Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008--Continued

Floor Speech

TOM LANTOS AND HENRY J. HYDE UNITED STATES GLOBAL LEADERSHIP AGAINST HIV/AIDS, TUBERCULOSIS, AND MALARIA REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2008--Continued -- (Senate - July 15, 2008)

OIL PRICE MYTHS

Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, we are all aware of the seriousness of the oil crisis. Gas prices are more than three times what they were when President Bush took office. High prices are forcing some businesses to cut back or close and forcing some families to choose between putting a gallon of gas in the tank and putting a gallon of milk on their kitchen table.

People are demanding honest solutions to our oil crisis. But President Bush, John McCain, and their allies on the other side of the aisle have only decided to perpetuate myths, which is what brings me to the floor.

They have told us offshore drilling will lower gas prices tomorrow. They have told us oil companies could produce more if we hand over even more Federal land and water to them. When people spoke about the dangers of drilling, they claimed no oil was spilled after Hurricane Katrina and that drilling off the shore of one State would not affect all the other States around it.

I am here to clear up these myths before it is too late and they take a life of their own.

Myth No. 1: Drilling immediately brings down gas prices. The biggest myth, a myth that has been repeated over and over on the floor of this Chamber, is that opening our shores to drilling will somehow lower the price of gasoline. Let's get one thing straight; drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf will do nothing to bring down gas prices--not now, not ever.

While President Bush is suggesting that drilling will bring down prices at the pump, his own Energy Information Administration admits drilling will have no effect. The reason is the amount of oil involved is a drop in the bucket compared to what we use every day.

Let me put offshore production in perspective. Since April of this year, Americans have responded to extraordinarily high gas prices by using over 800,000 barrels of oil less than we did 1 year ago. That is the most significant and sudden drop in oil demand since the 1970s. Yet what have we seen since April? We have continued to see record gas prices.

In recent weeks, in response to record oil prices, Saudi Arabia has increased its production of oil by 500,000 barrels each and every day. What has been the effect on gas prices? They continue to go up.

So how does the Bush/McCain drilling plan compare to these recent events? If we open all our shores to oil production, the first drop of oil would not be seen for over a decade. Offshore oil production would peak in the year 2030 and only at 200,000 barrels a day. To put that number another way, the amount of gas we could get from offshore drilling is equivalent to a few tablespoons per car per day.

So let's look at the totality of this. If 800,000 barrels per day in reduced demand by Americans combined with an increase of 500,000 barrels per day of Saudi production--a total shift of 1.3 million barrels a day--doesn't lower gas prices, how does 200,000 in the year 2030 lower gas prices? If we have seen a shift of both a reduction in demand and an increase in that supply by 1.3 million barrels a day, and the price still goes up, how is it that 200,000 barrels in 2030 is going to do anything? It is a myth.

The second myth we hear is that if oil companies could only lease more Federal land and water, they would produce more oil. The fact of the matter is the oil industry has already leased 68 million acres of land, where they have not produced--for the most part--a single drop of oil. The oil companies clearly think there is oil there or else why would they be leasing the land? But they are not using it.

This chart is an example of where all that oil is located. I know our Republican colleagues have these little sayings, and they are going around with patches on their lapels saying ``find more, use less.'' This is what they should be telling the oil companies: Find more and use less. In fact, they are not even pursuing that which they already have access to.

To get an idea of the scale involved, here is a map showing how much territory the oil companies control in the Gulf of Mexico. The red part of the map represents unused acres. It is a huge portion of the gulf region, going completely undeveloped, which they already have leases and access to.

Here is an even more impressive map--a map of how much of the Western United States oil companies control. The black portion shows where companies are exploring and, again, the red is where they are. As you can see, the red far exceeds the black portion of the map. These oil companies control an enormous amount of land. When you add it all up, it is an area more than 12 times the size of my home State of New Jersey.

So why are oil companies asking us to hand over more land, when they have so much land that is already unused? It seems to me there is only one explanation: Oil companies aren't actually in a rush to drill in those areas, but they are in a rush to control as much Federal land as possible before their friends in the White House leave.

Let's talk about myth No. 3. In order to convince us to let this plan go through, big oil and their supporters want us to believe a third myth, which is that offshore drilling presents no threat to our environment and to the economies of States, such as New Jersey, where tourism is the second multibillion dollar part of our economy.

Many of my colleagues from the Republican side of the aisle, including Senator McConnell and Senator McCain, have repeatedly denied that oil spills could happen. They have denied repeatedly that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused any oil to spill.

The picture I have here was taken not by me but by the U.S. Coast Guard. It shows what happened after the hurricanes: a massive oil spill that was set on fire to assist in the cleanup effort, as indicated in this photo.

I don't know what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would consider ``significant spillage,'' but I know if I saw this scene on the New Jersey shore, I would consider it a disaster.

In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused devastation on a massive scale. The EPA, the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Coast Guard all agree that the storms caused 700,000 gallons of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico and over 7 million gallons of oil to leak onshore from the infrastructure that supports offshore drilling.

When oil spills in those quantities take place, it is not isolated to a small area. Some suggest certain States may want to drill and other States may not want to drill off their coast, but the devastation spreads far and wide. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, the spill was 600 miles wide. The IXTOC I spill in the Gulf of Mexico traveled 600 miles. That is why the decision to drill cannot be left to a single State, because the State's actions affect all the other States in proximity to it.

An oil spill off the coast of Virginia could wash up as far away as Maine. It could devastate the coastline from South Carolina to New York.

In my home State of New Jersey, the shore generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year and supports about half a million jobs.

New Jersey families and businesses cannot afford the risk of a disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez crash or the spills after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with sticky crude washing up on our beaches, killing our wildlife, collapsing property values, and destroying our economy in the process.

Let's be honest. If there is drilling off our shore, it is not guaranteed that there would not be a major spill. These facts show that to be quite to the contrary.

Disasters have happened before and they will happen again. The question is, Is the risk of a significant disaster worth the insignificant amount of oil that might come with the drilling? That answer is, clearly, no.

Now, to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who say, drill more and ultimately conserve some, I say our need is to act more and talk less. Let's do something that really does something about gas prices.

If we are going to bring down gas prices, we need a better plan. First, we cannot wait until the year 2030 to get the type of relief we need in terms of offshore drilling. We need to lower gas prices now. The last time we opened lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico, with huge amounts, ultimately, what happened? That was a year and a half, 2 years ago. Did prices go down after we opened that section of the gulf? No. They went up. We cannot wait.

The supply-and-demand equation for oil is basically the same as it was a year ago--that is what testimony before the Congress tells us by even the oil executives--and prices have skyrocketed.

We need to check the unchecked speculation on the oil trading markets, which has driven oil prices higher. We need to see to it that our commodities markets are functioning fairly, so prices come down from their artificial highs. Yes, we offer drilling. But let us drill on the 68 million acres the oil companies have already leased to bring down the price of oil, not just use it to pad their books and inflate the price of their stock.

Together with Senators Feingold and Dodd, I have introduced legislation that sends a simple message to oil companies about the Federal land they lease: Use it or lose it.

The bill mandates that oil companies either produce on or seek to develop their existing Federal leases or make way for someone who will. Most importantly, we need to break our dependence upon oil. Here is the bigger picture: We can only ever produce a fraction of the oil we use as a country.

The only way for us to protect ourselves from rising gas prices is to end our dependence on oil, and that means making immediate, substantial investments in renewable fuels and conservation.

We should all get behind legislation, which our colleagues are opposed to, to expand tax credits for renewable energy producers. In order to boost vehicle efficiency, we should create stronger incentives for plug-in hybrids, support advanced battery research and research into cellulosic fuels.

It is time we fully funded mass transit at the level it deserves. We can do all this in the time President Bush would have us wait for minimal oil production along our coastlines.

Let's be clear. This coastline drilling plan is not a serious proposal to help American families today. It is exploitation of pain at the pump to give yet another handout to the oil companies.

It is long past time to stop repeating the myths that lie at the bottom of it. Instead of buying into this overhyped, oversold plan, if we work together, we have the ability and ingenuity as a country to secure our energy future once and for all.

It is that aspiration that we should, in fact, pursue. It is time we decide on a plan that looks out not just for the future of the oil companies but for our future as a nation. That is why our colleagues should join us in pushing the big oil companies to pursue drilling on the 68 million acres they have, ensure that they use billions in subsidies and tax breaks they have been given to invest in renewable energy and refineries, not stock buybacks to boost their pockets, tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to immediately increase oil supplies, and hopefully by doing so lower prices and stop the market manipulation that is taking place in the marketplace. Let's get the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to pursue this vigorously.

Finally, let's aspire to be something more than just today's crisis. Let's use the ingenuity of America to break our dependence not only on foreign oil but on domestic oil as well.

We can do all of these things. We are the people on the face of the Earth who are can-do. It is time for us to begin to deal with that rather than try to pursue a course of action that will do absolutely nothing about reducing gas prices, do absolutely nothing about breaking our dependency on foreign oil, absolutely nothing in terms of our domestic economy and security.

Those are the choices before the Senate, and I trust we will make the right ones.

I yield the floor.

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