Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. OK.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I think the regular order is to go out now. First, I suggest that I will want some time this afternoon to explain what this amendment really does and also to explain in some detail the marginal wells this would affect. The average marginal well in my State of Oklahoma is 2 barrels a day. We are not talking about giants here. This is a totally different situation. We will have an opportunity to pursue that after resuming the regular order.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. INHOFE. I object.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Let me mention one thing I want to make sure I get in here before we run out of time. We went through this class warfare once back in 1980. We had Jimmy Carter as President of the United States. He had the windfall profits tax. I am sure my friend from Vermont remembers that at that time. I remember it well. That is when they were going to have a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry. The results of that: The WPT reduced domestic production between 3 and 6 percent and increased oil imports from 8 to 16 percent. . . . This made the United States more dependent upon imported oil. That is the Congressional Research Service, which is nonpartisan. That is a major issue here in terms of our dependence on other countries for our ability to run this machine called America. Let's get back to the percentage depletion. The percentage depletion is particularly important for the production of America's over 600,000 low-volume marginal wells. The average marginal well produces 2 barrels a day. Let me tell you what that is so my colleagues, when they get ready to vote, will really understand whom they are affecting. A marginal well is a well producing under 15 barrels per day. The average is 2 barrels a day. My friend is talking about all these big giants. I am not nearly as concerned about the big five and the majors as I am about my marginal operators in my State of Oklahoma. With an average of 2 barrels a day, the marginal producers actually account for 28 percent of all domestic production in the lower 48 States--28 percent. These are all small people. If you are concerned also about whom you are affecting by this legislation, look at the royalty owners. There are literally millions of royalty owners. They have maybe a small piece of property, maybe their homestead. They are the ones who would be denied the use of their land. By putting the small ones out of business, they are the ones you are damaging. I will reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. INHOFE. I thank my friend from Vermont. I know my friend from Vermont would not intentionally say something that is not true. Sometimes he does not have and sometimes I do not have the actual facts, so inadvertently we might misrepresent. Let me just say as far as Exxon is concerned that from 2004 to 2008, they paid more than $18 billion in U.S. Federal income taxes, and that is just some of the taxes they pay. I have to say this, though. The whole discussion on this--the Sanders bill would effectively put the small and the marginal producers in America out of business. Before I go into that in any detail, let me just share this. It is interesting, when I listen to liberals talk about doing away with drilling, with oil and gas and coal and nuclear-- if you do that, you cannot run this machine called America. Every time they talk about doing something to stop production, as they are doing right now in the gulf--a lot of these people are using and exploiting the tragedy in the gulf to try to retard or stop all production in America. Consequently, this is something where we would be in a position where we would be so rationed in oil and gas that we would have to be more dependent on many of these countries on which we do not want to be dependent. We did a study. I think this would surprise the Chair. If we didn't have any political restrictions on what we could do in North America, we could completely eliminate our reliance upon the Middle East for any gas or oil within 4 years. That is pretty shocking. Our problem is not that we do not have enough oil and gas. We have more reserves than any other country. A CRS report came out with that just the other day. What I want to do is give my honorable friend a chance to respond to my statement, and then I will reserve the remainder of my time to discuss in a little more detail how this affects the very small, marginal operators in America.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I would say first of all, whether that is good policy--I think you have to have the accurate input before you make a policy determination. The oil and gas industry is very complicated. In order for them to go out and risk their capital, they have to plow this money back in. Frankly, most of it is plowed back into exploration. What I wanted to get across, which I think is important, is that the Sanders amendment repeals three things--first of all, expensing for intangible drilling costs; that is IDC. It repeals percentage depletion for marginal oil and gas wells. It repeals the manufacturing deduction for oil and gas. I predicted a long time ago, when the gulf spill took place, that people were going to try to parlay this into something to punish oil and gas. This is what they have been trying to do for a long time. It could very well be that tonight, when the President makes his big speech, he is going to talk about, now we are going to have to look at cap and trade, as if there is some relationship between what happened in the gulf and cap and trade. Repealing expensing of intangible drilling costs eliminates the ability to expense intangible drilling and development costs, which would force at least a 25- to 30-percent reduction in drilling budgets, leading to lost jobs, lost production, and higher prices to consumers. On the floor of the Senate yesterday, I spent some time talking about how many jobs actually would be lost in the State of Louisiana. But the IDC is an expensing-out item that has been in our Tax Code since 1913. It really only applies to the smaller operators, so they are the ones who are singled out for oil and gas production. Likewise, since 1926 small producers and millions of royalty owners have had the option to utilize percentage depletion to both simplify and account for the decline in the value of minerals from a property. As you know, they do deplete as you produce minerals. Who is going to pay the most for this? I will share with you who pays for this, but right now I will yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. INHOFE. The Senator is yielding the remainder of is time?

Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, today I wish to speak on where I think this climate change debate is headed after last Thursday's vote on the Murkowski resolution. We got a very clear signal in today's Politico, which reported that President Obama, in his Oval Office address tomorrow night, will seek, as a part of the response to the BP oilspill, to ``put a price on carbon.'' Let's keep in mind what ``a price on carbon'' is. That is a tax, a carbon tax, or what we call cap and trade. Quite often people have said: Well, if those individuals really want to charge for carbon, want to stop this economy, why don't they just put a carbon tax on it? The reason they do not is then people would know how much it is costing them. As it is now, with cap and trade, they would not. But again, he is going to have an Oval Office address. I think this will be the first talk he will give from the Oval Office since he has been President. Of course, that is Washington-speak for cap and trade--a price on carbon. This is remarkable. Here we have the most significant environmental disaster in our Nation's history, and the President decides now is the time for cap and trade--a massive new energy tax paid for by consumers, working families, farmers, and small businesses; a massive new energy tax that will destroy millions of jobs, in good measure by sending many of them to places such as China and India; a massive new energy tax that will make a gallon of gas more expensive; and a massive new energy tax that will not do anything to stop global warming but will increase the size of government and give more money to politicians to spend. Just how that will contain the oilspill, mitigate the environmental damage, or help those immediately affected by it remains a mystery. Put simply, it will not do any of those things, but it will damage the economy and make it harder to deal with this crisis. We have a serious incident on our hands. People died, people's economic livelihoods are at stake, and the environment is being harmed. But instead of Presidential leadership and clear direction, we are getting pure partisan politics. One glaring example is President Obama's moratorium on deepwater drilling--something environmental groups have been seeking for many years. This is an exercise in overreaching that will do far more harm than good. The Louisiana Department of Economic Development estimates that the President's moratorium would kill 3,000 to 6,000 jobs in the next few weeks and over 10,000 Louisiana jobs in the next few months. More than 20,000 jobs are at risk in the next 12 months. That is one example of just pure politics. Today, in a letter to supporters--we just got this, Mr. President; you may not be aware of this--this is a letter that went out today to Obama supporters all across the Nation, and it says: We are going to have a big meeting at the White House, and we are going to talk about moving forward on legislation to promote a new economy powered by green jobs, combating climate change, and ending our dependence on foreign oil. Down further in the letter, he says that the House of Representatives has already passed comprehensive energy legislation. Let's remember what that was. That was the Waxman-Markey bill. That was a cap-and- trade bill--one that was very expensive. He says there is currently a plan in the Senate to do the same thing. That is the Kerry-Lieberman bill he is talking about and we are going to talk about. So the whole idea of this meeting--and I understand the speech that is going to take place tomorrow night is to try to promote an agenda, a very liberal agenda, an agenda that has been rejected. Cap and trade has been rejected by this legislative body since the Kyoto Treaty. That was way back in the late 1990s. Then, of course, the 2003 and 2005 bills by McCain and Lieberman that have been cap-and-trade bills were rejected and every one of them since then, including the Warner- Lieberman bill and the other bills we have had. The interesting thing is, every time a cap-and-trade bill comes up here, it is defeated by a larger margin. That is why I have been saying cap and trade is something that is dead in the Senate. Instead of Presidential leadership, we are getting rhetoric of the worst kind. A case in point came last week. We heard that the Murkowski resolution is a ``big oil bailout'' that will allow oil companies such as BP to pollute the air. That must be news to thousands of groups across the country because they certainly were very much in support of her resolution. I am talking about people such as the American Association of Housing Services for the Aging, Family Dairies USA, the Farm Bureau, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Brick Industry Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Associated Builders and Contractors--the list goes on and on of the people who realize they do not want to have this massive government takeover. Let's keep in mind that when you talk about cap-and-trade legislation and then you talk about what the EPA is talking about doing under the Clean Air Act, it is essentially the same thing. It is just that since they could not get it passed legislatively, they are going to try to do it administratively. That is what the whole Murkowski resolution was about. It was about stopping that from taking place. Incidentally, it got 47 votes, and I am going to talk about those votes in a minute. Well, do some Members really believe these groups have been duped, that what they are really supporting is nothing more than a sop to BP and big oil? This is simply insulting to the citizens across the country who supported the Murkowski resolution for one simple reason: It will stop the greatest bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of the American people in history. I am confident we will keep hearing this refrain as we get closer to November. The story in today's Politico--and this is interesting; it just came out today--talks about a survey by a guy named Joe Benenson. He is President Obama's campaign pollster. He is an Obama guy. They are doing it for a very liberal group. Among other things, Mr. Benenson found that, based on his interpretation of the survey results, pushing for cap and trade and tying opposition to it to big oil is a ``potent political weapon'' for Democrats against Republicans this fall. Purely political. No one can argue that. Well, it is my view that we should be capping that well and not the economy, but apparently the President sees it differently. I suppose some of this was driven by last week's 47-to-53 vote on overturning the EPA's endangerment finding. The motion to proceed to the Murkowski resolution failed, but the President should not let those numbers obscure the hard political reality: there is a bipartisan majority in the Senate that supports either a delay of or an outright ban on the Obama EPA's job-killing global warming agenda. By preventing a debate on the Murkowski resolution, the Democrat-led Senate voted last week to expand the reach of government into our daily lives. But the reason this bureaucratic intrusion will continue is that a deal was cut just prior to the vote. Now, listen to this. It was exposed in a front-page story in the Hill the day of the vote. I am going to read from that story, the Hill story: Democratic leaders are scrambling to prevent the Senate from delivering a stinging slap to President Barack Obama on climate change. They have offered a vote on a bill they dislike in the hopes of avoiding a loss on legislation Obama hates. The president is threatening to veto a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski that would ban the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions. But if the president were forced to use his veto to prevent legislation emerging from a Congress in which his own party enjoys substantial majorities, it would be a humiliation for him and for Democrats on Capitol Hill. So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders are doing what they can to stop it. They are floating the possibility of voting on an alternative measure from Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia, which they previously refused to grant floor time. . . . This is all quoted from the article. It appears at least seven Democrats took the deal offered to them. What is the deal? The deal is: I know you guys want to vote for the Murkowski resolution. All your people back home want you to vote for it. It is a very popular resolution to stop this overwhelming takeover. Yet, in order to keep them from getting to 51 votes, you are going to have to vote against it. These are seven Democrats. At the same time, those same seven Democrats could use the Rockefeller amendment for cover. The Rockefeller amendment is the same as the Murkowski resolution, except it just delays it 2 years. Frankly, it accomplishes the same thing. I am for either one of them. Either one would be good. The problem with that is the Rockefeller bill would take 60 votes. So it is saying we know they can get the 51 votes, but if you seven won't vote for Murkowski, we will let you go ahead and vote for the Rockefeller thing and they won't get it anyway because it would take 60 votes. I know it is heavy lifting. It is complicated, but that is what is going on around here. In other words, for the Democrats to ensure that the EPA can micromanage farms and other institutions in America, they have to develop a scheme to give cover to Democratic Members who should oppose the EPA takeover. I wish to emphasize that I believe these Members are conflicted about what to do. I think they understand the economic harm and what an unfettered EPA bureaucracy could mean for their constituents--fewer jobs, more regulations, higher taxes, and a slower economy--but they were pressured by the President and the base of the Democratic Party. They were warned against defying the President on one of his top initiatives, so they turned to the Rockefeller bill as an alternative, which is a 2-year delay for implementation of this bill; in other words, not allowing the EPA to micromanage our lives at least for 2 more years, giving us a little breathing time. But it is not the end of the road. As I see it, the Rockefeller bill should not be used as political cover. It is merely an alternative means of achieving a similar goal sought by Senator Murkowski to stop the EPA from deciding our Nation's energy policy. We ought to get a vote on Rockefeller one way or another, and if it happens, I trust these seven Members--and possibly others who voted no on Murkowski--will vote with their constituents for the Rockefeller bill and against EPA taking jobs, businesses, and energy out of our struggling economy. Let me be blunt. EPA's growing regulatory regime will lead to one of the greatest bureaucratic intrusions into the lives of the American people. Peter Glaser, an attorney with Troutman Sanders and one of the foremost Clean Air Act attorneys--the Clean Air Act passed many decades ago--said that the EPA's endangerment finding will lead to Federal regulation of schools, hospitals, nursing homes, commercial buildings, churches, restaurants, homes, hotels, malls, colleges and universities, food processing facilities, farms, sports arenas--all of these things. That is virtually everybody--and it would be a very expensive proposition. If you look at what happened throughout the history of this endangerment finding, the debate over the Murkowski resolution began even before the resolution was introduced in January. It began with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. That was at the United Nations back in 1989. That led to the Kyoto Protocol, and we voted on the intent of the Kyoto Protocol right in this Chamber 95 to nothing. The question was this: We will reject any treaty that comes from the Clinton-Gore White House to us if it either hurts our economy or doesn't treat the developing nations the same as the developed nations. Of course, that is exactly what we did. That was 95 to 0. Then, later on, as I mentioned, we had all of these different bills, including the Lieberman-Warner bill, the McCain-Warner bill, and all of these were cap-and-trade bills and they all died. All of this led to the EPA's endangerment finding. What that said was--and this is the President: In the event that the House and the Senate refuse to vote in favor of some kind of a cap-and-trade bill, as has been mentioned, then we will go ahead and do it under the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act was set up to attack real pollutants such as SOX, NOX, and mercury. So they were saying we will go ahead and do it with this regulation. Make no mistake. Despite testimony to the contrary by senior officials, the Obama administration was not forced by the Supreme Court to choose endangerment. As I noted, they had a choice. They made the wrong choice. They could have either voted not to consider CO2 as endangering to health or they could do it or ignore it altogether. They decided to do it, and it didn't surprise me a bit. So the IPCC put together this thing and we now--I can remember so well when we had Lisa Jackson, who is the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, before our committee. We talked about the fact that I thought--this is before the endangerment finding. I said: Administrator Jackson, I think you are going to have an endangerment finding, and when you do, you have to base that on science. What science are you going to base it on? The answer was: The IPCC or the United Nations. We know what has happened to the credibility of that science since that time. It has been totally debunked. The other defense people use in trying to justify voting against the resolution as expressed by a few Democrats was that overturning endangerment would mean removing the authority from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration--that is the NHTSA--to set Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, CAFE standards. More specifically, some argue it would undo the historic auto deal reached last May by the two auto companies, the White House, and the EPA, DOT, and California. The only problem with this argument is that it is wrong. Ask the Obama administration. According to a February 19 letter by Kevin Vincent--that is the NHTSA's general counsel: As a strictly legal matter, the Murkowski resolution does not directly impact NHTSA's statutory authority to set fuel economy standards under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, as amended by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. So we are hearing that this resolution will revoke the new CAFE standards and increase the amount of oil we consume. It is patently false to assert that NHTSA said they can't continue to work on, and then implement, as they are doing today, the CAFE standards. So that argument is a phony argument. Cap and trade. During the debate last week, I spoke briefly about the collapse of the science behind manmade global warming. I said the vote last week was not based on the science but, rather, on stopping a liberal job-killing agenda. It is interesting because there are several people--all of the Republicans supported the Murkowski resolution. Yet there are some Republicans who actually believe that anthropogenic gas is a major cause of global warming. I am not one of those. I am at the other extreme. But there are some here who don't agree. So that wasn't what the vote was about. It was about whether they should take over control of our lives as they are talking about doing. There is no doubt that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs about the science in the Republican Party, but I am pleased that last week we stood united for protecting American jobs. That is all 41 Republicans. That is very rare. They always say Democrats are much more disciplined than Republicans are. That is where the phrase ``herding cats'' came from. That is why you try to get Republicans all together. It is a very unusual thing, but we were. We were all together last week. The Clean Air Act is a monumental mistake that will shackle the American economy with job-killing regulations and higher energy taxes. Let me now take a little time to discuss both the current state of cap and trade in the Senate and the latest science behind global warming. First, let me state the obvious. Despite the best efforts by many in the more extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party, global warming cap-and-trade legislation is dead. It is dead. I stated that 2 months ago, and there is no way they are going to be able to bring it back. We will have to wait and see. In fact, just the term ``cap and trade'' is so toxic these days in the Senate, my Democratic colleagues refuse to even use the term anymore. They don't use ``cap and trade.'' Last week Majority Leader Harry Reid said: We don't use the words ``cap and trade'' . . . That's something that's been deleted from my dictionary. Further, RollCall reported last week that Democrats in the House had a similar response to cap and trade. RollCall reported: Both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer bristled at a question about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's declaration that the House's cap-and-trade energy proposal is dead. The House passed a bill that includes the proposal last year, but the issue has stalled in the Senate. ``That's not the bill they have in the Senate,'' Pelosi told reporters. ``They don't have a cap- and-trade bill. That's not the bill they have in the Senate.'' That is the bill we have in the Senate. It is cap and trade. All of those are cap and trade. The current bill, the Kerry-Lieberman bill, is cap and trade. They may change the name of it, but it is still cap and trade. They cap emissions and then they start trading around and the government picks winners and losers and tries to convince everyone that he will be the winner. It wasn't long ago that the author of the cap-and-trade bill in the Senate tried to suggest that his bill wasn't cap and trade either. He said: I don't know what ``cap and trade'' means. I don't think the average American does. This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it's a pollution reduction bill. It is a cap-and-trade bill. In fact, when Senators Kerry and Lieberman finally introduced their bill, we soon learned that it was worse than cap and trade because it was cap and trade, but it also included a gas tax increase. No matter the word games employed or the extent to which the Democrats wish to hide the truth from the American people, cap and trade will mean more job losses, more pain at the pump, and higher food and electricity prices for consumers. Despite the postmodern denial of ``the truth'' in which words can mean whatever one chooses, the next version of ``putting a price on carbon'' will be cap and trade, pure and simple. And if the House Waxman-Markey bill is any guide, it will showcase massive expansion of government mandates, spending, taxes, and energy rationing for America. Now let me turn to cover the flaws of the science on which the EPA's endangerment is based. Lisa Jackson is President Obama's EPA Administrator. She admitted publicly that the EPA's finding of endangerment is in good measure a conclusion of the UN's IPCC. She told me in a public forum live on TV that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true. After climategate and the admission of errors by IPCC, we now know that the process was flawed all along. In a Senate report I released earlier this year on climategate, the report found that some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in unethical behavior and possibly violated Federal laws. Many of those scientists appeared to have manipulated the data--this is what came out of the report-- manipulated the data to fit preconceived conclusions. In other words, IPCC says, What do we have to show to come to the conclusion we have already come to 7, 8 years ago that anthropogenic gases are causing global warming. They obstructed Freedom of Information requests and dissemination of climate data--and by the way, they did show that was true in Great Britain, but the problem is the statute of limitations had already run and the IPCC had colluded to pressure journal editors against publishing scientific work contrary to their own. The U.K. Government has already found that scientists from the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, who are at the center of this scandal, violated its Freedom of Information Act. Importantly, the Senate report shows many of the scientists involved in this scandal worked for the UN's IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They helped compile the IPCC's 2O07 Fourth Assessment Report. That is important because that report is a primary basis for the EPA's endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. The media has uncovered several errors and mistakes in the report which undermine the credibility of the IPCC's science. The things I am going to list right here were found both in Al Gore's movie as well as the IPCC report. They are all in this thing together. They said it would melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That is just flat not true. They admit that is not true. They said it would destroy 40 percent of the Amazon's rain forest. That is not true. They said it would melt the ice in the Andes, the Alps, and in Africa. That is not true. They said it would drastically increase the cost of climate- related natural disasters. That is not true. It would drive 20 to 30 percent of the species to extinction. That is not true. It would slash crop production by 50 percent in Africa by 2020. All of these things have been fabricated and since proven not to be true. Yet that is the science on which the endangerment finding has been based. Oh, yes. The IPCC said the Netherlands is 50 percent below sea level. That is not true, either, as we well know. There is even more, but I think we have made our point here. The fact is that the EPA accepted the IPCC's erroneous claims wholesale without doing its own independent review. So EPA's endangerment finding rests on bad science. The EPA minority report provides further proof that EPA needs to scrap the endangerment finding and start all over again. By the way, anyone interested in this can look at my Web site where we cover all the details and all the documentation on everything I have been saying. The Obama administration, however, is pressing ahead. We have been told that the science still stands. We have been told that IPCC's mistakes are trivial. We have been told that climategate was just gossipy e-mails between scientists. Yet global warming alarmism has been sold on the very notion that manmade greenhouse gases are causing environmental catastrophes, such as the Himalayan glaciers melting and all that stuff. So the science is certainly not so. Further, the challenges to the integrity and credibility of the IPCC merit closer examination by the Congress. The ramifications of the IPCC spread far and wide, most notably to the endangerment finding. The EPA's finding rests on the IPCC's conclusions, and the EPA has accepted them wholesale, without independent assessment. Remember how the Telegraph of London referred to all this? That is one of their largest publications, the London Telegraph. They said climategate and the IPCC's errors amount to ``the greatest scientific scandal of our time.'' That is a publication that was very favorable to the IPCC before climategate came along. Climategate--even though it happened this last December, if anybody wants to document how far back this was first discovered, I made a speech at this podium on the Senate floor 4 or 5 years ago that documented all these scientists coming in and saying how they were rejected from the process of the IPCC because they would not verify their conclusions. At this pivotal time, as the Obama EPA is preparing to enact policies potentially costing trillions of dollars and thousands of jobs, IPCC's errors make plain that we need openness, transparency, and accountability in the scientific research financed by U.S. taxpayers. Mr. President, let me conclude with this: As the most conservative Member of the Senate, as ranked by the National Journal, I have spent the past 2 years speaking out against the unprecedented liberal agenda coming out of Washington. I have stood up and spoken out about massive out-of-control spending in Washington, increased government intervention into our daily lives, the gutting of our national defense, and of the costly global warming agenda. In the midst of these challenges, we also face an unprecedented environmental catastrophe in the gulf. Today, as the American people continue to face high unemployment and a struggling economy, we must remain focused on finding every opportunity to stand on the side of the American worker and create opportunities. In the gulf, we all have to work together and stay focused on mitigating and containing the environmental impacts and providing assistance to the gulf's affected commercial and recreational industries and investigating the causes so we can prevent a disaster of this kind from happening again. Staying focused will help us make prudent decisions. The bottom line is, for the sake of our Nation, we must be willing to put aside the costly liberal agenda of the left and not allow them to use the gulf tragedy to advance their cap-and-trade energy tax, which is completely unrelated to stopping the spill and helping the people in the gulf. There is no relationship between cap and trade and the gulf disaster. There is no relationship between what the EPA endangerment finding would allow one bureaucrat to do and the gulf tragedy. By their own admission--to say they can parlay this into their own agenda is something we cannot let happen. Twenty years ago, a very similar thing happened with the Exxon Valdez. It was tragic, and I went up there. The environmental extremists were up there celebrating and saying: We are going to parlay this into retarding the exploration and production on the North Slope. I made the statement there--it is all in writing--how can you figure this out? How can you stop oil production domestically in Alaska by using this issue? Well, the issue was a transportation issue. It wasn't an oilspill or a production accident. It was a transportation accident. I said: If you stop our production, we are going to be more dependent upon other countries for our ability to run this machine called America. They are going to have more transportation and a greater possibility of transportation accidents. That is what we are faced with now. Clearly, I appreciate the two statements that were made by President Obama's old director of the EPA that the endangerment finding is based on the science that we now know is false science. By the way, even though it is not the end of the world that the Murkowski resolution failed, four key lawsuits are filed challenging the law on which they are basing this endangerment finding. Even if we were to pass any of the cap-and-trade bills, it would not reduce worldwide emissions any. It would only affect the United States. I argue it would increase CO2 emissions because as we lose jobs in the United States with cap and trade and force a lot of our manufacturers to other countries--they would go to countries such as China, India, and Mexico where they don't even have strong emissions standards. With that, let's not politicize this any more. If they want to bring up cap and trade, let's do it, and we can defeat it like we have done over the past 10 years. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. INHOFE

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

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak in morning business for such time as I consume.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, there doesn't seem to be anybody else here, so I will make one comment about amendments coming up that are closely related to the subject we just discussed. It is Sanders amendment No. 4318. I knew this would happen--that the bill would be used to pass another agenda. Sure enough, that is what is happening. The Sanders amendment is aimed at stopping oil production altogether. It does three things: It repeals expensing for tangible drilling costs, it repeals percentage depletion for marginal oil and gas wells, and it repeals the manufacturing deduction for oil and gas production. I predicted the spill in the Gulf of Mexico would be used as an opportunity to shut down domestic oil and gas wells owned and operated by independent oil and gas producers throughout the country. That is what is happening with this amendment. Repealing expensing of intangible drilling costs eliminates the ability to expense intangible drilling and development costs, called IDC, which would force at least a 25- to 30-percent reduction in drilling budgets, leading to lost jobs, lost production, and higher prices for consumers. We have not talked much about higher prices to the consumers. With cap and trade--if they were successful in that--we would feel that in a matter of weeks. Despite the rhetoric, IDC expensing is firmly grounded in sound accounting practices and principles, and it has been in the Tax Code since 1913. IDC expensing is similar to expensing by other companies for technology, wages, and fuels which other industries expense for operations. So they are singling out the oil and gas industry, just willfully, to stop them and put them out of business. Likewise, since 1926, small producers and millions of royalty owners have had the option to utilize percentage depletion to both simplify and account for the decline in the value of minerals produced from a property. It is complicated, but percentage depletion recognizes that oil and gas reservoirs are depleted by production, so it is the amount which small producers can expense to reinvest in production. Percentage depletion is particularly important for the production of America's over 600,000 low-volume marginal wells. I am particularly interested in this because in my State of Oklahoma we have mostly marginal well production. Marginal wells produce less than 15 barrels a day. It is a smaller type of production. The average marginal well produces barely two barrels a day--we have been talking about millions of barrels in the gulf--yet, cumulatively, they account for nearly 28 percent of domestic production in the lower 48 States. Since every on-shore natural gas and oil well eventually declines into marginal production, the economic lifespan and corresponding production of nearly all natural gas and oil wells would be reduced through the elimination of percentage depletion. Finally, Congress has already frozen the manufacturers' tax deduction specifically for only oil and natural gas companies less than 2 years ago. All other domestic manufacturing can deduct income at a higher rate than oil and gas companies. Repealing the entire reduction for oil and gas companies is only targeting oil and gas production, and it shows what the motivation is. We have to remember a couple of very important points when we seek to target certain industries for tax treatment. First, oil and gas companies employ Americans and fund our communities. Oil and gas companies employ over 9 million people in the United States. Approximately 3 million land and mineral owners from coast to coast are the beneficiaries of monthly checks from the royalties produced on their properties. Many of these individuals are small property owners-- very small--and some are just small family farms. In fact, just today the National Association of Royalty Owners ranked this as its No. 1 concern on its Web site. That was today. They say the Sanders amendment is their No. 1 target. These are not rich people. They are small farm owners and landowners. States annually collect billions of dollars in oil and gas excise and severance taxes that furnish critical funding for roads, schools, and law enforcement. By punishing America's oil and gas industry, this amendment only puts unemployment and State and local funding in peril. Secondly, punishing our oil and gas industry only makes us more dependent on foreign sources of energy. After President Jimmy Carter imposed a windfall profit tax on the oil and gas industry in 1980, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service later determined that its results were hugely counterproductive, saying: The windfall profit tax reduced domestic oil production between 3 and 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent. . . . This made the U.S. more dependent upon imported oil. America's natural gas and oil companies are already paying taxes at the highest rates. Figures from the Energy Information Agency indicate that America's major oil producers already pay, on average, more than a 40-percent income tax rate. The EIA also reported in December of 2009 that, on average, 53 percent of the net incomes of oil and gas companies are paid in taxes compared to 32 percent from others in the manufacturing sector. Now is not the time to group the entire oil and gas industry together for punishment. Punishing the entire industry in the sledge hammer approach this amendment uses only increases the cost of energy for all Americans, and it makes us more dependent upon foreign countries to run this machine called America, as I often say. People say they don't want oil, gas, coal, or nuclear. Well, in the final analysis, how do you run the country without it? You can't. If we retard in any way the ability to produce oil and gas, it will make us more dependent upon foreign countries for us to drive this machine called America. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Thank you, Madam President. I said: If we were to pass this, any of these cap-and-trade bills, or if we were to do this through the Clean Air Act through the Environmental Protection Agency, how much would that reduce the worldwide CO2 emissions? Her answer was, Well, it wouldn't reduce it because this would only apply to the United States. What I am saying is, if you want to invoke all of this money spent, all of this cost on the American people, on every farmer in America, even if you believe the concept is there, it still wouldn't reduce the emissions. You could argue it could increase the emissions because our manufacturing base would have to go to places such as China, India, Mexico, places that didn't have the standards we have, and it would have the effect of increasing--actually increasing--CO2. So I just hope those individuals will realize if they think the problem is real, this isn't going to solve it. I yield back.

Mr. INHOFE. That is kind of interesting because I have probably talked on this subject over the last 7 years for 200 or 300 hours, and I never had any trouble before getting time. It lets you know there is an awakening in the people who are looking at this particular vote that we are going to have today. Many of them believe in their hearts that anthropogenic gases cause global warming. I do not believe that. And there is everyone in between. The point is not that. It is, do we really want to have this bureaucracy? Let me just comment. I was here when my good friend, Senator Boxer, was making her comments. That was very interesting because she spent three-fourths of her time talking about the oilspill. Let me say, there is no relationship between this and the oilspill. There is no reason to talk about them in the same speech. When they talk about big oil--as she said, ``big oil has all this control''--well, big oil is BP. The last I checked, BP is very much involved with the majority, with the White House. In fact, I went and checked. I found out in my last Senate race, I was given $2,000 by BP. And I checked, in the last Senate race, which was the first Senate race by then-Senator Obama, he got three times as much money as I did. Now we find out that during the Kerry-Lieberman bill that has been talked about quite a bit, BP has been behind closed doors with them. Everybody knows this. Now, it is not big oil behind this bill. Behind this bill you have the American Association of Housing Services for the Aging, Family Dairies USA, the Farm Bureau, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Brick Industry Association--all of these organizations, wholesome American organizations that are behind this issue because they do not want us to give up all the freedoms we would have to give up. When Senator Lincoln was talking about the tailoring rule, I know there has been a problem with those who are pushing for the endangerment finding, trying to make everybody believe that somehow it was not going to happen to anyone except some of the big industries, the refiners, the big manufacturers. No, the tailoring rule they are talking about is something that unilaterally they thought they would be able to get by with without anyone even noticing it, when, in fact, the Clean Air Act very simply says the emission of 250 tons in a period of a year. Now, 250 tons, that is every farm in my State of Oklahoma. That is every church. So it covers everyone. But let me go back in this brief period of time and try to put this in perspective. Eleven years ago we had the Kyoto Treaty. This is the big treaty then-Vice President Gore wanted the American people to have to ratify. They wanted to bring it to the Senate for ratification. They did sign that treaty, but it never came up for ratification. Do you want to know why? It did not come up because at that time it was so objectionable that we had a resolution that passed on the floor of this Senate 95 to 0--not one dissenting vote--saying: We do not want to be part of any movement or bill or treaty that treats developing nations differently than developed nations. That is exactly what it did. That resolution also said we do not want to ratify any treaty or pass anything that is going to be an economic hardship for the United States of America. Obviously, this was the case. So we set the stage 11 years ago. Now we are facing this same thing again. I have to say that when Republicans were a majority, I chaired the Environment and Public Works Committee, which had the jurisdiction over most of this stuff we are talking about today. I have to also say, back then I honestly, in my heart, believed the anthropogenic gases, the CO2, the methane, caused global warming because everyone said it did--catastrophic global warming. Now they do not call it that anymore since we are in the eighth year of a cooling period. They say ``climate change.'' That sounds a little bit more palatable. But I can remember when I did believe that, until we started looking at the various bills that came up. We have voted in this Chamber five times on cap-and-trade bills, starting right about 2002 and up to the present day, and there is one pending today. During that period of time, we started looking at it and realizing what it would cost. The first analysis of what cap and trade would cost--and the same thing goes for the EPA under their regulations--would have been somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. When we calculate that, in my State of Oklahoma--I always do the math--if we take the number of families who file tax returns, that would have been $3,100--not once but every year. So with that type of thing, looking at it, I thought: Well, as chairman of this committee, maybe we ought to look and be sure the science is accurate, the science is there. So we started looking at it and finding out this whole thing started--let's keep in mind, it started with the United Nations, the IPCC. That is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They then were joined by all these Hollywood elites--moveon.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, and all these groups--until we realized they were pushing this, but the science was flawed. I first made my statement on the Senate floor in 2002 that created some doubt in a lot of people's minds as to the accuracy of the science that the IPCC was putting together. There had been inquiries by many quality scientists who had said they rejected our input. We don't have any kind of an input in this issue, unless you agree with the United Nations and the IPCC, that categorically it is causing catastrophic global warming. Then they didn't let the scientists have their input. So we started gathering all of this information. People were coming to me saying: This is a fraud. I gathered enough material that 7 years ago this month, I made a speech and I said the notion that anthropogenic gases, that CO2 causes catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Then the scientists started coming in with their stuff. I would suggest that a lot of people don't agree with what I just said, so they ought to look at my Web site. Five years ago I made a speech and I talked about all the scientists who were coming forward. As it turned out, when climategate came, essentially it was the same thing I said 5 years ago. The scare tactics we hear from Senator Boxer that this is all about the gulf, the oilspill, and all of that stuff, this is what they have been using. If we take Al Gore's science fiction movie and the IPCC and look at all of the assertions they made in this movie and the IPCC has made, every one has been refuted. I can't find one assertion that has now not been refuted: melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035, not true; endanger 40 percent of the Amazon rain forests, not true; melt mountain ice in the Alps, Andes, and Africa, not true; deplete water resources for 4.5 billion people by 2085, totally refuted; slash crop production by 50 percent in North Africa by 2020; 55 percent of the Netherlands lies below sea level. I can remember when Vice President Gore--no, it was after he was Vice President--we had a hearing in our committee, and we had several of the parents of young kids coming to us and saying: You know, my young child, my elementary age child is forced to watch this movie once a month, and they have been having nightmares and all of this stuff. So a lot of damage was done at that time. But when we get back to what we are faced with today, we are faced with something they tried to pass. This administration has tried ever since they came in to pass cap-and-trade. A cap-and-trade, logically, you would say: Well, if you want to cut down on greenhouse gases, why not put a tax on CO2? The reason they don't do that is because then people would know what it is costing them. So there were all of these cap-and-trade bills that came up, and they were not able to pass them. So this administration said, I am sure--I wasn't in the meeting; I am not invited to those meetings of the President--but they said: We can't get it passed in Congress. We can't get it passed in the House or the Senate, so let's go ahead and do it. We will just run over them with the administration. So they said: We are going to have an endangerment finding. This is kind of interesting because right before going to Copenhagen--and for those of you who don't know this, once a year the U.N. throws a great big party and everybody goes to some exotic place and they try to sell the idea that we need to have this international treaty and, of course, it hasn't happened. Before Copenhagen--that was in December of this past year I can remember that we had--I suspected they would have an endangerment finding right while we were in Copenhagen to make it sound as though we were going to do something in the United States. In fact, I went over as a one-man truth squad and had a pretty good time. Anyway, on the endangerment finding, Lisa Jackson, who is the Administrator of the EPA, an appointee of Obama, testified. I said to her: You know, Madam Administrator, this is live on TV. I suspect what is going to happen is that you are going to have an endangerment finding and try to take this over and do all of these punitive things to America under the Clean Air Act. If there is an endangerment finding, it has to be based on science. What science would you use if you are going to have an endangerment finding? The answer was, It is going to be the IPCC, primarily, and that is the very science that climategate used when it came along, and it has been pretty much debunked. In fact, it was characterized in Great Britain as the greatest political scandal in the history of our country. So, anyway, the endangerment finding was all based on that, and that is where we find ourselves today. So I would say this: I only talk about the science. I don't like to talk about the science because I know people don't understand it. But I did it because if you are one of those--and I say this to the Chair; I say this to anyone who might be listening at this time--if you believe that anthropogenic gas causes catastrophic global warming and climate change, then what would this do to remedy that? Well, the answer is nothing because the same Lisa Jackson who testified before our committee when I asked her this question--

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, it is my understanding I have 13 minutes. I would like to have the Acting President pro tempore tell me when I have 1 minute left.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I wish today to honor and remember all of those magnificent heroes, and their families, who fought and died on D-day during World War II. I ask that this poem penned by Albert Caswell, of the guide service, be printed in the Record in remembrance of their selfless sacrifice and service to our Nation, on the upcoming 66th anniversary of D-day on June 6, 1944.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Reserving the right to object, first let me say I agree with most of what the Senator from New Jersey is saying. He mentioned the profits of the top five oil companies--Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Chevron. They are the giants. If we will recall, last week when I objected to the arbitrary figure, the cap of $10 billion, it was because it was arbitrary. I quoted a lot of people in the administration saying we do not want to have--it should not be an arbitrary cap. One of the complaints I had was, if you do have an arbitrary cap and that was at $10 billion, that would mean only the big five plus the national oil companies--Venezuela, China, certainly--would be in a position to do this work offshore. It is my feeling if you take the $10 billion off and make it totally unlimited, that could very well shut out even the five and leave nothing but national oil companies in a position to be doing it. I believe we should increase the cap. I know there is unanimity in that notion. We have to do it. The Secretary of Interior said this about the $10 billion cap: [I]t is important that we be thoughtful relative to that, what that cap will be, because you don't want only the BP's of the world essentially to be the ones that are involved in these efforts. I agree with 90 percent of what the Senator says, and with the Secretary of Interior, what he has said about this--that we need to determine how high that cap should be. It should be much higher. We have plenty of time to do that. Let me emphasize there is no cap in terms of the cleanup damages. We are only talking about economic damages here. There is no cap on cleanup damages. I think there should be. At some point we have to arrive at a cap. A lot of people are working on it. The administration is working on it, the Department of Interior is working on it, and we are working on it. I think we need to increase that. For that reason we need to have the time to get that done, and I do object.

Mr. INHOFE. I object.

Mr. INHOFE. Reserving the right to object.

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

Mr. INHOFE. This is a problem. I used to be in this business on some scale. The smaller contractors are the ones who do the renovation business. That means if they try to go out there and even replace one window, you can't replace the window without disturbing 6 square feet. Therefore, you would come under the provisions of this new rule, and you would be subjecting yourself to a fine of $37,500. So my bill that would have resolved the problem was not quite as good as the Collins bill, but it would have merely said that until such time as there are adequate numbers of people who are certified to do this work, we would not enforce the law. Well, the problem we are having right now is--and I have a list of the different States--in my State of Oklahoma, there is only one certified instructor. We have all these people wanting to take the course but they cannot get in, and they cannot do the work because of the heavy fine provisions. So what Senator Collins has done in her amendment is say that the penalty provision--the $37,500 a day--would be waived until September 30. That would allow the EPA to get certified instructors into all the States so the people who want to become certified can become certified--in the meantime, not miss this summer's construction season. It is a very simple thing. I can assure you, this is a huge jobs bill because right now these people are not working. We are talking about thousands and thousands, in just my State of Oklahoma, of subcontractors who do this kind of work. I strongly support the Collins-Inhofe amendment No. 4318. It is a jobs bill. It is a bill of fairness. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE. Let me make a couple comments about the comments of my friend from Maryland concerning the opportunities we might have to exploit our resources in the United States. I hear quite often people say that we only have 3 percent of the world's reserves. The only reason that figure is so low is because we can't go ahead and go after and define our recoverable reserves. CRS came out about 2 months ago with a report that we are No. 1 in the world in recoverable reserves of gas, oil, and coal. We have done a study, not a part of any formal study, but to determine where we would be if we, like every other country in the world, would exploit our own resources, where we would be in terms of our dependency on the Middle East for the ability to provide the energy we need. In a short period, just on this North American continent, Mexico, Canada, and ourselves, if we would lift all restrictions we currently have, we would be able to be independent of the Middle East. A lot of people who are concerned about the national security ramifications of our dependency on the Middle East are concerned about the Middle East. They are not concerned about Canada or Mexico. They are not concerned about the North American continent. For those people who don't want to drill offshore, certainly now is the time to stand up and say: Look what happened down here, a horrible disaster. But those people who have never wanted, at least in the 20 years I have been here, to drill offshore or even in some of the other areas that are now off limits are people who don't think fossil fuels have a place in our energy mix. Quite frankly, I am glad President Obama has changed his position and is now recognizing that fossil fuels, more clean coal technology and therefore more coal, more gas, more oil is something he would support. It is nice to talk about renewables. It is wonderful. We have more windmills in Oklahoma than any State right now. But until technology gets to the point where we can efficiently produce energy from renewables, we still have to run this machine called America. We can't do it without fossil fuels. I am a little bit prejudiced. I come from Oklahoma. We are one of the largest producing States. Ours are mostly marginal wells, shallow wells. They are not the giant ones. That is the reason I have been on the floor several times objecting to the Menendez limits or caps they are talking about putting on something that would be unrealistic, that would shut down any opportunities for independents and confine all offshore drilling to the five majors plus the NOCs. That is the national oil companies, mostly talking about China. I am concerned about that. I know right now we would be in a position to do something, and we could become energy sufficient in the North American continent within 5 years, if we would exploit our own energy resources. Amendment No. 4218 That is not the reason I am here this afternoon. I just happened to come in. I wish to comment on amendment No. 4218 by Senator Collins. She was here a little while ago. I had an amendment that would do essentially the same thing. It was the Inhofe-Collins amendment. This is the Collins-Inhofe amendment. It takes a slightly different approach. I support both amendments, although I am withdrawing mine in her favor. This is the problem we have. On April 22, the EPA came out with a rule that made the statement that in the event you disturb any 6 square feet of a building structure that is older than 1978, then you have to have a permit from the EPA to become certified to work on such a building. If you don't do it, there is a penalty provision of some $37,500 a day. Realistically, we know they would not fine somebody $37,500 a day. But unfortunately, a lot of the contractors who do that kind of work are individuals who don't know that is nothing but a bluff to keep people from doing things. We very much want to participate in this dialog. I think there may be a procedural problem that someone is whispering about here; is that correct? OK, I am sorry. I forgot to ask to be considered as in morning business. I ask unanimous consent at this time.

Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield for a question?