue gas from a coal electric generating plant, chemically treat it, and then produce these byproducts. Take a look at this chart. Here is the baking soda, and it contains the CO2. Instead of emitting it into the atmosphere, it is embedded in the CO2. It can be put in a landfill, but you can also make cookies. I happen to like the idea of eating cookies from this process. They said: Do you want to have some cookies produced from coal? It tasted pretty good because it was produced with, among other things, the baking soda which was a byproduct from coal. Here is another example of what we can do. I have in my hand some sandstone. You can find this in many geologic formations, including 10,000 to 15,000 feet underground in North Dakota. There also might be a very viable way to capture and store the CO2 underground. The carbon dioxide under pressure is pumped underground, attaches itself to sandstone and is therefore sequestered. We have examples, as I said previously, of CO2 being used in marginal oil wells. We suck out oil all across the planet every single day. We stick straws into the Earth, and we suck out 85 million barrels a day. We use one-fourth of that oil produced every day in the United States. We have a prodigious appetite for this energy. When you stick a drilling rig into the ground and find oil, in many cases, you are only getting about 30 percent of the oil pool pumped up. At that point, it is difficult to produce any more without some extra help or advanced technology. If you pump CO2 down into that ground under pressure, you enhance oil recovery. You have a way to get rid of the CO2 by putting pressure on the oil to bring it up. You have gotten rid of the CO2, protected the environment, are still able to use coal and have enhanced the recovery of oil from domestic sources. Why do I tell you all this? I think we need to produce substantial wind and other forms of renewable energy. We also have all kinds of needs for efficiency and conservation opportunities. But, if we don't find a way to unlock the opportunities to continue to use our fossil fuels, especially coal, we will not solve the problem that is brought to us with this piece of legislation on the Senate floor. How do we solve the problem of being able to use coal in a carbon constrained future? Perhaps by producing baking soda or algae, we can end up producing more cookies or biodiesel. Perhaps it's a dozen other innovative approaches. How do you do that? By investing in research and technological capability. This will require substantially more funding. I was visited by Craig Venter, who is one of the two fathers of the Human Genome Project and an unbelievable American. He has now turned his attention to energy. They are working on sophisticated things that I have a difficult time fully describing in simple terms. They are working on creating new kinds of organisms and bacteria that could eat coal in underground seams and produce liquid fuels. The Department of Energy's Office of Science is also studying the gut system of termites with our scientists because we know there are 200 microbes in the intestinal tract of a termite. When they eat your house, and they love to eat wood, it produces methane. Most living things do. But termites are able to break down cellulose. If we are going to have a revolution in the use of biofuels, we need to understand what these termites accomplish naturally. We are trying to figure out what is it in the gut system of termites that allows this insect to eat wood and break down cellulosic materials. If we can figure that out, we unlock another part of the mystery of how to produce more non-oil based fuels. So here is the proposal I will offer today. It is an amendment that would shift a substantial amount of money and dramatically increase the amount of money available for research and technology for advancing coal research. We would unlock the mysteries of going from research to demonstration to commercial application of carbon capture and storage or other beneficial uses. If they don't do that, the goals of this bill will fail. If we don't solve the problem without solving how to expand technology to use coal in a near zero emissions way, we can not meet the goals outlined in this bill. We have to make substantial investments in technology, science, and research. I was part of six of us in the Senate who said, some years ago, pushed to double the amount of money we spend at the National Institutes of Health because it is not spending, it is an investment in the future. If we invest in cures for cancer, ALS, Parkinson's, diabetes, heart disease, and so many more diseases, it will be beneficial to generations around the world. We made the commitment and doubled the amount of funding at the NIH. We need the same kind of commitment with respect to our energy future. We need to decide we are going to make a commitment. Just as NIH deals with the health of people. This bill and the technology we need to develop relates to the health of our economy, of our country, and of the expanded opportunities in this country. We need to make a similar commitment right now. I propose an amendment that would take the underlying bill which has about $17 billion for advancing coal research in the first 12 to 14 years. This is a good start but is not enough. I propose to shift about $20 billion to that $17 billion and try to provide about $37 billion in total. That $37 billion in this cap and trade bill would be coupled with the $500 million that I have each year through appropriations for clean coal research. By the way, this President's funding recommendation on research in fossil fuels has largely been largely flat and very inadequate to our needs. He has mostly paid lip service to our tremendous needs. There is no evidence the White House is very interested in this. Through such an amendment I propose to create a fund of at least about $3.5 billion a year, starting in 2009, because these can start with the first auctions and the funding can be available on the first opportunity after passage of a piece of legislation. If this could be accomplished, we would have about $3.5 billion a year for 12 to 14 years. I am convinced we can do this. I am convinced that investments in these technology opportunities allow us to address the climate change challenge and still continue to use the most abundant source of energy in this country without injuring our environment. There are people out there who are some of the best and the brightest scientists and engineers in our country. We need these people working on this issue. There are many technological leaps that need to be made. The best minds should be working on ways to take CO2, produce baking soda, and make cookies. They should be working on ways to have beneficial use of carbon, which is destructive to our environment, but can be constructive if you invest it in algae and harvest the algae for diesel fuel. Frankly, the amount of money that has been committed to research and technology and development has been pathetic, just pathetic. It is not just this, it is also solar, wind, and other technologies. But Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, has written a wonderful essay in Time Magazine this week. I commend him for saying we need a moonshot here. My amendment is going to give us that opportunity--$37 billion invested in the opportunity to unlock the mysteries of how we use our most abundant resource and still protect our environment. We can do this, but we cannot move forward and will not move forward in a way that says to our country we need to make investments. I believe we can produce a number of zero-emission, coal-fired electric generating facilities. It will not happen by accident. I chair the Committee on Appropriations that funds all our national laboratories. The thousands and thousands of the best scientists in this country are a national treasure. We are now seeing many of them being furloughed and leaving our Federal payroll. We have so much to do, in such a short time, to unlock the opportunities to address this issue I have described. I hope we can move forward very aggressively. Finally, in closing, I will speak at greater length on the floor today on this subject, and I may file an amendment today. But this, it seems to me, is the first key to unlock the opportunities that will give us a future in which we can protect our environment and continue to use the resources we must use. This must be part of the step if the promise of not only this bill but future bills dealing with the great challenge of global warming are to be fulfilled. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, June 5, at 9:30 a.m., in Room 562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing on Predatory Lending in Indian Country. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I ask unanimous consent--and I ask it not be taken out of my time--that H.R. 980 remain the pending business.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I want to start by acknowledging the tremendous work of Senators Conrad, Harkin, and Chambliss. This farm bill has taken countless hours of patience and perseverance. Thank goodness they have all that in abundance, along with great skill, wisdom and vision I especially want to recognize Senator Conrad's work here in the Senate and Congressman Pomeroy's work in the House. We wouldn't be where we are today without their efforts and I wanted to publicly thank them. Mr. President, the Congress has made a major decision today. That decision is to say to this President: It is time to start taking care of things here at home. It is a pretty substantial message-- notwithstanding the objections of the President, this Congress said we need to stand for family farmers and have voted overwhelmingly to decide that we will override the President's veto and voted overwhelmingly to decide that we will override the President's veto. Sometimes there is not much distance between the right track and the wrong track. But with respect to the farm bill, the distance here between the right track and the wrong track, between the President and the Congress, is a country mile. It surprises me, in fact. This Congress has said: Let's start taking care of things here at home for a change. Now, family farmers have always been the bedrock of this country's family values. They, in many cases, work alone. They raise a family out under yard lights, out in the country. They take big risks every year. They live on hope. They do not come to work in blue suit. They put on work shoes and work clothes and work hard, and all they ask for is a decent return on their investment, despite the substantial risks they take. Because of that this Congress, for a long period of time, over many decades, has decided to create a safety net so that when family farmers run into a patch of trouble, this Congress and this country say: You are not alone. We want to help you through these price valleys and through these tough times. So that safety net was significantly what we voted on today. The President began last year threatening to veto a farm bill, and consistently threatened that veto, and finally decided to exercise that veto, and the Congress said: You are wrong, Mr. President. The President came to my State of North Dakota. He said to farmers: When you need me, I will be there. But when farmers needed him, he was not there. That is a matter of fact. This Congress has used awfully good judgment in overriding the President's veto. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, I introduced an agriculture disaster bill here in the Congress. For 3 years in a row I have added an agriculture disaster piece to the supplemental appropriations bill because we did not have a disaster title in the farm bill. For 3 years as an appropriator I put disaster money in the Appropriations supplemental bill. Finally, on the third opportunity, we got it in a bill the President had to sign. But we had to go on bended knee when they had disasters over much of farm country to get disaster help. Now we have a farm bill that has a disaster title. That is a significant step forward. A lot of folks do not understand much about farming. They think that Corn Flakes, oatmeal, and puffed rice come in boxes. They do not. But those who put it in the boxes make much more money than those who plow the ground and plant the seeds that produce the corn and the oats and the wheat. Now, this is a pretty substantial day for those of us who care about family farmers and want good farm policy. This veto override is good public policy. Rodney Nelson, a cowboy poet from North Dakota, who is a rancher and a farmer out near Almont and Judd, ND, wrote a piece. I have mentioned it before to my colleagues. But he asks this question rhetorically in his piece: What is it worth? What is it worth for a kid to know how to weld a seam, to drive a combine, to fix a tractor? What's it worth for a kid to know how to pour cement? What is it worth for a kid to know how to work livestock, work in the hot summer sun and the cold winter day? He asks: What is it worth for a kid to know how to teach a calf to drink milk out of a pail? What is it worth for a kid to know how to build a lean-to? What is it worth for a kid to know how to fix a tractor that won't run? There is only one place in this country where all of those skills are taught, and that is on America's family farms. That is the university where all of those courses exist, and we lose it at our peril. That is why we write farm legislation. What is it worth? It is worth plenty to this country to say to family farmers during tough times: You are not alone, because we have created a farm bill to say here is a helping hand during tough times. That is what this is all about. I think the action today is something we ought to be proud of. Is this bill everything I would have liked? No. My colleague and I, Senator Grassley, offered an amendment on the floor of the Senate that was critical in terms of policy dealing with payment limits. We lost. We got 56 votes, we needed 60. The fact is, this bill remains a good bill. It is late. It should have been done months ago. We fought through 9 or 10 months of Presidential veto threats. But it is done and finally I think farmers who are working their fields now in the spring and trying to figure out how they are going to do this year, I think farmers are going to be able to look at this bill and say: Congress cared. Congress cared enough to override the President's veto and put in place a farm bill that once again says: America cares about family farming and its future. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, our go-it-alone foreign policy over the last 8 years has severely damaged our image and stirred up anti- American sentiment around the world. We have lost the international goodwill we had following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the failed strategy of the war in Iraq has cost us a good number of allies. A worldwide survey conducted last year of 28,000 people, asking them to rate 12 countries, put the United States at the bottom, along with Iran and Israel, when it comes to having the world's most negative image. In fact, even North Korea ranked higher than the United States in that survey. Another survey found that our favorability rating around the world dropped considerably from 2000 to 2006. For example, in Germany, we went from a favorability rating of 78 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2006. In Spain, only 23 percent of people have a favorable opinion of the United States. I could go on and on, but I don't think anyone can dispute the fact that our image and credibility in the world has dropped dramatically. This negative trend hurts us. It makes it more difficult to implement our foreign policy, and even threatens our national security by making the United States a target. With that being said, as the most powerful country in the world we still have an unprecedented opportunity to both help those in less fortunate countries and help our country regain the moral authority we once held. A lot of interesting ideas have been proposed to repair our damaged image. Some of the most creative suggestions have come from students, such as the paper I recently received from Occidental College in Los Angeles. That paper makes recommendations for United States policy changes on issues like the war in Iraq, oil and energy issues, and illegal immigration, just to name a few. Calling for the United States to lead rather than dominate, to be a beacon more than a bullhorn, this paper presents a possible path to help repair our standing in the international community. I don't agree with everything in the paper, but it is full of interesting ideas that can make a difference. It is encouraging to see that the youth of this country have taken a serious interest in our country's image. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take a serious look at this and other proposals to see what Congress can do to help ensure that future generations inherit a government that is well respected throughout the world. It is my hope that with the new administration, our country will be able to turn the page of the past 8 years and focus on a foreign policy that is more constructive. I look forward to working with my colleagues and the next President to make this happen.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, May 22, at 9:30 a.m. in room 562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Follow Up on the status of Backlogs at the Department of the Interior''.