ENERGY -- (House of Representatives - July 29, 2008)
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Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend from Iowa. And I admire so much, not just him, but also his State. And having had him be a gracious host previously, I appreciate all that Iowa is doing for the country.
But Mr. Speaker, my friend from Iowa is right; there's a lot of people that know a lot about energy in east Texas where I'm from. And the fact is--and we brought this up in our Natural Resources Committee--you know, there in east Texas where I live they're drilling, they're exploring, they're producing. We're doing everything we can to provide energy for the rest of the country to use. But we're to the point now, we desperately need some help, and we need it from those States that have energy but have been sitting on it and will not help the rest of the Nation with it.
Now, there are too many in this country that have to drive to survive. There's no mass transportation that is going to get them where they've got to go to keep their job. We were in a debate in Judiciary last week, and one of the Members across the aisle said, well, our Democratic Party, we're concerned about the consumers, unlike the other party. And the fact is, I know those of us on the floor, our friends, we've got some good friends across the aisle--not the ones in leadership, but across the aisle--who understand. You want to help consumers, the men and women that are just trying to keep their job so they can pay down their credit card so they can get enough gas to keep their job next month, they're needing help. And yes, we want to help the consumer, we want to help them keep their job. We want jobs to be available. But I'm talking to people that have restaurants, that have small businesses, convenient stores. They're saying their business is down about 30 percent or so.
And what some of our friends in leadership across the aisle don't understand is, yes, it's nice if you never had to use fossil fuel, but it's what is used to keep the economy going right now. And I'm hoping we can drive in directions--figuratively speaking--that will allow us to get off fossil fuel someday. But what they don't seem to understand is, when you destroy an economy, when you devastate an economy, which is beginning to happen now as these energy prices are hurting people so badly, you don't help the environment. We see that in India. We see it in China. When people are worried about keeping food on their table for their family, when they're worried about providing a place to live and sleep for their family, then they believe that the environmental issues have to take a back seat because we've got to survive first.
Now, the United States--I know with all the beating up that goes on with
the United States, but the United States has done more globally to help clean up the world's environment in the last 30 years than any nation on Earth. You destroy our economy, you hurt this economy the way this is beginning to do and you will lose the help from the best help source in the world, and that's the United States of America.
And this isn't the first time I've been proud of America; I've been proud of America my whole life. But I note that on the Natural Resources Committee that I'm on, you look at things that we've been doing in the last several months and compare that to what went on in the last Congress, when the Republican leadership was in charge. Well, I was upset with some of the things that the leadership didn't allow or didn't get done or didn't help us to do, but some of the things that were done were good.
For example, we had a bill, an energy bill in the last Congress, came out of our committee, we got it passed. And it provided incentives for people to use biomass to produce electricity. Tried and true, we've got a facility down in Nacogdoches just that's coming online. People relied on the representations that there would be incentives to use biomass, like left over tree limbs, things like that, to produce electricity. In our committee, in the last months, we decided to withdraw those incentives and instead provide a bunch of money for a new study to tell us whether it's feasible. I said, we know it's feasible, just use it. It's another source of energy.
We've got wind--and of course our friend, T. Boone Pickens, has been talking a great deal about that--geothermal, hydroelectricity, the solar and biomass, as I've mentioned, those are all out there for use and they need to be pursued. But in the meantime, it's fossil fuel that is driving this country and it's fossil fuel that's driving the planet. And what we end up hearing in so many of these debates, including these late-night discussions, are people that hear things and just assume, well, it's said in committee, it's said on the floor, it must be true. And so we still hear people say, if we were to start drilling in that section 1002 part of ANWR that President Jimmy Carter designated would be used for oil and gas development, you know, nearly 30 years ago, we pursue that, well, it would still be 10 or 15 years before that would be available. What's been heard more recently that people aren't saying across the aisle is--at least not in the leadership, some of our moderate friends know--but that is that actually there is a pipeline, as I understand it, 74 miles from ANWR, this section of it. And despite what you see on the news, there are no pristine mountains, there are no antelope playing or buffalo roaming or anything like, it's just basically a waste land. And what better place to drill. The technology is there to do it.
But we could have that in the United States--some of us have been told it can be done within 2 to 3 years; within 3 years it could be in the United States. Do it now. The mere fact that we would go after that would tell the speculators--that some say are contributing a third to the price--it would be nice to drop the price of gasoline by over a dollar just on speculation when they see we're serious about providing our own energy.
The OCS. We're hearing people say, well, it can be 10 or 15 years down the road. Others say, you know what? We're serious about this. The price of oil is so high, gas is so high, we get out there, and some think it could be produced and on its way back to us within 2 years. I mean, this stuff is right here, available for us to utilize.
We've got this--and most people, those that are listening probably have never seen, but that shale being talked about in the Green River Formation up in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, it's a thick black--looks like a black rock. It is full of what can be turned into barrels of
oil, very clean oil. Now, the 2005 RAND study says that there are probably 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil in this Green River Formation of oil shale. Some of us have heard numbers more recently that actually there may be a trillion barrels of oil in the entire Middle East left. Some think we can get two to five times that much recoverable from the shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. That is American energy from America for Americans, and there's no reason not to be producing that.
But you look at the Outer Continental Shelf. We hear about all these acres that are not being drilled and produced. Ninety-seven percent of the Outer Continental Shelf is not leased and not being used. And as a Texan, I can remember growing up hearing people say, oh, no, if you put drilling rigs out there in the Gulf of Mexico, it will destroy all of the aquatic life that's left out in the Gulf of Mexico. And you know what? When those platforms went in out there, they looked to the fish like artificial reefs. And now, if you want to go fishing, there is no better place to go than around these platforms way out in the Gulf. Man and the aquatic life of the Gulf of Mexico are doing splendidly together.
And when we hear about all this oil that is messing up beaches, most of that comes from tankers and natural ooze out of the Earth itself. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf off Louisiana and Texas, most people aren't aware, but it virtually destroyed some of those platforms. But you know what? They didn't leak. That's still coming from tankers and natural ooze from the Earth itself.
And I appreciate my friend from Iowa yielding because one of the things that's coming out, it seems like yesterday and today, the price of gasoline may have dropped 20 cents or so. And some people are already saying, see, we can take credit, we can back off; we don't have to drill the Outer Continental Shelf; we don't have to drill ANWR; we don't have to produce from coal to liquid, as our friend, Mr. Shimkus, talked about; we don't have to produce from the oil shale in the Green River Formation; we don't have to go after this new Haynesville formulation for natural gas--some are saying may be one of the biggest finds in history of natural gas in Louisiana and part of east Texas. Some are saying we don't have to do that anymore, we're okay, not to worry.
But you go back historically, and it's like that frog in the warm water; you know, you start it with warm, and you can get it warmer and warmer. And if he gets a little antsy, you may lower the temperature so he doesn't get too antsy and jump out, and eventually you can boil him. And it seems like that's what's going on.
We're to the point in American history where we can't keep funding people who fund our enemies, or as someone once said, ``we can't keep feeding the dogs that are trained to bite us.'' And I'm not calling the people that we pay for oil dogs, it's just a figure of speech that what we're doing, we're feeding people who are trained to hurt us. And that's got to stop.
We have got to follow through. We have got to use an energy plan that makes us independent. And Mr. Speaker, I wouldn't have thought a year ago that I could say this in good conscience, and so I didn't, but now I can say it. I believe this Nation can be completely energy independent, where we're not having the biggest transfer of funds in the history of the world. We could be energy independent for a number of decades while we develop these alternatives.
And I have some ideas. I'm hoping to file a bill this week that, if we follow through on this, could revolutionize ways to provide energy because of the way we store it. But we'll get into that later, but I'm hoping to file that this week.
These are long-term goals that could make this Nation even greater than it is today as the greatest Nation in the world. But the more we become dependent on those who have funded our enemies, the more vulnerable we are. And those that thought a solution was to raid the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, there's not that much oil in the scheme of things. And when you know history like my friend from Iowa and I do, you know the Battle of the Bulge was lost by the Germans, not because it was toward the end of the war and we had worn them down--yes, it was late in the game--but they, many historians believe, could have driven the Allied Forces right to the Atlantic and North Sea if they hadn't run out of gasoline.
We can't afford to get rid of our strategic reserve that may be necessary, if Iran decides to cut off the Straits of Hormuz, if we get a severe cut in our supply, we've got to be able to step up and allow our military to have what they need, and that petroleum reserve does that.
So, I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa yielding. Let me mention one other thing. In the last month--I believe it may be the last thing that we've done in the Natural Resources Committee that deals with the issue of providing more of our own energy--we passed a bill--and I say ``we'' loosely because I sure voted and spoke against it; most of us walked out, we couldn't believe we were doing it. But anyway, we put the last best source of uranium in the United States off-limits.
We have already put vast amounts of our coal off-limits. Now we are putting uranium off-limits. We can't keep doing that and expect to be the greatest nation in the world much longer. I think we can go on for decades as the greatest, but it takes common sense now. I know my friend from Iowa has it. I know my friend from Texas out here has it. But we have got to deal with this problem now. We can't say, well, it's dropped 20 cents; so we won't worry about it. We have got to deal with this issue now or it will devastate the economy, which will devastate the environment, and will hurt the free world, and we can't afford to do that. I appreciate my friend for yielding.
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Mr. GOHMERT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. You're talking about the caribou that more than 10 times gained from where they were before.
And with regard to the wolves being shot, one of the things I was surprised about when I heard that polar bears were now listed as threatened here recently was the fact, and we discussed this--it came out in debate in our Natural Resources Committee--it's acknowledged that in the last few decades we were down to 10,000 to 12,000 polar bears in the world. Now it's acknowledged universally there are over 25,000 polar bears, and somehow that caused the polar bears to now be threatened now that there are more than twice as many as there were a few decades ago. So it certainly isn't because of a lack of polar bears that the caribou are doing well. The polar bears are doing quite well themselves despite what you may hear from some of the far left folks on that issue.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. Yes, the polar bears are doing well, and they are probably dining on a seal diet. They'll eat caribou. They'll eat anything they can get their paws on. That's what a bear does. And 28,000 head caribou herd up there on the North Slope.
But there is no resident caribou herd in ANWR next door. There's a migratory herd that comes in in the spring from Canada. They come in and have their calves there, and when the calves get to where they can walk, they all walk back to Canada. So it's a kind of a maternity ward for caribou there in ANWR. But no one can come up with any reason why they would stop coming over to have their calves or think that it would hurt their population. It would probably help their population because they like to get up out of that cold, frozen water and the tundra and get up on something kind of high and let the breeze blow the flies away and have their calves up there where they have a better chance of survival.
Another gentleman that has come to the floor to address this issue is one of the three judges from the State of Texas, and they all come here from Texas knowing something about the law and something about energy.
I would be happy to yield to Judge Carter, the gentleman from Texas.
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