Recognizing National Physical Education And Sport Week

Floor Speech

Recognizing National Physical Education And Sport Week

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, in this steady march and drum towards cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax, it strikes me that certainly the health of our Nation is really what's at risk here in terms of what cap-and-trade will do to our Nation, what it does to our businesses, our industries, what it does to our families, what it does to the individual citizens in terms of the costs that will be placed upon them, the burden that they have to bear, and it's a burden that affects all segments of the society. Those that I worry most about actually are those who live paycheck to paycheck and those who just barely get by in their household budgets and what this significant increase of costs will be, specific to turning a light switch on in Pennsylvania with energy costs going up 30 percent, with filling up your gas. I represent a very rural district, and in rural America we drive. We drive to work. We drive to pick up our groceries. We drive sometimes to pick up our mail. And the cost of gas is estimated to increase by 76 percent. Those are costs that our families and individuals cannot bear.

But I think there is something out there, as opposed to this big government proposal of cap-and-trade, that we should be looking at, and that is using our natural resources like natural gas. Natural gas currently accounts for roughly 23 percent of our overall energy consumption, and natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Natural gas is used for many energy sources, but it's also vital as a feedstock ingredient in many products we consume every day. Anything from plastics to pharmaceuticals use natural gas as an ingredient.

Now, as a member of the House Agriculture Committee, I must point out how important natural gas is to our farmers and our agricultural sector. We can't grow our food without fertilizer, and natural gas is an important ingredient in fertilizer. We only have to go back as far as last summer when we saw the price of energy skyrocket in our country, and that's what we are looking at now under cap-and-trade, to see what the impact of that was on our farmers and on food prices. Many farmers in the past few years have been hurting because of high energy costs.

The United States has an abundant supply of natural gas, and the vast majority of what we consume is produced right here at home. Let me repeat that. The vast majority of natural gas we produce, that's a homegrown product, and that's good for this country.

Oil, for instance, is a world price. That means that we pay $69 a barrel, today's price, but so does Germany, Japan, and Canada. However, natural gas is not a world price, meaning that the price of natural gas varies from country to country, and it's simply supply and demand. When we produce more natural gas, its costs will come down.

Now, having said that, I believe that we should expand upon our natural gas production, which could act as a bridge to get us into a future where renewables really will be the major energy source. Renewables such as wind, solar, and the like are all energy sources that we would like to utilize. But it's also important to bear in mind that these sources make up only about 1 percent of what we consume, and the major reason for that is because they are not as inexpensive as coal, oil, and natural gas. However, the majority party in Washington would like to make renewables more viable by increasing the costs of fossil fuels through the proposed cap-and-trade bill.

Now, last fall the House Republicans had an important and major victory in Congress. They led the way in removing a longstanding moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf. I would like to see us move forward in producing in the OCS, which estimates the project has a net royalty worth of $1.7 trillion.

Another area that shows great promise is my home State of Pennsylvania. Eighty percent of Pennsylvania rests upon the Marcellus Shale, which is likely the third largest natural gas field in the world. That's literally hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean-burning natural gas that could power our country for decades, bringing jobs and all of the economic benefits with it.

Just today, in The Wall Street Journal, there was an article on the marketplace page entitled, ``KKR Invests in Gas Explorer.'' Within cap-and-trade, we talk a lot about these renewables that only exist because of the subsidy that we're putting into them. This is a great article because this is what America is all about in terms of real science. It talks about the company KKR that has invested in gas exploration. It didn't take stimulus money. It didn't take subsidy money from the Federal government or from any other level of government. It was free market enterprise money for investing in natural gas because they recognized the value of it.

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