Energy Independence

Floor Speech

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam Speaker, just a little while ago, we voted to suspend the acquisition of petroleum for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and for other purposes, a bill, H.R. 6022, which is going to take about 70,000 barrels of oil a day that would be going into the petroleum reserve and put it into the market for Americans to use in gasoline and other products.

It sounded very good and I voted for it because it is one small step, if you can call it a small step, in the right direction, but it's really not going to solve the problem.

The problem we have is that the United States is not energy independent. We have been talking about energy independence for the last 35 to 40 years, and we haven't done anything about it.

This House, and primarily the Democrat party, is being held hostage by the environmental lobby that won't allow us to drill in places like the ANWR in Alaska. Alaska is three-and-a-half times the size of Texas. It's huge. I've been up to Alaska. Drilling up there in the ANWR isn't going to hurt anybody or anything. And I cannot understand why we can't get 1 million to 2 million barrels of oil a day out of there that would help the American people see the price of their gasoline and other fuel products reduced dramatically.

We can't drill off the continental shelf, even 100 miles out, because of the environmental lobby, and yet Fidel Castro, and his brother Raul Castro, 90 miles off of the Florida shore, can drill within 45 miles or 50 miles of the United States of America and actually drill into oil reserves that we have down in that area. In other words, taking our oil reserves and pumping them out of that area and into their coffers, and they're selling that under contract to China, our oil reserves that we could drill for down in the area between us and Cuba.

We also have such dependency on the Middle East it isn't even funny. We have dependency on Venezuela. One of our chief adversaries now is the President of Venezuela, and he controls in large part the price of oil and gasoline in this country, as do the people in the Middle East that have great oil reserves and are pumping it.

And it's extremely important, in my opinion, that we do something about becoming energy independent. We talk about it all the time. We talk about moving toward other forms of energy and I'm for that, but it's going to take time for that transition to take place. And in the meantime, the environmental lobby is blocking us from drilling in the ANWR, drilling offshore on the continental shelf, and allowing our enemies to make a huge profit at our expense.

The gasoline prices that the American people are paying today is a direct result of us caving in this country to the environmental lobby year after year after year. We could move dramatically toward energy independence if we could just pass an energy bill that would allow us to use our resources.

And we come to this floor and talk about it all the time, and the American people are getting a steady diet that President Bush is responsible for the high gas prices. That's absolutely absurd. The reason the gas prices are as high as they are today is because we can't drill the oil out of our country and get our reserves to the market so that the gas prices can be reduced.

We can't do it because the Democratic party primarily is caving in after year after year to the environmental lobby, and we can extract oil out of the ANWR and off the continental shelf in an environmentally safe way. So, if the people of this country are really concerned about gas prices, they ought to find where the fault really lies, and that is with this Congress and the liberals who are controlled by the environmental lobby and will not allow us to drill to get the oil reserves that we have in our country and off the continental shelf.

It's a tragic shame, and I just wish the American people could get the information and the drive-by media, as Mr. Limbaugh calls it, would report the facts as they are. We have the ability to move toward energy independence, and we don't do it year after year after year, and we continue to be dependent on foreign oil. That's one of the main reasons why the price of gasoline is approaching $4 a gallon.

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