John Peterson

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Folks, if we're serious about cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, we can get affordable energy for America by producing offshore. Every country in the world produces here. We're the only country that doesn't, and we can have $20 billion, which is exactly what the Chesapeake Bay people need to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and we can have affordable natural gas and oil for America. Folks, we need to have supply.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from Utah, my good friend, for his wise words on innovation. I think we are going to be forced into innovation. That is good. But I will have to say the current prices of driving a vehicle and heating a home this year in my rural district are going to be prohibitive for some people being able to handle it. Their budgets are not prepared for the prices. Because as we have felt the oil prices, natural gas only increased marginally last year, but today the price for natural gas out of the ground is $12 and 40- some cents. Last year at this time, it was between $6 and $7. We are approaching a doubling of natural gas prices. At this time of the year, we don't use a lot of natural gas because we are not cooling much and we are not heating hardly anything. So we have surplus. We are using it for industrial purposes, which is big, and to generate electricity and to run our plants, but we are not using it at the home as much. So this is the time of year we normally put it in the ground. Last year, we were putting $6 and $7 gas in the ground. This year, it's currently, in the last few months, $11, now $12 gas, and seems to be going up a few pennies every day. So we don't know where that is headed. But the fear is we have a storm in the Gulf, which always interrupts supply, we could have $15, $16 gas, and that would make home heating almost impossible next winter. Just to share with you, as he was talking about innovation and change, I come from Titusville, Pennsylvania. I live in the little town of Pleasantville, Pennsylvania, 5 miles from there. But I was born 1 mile from Drakes Well, the first oil well in the world. It was drilled in 1859. And I vividly remember as a young boy, down the Oil Creek Valley, a stream called Oil Creek because it always had oil on it because the way oil perked its way out of the ground naturally. So there was oil on that stream. And when we had the rush of oil, those hills were naked. There was no vegetation. The trees were gone. But today, it's almost like a virgin, beautiful oak-cherry forest. And the streams there, Oil Creek naturally produces both trout and bass, which is not very common. And the brooky trout streams flow into it all the way down. It's a beautiful, pristine area. And nobody did anything. They just left nature purify it. So oil is not the horrible thing. It's a hydrocarbon. It went back to dirt. The trees grew and the streams are pure and wildlife is very abundant. Now I guess what we want to talk about is production. How did we get to $125 to $135 oil and how did we get to this tremendous price on natural gas? Many years ago, we had a legislative moratorium to lock up the Outer Continental Shelf. Now back then natural gas was $2, oil was $10, and many argued that we shouldn't use ours, we ought to use theirs. Whether that was a wise argument or not, I won't say, but they have won and it has been locked up ever since. In the early nineties, President Bush I put a Presidential moratorium on top of the legislative moratorium. Now what is a moratorium. The Continental Shelf is from 3 miles offshore. The States control the first 3 miles. Then the Federal Government, we the taxpayers, own the next 200 miles. That is considered our Continental Shelf. And most every country in the world, in fact, every country in the world produces there. Canada produces right above Maine. Canada produces right above the State of Washington, Great Britain produces on their continental shelf; Norway, Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia. It's just common practice. In fact, everybody gives Brazil great credit for being energy independent, and they give credit for ethanol. Well, ethanol is 15 percent of their energy use. The rest of it, they opened up their Outer Continental Shelf, had a big find out there, and they are now self-sufficient. They don't have to buy from anybody. Wouldn't it be great if America would be self-sufficient? I think we have a lot more oil than was anticipated in this country. I know we have a lot of natural gas. We are currently importing 17 percent of our natural gas. We wouldn't even have to do that. We get 15 percent from Canada and we get 2 percent from LNG, which is from foreign countries similar to where we buy oil. So we have locked ours up. Now what does that do? Well, we have locked it up and so we have taken our supply off the market. Now what is this Congress doing to react to that? Two or three weeks ago, we passed a bill, very thoughtful bill. We said, We are going to figure out a way to bring OPEC into court. We are going to bring OPEC to court. We are going to force them to produce for energy so we have more petroleum. Currently, we import 66 percent of our petroleum, about half from that area of the world and about half from Canada and Mexico. So we are going to force them because they are not producing enough. I think Saudi Arabia produces 12 million, I think another one, 7 million; another one, 6 million; another one, 5 million. But someone has determined that is not enough so we are going to have to bring them into court. Now how you take someone to court for not producing enough oil when we've locked up our Outer Continental Shelf, we've locked up most of Alaska, we've locked up most of the Midwest, now how a country can think that we can sue our neighbors for not selling us enough oil when we have refused to produce our own doesn't make a lot of sense to me. My taxpayers back home laugh at that when they hear the debate, but it's not funny. But we actually passed a bill to do that, as if it would make a difference. And I don't know what court we would bring it into. Let's look at our energy use today. We are about 40 percent petroleum, 23 percent natural gas, 23 percent coal, 8 percent nuclear, 2.7 hydro, 2.4 biomass. And this is the one people have not paid a lot of attention to. This is woody biomass. This one has grown measurably in the last few years. Eight hundred thousand Americans use a wood pellet stove today to heat their homes, and that is sawdust compressed. All our dry kilns in the country where we dry our wood uses wood sawdust to heat those rather than buy propane or fuel oil. A lot of factories in the rural areas are using wood waste also.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Surely. Be glad to.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Yes.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That's right.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That's one of the problems. Wood waste has great potential. I also have a company in my district that has built a wonderful wood waste boiler. It burns cleaner that natural gas and will burn even green wood, and it burns it cleanly. But the Democrats passed a bill that prohibits wood waste from public land from being utilized. We are not allowed to produce, which makes no public sense. I don't know who got the theory that letting every tree grow makes sense. When you thin a forest, it grows much faster, which takes CO2 out of the air. The biggest place to get rid of carbon in the air is plant life for us. And tree growth. Because you lock the carbon up. The log we cut down is carbon. We take it and put a roof on our house or floor in our house or windows in our house or furniture in our house. That is carbon. You lock the carbon up. So we have taken it out of the air. Well, by not pruning the forest, your forest becomes like a jungle. It grows very slow, and it dies naturally, which turns to CO2. As it dies naturally, it turns to CO2 and emits into the air, just the same as we do when we breathe and when we burn something. So nature itself puts CO2 back in the air. But biomass is kind of a sleeper. I think it can do a lot. And if we could unlock the National Forests, if we could start marketing an appropriate amount from the National Forests. You know, 40 percent of America is owned by the government. I don't think people realize that. Almost 50 percent of America is owned by some level of government, when you include counties and State governments. My State owns about 5 million acres in Pennsylvania. Most States don't have that much forest land. But the whole northern part of Pennsylvania is heavily owned, some by the Federal Government, much by the State, and a lot of that is not marketed adequately either. But when you market a forest adequately, when you prune it adequate, it is sort of like a garden. You prune the old out and you leave the young grow, and it is very healthy for the environment. It is much better for wildlife, and it is certainly better for clean air. Geothermal, a good form of energy, but it is expensive installation. Wind, solar. Now, here is the problem we face. How did we get here? I am going to tell you who I blame. I blame Congress. But who influenced Congress? Congress has pressure. Well, there is an organization. I made this statement the other day that Hugo Chavez and the Shah of Iran don't need lobbyists to keep us as a customer. The Democrats and the environmentalists continue to lock up domestic reserves, and that forces us to send billions of dollars over there to buy their oil. Now, the Sierra Club is number one. They are against oil shale development, they are against coal liquefaction, they are against offshore energy production that I talked about a minute ago. You have got Greenpeace. They want to phase out all fossil fuels. That means from here up, 86 percent of what we are using today has to go away. That is Greenpeace. Environmental Defense says power plant smokestacks are public health energy number one. Folks, that is 51 percent of our electricity. League of Conservation Voters. Coal to liquids. Most of us believe that coal to liquids or coal to gas is our future because we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. And when we learn how to do it, if carbon is the issue, I think we can could learn how to sequester the carbon, right along with the ability to make liquids from coal. Then we wouldn't be buying oil from other countries. We would be using the liquids made from our coal. Defenders of Wilderness. It says every coastal State is put in harm's way when oil rigs go up in our coastal waters. Well, you know, folks, every country in America produces energy out there and has the rigs out there. Next Wednesday, we are going to offer this Congress the first real chance we have for production. We are going to be offering offshore production. We are going to have legislation, an amendment to the Interior Committee, that will remove this. In the Interior Committee every year there is legislation that locks up, that says we cannot spend a dollar to lease the Outer Continental Shelf. That is 200 miles offshore. We are going to remove that from 50 miles out. Now, 50 miles is giving a big cushion. A lot of countries do 20. Some do 25. Most don't do 50. We are going to give 50. Eleven miles is sight, so after 11 miles, it is four times the sight line, more than that, so there will be nothing anybody can see. And every person in the energy business, MMS, that is the minerals and mine management people who manage this program, said that the most environmentally sensitive way to produce energy is offshore. It improves the fishing. It doesn't hurt it. You are not disturbing wildlife. You are not disturbing anything. So offshore energy is our most environmentally friendly way to harvest energy and use it. So we are going to give this Congress a chance next Wednesday, not the whole Congress, but just the Interior Subcommittee, to remove that moratorium. Then we will have to maintain it in full committee if we win and then maintain it on the floor, and then we will have to deal with the Senate, which is always our tremendous challenge. So as we go down these, we have these groups, Natural Resource Defense, coal mining. They are opposed to coal mining. They want coal. That is 50 percent of our electric grid. Center for Biological Diversity. Oil and gas drilling on public lands has devastating effects. Folks, it is a new era. You talked about technology. We have new technology. We know how to do it right. You drill a 6 inch hole in the ground. With gas, you just let gas out. With oil, you pump out oil. It does not have to be an environmental disaster. Then Friends of the Earth, the other one, the eighth one, liquid coal is dirty and a costly fuel. Folks, these eight groups, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Environmental Defense, League of Conservation Voters, Defenders of Wilderness, Natural Resource Defense Council, Center for Biological Diversity, and Friends of the Earth, those are the people you need to thank for the energy of America being locked up. It is their influence on Congress that has prevented us from a providing energy for America. They are wrong, folks. They need to lose that argument. We need to show them that we can produce energy. Now, as far as the world is concerned, you know, when it was $2 for gas and $10 for oil, maybe they were right. We should use their's. I remember that argument. Folks, at $125 to $130 a barrel, at $12.50 for natural gas, I think it is time to use ours. What is the other benefit of using ours? When we produce American energy, the landowner makes money, whether it is the government or a private person. The promoter of the well makes money. The pipeline guy makes money. The driller makes money. The hydrofracking people make money. The processing station, whether it is gas or the refineries for oil, make money. Millions of dollars of wealth are created. Billions of dollars of wealth created. Hundreds of thousands of people have wonderful jobs and can maintain a family and home. So producing our own energy will put a lot of Americans to work, especially in rural America where I live. Now, they claim, and when you hear all the talk, it is the bottom three that are ready to take over, with geothermal, wind and solar. If we double wind and solar in the next 5 years, we are less than three- quarters of one percent of our energy. We are all for wind. We are all for solar. We are all for geothermal. I led the Hydrogen Caucus 10 years ago. But, folks, we are not there yet. Now, what can keep us going? Here is what the Energy Department has in their chart. From this middle line towards me is history. That is where we have been. From that middle line out is where the Energy Department thinks we are going to be. To listen to many people, you would think we are ready. We have been holding back wind and we have been holding back solar and we have been holding back geothermal. We have been holding back hydrogen. We have been holding back electric cars. Folks, nobody is holding anything back. It has to compete. We have spent billions on every one of the new energies. But their projection is that not much is going to change. I don't quite agree with their chart, because I look for coal to decrease. This administration has not been friendly to coal. This Congress has not been friendly to coal. There have been 50 coal plants turned down in the last 6 months in this country. They will all become natural gas plants. And when you have a power plant and you switch to natural gas, this is going to widen. Really, that is one of the reasons that we have expensive natural gas in America. Twelve years ago, we didn't use natural gas to make electricity. Only 8 percent of our electricity was made with natural gas. Today, 23 percent of our electricity is made with natural gas, and it has put tremendous pressure on natural gas. Clean, green natural gas is the fuel that we use to make ethanol, it is the fuel we will use to make hydrogen. It is the fuel we will use as the bridge. A third of our auto fleet could be on clean, green natural gas if it was less expensive. So I look at natural gas as the savior for us to get us to the new generations of fuels. But in the meantime, we are going to need a lot of oil. We are going to need coal. We are going to need nuclear. The energy bill in 05 gave incentives. It took 10 years to get a permit for a nuclear plant. We now force that to be done in 4. So they say 4 years to build one. So I say with delays and problems, we can build a nuclear plant in 10 years. There are 50 on the drawing board and there are three or four ready to go, and that is because of the 05 Energy Act. But we need all of those 50 on line by 2030 to remain 20 percent of the grid, because electric use is going up so fast. Folks, the energy problem in America is because of the environmental groups we have decided to stop producing fossil fuels, forcing us to be 66 percent dependent on foreign and forcing us to cause part of the world shortage of petroleum and gas because we don't produce. So I find it very frustrating that here we are today with the highest prices. One more thing on natural gas. Natural gas is the one fuel that is not a world price. Neither is coal. When oil is $120 a barrel, it is that all around the world. But we have had the highest natural gas prices in America for 8 years. What does that do to us? That affects the petrochemical companies, the polymers and the plastic companies and the fertilizer companies that use huge amounts. They use it as an ingredient. Polymers and plastic, 45 percent of the cost of making it is natural gas. Fifty-five percent of the cost of petrochemical is natural gas. From 50 to 70 percent of fertilizer cost is natural gas. Half of our fertilizer plants have left in the last 3 years. We have lost 300,000 polymer plastic jobs in the last 3 years. A great percentage of the petrochemical industry has moved offshore. Just to show you, our largest chemical company is Dow Chemical. They spoke out the other day about natural gas prices. In 02, they spent $8 billion to purchase natural gas. This year, they will spend $32 billion for natural gas. That is a 400 percent increase. Now, here are the numbers that are scary. In 02, 60 percent of their revenue and jobs were in America. Today, 34 percent of their revenue and jobs are in America. Where are they? They are in foreign countries, where natural gas is a fraction of what it is here. Many of the plants I have mentioned, polymers, plastic, steel, aluminum, those plants are moving everywhere because of energy prices. They are building every kind of a plant you can think of down in South America in a place called Trinidad, about a day-and-a-half by ship to here. My prediction is if we don't deal with natural gas prices, bricks and glass, heavy bulky commodities will be produced in Trinidad and be on our shores within a day-and-a-half. Folks, that is not the America I believe in. If America is going to compete, we have to get gas prices under control. We have to get oil prices under control. We have to have energy that is affordable for Americans to heat their homes. We have to have energy prices that are affordable so companies will want to be here and produce the jobs here. I believe for the first time in the history of America we have to fight to compete with our competitors like China and India. They are huge. They are growing fast. They are building their own energy future. China will be producing oil 50 miles off the coast of Cuba and 50 miles off the Florida coast, while we prohibit it. Does that make sense? I don't think so. They are going to be working. China, Canada and Spain will all have contracts to produce energy in waters that should be ours, off our coast, because we don't produce there and because it is an equal distance from Cuba. It is time for this Congress, it is time for this administration, to lead. Recently the President has spoken out three times on offshore. He has never supported offshore production. But he said we should be offshore and onshore producing more energy. I wrote him a letter 2 weeks ago and put a release out today that says the following: ``Mr. President, I commend you for speaking about offshore production of energy. But it seems like if you would lead by removing the presidential moratorium, that is yours, and urging Congress to remove their moratorium so we can start the process.'' It will take years to get out there. We have to get in a 5-year plan, we have to do the leases, we have to do the environmental impact statements, and then they have to go out and build the platforms and the pipelines and drill. It takes a long time. Every day we wait we endanger the economic future of America. I think we are almost past the point. We need energy production in America today. Not next year. Today. We need to unlock what this Congress and three presidents have locked up. We need to produce our energy. We need to conserve. We need to use the innovation that my friend talked about a little bit ago. We need it to do everything we can to produce every form of energy that is available. We need wind, we need solar, and we need to use less. We need to use it more wisely. But, folks, the day is today. We cannot solve this problem with just conservation. We have to produce energy. I believe if we opened up the Outer Continental Shelf, we would take what we call the fear factor out of the market and we would get Wall Street out of the marketplace and we could drop energy prices 20 to 25 percent. The only other thing you and I can do is to use less and find alternatives. Folks, it is a crisis in America. I want to thank my friend from Utah and my friend from California who have joined us for the opportunity to share some time with them today.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentlelady from Colorado and gentlelady from Virginia and the gentleman from Tennessee for the right to join them this evening for an issue that I think is very much on the mind of every American. I can't talk to a neighbor, a friend, anywhere but what they're talking about energy prices. And it's interesting that it's not being talked about in this House in a productive way. In fact, 2 weeks ago we passed a bill that attempts to give us the right to get OPEC into our courts to force them to produce more energy, accusing them of not producing enough energy. Now, I don't know how a government who has locked up so much of its own supply--and I'll show you here on this chart--both coasts are off-limits to oil and gas production and a portion of the gulf. And out in the middle part of the country, millions and millions of acres are locked up. And of course up here in ANWR, that part of Alaska that was set aside by President Carter for energy production, has been locked up. And we passed a bill in the Clinton administration, and he vetoed it. That was 10 years ago. They said it would take 10 years to get production here, but today we would have that energy if it had happened. Folks, while we lock this up, we pass a bill trying to get us the ability to bring OPEC countries into a court somewhere to force them to produce. Now, people back home kind of laughed at me and they said, well, how do we force a country to produce when we won't produce our own? How do you rationalize that? But it sounds good if you don't look at the facts, I guess. But here we are, and now the Senate, this week, is working on carbon taxes, which will increase energy prices another 20 to 30 percent. Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, and Americans, listen to the carbon tax debate. It will tax energy further and raise the cost of fossil fuels, hoping, I guess, we won't use them so that we will be forced--and we will get into the renewables in a little bit. But it seems interesting to me that, at a time when every American that I talk to has one thing on their mind, affordable energy, and Congress is the reason. I'm here to say tonight, this body and three Presidents are the reason. This moratorium on our Outer Continental Shelf, that's from three miles offshore owned by the States to 200 miles that's owned by the Federal Government and us, the taxpayers, we own that. We're the only country in the world that's locked it up. It was locked up 28 years ago by President Bush I for 5 years to study and see where the best was and see if we had some sensitive areas we needed to protect. President Clinton came in, just extended it to 2012 and said they wouldn't explore out there. And then the current President has not supported raising this moratorium. In fact, I wrote him a letter 2 weeks ago, a man I love dearly, but disagree with very much on lack of energy leadership because he understands the energy issue--at least he should, he's from an energy family. But he has spoken three times recently in public about opening up onshore and offshore. So we sent him a letter saying, Mr. President, it seems like if you're serious about opening up offshore, that you would lift the presidential moratorium--because we actually have two moratoriums. We have a presidential decree that's been through three Presidents that says you can't produce out there. We have legislation that Congress passes every year in the Interior bill that says the Federal Government cannot spend one dollar to lease offshore leasing on either coast in the Gulf. Eighty-five percent. This is where most of the world produces a lot of their energy, these great resources. It's the most environmentally sensitive place. Fishing in the Gulf is better where we produce oil than where we don't produce oil. And when we had the terrible storms in Katrina a few years ago, the fishermen were saying--some of the rigs were really damaged, and the platforms, so they said, you're not going to take them away, are you? They said, no, we're going to repair them and use them. Because that's where the best fishing is. Now, with those terrible storms, the Minerals and Mines Management said we had no measurable spillage. Actually, we have more spillage on our ocean shores from ships and sporting boats than we have from drilling anywhere. We have not had an offshore incident since 1969 in Santa Barbara. Our technology today is tremendously improved. There is no viable reason that we're not producing energy offshore. Now, I'll be offering an amendment next Wednesday, the 11th of June, in the Interior Appropriations bill that will open up and remove these moratoriums from 50 miles out for both gas and oil. That will allow us to produce. Now, it's not something that's just going to happen overnight, it still would have to be, once it's opened up and signed by the President, it would have to be part of the 5-year plan. What's interesting is we know there's huge reserves out here, but has never been measured by modern seismographic and modern techniques that we use today. And it's like taking an old black and white picture tube, television, and comparing it to one of our beautiful flat screen TVs today of what you can see. Today they can know what's there, what type of energy is there, how deep it is, and how difficult it will be to produce it. But we, by law, this Congress has prohibited anybody from exploring out there, even to look at what's out there. Does that make sense? Of course it makes no sense. Let's look for a moment at our energy use. This is the interesting part. We are 40 percent petroleum, 23 percent natural gas, 23 percent coal, 8 percent nuclear. Now, that's 94 percent of America's energy. That's fossil fuel, except nuclear. Then you have the renewables. And, you know, I'm for wind and I'm for solar and I'm for geothermal and I'm for cellulosic ethanol and all of those good things, but we have to look at how small they are. I said to a gentleman on the plane this morning flying in, I said, if we double wind and solar in the next 5 years, how much of our energy do you think--oh, 10 percent? I said, less than three-quarters of 1 percent. Because when you get down here, the only one that's really grown a lot recently is woody biomass. Now, we have almost a million Americans now, just under a million Americans heats their homes with pellet stoves; that's saw dust pressed into a pellet, and they use it to heat their home. We're heating factories today with saw dust and wood chips. I have a hospital in my district that just put in a new wood boiler that has saved 70 percent on their energy bill by burning sawdust and wood chips and their own cardboard and their own paper. So that's been the one that's been growing. Geothermal has been just constant at a very small fraction. Wind and solar are fractions; these are fractions. Now, if we double them, they're still fractions. And I'm for them. But I guess the false hope has been--and I want to share with you who I think is really at fault. Now, Congress is at fault, but who has influenced Congress? Well, there is a group called the Sierra Club. And here is what is on their web page. They're against the oil shale development that's been talked about out west, where we think there's huge reserves. They're against coal liquefaction because we're the Saudi Arabia of coal and we think liquefied coal or coal-to-gas could get us away from the--66 percent of our petroleum now comes from foreign unstable governments. And that's where all our money is going, folks. We're enriching that part of the world who helped furnish us with 9/11. They're against offshore energy production. Back to the map I had up here. The Sierra Club will lead the fight. I debated a Sierra Club member on NPR last week on a California radio station, and they said we'll be leading the fight to stop Congressman Peterson's bill from being passed. Green Peace; you know what they want to do? They want to phase these out. And that's what a lot of Congress wants to do. They say, we can't use fossil fuels anymore. Well, okay, I'll buy that. I would like to be fueling our country down here. I will do anything and everything to fund these. And those who say we haven't spent billions on research in wind and solar are not being honest with you, we're spending billions annually to subsidize those. So Green Peace wants to phase these out; can't do this anymore. But that's really what we're doing, that's why we have high energy prices; we're phasing out fossil fuels before we have a replacement. We've decided we're not going to produce fossil fuels. Because if we don't produce them--I've talked to Members here on the floor. Well, John, if we continue to produce fossil fuels and they're affordable, Americans will not use renewables. I said, but if you phase out fossil fuels before we have the renewables, we're going to have awfully high energy prices. Now, we were arguing that when oil was $30 and $40 a barrel. I don't think any of us dreamed we would see $135 oil this year. I thought we might hit $100 oil this fall. That was my prediction. I did not dream . . . Now, what's interesting that's happening now, oil I think was $122 when it closed today; that's not cheap, but it's better than $135. But natural gas prices, creeping, creeping, creeping. And natural gas is the fuel that I think is the bridge fuel. Here's what natural gas prices have been doing. Natural gas prices are spiking again. This chart was made on the retail price. Today, natural gas was $12.40 out of the ground. And now what's ironic about that, this is a time of year when you don't use a lot of natural gas because you're minimizing heating and you're minimizing cooling. You're kind of at the period where we depend on natural temperatures. So we use much less natural gas at this time of year. So this is when natural gas prices dive. And we put that cheap gas in the ground and we use it next winter because in the winter time, when we're heating the country, we can't produce enough gas for that period of time, so we store it. And my district has many caverns, salt caverns where we store gas for the northeast. So we're now putting $12.40 gas in the ground for next winter. Last year at this time we were putting $6.50 and $7 gas in the ground. So the American public yet do not realize that we've had--they're paying very high prices for home heating oil, they're paying very high prices for gasoline and diesel, and they're paying very high prices for home heating oil and propane. But natural gas didn't increase much last year; it was kind of a soft year on natural gas prices. But this year, only the good Lord knows how expensive it's going to be because it appears, for some reason, it's going up like a quarter a day; so that's every four days you're up a dollar. I don't know what's causing it, it's increased use. We have said no to about 50 coal plants that were designed to be built to replace old coal plants in the last 6 months in this country. States have rejected them because of the carbon issue now, or the fear of the carbon issue. So those will all be natural gas plants. Now, up until about 12 years ago we didn't use natural gas to make electricity, and so we made about 8 percent of our electricity with natural gas. And that was peak power in the morning and the evening because you can turn a gas generator off and on, the rest you can't. Now that we use it unlimitedly, we're at 23 percent of our electric is being produced with natural gas. And it's a huge strain on the natural gas system. Now, natural gas should never be a problem in America. We can't probably produce all the oil we need; we can do a lot better than we're doing. But there's no reason America can't have lots of natural gas. We have reserves onshore, offshore, but unfortunately most of them are owned by government entities and they're locked up. Congress has locked them up. Congress has said we're not going to produce. And these environmental groups--let me go back through them. Green Peace; phase out fossil fuels. Environmental Defense; they're against power plant smokestacks are public health enemy number one, so you can't have a power plant. League of Conservation Voters; coal to liquids, the wrong direction. They're going to fight it. Defenders of Wilderness; every coastal State is put in harm's way when oil rigs go up on our coastal waters. Folks, I showed you the chart earlier about every country in the world, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, they all produce offshore, cleanly. The new technology, they turn the wells off when there are storms at the base. There has not been a major spill. And there has never been a gas spill that spoiled a beach. Gas is a clean fuel. And in my view, if we had abundant reasonable natural gas, we could fuel a third of our cars with natural gas. In the cities, our buses, all our short-haul vehicles, our construction vehicles, could all be on clean, green natural gas. But the price is so high today, there is no incentive to do that. To conclude here, here is the Energy Department's charts. The middle is now. This is history. This is what they project for our usage in the future. Now, not long ago there were commercials on television by oil companies that led me to believe that renewables were ready to take over, they were ready to fuel this country, all we had to do was release them. Well, this is what the Energy Department thinks. Not much changed. Now, I don't quite agree with some of these. I think natural gas will increase measurably out here because the carbon issue is going to restrict coal. It may prevent us from doing coal-to-liquid. And it shouldn't happen, but it's actually happening. Coal plants are being turned down--clean coal technology plants are being turned down by environmental agencies to replace all dirty coal plants that we would like to replace because of the carbon issue. So I look for gas to be--if we do a carbon tax, every country that has done a carbon tax, everybody has to go to natural gas because it's a third of the carbon when you burn it of any other fossil fuel. It's the cleanest fuel, it's almost the perfect fuel. But folks, we need oil, we need gas, we need coal, we need nuclear. We need all the renewables and hydros. And we need to grow them all as fast as we can. But our environmental groups want to eliminate all of the below and run the country on above. And it actually goes clear up to here, because they're not for nuclear. The environmental groups are not for nuclear, they're not for coal, they're not for gas, they're not for oil. But folks, that's how we run the world. And with today's clean technology, there is no argument why we can't have affordable energy in America. But it is the will of this Congress to open up. I hope next Wednesday on the Interior Subcommittee that we can be successful with our amendment that would open up the Outer Continental Shelf, from 50 miles out, to oil and gas production. Now, that won't change anything, but I just asked some oil company executives, who I don't talk to often but who were at a hearing, if we opened up the Outer Continental Shelf in its entirety, both coasts, and we opened up ANWR, what would that do to energy prices? He said, well, it would take the fear factor out because here is the problem we have in America. Historically, there was capacity in the world of about 10 million gallons a day of oil that could be pumped if we needed it, from eight to ten. That has been historic. Recently, as China and India have increased their usage and as many of the countries--Mexico, Chavez, Nigeria, Russia, and all of them--have nationalized their oil companies and are now run by the government, they are not being run as efficiently, and they're not producing as much, so production has actually slipped in many of those countries. We are down now to where there is about a 1.2-million-extra-barrel-a- day capacity in the world to meet the world demand. So, if you have a storm and when Exxon was arguing with Chavez over producing, the price went up. When we had the oil refinery a short time ago that was only a 78,000-barrel refinery, the price went up. Why? Because that is going to take some supply off the market. There is no slush. So, if you have any one of these countries--these dictatorships--topple and instead of producing 7 million barrels a day they would produce 5, there wouldn't be enough oil. So the fear factor allows Wall Street to play on those fears and run those prices up. If you took the fear factor out, the oil companies told me, it would probably reduce prices at least 20 to 25 percent. That's just theory. That's their thought. Take the fear factor because there is not enough oil in the marketplace. What has happened and no matter what we do is China's growth in energy use and India's growth in energy use is 15 to 20 percent a year because, as they build a home and buy their first vehicles, they are now in the energy business. Where they used to have a donkey and a hut, they now have a house. Millions of people all over the world are joining our way of life, and to join our way of life, they need heat in their homes; they need a vehicle that needs fuel, and they're part of the energy business. Those are the developing countries in South America, in India, in China, in Malaysia. It's happening everywhere. We are soon going to be the second biggest user of energy because China is about ready to go by us. I believe, if America continues to refuse to deal with energy and bring available energy to America, we will not compete in the new global economy. We are in an economy today where we have never had competitors like China and India before. We have never had this kind of pressure on us. We have to compete. I want to make one final point on natural gas. Natural gas is not a world price. We have had one of the highest prices of any country in the world of natural gas now for 8 years. That is why half the fertilizer industry has left this country; they use huge amounts of natural gas. I'll just share with you some data here that's scary. Dow Chemical announced a 20 percent price increase, but it's what you look at behind that that's scary. In 2002, their natural gas bill was $8 billion. In 2008, it was $32 billion. That's four times. In 2002, 60 percent of their revenues came from American plants. Just a few years later, it was only 34 percent of their revenues. Why? They had to move offshore to compete in the global economy. Over half the fertilizer companies have left America in the last 3 years because of natural gas prices. The increase in the cost of natural gas has caused plastic resin prices to rise to record levels. It has put American-based plastic facilities--and my district is full of plastic plants--at a severe competitive disadvantage, says Josh Young of the American Plastics Council. As a result, the factories are closing or are moving offshore. They are leaving Americans jobless. Over the past 5 years, the plastic industry has lost nearly 4,000 jobs in Florida, which refused to allow us to drill, and more than 300,000 jobs nationwide just in the plastics industry. Petrochemicals have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, fertilizer thousands of jobs and steel makers, aluminum makers and glass that use huge amounts. My prediction is that bulk commodities like glass and bricks, that should always be made close to home, will soon be made in Trinidad where gas is $1.50 instead of $12 coming out of the ground. We will make our bricks and glass in Trinidad, South America. It will come here in about a day and a half on a ship. That's not the America I dream for. Available, affordable energy is available to us if this Congress will do what is right: Open up offshore, do coal to liquids, expand the use of nuclear, continue to subsidize the renewables and to incentivize the renewables. I think we also need to incentivize Americans. I mean Americans are conserving. They have to conserve, but we need to incentivize Americans with tax breaks that would help them write off any measurable improvement they made in their homes and in their lifestyles, whether it's heating their homes with more modern appliances or whether it's better insulation or better windows or better doors, so we can conserve the use of energy. As was talked about here on the floor earlier, there is education. My school districts are getting hammered with energy costs. The hospitals are getting hammered with energy costs as are your agencies that give free aid to the people. I mean every social agency is getting hammered with energy costs. I talked to a church person tonight who said they weren't sure they were going to be able to keep their church open next winter. The energy bills last year have made it almost prohibitive to keep their church open in the colder months in the winter. They are going to have to find a place to meet somewhere else. Folks, this is a self-induced problem by this Congress and by three Presidents. In our Presidential debate, the number one issue ought to be who has the best plan for available, affordable energy for America.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That's right.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, let the record show that on Wednesday, May 21, oil hit $137 a barrel and closed at about $134. Natural gas has pushed by $11.50 per thousand and is approaching $12. Yes, this chart I have shows the growth in energy costs. Price of oil continues to skyrocket. I guess the part that's surprising is, as a 12- year Member of this body, that it's not a crisis here. This Congress is not treating energy prices as if it was a crisis. I was looking at my notes before I came down from an October time when I came down to the floor, and we talked then, as we were kind of climbing through the eighties, and that day we had hit $94 a barrel. And we all shuddered that we might be approaching $100, and here we are a few months later, not only past $100, but at $134 and actually hit $137 today. Do we have a bipartisan task force by the House and Senate that would look at how we deal with this energy crisis and how we deal with these high prices that American consumers are struggling with? The answer is no. Do we have a special House committee looking for solutions? The answer is no. Yesterday, the House had a bill. It was defined and named to cut costs, cut gas costs. Will it? Well, the first part of the bill dealt with trying to figure out a legal way that we can sue the OPEC countries for not producing enough oil. Now, Saudi Arabia alone produces 12 million barrels a day, and many of the other countries, 10, 9, 7, but we think they should produce more. It's interesting, on this floor a few months ago, when we had some energy bills pass that didn't have any energy in them, we claimed that it was a new era. The era of oil was over. We were moving into the fields, the new fields, and energy dependence on foreign countries would disappear. I've been in Congress 12 years. We've increased dependency almost 2 percent a year every year I've been here, and we're on a pattern that by 2015, if we don't change, we'll be 85 percent dependent on foreign, mostly dictatorship, unstable countries, not always friendly to us. I think that's a serious crisis for the American people. It's a serious crisis for American businesses to compete. It's a serious crisis to our defense of this country. I wish our governmental leaders, White House and legislative included, were half as interested in energy prices as our military was. Because when I talk to the leaders of the Air Force specifically, who use a huge amount of our energy flying our planes, they want 60 percent of their energy to be non-foreign, and they're working judiciously to do other fuels from coal and fuels from gas and trying to have other non-oil fuels because in oil we're just becoming majorly foreign dependent. Today, the Senate determined that when they return after the May recess, they're going to deal in the week or two period with climate change. They're going to deal with carbon taxes because they think that a one-and-a-half percentage degree in temperature increase in this country, in this world, is a greater threat to our future than energy prices that most Americans can't afford, and most businesses can't compete in the global economy if they continue. But the Senate is not talking about energy. They're talking about a climate bill and a carbon tax which will increase energy prices 25 to 30 percent. Much of America today hit $4 in gasoline. That means if the Senate acts as they say they're going to, a carbon tax could easily, everybody agrees, could increase energy prices 20 to 30 percent. So 25 percent of $4 is another dollar so we would go to $5 gasoline. And only God knows what oil prices will be by the time they accomplish that. Does America need to be in an energy crisis? I think not. We made a decision several decades ago, in fact 27 years ago, a very foolish decision. We locked up offshore production of energy on both coasts and in much of the gulf. Every country in the world, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, all green countries, all environmentally sensitive countries, they all produce offshore. They have different set-asides, some 20 miles, some 30 miles, some 15 miles. Eleven miles is the sight line. Once it's past 11 miles, nobody can see it. All those countries, every country produces. Canada, thank God for Canada. We import more energy from Canada than anybody else, our friend to the north. They produce both oil and gas right off the coast of Maine, just above it, and right above the coast of Washington. And since 1913, they've been producing natural gas only in the Great Lakes, and today they're selling it to us. We get 15 percent of our natural gas from Canada, 2 percent from LNG, and the rest we produce ourselves. We could be totally self-sufficient in natural gas. Now, a young lady said to me recently, she said, Mr. Peterson, I make $320 a week. I lost my other job so I have to travel a fair distance now to work. I'm now paying $130 a week to drive to work. She says, I don't know how I can continue to raise my two children and make ends meet. What she didn't know was that the small house she has, her current natural gas bill, on a monthly basis, $175--she pays balanced billing-- what she doesn't know is that the $12 gas or $11.70 today we're putting in the ground now compares to $6.50 gas we were putting in the ground-- and you may say, what do you mean putting in the ground? Well, we have great storage caverns, much of them in my district in Pennsylvania, where we store natural gas in old salt caverns, and then we use it in the wintertime because we can't produce, we can't pump enough out of the ground in the heating season when we use tremendous amounts of natural gas. So we're putting it in the ground in storage today. Now, one of the major storage companies told me last week at a luncheon, they're very concerned; they have not had their storage this low in a long time, and they're very concerned because they've been unable to buy as much LNG as they want. And they're very concerned. I said, why are you putting $11.50 gas in the ground? Why don't you wait until the price comes down? They said, we're afraid the price isn't going to come down. Because usually in the spring of the season, when we're not heating our homes and we're not running a lot of air conditioning, we use the least natural gas of any other time of the year. So that's when we have ample supply, the price comes down, it gets reasonable, and that's when we put it in storage for next winter. Later year at this time, it was $6.50, later in the summer it was $5 something. And last year we had a moderate increase in natural gas prices, about 7, 8, 9, 10 percent, depending on what part of the country you were in. That was moderate. Well, those who heated with home heating oil and propane had huge increases last year. And the sad story for Americans is those who heat with propane and home heating fuel are going to have enormous increases this year on top of last year's increases. And those who heat with natural gas are going to have a major increase. We don't know how much yet. For the first time in 2 years we have not had a storm in the Gulf, the last two summers. That's historic. We always have storms in the Gulf, hurricanes, that disrupt oil and gas supply. And when it disrupts that supply, we never replace it, so it just takes it out of the system. And whenever we have a major storm in the Gulf--when Katrina hit, gas went from, like, $4 or $5 to $14. And that year we had a huge increase in natural gas prices because that's what we had to pay. Now, the LNG issue I mentioned, you know, I had a debate with the White House some time ago, and they felt that LNG was our answer to natural gas. I argued then, 3 years ago, and I argue now, it's not the answer. It's a little piece of the solution. Now, what is LNG? That's liquefied natural gas, we buy it from foreign countries a long ways from here. Gas is cheaper in those countries. They liquefy it. They fill these huge tankers and they come here, and then we build controversial unloading stations. They're really not unsafe, but people perceive them to be. And we were in a flurry to build more receiving stations. We found out we really haven't needed them, we're hardly using half of the capacity we have today. Why? Because we can't buy it. When a tanker with LNG gets loaded in one of these foreign countries, countries like Japan, who don't have any gas of their own, little countries like Spain, and on and on the list goes, they outbid us. Sometimes a tanker load of gas will be coming to the States, and they will get a higher price offered and they actually turn around and go to that country. In fact, in the heating season, when we need it, we can't buy it on a bet. So LNG has not been the silver bullet that many thought. And the Secretary of Energy went around the world trying to entice LNG for this country. And I argued that LNG is helpful, but it's not a silver bullet, it shouldn't be our solution because, folks, between major gas areas in the Midwest and in the Pennsylvania Appalachian region, recent find, offshore we have an abundant volume of natural gas. And natural gas is the clean, green fuel. And if it was more affordable, we could be using it in our auto fleets because autos can run on natural gas with a couple thousand dollar exchange of carbonation and storage tanks and so forth, maybe $2,000 or $3,000 a vehicle. We could run all of our school buses, short haul, all of our city buses, the Washington City. Many of them are on natural gas. State College in my district has been an all natural gas district for a number of years now. All of their bus system--it's the third largest bus system in Pennsylvania--they're all on clean, green natural gas. Natural gas should be our bridge fuel. But at $12 now, and if we have a storm in the Gulf, it would be 15 or more, those prices, it's not our solution. But it could be our solution if we would open up the OCS, if we would open up Alaska, if we would open up much of the Midwest and start producing our own clean natural gas. I have found it astounding that there is resistance to producing energy in America. What's really happened in America, and I'll just go a little bit more on natural gas here. Here is the natural gas prices. The blue line is what commercial pays--they pay a little less than households because they use high volume--and the red line is where residents are. And folks, this is today's price at the retail. In the fall, it's going to be off of this chart. There is going to be a huge increase, I predict, and everybody agrees. We will have to make a new chart because this chart won't work. Natural gas prices. Now, is that problematic? Yeah, it's problematic, because not only do we use natural gas to heat our homes and to run our businesses, we use it as an ingredient. Fertilizer, about 70 to 90 percent of the cost of making it is natural gas because that's what we make it out of. The corn we're growing for ethanol uses natural gas to make the fertilizer to grow the corn. If we go to a hydrogen vehicle, we will use a natural gas. The ethanol we use in vehicles today, the biofuels, biodiesel, those plants consume huge amounts of natural gas. One was just proposed in a southern State, and their projected natural gas costs for the first year was $3.5 million and they were looking for a cheaper fuel. Natural gas is the major ingredient in petrochemicals, polymers, plastics. We use it to bend steel, melt steel. We use it to treat all kinds of products. We use it to cook. We use it to bake. We use it in many, many commercial ways. And natural gas prices are making American businesses noncompetitive. Dow Chemical, in 2002, a petrochemical company, the biggest in the world, American company, a good company, they used $8 billion of natural gas in 2002. Then we had the big spike in gas prices. In 2006, their gas bill went to $22 billion. And I don't know what it is today, certainly much higher. They started building their plants. These are the best blue-collar jobs left in America, petrochemical plants, fertilizer plants, polymer and plastic plants, plants that heat, treat steel and bend metal and shape things. They all use natural gas as their fuel. And they are being endangered because natural gas is not a world price. Nobody in the world pays this price but us. It's cheaper in Canada, a little bit. They're high because of us, because they're kind of hooked at the hip. It's cheaper in Mexico. At the wholesale side, it's $1 something in Trinidad, South America. In Russia, it's just barely over one dollar. Many parts of the world--all parts of the world, in those countries, China and India, our competitors, their natural gas prices are probably a third of ours. That puts our companies at a huge disadvantage, not just labor disadvantage, not just because of other high costs in this country, energy costs have driven more jobs out of America than any other issue, not that they wanted to leave, they just can't afford to stay. Now, with energy prices today, I talked about the young lady and her job, driving to work and her home, we're going to have seniors--you know, just the other day I had a gentleman tell me he put a new furnace in his mother's home. But when he went to visit her last winter, she had her temperature at 58 because she felt that was all she could afford. And he said, John, what do I do? I don't want my mother living at 58 degrees, I want her to be warm. So he's looking at some sort of heater in the one room where she sits in the evening so she can be toasty warm, maybe a pellet stove or a gas stove or something that keeps that room warm but the furnace down, not heating the whole house. I went into a hardware store 2 weeks ago and they had their coats on. It was chilly in there. It was a frosty morning, we had frost that morning. And I said, it's kind of chilly in here. And he said, well, with energy prices today, in the spring and the fall I shut my furnaces off. We're a lumber yard, we're a hardware store, people come in here dressed for the outside temperature, and so we just dress for the outside temperature in our work. It saves me $800 a month in the spring and the fall, that's 4 months, so that's $3,200 that I don't have a gas bill--that I would pay in a gas bill, $800. Now, in the winter I pay a lot more than that, but it's cold then and you have to have heat, pipes will freeze, people won't come in your store if they can see their breath. Folks, I don't think we have any idea what we're doing to the economic future of America, what we're doing to the quality of life of the average hardworking poor American. Now, those who are middle class will complain and groan and they'll pay because they have the money. But below the middle class and the working class and the poor in this country, when they pay their driving bill--and rural people, I represent rural, we don't have mass transit; we drive to school, we drive to work, we drive to church, we drive to the doctor, we drive to the mall, we drive everywhere. And in rural areas, when the economy shifts and you lose your job at a plant, you don't move away, you go 50 miles down the road and you get a job and then you drive to work every day. I had a lady tell me today, my gas bill per week now is $180 a week. And now when she gets her heating bill next winter, will she have enough money to raise her family, heat her home, and drive her car? Many won't. The current energy prices have the potential of stalling this economy. I had a person who has been dealing with energy all his life. He is a government official. He told me about 9 months ago that he thought $75 oil would put us in a recession and stall the economy of this country, and in time, the world. Now he said we bounced through that. We were just by that, and we were in the $80s then. He said, my people and I may have been wrong, but there is a price that our economy cannot absorb these energy prices. And folks, $134 oil? I mean, it's almost like we're talking fantasy. How did we get here? How did we get to this situation? Well, here's some of the things--back to natural gas for a minute. In all of these products, natural gas is used in making them--steam, power, and all of these blocks. Huge amounts of natural gas. Even the skin creams that you ladies like to keep your skin soft, that's a direct ingredient of natural gas. The feedstock for making skin softeners is natural gas. Well, here's where we are in energy use. Let's try to figure out how we got here. You can see the big part of our energy is oil. And now, 66.5 percent of our oil comes from foreign countries. Natural gas is the next largest, and coal--well, I guess coal would be the next, but let's go to natural gas. We're 83 percent self-sufficient. We get 2 percent in fraction from LNG and about 15 percent from Canada, our good friend in the north who drills offshore where we won't. Now, coal basically is used in this country to make electricity, and about 50 percent of our electricity in this country is made from coal. Now, nuclear has been 20 percent of the energy in our electric system, not our energy overall, but our electric system. And of course the beige line here is hydro, and that's getting smaller because we're taking dams out. The environmentalists don't want dams. All the environmental community, they don't want dams in our rivers, and a lot of them have been tore out. And we're not adding hydro anywhere, so it's a declining factor. Now, as you look at renewables, this is scary. Renewables are wind and solar and geothermal and woody biomass. And the only one of those that actually had real measurable growth in volume is woody biomass. A little growth in wind and a little growth in solar, but the big one that has really grown measurably is woody biomass. How did that happen? Well, we have between 800,000 and 1 million Americans heating their homes with pellet stoves. That's a fuel made out of waste sawdust, a good use of biomass. We use it to heat factories. Most of the dry kilns, where you dry your lumber, that used to be heated with fuel oil and natural gas are now heated with wood waste. Many factories that are in the wood business are all heated with wood waste boilers. I have a company in my district now that builds very efficient wood waste boilers that actually burn wood waste cleaner than natural gas; it's an amazing ceramic-lined boiler. We recently placed those in a hospital in my district, that boiler, and that hospital is going to save 70 percent on their energy bill. And they're going to be using waste sawdust and wood chips. They can even burn green wood chips, like if a tree trimmer comes through and trims the trees and grinds it up-- and they usually find places to dump that--they can now blow that into a tractor trailer and use it for fuel, cardboard waste, paper waste. This hospital is going to burn all its cardboard, all its paper, all its clean fuel, and buy sawdust and wood chips. They are going to save 70 percent on their energy bill. Woody biomass is finding a market of its own. Now, there have been a lot of windmills added, and they are going to be a lot more added. But the numbers are still, you know--I keep reading articles. I read one recently that in just a few years 100 percent of electricity could be from wind. Folks, that's just not accurate. I read an article last week that in a few years we'll have 20 percent of our electricity. Now, one of the problems, you know, the grid failed in Texas recently because they have some successful windmills. But there are two times of the day when we need a lot of energy, that's in the morning and evening, peak power. That's when we're running our homes and our factories simultaneously. We're running washers and dryers and we're running hot water and we're cooking and we're doing things, so we're using a lot of energy in the factory and at home. Those are called peaks. Well, from 4 to 6 o'clock, if you just watch the weather, and I've watched it, you can have a very windy day, and between 4 and 6, for some reason, the wind calms down. There's not much breeze. So wind farms don't produce a lot of energy sometimes on a nonwindy afternoon from 4 to 6 when you need it. So what happens when it doesn't blow and it doesn't turn? You have to turn on a gas generator. For every wind and solar generator, we have to have a gas backup. Now, gas is 23 percent. Gas is now 23 percent of our electric generation. Just a decade ago, it was less than 7. We only allowed it to be peak power. We didn't allow electricity to be made from natural gas. We thought it was too clean and perfect to fuel and there were too many other uses for it, but we've changed. Now we are at 23 percent. And on a hot summer day when you have 100 degree temperatures across America and air conditioning is just sucking up all the electricity we can produce and our grid is struggling to stay up, every power plant that only comes on when it's peak is running 24/7 when we have hot summer weather. Now, that's changed things. We have never taken gas out of storage in the summertime until last year. Last year we had 2 weeks, 2 different weeks, when it was hot enough that we were producing enough electricity with natural gas that we fully had a negative flow of gas out of our storage areas for winter instead of in. Folks, if we were to have a terrible storm in the this year, and everybody says we're going to, and we went 2 years without it, and we would have a very hot summer where we would use a lot of peak power and a lot of natural gas for electric generation, we could be looking at unbelievable natural gas prices this fall. Now, I know the news I'm giving you is all bad news. But, folks, it's because this Congress and three Presidents have chosen not to produce fossil fuels. Now, I'm for every renewable source there is. I'm for hydrogen. I have been pushing hydrogen my whole time in Congress. We hope it becomes a fuel of the future. I'm for wind and solar. I'm for cellulosic ethanol because it's vital because I don't think we can get to where they want to be with biofuels with soybeans and corn. I don't think we can grow enough of it. I've been stunned that we haven't opened up a lot more farmland, but we haven't. Last year we grew 20 million more acres of corn, and corn prices went from 3 something a bushel to $6.40 and $6.50 at one point. It's just under $6 now. We doubled and tripled grain prices. Food prices are skyrocketing because we used 20 percent of our corn last year to make biofuels, and this year we're projecting to use a third of our corn, and this year we are not growing 20 million acres more; I think we are only growing 8 million acres more or we're growing 8 million acres less. Somewhere in there that number is correct. But we're not going to grow as much corn, and they're concerned now with the wet weather in the West that we are not going to get all the corn we need planted. Now, when you use grain long term and food long term for energy source, what happens when you have a bad crop year? You're not going to have food to eat and you're not going to have warmth. That's why cellulosic ethanol is so important. Now, cellulosic ethanol can be made out of switchgrass, it can be made out of garbage, and it can be made out of wood waste. Where I come from, we have lots of wood waste, and I think that will be of use. But I think the one that has the most potential if in the laboratory--and these are all ``ifs.'' But yet we have a mandate by 2030 that we have to have 36.5 billion gallons per year of ethanol, the first 15 made from corn and the next 20 made from cellulosic. This is a mandate, by law. This is a process where we have not yet proven we can make it cost effectively. Folks, we are in a crisis in this country because we have chosen not to drill for gas, not to drill for oil, no new fields. We have people come up here and talk about all the unused permits, all the land that's been leased and not drilled. Folks, if it's drillable and there's money there to be made, it will be drilled. And they all talk about big oil, but 80 percent of our energy is produced by small companies, people that are in our own States. Big oil are the named marketers, but energy is basically produced by independents. But we keep talking about these terrible oil companies and they're the problem. I think Exxon answered the question well. They were talking about their profits the other day, and they said, Folks, we would reinvest in America if offshore was open, if Alaska was open, if the Midwest was open, but you forced us to go to foreign countries. Now we have foreign countries nationalizing their oil patches and their oil refineries and their oil production systems, and big oil is being gradually pushed out, and oftentimes their investments have been captured. Sometimes they have been paid for, sometimes not. And big oil is prepared to produce here if we open up. Folks, we need to open up oil and gas reserves in this country. We need to have six or eight coal-to-liquid plants so we're not dependent on oil forever because we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. We need to figure out how to have more nuclear plants. The 2005 bill streamlined the process, and there are about 50 nuclear plants in the permit process, and there are 3 or 4 about ready to be built. We need all 50 of them by 2030 to maintain 20 percent of the electric grid. Not an increase. Hydro will continue to decrease. This is a chart put out by EIA of the Energy Department. I disagree with them. We have had 60 coal plants turned down, clean coal, not dirty coal, clean coal, turned down by States because of the fear of the carbon issue. All of those will be built in gas plants, and when they are all built in gas plants, you will see this blue narrow and you will see the greens widen. Natural gas is where we will be going. It's the only place we can go. It's the clean, green fuel. But, folks, for it to be affordable, we need to produce a whole lot more of it. It's never polluted a beach. It's never caused pollution in this country. It's the cleanest fuel, no NOX, no SOX, a third of the CO2. It's almost the perfect fuel. It's cleaner than biofuels. But for some reason, three Presidents and Congress for 27 years have locked up not only our shorelines but much of the middle of this country and the part of Alaska that was set aside for energy production, 2,000 acres on a 70 million acre plot to produce energy. With modern drilling they drill multiple wells on the same site, and they go many directions. You don't have nearly as many sites. Folks, America needs energy. We need energy we can afford to pay. The working people of this country not only are not going to be able to afford to heat their homes and drive their cars, but many of them will lose their jobs because these energy prices, as I showed you earlier, $14 gas, America is the only place that someone pays $14 for gas. Every other part of the world is cheaper. Oil prices are the same everywhere. It's a world price. But for 8 years the Dow Chemicals, the manufacturers, the fertilizer companies have paid the highest prices in the world for natural gas and have been asked to compete with the rest of the world. Energy is a crisis in America, but Congress treats it like it's not a crisis. We do goofy things like trying to sue OPEC, and we know we don't have standing to sue other countries. They don't come under our court system. We're trying to wiggle our laws around so we can sue them. That's a waste of time. We need to produce energy. Also, I have a natural gas bill, the Outer Continental Shelf. In my bill it's natural gas only, offshore. We use the royalties for renewable research. We use royalties to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. We use royalties to clean up the Great Lakes, San Francisco Bay, the Everglades. Folks, if we would produce energy offshore, we can allocate the royalties to fund the renewables. Today we were arguing over and fighting over the extensions for the tax incentives for wind and solar and geothermal and all the renewables. We extended them for 1 year. Our investment companies are going to spend a billion dollars on wind and solar when in a year from now, there may not be that incentive there that makes it work. Folks, this Congress has failed us. This Congress continues to fail us. This Congress needs an energy policy. This White House needs an energy policy. And the people running for President of this United States need to prove to the Americans before they elect them that they have an energy policy that they're going to bring to this country to provide us with the gas and the oil and the renewables and clean energies and it's going to be affordable for Americans to live their lives, run their farms, run their businesses. Folks, I've listened to hours and hours of presidential debates. Energy was seldom mentioned, and it's certainly not been a platform of the current candidates. We need a person running for President, Americans need to demand of those running for President, ``How are you going to produce?'' We have those who talk about green collar jobs. I'm for green collar jobs. But let me tell you, if we don't bring affordable energy to America, the blue collar jobs won't be here. They'll be gone, and we don't know how many of the green collar jobs. We need them both. I'm for plants to build windmills. I'm for plants to build solar. And when we learn how to store wind and solar so that we can make it during the night when we don't need it and use it in the daytime when we need it, then it will work. But until we do that, it's on the margins. If we double wind and solar in 5 years, it will be less than 1 percent of our energy. I hope we can do that, but that's still not very much energy. But the American public have been led to believe that we are holding renewables back, that we're not for these energy-efficient cars. There are incentives, folks, of thousands of dollars to buy energy-efficient cars. There are incentives to do wind and solar. Unfortunately, they're not long term. Those who are investing are gambling because we just renewed them a little bit at a time. We just renewed them for a year. Folks, we need to renew them for 5 to 10 years. We need to have it out there, and then if it isn't working, we stop doing that. But, folks, there are those who say we need to conserve, and we do, and we will at these prices. But let me tell you that in a later speech sometime I'm going to show you the American people are using far less energy in America per capita today than we did a few years ago. We've done more than people give us credit for. We have more efficient appliances and more efficient engines and things than we had many years ago. We have done better than any other country in overall energy conservation. Folks, we haven't done enough, but I want to tell you $4 gasoline or $5 gasoline and $14 gas to heat our homes are going to force us to do a lot of things. But America doesn't have to be in this situation. Yes, we need the new kind of fuels, renewable fuels. But until they are ready, we can't decide, as a Congress and a White House, that we're not going to produce. Let me just tell you who some of the perpetrators are. The environmental groups of America own this Congress. Sierra Club rails against shale oil production. Over a trillion barrels of shale oil in the West. We can't do that. Green Peace says we must phase out fossil fuels. Folks, how do we do that? Ninety-six percent of our energy is fossil fuels. How do we stop that? That's what we're doing. We're phasing them out before we have the replacement. The Environmental Defense Fund: ``Power plants and smokestacks are our public health enemy number one, and we must do away with them.'' That's our jobs, our factories, folks. League of Conservation Voters; coal to liquids, wrong direction. Well, should we do coal to liquids or should we do more foreign dependence on the Mid East? That is our choice. Defenders of Wilderness; every coastal State is in harm's way when an oil rig goes up. Folks, that is not true. We haven't had an oil spill since 1969. We have never had a gas spill. When a gas well lets gas out, it goes in the air. Dissipates. Natural Resource Defense Council; coal mining destroys land. Coal plant emissions cripple and kill. We have clean coal technologies with much cleaner emissions than we have ever had, but we are turning them down and not building them. We are using old dirty coal plants because they can't build the new ones. That's our environmental policy. Center for Biological Diversity; oil and gas drilling on public land has a devastating impact. Does it have to? It can be done right. Friends of the Earth; liquid coal is dirty and costly. Liquid coal doesn't have to be dirty and costly. We have ways of doing it. North Africa, or South Africa, I guess, is leading the way with liquid coal. That is making gasoline and diesel out of coal. And we have lots of it. We need to be working at it and learning how to do it cleanly so we are not dependent. Folks, we are 66 percent dependent on foreign unstable countries. We have no control over prices. A storm in the gulf and we have another major spurt in energy prices. One of our sending countries, and here's who we get our energy from. We produce 33.7 percent of our own oil, we import 66.3 percent of our oil. Canada provides 12 percent of our oil; Mexico, 9.3; non-OPEC nations, 8.9; Ecuador, 1.3; Saudi Arabia, 9.6 percent; Venezuela, 7.5. Our friend, Venezuela, 7.5 percent of our oil comes from there. Nigeria, a stable country, questionable, 7.2; Angola 3.3 percent; Iraq 3.2; Algeria, 3.1; Kuwait, 1.2; other OPEC is .06. That is our oil. That's where we get our oil from. Folks, we don't have to be dependent on it. America is rich in resources. Natural gas should be our bridge. Clean vehicles on natural gas. Natural gas should be the fuel of the future, and our industries shouldn't have to pay the highest price in the world for natural gas so they are forced to leave here. Americans shouldn't be forced to live in homes that are cold in the wintertime because they can't afford to heat them. People should be able to afford to drive to work. Folks, it's a crisis in America. It should be a crisis in this Congress. Today, the White House again spoke about we need to produce more energy. Tomorrow I am going to write the President a letter. You know, if he means that, he needs to lift the Outer Continental Shelf moratorium, because we don't have one moratorium, we have a legislative one by Congress for 27 years and we have had a Presidential one for 27 years, and he can lift it in a moment. That is how it was put there. Bush I put it there for 5 years until we assessed the Outer Continental Shelf, what was there. We have never assessed that. We have never allowed seismographic out there. Then Clinton came in and extended it to 2012, and also vetoed the Alaskan bill, ANWR, which would be producing major oil for us today. He vetoed that. Bush II has ignored it and refused to talk about the OCS. Folks, we have three Presidents and a Congress with a 27-year history of not producing affordable available energy in America, and we are the only country in the world to lock up the Outer Continental Shelf, we are the only country in the world that has locked up most of our internal resources. Congress and Presidents have been our problem. Congress needs to get the message that it's time to stop being our problem, and we need to have a President that leads us to energy, affordable available energy for America.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. And if carbon capture and CO2, if you have those who believe that's such an evil force, that the CO2 we breathe out is a poisonous gas, if we put carbon capture and CO2 payments ahead of affordable available energy, America will be a Section 8 Nation. We won't compete with anybody in the industrialized world because our energy costs will prohibit it.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. In fairness to those countries, they're producing more and more energy, and we have chosen not to produce very much of our own only in the whole entire fields. And yet we pass a bill so we think we can sue them because they're not producing enough? I find that interesting. The bill ought to be that the American public can sue us because we've locked up our resources and forced them to buy foreign expensive energy.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, that is something they all have. And I think, in my view, we need to be watching very closely as we elect a President, do they have a bona fide energy policy for America.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I want to thank the gentleman from Utah and thank him for his leadership in the Western Caucus. Even though I'm from Western Pennsylvania and Central Pennsylvania, I've been a proud member of the Western Caucus my tenure in Congress, and have enjoyed working on the many issues that the West is interested in. $129 oil today. I remember a short time ago when it hit 80 and then it hit 90. I came down on the floor, thinking this Congress would start to react as if it was a crisis. Here we are today with $129. We've been over 120 for a week or so. Do we have a bipartisan Senate/House task force formed to deal with energy? No. Not an issue. Do we have a special committee in the Congress here in the House to deal with energy, maybe bipartisan or partisan? No. Is anybody calling for a special session that we deal with energy? No matter where I go, where I fly, what coffee shop I sit in, everybody's talking about energy prices. Why? Because a young lady said to me recently, Mr. Peterson, I make $320 a week. I'm raising two children as a single mom. I'm now paying $130 a month, no, $130 a week to drive to work. In rural America people drive distances to work. They drive distances to school. They drive distances to shop. They drive distances to go to the doctor. There's no transits, there's no cheap way to travel. She said, I'm spending $130 a week. I said, what are you spending to heat your home? She said, I'm spending $175 a month, year round, to heat my home with natural gas. What this young lady doesn't know that, since she told me that, energy prices have risen considerably. That was a few weeks ago. And what she doesn't know, and most Americans don't know that natural gas prices to heat our homes are going up measurably this fall. Last year, at this time, in the summertime, we put our natural gas in reserve, underground caverns because we can't produce enough during the winter heating season. Last year, at this time we were putting gas in the ground at $6.50 to 7, and that was a little bit higher than usual. Not a lot but a little bit. Today we're putting $11 gas in the ground. And I talked to one of the experts at the Energy Department today, and he expects that figure to rise. If we would have a major storm in the gulf, which we have not had for 2 years, and we always lose some production in the gulf when that happens, we could have 14, $15 gas go in the ground. If that's true, home heating costs next winter, with natural gas, and that's 62 percent of Americans, will double. Those who are heating with propane and home heating oil this year paid huge prices, and are going to pay much higher prices next year. Natural gas only went up about 10 percent. But that's going to change. Folks, America has chosen, the leadership in America has chosen to not produce our own energy, to lock ours up. Now, we did pass a bill today called, interesting name, the Gas Price Relief Act for Consumers of 2008. Now, wouldn't you think that's going to do something with prices? Well, here's what it does. It's trying to figure out a legal way for us to sue OPEC and other countries who we don't think's producing enough oil. If, you know, I think Saudi Arabia, I looked today, is 12 million barrel a day. And the President was just there, and the Speaker asked him to ask for more oil, and I think he asked for more oil. A month or so ago, Vice President Cheney was over there, and the Speaker and others asked him to ask for more oil, and he asked for more oil. But now we're going to pass a bill saying that if they don't produce enough oil, and if we think they're kind of conspiring and not producing as much as they could, we want some court to sue them in. Well, it seems to me, we're a little bit vulnerable, because I want you to look at my chart here. Congress, for 27 years, has locked up the Outer Continental Shelf. That's offshore production of energy. Every country in the world produces out there, a major part of their energy, both oil and natural gas. We've also locked up major parts of the Midwest. Up here in Alaska, we locked up the portion of ANWR that was set aside for energy production. That's why it was set aside. I think we heard in earlier testimony here that 2,000 acres out of millions would have been actually the footprint. And yet, this Congress said no. Now, we've said no to Alaska. We've said no to the Midwest. The oil shale rock was recently locked up, not signed into law yet, but we passed a bill here with six plus votes, I think, to lock up the shale oil in three States in the West. We heard earlier about the huge coal lock up with one Presidential order. Congress, and three Presidents, have locked up offshore production. Now, we have the nerve to say that we're going to sue other countries because they're only producing 12 million barrels a day for us? I think maybe we ought to pass the bill that Americans could sue Congress and the administration for not producing adequate energy. We have been negligent. This Congress has the mind set that we're going to run this country with renewables. Now, I wish that was true. But let's look at the chart. The left of this chart is history. The right of this chart is the Energy Department's prediction. There's not much change. Hydro, non-hydro renewables. This is wind, solar and geothermal and woody biomass. And the one that's increased the most is woody biomass because a million Americans are now heating their home with pellet stoves. That's sawdust made into pellets. All the wood companies are drying their wood. If they dry their wood they're using wood waste now instead of fuel oil or diesel or natural gas because they can't afford that. And many power plants are topping off their loads. To keep under air emission standards they may use 80 percent coal and 20 percent wood waste. And we now have some plants coming on-line generating with wood waste. So woody biomass, and now we're talking about cellulosic ethanol, which will also be another use for woody biomass. So that's been the only one that's growing. Nuclear, we need, we have 45 to 50 plants that are now applying for new permits, and we need all of them to be completed by 2030 to stay equal. Coal, it shows coal growing. I don't believe that's going to happen. We've had about 60 coal plants in the country that have been turned down by States because of the threat of climate change legislation, which will put a tax on energy. When you hear people talking about carbon taxes and carbon trading, you need to realize that in every country that's went down that road, that will increase energy prices another 20 to 30 percent. Now, let's say it's 25. Well, at $4 gasoline, that means, with a carbon tax, gasoline would be $5 pretty quickly, without oil prices going up. Now, they show natural gas flat here. I disagree with the Energy Department, because every one of those 60 coal plants that have been turned down will be a natural gas fired generation plant. Just 10, 12 years ago we produced 7 percent of our electricity with natural gas. We're now at 23 percent and growing. And whenever you deal with carbon in any country, the only field you can shift to is natural gas. It's cleaner. No knocks, no socks, and a third of the CO2. So it's the clean green gas. Now, we should be using more of it. But if we're going to use more of it, we need to produce more of it and we need to be out on the Outer Continental Shelf. As we showed before, we need to get into the Midwest, we need to do the coal to liquids, coal to gas, as we heard others talking about earlier. We need to do all of those things, and those are all doable. Folks, we need all the wind and solar we can get. And I'm for it. But if we double it in the next 5 years, we will be less than 1 percent of our energy use in this country. So it's not big numbers. We can't run the country on renewables. We're not increasing hydro. Folks, we're really not increasing anything. We're sitting on our hands. We're a policy-less country, as far as energy is concerned. The 2005 Energy Bill did a lot of good things. The reason we have 45 to 50 permits on nuclear is because it streamlined the process and we now have all those in the pipeline. The unfortunate part, when we build these nuclear plants, the basins are going to come from Japan, that's the base because we don't have the ability to make them here anymore. And many of the components are going to come from Germany, which has a lot of capacity. And we've kind of lost our capacity.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Surely.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. And that comes from Third World countries, dictatorships, the same type of countries that we're purchasing oil from. But let me tell you, it's not that simple. LNG, and I'm not opposed to it, but when a tanker is loaded with LNG it becomes a commodity, and countries like Japan and Spain and other countries that have no natural gas, live by it. They will currently, are paying 14 to $15 per thousand for a tanker load, and we can't afford to pay that. We're paying 11 to put in the ground. We can't put 14 and $15 dollar gas in the ground, or we are automatically doubling natural gas heating prices for next year. Now, natural gas is not just a heating fuel. We run our country with it. You know, we use--70 to 90 percent of the cost of fertilizer to grow corn to make ethanol is natural gas cost. That's what we use. Petrochemical business, 55 percent of their cost is natural gas because they use it as an ingredient and as a fuel. Polymers and plastics, 45 percent of the cost of that industry is natural gas because they use it as an ingredient, as a fuel. Almost everything we manufacture in America has natural gas in it as an ingredient, as a fuel. Really, I've had people tell me it's such a wonderful substance, we never should burn it, we should use it as the chemical that it is to make products. But we know that's not going be the case. We have lots of natural gas in America. Unfortunately, all the rich fields are locked up. Offshore is loaded. The Roan Plateau in the West is loaded. They've just found the new Marcella Shale in the Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia area. It's going to take a while to develop it. But we have lots, but we are not producing enough of it to keep it affordable. And we are looking at a huge spike that's coming at us right now. But LNG, we can only buy it in the off season. In the heating season, when we need it, we never can afford to pay for it because the other countries bid it up. And they have to pay the price because they don't have any other oil.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I was in a hardware store last month, and they had their coats on. And I said, what's going on? He said, in the spring and the fall season now we don't heat our store because people, working people are coming in to buy hardware and lumber, it's a lumber yard. And they said because it costs us 800 in the month in the spring and the fall season, now it's going to cost us a lot more than that in the winter, but we have to keep it warm in the winter. But in the spring months, when nothing will freeze, we shut our heat off. That saves us 800 a month. Those are two fall months and two spring months. That saves me $3,200 profits. So he said, we work with our coats on. Our customers come in with their coats on, they just leave them on and they don't complain. He said, that's how we do it now. We can't afford to heat our store. These costs of natural gas, costs to heat schools this year are going to double. Costs to heat our hospitals are going to double. Almost everything that we use gas for will probably come close to doubling this year. It's going to be terribly inflationary, and it's going to make some businesses just noncompetitive.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Someone was talking the other day here on the floor that we're drilling twice as many wells and we don't need to drill more. Well, we're drilling in old, tired fields. We're drilling the cracks and crevices that we haven't drilled before. You get out into some fertile territories, there's huge gas fields. Just huge. In fact, off the coast of Florida, there was a huge gas field that I think the lady from MS said it was called very sweet gas and it was tremendous volumes, and we actually bought the leases back so we wouldn't produce it. Yet 50 miles offshore, we have Cuba cutting deals with China, Norway, and Canada. They're going to produce gas 50 miles off the Florida coast, and we can't produce 100 miles off the coast. Does that make sense? I don't think so.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, the good news is within the next 3 to 4 weeks, we will be offering an amendment to the Interior bill that will open up on the offshore--let me put my sign back up, my chart back up here--in part of the gulf, east Atlantic, Pacific. Both oceans will all be open from 50 miles out for gas and oil. Now the site distance is level. So if you're at your condo at the beach, when it gets past 11 miles, you won't know it's there. We're going to be 50 miles out. Now, I'd like to come in to 25 or 30 because there's a lot of energy in that section. But we're going to go 50 in hopes that a majority of Congress, House and Senate, will feel the heat from back home and we will open up production. Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, all of these very sensitive environmental countries, they all produce. Canada laughs at us. They actually produce in the Great Lakes. They produce in Lake Erie where I live and they sell us the gas. And I asked them the last time they were in, Do you slant drill to our part of the lake? And he smiled and he said, You bet. Now, we don't allow drilling there either. We could actually drill the Great Lakes from offshore. We wouldn't even have to get in the lakes. But since 1913, Canada has produced in the Great Lakes, and now they're selling us, because we get 15 percent of our natural gas from Canada. Our largest producer of oil outside of our own is Canada, and it's also the only major source we have of natural gas other than our own, and I think 2 percent LNG. I think 15 percent of our natural gas. Thank God Canada produces. They also produce right off of the Washington coast, right off the main coast. Right off within sight of us, they're producing energy with no negative results. I hope in the next 3 or 4 weeks that Congress will feel the heat, understand this issue a little better. A lot of people in the country, a lot of people in Congress don't realize that natural gas is not a world price, and when we're putting $11 gas in the ground, that's the highest price for natural gas coming out of the ground anywhere in the world. In South America, it's a buck-something. In Russia, it's a buck something. So our fertilizer, 50 percent of our fertilizer industry has went offshore now. Polymers and plastics are going offshore. Petrochemicals are going offshore. Those are the best blue-collar jobs left in America, and they need natural gas to produce.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, maybe 30 years ago when oil was $10 a barrel and natural was $2 a thousand, it was smart to use theirs. But when it's $129 a barrel and $11 for natural gas, I think it's time to produce our own. Americans do not need to be sending all of our resources to these other countries.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. If your foreign competitor is melting steel or making a product with $1.25 natural gas, you have a huge disadvantage, and that's what's actually happening.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Thanks for the time. In a couple, 3 weeks we will have the opportunity to fight to open up offshore production of oil and gas, and that alone I think will take some, if we could pass that, House and Senate, have the President sign it, I think that would take some of the excitement out of the oil market and oil and gas would settle down because everybody feels there's a lot of hype in there because the traders see it keep going up and they keep bidding it up to make money. And so we have Wall Street, you know, 15 to 20 percent of our energy prices might be Wall Street making money. But if you take the risk out, you make sure that we have adequate supply opened up, that takes that away; and I think we could see a settling down of the markets, and we might see some measurable price decreases because if we don't, it's going to be a hot summer and it's going to be a long, cold winter for America.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about the energy issue also. There are some good things in this bill for our farmers. I especially think the dairy provision was well done. Dairy is very important to Pennsylvania. I was in the food business 26 years of my life. I know how people struggle with their family budgets. But let me tell you, the farmers are reeling with fertilizer costs. Why are fertilizer costs doubling and tripling year after year? And why is 50 percent of our fertilizer now being imported? Because of natural gas costs. Ninety percent of the cost of ammonia fertilizer is natural gas, clean, green natural gas. This Congress refuses to produce natural gas in this country. There has never been a gas well that polluted a beach. Look at this chart. Off- limits. Off-limits. Off-limits. There should be another one in the middle. There should be one up here in Alaska. We have said that we are not going to produce fossil fuel. Natural gas is a fossil fuel. We are not going to produce oil. Our farmers need relief. They need affordable energy to drive their tractors, to dry their grain after they harvest it, and to buy their fertilizer. Folks, this country's economic future, not just farming, but our ability to manufacture, our ability to heat our homes this winter-- right today, we are putting $11.50 natural gas in the ground for next winter's use. Last year at this time, it was $6.50 to $7. Do the math. That's a 40 to 50 percent increase in natural gas costs. We have lost half of the fertilizer factories in America. That's why our farmers are now using foreign fertilizer. That's why it is costing them 300, 400 and 500 percent more than it did just several years ago. Folks, we have to produce energy in America if we are going to farm and have affordable food, if we are going to manufacture products and if we are going to have an economy that competes in the global economy. We are not in a sole economy any more. We are in a global economy. We have to compete. In America, we pay $125 for oil. Everybody does. But we have had the highest natural gas prices in the world for 8 years. And the margin is increasing because we refuse to produce energy for America. All of these other debates are going to be academic. We won't have factories. We won't have successful farmers. We'll be buying foreign fertilizer to grow products in this country. We'll be buying foreign tractors to produce our farms. We'll be driving foreign cars because we won't have a manufacturing base left. Clean, green natural gas is the answer. And we need to open up. And we need to drill for oil, too. There has never been a natural gas well that has harmed us economically and environmentally. Clean, green natural gas.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I'm delighted today that we're talking about energy. I think it's vital because I want to tell you something; if we don't get a lid on energy prices in America, there will be no level of government with a budget that will balance. The cost to heat our schools, the cost to heat our hospitals, the cost to do everything is going to explode. The cost to move goods and services is exploding. And it's about time, Americans. I had a young lady say to me last week, she said, Mr. Peterson, I make $320 a week. I used to spend $90 to drive to work, now I'm spending $140. How do I pay my bills? What she doesn't know is she heats her home with natural gas, and the natural gas that we're putting in the ground today for next winter's heating is $11.50. Last year, it was running between $6.50 and $7. She's looking at a 50 percent increase in home heating costs next year, which she cannot meet. Folks, the average working American is struggling to pay their bills because of energy costs. Our State governments, our county governments and our hospitals and our schools are going to take money away from the classroom to heat those facilities. If this Congress does not address the energy issue, we're going to collapse the economic viability of this country. Energy runs this country. We've had $2 gas and $10 oil most of our lifetime, with a few spikes in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Folks, we have $125 oil, $11.50 gas. We have not had a storm in the gulf in 2 years that always causes spike prices. We've not had a major country that supplies oil to us all tip over or have a coup that took away the government and took away that supply of oil. I'm predicting that countries like China, who are amassing energy all around the world, we'll read one of these days where they have purchased all the oil and gas that one of the major contributing countries can produce for the next decade and we won't get any of it. Folks, if we have a storm in the gulf this summer like they're predicting, and they're predicting them, if we have any kind of terrorist attack on a supply system, $125 oil will seem cheap to us. I'm not sure this economy can handle $125 oil. I am for every renewable there is, but let's look at the Energy Department's prediction: Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, renewables, hydro and non-hydro, that's their prediction. We've spent $30 billion for renewables. Folks, if we double wind and solar--and I wish we could double it every year--but if we double it, we will still be less than three-quarters of 1 percent of our energy needs. Where is the renewable coming? The renewable that's grown the fastest is wood waste. With pellet stoves heating hundreds of homes, with factories heating their factories with wood waste, wood waste has been the fastest growing energy renewable. Folks, America better get serious. And we'd better open our Outer Continental Shelf, we'd better do ANWR, we'd better do the Midwest. Coal-to-liquid, coal-to-gas, wind, solar, we need it all, folks. America is in an energy crisis.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. This has been an interesting discussion. Oil prices record high, $119, gas prices, $11. And is Congress acting? What is on the table here to help Americans for affordable energy? Very little, folks. We're about restricting supply. Consumers are paying the highest prices. The people in my district, and I'm sure in yours, are struggling to drive long distances. I come from a rural district. People are paying $20 and $30 a day to drive to work. They can't afford that. They're struggling now to catch up with their winter heating bills, which were unreasonably high. Well, who's the bad guy? Who's causing this price rise? Mr. Markey from Massachusetts said it's Big Oil because they just charge too much. He also says it's because we're putting 70,000 barrels a day in the SPR. Well, why are oil prices high, folks? It's because this Congress, three decades ago, locked up supply. Look at the red on the map. That's the Outer Continental Shelf. We're the only country in the world who doesn't produce gas and oil there. The only country in the world. There are huge reserves in the Midwest. This body and the Democrat Party have been talking about locking up the shale rock, there's been legislation to do that, the Roan Plateau, the best gas reserve in the Midwest, locking them up. They talk about us not being dependent on foreign energy, but everything they're doing makes us dependent on foreign energy, where we have no control. Yes, prices for energy are set on Wall Street. Right or wrong, that's the system. They set the prices. When you lock up supply, if we stopped growing as much corn, prices go up. If you stop making as much steel in this country, if you limit, steel prices are going to go up. We're limiting the production of energy. Are we against wind and solar? Absolutely not. Look at the chart here. Here's the renewables. They think that's going to be an instant answer. I want all the wind we can get, all the solar we can get, all the geothermal. We're promoting biofuels. On the biofuels issue, we mandated 35.5 billion gallons a year by 2030. We had 6.5 billion gallons last year. Corn prices have tripled. Wheat prices have tripled. Food prices are getting so people now are struggling to go to the grocery store after they've been to the gas station. If we have a bad crop failure down the road, not only are food prices going to go crazy, but ethanol prices. Folks, I think we better be very careful about the biofuels. I'm not opposing them, I never have, but I would be surprised if biofuels can increase the use of gasoline we need in growth. Energy prices, folks, are dependent on supply. If we double wind and solar tomorrow, we're at less than three-quarters of 1 percent of our energy supply. I hope we can do it. Folks, we need to produce energy so Americans can afford to live.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a deep concern. We, as a country, will be a second-rate nation in the next decade if we don't have an energy policy. America needs an energy policy. We need to have a plan of how we're going to have available, affordable fuel for everybody to run our companies, to heat our homes, to drive our cars. We don't have an energy policy, folks. We have a policy where we've locked up our resources and we're going to let the rest of the world produce. Our dependence on foreign oil has increased 2 percent a year every year for 20 years. We are on that path of maybe going to 3 percent a year. Because when we don't produce, they do and we pay. We have the rest of the world consuming greater and greater amounts of energy making us now bid for our energy. I find it interesting. They like to say it's the six big American oil companies, or I guess it's five, that are the cause of our energy prices. The fact is, this Congress and the last three administrations are the reason we have high energy prices. This Congress locked up. This map right here shows we're the only country in the world that's locked up the outer continental shelf, the best and safest place to produce energy. Every country in the world produces there. Cuba will soon be producing energy 50-some miles off our coasts where we prohibit. We need to have an energy policy. We need to open up our midwest. We need to open up our offshore. I have the bill. I heard talk in here a little bit ago about how we are going to savage the beaches. My bill opens up for natural gas only. The first 25 miles are locked up. The second 25 miles are only open if States choose to. The second 50 miles are open; States can still close it with the legislation. And the second hundred miles are open. I ask for some Member of this Congress to show me a natural gas well that has ever polluted a beach. Natural gas bubbles up under the ground all over the country from gas pressure in the earth. Natural gas comes out of the ground naturally, and if we put a 6-inch hole in the ground, it comes out in a commercial way that we can heat our homes. America has had the highest natural gas prices in the world. Natural gas is not a world price. Oil is a world price. Natural gas is not a world price. For 7 years now, soon going on 8, we've had the highest natural gas prices in the world, and our fertilizer companies are leaving because they use so much of it. Our petrochemical manufacturers are leaving, our polymers and plastic companies are leaving. People who have bend metal, treat metal, cook food are going to do it in other places where natural gas is a fraction than it is here. Clean, green natural gas is what America ought to be running on until we have viable renewable. I met with wind people this morning. I'm for all the wind we can get. But if we double wind and solar, which so many people are counting on, in the next 5 years we will be less than three-quarters of 1 percent of our energy needs. I find it unexplainable that we have the highest fuel prices for trucks and cars, the highest heating home costs on record, and this Congress doesn't even talk about it. We don't have a plan. We are doing stimulus packages because energy is taking the life out of our economy. We're going to need to do a stimulus package every 6 months, because as soon as we inject another $220 billion in, the energy policies of this country are going to suck it right back out because Americans are going to spend more and more. We have $3.40 gasoline, soon to be $4, and if we have a storm in the gulf this summer, we will be looking at $5 gasoline. $5 gasoline will sink our economy. We must have an energy policy.