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Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I was listening very carefully to the Senator talking about our situation with the pipeline, and there is something else I was going to talk about, but I want to make sure we say it as often as we can. I have sent for a poster which I want to share with the Senate.
My State of Oklahoma is more than just passively interested in the pipeline. In the center of Oklahoma is a town called Cushing. Cushing, OK, happens to be the central location for the pipelines going throughout the United States--east, west, north, and south. The picture, if it does arrive, that I wanted to share with everyone is of this President who is trying to, I guess, insult our intelligence by having it both ways. I think the Senator from North Dakota made it very clear that the President is dragging his feet and that he has been able to successfully stop the pipeline from coming through.
The picture I will show is a picture of President Obama coming into my State of Oklahoma and standing with all the barrels behind him in Cushing, OK, announcing that he is not going to stop the pipeline from going south from Oklahoma down to the Texas border. That is very good because he cannot do it. The only place he can stop it is when it crosses the international border. Of course that is where he is continuing to stop it.
I have to say he has lost the war of words on this because people know we have an opportunity--that everything the Senator said is correct. We can be totally independent in no time at all. We are not talking about years, we are talking about weeks and months. We can have our total independence just by lifting all the restrictions we have right now, not just the pipeline but what is happening on Federal land.
It is interesting. We have gone through this shale revolution in this country, and it has been so overwhelming. In the last 5 years it has been in spite of the President because he continues in his budget to have all kinds of punitive provisions for the oil and gas industry. Yet because of what has happened with the shale revolution, the use of hydraulic fracturing, the horizontal drilling, we have increased our production over the last 5 years by 61 percent. All of the 61 percent is in private land or it is in State land. We have on Federal land a reduction. While the rest of the country has increased 61 percent, it has been reduced by 6 percent. That is the dilemma we have right now.
It goes far beyond just the pipeline. We have an opportunity to be completely free--and I am talking about our Northern Hemisphere--being free from dependence on anyone in any part of the world for our ability to produce the energy necessary to run this machine called America.
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