John Peterson

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Madam Chairman, on April 10, 2008, let the record show, oil is $110 and rising, natural gas is $10.56 and rising, gasoline and diesel prices at record levels in all our communities. Folks back home are scared. They want us to help them. An amendment I will offer later will help, the NEED Act, to this bill because it will provide the ability to produce clean, green natural gas on out, out of sight, offshore. It will provide $20 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and the beaches there, $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes, $12 billion for San Francisco Bay clean-up, energy efficiency and renewables, $32 billion, carbon capture, the famous discussion in the Senate now, $32 billion. And it'll be mandated spending. The appropriators can't screw it up. America's economic future is in trouble. Energy prices will prevent people from having a job, having an economy and being able to afford their vacations and go to the beautiful beaches that we have. I think Roy Ennis says it best, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. Energy is the master resource, the foundation of everything else. Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, natural gas and transportation fuels make our jobs, health and living standards possible. Energy is the great equalizer, the creator of economic opportunity and environmental justice. Push energy prices up, everybody suffers. When energy costs get too much, industry lays people off or just leaves. Jobs, income and tax revenues vanish. Government social programs wither. Town and leadership migrate to other cities, other countries. Social ills multiply. That's why I say the fight over energy is the critical civil rights battle of our era. Your utility bills, the price you pay at the pump, your job security are in danger, and not just because of the Middle East oil wars or competition from China and India. Our rights are being endangered because of what's happening right here at home. This Congress is the cause of high energy prices. There's no action here to fix the ills of the past. We're locking up our energy supply. It's not even to be debated. It's not even a priority. Congress is the reason America doesn't compete energywise. And, folks, in a period of time, we won't compete in the global economic economy, and we will not have jobs and a future for this country. We have the potential of being a second-rate nation because we, as Congress, have caused the energy crisis and are refusing to fix it.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Madam Speaker, I rise today in honor of a talented high school choir in my district, the State College Area High School Master Singers of State College, PA, which was chosen to perform at New York City's world-renowned Carnegie Hall on March 10, 2008. The State College Area High School Master Singers were selected out of dozens of high schools across the country to perform in this concert. The event featured 200 students from four States, and was the capstone of Carnegie Hall's yearlong National High School Choral Festival. The concert was conducted by Dr. Craig Jessop, esteemed music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who was working with the choirs and their conductors throughout the year. Known best for their legendary musical performances, Carnegie Hall is also a pioneer of music education, and I am thrilled that these students were given such a remarkable opportunity to showcase their talent. Led by Robert Drafall, the Master Singers is comprised of sophomores, juniors and seniors, and performs in a variety of venues as well as performing at the Heinz Chapel Chamber Choir Invitational, The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, and The Celebration of African American Spirituals. The Master Singers have distinguished themselves in earning superior ratings at adjudicated festivals in New York City, Toronto, Virginia Beach, and Chicago. They were invited to participate in a master class with the famed a cappella ensemble Chanticleer, and they have collaborated with the Central Pennsylvania Youth Orchestra and with the State College Choral Society and Orchestra in a performance featuring Metropolitan Opera Audition winners. I am privileged to have one of the four schools in the Nation chosen for the Carnegie Hall National High School Choral Festival residing in my Pennsylvania district. I commend these students and their leaders for their accomplishment, and congratulate them for representing the State of Pennsylvania in their performance at the famed Carnegie Hall on March 10th.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I stand ready to support every renewable form of energy that we can produce. We can't do it fast enough. But a year ago we had $55 oil. Today we have $100 oil, and I'm not going to blame the Democrats like you blamed Mr. Bush. We are all guilty. Congress is the reason we have hundred dollar oil. And I think the Bush administration could have been a lot more aggressive in its energy policies, but the 2005 act had a lot of things in it that your side fought that are reaping benefits today. But hundred dollar oil is because this Congress has decided we are not going to produce oil and gas anymore, clean natural gas. We are not going to do coal to liquids, coal to gas. We are going to do just renewable. Let's look at the chart. At the top, the orange, the buff, the yellow, yellow is nuclear, coal, this is our energy use today, and this is a projection on the right-hand side, on the right-hand side of where it's going to be by 2030 according to the Energy Department. If we double wind and solar in the next 5 years, it will be less than 3 quarters of 1 percent of our energy use in America. We have to double it. We have to quadruple it before it really makes a measurement difference. Oil companies make huge profits when they own the rights to oil and Congress locks up the ability to harvest them in America and forces us to go offshore to buy them. We have been gaining 2 percent a year since I have been here. This will be the 12th year. Every year dependence grows 2 percent because Congress has locked up supply. We have to go over there to buy it, foreign unstable countries. And when you own it and we lock it up and the market goes high and crazy, Wall Street does that. Oil companies don't set the price; Wall Street does. I have been trying to produce clean natural gas. I haven't been able to get a majority for that. Clean and natural gas. I haven't been able to get a majority for that. And that's the one that's vital to the manufacturers of America because it is not a world price, and we have the highest prices in the world. However, what hope does this bill actually give to young families with home heating costs? Nothing. What hope does this bill bring to poor folks living in rural and urban America who struggle to drive to work, to school, to the doctor's office, to do their shopping? It doesn't do anything. What hope does this bill give to independent truckers who are struggling to pay their fuel oil bill, soon approaching $4, if they try to make a profit with their independent trucks? It doesn't do anything. What does this bill do for rural and suburban seniors who keep their thermostat at 58 degrees last winter and this winter so they can cut their fuel costs? It doesn't do anything. What does this bill do to prevent the tragedy that happened in my district last year when an elderly gentleman tried to warm, on a sub- zero night, by putting coal in a wood stove and he burned in a fire? This bill would not have saved his life.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to, I hope, bring some balance to this debate. I was stunned in my office listening to the opening comments that it is going to be a new era in America on energy prices. Americans are struggling to heat their homes. Americans are struggling to have fuel to drive their cars affordably. Companies all across this country are struggling to make a profit because of energy prices. And the bill before us will not change that in the next 3 to 5 years. I don't oppose better CAFE standards. It takes 2 or 3 years to design new cars, other years to build them. You are 4 to 5 years away from people. And the poorest among us seldom ever own a new car with high efficiency standards, the poorest among us. Folks, America needs more affordable energy. We have the highest energy prices in the world because of this Congress, because we have locked up natural gas reserves, we have locked up oil reserves. We have not allowed the movement that should be in coal-to-liquids and coal-to- gas, and there has been resistance to expanding nuclear which provides the vast majority of America's energy. I hope renewables become a major force, but it will be years if not decades. Today, Americans need affordable gasoline. They need affordable diesel fuel to fuel our trucks. They need affordable home heating fuel to heat their homes. They need affordable natural gas. And this bill does nothing for any of those. The ethanol, biofuels, the second part of this bill, it is futuristic. We now have 7 billion gallons; that mandates 36 billion. It limits 15 to corn. And we know that corn was $1.80 when it started; it is $4.37 today, and rising. It is going to raise food prices. God forbid we get dependent on corn and we have a bad crop year. We will have high-cost food and unaffordable energy. Now, I am not saying we shouldn't do that, but we should do it carefully. But we can't build America's energy future on CAFE standards. I am all for the fuel efficiency appliances. It takes years for that to happen. Americans today expect more from this Congress. High oil prices on the backs of Congress because we locked it up. Clean green natural gas, the affordable fuels that Americans should be using in greater quantities if it were affordable. $11.37, it spiked a couple bucks in the last couple days because it is cold and we are starting to use a lot of gas. Natural gas is used in heavy amounts to make ethanol, almost an even swap. Natural gas is what will be the hydrogen car if we get there. Folks, we need affordable energy that runs 90-some percent of this country's energy needs, and we are ignoring it. This bill does nothing. The big bill that we voted on last week did nothing. Natural gas supplies need to be increased; oil supplies need to be increased in this country so we are not buying it from foreign countries. Coal-to- liquid, coal-to-gas needs to be advanced like we are force-feeding cellulosic ethanol. I am not against cellulosic ethanol. It is being sold to do most of the 36 billion gallons, and it is still in the laboratory, folks. I hope it comes out. I hope we build a successful plant. But it won't be this year; it won't be next year. It will be down the road. People are struggling here in 2007, and 2008 coming, to heat their homes; and they are going to struggle in rural America to drive their car a long distance because they have to drive everywhere, they don't have mass transit. They need money to run their families, and energy costs are robbing them of their ability. Fifty-eight degrees was common for seniors in my district. That is because they couldn't afford more energy.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I'm not opposed to CAFE. I'm not opposed to fuel efficiency. I'm not opposed to biofuels. But, folks, you are overselling them. We have an energy crisis today, not 5 years from now. OPEC told us last week no more oil, get used to $90 to $100 oil. Today it is $92. Today we have the highest home heating costs ever, the highest diesel costs ever, the highest gasoline costs ever. The poor and middle class of this country are struggling to heat their homes and afford to drive. Under this bill, foreign dependence will not decrease. It is currently at 66 percent, and for the last 10 years, for the last 10 years, 2 percent a year, dependence, 2 percent a year, folks, it is going to continue for the next 5 because this doesn't produce energy for 5. If this continues, 76 percent of our energy will be foreign dependent. The gentlemen from Massachusetts and California stated we will save 4 million barrels a day with CAFE and biofuels today combined. Not now. Not in 5 years, but by 2030. That is 23 years. Our increase in energy need from population growth alone will be greater than that. We grew 5 billion barrel a day in the last 25 years in need for oil. This will have no impact for 5 years. Can Americans afford no relief for 5 years? $90 to $100 oil can sink the economy of this country. Every recession has been energy related. This country is on the verge of going into a recession because of energy prices. As we conserve and become more efficient, we must have more energy also, produce the Outer Continental Shelf, Alaska, and the Midwest and lessen our foreign dependence, increase nuclear production of electricity, implement clean coal technology, stimulate the production of fuel and gas from coal. Our growing need for affordable energy is growing faster than the savings in this bill. America expects more of us. They don't want to wait 5 years: high home heating costs, high driving costs, the chance of their job going abroad. We are going to lose a million or two jobs in this country because we have the highest energy prices in the world. Our natural gas prices are higher than everybody, and clean, green natural gas, which you oppose producing, is the best fuel for America's future to get us by this difficult stage we are in. Ladies and gentlemen, we need policy that will bring energy to Americans so they can afford to live their lives, so they can maintain the manufacturing and processing jobs, so we can afford to move our goods across this country. We are in an energy crisis, folks. This bill does not resolve a crisis. It has futuristic things in it. But we are not going to resolve the energy crisis in America. People in America expect more of us, and we should be delivering more.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Just yesterday, OPEC told the world that $90 oil is okay and they won't be increasing production. They want $100 oil. They want more. Now, on the surface, Americans will say, Thank God. We have a Democrat energy bill coming to help us as energy prices continue to skyrocket as we move into the cold winter months. However, what hope does H.R. 6 actually give to young families with high home heating costs? Unquestionably, nothing. What hope does H.R. 6 bring to poor folks living in rural and urban America that struggle to afford fuel to travel to work, to drive their kids to school and do Christmas shopping? Absolutely nothing. What relief does H.R. 6 bring to seniors living on fixed incomes who struggle to make mortgage payments and stay warm? Absolutely nothing. What does H.R. 6 do for rural and urban seniors who kept their thermostats at 58 degrees last winter with temperatures below zero because that is all they could afford? Nothing. What does H.R. 6 do to prevent the tragedy that happened in my district last year when an elderly gentleman living alone tried to keep warm on a subzero night by putting coal in his wood-burning stove and perished when his modest home burned? It does nothing to prevent that. What does H.R. 6 do for small business owners and manufacturers who happen to be high energy consumers to remain competitive and be able to keep America's best jobs here? It does nothing. What does H.R. 6 do to the large manufacturers who have to compete in the global marketplace and provide jobs for middle-class America and compete against countries with cheap labor and cheap energy? It does nothing. In fact, it will continue to push more jobs offshore to countries like India and China where energy is cheaper and more accessible. The working men and women of America who struggle to heat their homes and travel to and from work deserve action from this Congress. We need to provide them with available and affordable energy not 4 years from now but today. Yes, Congress is the reason we have the highest world energy prices because we have continually locked up our abundant supplies of gas and oil and coal, increasing our dependence on unaffordable, high-priced oil and gas from foreign countries. H.R. 6 is not an energy bill. Efficiency standards, conservation and renewables are vital to our future, but they are 4 and 5 years down the road before they provide energy. Americans need energy now, not tomorrow. We have the highest prices in the history of this country; and folks, I am going to tell you, they are going higher. The height has not been reached. We are going to have more than $100 oil because OPEC is in control because we have decided that we are not going to produce energy for America; we are going to buy it from those who are holding us hostage. This bill has some good futuristic parts, but nothing in the next 5 years to heat and cool this country and allow Americans to drive to work affordably. We need an energy bill. I challenge the bill Democrats, let's do a bipartisan bill and let's argue the points. Let's bring affordable energy to America.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Does the energy bill help Americans who are struggling to heat their homes and drive their cars? For affordable energy, the answer is no. Despite claims to the American public that they will put policies in place to achieve energy independence, the Democrats' energy bill will not produce a single BTU of energy. To achieve energy independence, we must replace imported energy with our domestic resources. Unfortunately, the Pelosi bill will make us more dependent on foreign energy, not less. The Democrat bill relies on much-needed conservation through increased CAFE standards 13 years from now, which will change the fleet, and the production of 15 percent of our electricity from renewables, hardly enough to replace the 13 million barrels of oil we import every day. If we want to achieve energy security and reduce our dependence on foreign energy, we must increase domestic production of oil and gas in America's energy-rich areas. As American families and small businesses continue to tighten their belts to cope with soaring energy costs, Congress should be doing everything in their power to relieve this unnecessary burden. Yet today the House is taking a step in the opposite direction, increasing our dependence on energy from foreign, unstable countries.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I can think of five or six.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. It's going to be much higher.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That's the electric map, and it shows, it's the same as this. But it does prove my point, that coal goes down and gas goes up; it gets bigger. But up here at the top, you have the same thing. There is almost no change because the growth in volume needed more than absorbs all these new renewables.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from Texas and my friend from Illinois. It's a pleasure to work with both of you. And I just wish the majority of Congress had a deeper interest in energy. I guess I find it confounding that this is a chart I have been using all year and it doesn't work anymore. This was the rise. This is annualized by year. It doesn't have the spikes that happened in those years, but this is the annualized figure. And I just find it confounding that last week we were bouncing all over 98, almost 100 one day, and not a word spoken in here about energy. It wasn't a priority. It was not even a discussion on this floor, except for a few of us, in 5-minute speeches or hour speeches, like tonight, talking about it. But the committee is not meeting. The conference committee is not meeting. And I guess the question is how difficult does it have to get. Because here we are approaching the winter season. People have to heat their homes. And 58 percent of them use gas, I think 30 percent use electricity, and 9 percent use home heating oil, and then there are a few other mixtures in there. But nobody seems to be concerned. I was a retailer for many years, supermarket operator, and I remember back in the 1970s and 1980s when we had the energy spikes that were really severe back then. And as a person in the food industry, you would think people would always have money for food. 1979 and 1980 were very difficult years in my business because people didn't have money to spend. What we forget about is 50 percent or maybe 60 percent of Americans spend every dollar they make every week. They don't have any money in the drawer. They don't have any extra cash in the bank. They spend. And when energy prices spike like this, and especially in rural America where I come from, transportation costs are high in big rural areas. People have to travel to work, travel to church, travel to school, travel for everything. And then when you pay your transportation bill and then your home heating bill, in rural America, again, bigger old farmhouses, not a lot of new housing, not as energy efficient as the new modern housing, so they have high home heating bills. And when they spend an inordinate amount for home heating and for transportation, then they have less money. And my friend from Illinois was talking about it. I had tough springs. Usually in my business, I was lucky to break even through March. You had to make your profits the rest of the year. But in those years it was into May before I cracked into a profit because people didn't have money to buy basic fundamentals, food. I was in the food business. And that's what is going to happen in America this year. It could challenge the holiday season because it came this early. I didn't expect $95 oil, and I'm going to tell you why. Everybody has told me that if we had a major storm in the gulf, and we have been very fortunate in America, we haven't had a major storm in the gulf in 2 years. The first time ever that we've gone that length of time. Everybody has told me this summer, when it was 75 or 80 and I asked what a major storm in the gulf would bring us, $100 oil. A couple weeks ago, I asked a gentleman what would a storm in the gulf bring us. He said $120 oil. Could we handle $120 oil? I'm not sure. I don't think we could handle $95 oil for a long period of time and keep the economy moving, because a great amount of our economy is you and I shopping, buying goods and services, and when we have so much money being consumed by energy, it has to come out of our budgets. And those who don't have any extra cash, credit cards will only give them so much, and then they are going to start cutting their spending. I think the thing that's interesting is the prediction for America. We have finally gotten this on a chart that anybody could figure out. Usually you see charts and you have lines going up and down. This is energy usage in America up to now. This line in the middle to my left is the projection by the Energy Department of what energy we are going to consume in this country. It doesn't change much. Now, I wish this nonhydro renewable line up here was just exploding, this red. That's what we are pinning our future on. Now, I'm for it. We are subsidizing. The people are saying we are holding it back. We're not holding it back. This is the projection of the Department of Energy of what renewables are going to grow. That's wind and solar. That's the mix. Look at hydro. Because we are not building dams and because dams are still being removed, hydro decreases. Now, there is a little bit of growth in nuclear here, very little, if we build the 35 plants that are under permit process tonight. We need to build those new 35 nuclear plants just to keep electric generation at this percentage that it is. I think it's 8 percent, if my memory is correct. Coal, now I happen to disagree with the Energy Department. They have coal growing. With the CO2 debate, coal is going to diminish. And I think their projections were made before CO2 and carbon became the issue, because I see coal plants being refused by States all over the country. There are permits being denied. And they don't show gas growing, and I disagree with the Department of Energy on this estimate, and they may be a little bit wrong on renewables. But if you double this line, that's a lot wrong. It still isn't very much, is it? Now, I look for gas, because every country that started dealing with carbon as a pollutant and started charging carbon taxes or penalties, natural gas is the big winner because it has a third of the carbon of the other fossil fuels and has no NOX or no SOX, nitric oxides or sulfur oxides; so I predict that it will come up here and coal will decrease. That's my opinion because, as my friend from Illinois has talked about, we ought to be building. I'm going to give the White House credit. They are pushing six cellulosic ethanol plants. I think that's good. That's pretty new technology. That's using woody waste or biomass of any kind to make ethanol, and I think that's good. But I think we ought to be building 10 coal to liquid plants and some coal to gas plants. Then we look down here at oil. Oil is going to be a major part of America. Now, we have heard lots of speeches on this floor that we are going to replace oil. I wish that were true. I wish that was possible. But what we have decided in America is we are not going to produce oil. We're going to restrict it. The government owns a lot of the oil in America. They have control of all offshore, and 80 percent of that has been locked up by three Presidents, and all the Congresses in the last 26 years have voted to literally not produce energy. In Brazil, who is energy independent and everybody says it's ethanol, well, ethanol is a piece of it. It's a nice piece of it. But they've opened up their Outer Continental Shelf, and I think they just found one of the biggest finds ever off South America just in the last week, and Brazil is producing offshore like we ought to be producing. But oil is what scares me. Number one, we are not producing it, so we are part of causing the shortage in the world. Number two, we are gaining dependency on foreign, unstable governments, 2 percent a year. And I think if we pass the energy bill that I hear rumored about, it will probably be 3 percent a year. And I hear people say we are going to be energy dependent. Well, there is no way in our lifetime, probably my lifetime anyway, and some of you may be younger, that we can be energy independent. We can be less dependent. I would like us to be energy independent, but we can only be less dependent. But this one just keeps marching on. And why is it $95? Well, we have countries like China who are producing energy all over the world. They are locking up oil and gas reserves in every part of the world. Every part of the world. They're going to be producing less than 50 miles off of Florida with Cuba, as are five or six other countries. In our waters, actually, they are going to be producing oil that we should be producing. But we have locked up those 200 miles offshore and cannot produce there. So my biggest fear, and I will just ask the question, what if one unstable administering country topples? What does that do to the price of oil? What if we have a storm like Katrina? What does that do to the price of oil? What if terrorists struck a couple of refineries, some pipelines, some loading stations in foreign countries where we get a lot of our energy? What happens to the price of oil? Will China stop anytime soon purchasing and outbidding us? I predict in the near future you are going to see China announcing a major oil coup with a major supplier that has been part of our supply system. That's what they are doing. They are out there locking it up. It's interesting in the summertime we get 20 percent of our gasoline from Europe. This spring we had $3.09 gasoline in my market, which we have $3.09 now, at $63 oil. We now have 90-some-dollar oil, and we still only have $3.09 gasoline because gasoline has not yet caught up with the oil price, plus at the end of the summer there was a surplus of gasoline. This spring when the driving season started, Europe was short of gas themselves, so they couldn't supply us with the gasoline they normally did. So there was a shortage in the market, and, of course, that runs the marketplace up. So $3.09 gasoline was abnormal, just as abnormal as $3.09 gasoline is in America today with $95 oil. We are probably looking at $3.49, $3.50 gasoline would sort of be the price if it was being used out of today's oil and with not a surplus of supply. Here is a chart that tells what we use: 40 percent petroleum, 23 percent natural gas. Now, this figure has grown a lot because 13 years ago we took away the prohibition of using natural gas to make electricity, and we went from 8 or 9 percent of our electricity made with natural gas. We only allowed it to be used for peak power in the morning and evening when we have to turn them on and off. And a gas generator is cheaper to build, doesn't take very long in comparison to other generators. But now we produce 23 percent, and that number is growing every day, and it will really grow. Coal, 23 percent; nuclear, 8 percent; hydroelectric, 2.7; biomass, 2.4; geothermal, .36; wind, .12; solar, .06. Now, here is where our future lies, and the only one that is really growing is biomass. How is that growing? Well, we are using it to heat factories. Wood waste has now become a commodity. I'm from Pennsylvania, the hardwood capital of the world. We are now drying most of our wood with wood waste instead of using fuel oil or natural gas because it's cheaper. A million Americans will heat their homes this year with wood pellets. A lot of people don't know about a pellet stove, but a pellet stove is a new, modern, beautiful stove that you can heat your home and it's wood waste. That is a new consumer in the market. And also power plants that are burning coal will top them with wood waste so they can just slide under the air standards where the coal they are burning might just have a little too much emission in it. So they'll use 20, 30 percent wood waste, and they will be able to meet the EPA air quality standards. So woody biomass is the growing one. And now when we go into cellulosic ethanol, we are going to use wood waste again to make ethanol, cellulosic ethanol. But let's say we really put our effort behind, and we are, solar. So let's say we double solar. Now, it is hard to double something in 10 years. But let's say we double it in 5 years. So we would be at .12. And if we double it again in another 5 years, we would be at .24, if my math is still good. And we take wind and we do the same. We could do that for a number of years, a couple decades. We'd still be struggling to get a percent of our energy from wind and solar. And yet people seem to think, and I don't know why, but they seem to think it's ready to take over, it's ready to be helpful. But it's not ready to replace that big wide band I had on oil, it's not ready to replace that big wide band on coal. Nothing is. And hydroelectric is decreasing because we're taking dams out and it's becoming a smaller percentage. And nuclear will decrease to 7 percent if we don't open the new plants because, as electric use goes up, if nuclear doesn't go up with it, it will become a smaller figure. So when you look at this chart, now I'm going to switch gears on you for just a minute, what do we hear? Here's what we hear is coming now: this is, I believe, the ``no energy bill.'' It locks up 9 trillion cubic feet in the Roan Plateau. The Roan Plateau is a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as a naval oil shale reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas in the OCS bill that was passed in Congress last year, that little piece in the gulf, will be put off limits. It has already been through NEPA, it's all ready to lease, it's ready to produce. Legislation that's coming before us is going to take it away. What makes sense about clean green natural gas? Next, it locks up 18 percent of the Federal onshore production, America's natural gas. And that's because of policy changes and further NEPA studies, and making it more difficult to permit is going to slow down the production of both oil and gas production in America. I was responsible for a small amendment, but a good amendment, in the energy bill in 2005. It took away redundant NEPA studies because NEPA studies take a year. I talked to people who had leased land and in 7 years have not drilled yet because they were still doing NEPA studies because they had to do one for every piece of the process, not a NEPA study, and then produce it with a NEPA study to delay. Locks up 2 trillion barrels of oil shale from the West oil shale. Now, everybody talked about the tar sands as oil that we couldn't get. Canada has been persistent. They're now producing 1.5 million barrels a day. Much of that is coming into our States to be refined. In fact, they're trying to enlarge refineries in the northern tier, having a lot of problems. Lots of resistance about enlarging those refineries, but that's necessary to produce. But the tar sands are one of the fields that's growing in Canada that's available, and they tell me that shale oil has even greater reserves. It's going to lock up 10 billion barrels in Alaska, the national petroleum reserve, breaches legitimate legal contracts that are out there that companies have signed to produce oil by trying to make them null and void with legislation. And then the one that really is bad, $15 billion tax increase. I have two oil refineries in my district, one in Warren, Pennsylvania, American Refineries, and in Bradford, Pennsylvania the original Kendall refinery. They're going to pay, if this bill passes, a higher tax than any other business in Pennsylvania or in America. Does that make sense, that we're going to tax people who produce energy with a greater tax than those who produce steel or food or other products for a profit? I don't think it does. I know what it's about; it's about the hatred of oil companies. Well, Big Oil does not produce. The other fact I want to share with you, 90 percent of the oil in the world today is not owned by an oil company. The 14th largest oil company in America today is Exxon. The other 13 are countries like Mexico, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia, all our good friends. Dictatorships, unstable governments, unfriendly governments, and they own about 90 percent of the oil. And now what's worrisome, from what I'm told, is they're using this huge cash revenue for social purposes, and they're not putting the money back. So it could happen in the very near future that those countries could not produce enough oil to supply America. And that's why we have $95 oil, because we're not doing coal-to-liquid; we're not doing all the other things we ought to be doing. We're hoping that renewables can replace oil. I wish they could. I think America, I think this Congress, I think this administration needs to take a very serious look at the economic viability of this country if we continue, if all we have coming at us is a bill that has, it shouldn't be no energy, it's less energy and more taxes. I thank the gentleman for allowing me to share.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I don't have a big chart, but I have a little chart.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I disagreed with the IAs. I look for gas to get bigger and coal to get smaller because of the CO2 issues. Now, let's say they're wrong here, because I'm sure lots of people will disagree with them. Let's say they're 100 percent wrong. Right now, when you see hydro and nonhydro, you see hydro decreasing as much or more than nonhydro increases, so there is really no growth in renewables. Let's say they're 100 percent wrong. So instead of having 5 percent, we're 10 percent. It wouldn't even take up the growth need of America. So let's say they're wrong, and we're going to be twice that effective at renewables. I hope they're wrong, but it won't take care of the growth. We will still need this oil, we will still need this gas, we will still need this coal.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. None in Pennsylvania.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. One thing I want to mention, what has happened to these high energy prices? Dow Chemical paid $8 billion for natural gas in 2002, $22 billion in 2006, and they are now building plants all over the world because we can't afford America's energy. That is the message we need to realize. Many companies are doing that, and we need to prevent that.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, I guess I think the thing we need is we need an energy policy. We need to get serious about energy. Energy, in my view, is the number one challenge of America. I've said this in many speeches; I think it equals terrorism and the security of America. But if energy prices continue to skyrocket and we cannot compete in the global economy and the average American can't get a workingman's job, we are going to be a country in trouble. We are going to be a country that is not first rate. We are not going to be the leader of the world. Energy availability and affordability should be the number one issue in the Congress. It is unlocking the OCS. It is unlocking the Midwest. It is wiser use of energy. It is using less for transportation, more efficiency. In fact, conserving in the next 5 years is probably all we can do, because everything we have talked about takes 5 to 10 years to produce fruit to bring it to market. So I think America's, I think that the real terror threat of this country is available, affordable energy.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise once again on this House floor to talk about an issue that I think is the most important issue that this Congress should be dealing with and that this administration should be dealing with. Six short years ago, we had $2 natural gas and $16 oil. Most of our lifetime we have had gas that was less than $2 per thousand and oil that was around $8, $9, or $10 a barrel. That is how America grew, cheap, affordable energy. Now, we have lots of other sources of energy, coal, hydro, wind, solar, renewables of all kinds, but the majority of our transportation fuel has always been oil. Four weeks ago, I rose to speak on this House floor. Oil was $82, and most of us were panicked. Can our economy handle $82 oil? Just a few months ago, I met with an Assistant Secretary of State whose role is to deal with energy. He shared with me that he and many of his colleagues felt that $70 to $75 oil would really put us in recession because the economy could not absorb those costs. It didn't. Then, we were at $82. Two weeks ago, we were at $90.92. Last week we were at $94.53. And, at one point it was 98- something. Today it is $91.92. Can America's economy continue to afford $90 to $100 oil? I think there are many who are very concerned. I know that the poorest among us, the average American who spends every dollar they earn every week, and sometimes with the use of a credit card maybe a couple dollars they didn't earn that week hoping to catch up later. And with the winter heating season coming on, you would think this body and someone would be debating energy. Four weeks ago, there was no energy debate on this floor; three weeks ago, there was no energy debate on this floor; last week, there was no energy debate on this floor. And there is a little rumble that there could be an energy debate on this floor, but most people don't think so. Record high heating oil prices; winter is coming. Record high diesel prices for our truckers who move our goods across this country; winter is coming. Gas prices are on the rise. We have a mortgage crisis, everybody is talking about it. Is the mortgage crisis equal on the impact on America that high energy prices will have? No. Is it important? Yes. No discussion about energy for America. We passed a House bill some time ago. They passed a Senate bill some time ago. No conference committee has met. We have heard rumblings that a few staffs have met, but no sense of urgency. I cannot understand for one minute why energy isn't the number one issue facing this Congress, available, affordable energy to maintain our economic base, people to heat their homes, people to drive to work, and to have a few dollars left for food. Now, we've done a few things. The Speaker sometime a few months back made a declaration that we would stop heating a portion of the complex here with coal and we would use natural gas. And that was because of the concern of the carbon, the CO2, the carbon footprint. Now, we didn't do anything to put double pane glass in any of the windows in the Capitol or all the surrounding office buildings. They're all single pane. I'm not saying it was right or wrong to switch to natural gas. It costs the taxpayers another $3 to $4 million. But it didn't do anything to conserve energy. We could have put double pane glass on all the buildings in the complex and saved millions of dollars in energy for America. Oh, we also mandated with recent legislation that all bulbs in the Capitol complex will be the new fluorescent bulb that screws in. I have some of those at home. My wife doesn't like them. I don't like them in a place where I read a lot. They're not quite as clear, bright, and some of them buzz, vibrate a little. But the unfortunate part is we mandated them here; those are all made in China. No American jobs. And I have the largest incandescent light bulb plant left in my district in St. Mary's, Pennsylvania. What are others doing about energy? Well, the one that's leading the world in the fight for energy is China. They're building a coal electric plant every 5 days. They're building a nuclear plant every month. They're building the largest hydro-dams in the world as we speak. They're buying up rights to oil and gas and other forms of energy all over the world. In fact, they've just developed a pact with Cuba. Less than 50 miles off the Florida coast, with Norway and Canada and a number of other partners, they're going to be producing oil and gas right off our coast, while we prohibit offshore drilling. China and India, the two new giants that are our competition, are increasing their energy use between 15 and 20 percent annually, and they're out securing it. In fact, that's the real reason for the price run-up. I have a chart here that shows, that I've been using for the last 6 to 8 months and no longer does it work. It doesn't go high enough; 90's up in here. So I'm going to take it down because really it's no longer applicable. Now, here's what's happened in just a year. In 11 months we've gone from $58.31 to a high of $96.65 on the day this was used in a press conference last week. It actually hit 90-some later that day. But no energy around here about doing something about energy. I find it unbelievable. What does America want Congress to do? They want available, affordable energy to heat their homes, to run their vehicles, and to power the places they work. Companies who make steel use a lot of energy. Companies who make aluminum use a lot of energy. Petrochemicals, polymers and plastics, 45 to 55 percent of the cost of all of them is energy. Fertilizer that we grow our corn and our wheat and our crops with, 70 percent of the cost is natural gas, energy. And while we have these skyrocketing prices that have Americans afraid because this $90 oil is not $3.09 gasoline, which is the price at the pump where I buy, it will soon be $3.39, $3.49, $3.59. In some parts of the country it already is. This spring we had $3.09 gasoline with $63 oil. How did that happen? Well, oil companies don't set the price. We like to blame them, but they don't set the price. Wall Street sets the price. And there was a shortage of gasoline because Americans don't realize it, but we don't produce enough gasoline in America for Americans. Twenty percent of our gasoline now comes from Europe. Europe has an excess of gasoline because they switched to diesel in their cars. Many of their cars and trucks are diesel so they have an excess capacity of gasoline, so they ship it over here in ships. This spring they used more than usual, for some reason, and they didn't have enough to supply us, so we had a gasoline shortage in Europe and America, and the prices were extremely high. And so with $63 oil we had $3.09 gasoline. So you don't have to be a very good mathematician to know that $92, $95, $96 oil doesn't equate to $3.09 again. It'll be much higher. It's just a matter of a few days and weeks until that little extra gasoline that's in the marketplace from the summer gets utilized. Well, what is Congress doing? Let's take a look at not what should we be doing, but what are we doing. And we're not even meeting on this for some reason. Maybe that's good. Many of us stood on this House floor a few months back and debated this energy bill and tried to get amendments into this bill, but it was pretty well locked up. There were very few chances for amendment in the energy debate in Congress. But here's what it does. It locks up 9 trillion cubic feet of American natural gas. That's the Roan Plateau, a huge clean natural gas fill in Colorado that was set aside as the oil shale reserves in 1912, because of its rich energy resources. And this legislation means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas will not be available to us. It's already went through the NEPA. That's the environmental assessments. It's passed all those. It's ready for lease. This provision was not in the original bill, but it was stuck in at the last minute, in the dark of the night. Suddenly when the bill came to the floor, not from committee, but somewhere down the line, in Rules or somewhere else, they slipped this in and removed the best potential onshore gas for America from being able to be produced. The next part here is, I was responsible in the 2005 energy act for taking away redundant NEPA studies. NEPA studies are an important part of our environmental assessment for everything we do. It's about a year-long process. But abuse of the NEPA studies was to the point of where people would lease oil and gas in America and 5, 6, 7 years later we're still not able to produce it because of NEPA study after NEPA study. They do a NEPA study for the project, then they do a NEPA study for the roads, then they do a NEPA study for the well layout, and then a NEPA study for every well. And this process is a year-long process, a paperwork process that wasn't about the environment. It's about stopping the production of energy successfully. So we took away the redundant waste, and they want to put them back. The next one's probably the worst. There's huge reserves in the West called western oil shale. It's even greater than in Canada's tar sands. This oil shale has up to 2 trillion barrels. Now, we need to figure out how to produce it environmentally in a sound fashion. There are companies preparing to do that. But this legislation would say no to shale oil. When we have $100 oil and we're dependent on foreign unstable countries for 66 percent of our oil, increasing 2 percent a year, and if this bill passes here, it'll be 3 percent a year or 4, why would we lock up the shale oil in the West? It makes no sense to me. National reserve in Alaska. Locking up another 10 billion barrels of oil. Making sense? No, it doesn't make sense. Alaska's a huge place. The Alaskans want to produce energy. We know how to produce energy cleanly today. But this bill that's been proposed in both the House and the Senate will remove. It also breaches contracts, which I think will lose in the courts. But the one down here that really makes no sense, and it's talking about taxing Big Oil. Big Oil produces a small percentage of our energy; 60, 70, 80 percent of our energy is produced by little companies. I have two refineries in my district, United Refinery in Warren, American Refiners in Bradford. This bill will force them to pay higher taxes than any other business in America. That will increase the price of energy, and when you make American production of energy more costly than offshore production of energy, you're going to get more foreign dependent. Does that make sense? I don't think so. Now, we were talking earlier tonight about how many times they've spent that in the appropriations process. I thought it was four or five. Someone said three or four. But many, many bills have been funded with this tax. Now, the next one does nothing for coal to liquids or coal to gas. Everybody knows I'm the big proponent of offshore, and I'm going to talk about it a little later. But there's huge potential in America of using coal in the traditional way, but also using coal to make liquids, jet fuel, gasoline, fuel oil, and coal to make gas. And some of the new processes, they want to make gas out of coal and then burn the cast to make electricity in a clean way. But to make that work, we've got to fund some of those and get them online, get the bugs out, help industry make this a productive way to use coal in a cleaner way for the environment. But there's great resistance in this Congress to do anything with coal because we're now in the carbon debate. Now, I guess, the carbon argument is still out there. Many Americans believe CO2 is a poisonous gas and it's causing global warming and it's a crisis. I think the crisis is available, affordable energy. And as we go coal to liquid or coal to gas, we can do it in a manner that deals with developing the process to make coal to liquids and coal to gas affordable and in a way that we capture the carbon and then use it in another form. That should all be part of the original projects. But, no, we're finding coal plants not permitted all over this country. They're closing the door on coal. And we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. In my view, they're really trying to eliminate coal as one of our energies. And as I'll show you later, that won't work. And then at the bottom down here, there's a mandate that's part of this legislation in the House version. And it sounds good. And I wish it was doable. And later on some charts I'll show you why it's not, that electricity, 15 percent of electricity being produced by renewables, but not allowed to count hydro. And as I show my charts later, I'll come back to that. But it doesn't appear in the next 30 years there's any way to do that yet. Twenty States have passed laws and Congress is wanting to pass one that will severely limit what can be counted, but forcing States to produce companies in the whole country to produce 15 percent of electricity from renewables, and if they don't accomplish that then they're going to be fined. And who's the fine going to be paid for? By the electric users. We're going to pay as we pay for more expensive electricity. But it'll still be generated the same old way. Now, if it was doable, I would say let's take the carrot-stick approach. Let's put some inducements, some incentives for producing electricity with renewables. Here's our current use of energy. And of course, petroleum, 40 percent; natural gas, 23 percent; coal, 23 percent. Now, natural gas has had the fastest growth because about 12 years ago we took away the prohibition of using natural gas to make electricity. We didn't used to allow them to do that, only in the morning and the evening when you have that extra surge, when we're cooking and washing and doing the home duties and the factories are running too. We need more electricity than we do any other time of the day, so we had gas peaking plants because you can turn them off and you can turn them on. Seven or 8 percent of our electricity was natural gas. Now in a short period of time we're up to 23 percent, and that's why we have the highest natural gas prices in the world, which are driving major industries out of this country, and I'll talk about that a little more later. Nuclear, 8 percent. We need all 35 plants that have asked for a permit to expand or build a new nuclear plant to be permitted and built in the next 20 years or this 8 percent figure will continue to shrink, because as electric use goes up, everything on here has to go up or that percentage will go down. We know hydro's going to go down because we sure aren't going to build another dam. In fact, they keep taking dams out. Biomass is the only one that's really shown some growth. Biomass is woody waste, any kind of fiber, and what's really growing there is that wood waste used to be a throwaway item. Sawdust was something you just got rid of. Now it burns in factories to heat the factories. I come from a heavily wooded area, the best hardwood forest in America. We dry most of our wood now in the dry kilns with wood waste. And a million Americans are heating their homes with pellet stoves made out of dry sawdust. And they are trying to now the expand of the use of them into biomass stoves where any kind of waste material that can burn cleanly could be made into a pellet and can be burned like corn stoves. There are a lot of corn stoves now, but with the surge of ethanol, corn has become quite expensive and is no longer as viable a fuel as it was but it is still being used in biomass stoves and in corn stoves. Geothermal, not really much growth. A good, efficient way to heat a home. It's costly in the beginning. I know people who have used geothermal, and when they build a new home, they go with geothermal because they are familiar with it. And it is a less costly way to heat your home, especially in milder climates, than traditional fuels. Then we come to the hope of the future: wind and solar. Unfortunately for many, people think that the renewables here can trickle. They bring petroleum down, coal down, nuclear down. I wish that were true. But I will show you now the chart of what the Energy Department says about the future, and that's this chart in a different way because this chart is about history; this chart is about history and the future. The left half of this chart is history. There is a line here in the middle. This is use in the past; this is use in the future, projected. Now, I don't totally agree with the Energy Department. I think natural gas will grow and I think coal will decrease for the reasons I just mentioned. The carbon issue is going to decrease coal until we find clean ways to use coal, and we are working on those. But there is great resistance for coal. I don't agree with it. And there is a lot of reluctance in nuclear. I don't agree with that either because we need it too. But I look for natural gas to grow and oil probably to just chug along. Now, $95, $100, $120 oil may decrease oil, but I don't know what we are going to replace it with because we are not doing coal to liquids, which could replace oil. We are not going to run our cars with nuclear. We are not going to run them with hydro. We could run a lot of them with natural gas. Natural gas, in my view, is the fuel, the clean, green fuel, that's underestimated in this country. And we cannot ever be in control of our oil needs. We don't have enough. But natural gas we have lots of. And we will talk now about how we have locked it up. First, I want to talk about what natural gas prices have done to manufacturing, manufacturing employment. As gas prices have risen, manufacturing has decreased. Natural gas is the fuel that we use to run this country. And for the last number of years, we have had the highest natural gas prices in the world. Here is how fast they have risen. And now we are back up between $7 and $8. During the winter, we will be back to $8 and $9. Now, that's from the well head; that's not the price people pay. So these figures are costs from out of the ground. But America's natural gas prices, historically we were down here under $2, and we were very competitive in the world. But in these years since this rise, we have not been competitive. And in China and India natural gas prices are half of ours. And South America, a buck something; Russia, less than a dollar. Our competition in the global marketplace have much cheaper natural gas prices. And that's a problem for America. Here's the reason why: Now, there is also a chart I have. I don't have it with me, with some big circles in here, and these are areas where there are lots of gas and oil. But they are locked up. Why? We are the only country in the world that has chosen to lock up our gas and oil. The only country in the world, offshore and onshore. Even with $95 oil and $8 and $9 gas, we're locking it up. Twenty-seven years ago, Congress, in its wisdom, prohibited the production of energy offshore in these areas. Canada produces, Great Britain produces, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, all environmentally sensitive countries, they produce offshore. We talk about Brazil being energy independent because of ethanol. Ethanol was just a piece of it. They also went out offshore and produced oil and gas and became energy independent, and they don't have to buy this expensive energy from anybody. They have their own. America could be self-sufficient on natural gas. We could fuel a third of our auto fleet, all short-haul vehicles, all short-haul trucks, all construction vehicles if it was affordable, more affordable than oil and gasoline. It is cleaner burning, no SO2, no NOX, a third of the CO2, if that's giving you gray hair. But for some reason, here's what natural gas is used for. People just have no idea. And ladies, natural gas is the derivative of the skin softeners we all love. I have dry skin. I use skin softeners on my hands every day. I inherited that from my father. All of these products, natural gas is not only used to make them; it's an ingredient: polymers, plastics, tires, carpet. Look at these products. Insulation in our houses. Huge amounts of natural gas. Feedstocks, ethane, propane, butane to make steam, to make power. All of these are feedstocks. And if we go to our hydrogen society, which we are all hopeful in hydrogen, how do we make hydrogen? The only way we have portable to make it is from natural gas. Natural gas should be the bridge to America's renewable future. Natural gas is the clean fuel. And for us to lock our supply of natural gas in this country up makes no public policy sense. Natural gas has never washed up on a shore. We had an oil spill in San Francisco. It wasn't an oil well; it was a ship. There are ships everywhere that could spill oil. Every moving ship in the waterways, on a lake, a river, a dam, or the ocean spill oil from their engines every day. But we won't drill for it and we won't drill for clean natural gas that doesn't have oil, that isn't oil. I think we should be producing both. But natural gas is the vital part of our future. We have a bill that we now have 170-some sponsors for but have not been able to get it considered yet. Now, our bill is a bill that gives a lot of States rights. Our bill will say the first 25 miles, and I don't theoretically agree with it, but I have agreed with it to try to get it passed, the first 25 miles is closed, period. You only can see 11 or 12, so nobody is ever going to see a gas well. The next 25 miles it is up to the States. They choose whether they want to produce energy. Their legislature decides. If they want out under the moratorium, they can choose to be out. The second 50 mile is automatically open, but, again, States have a right to pass a bill and have it signed by their Governor to keep it locked up. So Congress could open it, but they can close it back up with just a State-passed legislation. Then the second 100 miles, the OCS, Outer Continental Shelf, is from 3 miles, which is now controlled by the States, to 200 miles. I'm giving the States total control of the first 25 and saying you can't drill. The second 25, you can drill if you have the wisdom to. And the second 50, you can drill unless you have the foolish attitude that you don't want to produce natural gas. This bill would bring in billions to producing States because of the royalties, $100 billion for the Treasury. Now, we have set-aside funds. We talk about renewable energy. This bill, the NEED Act, would put $32 billion in the coffers for energy research, clean, green energy research; $32 billion for carbon capture and sequestration research to teach us how to burn coal and other fuels and capture the carbon. This isn't talk. This is real money that would put $32 billion to research that. And we have some spoils of the past that we need to clean up. They have been trying for a long time to get $20 billion to clean up Chesapeake Bay. This bill would provide it. There is $20 billion for Great Lakes restoration because when we first started this country, we used the Great Lakes as a depository for our waste of all kinds. Wrong. We don't do that anymore. This would give them the money they have been looking for for the Great Lakes group to clean up. And $12 billion for Everglades restoration. I saw a complaint the other day that this year's bill didn't give the Everglades as much as usual. This would give them mandatory spending right out of the energy bill. Also, $12 billion for the Colorado basin restoration, $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay cleanup, and $10 billion for LIHEAP and weatherization. You haven't heard any energy debates on this floor, but I'm going to tell you in a few weeks when people start paying high energy bills to heat their homes, you're going to hear a lot of LIHEAP debates on this bill where people are going to say $2 billion isn't enough, $3 billion isn't enough, $4 billion isn't enough. We need more money because people can't heat their homes. They can't heat their homes because Congress has locked up energy and caused energy prices to be unaffordable not only for homeowners but for the businesses that provide the jobs for the people. If America doesn't get a handle on energy prices, we won't have working people's jobs in this country. We won't have a petrochemical industry. We won't have a polymers and plastics industry. We won't do anything like making steel or aluminum or bending it or shaping it. It will all be done offshore where energy is much cheaper and labor is much cheaper and environmental standards don't exist. America cannot be the strong country that we grew up in if we don't have available, affordable energy. I plead with this Congress, energy needs to be the number one issue facing this country. Affordable, available energy so we can run this country, so people can live their lives in a normal fashion and have jobs and we can compete. I think America faces a challenge that it has never faced before. We have always been the big dog. We have always been the giant. We have always been able to handle competition. But we have people today that are building economic bases and they are building the energy support systems to run them. America is going to starve itself of affordable energy by choice because we locked up onshore, offshore major supplies of energy and we didn't allow the adequate trial on coal to liquids and coal to gas and we've had great resistance to nuclear and the undue hope that renewables are the answer. I wish they were, but let's go back to that chart. The first half is history. The second half is projection. I don't totally agree with it. Let's say renewable estimates are wrong. Let's say they're 100 percent wrong, and they're going to be twice as much. They still won't hardly be 10 or 11 percent of the energy needed for this country. And our energy growth is going up percentages every year. If we doubled this for renewables, if we tripled it, we would be lucky to keep up with the energy growth. We would still need all of this. And we have people in this Congress thinking we don't need oil; they won't support gas, they won't support coal, they won't support nuclear because we want this. Yes, we want this, but how do we get this? How do we get that? When wind and solar are just fractions, and geothermal are just fractions. They're good, they're good sources, they're clean, they're green, they're pure. You know, we have a lot of groups in this country, I can just think of a few, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and the PIRGs and the League of Conservation Voters and the Environmental Defense Fund, and more. These organizations are opposed to all of these. They grade legislators badly if you support the use of them and the production of them. They would all rate me badly because I know we need this to run this country. If we could run it on these, I would be for it, but we can't. We need to try to grow these, we need to try to get into a hydrogen society, we need to try to do every kind of renewable there is; but at the same time, we must produce oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear to run this country because that's what has run it, and it's what will run it for the next 30 years, according to the Energy Department. Let's say they're wrong. I think they're off on natural gas. I think the use of gas is going to explode because of the carbon debate, because the carbon debate is going to cause us to shut down coal, not permit new coal plants, not allow us to do coal-to-liquid or coal-to- gas, which would be a clean way to use coal; but they're not even going to let us experiment. The administration is pushing cellulosic ethanol. That's good and fine, but I keep arguing with them, we need to be experimenting with clean coal technologies and liquids and gas from coals because we have it. Other countries have done it. We just need to know how to do it in a cost-effective way and then try to, if carbon is the big issue, secure the carbon. And if we passed the NEED Act, we would have the money to do it. Energy availability and affordability will depend on whether America is a competitive Nation. If this Congress doesn't wake up out of its slumber, if it doesn't wake up and realize that affordable and available energy, and I understand why they're asleep. All of our lifetime there has been lots of energy, and it's been cheap, cheap, cheap. It's not cheap anymore, it's expensive and going to get more expensive. Available, affordable energy will slowly shut this country's economic base down. And the working people of America that don't have white collar jobs, that go to work and make things, as we try to get back into the growth of nuclear, the new plants that are being designed, the bases of them, the big, huge cast bases will be shipped here in a ship from Japan because we no longer have a casting plant big enough to make them. Much of the high-tech parts of our nuclear plants will be built in Germany because we haven't built them in a long time and we've lost our capacity. I say down the road, how do we defend our country? How do we build the jets and the planes, the tanks and the equipment, the sophisticated equipment? We're going to be buying the parts from foreign countries, who may not even be our friends, built by foreign people who aren't even in this country and Americans will not have the jobs. Energy is one of the biggest job creators. When you produce energy, a lot of people make a living. When you buy it from Saudi Arabia, when you buy it from foreign countries, when you buy it from the Mideast, the only Americans who get a job are those who sell it, a retail job. I was a retailer, and I'm not saying that in any way to cast aspersions; but right now here in Washington, DC you can buy gasoline made in Russia. Not only produce the oil in Russia, but the gasoline was made in Russia, came here in a ship. Not many Americans get a job from that. But when you buy gasoline made from an American refiner and produced from American oil, a lot of people have made a living. I hope the next time I rise on this floor there will have been some action from this body, there will have been some voice from the White House. I haven't heard much from the Secretary of Energy about the energy crisis. Every time I talk to any of the people in the Cabinet that advise the President, I talk to them about my views and they listen intently, but not much action; and no action from this Congress, zero action. Available, affordable energy has the ability to shut the economic base of this country and take us down and make us a second-rate Nation. And the number of poor people in America will continue to grow. Working-men jobs for the people who work with their hands, who have made this country, they're the heart and soul of this country. I was the son of a seventh grade-educated steelworker. He was a darn good dad. He taught me to be honest, work hard, always do my best, and never quit and give up. And those principles he taught me I have lived with all my life. And I thank him today and my mother for teaching me to be honest and upright. But they were working people. Neither of them had graduated from high school. They worked with their hands. They were ambitious. There are lots of Americans that need jobs to work with their hands, to make things, build things. And this country will no longer be a country that makes things and builds things and creates things. We're just becoming consumers as we export our jobs. And energy, available, affordable energy has exported more jobs from America than any other issue. I will debate that with anybody. And it will continue to export the good jobs we have. Dow Chemical, the biggest employer and manufacturer of chemicals in the world, used to pay $8 billion a year for natural gas in 2002. In 2006, they paid $22 billion, and they came to Congress and begged. I had them at hearings, and they begged us. The President of Dow Chemical begged this Congress to take action on opening up energy supply for this country so he didn't have to go across the ponds in other countries to build his plants so he could compete. They make products for the whole world, and they can go to countries where energy is a third, a fourth, a fifth of what it costs here and labor is cheaper. And that's why they're going. They don't want to go. He said, I don't want to go. I'm loyal to America. And many companies are loyal. I talk to company CEOs that say they spend millions every year trying to cut energy use, but the energy costs just go up faster than their energy use. Americans need to conserve. We all need to use less. We need to learn how to use less. We need to figure out how to quit wasting energy, and more fuel-efficient cars, more efficient homes. But folks, we need to have a Congress and an administration that puts energy at the front door of our future and says that we're going to do whatever it takes to compete in this global economy. We're going to provide energy for Americans. We're going to open up our reserves. We're going to produce the oil we need, the gas we need. And we're going to use coal the clean way. And, yes, we're going to expand nuclear. And, yes, we're going to even maybe build some dams and do some hydro. And, yes, we're going to do everything we can to promote renewables, all of those. And we're going to try to get into hydrogen. It will be decades, but hydrogen society, where we can make hydrogen. If we learn to make it out of water, we've got it made. But then we still have to learn how to transport it safely and how to utilize it, how to sell it, how to process it and distribute it. It takes years and decades to do that. In the meantime, we've got to continue with what we have, and it's nuclear, coal, natural gas and oil, and renewables. We need to make energy one of the top issues in this Congress, not tomorrow, not the next day, but now. Not next year or two years from now; it may be too late. When we open up a new oil field, if we open up the Outer Continental Shelf, it's 10 years before you have any real production out there. If we start coal-to-liquid, coal-to-gas, it will be a decade before we would have real production. We need to be starting it now. We need to be figuring out how to speed up the process of nuclear to run this country. America needs a Congress committed to available, affordable energy. And I'm going to conclude, you know who owns the oil in the world? You know who the biggest oil companies are? It's not Exxon. Exxon is the 14th largest oil company in the world. They're pretty big. But 13, unstable, nondemocratic governments are bigger oil companies. And they've kicked out Big Oil in the recent years, taken over their investments, captured their monies. And they're running the oil production in most parts of the world. Ninety percent of the oil is owned by unstable governments. And any one of them that tips over, along with a Katrina-type storm in the gulf, can give us unaffordable energy overnight. We're vulnerable to a storm; we're vulnerable to unstable nondemocratic governments that don't even like us. How can America go to sleep? How can this Congress go to sleep at night knowing that we are vulnerable to those we don't even trust with our energy future? This Congress must have an energy policy soon, and it can't be the one I talked about first that takes energy off the table. It has to be one that puts energy on the table, yes, does conservation, does all of the things to conserve and use wiser, but produces the energy this country needs to compete. We're in a global climate, we're in a global economy today, and America must figure out soon that everything we do in Congress must enable our companies to compete in the world; and affordable energy is one of the first things we ought to be doing.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about a different subject than you've been hearing about, one that I think should be talked about in the halls of Congress here: What is Congress doing about available, affordable energy for America? I know it's Halloween, but when we find out the price of oil today on the market, we are all going to think it's a Halloween joke. First, I want to show the record of oil prices, of how they have been rising. Now, this doesn't show the spikes up and down all along. These are annual average prices. Just last week I was here speaking and we were at $90. But today I think we're off this chart because at the close of business on Wall Street today, oil was $94.53 a barrel. I don't know about you, but that puts fear in my heart. The winter season is coming. People are going to need to keep their homes heated. People are going to need fuel to drive their cars. The American economy is going to need affordable energy to compete in the global economy. On October 31, 2007, oil closed at $94.53. Now, 6 years ago, it doesn't show it on the chart, but 6 years ago, natural gas was $2 a thousand; now it's $8. Oil was $16. This is a 600 percent increase in oil prices in just 6 years. Is it an issue? It hasn't been mentioned here today. It wasn't mentioned here yesterday. It wasn't debated last week. We are going to have record high home heating oil prices for those heating their homes, record high diesel prices for those who are transporting our goods up and down the highways, and so I guess the fair question is, what is Congress's plan for affordable energy for America? Months ago I was down here on the floor and debated the House bill. The House passed a bill. We'll talk about it later in content. And simultaneously a little later, and the Senate is usually a little behind, they passed a bill. Now, you would think with energy prices spiking to record levels, there would be some sense of urgency in Congress. There would be some sense of urgency to get the Senate bill and the House bill together and get it on the floor to help Americans meet their energy needs. Now, we have had some interesting things happen here. Speaker Pelosi forced the curator, those who run the Capitol here, to switch from coal to gas so we could lessen our carbon imprint. Now, that's going to cost the taxpayers $3 or $4 million because gas is the clean, green fuel and she thought it was better that we heat the Capitol with gas and not coal. Now, what is interesting is it would seem like we should be about conserving. I haven't seen a dollar appropriated to put double-pane windows in all of the Capitol complex. Most of them are single-pane glass. Now, most of us at home have done better than that. My office building, single-pane glass. On a cold winter day it frosts right up. It transmits lots of heat out, lots of heat in. Depending on where the heat is, it goes right through single-pane glass. But wouldn't it make more sense to conserve energy in the Capitol complex and do energy efficient windows and doors? No, we just switched fuels and spent an extra $4 million so our carbon imprint was less. Now, we have also mandated that all government agencies, including ourselves, use those little round fluorescent screw-in light bulbs. I have some at home. My wife doesn't like them. I don't like them if it's a reading light. At least they vary. They are not the same quality of the incandescent bulb we are used to. We're spoiled. But we have mandated those in every appropriations bill this year, and what's disappointing, though, is that they are all made in China. We are mandating that our light bulbs come from China. Now, while we talk about energy, we can talk about why we have such high prices. I want to switch charts here. And here we have a chart of the percentage of imports for America. Now, this chart is a little behind. It actually is almost up to 70 now. Every year we increase dependence on foreign, unstable countries by 2 percent. That's in the last decade. Every year. I think that number is going to increase, and I will explain to you why later, that it may even go up faster. Now, while we are becoming more and more dependent on foreign oil, we have countries like China and India, and this is one of the reasons for high energy prices today. We have always been the only big user. We have always been the big dog economically. Well, we're one of the pack now. There are a lot of big dogs out there. China and India's energy use is increasing between 15 and 20 percent a year. They are building a coal plant in China every 5 days. They are opening a new nuclear plant for electricity every month. They are building the largest hydrodams ever known in the world routinely. They are buying up oil and gas reserves and making deals with other countries all over the globe so that China has the energy it needs to run its country. What is America doing? We will talk about that. America does not have an adequate sense of urgency about providing energy for America, affordable energy for America. We passed a bill in 2005 that had a lot of positive incentives. But the problem is when you pass a bill, it's years before you have production of energy. And many of the incentives that were in that bill, many of the things that were helping us produce more energy are now being tried to be rolled back by the Democrat bills that are going to come before us, that have come before us, and will come back before us again in a conference report, and we will talk about that in more detail. What does America want us to do? Well, the Americans I talk to, they want to be able to afford to heat their homes and drive a decent car. They'd like to be able to afford to buy food and other things after they pay their energy bills. Now, these energy bills that have been passed some months ago have been languishing. I haven't heard much discussion. In fact, I haven't heard of a conference committee meeting. It doesn't seem like 3 weeks ago when we had $80 oil; that was enough sense of urgency. It doesn't seem like last week when we had $90 oil; that was enough sense of urgency. And here we are at $94.53 oil, and that doesn't seem like enough sense of urgency. Now, reading the Wall Street Journal today, the article was scary, it said, ``We don't expect oil to stop at 100.'' Now, I expected energy to get expensive this year. I've been predicting it. And I had someone say, How did you know that? And I said, You've just got to be watching what's going on. There's an oil shortage in the world. There is tremendous demand because all the developing countries are now driving cars and have factories and are using energy. And specifically the big ones, like China and India, their economies are growing at record paces, are consuming a lot of energy. And we're going to be competing with them down the road. What scares me, and I'm going to put $94.53 back up here, because that's correct. Here is what's scary about $94.53 oil. We, for the first time in many years, have not had a storm in the gulf. Every time we have a major storm in the gulf, it reduces supply of oil and gas; about 40 percent of our energy comes from the gulf. So when a storm like Katrina or Rita hits the gulf, or even one not as severe as them, it shuts in a lot of oil for weeks and months, and any damage that's done to rigs or refineries or pipelines or processing stations for the gas, it just shuts down capacity. We get a lot less energy after a Katrina. Some of those were not repaired for 9 months to a year, and that energy is just lost. You just don't get it because you have to keep producing every day. Now, we have not had, for the first time in years, a storm in the gulf that has disrupted any amount of supply. That's a record. We always have at least one storm. And we still have a few weeks left, but the season is getting short. We have not had an unstable country. And the fact that's scary with $94.53 oil is that now about 90 percent of the oil in the world, of known reserves, is not owned by companies, but is owned, produced, refined and marketed by dictator, unstable, unfriendly governments. So a majority of the energy in the world is controlled by unfriendly, dictator-type governments. And if one of those tips over and their 3 million barrel a day is disrupted, where will the price go? I asked one of the large energy producers this week in my office, I said, what if we have a storm in the gulf? $120 oil in 2 days, a serious storm. And this company knows because they produce there; they produce about one-third of the gulf. What if a terrorist struck a sending port or a ship or a major pipeline or a major refinery? Where will energy prices be? These are all potentials. And I have been predicting this, and I have energy experts tell me I'm probably not wrong, we will read in the paper one of these days where China has purchased the total supply of some country that normally sold us oil, and that oil will no longer be available to us. And on gasoline, we don't produce enough in this country. We don't have enough refining capacity. Twenty percent of our gasoline comes from Europe because when they switched to diesel, they have excess gasoline capacity, so they sell us gasoline. And this spring, when we had abnormally high gasoline prices, we had 60-some-dollar oil and we had $3 gasoline. And I was shaking my head, what's going on here? That's not normal. But that's what was happening. And so I checked, and here Europe was short on gasoline. They didn't have enough to sell us. And so there was a shortage in the marketplace, and of course Wall Street ran it up, abnormally high prices. Now, today, with $94.53 oil, or more than $90 all week, if that translated into a market gasoline price, we're probably talking somewhere between $3.39 a gallon for gasoline and $3.59 a gallon of gasoline, depending on where you're at in the country. That's a long ways above the $3 price that we're approaching right now. And that's going to come because 80-something-dollar oil will put us at $3.19, $3.29 gasoline; $90 oil is going to push us up into the mid $3. And it's just a matter of time because, at the end of the summer driving season, when we switch the refineries over to make it home heating oil, there was a little surplus of gasoline in the marketplace, and so it has held the price down. And when that burns off and there is none of that left, we will be paying a lot higher prices to drive our cars because the truck people, the fuel oil is already up there. It's already higher, much higher. And home heating oil is much higher. Those who didn't fill their tank early this year for home heating have missed that opportunity because those high prices are already there. The question I ask, I was concerned, and there are those who I've talked with that know a lot more than I felt that $75 oil for any period of time would put America into a recession. Now, that didn't happen, because we've had higher than 75 now for quite a while. What figure can the American economy absorb and not go into recession? All of our recessions have been energy driven, almost all of them. I think maybe there was one that wasn't, one or two. Every time we've had a recession in this country, and they last for years, a lot of people lose their jobs, employment slips, tax revenues are down, the government doesn't have enough money to pay its bills, a lot of Americans are hurting, unemployment rates go up. What figure can America absorb and not have a recession? Well, I don't think we have any wiggle room. I don't personally think we can handle this for a very long period of time. I'm not the expert, but a lot of people agree with me. And I want to tell you, it's almost guaranteed that this is not the ceiling. See, we don't have a spike here because of a Katrina, a country tipping over, or some terrorist attack in the supply line system. Things are kind of going along. Now, there is a lot of instability in the world, but there is always lots of instability in the Middle East, so those little tremors come and go. So, what price can the American economy absorb? I don't think much higher. The other thing that we don't talk about is natural gas prices a lot because people don't realize that natural gas prices are not like oil. This is a world price. Natural gas prices are country by country. And for 6 years now America has had one of the highest natural gas prices in the world, and that puts all of the manufacturers in this country who use it for heat and who use it as an ingredient, and we will talk a little more about that later, are at a tremendous disadvantage because of our continued very high natural gas prices. Yes, it wasn't very long ago, just 6 years, that we had $2 gas and $16 oil, and today, we have $94.53 oil. And our dependency is at 66 and will soon be 70. America should be concerned about that. I remember people talking that, when oil was cheap and gas was cheap, use foreign oil. We will use theirs while it's cheap, and we will use ours when it's expensive. Well, theirs is expensive, but we're not using ours. Here is the map that's interesting. These red circles are areas loaded with natural gas and oil, and they're off limits to production. We're the only country in the world that says our Outer Continental Shelf, that's around the edges, 85 percent of it, is not open to production. Canada produces there, Great Britain produces there, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia. Now those are all environmentally sensitive countries; they all produce there. Norway has become a rich country because of their offshore oil finds. And a lot of people talk about Brazil being energy independent because of ethanol. Ethanol was just a piece of the pie. Brazil also went offshore and produced their energy. America, for 26 years, a combination of Presidential and congressional moratoriums from producing energy on the Outer Continental Shelf, and many parts of the Midwest like this one are locked up, too. And the legislation that's coming before us will lock it up some more. Now, I don't understand that. I don't understand where a six-inch hole in the ground with a steel casing producing oil or gas, and specifically clean natural gas, is a threat to our environment. All the studies show that offshore, the majority of the oil that's found is from leakage of ships or natural seeps, because when oil is under high pressure underground, it will find its way to the surface. In fact, I come from Titusville, Pennsylvania, the home of the first oil well, Drake Well. We're all very proud of that. It changed the world, it started the Industrial Revolution. It started the new transportation system. Oil that was transportable, refinable, and it developed this country into the power it is today. And it has the potential today of making us a second-rate nation because we refuse to use our own energy and we're forcing ourselves to purchase from unstable, undependable countries around the world. And their $95 oil, they're going to own us. We just heard people talking here about them buying our debt. Yeah. Because we're spending so much of our resources purchasing energy that we have, but we've locked it up. I just find it amazing. Now we're going to look at the legislation that should be coming, but there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency. This is sort of a compilation of the energy bills that have passed both the House and the Senate and have not been conferenced on. Now, first what we're going to talk about is it locks up 9 trillion cubic feet of American natural gas. It cuts off production from the Roan Plateau, a huge clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as a national oil reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources for our future. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas the OCS bill that passed last Congress was put off limits. Roan Plateau has already gone through NEPA. That's the environmental assessment that says it's safe to do it, all done. It is ready for lease sale. The provision was not in the original bill when it came out of the Resource Committee, but was added almost with no debate, no hearings, and no real serious discussion. Make sense? No. The next part here locks up 18 percent of our Federal onshore production of American natural gas. It cuts the categoric exclusion provision. And I will explain that a little in my terms. I helped put that in in the 2005 energy bill. Redundant NEPAs allowed the anti-energy people from allowing the Americans to produce energy. So, land would be leased in the West, mostly in the West, and 5 or 6 years later, after they purchased the rights to it, they still weren't producing it because they were required to do multiple NEPAs. They do a NEPA on the original plan. Then they have to do a NEPA for the road plan. Then they have to do a NEPA for every site. And then for putting in the production equipment, another NEPA. So year after year after year, a NEPA study takes about a year. So years later, they still didn't have any production. And so we said that one NEPA that covers all the aspects of producing energy in that area should be done, and that should pass the test. And we shouldn't do redundant NEPAs. But now they want to go back. It locks up, this is huge, the third one, 2 trillion barrels of American oil from western oil shale. Now, western oil shale, everybody knows, is a huge oil reserve, and the underground can be tricky. We have oil companies on some of the private land they own there trying to release this, and they think they have a way to do it. It is somewhat similar to the Canadian tar sands. The Canadian tar sands have been around since I was a kid. In fact, I have a neighbor who bought rights to them many, many years ago, and he's now laughing because everybody wants to buy them at huge prices. And I don't know whether he has sold them yet or not, but I was kind of stunned that he was smart enough 30, 40 years ago to buy tar sands in Canada as an investment. And today they're producing 1.5 million barrels a day there. It's just over the American border into Canada. And their goal is to be up to 4 to 5 million barrels a day down the road. And fortunately for America, most of that's coming here. Our biggest supplier of energy is Canada, our good friend. Now, Canadians are a little frustrated with us because they produce their energy resources. They're offshore, they're onshore, they're tar sands, and we keep locking ours up. Thus, North America has the highest natural gas prices because of us. If we produced equal to Canada, North America would have reasonable natural gas prices, not the highest in the world. But they keep selling to us. Now, this 2 trillion, this bill stops the leasing program for oil shale reserves on Federal lands that will hold enough oil to supply us for 228 years. Now, that's a study. If it's half that, if it's a third of that, it's huge, and it could eliminate our dependence on, and that's the only reserve that I know of, that if we learn how to release it, could eliminate our foreign dependence on energy. But that's the only way. But that is the only way. This is more oil than the entire world has used since oil was discovered at Drake well in my district 150 years ago. Meanwhile, in China, they are busily developing their oil shale fields. The next one here locks up 10 million barrels of oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. That is, again, an area that was set aside for production, set aside in 1923 for production of future energy needs in America. Then the next one breaches legitimate legal offshore energy contracts, and I have had several of those companies come in to me and say, hey, this is a contract. If Congress changes that, we are going to win in the Supreme Court because Congress doesn't have the right. I am not saying I agree with these leases and how they were done. They were done in the Clinton administration, but we have this legislation coming that is going to override those. It won't work. It will just delay the process. I am hoping that we can continue to negotiate these leases and have them out of the way. The next one is really foolhardy. There are a lot of Members of Congress who hate oil companies. This inflicts a $15 billion tax increase on the American oil and gas industry. Seventy-five to 80 percent of the energy in this country is not produced by Big Oil. It is produced by little companies. I have two refineries in my district who will now pay a higher tax than any other company in Pennsylvania if this bill becomes law because we are going to tax the production of energy with an added tax over any other business. Now, when you are short on something, and the prices are high, if you want to get less of it and make the prices higher, the sure remedy is to tax it. Well, they are going to tax it. I am not going to, but they are going to tax it. Now, the next one down here, I am a big proponent of offshore drilling, and I will talk about that later, but I am also a big proponent of using coal, to gasify it, to make electricity, and that is called clean coal, and make liquids out of it. Penn State has a process to make jet fuel out of coal. The Air Force is in the process of trying to figure out how to have 60 percent of their jet fuel available from nonimport sources. They are working with natural gas right now. They are doing other studies, too, but they are working with natural gas now. If they are successful, and they get 60 percent of their 3 billion gallon a day, they are going to inflate gas prices even more, which will make it harder to heat our homes. I will talk more about that later. But coal to liquids should be getting the same treatment as cellulytic ethanol. I am for cellulytic ethanol, and this administration is funding six plants. It is still in the test tube. We are still working at it in the university laboratories, but I am for building those plants and streamlining this process. I think one plant is going to try to make it out of garbage, another switchgrass, another cornstalks, another one is woody biomass, but we need to be doing all those things. But to be not having an equal emphasis on coal to liquids, I fault this administration, and I fault this Congress. Because that is the largest energy source we have. We need to figure out how to use it cleanly. We need to be developing, and again, curtail our dependence on foreign countries. Now, we also have in the legislation a false expectation by mandating a 15 percent of renewables to make electricity. I wish that were doable. I would vote for it if it was. I didn't vote for that. I voted against that amendment. I fought against that amendment. We currently make 3 percent of electricity with renewables because they will not count hydro, only the new hydro, and there is not much new hydro coming down the line. So to go from 3 percent, they are going to allow cost savings of 4 percent, so that gets us to 7, but the growth of wind and solar is nowhere near enough in the next decade or two to get us to 15 percent. Now, what we are going to do is we are going to force those companies to pay fines. Do you know who is going to pay the fines? The electric rate users. Some States will come close because they have a lot of wind, and there are States that have solar. But most States will not. It should be an incentive-type program. It should be a carrot, not a stick. We should be incentivizing renewables for electricity. But when you mandate 15 percent, and I have charts and graphs to show that. I don't have them with me tonight. But there is no way to get there in the time frame they are asking. I am going to change charts here and talk just a little bit about current energy use in America. These don't change a lot. I have been watching them for a long time. Currently, petroleum is 40 percent of our energy needs, and 66 percent of it comes from foreign, unstable countries. That number is going to escalate if we lock up the Roan Plateau. It is going to escalate if we lock up shale oil. It is going to escalate if we tax energy production and make it more expensive. Natural gas is 23. Now, this is a growing figure. It is interesting because about 12 or 13 years ago now, Congress removed the prohibition of making electricity with gas. That is when gas ceased to be cheap. We have always had $1.80, $2 gas, and it would go up a little, down a little, maybe up to $3 a year, $3-\1/2\ or $4. I remember some of those years in the seventies when it was a lot more costly to heat our homes. But it would come back to $2 or $1.80. It never went much above $2. Now, it is way above. It is $8 and something right now, and we are still not into the high season. The average price for the year is somewhere between 9 and 10, and then when you get transmission costs and storage costs, we, as consumers, are going to be paying $13, $14, $15 for gas. I believe that clean, green natural gas is really our best hope. But we have to drill for it. And people in this Congress are just as much against drilling a gas well as they are against drilling an oil well. And I think they are wrong on both. But there is no good argument. There has never been a beach dirtied by a gas well. There has never been an environmental threat by a gas well. It is the cleanest fuel we have. There is no NOX, no SOX, and a third of the CO2 if that is keeping you awake at night. Now, coal is 23 percent. Coal has great potential for liquid or gas. But there is a real push around here against coal. I think it is a mistake. It is the one we have the most of. If we continue that, gas will be the winner, and gas prices will continue to rise. And if we continue to have the highest gas prices in the would, we just won't be a competitive country. Nuclear is at 8 percent. From the 2005 bill, we have a lot of companies going in for permits now. We need all 35 that are starting the process to be completed in a very short period of time if we don't want this figure to go down, because the energy electric use in this country is rising fast and nuclear is about 20 percent of it. But that figure will drop because nuclear has not grown. We haven't built a nuclear plant in a long time. The interesting part is, as we attempt to build nuclear plants, the shroud, which is the big steel casing that they use, we don't make them in America. The companies that are that far along in the permit process are buying them from Japan. I find that unfortunate, and someone told me an awful lot of the components are going to be purchased in Germany because we don't have the capacity because we have done so little with nuclear in the last decade. Hydroelectric, a figure that continues to decline. Biomass is the fastest growing figure. That is wood waste. A lot of it is being used. There's a million Americans heating their homes with pellet stoves. That is compressed wood waste. We have power plants that are using it to top the coal load so that they can slide under the environmental standards because it burns a lot cleaner than coal. We have a lot of companies in the wood business and around where there is wood waste using it to heat their factories. Most of the dry kilns drying wood are now biomass burners. So biomass has just been sort of growing on its own because sawdust used to be a commodity. I remember in Pennsylvania when I was in State government, they were trying to make it a hazardous waste. I fought that because it is not a hazardous waste. And now it's a commodity that sells. People want it. Geothermal, a nice way to heat your homes if you are not in zero climate. In a mild climate, it is a good exchange of using underground water, whether you have a loop system where you have a big piping system with water or whether you drill into the aquifers and use that water, you take heat out of it in the wintertime to warm your home, and you take cold out of it in the summertime to cool your home. But, again, it is an investment up front. I know people who have it. If they build a second home, they usually put it in unless they are in a high zero where there is a lot of cold weather. It has its limitations when the weather is zero. Wind and solar, this is the part that I find scary. Too many Americans think that wind and solar are prepared to become major energy sources. You can see the numbers, 0.06, 0.12. If we double those numbers, they are still a pretty small fraction, and it will take years to do that. But, unfortunately, an awful lot of Americans want this group right here to be our major energy source. I wish there was a way to do that. There are an awful lot of Members of Congress who think petroleum, gas and coal are just evil and we shouldn't do any more production of it, and they won't vote for a bill to lease land. They won't vote for a bill to open up areas. Some of them are against nuclear. Some aren't. That is a mixed bag. But, folks, this is the major part of America's energy production. It is 94 percent of our energy production, nuclear, coal, gas and petroleum. And it will be a major part of our energy portfolio for a long time whether we like it or not because none of these are prepared to take over. I wish they were. Now, there's a lot of creative things. But they are little niche players. They are little niche markets. They are not huge volumes. So it is important that Americans understand that whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are going to be our major energy source a lot longer than we want them. If we continue to not produce our own, then we are going to have to buy them from foreign countries. Now, I want to talk about natural gas a little bit. This is America's gem. We have lots of natural gas. And I find it astounding that so many Members of Congress and three administrations in a row have locked up our Outer Continental Shelf, which has huge reserves of clean, green natural gas. I don't understand it. I don't know what they are thinking about. I don't know what their hopes are or dreams are, because, folks, we can't afford to continue to do that. Natural gas is a far more bigger part of our life than most people realize. Now, you see all of these products here. They are all made with natural gas. Not only as a heat source, but as an ingredient. Somewhere here you will find soaps and skin lotions and skin softeners. Yes, ladies, the skin softeners that you love and we all like that keep our skin soft are a direct derivative of natural gas stock. Polyurethane, plastics, petrochemicals, fertilizer, all made, fertilizer that we grow corn with to produce ethanol, 70 percent of the cost is natural gas. It is the reason in how we make all of these products. And yet we lock it up and treat it like it is something evil. I just plain don't understand that. We have a bill that opens up the Outer Continental Shelf. Now, we are only doing it for natural gas. I think it should be for both because every other part of the world produces both. But I have not been able to get natural gas here. Now, we passed a good bill last session in the House that opened up gas and oil both. But we didn't get any action in the Senate. So we are going at it cautiously this time, just natural gas. This bill is very States' rights oriented. We will lock up the first 25 miles, can't produce it, that is out of sight. Eleven miles is sight line. The second 25 miles, States have a right to open up if they want to just by passing a State law. We will repeal the moratorium, but it doesn't repeal unless the States pass a bill. Now, the second 50 miles will be open unless the State passes a law and this gives States rights for 100 miles to close it. Now, this is much more conservative than I would like, but we are trying to get some natural gas for America to stop a calamity of starving our industry and our homeowners from affordable natural gas. Now, the second 100 miles would be open, period. Those who produce natural gas say this would help immensely because clean, green natural gas can be our bridge to renewables. To make ethanol, we use a huge amount of natural gas. If we go to a hydrogen society, the only good way right now of making hydrogen quickly is natural gas. Natural gas is used to make biodiesel. Natural gas heats 50 some percent of our homes; 58 percent, I believe. It runs our major industries. It's the major feedstock for the polymers and plastic and fertilizer and petrochemical. We use huge amounts of it to make bricks and glass and steel and aluminum and to bend metal and to treat products, heat-treat things. In my district, we have the powdered metal industry. They use huge amounts of natural gas to make that new powdered metal product that has brought the price of cars and vehicles and all kinds of moving parts down because it's so much less expensive than the old machining and forging of parts. Powdered metals. But they heat treat it with clean, green natural gas. Natural gas is the fuel that should bridge us to where some kind of new energy, whether when we learn how to release hydrogen from water and then learn how to transport hydrogen safely, it takes years to develop all of the facets of an industry so that it becomes our stable fuel source of the future. We need to be doing everything we can do in America for renewables. But we need to have adequate fossil fuels, and, specifically, natural gas. Now, my bill rewards some people. The States would get up to $150 billion in royalties because States would get 30 some percent. There would be $100 billion left over in the Treasury of money we wouldn't have to pay in taxes because we could get the royalty off the gas, not oil. Now we have some cleanup funds here that I think are pretty unique: $32 billion for renewable energy research. That is real money to allow us to develop the fuels of the future. We have $32 billion for carbon capture and sequestration research so we can learn how to take the CO2 from coal plants and the CO2 from any fuel we burn and utilize it somehow, or sequester it. We have $20 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, exactly what they need; $20 billion for the Great Lakes restoration, exactly what their program needs; $12 billion for the Everglades restoration; $12 billion for the Colorado River basin restoration; $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay restoration; and $10 million for LIHEAP and weatherization to help the poorest among us make their homes energy efficient and make energy affordable by helping pay their energy bills. America is at a crossroads. We have been the big giant of a Nation, the powerful Nation all of our lifetimes. You know, it makes me sad to think that this Congress and administrations were unwilling to in totality agree and deal with the energy issue, making sure that America has available, affordable energy. Folks, that's doable. I know there are people who talk on this floor about energy independence. That is really not doable. The only way we can be energy independent is if we got oil from the shale rock in large quantities over a period of time and where we no longer had to import oil. We import 17 percent of our natural gas today. If we opened up the gas field, we wouldn't need to import any. We would have lots of gas. This is an interesting point about natural gas. We could fuel a third of our auto fleet. One of the problems with using gas in a vehicle is you can't go as far. You can't put a big enough tank in there. But we have lots of vehicles that don't go anywhere. We have all the service vehicles that are out servicing our homes, whether they are heating contractors or air conditioning contractors or lawn services, they could fuel up every night. In fact, they are developing ways you can fuel up from your gas line in your house if you have gas in your home. They are working on a way to fuel a car. Every construction vehicle could be on natural gas because they already are fueled by a truck that comes up to the construction site and fills up the tractors and fills up the Caterpillars and all the heavy equipment and the trucks. Every taxicab could be on natural gas because they don't go big distances. Every school bus, every local person who doesn't drive a long distance could fuel their vehicle with clean, green natural gas. If we opened up the gas fields that are really available to us, it could be a whole lot cheaper than oil. A whole lot cheaper and a whole lot cleaner. No knocks, a third of the CO2. I don't understand why we haven't embraced natural gas as our bridge fuel to the future, as I said previously. But, folks, America better think very seriously in the weeks ahead. We don't have a long time to wait. Energy prices are going to continue to skyrocket because we are competing the whole world for the energy because we are buying it from them. If we produced our own, we don't have to worry about that. I understand the complacency when it was $2 for gas and $10 for oil and it was so cheap. But, folks, it's not cheap today and it is never going to be cheap again. Now we do need to use less, we do need to conserve, we do need to keep continuing to research how to produce things with less fuel, heat our homes more efficiently, make them more energy efficient. We, in the meantime, need a strong, viable source of energy for America, and clean green, natural gas is the bridge to our future. I hope and pray that this Congress will suddenly get a sense of urgency about the energy problems in this country. Mr. Speaker, $94.53 oil should scare us into movement. We should have fear in our hearts, because this isn't the ceiling, as I started out at the beginning. There is no storm in the Gulf, no countries tipped over, no terrorist threat that has taken out supply. If they all happened simultaneously, only God knows what energy would be. It is imperative. Congress is the reason we have high energy prices, because they have locked it up. There is also a lot in Alaska. There are huge reserves in Alaska that are not shown on this map. Congress has locked up this energy and three administrations have supported the moratorium for twenty-six years. We are the only country in the world to lock up our own resources and force ourselves to buy from unstable countries who will own us. They are going to have the resources to literally buy every good, profitable business in this country. They are going to buy whatever they want to, because we are going to be forced to sell it to them, because when you are paying $95.43 for a barrel of oil that it costs them a dollar or two to lift in their country, they have nothing but riches. Americans are going to have nothing but tragic situations, where our businesses can no longer afford to be here. We won't manufacture anything in this country of substance, and Americans will struggle to heat their homes and afford to travel around this beautiful land. Energy affordability, available, affordable energy for America, should be the cry of this Congress. And if this Congress doesn't do that, if the energy bills when they come out that the House and Senate have now are not altered and talk about opening up energy, about increasing supply, that is the only thing that brings down prices. Folks, we need to conserve, but we can't conserve our way out of this problem. As a country, we are demanding more energy every day as we grow, as our number of people grow, as the number of people that drive cars grows, as our population grows. Folks, available, affordable energy is the issue that can bring this great country down to where it is a second-rate nation. I don't want that to happen, and I hope Americans will push their Congress Members into making available, affordable energy the number one issue in this Congress before we adjourn the 110th Congress, and that we deal with this issue, because we can deal with it. This is an issue we can change. It won't change quickly, but we can make a lot of right moves. We can deal with all of the different forms of energy. We can open up supply for gas and oil. We can do coal-to- liquids, coal-to-gas. We can give nuclear another push. We can promote all the renewables and look for new transportation fuels to blend with our current fuels. Ethanol has potential. Corn ethanol has limited potential, but there are problems with it. The biggest problem with ethanol, and I am not against it because it is made out of American products, but it is competing with our food supply. And ethanol does not go in the pipeline. The majority of our gas stations deliver by pipelines, and you can't put it in the pipeline. Already, with the ethanol plants we have, we have distribution problems, because you need a blending station to blend it and then need to haul it by truck or trailer. That is a system not in place adequately around the country. We have as many ethanol plants under construction as we have producing ethanol today. I am not saying that is bad, but it is not a situation without problems and great challenges. Ethanol takes a tremendous amount of natural gas to make it. In Pennsylvania they are talking of doing a couple plants with coal. Many States would reject that. I commend the Pennsylvania government for going in that direction, using waste coal to make it so it doesn't further strain our natural gas supply. But as we look at this map and think about Alaska, America can be far more self-sufficient with available, affordable energy if we just have the desire and the willingness to produce more of our own. I believe we must if we want to compete in the global economy.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address the House on an issue that I think should be a very high priority in this Congress. On October 25, 2007, our world oil prices hit $92 a barrel and closed at $90. This is our chart from 1986. These are annual average prices. I can't analyze this year's price; we don't show the little spikes that happen throughout the year. But folks, we're clear up here, off the chart. Two weeks ago, I stood at this microphone with shock and dismay that we had over $80 oil, had set record prices 2 weeks ago. Now, this would be understandable if we had had a storm in the gulf as we normally do every summer, but we have been protected for the last 2 years. We have not had a storm in the gulf that disrupted supply. We get 40 percent of our energy from the gulf. So whenever we have problems in the gulf we have oil spikes because oil and gas are deprived from the system for weeks, months at a time until all repairs are made, and so we lose a lot of our energy. But this year and last year, we've had no disruptive storms in the gulf. We've not had a terrorist act that has blown up a refinery, a pipeline, or somehow impeded supply. We have not had a dictatorship. I don't think a lot of people realize that the vast majority of oil produced today, in fact 90 percent of the oil in the world, is produced by government-run dictatorships who own the oil, produce the oil, market the oil, skim off the profits for their social programs, and actually run their own oil companies. It's kind of surprising to the world, but Exxon is now the 14th largest oil company in the world, our largest. But they are only 14th in the world. The other 13 are countries, dictatorships, some of them very unstable ones. Now, we haven't had one of them tip over, but here we are at $90 oil. Six years ago, we got as low as $16, just 6 years ago. Now, it doesn't show it on here because these are average prices, but it got as low as $16. And we had $2 natural gas. The question I have is, When will the House of Representatives of this Congress think that energy should be a priority issue for Americans? What's really concerning is, as we look at $90 oil, we have somewhere slightly under $3 gasoline at the pump today. Now, that's not going to last because there is a lot of gasoline, there is a little extra gasoline in the market place, and this is the slowest time of year for gasoline usage, so the price is below the normal trend. I talked to a refinery in Warren, Pennsylvania, today in my district and I said, where would, normally, gasoline prices be with $90 oil? If it stays there, now it has to stay there a while until the system becomes $90 oil because it's not $90 oil yet in the system. He said it will be about $3.29 or $3.30 gasoline. What does that do to the American homeowner, the American family trying to raise their children and go to work, go to school and travel, $3.29 to $3.30 gasoline? We're going to have record-setting home heating oil prices this year for both natural gas, and particularly home heating oil. We already have record-setting prices for fuel oil for trucks, record-setting prices. Now, the Senate passed a bill some months ago and the House passed a bill some months ago. And we heard a lot of chatter here a few moments ago about conferencing on the appropriations bill; and that's appropriate, but this week, last week, the week before, I have not heard any mention of conferencing on an energy bill for America. I don't know why they're not getting together. I guess it's just not a priority. You now, why do we have record-setting oil prices? Because for three administrations in a row and 26 years of congressional rule we have locked up America's best oil and gas reserves. Then we can go up here to Alaska, and there are even larger spots up there locked up. Now, I remember the arguments decades ago when gas was $2 a thousand and oil was $10 a barrel. People said, yes, we should use their cheaper energy and we should save ours. Should we be saving ours when it's $90 a barrel? I don't know if you watched ``60 Minutes'' 2 weeks ago and watched Dubai build cities, build islands, build immense properties with our cash. That part of the world is enriched. They're buying our debt, they're buying our facilities, they're buying our buildings, they're buying our infrastructure because they have so much cash because $90 oil will enrich them far greater than they were enriched at $50 and $60 oil. When is America going to realize, when is this Congress going to realize that high energy prices, the only way to fight them is to increase supply of all of our energy sources. They are market driven on Wall Street. Every day they're trading them on Wall Street. And when there's a shortage in the world, the prices go up. When there's a storm in the gulf, prices go up. When something happens in a country that produces two or three million barrels a day, prices go up because there is going to be a shortage. Now, these are not caused by weather. These are caused by congressional action, not inaction, action. We have locked this up. This outer area is known as the Outer Continental Shelf. Should we produce there? It appears Congress thinks we shouldn't. Does Canada produce there? Yes. Does Norway produce there? Yes. Does Sweden produce there? Yes. Does Australia and New Zealand? Yes. Does Denmark? Yes. Do South American countries produce there? Yes. Is there another country in the world that doesn't produce on the Outer Continental Shelf? No. America is the only Nation who has decided to lock up its energy resources. And maybe they were right when it was $2 for gas and $10 for oil, and we'll use theirs while it's cheap; but it's not cheap anymore. I met recently with someone from the Department of State on energy, and they shared with me their concern that $75 oil would put this country, and maybe the world, into a recession. It didn't. But energy is such a part of our overall economy, overall lives, that when it reaches a certain point, it will put us into a recession. Every recession we've had goes to energy spikes, in the seventies, in the eighties and in the nineties. Energy prices have an immense impact on the economic future of our country, yet we sat here today, a body that's not even talking, Congress is not even talking about the energy crisis. In fact, I guess they don't think it's a crisis. I thought it was a crisis for a number of years and I've been speaking out for a number of years, and I'm going to keep speaking out until this body decides that energy is something we need to deal with. Now, why is energy so high? Well, what people don't realize, I was talking to a gentleman today from a world oil company, Statoil in Norway, stopped into my office just to talk. And he said the world is astounded by the amount of energy being used by China and India, the two largest populations in the world, as their economies are almost exploding with their population. Those two countries are moving forward with tremendous growth in their economies. Their energy use is growing between 15 and 20 percent per year. And their thirst for oil and gas and all other energy sources are causing the world's shortage. We've never had competitors before. America has always been the big dog in the world marketplace. We've always been the big dog in the energy market. China will soon pass us in energy usage, and India is climbing fast. And then you have all of developing South America. The developing world starts to use energy when they go from life on a desert, or nomad on a desert, to where they're living a life like we live. They use energy. They use electricity. They use heat. They use fuel in a vehicle. That's happening all over the world. So the demand for energy continues. It is interesting. China has just made a deal with Cuba. They are going to be drilling 45 miles off the Florida coast and we can't drill within 200 miles. Does that make sense? Cuba and China will be producing oil 45 miles. Cuba is cutting deals with Canada, with Norway, and a number of other countries, I think maybe Russia, I am not sure on that one, but I know with China, where they are going to be producing oil actually within our 200-mile limit. They are going to be producing oil where we can be producing oil, but we have chosen not to. We have chosen. What does America want Congress to do? I think Americans want us to deal with the energy issue. They want available, affordable energy so they can heat their homes, they can drive to work and school, and they can live a decent life. What does this Congress have on the table to deal with energy? Let's take a look. These are some of the things that are in the energy bills that will be looked at in the House and the Senate. Does it produce more energy? No. We call it the ``no energy bill.'' It locks up 9 trillion cubic feet of American natural gas. The Roan Plateau. Why? I don't know. It is prepared. It is ready to be produced. It is ready to take to market. But, no, this Congress is going to say, ``That is off limits, too.'' This bill cuts off production from the Roan Plateau, a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as a naval oil shale reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resource. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the bill passed last year in the Gulf, off limits. It has already gone through the NEPA process. That is the Environmental Impact Statement, and they passed them. It is ready for lease sale. This provision was not in the original Natural Resources Committee bill but was added without hearings, without any input, any debate and very little discussion in Congress. The next one, this one requires the redundant environmental studies to place a second well on existing oil and gas drilling pads. It really locks up 18 percent of the Federal onshore production of American natural gas. It guts the category exclusion provision from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a provision I authored and I understand it. What it did was, NEPA is an act we have that you have to go through an environmental assessment to do anything. It takes almost a year to do this environmental assessment. I had people tell me in the West who had leased land, 5, 6 and 7 years ago and hadn't drilled a well yet because they were doing their fifth, six and seventh NEPA. They had to do a NEPA on the original plan. Then they had to do a NEPA where they were going to build the roads. Then they had to do a NEPA on every well site. Every time they turned a corner they had to do another NEPA, and they hadn't gotten a well drilled. It was being utilized to thwart energy production because they believed we shouldn't produce energy. So we took away the redundant NEPAs, and now they want to put them back. Now, this one is really interesting. It locks up 2 trillion barrels of American oil from the western oil shale. What is western oil shale? This is an oil shale reserve in the West that some say has enough oil to supply us for several hundred years. We have to refine the process of removing it from the shale rock that it is in. It is somewhat similar to what the Canadians have done with tar sands. They have been talking about tar sands in Canada since I was a kid as being a great oil reserve. They have worked at it to where now they are getting about 1\1/2\ million barrels a day. Their goal is soon to have, in some period of time, to have 4 million barrels a day. We are going to be the benefactor because we buy most of it, because we import a lot of oil. Thankfully, Canada produces a lot more than we do. They have worked at the tar sands with process to release that oil from those tar sands. It takes a lot of energy to do it. It takes a lot of natural gas to do it. They are fortunate. They have a lot of natural gas there, too, and they produce theirs. We don't produce ours. But we are going to lock up the shale oil. We are going to stop the production of it. We are going to stop the experiments of trying to get that shale oil so Americans can have some of their own oil and not have to pay foreign countries $90 a barrel for it. Do you know what is scary about $90 oil? That is without a storm in the Gulf. It is without a dictatorship tipping over. It is without terrorist attacks. If any one of those happened tomorrow, if we have a storm in the Gulf, I had two energy experts tell me this morning, I said, ``What will oil be?'' They said, ``$120 a barrel if a major storm hits the Gulf that disrupts our refineries and disrupts our oil supply.'' Folks, we are already in trouble. We better pray that we don't have a storm. We better pray that dictatorships stay stable. I don't know about you, but I am not comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with this process we are in. It also locks up 10 billion barrels of oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Why? Many of those oil reserves up there are tundra. They are frozen ground. There is little life. But we are saying we are not going to produce it. They want to produce it. The Alaskans beg to produce it. But Congress says ``no.'' Legal offshore contracts are being thwarted. We have legislation moving because of contracts that had royalty incentives in them that they think are too low. Now, whether they are or not, Congress doesn't have the right to change legal contracts. The Clinton administration signed them. They are law. They are a contract. But that is part of our legislation. This one is really crazy. There are a lot of Members of Congress that hate the oil companies. I won't say that I am in love with them. But a $15 billion tax increase on the American oil and gas industry. When we tax the production of energy on our shores, that means we are less competitive and we are more likely to buy energy offshore. And we will get to that chart in a minute. We are tremendously dependent on foreign energy. For us to tax, what they are doing was when we had the corporate tax cut for employers to grow in this country, we had a 4 percent cut. They are taking that away. The manufacturer right down the street will pay 4 percent less tax than the guy who produces energy right up the street. I don't think that makes sense, because when you increase the taxation on energy, the users pay it. The gasoline price goes up. The fuel oil price goes up. The natural gas price goes up. We are taxing ourselves. And it seems to me $90 oil is enough. Why do we want to tax it? While they are trying to get at big oil, I have American Refinery, a little 10,000-barrel refinery in Bradford. It used to be Kendall Refining. They now pay the higher priced taxes. That was a company that we put together a few years ago. The State government helped them. When Kendall left us and we had a refinery and the Kendall brand got sold off to another company, and American Refinery, a smaller company came in and bought it, I used to say it was put together with chewing gum and rubber bands. But it worked. We now have 400, 500 employees there. They are a growing company. They have developed another brand. They are entrepreneurs. They are doing good. And we are going to make them pay higher taxes. United Refinery in Warren, not big oil. But they provided the gasoline for most of New York State and Pennsylvania. They are going to pay 4 percent more now in income taxes. And who pays it? We do by raising the cost of energy. Now this one down here I find frightening. There is nothing in the Democrats' bill about coal to liquid or coal to gas. It would seem like when we had 70 and $80 oil, that was enough incentive that we ought to start figuring out how we make liquid energy out of coal. Not burn it; turn it into gas. There are processes to do that. In World War II, Germany fought us because we barricaded them. We didn't allow them to have oil shipments. They had to make their own energy. The Germans are pretty smart people. They figured out how to make it out of coal, the Fischer-Tropsch method and several other methods. Penn State has just developed a process to make jet fuel out of coal. Instead of us incentivizing and promoting energy from coal and liquids and gas so we learn how to do it so we get it streamlined, so we make it compete with oil, so we would be less dependent on 90 or $100 oil. No, we are not going to do that because coal has CO2. We can't do anything that puts carbon in the air. I said to some I was arguing with recently, well, let's start eight plants, and we will give them a dual role. We will say, ``We want you to streamline the Fischer-Tropsch process and you streamline this process, and let's get it going. Your secondary mission will be to sequester the carbon and figure out how to deal with it. Let's practice. Let's get to work at it.'' No, we can't do that. Coal is out. I see coal electric plants all over this country being turned down for permits. That is going to have a huge impact on electric prices because nuclear and coal are the cheapest electric prices we have. Coal to liquid should be something, and coal to gas should be things that we are incentivizing. Now, the interesting one down here at the bottom, raises false expectations by mandating unrealistic 15 percent RPS. Now, what is RPS? It is renewable portfolio. It says that companies making electricity in America have to use 15 percent, they have to produce 15 percent of it from renewables. I am for that. But when you mandate it by law, and it is not achievable, what happens? They are going to pay penalties. Who is going to pay the penalties? The electric users. Or they are going to cheat. Currently we make 3 percent of our electricity from renewables, 3 percent. And we are going to mandate 15 percent. Now, Pennsylvania has a mandate. But they were smart. They have waste coal. They use the cleanest process they know. But that is being included in their standards, renewable standards, using the waste coal where we clean up the environment when we get rid of that runoff from the coal piles. So Pennsylvania was smart. They are using it. Now, some States will be able to do it more so than others. But some States, if you have a lot of wind farms, the only States that come to mind with real sizable wind farms that produce any amount of wind energy is north Texas and North Dakota. They will be able to do some wind. Solar is still on the margins everywhere. We are hoping and praying solar becomes a bigger factor. But we are going to say that we have to produce 15 percent of electricity from renewables. I wish that was simple. But it is not. Let's look for a moment at where our energy use is. Currently, 40 percent of our energy is petroleum. And 66 percent of that comes from foreign countries. A lot of them unstable dictatorships. Natural gas is now 23 percent and fast growing. Coal is 23 percent, and I say will soon be shrinking because Federal policies, Federal regulators and EPA are making it very difficult to permit a new coal plant. There are many Members of Congress who don't want new coal plants, even though they are using the newest, cleanest methods. Nuclear is at 8 percent and shrinking because the amount of electricity is growing, but nuclear has been studied. Now, there are 35 plants starting the process of permitting. The 2005 act speeded up the process. It used to take 10 years to get a permit. They have told them they have to do that in 4 years, then it takes another 4 to 5 years to build the plant. For a new nuclear plant to begin producing electricity, you're probably going to be looking at a minimum of 10 years. There's one, I think, that has a complete application in; the rest are in the process. Now there are 35 that are in the process, and we need them all permitted by 2030 and built and producing electricity to keep nuclear at 8 percent of our grid, just to keep status quo. That means we are going to have to have more of something else. And if we don't meet that goal, we are going to have to have more of something else to replace nuclear. Hydroelectric is 2.7 percent of our overall energy power. Nuclear is actually 20 percent of the grid, but 8 percent of overall. Hydroelectric is 2.7 percent. Again, a figure that is dropping because as energy use rises and it remains static, and there are many Members of Congress who want most of our dams in place torn down. When they tear a dam out, we lose hydroelectric power because they don't believe we should have ever built dams. Now, the only energy field portfolio that is showing pretty steady growth is biomass. That surprises a lot of people. That is wood waste. This year more and more Americans will heat their homes with pellet stoves. Pellet stoves are saw dust, wood waste pressed into a pellet, put in a nice heating unit in your home. They can be put in fireplaces. More and more Americans, many use wood stoves, but they are now using pellet stoves. People who can't cut wood or don't have access to wood, and that is biomass, wood waste. There are many companies in the wooded areas where there's a timber industry that heats their factories with wood waste because they have it. They take the old trash wood and they grind it up and they burn it. We have dry kilns in the timber industry. We used to run them all with natural gas. Now they can't afford to. They are putting in wood waste boilers. In fact, I had a friend a couple of years ago when I saw gas prices rising, I said to him, How do you dry your wood? I knew they had two plants. They said, Well, we use natural gas. I said, Had you ever thought of putting wood waste? He said, No, why would we do that? I said, Well, natural gas is going to get pretty expensive. Well, they had a little meeting about it and decided not to do it. A couple of months later they called me and said, How did you know gas prices were going up? I said, Well, I just knew it. They said, We got our new contract and our prices quadrupled and we can't afford to dry wood with gas anymore. But it took them a year to buy the equipment to put in a biomass burner. There are many coal power plants who are topping off their load with wood waste so they get under the EPA standards, because wood burns a lot cleaner than many fuels. So the new hope for biomass is cellulosic ethanol. Now, that is still in the test tube. This administration is pushing six new plants. Even though it's still in the test tube, there are those who think they are close to the process. Now, geothermal is one that we have high hopes for. That is where you use groundwater temperature. You either pump water out of an aquifer and put it back after you take heat out of it, or take coal out of it; or you put in a big loop system and fill it with water and use the ground to cool and warm the water after you have used it. Now, wind and solar are the ones we have tremendous hope for. Windmills are being talked about everywhere. Solar. What a lot of Americans don't realize is they are not ready to take over. We have a growth curve in the use of energy. These renewables at the bottom people think can supply our future needs, and we don't need to drill and we don't need to use gas and we don't need to use coal. And most of them don't want nuclear either. This is what we have to use. I wish it was growing at the rate that it would fill the bill. I wish it was ready to take over. It's not. We are incentivizing, we are supporting, we are subsidizing; but it has to become where it will pay for itself somewhere down the road. Though it's growing, when you multiply wind by two, it takes years to double it; solar by two, it's still a very small part. Let's just talk about where we get our oil, once again. We are actually higher than 60. We are up here at 66, because this is a 2- year-old chart. We are up here at 66. We are increasing dependence on foreign oil 2 percent a year. Now, if we pass the Democrat plan, I predict our only option, if we pass this plan and take gas off the table and oil off the table, we will increase 3 percent a year in the future. Foreign dependence, unstable dictatorships: 90 percent of the world's oil is owned, produced and marketed by a government-owned oil company, a dictator. Our best friend ought to be Canada. We buy more oil from Canada than anybody, and we buy most of the 17 percent of our natural gas. We import I think about 15 percent of it comes from Canada. So we should be saying: Thank you, Canada. But when it comes to oil dependence, and I hear people on the House floor talk all the time oil independence, we have got to be independent, there is no way in the next decade America could even conceive of being oil independent. Anybody who says that doesn't know the numbers, doesn't know the facts. At the same time, they say you can't drill out here and drill off the coast and you can't drill in the Midwest and Alaska, but we want to be energy independent, wind, solar and geothermal. I wish they were right, but they are not. These are just the facts, folk. These aren't opinions; these are just the facts. Here's the supply of natural gas. Natural gas is becoming the choice fuel because we use it to make ethanol, we use it to make fertilizer to grow the corn to make ethanol, we use it to make hydrogen, we use it to make most of our products. I will show you that chart in a minute. Natural gas is the one that is going to have tremendous pressure upon it. It's the one that heats 58 percent of our homes. It's the fuel we ought to be the most concerned about. Why? It's not as bad price-wise today as oil. But when oil is $90 a barrel, the whole world pays that, and so all our competitors that we compete with in the global marketplace pay that. But we have one of the highest prices for natural gas of anyplace in the world. On this chart, there is $1.85, $4.90, $1.65, and $7.20 is about our price. Russia, $1.50. But Trinidad is the one I am worried about. They are building every kind of manufacturing plant known to man in Trinidad. That is a very short shipping distance from the United States. If we think China is tough competition, wait until Trinidad starts making our bricks and our glass and our bulk commodities, because their natural gas prices are a fraction. You know, I want the American working people to have a job. When we look at the next chart, we will see why natural gas is the one we should be most concerned about. Most people don't realize that natural gas is the feedstock for all these products. I don't mean that it is just the energy we use to make them. It is part of the ingredient. I mentioned fertilizer a little bit ago. The fertilizer we grow corn with, one part of it is 70 percent natural gas. There is another one, I can't remember the name, some sort of ammonia, it is 90 percent natural gas. Natural gas is what we make it out of. So farmers are paying huge prices for energy, and in the last 2 years, 50 percent of our fertilizer business has gone offshore, and I find that very troubling. Whether it is household products, skin softeners are a derivative of natural gas, shampoos, pipe, clothing, plastic products, plastic bottles. All these products. Tires have natural gas to make them and natural gas as an ingredient. It is the mother's milk of manufacturing in the world, and we are paying the highest prices for it of anybody in the world, and that puts American manufacturers and processors at a disadvantage. When oil is $90, the whole world pays, unless they have their own. If they are buying oil, they pay it. But natural gas, there is not a world marketplace because you can't just ship it around. We buy about 2 percent of our natural gas, liquefied natural gas, called LNG, that comes in large tankers. Unfortunately, it comes from the same parts of the world where we buy our oil: foreign, unstable dictatorships. Folks, energy for America, affordable energy for America should be the number one issue in this Congress. It should be the number one issue on the White House's agenda. It should be the number one issue in the Senate's agenda. Affordable energy for America. Why should it be in crisis mode? Any of the things we have talked about, whether we are opening up the Continental Shelf, whether we are opening up land in the Midwest, wherever we are going to produce energy, whether we are going to do coal to liquids, whether we are going to do nuclear, all of those initiatives take 8 to 10 years before we have the energy to run America. The longer we wait, the more trouble we are going to be in, because what is going to happen, it is my opinion, that Congress thinks little about America as a country that has to learn how to compete in the new global economy. The debate on being in the global economy is over. We are a global economy. We trade with everybody. We have to compete. There are developing countries everywhere, and we have to sharpen our tools, we have to sharpen our competitiveness, we have to help our manufacturers stay alive in this country. The first thing we ought to do is give them decent energy prices, less litigation, better tax laws. You tax jobs because that is what you tax when you tax business. A lot of people say, we are just taxing business. Well, businesses are jobs. I was talking to a gentleman, a Member of the House the other day, I was talking about a cost to business we were debating about, and he said, they have got lots of money; they can pay for that. I said, sir, they have choices. Do they grow this plant here, or do they grow this plant over here where costs are less? They are going to grow that plant and their production where costs are less. It is a competitive world. They have to compete with competitors. And Congress needs to make priority number one helping American job makers, help American businesses compete. And that means affordable energy, legal reforms, tax cuts for business, regulatory reform to be fair to business, help our companies make sure they have the skilled workers they need with technology education, which we are terrible at in this country. We are a failure. We are one of the worst, teaching the working people the new skills they need. It used to be 50 percent of Americans had to show up at a plant and within 6 weeks they knew their job and had a good job for the rest of their life. Not true today. Today you need to have skills, a set of skills that are certified with some sort of a 1-year or 2-year certificate that says, yes, he or she has this ability and she can provide this company with the skills they need to compete in the global marketplace. America is being challenged, my friends. We are being challenged by fast-growing nations who have plans on action. On the energy side, China is opening a coal plant every 5 days. They are opening a new nuclear plant every month. They are building the biggest hydro-dams in the world. They are locking up oil and gas supplies all around the world. And we sit here and do not have a plan of action. The 2005 energy bill had a lot of good pieces in it, and I want to congratulate all of those that created it and got it passed. It took like 4 years to pass it because this Congress didn't want to deal with energy. But, folks, it is not enough. It was just the starter. It was just the primer. We are now challenged with a world shortage of energy. America must figure out how to have their own. Now, I agree, we have to conserve more. We have to use it more wisely. We have to teach Americans how to be careful and not waste energy. And we need to help small businesses be energy efficient, like big businesses. Big businesses are cutting their energy bills. I have been told by many of them, they say we cut our energy bills 20 percent the last 4 years. But you know what? Energy costs us more, because energy prices are going up faster now. And they were discouraged because they had worked so hard. Big business has the ability to figure out the cheapest way to do it, but many Americans don't understand and we need as a government to provide the technology and the education so that people know how to use energy wisely and purchase energy-efficient appliances and energy-efficient cars. We need to conserve. But folks, we also need to have affordable energy to run this country. Folks, America is at the crossroads. Today it is $90 oil. Two weeks ago I was here, it was $80 oil. I didn't expect this. I predicted that energy prices would rise steadily this fall. I didn't think they would spike. We haven't had a storm in the Gulf which we were afraid of, we haven't had a country topple, which can cause 2 or 3 million barrels a day to come out of the system. We haven't had a terrorist attack which interrupted oil supply. But in spite of that, we have fast-rising oil prices. If we couple that with any of the three I just mentioned, we have $100-$120 oil. I can guarantee you this country cannot afford $100 a barrel for oil and stay competitive and have a thriving economic base. We will go into the tank. We will be in a recession, and this Congress needs to take this issue seriously. You know what bothers me in the Presidential debate, and I listened to two Presidential debates. The press asks the questions, and so I blame the press. The press doesn't take this issue seriously. The press doesn't understand this issue very well. If they did, they would be asking every Presidential candidate in every forum: What is your energy policy for affordable, available energy for America? I haven't committed to a Presidential candidate yet because I don't see a candidate that has a good, well thought-out energy policy for America. That will be the issue the next President has to deal with because the Congress in the last decade, we have not adequately dealt with energy's availability and affordability for America. Without a crisis, without a storm in the Gulf, we have $90 a barrel oil, and it hit $92 today. I am going to conclude my comments this evening with America needs a bona fide energy plan. We need to open up the Outer Continental Shelf where we are energy rich. My legislation opens it up for natural gas, and I hope we can get it considered. I will conclude with that chart. Our bill says that the first 25 miles remain locked up, and you can only see for 11 to 12 miles, so nobody will even see it. It will not hurt the shoreline. It won't be unsightly. The second 25 miles are options of the State. If they want to open it, they can. The second 50 miles are open automatically for natural gas, but the States still have the right to close it if they choose to. By passing a law with the Governor's signature, they can keep it closed for the first 100 miles. The second 100 miles it is open. That is a pretty soft bill. That is not what I would like to do, but that is what I hope to coax this Congress into doing so we do something for natural gas. We will give $150 billion in royalties to the States, $100 billion for the treasury, $32 billion for renewable energy. That's real money to help renewables; not promises, real money; $32 billion for carbon capture sequestration research, and that can come from the payments of royalties; $20 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, exactly what they have been needing; $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes restoration, exactly what they have been needing; $12 billion for the Everglades; $12 billion for the Colorado River basin; $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay restoration; and $10 billion to help the poorest of Americans winterize their homes and pay their heating bills in the wintertime. Folks, the NEED Act is the act Congress needs to pass. We have 160- some cosponsors. It is bipartisan. The gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) is my co-partner on this bill. It is the bill that America needs to have in its energy package, but neither the House nor Senate are talking about it. On top of natural gas and offshore, we need to have a plan for nuclear, the expansion of nuclear in America. We need to have a plan where we are moving forward with coal to liquids and coal to gas. We need to have a plan where we push wind and solar and all renewables. And yes, we should look at many dams we have that are not harnessed, harnessing them for hydro. There are many dams in America that could be harnessed for hydro. And yes, we need to do ethanol and biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol. Landfill gas should never be flared. It should all be plugged into the energy pipeline. We need to get serious about not wasting energy in America, conserving energy in America, and producing energy for Americans that is affordable and available so this winter they can afford to heat their homes, they can afford to run their businesses, and the jobs will not be pushed offshore. High energy prices have pushed more jobs offshore than any other fact that this Congress talks about. And energy has the potential of pushing almost every manufacturing and processing job that is left in America offshore if we don't deal with the energy issue. Energy is a crisis for the future economic viability of America. I challenge this Congress, both bodies and the White House, to get serious about it. Affordable, available energy for America, we could do no more. That's the least we can do to make sure Americans have the quality of life that they should have, they have a right to, and they deserve.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Yes. Natural gas, I call it America's clean, green energy, no NOX, no SOX, a third of the CO2. It's almost the perfect fuel. Now, a lot of people don't realize what all we do with natural gas, but natural gas is the basic ingredient of many of our products, polymers, plastics, petrochemical. Everything we manufacture has some form of natural gas in it or we have used natural gas to do it. Natural gas is America's hope for the future. I call it the bridge fuel. Now, just a few years ago, in fact, 6 years ago, we had $2 natural gas, and we had $16 oil. Just 6 years later we now have $7 natural gas, but we haven't had a storm in the gulf yet, we haven't started our winter heating yet. We know those prices will skyrocket much higher. Well, it amazes me. I am going to speak a little bit about oil. $87.50 was the price of oil, that it just closed at. Not a crisis in this Congress. I haven't heard any rustling of activity. We have a Senate bill and a House bill not conferenced on yet. I haven't seen where the House and the Senate have agreed to have their conference committee and move forward with their bill. Now, maybe it's a good thing they don't, because let's just look at it. With the natural gas prices we have today, highest in the world, here is what their bill does. Their bill locks up 9 trillion feet of natural gas in the Roan Plateau. The Roan Plateau is a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was once set aside as the Naval Oil Shale Reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. That means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the OCS bill that passed last Congress in the gulf, will be put off-limits. The Roan Plateau is ready to go. It has already gone through NEPA. It's ready for lease sale. This provision was not in the original Resources Committee bill and was added without any hearings in the 11th hour. That's the kind of legislation this Congress is putting forth to cause natural gas prices to continue to increase, locks up 18 percent more by policy changes. I had some amendments in the energy bill in 2005. This guts the categoric exclusions if we stop allowing redundant NEPAs to stop the process. We had leases in the West where they had leased the land for oil and gas production, and 5, 6 and 7 years later, they are doing redundant NEPAs. They had to do a NEPA for the whole layout. Then they had to do a NEPA for the road construction. Then they had to do a NEPA for every location. A NEPA study takes about a year. There is no reason that an overall NEPA on the project couldn't cover all those aspects in a year's time and make sure we do it right. No, we are going to take away that, and that will lock up more natural gas. Of course, we just heard from our friend about the 2 trillion barrels of oil from western oil shale. Well, it's similar to tar sands in Canada. Everybody thought that wasn't a good thing. Well, they are now producing 1.5 million barrels a day. Their goal is 4 million a day. They are increasing every month, because they figured out how to release the tar sand oil, and we need to be working at releasing the oil shale oil because we have trillions of barrels there. Should we have policy? Should we have legislation going that's going to take oil and gas? Then we go on down here a little further, we are going to have a $15 billion tax increase on the production of energy and the processing of it. Does that make sense? That means it is going to cost American taxpayers $15 billion more for energy somewhere down the road. Should we be taxing the production of oil and gas? I don't think so. There is nothing in the bills before us about coal-to-liquids. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. It's a tragedy in America that we are not moving forward with coal-to-liquid and coal-to-gas, because, you know, today we are 66 percent dependent on foreign oil, and we are growing 2 percent a year, and we have $87.50, today's closing price. We hit $90 a few days ago. And just 6 years ago, it was $16. How much can the American economy absorb without a recession? I was told by someone from the Department of State that they thought $75 oil for any length of time would put America in a recession. It didn't. What some figure is a figure that the American economy can no longer absorb. Now we are approaching the heating season. Sixty-two percent of Americans heat their homes with natural gas. What do we have? We have it locked up. These are all areas that are locked up. Clean, green natural gas. A natural gas well has never contaminated a beach. It has never really done major environmental harm. But, no, America has a policy that we are not going to use the cleanest, greenest fossil fuel there is, natural gas. We're just not going to produce it. I don't understand that, but that's where we are, folks. High gas and high oil prices are because this Congress, not just this current Congress, but historically, 26 years ago Presidents and Congress locked up the outer continental shelf. We are the only country in the world not to produce it, the only country in the world not to produce. This is the greatest energy reserves we have. Eleven miles offshore you don't even know they are there. You don't see it. I have legislation that says the first 25 miles will not even be open for drilling. The second 25 miles would be controlled by the State. The second 50 miles would be open, but States would still have the right to pass a bill to not produce if they don't want to. That gives States rights. Then the second 100 miles would be open. Folks, when we make these decisions to open these up, when we make the decisions to make any major coal-to-liquid, coal-to-gas, when we make decisions to reopen nuclear and get it moving again, you are talking 8 to 10 years before you have any energy. America is in a crisis today. I think $87.50 oil is a crisis. We have $7 gas, and we know it's going to spike as soon as we start using our winter supply. When American homeowners find out the price of home heating oil, they are going to be pretty angry at Congress, and they ought to be. Now, the gas prices that are out today, I heard the gentleman say $3.09. In my State it's $2.89. But gasoline prices have not caught up with $80 oil. $80 oil means $3.29, $3.39 gasoline. There is still a glut of gasoline in the marketplace. This spring we had $3 something gasoline with $60 oil because there was a shortage of gasoline in the world. We buy 20 percent of our gasoline now from Europe. We don't produce enough in this country. Europe didn't have any to sell us because they were using more than normal. There was a world shortage and so our price was much higher than it ought to have been, because it's a separate marketplace. Now, just wait till gasoline catches up, the summer fuel burns off. Our refineries are now making home heating oil, and those on home heating oil are going to pay a tremendous price because there is none of that in the system. Those heating with propane are going to pay a much higher price. Those heating with natural gas are going to pay 10 to 15 percent more. Home heating this winter is going to be very expensive. Do you know who even feels the pain worse, small businesses who use a lot of energy. There are no programs to help them. There is no LIHEAP funding to help them. Small businesses in America are going to struggle to make a profit because of energy prices. And natural gas, being one of the highest prices in the world, and we have lots of countries with very cheap natural gas, we're going to continue to export petrochemical jobs, polymer and plastic jobs, fertilizer. You know, here we're using ethanol now, it's big. We have to grow a lot of corn to make ethanol. We have to use a lot of fertilizer. Seventy percent of the cost of fertilizer is natural gas. If we make a hydrogen car, it's going to use natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock for most of our manufacturing. It's what we heat our homes with. We need energy policy here in Congress. We don't want a bill that takes energy away from Americans. This bill takes energy away from Americans. This bill makes energy more expensive. The bill before us does nothing to produce energy and to bring down gasoline prices, to bring down home heating prices and to keep American jobs here. And there's no reason that America cannot be in charge of its future destiny with natural gas. We can't control the oil market. We can control our natural gas market. We can be self-dependent. We now import 17 percent of our natural gas. We wouldn't have to import any of it. America is rich in natural gas, the clean, green fuel. And I impose this Congress, natural gas could actually fuel a third of the auto fleet. It would save a lot more than CAFE standards. And I'm for better CAFE standards. But it would immediately take all construction vehicles, school buses, taxicabs could all be on natural gas. That's a known technology. It's just a conversion. Folks, clean natural gas is what America needs to be about as we build our renewable future. All the renewables are built off of natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock. Folks, we need clean, natural gas so Americans can afford to heat their homes and can afford to drive their cars.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to join you this evening and talk about an issue that I think is vital to America's future. We're in the beautiful time of year. My favorite time of year is the fall season, and it's arrived. We have now a week of fall behind us. The cool days and cold nights will soon be here all so quickly, and the home heating season will begin where Americans will struggle this year to keep their homes warm, and American factories and businesses and manufacturers will struggle to pay their very high energy bills to continue to compete in a global economy, manufacturing, processing and distributing their goods. Home heating oil prices this year will be record highs with the $80 oil that's upon us and that has been with us for more than a week now. Home heating oil prices will have the largest increase, and those who heat with home heating oil will be under severe pressure to be warm affordably. Propane and natural gas prices are scheduled to go up again this year, propane a little more than natural gas, but both of them, and that's barring no storms in the gulf. We've been very fortunate in the country. For a year and a half now, we have not had a major storm in the gulf, and why that's a problem is 40 percent of America's energy comes from the gulf. And when we have a major storm there like Katrina and Rita in the same year, there's huge disruptions in the ability to produce both gas and oil and refine it and process it and ship it around this country, and it will help prices to raise drastically. I guess the question I ask tonight is, what is Congress doing? Is it a discussion? I don't know about you. I've listened to the last two Presidential debates, one Republican, one Democrat, and the press asks the question, but not one question while I was listening was asked about energy. I find that amazing because here we are with $80 oil. Is it a new floor? My chart, which goes through 2006, has this up as high $60, but we're clear up here in the $80s. Most people were very concerned that $60 and $70 oil would put us into recession, but when you look at the constant increase in the last 5, 6 years of oil prices just skyrocketing and no stopping, and the scary part on oil is that historically in the world marketplace we had slush. I mean, we had extra oil. There were 10, 12, 15 million barrels of oil that were available to be produced daily if we needed them. I'm told today that we're lucky between 1 million and 2 million barrels a day is available if we have a crisis. So, if we would have a storm in the gulf that could take a few million barrels off the market and you had one of our Third World countries that ship a lot of oil have a governmental problem or a terroristic attack one of their sending stations or their pipeline systems, then we could lose 4, 5, 6 million barrels of oil a day. You would see prices at $100 very quickly. $100 oil will have a severe crisis in this country. We now have $7.50 gas. It's going up weekly now. The season is here. We're through the soft season, and much of the gas in the ground for this year's storage was put in at much higher prices than that. Then you have the storage costs and the distribution costs, and we're talking about a sizeable increase in natural gas prices this year. As I was showing you the oil chart, oil prices continue to spike, and yet we hear nothing from Congress. We don't hear questions and much discussion in the Presidential campaigns, and I find that confounding because energy, reasonable, affordable energy, is why America is what it is today. Natural gas prices, you know for a long time natural gas prices were around $2 or less, and then we had spikes, and then we came back down. And now we are on the same path as oil. We're right up here about here now, $7.50. That's out-of-the-ground price. That's not the price you and I pay at home or the companies pay. Pipeline charges, storage charges, distribution costs, I mean it's clear up in here, $12, $13 gas when it gets to us as a consumer. But the price out of the ground, this is the price out of the ground that we start at. We're up here. We will be soon approaching $8, and that will continue to rise as heating season comes and industry continues to use. Well, why is this? Why is America having this constant skyrocketing prices in energy? Well, here's one of the reasons. About 26 years ago, the President of the United States and two Presidents since and Congress both put moratoriums on producing offshore. That's called our Outer Continental Shelf. The States control the first three miles, and then the United States Government controls the next 197 miles to 200. Now, the only place we've historically produced is right here. 40 percent of our energy has come from this little area, and last year we opened another small area down here that will be helpful, but will certainly not solve our problem. So America is the only country in the world that has locked up its best oil and gas reserves that cannot be produced. Countries like Canada don't do that. Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, all environmentally sensitive countries, they all produce out here. Everybody's given kudos to South America, to Brazil for being one of the first countries that is now energy independent, and everybody thinks it's their ethanol. Ethanol was a part of it, but they opened up their Outer Continental Shelf. They produce out here. There's tremendous gas reserves around Florida. There's tremendous gas reserves up and down the coast and oil reserves. Now, there are those who are afraid. The last oil spill we had offshore was at Santa Barbara in 1969. That's a long time ago, and we've never had a natural gas spill and we never will because natural gas escapes into the air. Now, we could also put some huge blocks in here of where we, the government, have locked up some of our best reserves in the West, and for some reason, we, being one of the largest users of energy in the world, have decided that we're not going to produce it. So we're very much the reason, because of those charts that I showed you previously are just going almost straight up. Now, we do have energy bills in the House and the Senate, and they will be considered at some point in time. They're not scheduled yet. They were supposed to be on the floor now, but they've not been scheduled yet but we think they will be. The only problem is, as you see at the top of my chart, we call them the No Energy Bill because they don't produce energy. They lock up 9 trillion cubic feet of America's natural gas. It cuts off production from the Rome plateau, a huge clean natural gas field in Colorado that was once set aside as the naval oil shale reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the OCS bill passed last Congress in the gulf, the Rome plateau has already gone through NEPA, that's all the environmental assessments, and is ready to lease. This position was not in the original Resources Committee bill and was added without any public hearings or very much debate on the House floor. It also locks up 18 percent of Federal onshore production because it requires redundant environmental studies. I authored an amendment in the 2005 energy bill that was very helpful. Those who were opposed to us producing energy in America, and there's lots of those, all the environmental groups that had decided that we shouldn't produce fossil fuels, that they're just not a part of our future, even though later I'll show you they almost have to be, this bill that we passed took away the redundant use of NEPA. NEPA's an environmental assessment that has to be done before we do much of anything. What they did was this is akin to doing an environmental review for a parking lot with one car and then requiring a second environmental review for a second car in the lot. It makes companies who have leased land do an environmental assessment for the overall outlay or overlay of a proposal to where they're going to drill and produce. Then it does another environmental assessment for the roads they're going to build. Then it does another environmental assessment for every well they drill. These are many, many months long, sometimes yearlong proposals that have to be developed on how the environment's going to do. So the use of redundant NEPAs was a way of just stalling and stopping production, and we were pleased when we got that legislation passed in 2005, because in the West there were people who had leased land for 6 and 7 years and never been able to produce it. So we were able to help them. This bill locks up 2 trillion barrels of American oil from the Western oil shale. The bill stops the leasing program for oil shale reserves on Federal land that hold enough oil supply for the United States for 228 years. This is more oil than the entire world has used since oil was discovered at Drake Well in my home district nearly 150 years ago and over twice as much oil as the entire OPEC cartel holds. Meanwhile, China's developing their shale oil. Now we're in the process of developing how to get that oil released. It's like similar to Canada's tar sand oil. They've worked at that for a decade or more, and today they're producing 1.3 million barrels of oil just above the American border. A lot of that oil is coming down here to be refined, thank the good Lord and thank Canada. But they are at 1.3 million barrels, and they hope to be at 3 to 3.5 million barrels at some point in time, but they have developed the ability to release that oil from the tar sands. It has been known to be there, and that is very similar to our shale oil. Are we learning how to do it? Are we continuing to start and get some pilot projects going? No. The legislation before us will take it off the charts. Well, we go on down here, it locks up 10 billion barrels of oil from the National Petroleum Reserve. Again, that's in Alaska. This bill will make it much harder to produce energy from Alaska's national oil reserve that was set aside in 1923 for energy for this country. It has only recently begun to be explored starting with leases issued by the Clinton administration. Under current law, the Department of Interior can extend the time of a lessee who might have begun to produce energy without fear of losing his lease. Producing oil offshore is a complicated, expensive process. Sometimes if they have a lease of a certain period of time and they don't get their leasing done as quickly as they would like to, maybe for many reasons, caused by government, then they want to take away the right to renew that lease and extend it. Again, it would take that amount of oil, 10 million barrels, away from the marketplace. Then we go down to breaking legitimate offshore energy contracts. We have contracts that were given for the deep water oil. We have companies that have spent $2 billion producing energy out in the deep water, I mean, way out there several, many miles deep, very expensive, very costly, and they have not yet made a profit. But there are those who think they should be paying royalty, even though they are not making a profit, and want to, with legislation in those contracts, or prevent them from having contracts again. That's not exactly how the American economic system works, but there are many here in Congress who want to confiscate those leases, even though they were legitimately given by the Clinton administration. It also inflicts a $15 million tax increase on American oil and gas companies. Why would we do that? Well, there are those here who hate oil companies. A few years ago, Congress lowered the corporate tax rate for all manufacturers and processors, and that included oil producers and manufacturers. This no energy bill singles out the oil and gas industry, hiking their tax rate back up to 35 from 32 percent. So my refinery in Bradford, Pennsylvania in my district and my refinery in Warren, Pennsylvania, United in Warren, Pennsylvania, will pay 3 percent more corporate taxes than all the manufacturers and processors around them. Will that help us to have more energy in America? No. Will it make it more expensive to produce American energy? Yes. Does it make sense in the big, long-term of energy production for America? Of course it doesn't. Now, the next one down here, all the legislation ignores alternative energy like coal-to-liquids. It seems like coal has been shut out by many. Coal cannot be a part of our future, according to many, but we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. The future of coal is not just using it to make electricity by burning it, but making liquids from it. During World War II, Germany was blockaded. They didn't have oil, so they made oil out of coal, and the Fischer-Tropsch method was one of them. There are several others now, but we need to, in this country, in my opinion, we need to be force-feeding some coal plants that are making liquid fuels, diesel and gasoline and jet fuel, out of coal. We also need to be making natural gas out of coal. We need to have those plants online, refining that process so it can be cost-effective, because these plants cost from $2- to $3 billion apiece for just a medium-sized plant, a very heavy capital investment. They need some incentives, some loan guarantees, some help, to get these plants up and running to make sure that that's an alternative. Why do we want to do that? We need to have as much energy available to Americans as we can get, all kinds of energy. We will get into that in a moment. The more alternatives we have and the better supply we have, the more affordable the price will be. Today, those first charts I showed you with the prices skyrocketing, it's because we have a shortage of almost every kind of energy. So we believe that it's very important that we have coal-to-liquid. Also, on the last one here, we raise false expectations by mandating that we have 15 percent renewables used, that's called the renewable standard, to make electricity. Now, I wish we could make 15 percent of our electricity from renewables. We are currently, on an average, nationally, at 3. Some States and some plants are doing better than that, but they have resources and the ability in their area to do that. Not every part of the country can do wind and can do solar. The sun doesn't shine often enough or the wind doesn't below regularly enough. Those are very specific areas where you can do that. And other places just don't have the renewable fuels that could be used. We think the Federal standard of 15 percent will force companies into making electricity in very expensive ways and will skyrocket electric prices, especially in areas where you just don't have access to renewables. We believe the 2007 energy bills that are currently in the Senate and the House are no energy bills. Now, there are some good conservation measures in there. There are some things in there that will stimulate renewables. But there is no energy there. It limits gas, it takes away oil, it has nothing for coal, and it makes it much more difficult to produce in existing fields. Now, let's look at where we are at in the country today. Energy in America, these are 2005 charts, we still have them from the Energy Department but they haven't changed very much in the last year and a half. Forty percent of our energy is petroleum. That's oil. Twenty- three percent is natural gas. Twenty-three percent is coal. Now, this has been a growing figure, because 12 years ago, we took the lid off and we allowed an unlimited amount of natural gas to be used to make electricity. We use to limit that, that it could only be used for peak power, and so a very small amount was used. But now a lot of natural gas is used for electricity. In fact, about 20 percent of our electric comes from natural gas. Nuclear has remained 8. The only reason it has remained 8 as electric use has went up is because we've squeezed more production out of our old plants than they were designed for. We have been upgrading them and working them overtime. These plants are producing more electricity, but the bad news is that we need 35 new plants online by 2020 to stay at 8 percent. That's going to be a big job for America. So that means if we don't do that, we are going to have to substitute something else for the nuclear that's not going to grow maybe that fast. We have 35 companies with permits now, it takes 4 years to design them, 4 years to build them and with delays, that's at least a decade. So if we don't have those online by 2020, then we will be looking at other ways to make more electricity that we are not making out of nuclear. Then we have hydroelectric. There is no growth here. This is a shrinking figure because actually we have the environmental groups that want to tear out the dams we have. They want nothing to do with damming up a waterway and using that to make electricity, so that's a figure that will continue to decline. Now, biomass is the one that has been growing. That's wood waste. It's being used to make pellets to heat our homes. We have pellet stoves and pellet furnaces. That's the new fuel, so that's using waste wood, sawdust and trimmings that are ground up and made into pellets. Now, biomass is also being used as topping the load on electric plants that are using coal. Because to meet air quality standards, if they use 80 percent coal and 20 percent wood waste, they can sometimes meet the air standards, depending on the coal they are burning that day. So wood waste is an add-on. Wood waste is going to be used down the road making ethanol, we believe. But biomass is the one that's growing. We also, in the wooded areas, like my district is a big timber district, we're using wood waste to heat all of our dry kilns now that we use to dry our wood. We use to use natural gas and fuel oil for that. I shouldn't say all, but many. Because of the prices of natural gas and fuel oil, you can't hardly afford to use it anymore for that purpose. Many of the small factories where they process wood, they use the waste to heat the factory. So biomass is sort of finding its own market, especially in the areas where you have strong supplies of it. Now, geothermal is a very good form of energy, but it's a costly investment. It's where you either drill into the water table, and then when you pump that up into your system, you take heat out of it in the wintertime, or you take coolness out of it in the summertime and send it back cooler or hotter. Another way to do it is to put a big loop pipe system in your property. Then you get it below the frost line, where it stays at 54 degrees all the time, and you take heat out of it in the wintertime, and you take coolness out of it in the summertime. You will use a fair amount of electricity with that because there are a lot of pumps, but this has been a pretty affordable type of energy, and it's renewable. You use some amount of electricity, but not as much as you would in direct electric heat. Now, wind and solar are the ones that we are putting an awful lot of pressure on, and everybody is talking about. Wind also has its opponents. We had a bill proposed this year by the Resources Committee that actually stated that if you found a dead bird or bat at the foot of a windmill, it was a criminal offense. Now, that language has been removed, but somebody believed that, and I also serve on a committee where one of the gentleman there raises the issue there all the time with the Fish and Wildlife Service, why they are not arresting windmill operators where they find endangered species birds or bats at the foot of the windmill, that that should be a criminal offense. I have heard that argument each year now for a number of years. It has its opponents. I am not one of them. But wind has limited application. When the wind doesn't blow, you have to have a redundant supply. That takes us back up to natural gas, because natural gas is the generation where you can turn the plant off and on quickly. That's why we historically used it for peak power in the morning and night, when we're running our factories and we are using a lot at home, that's when the greatest demand for electricity was and that's when we turned on the gas generators. When the wind doesn't blow, you turn on the gas generator. When the sun doesn't shine and you don't have solar coming, you turn on the gas generator. Now, what I think the American people and too many Members of Congress don't understand is how small they are. Wind currently is 0.12 of a percent. Solar is 0.06 of a percent. Let's say we could double them every 3 years. This would be 0.24, and this would be 0.12. Let's say 3 more years we double it again, and then we would be 0.48 and 0.24. We are still a very small fraction and now we are already 6 years down the road. And, you know, to get to 1 percent would take decades. So we have to realize, as good as these are, and as much as we want them to be a part of our energy supply, they are limited in the ability they can produce. So those are the facts sometimes that sort of get lost. Now, another issue I want to mention is the new issue here, the issue that's getting a lot more attention here in this House and in the Senate is climate change. Climate change is the fear that the use of fossil fuels and putting CO2 into the air is harming our environment and causing the surface of the Earth to warm. Now, there are many scientists that don't agree with that. I know the sun scientist from MIT doesn't agree with that. She has a pretty strong history where when the sun hits us directly, we warm for a decade or so. Then when the sun is hitting us a glancing blow, we cool. But there are those today that are convinced that it's CO2. That's what we breathe out. We breathe out CO2 and we breathe in the oxygen. The plants take in CO2 and they process oxygen that we breathe. It's that even exchange. But there are those who feel that we have too much CO2 in the air and are really wanting to treat CO2 as a pollutant, and they are really somewhat being successful with that, which I think is going to be harmful. Now, I am not saying we shouldn't be observing it, I am not saying we shouldn't be working on how to sequester carbon as we use fuels, that we shouldn't be working on all those things, but I look for us to put on measures that will raise energy prices up to 30 percent or more because of having to deal with the carbon issue. The carbon issue makes it very difficult for coal to participate, and that's what we own the most of. And it makes it very difficult for petroleum. That's what we don't have a lot of but we use a lot of for our transportation system. Then when that happens, we will be putting great pressure on natural gas, because it has no NOX or SOx, very clean burning, and it has a third of the CO2 of any other fossil fuel. It will move to gas if we force companies to measure how much CO2 they are putting into the air, and it will decimate certain industries. We probably won't make lime and cement in this country. I guess what worries me is when we don't manufacture anything in America. The current natural gas prices have caused us to lose 50 percent of the fertilizer industry in the last 2 years. The petrochemical industry is in the process of building all their new plants offshore, where natural gas is a fraction. That's another point I want to make is most Americans are not aware that our natural gas prices are the highest in the world. How is that? Well, it's not a world price. When oil has been $80, and that's a scary figure to me, and nobody is talking about it now. It's just kind of like, well, it's $80, but natural gas prices, when we have $80 oil the whole world has $80 oil, so competitively it keeps us even. But when natural gas prices are two, three, four, five times higher here than in other countries, it gives those countries a huge advantage. I have been promoting that we must, as a first priority, open up natural gas. Before I go to that, I just want to mention, here is the chart that shows us our oil imports as we continue to become dependent on foreign, unstable countries. And we're up here right now. This is of course old data. And we're up here right now at 66, and we're going up 2 percent a year and we'll soon be at 70 percent. Now, is that bad? Well, a decade or so ago, when oil was much cheaper, you know, over in the 30, 20 range, and back here when it was below 20, and I remember when it was back here at 10. Now, these are the average prices per year. So during this period of time we've had $10 oil a number of times. But then in the year average, so this chart is the annual average price, so it doesn't show the $10 level. But when oil was 20 and $30 a barrel, it was much more affordable. And a lot of people said, well, we should be using their oil and saving ours. Well, we did that. Well, when you get up here to where you're at $80 oil, it seems to me that that's pretty concerning. And how do we compete as a country when we have $80 oil ongoingly and could have spikes from that? Now, we believe that, I want to go back to this chart here. We believe it's time to open up the OCS. And our proposal opens it up for natural gas only. It's a bill that we now have 165 cosponsors of. It's called the NEED Act. And it also sets aside funds for a lot of very good purposes. But it would open up both of our coastlines and the rest of the gulf for natural gas production only. Now, the States currently control 3 miles. We're prepared to give them, with this legislation, 50 miles. And they could open that if they chose to, but they would have to pass a law asking for it to be open. The next 50 miles would be open automatically, but they have the right, within 12 months, to pass a bill to say they don't want to produce. So we have States' rights for up to 100 miles, where now they just have it out to 3 miles. Then the second hundred miles would just be purely open. So we believe that making natural gas available and stabilizing natural gas prices, we can preserve the petrochemical industry in this country, we can preserve the polymers and plastic industry in this country, we can keep what steel and aluminum manufacturing and bending and shaping companies we have left. I predict that if we don't stabilize natural gas prices for home heating, for business heating, and for production of products, we will be making bricks and glass in nearby South America where gas is a buck and a quarter, when our average retail price will be 11 or $12. Those companies will go there and save millions of dollars in energy costs, and they can ship those bulky products like bricks and glass to us in a boat in a day or two. Not very far down here to South America. We have enough competition with China and India. Their natural gas prices are way lower than ours, maybe a third of ours, and so they have not only the cheap labor advantage, we're giving them an energy advantage. And I guess the part that I've struggled with in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is it seems like Americans are just immune to the impacts of high energy prices. Now, this winter, as I started, when we start heating our homes, we will feel pain. The poorest among us will struggle to heat their homes this winter, especially when they live in older housing that's not as tight, doesn't have the new windows. I found it interesting this year, I'll just step on a sidebar here for a minute. The Speaker of the House wanted us to have a less carbon imprint for the Capitol, and so she's mandated that we switch from using less coal to heat the Capitol complex and more natural gas. Well, that costs us an extra $3 million because gas is much more expensive, and it sets a precedent out there to all of our local governments and State governments and all the other departments of government that they ought to do the same. And I see universities doing it now, switching to clean natural gas, spending more money. But what we didn't do is this building and all the buildings we work in still have single-pane windows that let the heat out or the cold in. It would seem to me that the first thing we should have done was to put modern windows in our buildings to keep the heat in and keep the cold out, because there's a huge difference between a single-pane window and a triple-pane window, whether it keeps the heat in and the cold out or the cool in in the summer time and the heat out. So windows should have been our first measure. But no, we're putting in the little curly-cue light bulbs in all our offices now, by mandate, by law. I'm not opposed to them. I have some in my house. But they unfortunately are all made in China. They're not made in this country. And so that's another part; we are mandating China products to light our facilities around here. And we're now forcing natural gas to be used instead of coal, which will cost us more but will send a precedent around the world. And if everybody, if all the governments do that, all the agencies do that, all the educational facilities do that, we'll put tremendous pressure on natural gas. Now, our natural gas bills, I explained that and I'll just explain it again. The first 50 miles will be controlled by the State, only produced there if they pass a bill and ask to be opened up. The second 50 miles will be open, but the States have a right to close it with legislation if they can pass it and their Governor signs it, the second hundred miles would be open for natural gas only, not oil. Now, we also have some things that we think are pretty important in this bill. And as you look there, we're going to give $150 billion of the royalties to the States. That's an incentive. So as they produce in all the coastal States, they will then have the ability to have some of those monies for their reserves, and we think that's important. Then we have $100 billion for the government. The Federal Government will get $100 billion utilizing the resource on the Outer Continental Shelf over a period of years. And we're going to have $32 billion set aside for energy research and production, real money, not a few $100 million, but billions of dollars to do the essential research and develop the renewables that can help us in the future. And $32 billion set aside in a fund for carbon capture and sequestration research. That's what we're talking about today. Not talking about it. We would get affordable energy for Americans to heat our homes and run our businesses, and we'd get $32 billion over a period of time to figure out how to deal with the CO2 issue, if that's our number one problem. Now, I think affordable energy is a far bigger problem than CO2. I know the pain that's going to be felt in this country for the home heating costs and the small business costs, but the job losses as we, and we have the potential of losing millions of jobs in America, more going to foreign countries because of our energy prices. That's the concern, because when the working man loses his chance to make a living, how does he afford to heat his home? How does he afford to have a home? Now, we have some areas that have been wanting cleanup money for a long time, and the first one here is the Chesapeake Bay. They've wanted $20 billion, and their proposal says they need $19 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and the State's put a little bit of money, the Feds put in a little every year, but it's kind of trickling in. This would provide them over a period of time the money they need to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Great Lakes, the need, their studies have all shown, their organization's the same. They need $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes. Well, this bill would provide them with the $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes. Then the Everglades. You know, we've been putting money in the Everglades every year. Well, this would give them $12 billion for Everglade restoration. We've been talking about the Colorado River Basin restoration. Well, this would give them $12 billion for restoring the Colorado River Basin. And the San Francisco Bay restoration. This would give them $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay. Now, the issue that I always find confounding here, every year we give more and more money for LIHEAP and weatherization, and rightfully so, because the reason America has the highest energy costs in the world is Congress and the administrations that have been running our government, both parties, we have not, either party, adequately went after energy. I think my party is more on the right track than the other party, but neither party has done what we need, and that's why we're in trouble today. And then when we're in trouble and it costs so much to heat our homes, we have to help the poor. We also have to save energy by helping the poor weatherize their homes, because they don't have the money to spend to save money. So we put $10 billion into LIHEAP and weatherization to help Americans to heat their homes. I'm going to go back to the first chart here. World oil prices. Here we are, as I started, we're now clear up here, clear up off the chart, $80. All week long, in fact, it's been as high as $83. Have we heard much about it on television? No. Hardly mentioned. Do we hear about it in the Presidential debates? No. Has it been any special meetings here in Congress? No. Has there been any discussion in the last few weeks about the energy bills that are languishing to be considered and need to be conferenced? No. It's like it doesn't matter. Mr. Speaker, it does matter. $80 oil. I've talked to experts in Federal agencies that have dealt with energy all their life. They told me in a private meeting that they thought $60 to $70 oil for a long period of time, or for, you know, a decent period of time would stall our economy. And then we hit $70 oil for quite a while, and then it got up around $75, and it still hasn't stalled our economy. And they said they know we're getting close to that price point. They don't know where it's at, but they don't think it's far away. And folks, when that happens, it takes a long time to come back, because here's the problem. As we go back to the big chart that I had, I want to put it back up here. The problem that we have with energy, to open up the Outer Continental Shelf to get gas, and then maybe at some point oil on out, it's 10 years from the day you pass a bill till you have any quantity of energy. If we do new nuclear, from the day you put some new incentives in or figure out some ways to entice companies to invest or government helps invest, you're 10 years away from production. Everything we're doing, and we don't know when. We hope it's soon, but we don't know when wind and solar will be a real mark on the chart, will be percentages of our energy portfolio. There are people who think we are right up there. They've been saying that for a decade. And nobody's holding them back. They're highly subsidized. I haven't talked about ethanol. Ethanol is the one that's happening with petroleum. You know, we now use 6.3 billion gallons of ethanol this year. There's almost as many plants in production being built as there are in production, that in a year or two will double our ethanol. And that's from corn. The price of corn has gotten high. Now, our food prices are rising, and the cost of making ethanol's very high. It's almost an energy swap. I'm not against it because it's American made, but there is some danger in putting too much of your portfolio when you're using food to make your fuel. And the cost, what do we use to make ethanol? Natural gas. Huge amounts of natural gas. If we can break the hydrogen link, what do we use to make hydrogen? We use natural gas. Biodiesel, we use natural gas and soybeans. Ethanol, natural gas and corn. Natural gas is the one, the only one that gives us hope. It can be a bridge. Natural gas could replace a third of our auto fleet and really cut back our need for oil. But there's no push to do that. It would burn cleaner. The only problem with natural gas in vehicles is you can't drive as far. You can't have a big tank. But all your short-haul vehicles, all your taxicabs, all your small engines, all your local tractors, a lot of your construction vehicles that are nearby and can be fueled up every night, they could all be on natural gas. That's an exchange of carburetion. Our current engines will burn natural gas. And so natural gas, if it was more affordable, if we got out on the Outer Continental Shelf and produced it and we had lots of it, it's our hope till renewables grow to where they can really help us. My concern is there's no sense of urgency here. Congress does not have a sense of urgency. The White House does not have a sense of urgency. Where do we get our oil? Eighty percent of the oil today is owned by governments, not companies, Third World countries, very few democratic governments, dictators, unstable governments, they not only own the oil, they're producing it. And when government produces, it's never efficient. It's like Mexico. Mexico is loaded with energy. We actually export some gas and oil to Mexico because they just can't get out of their own way. Their government is so inefficient and so ineffective, they can't get it out of the ground and get it refined. They actually buy some from us. The most energy we buy from any one country is Canada. Thank God, to the north of us, if Canada really produces gas and oil and they are reaching into the new fields with the oil sands and so forth, they're moving. They are an environmentally sensitive country, but they are moving forward with their energy production. And, fortunately, we benefit from that. But to the south of us, 80 percent of the oil is owned by unstable countries. They not only own it, they're producing it, they're refining it, and they're marketing it. And what they are doing that is very troublesome is they are skimming off the profits, instead of putting it back into the business, and using it for all their social programs and for people to live wealthy life-styles, and their energy patches are often a mess. Many of them have kicked out Big Oil. Big Oil has been chased out of country after country. Their investments have been captured. I could name a whole lot of them, Nigeria, El Salvador, Russia. Country after country has nationalized their energy, chased the big boys out that actually had the expertise, and are now running their own refineries. We have 80 percent of our oil coming from countries that are not run like a business. And they are not democracies. They are not efficient. And so the supply of petroleum could decrease quickly if two or three of those countries get in any kind of trouble or would have any kind of an explosion in their major pipelines or refineries or sending stations. Terrorism is a threat to energy. Terrorists could put this country in serious straits with little explosives in the right places. It's a scary world. I guess the part that bothers me tonight is as we approach this season, this heating season for America, Congress ought to have on its agenda that we are going to provide affordable energy for Americans by producing adequate amounts of energy so we can bring the prices down. Prices aren't set by big oil companies. Everyone blames them. Prices are set by the stock market. And every day they bid on what the price of natural gas is going to be, what the price of oil is going to be, what the price of fuel oil is going to be, what the price of kerosene is going to be. Those are all set by traders on the market. And if it shows there's a little shortage, they run the price up, and that helps add to the price. Fear of a shortage. Well, we know there is an upcoming shortage of oil and gas in America. And we also know that we are doing very little. China is building a coal power plant every 5 days. They are building a nuclear plant every month. They are building the largest hydrodams known in America. They are buying up oil and gas reserves from countries whom we have historically purchased from. And I'm not going to be surprised when we pick up the paper one of these days and we read where one of the major countries that America has been buying a lot of oil from, that China has bought their whole supply. They are going to be producing oil 50 miles off the Florida coast in companionship with Cuba. Mr. Speaker, America needs to wake Congress up. We need to wake Congress up. We need to wake this administration up. We need to have a sense of urgency that America produces the energy we need. We are still 86 percent fossil fuel, 8 percent nuclear, and 6 percent renewables, and biomass and hydroelectric are more than 5. And that leaves geothermal, wind, and solar, less than 1 percent, and 83 percent of that is geothermal. America needs to understand the concern that is out there about having available, affordable energy. We have always taken it for granted. It is no longer going to just happen. America needs to be debating an energy policy that will bring oil and gas prices down; will take advantage of using clean coal technology, coal to liquids, coal to gas; expanding the use of clean nuclear; no CO2; looking harder at hydroelectric; continuing to grow biomass, geothermal, wind and solar, ethanol and biodiesel as fast as we can. We can't do it quick enough, Mr. Speaker. America needs to put the pedal to the metal. We need to produce energy for Americans so they can afford to heat their homes and we can afford to run our businesses so Americans can have jobs to support their families.