Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I am just getting cranked up, but I will see if I can crank it up and conclude within 4 minutes. We saw the devastation of the electricity contracts being bid up by speculators as a result of the Enron loophole in the law. We thought we closed that Enron loophole a few weeks ago on the farm bill so that there will be new regulation, but there is disagreement on this floor among Senators as to whether we have closed it. This Professor Greenberger has opined to us in the Commerce Committee that we did not sufficiently close it off. I think we ought to examine how ironclad our closing of that loophole is and ask ourselves some important questions. Question No. 1: Should we consider the outright barring of trading energy except for a legitimate business purpose? In other words, if you want to buy a future oil contract, you have to plan to be able to use it. No. 2: Should we stop large investors and hedge funds from gambling in energy contracts? If it is for the purpose of just running up the investment cost, I think we should. No. 3: Should we regulate or shut down international exchanges that do business in the United States and whose trades and actions impact the lives of our people in this country? In other words, if they are not trading just on that commodities futures trading exchange but are trading on another exchange that they say is overseas, such as London or Dubai, but, in fact, are trading on electronic machines in this country, should we regulate that or shut it down? No. 4: Should we close the over-the-counter markets until the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can get its act together with this new law that says they should regulate these energy contracts? Energy is too precious and it impacts the economy too greatly. This endless game of speculation must stop. While the traders are making billions of dollars, our people are having difficulty in being able to afford to drive to work. There are a bunch of Senators who have been involved in this issue-- Senator Levin, Senator Feinstein, Senator Cantwell, Senator Dorgan, and a host of others I am joining. I support these efforts to find some answers quickly to help our people. At an appropriate time, it is this Senator's intention, if we have not gotten our act together and offered amendments, to do exactly what I have been talking about. This Senator intends to do it. I look forward to the debate on this issue. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, we are getting ready to consider the gasoline bill next week and all its ramifications for the American public who are suffering under $4 and $4-plus gas. A few days ago, this Senator showed a photograph of a town in north Florida, Madison, FL, in Madison County, downtown, the local Shell Oil station. Regular in the State of Florida, reflected in that photograph of a few days ago, was at $4.10 a gallon. It goes without saying that our people are hurting. And I can tell you, having had 18 townhall meetings last week all over my State, that hurting has turned into frustration, and that frustration is turning into anger. Now, there is a new poll out this week that reflects the increasing number of Americans who believe it is the supply and demand of oil that is driving these prices to record highs--just the supply and demand. We know we have a very tight world oil market, and we know places such as India and China in fact are consuming more oil, and their demand is higher. We understand that makes the world's oil markets all the more tight. And believe it or not, because of that, and because of this constant amount of information coming out from the oil sector about supply and demand creating the tight oil market, the American people are believing that is the cause of these record oil prices, believing that translates into these very high gasoline prices. It is interesting because it is just at a time that the Senate has voted to close the so-called Enron loophole, which is perhaps the real culprit to blame in the shocking runup of the oil prices. Now, what is the Enron loophole? Back in the year 2000, legislation was passed that exempted oil and metals from being regulated on the commodity futures exchange. That meant that as contracts for future purchase of oil and metals are being traded, there is no government oversight, no government regulation of how much those can go up. So as long as the participants bidding for those futures contracts continue to bid the price of those oil contracts higher and higher, in fact the price of that oil on the world market continues to go higher and higher, much over and above what normal supply and demand would cause the price to be. This closing of that Enron loophole has just occurred. It is still in the works because even though it was added to the farm bill, the farm bill was vetoed by the President. The veto was then overridden and, therefore, it came into law immediately upon the override. Nevertheless, we found that we omitted a section of the farm bill, so we are going back and redoing that all over again. We just passed the farm bill again in its entirety in the Senate yesterday, last night. It does have the Enron loophole closure in the bill. Presumably, that will be passed by the House, go down to the President for signature, he will veto it again, and then it will come back to both Houses for overriding, like we did before about 2 or 3 weeks ago, and the Enron loophole will be closed. There are a bunch of us, including this Senator, who were cosponsors of this provision. Hopefully, it is going to address this loophole. But what happened in the past? It was enacted back in 2000--in December of 2000. I believe that loophole, when enacted, was exploited by energy traders. This is based on the mounting evidence that we see over and over. It is at least a partial cause of the huge runup in the gas prices. Well, I think we need to do more on this Enron loophole. There have been some commentaries by some experts that say we should be closing it further. And if we need to do that, this Senator is certainly ready to do it. But right now what needs further examination is how we got to this point in the first place. How did this provision in law, leaving this huge hole big enough to drive a Mack truck through get to this point where it essentially exempted the trading of oil futures from Federal commodities regulation? How did that become the law of the land? What was the role of lobbyists and oil companies and investment banks and commodity speculators? We need answers to those questions. We have seen through testimony to the Congress and from other reports that unchecked commodities trading plays a very significant role in rising gasoline prices. We know high gas prices are not merely a function of supply and demand in the marketplace. In fact, we ought to know this from several years ago. A subcommittee, led by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, found that supplies were mostly adequate, but it found something else was missing. What was the role that caused these prices to be jacked up? Just a few days ago, financier George Soros told our Senate Commerce Committee--in fact, just this past Tuesday--that a dramatic increase in commodities trading in recent years has contributed to the oil bubble and its ``harmful economic consequences.'' Indeed, loosely regulated speculators appear to have bid up oil prices to these unrealistic highs. There are also links between oil companies and investment banks in the oil futures trading. And this is what these reports are showing. The Senate investigations subcommittee, in a bipartisan way, under the leadership of Senator Levin, released a report finding that there was lax Federal oversight of oil and gas traders due to the loophole slipped into the law in 2000, and it was slipped in at the behest, according to the Levin report, of the now infamous Enron Corporation, along with oil companies and investment banks. That is according to the Levin report. Other links between soaring oil prices and vast sums of money now flowing through these commodity markets were uncovered by a Homeland Security panel and our colleague, Independent-Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman. In fact, a top oil executive for a major oil company recently testified before a House panel that crude oil, under normal supply and demand, ought to be around $55 a barrel, based on the rule of supply and demand. Yet last week it went up to $135, and it is somewhere in the $130-a-barrel range today. Mr. President, I think those investigations into the cause of the runup of the price of oil ought to continue. An estimated one-third of the amount of the runup of the price of oil can be blamed on speculators having poured tens of billions of dollars into the unregulated energy commodities markets in the wake of that so-called Enron loophole that deregulated those commodities markets. In essence, the loophole exempted electronic trading of energy and metal by large traders--exempted them from Federal commodities regulation. Since then the price of oil and natural gas has skyrocketed, and that is all despite reports that the supplies are mostly adequate. Next week we are going to try to take up legislation aimed at getting at this situation of high gas prices. This Senator intends to address this issue. If, in fact, as that oil company executive said, supply and demand ought to cause oil to be trading at $55, why is it trading in excess of $130? What role do the unregulated commodities markets play, and how did that get into law? How much of that capital out there is flowing into that because those markets are unregulated, thereby driving up that price to what we have today? We see one Federal agency that otherwise regulates futures trading has said it will investigate allegations of short-term manipulation of crude oil prices. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also said it would work with British regulators to monitor large trades of crude oil by a London futures exchange known as ICE, Intercontinental Exchange. Some of the founding members of that intercontinental exchange, it has been reported, were instrumental in getting the Enron loophole through Congress back in the year 2000. It was ill-conceived public policy at best, and it should be reversed. Next week we are going to have a chance to do something about it because we have legislation on the price of gasoline coming to the Senate floor. By having greater oversight and regulation on oil trading, we obviously have to go beyond that and look to our commitment to a comprehensive national energy policy. Fifty percent of the oil we use goes into transportation, and most of that is for our personal vehicles. So it should not take a rocket scientist to realize we must focus on conservation measures like 40 miles per gallon as a fleet average for our vehicles. We finally broke through and got through the Senate 35 miles per gallon phased in over the next 12 years. Maybe we ought to accelerate that. We ought to look at providing bigger tax breaks for hybrid and plug- in hybrid vehicles. Ultimately, we must look to the research and development of electric and hydrogen-powered cars. All of this is going to fall in the lap of the next President. The next President is going to have to urge us--and I hope we will support the next President--to enact a national energy program to transition us from gasoline to alternative, synthetic, and renewable fuels to power much of this economic engine of America. President Kennedy led us on such a monumental task, and that was the task to escape the bonds of Earth within a decade, to go to the Moon, and return safely. We did that. We must act with the same urgency now. While we are at it, we are going to have to make ethanol from things that we do not eat. While we are at that, we are going to have to pay attention to how we power, not just our cars and trucks, but our homes and our industries. We need to develop solar and wind and thermal energy and safe nuclear power. The world is begging for change. One of the most enormous changes that needs to be brought about is how we utilize and how we create energy and how we are going to utilize and create energy for the future. We have a chance to do that next week when we take up this legislation about the high price of gasoline. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, if I may be recognized.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary procedure we are in?

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

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I understand that S. 3098 introduced earlier today by Senator McConnell is at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I now object to any further proceedings at this time.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I understand H.J. Res. 92 is at the desk and due for a second reading.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to consideration of S. Res. 588, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid on the table.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Connecticut for the clarification.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise to engage in a colloquy with my friend, the junior Senator from Connecticut. I was pleased to cosponsor the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act shortly after it was introduced last October, and I followed its progress through the Environment and Public Works Committee with interest. Today, the full Senate will begin considering that bill, and Senator Boxer, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will offer a substitute amendment that she has worked out with Senators Lieberman and Warner. I have a question for my friend from Connecticut regarding this substitute amendment. As the Senator from Connecticut knows, many rural electric cooperatives in this country serve the role of local distribution companies. The committee-reported version of the Climate Security Act included rural electric cooperatives among the local distribution companies that receive emission allowances over the entire 42-year life of the program. In Florida, electric cooperatives serve more than 1,000,000 Floridians in 58 of our 67 counties. Most of these rural electric cooperatives own fossil fuel-fired powerplants. I was recently in Florida and held a series of town hall meetings across the State and heard from rural cooperatives that are concerned about the way emission allocations are distributed under the substitute amendment. Can my friend from Connecticut address their concern and explain how allowances are available to rural cooperatives under the Boxer- Lieberman-Warner substitute amendment?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. For that reason, I am supporting this Lieberman-Warner bill. I thank the Chair.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I wish to share with the Senate what I saw from the window of a spacecraft. It is very typical that space fliers, on the first day in space, will be looking for things. On the 24th flight of the space shuttle over two decades ago, I was at that window--when you can get time and you don't have much time because every minute is planned--and I was looking for things. I was looking for the cape where we were launched. By the second day in space, your perspective has broadened and you are looking at continents. And by the third day in space, you are looking back at home, and home is the planet. It is so beautiful, it is so colorful, it is such an alive creation suspended in the middle of nothing, and space is nothing. It is an airless vacuum that goes on and on for billions of light years--and there is home. It is so beautiful. Yet when you look at it, it is so fragile. You look at the rim of the Earth. There is a bright blue color right at the rim that fades off into the blackness of outer space. And right at the rim of the Earth, you can see the thin little film that sustains all of life, the atmosphere. Even from that altitude, with the naked eye you can see how we are messing it up. Coming across Brazil in the upper Amazon region, the color contrast will show you where they are destroying the rainforests. I came away from that profound experience of seeing home from a different perspective, with a new feeling that I needed to be a better steward of what God has given us--our home, the planet. If we continue to abuse the planet, Mother Nature will not work in syncopation and in balance.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, what I wished to share with the Senate is how I come to the table on the question of the climate change bill. We clearly understand something is happening to the Earth. The Earth is heating up. Obviously, there are interests that are going to be affected--special interests--if we go about changing the way we are doing business, the kinds of pollutants we are putting in the air, and those business interests will claim that, in fact, they are being harmed. I understand that. That is part of the body politic we have to come together and find a solution on what will be the least detrimental to folks as we are trying to change the Government policy of all this stuff we are putting in the air. Indeed, we have been putting this in the air ever since we started changing our society in the Industrial Revolution because the burning of fossil fuels is starting to accumulate carbon in the air. That carbon is acting as a shield in the upper atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect, that when the Sun's rays come in and hit the Earth, and they reflect off; normally, they would radiate out into space. But the fact that we are creating a cap, similar to a greenhouse, with these gases--primarily carbon dioxide-- they are trapping that heat and, as a result, the Earth is heating up. In the course of this debate, we will have a lot more scientific evidence that will come forth and tell us how many parts per million of carbon in the air you can get before it becomes almost irreversible. We certainly wish to avoid that. But that means we have to come back to the political policy and make the decisions that will prevent us from ever getting to that concentration of carbon in the atmosphere that becomes the point of no return, that at that point the Earth continues to heat up to the point that it has all the consequences--the consequences of the ice sheet in Greenland, which I have been on, which is melting, and that in itself is 2 miles thick. It is freshwater because of the hundreds of thousands of years of the rain coming and the rain turning into snow and the snow packing and, year after year, the same thing happening. It is 2 miles thick in the center of Greenland. It is all freshwater. If that melts, the seas are going to rise somewhere between 10 and 15 feet--the entire seas of planet Earth are going to rise. What happens to Antarctica and the icecaps there? We will have testimony, and we will have scientific evidence on all this. We cannot let that happen. So we are going to have to make the policy changes; that is, we are going to have to have the political will in order to make the policy changes, and the tough thing about this is that it is not just this country. We have to get the rest of the countries to do it. But America is the one that has to lead, and in the last decade, America has not led. Let me just show this chart. This is my State. What would happen if the seas rise? If they rise 10 feet, which is the red--here is the State of Florida. We are familiar with it, the peninsula with the Florida Keys. If the seas rise 10 to 20 feet, Florida is going to look like this, just the gray. All of this red and blue is going to be underwater. Mr. President, I say to my colleagues, most of the population of Florida is along the coast. I don't want that to happen to my State. My State has more coastline than any other State in the continental United States. Only Alaska has more coastline than our State. That is in excess of 1,500 miles of coastline. That is where the population lives in Florida. I don't want that to happen to our State. In the closing minutes that I have--Mr. President, will you tell me how many minutes I have.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Is this in morning business?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I will speak on the climate change bill. How much time do we have under this order?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Sara Sanders of my staff be granted the privilege of the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I am having a good time doing it, too. I will wrap up within the next 5 or so minutes. Why, then, other than what we have already talked about--the tightness of the world's oil market--why, in just the last couple of months, has it spiked from $3 a gallon to over $4 a gallon? Why, in Madison, FL, a rural part of Florida, 2 days ago, was regular gas at $4.10? Part of that reason, of course, is what we have talked about, the world tightness. Part of it is that the United States relies on oil from foreign shores for 60 percent of its daily consumption of oil from places such as the Persian Gulf and Nigeria and Venezuela--the Persian Gulf, roughly 20 percent of our oil supply; Nigeria, 12 percent of our daily supply; Venezuela, 14 percent of our daily supply. I have just mentioned three very unstable parts of the world. That is part of the skittishness of this world oil market. But there have to be additional reasons. How about the weakness of the dollar? You know what we could do about that? Here is a solution. We could start bringing our budget back into balance instead of going out where spending is here but revenues are only here and the difference each year we have to borrow. Guess whom we are borrowing from--China and Japan. They are buying our debt in order for us to meet our expenditures. If we bring that budget back into balance, we can start strengthening our dollar, which will help us in this overall global market of oil since oil is sold in U.S. dollars. But I think the biggest part of this spike is that we have world oil markets that are buying futures contracts, and the speculators are speculating up the price as they bid up the price, and they are not having to put down a substantial amount of money. They are only putting down about 6 percent of the total oil contract, so 94 percent they are basically getting on future credit, and that means they can bid up that price. The question is, Are we going to get in and start checking out these commodities exchanges? Are we going to get a Commodity Futures Trading Commission that will crack the whip, that will examine this speculation driving up the price? We passed a part 2 weeks ago in the farm bill that is now law that will close that Enron loophole that occurred in the year 2000, that exempted Enron and others from oversight in the trading markets for energy. That certainly has allowed that speculation to go on. We got a little victory there, on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The bottom line is, if we are going to solve this problem we have to have the political will. This Senator will be speaking about the Lieberman-Warner bill later on, but there is all kinds of inflammatory rhetoric about how this is going to jack up the price of gasoline and of oil. But the fundamental problem is we have to have the political will to start going to alternative sources in order to break the stranglehold of dependence on oil and particularly foreign oil. That means we are going to have to go to alternative sources such as biofuels. We are going to have to pour the money into research and development on cellulosic ethanol. Ethanol, of course, we can mix in our existing cars with gasoline, and that yields much less consumption of oil. In the new vehicles, the new cars, you can take 85 percent of ethanol and mix it with 15 percent of gasoline. Just think how much less is the use of oil. Or you put all of that mixture--85 ethanol, 15 gasoline-- into a hybrid, and what about a plug-in hybrid? Suddenly you have expanded your equivalent miles per gallon of oil consumed to upwards of several hundreds of miles. We have the technology to do this. The question is, Do we have the political will? That is what I bring us back around to. There is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric about how, if you try this new thing or you try that new thing--don't do it. Go back on the old, reliable oil. I have seen frustration grow into anger out there as I faced my constituents and tried to give them hope this past week in those 18 townhall meetings. They need hope. We need to help provide that hope. The next President of the United States needs to help provide that hope. I want to be a part of that solution, to provide that hope. This Senator is going to continue to speak out against those voices that would say: No, no, just do it the same old way. It is time for change. It is time for bold ideas. It is time for research and development. It is time to take the competitive genius of America, this Yankee ingenuity, our ability to create, our ability in our technological prowess--it is time to utilize all of those assets and to break through to a new beginning. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. That was my understanding. Mr. President, does the Senator from California want to speak?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I wanted Sara Sanders to come over here and be on the floor while I am speaking, because this photograph is of her hometown, Madison, FL, in Madison County, which is in north Florida. If you examine this photograph of downtown Madison, here is the old courthouse, and across U.S. 90 is this Shell gasoline station. This photograph is from a couple of days ago, and you can see that regular is $4.09.9 a gallon, and premium is $4.33.9 a gallon. This is certainly a record for Florida, and it is especially a record for the rural parts of Florida, which Madison County, part of north Florida, is a part of. Last week, when we were in recess, I did 18 townhall meetings all over the State of Florida, and I can tell you our people are hurting. They are hurting because they are having difficulty making financial ends meet. Our people are hurting and are having difficulty making their paycheck go far enough. Our people, particularly those who have to drive long distances and don't have any alternative of mass transit to get to work, are having difficulty being able to afford getting to work. That is symbolized by this photograph of a couple of days ago in Madison, FL--$4.10 for a gallon of regular gas. Where is it going to go? Well, I wish to have you look at this particular chart. Now, this indicates to us what has happened to the price of gas over the last 8 years. In January of 2001, the price of gas was at $1.47. Seven and one-half years later, the price at the end of May was $3.94 a gallon. This is a national average. As that photograph reflected, it has exceeded, even in rural parts of America, $4 a gallon. It rocked along here at less than $1.50 for a couple of years. Then, in 2003, it jumped above $1.50 and started to gradually climb. Then, in 2005, it spiked up right after Katrina. As a matter of fact, overnight, when Katrina hit, it went from about $2.65 to up over $3. It gyrated back and forth, exceeding that $3 limit, and look what has happened in the last month or 2 months. It has gone from less than $3 a gallon all the way up to $4 a gallon. There is something that is going on, and people are sick and tired because they are frustrated they can't afford this. By the way, Florida is a microcosm of America. A lot of America has moved to Florida and, therefore, when you look at a representative sampling of this country, our State is a microcosm. And having been all over the State for all of these townhall meetings this past week, I can tell you that people's frustrations are turning to anger. They do not know what to do, but they want their Government to act. Now, what do we do? Well, I must say it is very interesting that we hear coming from parts of the energy sector the same old story: We have to drill more. If you could drill more and you could get it to market immediately, that would certainly bring some relief. But when that is said, the full story isn't told. Because when the oil companies say they want to drill more, and that supply and demand will take care of the problem, what they fail to say--and they fail purposely to say this--is that there are 33 million acres under lease that are submerged lands--33 million acres--of which they haven't drilled. It is there. They have not drilled. Of course, a side issue here is the constant pressure to come in and drill off of our coast, off of the east coast of the United States and off of the west coast. But there are 33 million acres under lease, submerged, that are already available. Plus, there are another 34 million acres that are either owned or leased on lands that have not been drilled. Now, you don't hear that, but that is a fact. Of those 33 million acres that are submerged, and that are under lease and ready to be drilled, or to go through the process of leasing, they ignore the fact that we worked out a compromise 2 or 3 years ago where we would add an additional 8.3 million acres of submerged lands in the Gulf of Mexico that could be leased. We kept that away from the military training area, which is most of the Gulf of Mexico off of the State of Florida. All that submerged land is there for drilling, but of course we hear the same old refrain from over the years: Well, let's drill. Let's drill our way out of the problem. The fact is that is a red herring to get us off of the ultimate solution to this problem. The answer is not just drill, the answer is alternative energy sources. Now, let me put it another way. The United States has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, but the United States consumes 25 percent of the world's oil production. If you only have 3 percent of the world's oil reserves but you are consuming every day 25 percent of the world's oil production, doesn't that suggest to you that you can't drill your way out of the problem; that you ought to be looking to different solutions? I am going to suggest a few. But first I want to go back in history. What has happened in America? First, we had a wake-up call. Remember, it was back in the early 1970s. The OPEC cartel was formed and they decided to have an oil embargo, and so the price of oil jumped per barrel something like from the $2 or $3 a barrel price to suddenly $10 and a little more, and the long gas lines occurred. There was world oil panic and we vowed we were going to do something about it. As a matter of fact, the President of the United States at the time said, We are going to make ourselves energy independent. Well, here we are, 3\1/2\ decades later, and it is not the United States that is energy independent, it is Brazil that is energy independent. In those early 1970s, after that scare, when we vowed we were going to do something about it, we went back to sleep. Then in the late 1970s, we had another wake-up call. This wake-up call was the Iranian hostage crisis. Remember how the oil markets got jittery and we started having the long lines at the gas stations again, and we said, We are going to do something about this energy independence on foreign oil? Then what happened? We collectively, as a nation, went back to sleep. Cheap oil was part of the problem. It seduced us, even though that cheap oil was continuing to get a little more expensive. So, then, we get up to the end of the decade of the 1980s and Saddam Hussein suddenly moves on Kuwait and takes over another country and their oil fields. We had another crisis and oil spikes again. The Nation was in an energy crisis. Our foreign oil supplies were being threatened, and we make another vow that we are going to do something about it. And what happens? We allow ourselves to be lulled by the sweet dulcet tones of being reliant on a cheap energy source, even though it was getting higher and higher, and we go back to sleep. Then we turn the century. Suddenly, we have September 11. Then we have Afghanistan. Then we have the Iraq war. All of those oil supplies in that region of the world are threatened and, suddenly, everyone is getting jittery. At the same time, China is emerging as an industrial power, and so is India. They are demanding more and more of the world's oil supplies and the supplies are getting tighter and tighter and the price starts going up and up. Still, on the Senate floor with my colleague, the senior Senator from California, as I have assisted her for the last 8 years, each year trying to increase miles per gallon in the fleet average of our automobiles, we are not able to get the votes to pass it. We allow ourselves to be lulled and lulled back to sleep. Finally, because of the way this gas price spiked after Katrina to over $3, finally we were able to marshal the political will so that we could change the miles per gallon, a modest change, to 35 miles per gallon from 25 miles per gallon--although that 25-miles-per-gallon standard set in the 1980s was illusory because light trucks and SUVs were exempt. We were able to get to a new standard to include all and a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon--but it would not be fully phased in, over the period of the next 12 years, until the date of 2020. Before I offer some additional solutions, why has oil, as measured in gas prices, gone, in just a few months, from $3 a gallon to over $4 a gallon? Is the President indicating that I do not have any further time, Mr. President? Is the Presiding Officer indicating I do not have any further time?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I intend to speak about Senator Kennedy at a later time in more depth. Certainly there have been a lot of Senators who have said a quiet little prayer for the complete recovery of Senator Kennedy that would include other colleagues, some of whom we do not even know about. Certainly we know about the recurrence of the cancer in the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Specter. We certainly know of the physical health challenges the President pro tempore, Senator Byrd, is going through. Since this is a Senate family, perhaps the world at large doesn't understand that political differences, just as in a real family, can keep people separated. But when there is a time of need and healing, the family comes together. That is certainly the case in what we feel about Senator Kennedy, Senator Specter, Senator Byrd. But I will be speaking about that later.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, when Lyndon Johnson was Senator and majority leader, he had observed that during the Korean war, often the Soviet Union held the high ground because their MiGs could fly higher than our planes. Certainly as majority leader he went through the shocks that the entire Nation experienced when the Soviets surprised us by the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik. We knew then that the Soviet Union had the high ground. At that point the Nation came together, realizing we had a serious problem because we had an adversary that was dedicated to the elimination of the United States of America and that for our defense interests we clearly had to start doing something about it. There is the whole story of that extraordinary time of the late 1950s when America came together, when we finally had to reach out to a group of German scientists. We were fortunate, at the end of World War II, to get to Peenumunde, Germany, before the Soviets did, in order to get most of those German rocket scientists, led by Werner von Braun. Ultimately that was the team to which we turned to produce the rocket that could get our first satellite--Explorer was its name--in orbit. But that was after we were shocked. This Senate, this Congress, under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, said we have to organize ourselves in a way that we can take this on. That was the birth of NASA, 50 years ago this year. NASA was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Now that acronym has become the noun; everybody knows it as NASA. It was the organization that was given the task after that majority leader put that through this Chamber and through the Congress, to have it signed into law by President Eisenhower, with all the ingredients in the law that would give us this Federal agency that could take on this daunting task. Along comes the election of 1960 and Lyndon Johnson doesn't get the nomination but, because the nominee is smart enough to realize he has to bring together the party in a tough election, Lyndon Johnson is his Vice President. So they get into their first year in office and the Soviets surprise us again and they take the high ground when they launch Yuri Gagarin into one orbit. Mind you, we didn't even have a rocket at that point that we could put a human on the top of that could get us to orbit. We were still operating off of that Army Redstone rocket that von Braun had successfully put up to put the first satellite in orbit, but it only had enough throw-weight, or power, to take that Mercury capsule with one human in it and put it into suborbit. I remember when I was a young Congressman back in the 1980s, one day Tip O'Neill, the Speaker, saw me on the floor and he said: Bill, come here. He knew I had just flown in space. He wanted to tell me a story. As a young Boston Congressman, Tip O'Neill was down at the White House--the John Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson White House--and he said: I had never seen the President so nervous that day. He was pacing back and forth. He was just like a cat on a hot tin roof. He asked one of the aides what is going on, and he realized that Kennedy knew that we were just about to launch Alan Shepherd, only in suborbit--and this is a few weeks after Gagarin has already taken the high ground. Of course it was then a second suborbit with Grissom, and it was 10 months later that America had John Glenn climbing into that Mercury capsule on top of an Atlas rocket that had a 20 percent chance of failure. Of course we know the rest of the story. Interestingly, what happened in between that time when the Soviets had taken the high ground with Gagarin up, before we could get Glenn up for three orbits, the President made the decision--and it was a bold, new vision--and said we are going to the Moon and back within 9 years. But then he turned to his Vice President to implement it. Therein lay the idea and the secret to one of the most successful governmental and technological achievements in the history of humankind with the White House, specifically the Vice President, directing the way, giving complete carte blanche to their newly selected Director of NASA, Jim Webb, to go forth and do this magnificent technological achievement. Of course we had to scramble. Even after we had John Glenn up, the Soviets still held the high ground. They did the first rendezvous in space. But then we started to catch up and of course America knows this wonderful success story in which we were able to go to the Moon and return safely, a feat that has not been accomplished by any others. I come back to why I am standing on this floor today. America has had that success because of the then Vice President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, who then became President and pushed that program on through to extraordinary success. It is fitting that the space center that trains those astronauts is named the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center.