Mr. President, day after day record-high oil and gasoline prices are causing immense harm to millions of American consumers and businesses. Unless something is done to make energy more affordable, these record-high prices will continue to…
Mr. President, day after day record-high oil and gasoline prices are causing immense harm to millions of American consumers and businesses. Unless something is done to make energy more affordable, these record-high prices will continue to damage our economy, increasing the prices of transportation, food, manufacturing, and everything in between. Skyrocketing energy prices are a threat to our economic and national security, and the time is long past for action.
My Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has conducted four separate investigations into how our energy markets can be made to work better. Most recently, last December, we had a joint hearing with the Senate Energy Subcommittee on the role of speculation in rising energy prices. As a result of these investigations and hearings, I have been advocating a variety of measures to address the rampant speculation and lack of regulation of energy markets which have contributed to sky high energy prices:
First, put a cop--a regulatory agency--back on the beat in the energy markets to prevent excessive speculation and manipulation. That includes closing the Enron loophole and the London loophole and taking other steps to strengthen market oversight.
Second, develop alternatives to fossil fuels to reduce our dependence on oil.
Third, impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies that have profited from the massive price runup and use the money to help consumers, boost domestic energy supplies, improve energy technologies, and strengthen our energy markets.
One of the major causes of our energy crisis is the failed policies of the current administration. The chickens have come home to roost on 7 years of a business-as-usual energy policy, paired with fiscal and foreign policies that have pushed our growing energy problem close to a breaking point. Because the administration has proved itself unable and unwilling to take the necessary steps to provide affordable energy supplies to the American people, it is up to the Congress to try to jump-start a comprehensive solution to skyrocketing energy prices. Congress already has taken two important steps this year--we have closed the Enron loophole and we have stopped the administration's misguided program to keep on filling the SPR despite record-high prices--but more can and should be done. That is why I support enactment of the Consumer-First Energy Act now before us and will be voting for cloture on this bill.
Last week the price of crude oil reached a record high price of about $139 per barrel. Sky-high crude oil prices have led to record highs in the price of other fuels produced from crude oil, including gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, and jet fuel. The national average price of gasoline is at a record high of just over $4 per gallon. The price of diesel fuel, which is normally less expensive than gasoline, has soared to a record high of nearly $4.60 per gallon.
Rising energy prices increase the cost of getting to work and taking our children to school, traveling by car, truck, air and rail, and growing the food we eat and transporting it to market. Rising energy prices increase the cost of producing the medicines we need for our health, heating our homes and offices, generating electricity, and manufacturing countless industrial and consumer products. The relentless increase in jet fuel prices, which have added nearly $75 billion to our airlines' annual fuel costs, has contributed to airline bankruptcies, mergers, fare increases, and service cuts. ``If fuel continues to go up, this industry cannot survive in current form,'' the president of the Air Transport Association said recently. Rising diesel prices have placed a crushing burden upon our Nation's truckers, farmers, manufacturers, and other industries. To make matters worse, our energy costs are rising much more quickly than energy costs in other countries, directly threatening our global competitiveness.
In January 2001, when President Bush took office, the price of oil was about $30 per barrel. The average price for a gallon of gasoline was about $1.50. Since President Bush took office, crude oil prices have more than quadrupled, natural gas prices to heat our homes have almost doubled, gasoline prices have nearly tripled, and diesel fuel prices have more than tripled.
It doesn't have to be this way. Just 7 years ago, at the end of the Clinton Administration, energy supplies were plentiful, and gasoline and other forms of energy were affordable. Once the Bush administration took office, however, it didn't take them long to eliminate the budget surplus by cutting taxes mainly for the wealthiest among us, creating a huge annual budget deficit, and driving up the national debt. This fiscal mismanagement has contributed significantly to a steep decline in the value of the dollar and soaring commodity prices. Because American currency is worth less, it takes more of them to buy the same barrel of oil. American consumers and businesses are forced to spend more and more of their hard-earned dollars to buy the same amount of energy.
During the last years of the Clinton administration, the United States ran a budget surplus, totaling nearly $560 billion. But over the past 6 years of the Bush administration the annual deficits have totaled nearly $1.7 trillion, not counting the amount by which the Bush administration has been draining the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. When this is counted, under this administration the total outstanding debt has increased by a whopping $3.2 trillion.
When President Clinton left office, the dollar was worth more than the Euro. In January 2001, it took only about 90 cents to buy one Euro. Today, it takes about $1.60 to buy one Euro--a record low for the dollar. The fall in the value of the dollar is a result of a weakened U.S. economy, a high trade deficit and a worldwide lack of confidence in the Bush administration's ability to manage our Nation's economy and foreign policy.
As long as this administration continues to insist on irresponsible fiscal practices--including tax cuts for people with the highest income and an open-ended conflict in Iraq that is costing $12 billion a month--the dollar will likely continue to decline in value. The marketplace has rendered a clear ``no confidence'' in this administration's fiscal competence.
Besides the weak dollar, there are other factors at work that account for soaring energy prices. Some are beyond our control; others we can do something about. In global markets, for example, the combination of increasing demand from developing countries, coupled with a variety of political problems in supplier countries, has contributed to price increases. Growing demand for oil and gas in China, India, and other developing countries is contributing to an overall increase in global demand for crude oil. On the supply side, many oil producing countries are politically unstable and have not been fully reliable suppliers. For example, in Nigeria, which is a major oil-producing country, for several years tribal gangs have been sabotaging production and pipelines.
While we can't do much about growing demand in China and India, other causes of high prices can be addressed. For example, one key factor in energy price spikes is rampant speculation in the energy markets. Traders are trading contracts for future delivery of oil in record amounts, creating a paper demand that is driving up prices and increasing price volatility solely to take a profit. Overall, the amount of trading of futures and options in oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange has risen sixfold in recent years, from 500,000 outstanding contracts in 2001, to about 3 million contracts now.
Much of this increase in trading of futures has been due to speculation. Speculators in the oil market do not intend to use crude oil; instead they buy and sell contracts for crude oil just to make a profit from the changing prices. The number of futures and options contracts held by speculators has gone from around 100,000 contracts in 2001, which was 20 percent of the total number of outstanding contracts, to 1.2 million contracts currently held by speculators, which represents almost 40 percent of the outstanding futures and options contracts in oil on NYMEX .
There are now 12 times as many speculative holdings as there was in 2001, while holdings of nonspeculative futures and options are up but 3 times.
Not surprisingly, this massive speculation that the price of oil will increase has, in fact, helped fuel the actual increase in the price of oil to a level far above the price that is justified by the traditional forces of supply and demand.
The president and CEO of Marathon Oil recently said, ``$100 oil isn't justified by the physical demand in the market. It has to be speculation on the futures market that is fueling this.'' Mr. Fadel Gheit, oil analyst for Oppenheimer and Company, describes the oil market as ``a farce.'' ``The speculators have seized control and it's basically a free-for-all, a global gambling hall, and it won't shut down unless and until responsible governments step in.'' In January of this year, as oil hit $100 barrel, Mr. Tim Evans, oil analyst for Citigroup, wrote ``the larger supply and demand fundamentals do not support a further rise and are, in fact, more consistent with lower price levels.'' At the joint hearing on the effects of speculation held by my subcommittee last December, Dr. Edward Krapels, a financial market analyst, testified, ``Of course financial trading, speculation affects the price of oil because it affects the price of everything we trade. . . . It would be amazing if oil somehow escaped this effect.'' Dr. Krapels added that as a result of this speculation, ``There is a bubble in oil prices.''
A fair price for a commodity is a price that accurately reflects the forces of supply and demand for the commodity, not the trading strategies of speculators who only are in the market to make a profit by the buying and selling of paper contracts with no intent to actually purchase, deliver, or transfer the commodity. As we have all too often seen in recent years, when speculation grows so large that it has a major impact on the market, prices get distorted and stop reflecting true supply and demand.
Last month, Senator Jack Reed and I wrote a letter asking President Bush to appoint a high-level task force to evaluate how speculators are driving up prices through manipulative or deceptive devices. The task force should also evaluate whether there are adequate regulatory tools to control market speculation and prevent manipulation. Hopefully the President will act quickly to convene this task force.
Excessive market speculation is a factor that we can and should do a better job of controlling. There are other long overdue actions as well that, if taken as part of a comprehensive plan, can combat rising energy prices.
As to reining in speculation, the first step to take is to put a cop back on the beat in all our energy markets to prevent excessive speculation, price manipulation, and trading abuses. In 2001, my Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began investigating our energy markets. At the time, the price of a gallon of gasoline had spiked upwards by about 25 cents over the course of the Memorial Day holiday. We subpoenaed records from major oil companies and interviewed oil industry experts, gas station dealers, antitrust experts, gasoline wholesalers and distributors, and oil company executives. We examined thousands of prices at gas stations in Michigan, Ohio, California, and other States. In the spring of 2002, I released a 400-page report and held 2 days of hearings on the results of the investigation.
The investigation found that increasing concentration in the gasoline refining industry, due to a large number of recent mergers and acquisitions, was one of the causes of the increasing number of gasoline price spikes. Another factor causing price spikes was the increasing tendency of refiners to keep lower inventories of gasoline. We also found a number of instances in which the increasing concentration in the refining industry was also leading to higher prices in general. Limitations on the pipeline that brings gasoline into my home State of Michigan were another cause of price increases and spikes in Michigan. The report recommended that the Federal Trade Commission carefully investigate proposed mergers, particularly with respect to the effect of mergers on inventories of gasoline.
The investigation discovered one instance in which a major oil company was considering ways to prevent other refiners from supplying gasoline to the Midwest so that supply would be constricted and prices would increase.
In March 2003, my subcommittee released a second report detailing how the operation of crude oil markets affects the price of not only gasoline but also key commodities like home heating oil, jet fuel, and diesel fuel. The report warned that U.S. energy markets were vulnerable to price manipulation due to a lack of comprehensive regulation and market oversight.
Following this report, I worked with Senator Feinstein on legislation to put the cop back on the beat in those energy markets that had been exempted from regulation pursuant to an ``Enron loophole'' that was snuck into other legislation in December 2000. For 2 years we attempted to close the Enron loophole, but efforts to put the cop back on the beat in these markets were unsuccessful, due to opposition from the Bush administration, large energy companies, and large financial institutions that trade energy commodities.
In June 2006, I released another Subcommittee report, ``The Role of Market
Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices: A Need to Put a Cop on the Beat.'' This report found that the traditional forces of supply and demand no longer accounted for sustained price increases and price volatility in the oil and gasoline markets. The report determined that, in 2006, that a growing number of energy trades occurred without regulatory oversight and that market speculation had contributed to rising oil and gasoline prices, perhaps accounting for $20 out of a then-priced $70 barrel of oil.
The subcommittee report I released in June 2006 again recommended new laws to increase market oversight and stop market manipulation and excessive speculation. I again coauthored legislation with Senator Feinstein to improve oversight of the unregulated energy markets. Once again, opposition from the Bush administration, large energy traders, and the financial industry prevented the full Senate from considering this legislation.
In 2007, my Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations addressed the sharp rise in natural gas prices over the previous year and released a fourth report, entitled ``Excessive Speculation in the Natural Gas Market.'' Our investigation showed that speculation by a single hedge fund named Amaranth had distorted natural gas prices during the summer of 2006 and drove up prices for average consumers. The report also demonstrated how Amaranth had traded in unregulated markets to avoid the restrictions and oversight in the regulated markets and how the price increases caused by Amaranth could have been prevented if there had been the same type of oversight in the unregulated markets as in the regulated markets.
Following this investigation, I introduced a new bill, S. 2058, to close the Enron loophole and regulate the unregulated electronic energy markets. Working again with Senators Feinstein and Snowe and with the members of the Agriculture Committee in a bipartisan effort, we finally managed to include an amendment to close the Enron loophole in the farm bill that was then being considered by the Senate. The Senate unanimously passed this amendment to close the Enron loophole last December. The final farm bill that was passed by the House and Senate last month included language nearly identical to what the Senate had passed. Although President Bush vetoed the entire farm bill, both the House and Senate have overridden his veto. Our 5-year quest to close the Enron Loophole has finally been successful.
The CFTC is now in the process of implementing the close-the-Enron- loophole law. Among other steps, it is charged with reviewing the contracts on previously unregulated energy markets, like the Intercontinental Exchange or ICE, to determine which contracts have a significant effect on energy prices and must undergo daily oversight. Once that process is complete, the cop will be back on the beat in those markets for the first time since 2000.
Closing the Enron loophole is vitally important for energy market oversight as a whole, and for our natural gas markets in particular, but it is not enough. Because over the last 2 years, energy traders have moved a significant amount of U.S. crude oil and gasoline trading to the United Kingdom, beyond the direct reach of U.S. regulators, we have to address that second loophole too. I call it closing the London loophole.
There are currently two key energy commodity markets for U.S. crude oil and gasoline trading. The first is the New York Mercantile Exchange or NYMEX, located in New York City. The second is the ICE Futures Europe exchange, located in London and regulated by the British agency called the Financial Services Authority.
The British regulators, however, do not oversee their energy markets the same way we do; they don't place limits on speculation like we do, and they don't make public the same type of trading data that we do. That means that traders can avoid the limits on speculation in crude oil imposed on the New York exchange by trading on the London exchange. It also makes the London exchange less transparent than the New York exchange. My original legislation to close the Enron loophole would have required U.S. traders on the London exchange to provide U.S. regulators with the same type of trading information that they are already required to provide when they trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Unfortunately, this provision was dropped from the close-the- Enron-loophole legislation in the farm bill.
The Consumer-First Energy Act, S. 3044, which the majority leader and others introduced recently to address high prices and reduce speculation, includes at my request a provision to curb rampant speculation, increase our access to foreign exchange trading data, and strengthen oversight of the trading of U.S. energy commodities no matter where that trading occurs. This provision would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC, prior to allowing a foreign exchange to establish direct trading terminals located in this country, to obtain an agreement from the that foreign exchange, such as the London exchange, to impose speculative limits and reporting requirements on traders of U.S. energy commodities that are comparable to the requirements imposed by the CFTC on U.S. exchanges. I believe this issue is so important that I have introduced this section of the package as a separate bill, which is numbered S. 2995. Senator Feinstein is a cosponsor of that bill.
Following the introduction of our legislation, the CFTC finally moved to address some of the gaps in its ability to oversee foreign exchanges operating in the United States. Specifically, the CFTC, working with the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority and the ICE Futures Europe exchange, announced that it will now obtain the following information about the trading of U.S. crude oil contracts on the London exchange:
Daily large trader reports on positions in West Texas
Intermediate or WTI contracts traded on the London exchange;
information on those large trader positions for all futures
contracts, not just a limited set of contracts due to expire
in the near future; enhanced trader information to permit
more detailed identification of end users; improved data
formatting to facilitate integration of the data with other
CFTC data systems; and notification to the CFTC of when a
trader on ICE Futures Europe exceeds the position
accountability levels established by NYMEX for the trading of
WTI crude oil contracts.
These new steps will strengthen the CFTC's ability to detect and prevent manipulation and excessive speculation in the oil and gasoline markets. It will ensure that the CFTC has the same type of information it receives from U.S. exchanges in order to detect and prevent manipulation and excessive speculation.
However, in order to fully close the London loophole, better information is not enough. The CFTC must also have clear authority to act upon this information to stop manipulation and excessive speculation.
That is why I have been working with the sponsors of the Consumer- First Energy Act to include additional language to ensure that the CFTC has the authority to act upon the information it will obtain from the London exchange, in order to prevent price manipulation and excessive speculation. This new provision, which I helped author, would make it clear that the CFTC has the authority to prosecute and punish manipulation of the price of a commodity, regardless of whether the trader within the United States is trading on a U.S. or on a foreign exchange. It would also make it clear that the CFTC has the authority to require traders in the United States to reduce their positions, no matter where the trading occurs--on a U.S. or foreign exchange--to prevent price manipulation or excessive speculation. Finally, it would clarify that the CFTC has the authority to require all U.S. traders to keep records of their trades, regardless of which exchange the trader is using.
It is my understanding that this new provision will be included in a substitute amendment that will be offered today or in a future debate on this bill, if cloture is not invoked today. I thank the bill sponsors for accepting this language to ensure that the CFTC has full enforcement authority over traders within the United States who are trading on a foreign exchange, just as the CFTC has over traders who are trading on a U.S. exchange. This clarification of the CFTC's enforcement authority over traders in the United States, together with the earlier provision setting standards for foreign boards of
trade wishing to place trading terminals in the United States, will fully close the London loophole.
There is another problem with our energy markets that Congress has finally acted on. In 2003, a report issued by my Subcommittee staff found that the Bush administration's large deposits of oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, SPR, were increasing crude oil prices without improving overall U.S. energy security. We found that in 2002, the Bush administration, over the repeated objections of its own experts in the Department of Energy, had changed its policy and decided to put oil into the SPR regardless of the price of oil or market conditions. By placing oil into the SPR while oil prices were high and oil supplies were tight, the administration's deposits into the SPR were reducing market supplies and boosting prices, with almost no benefit to national security, given the fact that the SPR is more than 95 percent filled. The DOE experts believed that in a tight market, we are better off with keeping the oil on the market rather than putting it into the ground where it cannot be used.
Following the issuance of this report, in early 2003, I asked the Department of Energy to suspend its filling of the SPR until prices had abated and supplies were more plentiful. DOE refused to change course and continued the SPR fill without regard to market supplies or prices.
After DOE denied my request, I offered a bipartisan amendment with Senator Collins to the Interior appropriations bill, which provides funding for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve program, to require DOE to minimize the costs to the taxpayers and market impacts when placing oil into the SPR. The Senate unanimously adopted our amendment, but it was dropped from the conference report due to the Bush Administration's continued opposition.
The next spring, I offered another amendment, also with Senator Collins, to the budget resolution, expressing the sense of the Senate that the administration should postpone deliveries into the SPR and use the savings from the postponement to increase funding for national security programs. The amendment passed the Senate by a vote of 52 to 43. That fall, we attempted to attach a similar amendment to the homeland security appropriations bill that would have postponed the SPR fill and used the savings for homeland security programs, but the amendment was defeated by a procedural vote, even though the majority of Senators voted in favor of the amendment, 48 to 47.
The next year, the Senate passed the Levin-Collins amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to require the DOE to consider price impacts and minimize the costs to the taxpayers and market impacts when placing oil into the SPR. The Levin-Collins amendment was agreed to by the conferees and is now law.
Unfortunately, passage of this provision has had no effect upon DOE's actions. DOE continued to fill the SPR regardless of the market effects of buying oil, thereby taking oil off the market and reducing supply by placing it into the SPR. In the past year, no matter what the price of oil or market conditions, DOE consistently found that the market effects are negligible and no reason to delay filling the SPR.
Most recently, at the same time the President was urging OPEC to put more oil on the market to reduce supplies, the administration was continuing to take oil off the market and place it into the SPR. Until recently, the DOE was depositing about 70,000 barrels of crude oil per day into the SPR, much of it high-quality crude oil ideal for refining into gasoline. It defies common sense for the U.S. Government to be acquiring oil at $120 or $130 per barrel, in a time of tight supply, taking that oil off the market, and putting it in the SPR. That is why I cosponsored Senator Dorgan's bill to suspend the SPR fill, as well as a similar provision in the Consumer-First Energy Act.
Finally, Congress had had enough of this senseless policy. The provision to stop the continuous filing of the SPR was pulled from the Consumer-First Energy Act and offered in the House and Senate as a stand alone bill. Congress enacted into law by an overwhelming vote. In response, the President finally called a halt to his policy and stopped filling the SPR. It is about time.
The SPR fill policy, by the way, exacerbated yet another problem in our oil markets--the fact that the standard NYMEX futures contract that sets the benchmark price for U.S. crude oil requires a particular type of high quality crude oil known as West Texas Intermediate, WTI, to be delivered at a particular location, Cushing, OK. The standard NYMEX contract price, in turn, has a major influence on the price of fuels refined from crude oil such as gasoline, heating oil, and diesel.
Because the price of the standard contract depends upon the supply of WTI at Cushing, OK, the supply and demand conditions in Oklahoma have a disproportionate influence on the price of NYMEX futures contracts. That means when the WTI price is no longer representative of the price of U.S. crude oil in general, the prices of other energy commodities are also thrown out of whack. In other words, we have an oil futures market that reflects the supply and demand conditions in Cushing, OK, but not necessarily the overall supply and demand situation in the United States as a whole.
I have long called for reform of this outdated feature of the standard NYMEX crude oil contract. In 2003, the PSI report recommended the CFTC and NYMEX to work together to revise the standard NYMEX crude oil futures contract to reduce its susceptibility to local imbalances in the market for WTI crude oil. The subcommittee report suggested that allowing for delivery at other locations could reduce the volatility of the contract. It is truly disappointing that since our report was issued no progress has been made for allowing for delivery at other places than Cushing, OK. As the price of oil has increased, the distortions and imbalances caused by the atypical nature of the standard contract have gotten worse. It is essential NYMEX repair its crude oil contract.
Putting the cop on the beat in our energy markets, strengthening oversight of U.S. energy commodities traded on foreign exchanges, stopping the SPR fill, and fixing the NYMEX crude oil contract all focus on problems caused by rising energy prices. These consistently rising gas prices also underscore the need to develop advanced vehicle technologies and alternative energy sources that will significantly reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
I have long advocated advanced automotive technologies such as hybrid electric, advanced batteries, hydrogen and fuel cells and promoted development of these technologies through Federal research and development and through joint government-industry partnerships. We need a significant infusion of Federal dollars into these efforts to make revolutionary breakthroughs in automotive technologies. Such an investment will make technologies such as plug-in hybrid vehicles affordable to the American public and reduce our dependence on oil and reduce prices at the pump.
We need an equally strong investment in development of alternative fuels that can replace gasoline. I have strongly supported efforts to increase our production of renewable fuels and to do that in a way that will also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a strong push toward biofuels produced from cellulosic materials, which requires a significantly greater Federal investment in biofuels technologies. Cellulosic ethanol has enormous potential for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but additional Federal support is required to make this technology financially viable. We need expanded Federal research and development grants as well as increased tax incentives and Federal loan guarantees to make cellulosic ethanol a viable replacement for gasoline. The Federal Government must do its part first to develop these technologies so that they will then in turn be within reach of the American public.
One more point. The burden of higher energy prices is not being shared equally. To the contrary, it is falling hardest upon those who can least afford it. Large oil companies are reaping record profits at the expense of the average American who ultimately bears the full burden of these price increases. At the same time that average Americans are having to devote a greater and greater portion of their income to pay for basic necessities, such as gasoline, household utilities, and food, the major oil companies are reporting record profits and
their executives are taking home annual paychecks of hundreds of millions of dollars. Many of these profits have been generated without any additional investments into energy production. Rather, these companies have seen their profits rise with the flood of speculation. What is a high tide of profits for the oil companies, though, is a tsunami that is overwhelming millions of Americans.
And what are these oil companies doing with these record profits? Are they investing in new technologies? The answer is that the oil companies are not increasing their exploration and development investments by nearly as much as their profits are increasing. Instead, they are devoting large amounts of their profits to acquiring other companies and buying back their own shares. On May 1 of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that in the first quarter of 2008 ExxonMobil spent $8 billion to buy back company shares, which ``boosted per-share earnings to stratospheric levels,'' whereas it spent less on exploration and actually reduced oil production.
For these reasons, we need to institute a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. We should incentivize big oil companies to invest their windfall profits into things that will increase our own domestic energy production by reducing the amount of the tax for such investments. If they don't make these investments, a portion of that profit should be recouped by the public to help offset the outrageous prices they are facing at the pump.
I have supported a windfall profits tax numerous times when we have voted on it in the Senate. The Consumer-First Energy Act, imposes a 25 percent tax on windfall profits of the major oil companies. Windfall profits invested to boost domestic energy supplies would be exempt from the tax, which would encourage investments in renewable facilities and the production of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. It would also encourage oil companies to increase their domestic refinery capacity. Proceeds from the tax would be put toward measures to reduce the burdens of rising energy costs and increase our energy independence and security.
Sky-high energy prices are causing immense financial pain to working families and businesses throughout this country and tying our already weak economy in knots. Congress cannot just stand by; we must act now to stop the pain. Immediate steps include putting the cop on the beat in all of our energy markets to prevent price manipulation and excessive speculation, strengthening oversight of U.S. energy commodities traded in London, fixing the key NYMEX crude oil contract, investing in advanced vehicle technologies and alternative energy sources, and imposing a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. Longer range steps include fixing the fiscal policies undermining the strength of the U.S. dollar, including by eliminating tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, reducing the $12 billion a month spending bill in Iraq, and closing outrageous tax loopholes than enable tax dodgers to use offshore tax havens to avoid payment of taxes in the range of $100 billion each year.
We can fight back against exorbitantly high energy prices. But it will take all our energy--and determination--to do it.