Consumer First Energy Act of 2008--Motion to Proceed--Continued

Floor Speech

CONSUMER-FIRST ENERGY ACT OF 2008--MOTION TO PROCEED--Continued -- (Senate - June 10, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we have had some unusual developments in the Senate in recent days. No sooner had the majority in the Senate moved to the cap-and-trade bill, for which they were demanding the debate be limited and utilizing a procedure by the Democratic majority leader to basically fill the tree, which eliminates free debate of amendments on the bill--this was a piece of legislation that was claimed to be one of the most important to be offered in the Senate.

In the early 1990s, when the clean air act amendments were passed, 131 amendments were disposed of during that debate, and it took 5 weeks on the floor. This bill has more far-reaching and pernicious ramifications than the Clean Air Act Amendments. Yet they were going to end the debate and begun to spin the issue as if the Republicans were filibustering the bill. That is what they said repeatedly: Republicans were filibustering the bill. But in truth we wished to talk about the bill. We asked to be able to do so and use the 30 hours which Senate rules allow to discuss the legislation, and our request was treated with great horror, as if this were somehow a plan to reject a discussion of the legislation.

Well, no sooner had we done that and gotten through that, and the majority leader filled the tree to limit real amendments on the bill--amendments he did not approve--then, the majority leader came forward and moved to move off the bill, to move away from cap and trade--the centerpiece of their philosophy about what is happening in energy in America today--and he wanted to move to their Energy bill, which I think can legitimately be referred to, in utilizing senatorial license, as a no-energy bill. I will talk about that in a minute.

It is not an energy bill. It is not going to produce any energy. It is weak to a degree that is breathtaking. It is not what the American people are upset about. It would not come close to helping us deal with the serious problems we face.

So I would say, this is a weird kind of event here. The no-energy bill I understand they would like to move to--and wanted to move to--would authorize the U.S. Government to sue OPEC nations that are withholding and reducing supplies of oil on the world market in the way we would sue an American company that was manipulating the market by withholding products or otherwise colluding to fix prices. Now, that is exactly what OPEC is doing. What they are doing is unacceptable, and it needs sustained, relentless leadership by this administration and this Congress to stand up to OPEC and confront that because they are effectively raising the price of oil by restricting supply. I understand other nations are seeing declines in production as well, including Mexico and Russia. So we are creating shortages in the marketplace, allowing people to make large amounts of money--corporations and others--but the people who are primarily making the money are oil-producing nations. Go look at the skyscrapers they are building in the desert, the billions and billions of dollars they are receiving from us as a result of these high prices, as a result of tripling the price of oil on the world marketplace from the forties just a couple years ago to now over $130 a barrel. So you were getting $40 for each barrel of oil one year, and a couple years later you are now getting $130 for each barrel in your small country. The bigger countries, of course, make more money because they produce and sell more oil.

We are sending overseas each year from our Nation $500 billion a year to purchase the oil that comes into our country. It is half the trade deficit we have--half of it--just to purchase this oil. It is not getting better, and we have no policy before us to legitimately do something about this other than the one Senator Domenici and Senator McConnell and the Republican leadership offered a few weeks ago, which was rejected.

Let me explain what this no-energy bill and its NOPEC provision would do. We would sue OPEC nations for refusing to increase their production. Now, how you get jurisdiction over a sovereign nation--the Presiding Officer, a former attorney general, as I have been in a previous life, knows jurisdiction may sound like a little thing. It is not such a little thing to get jurisdiction over a sovereign nation to order them to produce more oil out of their ground.

But I would submit to you, the idea is so weak and so implausible and so unenforceable that it would be a laughable thing if it were not so serious because we do have a problem with OPEC nations and others who are fixing the price of oil.

See, oil production is an essential part, I would suggest--and I think most any court would conclude--of sovereignty. A sovereign nation can produce as much of its oil as it wants to produce. You cannot make them produce more oil because you would like them to. They are not like an American corporation, subject to the jurisdiction of the court. Part of the protections of the laws of America, they become subject to lawsuits--but not a foreign nation.

We do not want them suing us to say: You ought to open ANWR--or perhaps we might. Open Alaska. Open offshore. Now, that has, perhaps, a lawsuit that might have some merit. Or maybe sue the Congress for voting not to produce more oil and gas off our shores over the years. At least you could get jurisdiction over Congress.

So this is not a serious response, I will say to you. It is not.

Now, in addition, they propose in this Energy bill to tax the oil companies, but taxing the oil companies will not produce more energy. You can take this to the bank. It is a concept of universal acceptance. When you tax something, you get less of it. What we need in this country is more energy, not less. We need more cleanly produced, clean American energy. That is what we need more of. That is what people are complaining to me about.

When I go back home and talk to my constituents, they are upset. They are outraged. According to the national reports that came out yesterday, the people in my home county in Alabama--the citizens there--pay a larger percentage of their income to buy gasoline than any other county in America. It is because they are rural, they have low wages. They do not compete with the big-city wages, and they have to travel so far to work.

That is a very painful thing. It brings it home to me personally. I filled up our smaller car this weekend, and it cost $61. People have larger cars. They bought them years ago. They cannot just go out and sell their SUV today--what price would they get?--sell it so they could buy some Prius. Where are they going to get the money to do that? We would like them to. We would like them to move to those kinds of vehicles in the future, but it is not possible today.

So the ``masters of the universe'' who think we can pass a bill and allow the price of energy to be exceedingly high and that the people will adjust their habits so they can reduce the price of oil, are not in the real world. Let's get with it.

I tell you, my constituents are unhappy, and they want us to do something to confront, in a realistic way, the surge of prices that are impacting their budgets very seriously. They also understand these rising prices that are taking money out of their budget are also impacting the businesses they deal with and see and, perhaps, work for and it is making us less competitive in the world marketplace and it places us in a position to see our economy sink in general and it puts at risk their job. It affects how many hours they might work a week and whether they can get overtime or whether they get a bonus. That is what people are worried about.

So what do we have before us? A cap-and-trade bill that is guaranteed, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, to drive up the cost of gasoline $1.40 a gallon to meet Kyoto-type agreements we did not sign and we have not approved. That is not what people are telling me they want us to do. They want us to produce more clean American energy.

Well, I hate to be partisan about this, but I think we need to talk about how we got here, what happened in this country to get us in as bad a shape as we are.

The trends have not been good in terms of a rising demand for oil and energy and a not-rising-so-fast supply, but there are things we could and should have done and some things we did 2 years ago that are being reversed.

In 2005, for example, this Congress, when Senator PETE DOMENICI chaired the Energy Committee, recognized the potential of oil shale in the Energy Policy Act that became law. The act identified oil from the shale rock out in the West as a strategically important asset and called for its development. Yet, last year, the Democratic-controlled Congress, led by the House of Representatives, put in language that blocked and reversed the development of this abundant resource despite the surging price of oil and gasoline.

In the recently passed Energy Independence and Security Act, the House-sponsored section 526 prohibits any Federal agency from contracting to procure any alternative or synthetic fuel that produces greater life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than those produced from traditional fuels. This language prohibits the Federal Government from contracting to produce and use oil shale and coal-to-liquids. This provision is misguided and should be repealed immediately.

Now, let me tell my colleagues--I know the Presiding Officer is familiar with a number of these issues--a representative of U.S. Air Force was in my office a few weeks ago discussing a contract they had with a company that would take coal--we have 250 years of coal in America. It is an American energy source. You can heat that coal and off comes a gas which can be converted through a known and proven process to a liquid, and they were going to use it in their airplanes to fly U.S. aircraft with it. But the Air Force representative told me the language in section 526 had blocked them. Coal-to-liquids derived fuel is a fabulously clean fuel. It actually cleans the engine, so when you use this fuel, the pollutants and waste products have been taken out, and it is a very pure fuel they burn, and the Air Force was expecting to be able to bring this fuel into the U.S. Department of Defense for around $85 a barrel. That is well below the more-than-$130 a barrel cost that is on the world marketplace today, and it is a source of energy that does not leave the U.S. Air Force dependent on foreign sources of oil to fuel our Nation's aircraft in the defense of America. But this effort has been blocked by the Democratic majority.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act, which Senator Domenici led when he was chairman of the Energy Committee, also directed the Bureau of Land Management to lease Federal lands for oil shale research projects. There are approximately 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in oil shale rock, but it is hard to get out. It is not easy to get out. It takes some effort to produce that, but some major companies are prepared to invest billions of dollars to prove that it can be brought out well below the current world price of oil. I would have thought we would have been delighted to see this go forward--at least in an experimental way--and see how that would work out. But oh, no. This Congress, again with a Democratic majority, acted to block the development and the carrying out of this provision that would promote oil shale. The Senate-sponsored section 433 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act--this was the monumental appropriations bill that was about this thick. They slipped language in, in conference, to take care of that. It would prohibit funds from being used to implement any leasing program directed to the Bureau of Land Management, as had been approved in 2005, effectively stopping this program.

I will just say that is frustrating. We are sort of in a manner of disconnect here to an extraordinary degree. The American people want us to do something. Oil shale: Well, it is not going to be easy, but this is not a dreamland idea. It absolutely can work. One company is using the same technology that was used by the oil sands industry in Canada that has proven to be quite commercially feasible. We need to be testing this because 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in oil shale would be enough for 100 years of oil--actually, 200 years of oil at our current rate. So oil shale, if we could make that breakthrough, would make us completely independent of foreign oil. We have huge reserves offshore, as the Senator from Louisiana knows. He is out there. He is in Louisiana, and he sees the production that survived Hurricane Katrina, and as a result, we were able to get those systems back on line with no oil spills or damage to the environment.

I thank the Chair for letting me share this frustration. I don't know where we are going now, but I know one thing: This Congress does not need to leave this energy debate without creating some policies that allow for more production of clean American energy. We can do that. We are going to continue using oil and gas for many years to come. Why in the world would we want 60-plus percent of it to be foreign oil? Why wouldn't we want to at least produce what we can at home--and really we can produce quite a lot at home. It is very frustrating that attempts to do that have been blocked by persons whose thinking, I believe, on this issue is confused and not in the public interest.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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