Control Carbon And Control Life

Floor Speech

Control Carbon And Control Life

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Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman from Utah, and I, too, feel very privileged, Mr. Speaker, to have been a cosponsor on the no-cost stimulus energy plan that my friend from Utah was also a sponsor of, and it would have provided tremendous utilization of the potential energy we have, but of course, it never made it to the floor.

As a good segue into really what I want to talk about is my local district, I just want to reiterate what we discussed this evening, and we also talked about it last night, that this cap-and-tax program has been tried before. We've been 10 years down this pathway with Spain. Representatives from Spain came and spoke with us about this, and they said that the net of all that has been is they've lost companies, they've lost jobs, their unemployment rate is now 17.5 percent, and their energy costs are skyrocketing, which of course prophetically even our own President, President Obama, made the comment in January 2008 that utility costs, electrical costs, home costs of energy will skyrocket if this bill is passed.

What I want to talk about for a moment, Mr. Speaker, is the Haynesville shale. I'm from the fourth district of Louisiana. This is the northwestern corner of Louisiana, and 3 years ago no one had ever heard of the Haynesville shale. In fact, the whole idea of shale formation, that is, a rock formation that holds like a porous sponge deposits of natural gas, something that was barely heard of even 4 years ago, and today, we're finding that in the case of the Haynesville shale, it is perhaps the largest natural gas find in this hemisphere.

And hopefully, the camera will pick this map up, but you see the area, and it borders, of course, several parishes in Louisiana and then also counties in Texas. As you can see, it covers a wide swath of area, and so this represents a tremendous opportunity for the State of

Louisiana and also parts of the State of Texas.

So I just want to tell you something about the impact. We're talking about 234 trillion cubic feet of natural gas production potential. This could be a source of energy for many years to come for this country, and remember that natural gas is a very clean form of fossil fuel. It produces significantly less carbon dioxide than say coal, and yet there's forces out there that would like to stop the drilling for natural gas in the Haynesville shale. We're even going to have hearings tomorrow talking about the manufacturing process and potentially issues having to do with the environment with that. But let me tell you about what we also can lose if we lose the ability to extract natural gas just in my district.

A 2008 study was done, and it showed that $4.5 billion was pumped into the Louisiana economy in that year. It created $3.9 billion in household earnings. The greatest impact on indirect household earnings was experienced by workers in the mining sector, with new household earnings of $193 million in 2008. It created over $30 million in new earnings in separate sectors; $56.7 million in health care; management, $46 million. On and on and on, many millions of dollars. It's creating cash into the local economy in my district. And as a result of this, our unemployment rate is much lower than that of the east of the country, and our economy's doing very well. Real estate is doing very well. On that, we've created many jobs. Large impacts were felt with 5,229 jobs in the utility sector; health care, 3,496 jobs.

Conservative estimates report that State and local tax revenues increased by $153.3 million in 2008. Some parishes reported a 300 percent increase in sales tax.

So as you can see, Mr. Speaker, the Haynesville shale is just starting, and yet it is creating a tremendous impact on the economy of my district. So, if we continue down this cap-and-tax road, not only are we going to lose what we have but potentially lose what we're going to have.

In the 2010 budget of President Obama on this same subject, we're looking at a potential loss of $80 billion in tax incentives for oil and natural gas businesses, and this impacts small companies. The majority of oil and gas companies in my district are small companies. They're mom-and-pop businesses, and that is the backbone of our economy. We're not talking about Shell Oil. We're not talking about Exxon. We're talking about local, Joe Smith kinds of businesses.

Independent oilmen and women in northeast Louisiana rely on these incentives to reinvest their capital in these companies. This is caused by the loss of depletion allowance and the writeoff of intangible drilling costs. It will also broaden our dependence foreign oil; of course, the thing that we used to talk about when gas was $4 a gallon and soon we're going to be talking about that again.

Well, in closing, I just want to say, Mr. Speaker, that we cannot tax and spend our way out of growing our economy. In a time of recession, the best way to encourage an economic turnaround is to preserve jobs. The State, instead of flowing money into the economy, as we've tried with this stimulus plan, which, estimates are, only 6 percent of the money is even in the economy, we may actually be pulling out of this recession as we speak.

Without the development of natural gas plays like the Haynesville shale, without increased exploration in ANWR, the Outer Continental Shelf,

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without the tax incentives that I just mentioned, without these things we're going to see our economy, even if it put pulls out of this, level off.

We can have our cake and eat it, too, Mr. Speaker. We don't have to destroy our economy and clean up our environment at the same time. We can be good, responsible tenders of our environment. We can be good stewards of our environment without destroying our economy in the process.

Someday perhaps we will be able to use some of these technologies. Perhaps we can use solar, maybe wind, but at this point, my friend from Utah says it's 1.6 percent of production, and we're going to have a lot of breakthroughs to make it go much higher than that. But until that time, there's a lot we can do with the technologies we have, technologies that are coming online, and that's not even mentioning nuclear power which many countries, particularly in Europe, are way ahead of us on.

But we can do a lot to solve our problems without throwing our economy into the dumpster, as Spain has.

So with that I want to thank my friend from Utah for his time, his many great efforts with this. I appreciate his leadership on this subject.

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