Skyrocketing Gas Prices
Floor Speech
Mr. KELLER of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss the problem of skyrocketing gas prices. When a single mom in Orlando, Florida, is paying $80 to fill up her minivan, that's a crisis. The American people deserve some straight talk, and here it is: The main component of a price of gasoline at the pump is crude oil. Crude oil is a commodity governed by the law of supply and demand. Therefore, we must increase our supply and reduce our demand. To increase our supply, where is the single largest source of untapped crude oil in the United States? It's in Alaska in an area called ANWR, specifically in a section called 1002.
I recently went to Alaska and toured the entire northern slope, including the 1002 section of ANWR. I will tell you why I did. The critics of Alaska oil drilling say three things about ANWR:
They say, first, don't drill there because there's only a trivial amount of oil. Then they tell us that it would ruin the pristine wilderness. And, finally, they say don't do it because it will hurt the wildlife there, particularly the caribou and the polar bear. Let me address all three issues head-on as someone who has personally been there.
First, is there a trivial amount of oil there? There's 10.4 billion barrels of oil there, according to the United States Department of Interior. And 10.4 billion barrels of oil is enough to provide all of my home State of Florida's energy needs for 29 years; 10.4 billion barrels of oil is enough to pump 1 million barrels of oil a day every single day for the next 30 years. Does that sound like a trivial amount of oil to you?
The next thing we heard is that it's a pristine wilderness. You can't possibly drill there. Well, I went there. I went to the town of Kaktovik, the only village of ANWR, and I looked out and was a little surprised by what I saw, and I'll tell you what I saw. It was a flat, barren tundra. It looked like the surface of the moon, not some rain forest-style wilderness. There was not a tree within 100 miles. And as I stood there with the leader of Kaktovik, Mr. Felton Rexford, the leader of the local Eskimo tribe, I said, ``Where are all the trees? Where's the wilderness?
He said, ``Congressman, there is no wilderness here. There are no trees. The closest tree is over 100 miles away.''
When you look at the size of ANWR, 19 million acres, the size of South Carolina, you have to realize that the drilling that we're proposing is in a limited 2,000-acre section of 1002. That means literally 99.99 percent of ANWR is off-limits and the tiny area that we would drill is a flat, frozen, barren tundra. To put that in perspective, it would be the size of a stamp on a football field.
The next issue: This would hurt the wildlife, particularly caribou and polar bear. Well, there are 800,000 caribou in Alaska, 5,000 polar bear. I saw them both on my trip. I can tell you the numbers for both are up over the last 30 years, each and every year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In fact, next door to ANWR is Prudhoe Bay, which is an existing oil field that's owned by the State, and we had caribou there in the mid 1970s to the tune of 3,000. They have increased since then tenfold up to 30,000.
So if those reasons aren't valid, what are the real reasons we are not drilling in ANWR? Well, here is a quote from the head of the Sierra Club, Mr. Carl Pope, and he says, ``We are better off without cheap gas.'' Better off without cheap gas. Tell the single mom paying $80 to fill up her minivan that she's better off without cheap gas. Tell the airline employees who all just lost their jobs that they're better off without cheap gas. Tell the small business employees who were just laid off that their families are better off without cheap gas. Tell the public school superintendent that had to switch to a 4-day week because he can't afford the money for the buses that our children are better off without cheap gas.
Mr. Speaker, the American people are hurting. We want you to put the ordinary Americans above the radical fringe environmental groups. We want you to give us an up-or-down vote on the American Energy Act. We want you to do it this September before taking another vacation and take care of business.
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