Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I requested and were included in H. Res. 1488, Providing for consideration of the Senate amendment to the bill (H.R. 2638) making appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes. Consistent with the Republican Leadership's policy on earmarks, I hereby certify that to the best of my knowledge this earmark: (1) is not directed to an entity or program that will be named after a sitting Member of Congress; (2) is not intended to be used by an entity to secure funds for other entities unless the use of funding is consistent with the specified purpose of the earmark; and (3) meets or exceeds all statutory requirements for matching funds where applicable.

Member: Congressman John E. Peterson.

Bill Number: H. Res. 1488 (H.R. 2638).

Provision: RDTE, N, Line# 183, PE# 0205633N.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Impact Technologies.

Address of Requesting Entity: 2571 Park Center Blvd., State College,

I have mixed emotions today. It may be the last chance I have to address this body. In 1 minute, I can't say much. I want to tell how much I've appreciated both sides of the aisle, my friendships.

Mr. Speaker, I rise with disappointment today. People in my district and the working people of this country are begging us to resolve this energy issue. They're struggling to drive their cars, and they don't have any idea how they're going to heat their homes and run their businesses with today's energy prices. They expect us to do something.

Speaker Pelosi's been telling the country that drilling's not the answer; it would take 10 years. Well, the Pelosi team drafted a bill. It will take 10 years, maybe 15, maybe 20, folks. This bill will not produce energy. It locks up 97 percent of the west coast forever. It locks up the most productive part of the gulf that we can produce quickly forever.

Folks, we need a bipartisan bill. Twenty-three Republicans and Democrats sat down and drafted a bill, 11 Democrats and 12 Republicans. We drafted the Peterson-Abercrombie bill that opens up all kinds of energy for America, funds all the renewables, and gives hope to the American people.

That's the kind of bill they don't want. They don't want a Republican bill. They don't want a Democrat bill. They want a bill that Members of this Congress sat down with no oil companies, no lobbyists. We sat down and drafted a simple bill--not 290 pages--one we could understand. We need to vote on a bipartisan energy bill that will give hope to the Americans that there is an economic future.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart.

America is in a crisis for affordable, available energy. Our folks back home want us to sit down and figure out how to have available, affordable energy. Four hundred Members of Congress, including me, who have been involved in this debate for years, this morning found out there is a 290-page bill that we are going to vote on today with no amendments.

That's not the process of how to get to a solution. That's the political process. This is a political process, not a process about solving America's energy crisis.

Mr. Markey's just sharing with us that we are holding back wind and solar and geothermal. That's not true. There is no Member of Congress that I know of that won't fund all of those.

The Peterson-Abercrombie bill funds every renewable that's on the books for 5 years. It funds all the conservation programs that both parties have thought of, and it funds environmental cleanups. It incentivizes all the forms of energy that will help us get to where we need to be.

The Pelosi bill, unfortunately, talks with one hand of opening up drilling. On the other hand, it locks it back up because of a 50-mile setback, and then States are supposed to open it up when Members of Congress don't have the courage to, with no reward of a royalty. No State legislature is going to open up the second 50 miles and get no royalties.

America doesn't want this political rhetoric. America wants us to sit down as Republicans and Democrats. They don't want a Republican bill or a Democrat bill. They want us to sit down and discuss energy into the night, day after day, until we get it right, and we fix and provide America available, affordable energy.

Folks, we can do that. We have lots of reserves. Twenty-eight years ago we started locking up our reserves and decided not to produce energy. We caused the shortage. We caused the high prices. We are the reason the oil companies have made huge profits.

When you lock up supply, the price triples. Whoever owns it gets rich. That's how it works, folks. We need to open up supply, bring prices down and give America energy to heat their homes and drive their cars so that they can afford to pay for them.

I want to thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank all the Members of this body for participating. Those of you that have been down here for hours, I want to thank you. I want to thank my friend Mr. Abercrombie from Hawaii, who has worked at my side for half a decade, bipartisanly, to try to figure out how we can make America energy independent and open up the resources that we have.

How can the most powerful country in the world allow itself to be in a position where its energy prices depend on three things that they have no control over? We just faced one, and we dodged a bullet again from major damage; storms in the gulf. They happen most years. It will depend on that whether we have available affordable energy.

The stability of the 13 largest oil companies in the world, all bigger than Exxon, unstable countries, non-democracies who have governments that tip over often. And if any one of them tips and produces two or three million barrels less oil, there is a shortage of oil in the world.

And then we have been lucky that terrorists have not yet attacked our energy system. It is so vulnerable.

How did we let ourselves get there? Well, most of our lifetime, in fairness to the former Congresses, energy was cheap, $2 gas and $10 oil. A spike in the seventies, a spike in the eighties, a spike in the nineties. We tried alternatives, but they didn't work, because cheap oil ran them out of the market.

Folks, cheap oil is gone. Cheap natural gas is over. We are in a new era. We are sharing energy now with a whole part of the world that didn't use it before. We will soon not be the biggest user of energy.

Twenty-eight years ago, we decided it was better to use theirs, not ours. We started locking up our Outer Continental Shelf. A few years later we tried to open ANWR when it was starting to get a little tighter, and a President vetoed it. About the same time, they set one of the largest coal reserves in America, I believe it was in the State of Utah, aside, as if it wasn't important, millions of acres.

More recently, in legislation that slipped through and got signed, unfortunately, we locked up shale oil, the big new field that has awesome potential.

And the one that stuns me, the fastest growing renewable, and I haven't heard anybody mention it here, woody biomass, 3.6 percent now. Woody biomass. Pellet stoves, wood waste for boilers, and we are hoping to do cellulosic ethanol from it. We have legislation that says wood waste from our Federal lands can't be used.

Tar sand oil, the new oil from Canada that we have built our refineries to use, we have legislation that is going to made it difficult to get that.

Every year since I have been here we have become 2 percent more dependent on foreign oil, and we will again next year. Unfortunately, this legislation locks up 97 percent of the west coast energy availability. It removes the part of the eastern gulf that is the most easy to obtain, close to where we are producing today, where the infrastructure is there and we can do it quickly. On the east coast, most of the energy is between 25 and 50 miles out, and it is locked up.

Then I guess the part that bothers me, I was a State legislator before I came here, we are kicking the ball to the State legislatures. It is Congress' role to provide energy for America. We are saying to State legislators, vote to open up. We are not going to give you royalties. There is no win in it for you, but you be statesmen. You take on that environmental lobby and you open that land up, because we won't.

Yes, prior to this bill, the ANWR Interior bill was available, and for the last number of years I forced many of you, and some of you groaned, to vote on whether we continued the moratorium.

Fourteen Congresses and three Presidents have not adequately valued energy availability for America. There is lots of blame to go around. Let's stop blaming each other here.

Who are the losers? The working people of America, Mary and Joe, retired seniors, living in a family homestead, struggling to have money for their automobile fuel and going to try to heat that big old home this year. Last year they kept it at 58. They don't know what they are going to do this year.

Jim and Nicole with three children. They have an eight-year-old vehicle and a modest older home. They kept their home at 60 raising kids, and they don't know how they are going to do it, because their bills are going to be much higher this year.

Then Margie, a single mom with a teenage daughter and a teenage son. She drives 40 miles to work one way, that is 400 miles a week. That is really stretching her budget with these gas prices. Her gas bill has gone from $175 to $220 to $230. She has no idea how she is going to pay it.

The small businesses that employ the bulk of our friends and neighbors are struggling to pay their energy bill.

Folks, we need to deal with this energy issue, and we need to deal with it bipartisanly and get cost-effective energy for this country.

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Yes, in its current form.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I want to thank the leadership on both sides. I want to thank all of the Members for the opportunity tonight to offer America the first bipartisan energy bill that may have been offered in this century written by Republicans and Democrats in a room with just cold sandwiches night after night, working with no lobbyists, no power brokers, trying to come together like the American people want us to. They want affordable, available energy as soon as we can get it, and they want it ongoingly, and they deserve it.

We're the most powerful Nation in the world, and it's unfair to the American public that their future depends on weather in the gulf, that their future depends on unstable countries that provide us half of our imported oil. We get half of the 70 percent we import from friends and half of it from unstable nations. The American people are not comfortable with that. They want better.

And the American people know that our energy system could be sabotaged each and every day by the terrorists because there is no slop in the system, there's no surplus, there's no extra. There's just enough oil to meet the oil demand each day, and whenever anything goes wrong, the prices skyrocket.

Folks, we have the chance here to reevaluate our policies. I understand many years ago when we set it aside, it was cheap: $2 gas, $10 oil, use theirs, save ours. Folks, that day is gone. We need to now reassess where we're at. We need to be energy independent in this country, and we need to start down that long road. It won't be easy, and it needs to be a broad-based plan.

Our bill opens up the Outer Continental Shelf. It takes away all the prohibitions that have been put upon the Department of the Interior for leasing land. It repeals the prohibition of preventing Federal agencies from entering into contracts for procurement of alternative and synthetic fuels. It repeals limitation on the number of new qualified hybrid and advanced clean-burn technology vehicles eligible for the alternative vehicle tax benefits. That's electric and gas cars.

It allows the use of woody biomass, the fastest growing renewable we have that's fueling pellet stoves and factories with wood waste and will be part of cellulosic ethanol as we move from corn to cellulose, prohibited today by law from using off of Federal land, wood waste. Removes that.

Folks, it removes the prohibition on shale oil, the biggest oil opportunity this country has ever had. And folks, it takes the revenues and funds the renewables better than they've ever been funded. It funds conservation better than it's ever been funded. It funds clean-up efforts, environmental clean-up efforts. It funds carbon sequestration with large amounts of money.

And let me read you that paragraph which I think is vital: ``The Carbon Capture and Sequestration Reserve offsets the cost of legislation enacted after the date of the enactment of the National Conservation, Environment and Energy Independence Act to promote research and development projects associated with carbon capture and storage in the production of liquid transportation fuels, electricity, synthetic natural gas, chemical feedstock and for the disposition and recycling/reprocessing of nuclear waste from nuclear power plants.''

It will fund LIHEAP for those who are not going to be able to afford their heating this winter.

Folks, this is not a perfect bill, but it's a damn good start, and it was put together by no interest groups, no corporations got involved, no environmental radical groups. None of them were at the table.

It was just Members of Congress who felt the needs of their districts and realized the plea of the people to give us available, affordable energy. We're the most powerful Nation. Why are we not doing that? Just recently, Russia bought a coal plant in Pennsylvania. You're going to find China buying energy plants in this country. They're building plants everywhere. They're preparing for their future while we've been sitting on our hands, bickering and bipartisanly fighting with each other.

I ask the Members of both conferences to support this act that will give America energy in the future that's affordable.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I appeal the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I've been listening to the discussion and the debate here. Having served in local government and State government and here in Washington, I find it unbelievable that we're talking about an issue that came from an energy discussion of the beginning of the Bush administration's e-mail records.

Back home people are struggling--and I live in a big rural area--to drive their cars. They're soon going to find out that natural gas prices are probably going to double by fall and the costs to heat their homes are going to double. My schools are going to pay twice as much to transport their children. They're going to pay twice as much to heat those schools. My hospitals are going to pay twice as much to heat those facilities and to transport patients. I'm losing the air service at my rural airports because you can't fly small planes with these fuel prices.

This country's economic base is crumbling as we talk here today because of exploding energy costs. We are not going to live in the country we were born in. Opportunity is not going to abound. Americans are frightened and concerned, and we're worried about e-mail records of a meeting 8 years ago.

I think our priorities are backwards. We passed an energy bill in `05 that was timid. I think this administration has been timid. We've had three administrations in a row that locked up our Outer Continental Shelf, the only modern country in the world to do that. We've had 14 Congresses in a row that have locked up the Outer Continental Shelf where there's huge resources.

I'm for all the wind we can produce. I'm for all the solar we can absorb. But if we double them both in the next 5 years, we're less than 1 percent of our energy need, and our energy need is growing more than 1 percent a year, so it can't even fill that gap.

Whether we like it or not, we need fossil fuels. We need coal, we need oil, we need gas--clean, green natural gas. I can't believe that people are afraid of drilling a gas well.

Natural gas is driving the blue collar jobs out of this country as we speak. Dow Chemical used to do 64 percent of its business in this country in 2000; they're now at 34 percent of their business in this country. They paid $8 billion for gas in `02; they now pay $8 billion in natural gas quarterly. They can't afford to be here, folks.

Americans can't afford to heat their older homes. They can't afford to drive their older cars. One hundred small trucking companies are going out of business every week because they can't afford fuel oil prices.

The working poor of this country are being destroyed economically. The middle class are going to become poor. Most people in this Congress won't feel much pain. They can afford to pay these prices. But I want to tell you, my neighbors can't. A young lady that lives besides me drives 36 miles to work. She makes $11 an hour.

She pays $200 a month to heat her home, and she can't afford a doubling of those prices and she can't afford to drive to work. I can tell you story after story after story.

I thank the gentleman from Iowa and for the opportunity to share time with him.

I don't know about you, Mr. Speaker. After the 4th of July recess where we had $4 gasoline, $5 diesel, almost $4 heating oil, and Americans are shuddering because what they don't know, and they will be even more concerned, is that in a few months, they will be getting 50- to 60-percent increases in home heating costs with natural gas. Those passed-through costs will be approved by our State PUCs. My home company in western Pennsylvania raised the rates at 6 percent in May and are going to be raising it 50 percent August 1, and they have another opportunity to raise it again in November. And they're just passing through the costs of gas.

Just like New England just had a 42 percent increase in electric costs because of the percentage of their electricity that is now made with natural gas. So as natural gas prices escalate, theirs escalate.

When we have these prices, I have neighbors who don't know how they're going to heat their home this year. I have churches in my district who probably won't use their sanctuaries, seniors who are living on limited budgets. I know a gentleman, a neighbor, this week-- he's 75 years old. Four years ago, he sold his pellet stove because he was 71 and decided he was getting too old to carry 40-pound pellet bags into the basement. He had it in his basement and ran heat up through his registers. And he took it out. And with the current energy prices, he bought another pellet stove. He has to cut another hole through the cement wall that he had cemented and put another pellet stove in because he can't afford fuel.

I have neighbors and friends who kept their house at 55 last year. And this year energy prices are double if they're heating with home heating oil. They're about 75 percent higher with propane, and they're going to be somewhere between 50 and 75 to 100 percent higher in natural gas when those prices hit the market.

I know Americans who are driving 30 and 40 and 50 miles to work. I have a neighbor lady who makes $11 an hour. She has two children. She travels 36 miles to work. Her balanced billing bill is $175 a month, and she has no money in her budget for a 60 percent increase in natural gas prices that are going to hit her for this winter.

People all over America are scared. Should we open the reserve? Well, I guess if we do, we sort of say we didn't need a reserve because the reserve is only several months' supply in case there's a tragedy in the world market, there is a major problem in one of the big sending countries. Let's just say, God forbid, that terrorists would blow up the sending platforms where we load our tankers in Saudi Arabia, we would have $250 oil quickly.

The petroleum reserve is in case of war, is in case of tragedy somewhere in the country, some tragic incident that cuts off our supply. Because today, we get one-third of our oil from home, we buy one-third of it from our friends like Canada and Mexico and other friendly countries, and we buy one-third of it from the Middle East. The one-third in the Middle East, as we've heard earlier, is fragile. We don't know that will always be available. Should we use the reserve? I don't personally think we should. I think we should have kept filling it because 70,000 barrels a day is a drop in a bucket. It did nothing for prices, will do nothing for prices.

So use the reserve and say July, August, and September it will be all gone. And what do we do in October, November, December if we have tragedy or what are we going to do then? That's not a solution.

It amazes me, because I'm not giving high grades on energy to many people around here. It's my view that 3 Presidents and 14 Congresses in succession have not gotten good marks on energy, have not had a bona fide energy plan. And you say, Why is it? Well, it's kind of understandable. Up until 7 or 8 years ago, except for a spike in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s for a year or two at a time, we had $2 gas and $10 oil. And the argument was--and I remember debating it at the State--should we use theirs or should we use ours. I always thought we should produce ours. It creates jobs here. It's part of our economy. There's no better jobs than oil-

patch jobs and all the related jobs, the refineries and the pipelines and all of that whole system.

You can go down in downtown Washington and buy gasoline made in Russia, and the only person making money off of it is the guy selling it. It was refined in Russia. We can buy that in Washington, D.C. They only chain the stations here in the east coast.

So I just find it, I guess, unconceivable that we don't--we can't figure this thing out that when we're one-third dependent--we're two- thirds dependent--but one-third dependent on enemies or people who aren't our friends, and people who--or they're not stable governments. And when they say not to drill here, every day we don't drill here we become more dependent.

Since I've been in Congress, we've averaged 2 percent a year. This year we will increase another 2 percent. We're at two-thirds now dependent on foreign countries.

And what happened was--I don't give the Bush administration high marks. In fact, looking at, you know, they actually get higher marks than many. They had the hydrogen car initiative 2 or 3 years ago. They pumped a lot of money into hydrogen cars. But do we have a hydrogen car? No. Do we hope to some day? Yes. But that's futuristic. That's a good thing.

Last year they had the mandate, they urged us to increase the mandate on biofuels to 36.5 billion by 2030, switching from corn after 15 billion gallons to cellulosic ethanol. Now, I get a little nervous when you mandate cellulosic ethanol when we still don't have the design of a plant to make it. Now, we're hoping and praying, and the thought is making it out of wood waste and making it out of garbage and out of sweet grasses like switchgrass. That looks hopeful as a better way to make ethanol. Because we do know that corn prices have edged up a little from $2 a bushel to I think it hit a high of $7.70 last week. It's down to maybe $7.40 this week.

But the first Bush administration locked up the Outer Continental Shelf. We're the only country in the world to do that. Canada drills right up here. And they drill right up here within sight of our coastline. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, every country, all of South America, everybody produces offshore. In fact, Brazil, the country everybody gives high marks for, and they gave the credit for ethanol. Ethanol is 15 percent of it. But they went out and opened up their continental shelf and just recently in deep water found a huge reserve of oil, and now we're going to be an exporter of oil.

Now, what we don't know about America is when we did seismographic on our shores 30-some years ago, since then for the last 28 years law has prohibited us from even measuring out there to see what's out there. That's how stupid I say we are. We don't even want to go out and look. We could have somewhere out here, or somewhere out here, the largest oil and gas reserve because all over the world, offshore is tremendous energy production.

In fact, everybody tells me, everybody that knows the business and who have regulated the business, not necessarily producers, that it is the least environmental hazard. When you're out in the ocean and you drill a hole in the ground, I mean, one little storm stirs up more than a drilling bit going down into the ocean floor. And we've not had a major spill since Santa Barbara in 1969. We have the technology today. And the cost offshore is big.

But here offshore when we did the seismic measurements 30-some years ago. We only did it in water less than 4,000 feet. Now, today we can drill in 2-mile deep water so we've never even used--and the seismic of today would be like comparing an old seismic 30 years ago. It would be like a black and white TV to the current thin-screen TVs like we have today. That would be the difference. I mean, the new seismic tells you what's there. Tells you a lot.

But we're not there. We just drill in a small part of the gulf. That's the other thing. And it amazes me when we listen to these talks about we got 64 or 84 million acres. Until they drill that we're not going to let them. Well, you know, four out of five deep water wells are dry. It costs $900 million. I'm going to say that again: $900 million to build a deep water platform. It costs $1 million a day to operate it, and it's four out of five wells you will drill.

Now, I'm not able to personally assess. I'm meeting with some people tomorrow in two different groups to learn more about the potential of those 64 or 84--I keep hearing different figures--million acres that they're talking about. But I do know that these are great and the rest of the gulf here are great areas, and we are saying can't drill there.

Now, it seems to me drilling for oil's not a sure thing. Four out of five deep? No. You don't get anything. Three out of four shallow? No. You don't get anything. So you explore, and when you find three or four good wells, now you know you've hit a pool and you will go in and try to figure where it's at and maximize it.

We know in much of the gulf we've been drilling for so long that the gulf is actually depleting. Although we're drilling twice as many wells there as we used to, we're getting less energy because we're in old, tired fields. We're drilling between wells. We're drilling deeper where it's more costly, and it's still exploring, trying to find more gas and oil.

Now, I guess the part that really confounds me is the hope we have for renewables. And you know, I hope for the day in my lifetime that we can run our country on renewables. But here is the chart. From the middle of this chart towards me is history. This is the Energy Department's figures. From the middle of my chart to my left is their projection of the future. Of course, oil's the Big Kahuna. Natural gas and coal are the other big ones.

Now, they show coal increasing. I disagree with that because of the carbon issue and because 70 coal plants in the last 8 or 9 months have been turned down by State agencies, and they will all become gas plants. And the reason we have such high gas prices in our country today is that 12 years ago we took away the moratorium for using natural gas to make electricity. Historically, Mr. Speaker, we only made electricity out of natural gas in a peak power plant that ran in the morning and the evening when we consumed huge amounts of electricity when we're heating water at home and cooking and doing the washing and so forth in the morning and evening, and all of the plants that were running to. So that was a maximum load of electricity.

So 12 years ago we took that moratorium off, and now 24 percent of our electricity is made with natural gas. From 7. That's a huge increase, and we didn't open up supply.

Now, just several years ago natural gas was $2 a thousand. The last few months it's been running at $1,300 to $1,350 a thousand. Those are figures that will drive most industries left out of this country because natural gas is not a world price. It's a country-by-country price. When we pay $130, $140, or $150 for oil, it's very painful; but it's painful for our competitors. It's painful to our neighbors.

But on natural gas, we've been paying the highest prices in the world, and we have competing countries who are right in South America. Trinidad has $1.60 gas. Now, if you're going to make glass or you're going to make bricks, you're going to make petrochemicals, you're going to make fertilizers which consume enormous amounts of gas.

Just to show you. Dow Chemical in 2002 paid $8 billion a year for natural gas. Today, Dow Chemical pays $8 billion a quarter for natural gas. And to show you the migration of jobs out of this country, Dow Chemical in the year 2000 had 64 percent of their production on shore in America. Today they have 34 percent. Why? They can't afford to be here. Just like my neighbors can't afford to heat their homes and drive their cars in rural areas. Companies and small businesses who heat treat things who bend metal and twist metal and have to heat it with natural gas, they can't afford to function competitively in this country if they're competing with products made in another country that can buy gas for a fraction of the cost.

Now, let's look at where we're putting all our faith. I want wind and solar to be huge but it's not.

Nuclear, we did in the 2005 Act streamline the nuclear process. We have thirty-some permits applied for. I think we have 33 about ready to be

given. We need 35 to 40 new plants built for nuclear to keep nuclear at 20 percent of the grid, just maintain, 20 percent, not gain.

Hydro continues to lose ground--that's the brown line here--because we're not building dams. We aren't allowed to build dams. That's the cleanest energy we could have.

The top line is the renewables. Now, over on my left, I'm going to have a big chart tomorrow, but the red is biomass, woody biomass. Now, woody biomass has grown almost a percent in the last 4 years. That's pellet stoves. Over 1 million Americans this year will heat their home with a pellet stove. That's wood waste factories burning boilers with wood waste, heating their factories with wood waste. And it's power plants topping their coal loads with some wood waste to meet air standards there near the edge. So woody biomass, and I don't think there's been any initiatives, any tax credits. That's just happened.

Then we have hydro, and it's not gone. It's going to stay there. The yellow line is geothermal, and there's all kind of incentives. They get the tax credits, but as we grow our economy, it just remains a small portion.

Then we have the blue line, which is wind, which has bubbled somewhat. But if we double wind and solar in the next 5 years we will be less than 1 percent of our energy portfolio. Now, I hope we can, and I hope we can double it again the next 5 years, but we'd still be less than 2 percent of our energy portfolio, maybe even less than that because our energy needs will grow.

Now, the problem that's changed in the world, and a lot of people don't realize it, is the growth of use of energy in the world. It's not us. We're flat on energy use. In fact, we're decreasing because of price.

China is increasing 15 to 20 percent a year. India's increasing at a huge rate. You have South America developing. You have Malaysia developing. You have millions and millions of people in this world who are buying their first car and owning their first home, and when they buy their first car and own their first home, they're in the energy use business.

So, no matter what we do, we can't control prices by conserving. I'm for conservation. In fact, we need to figure out how to help Americans to use energy more wisely and let them write it off on their income taxes in a 3- or 4-year period. We need to do that, whether it's more efficient heating, whether it's better windows, better doors, whether it's more efficient appliances, yes, we need to help them out, because, really, I hate to say it, but the only thing Americans have today that they can do is use less energy. There is nothing now because we are not going to drill. We're not going to drill.

I have a bill to open up the Outer Continental Shelf. I had it poised. I offered it in the committee, in Interior, in the subcommittee, and it's the first time that it's been treated partisanly. We had six Republican votes were ``yes'' and nine Democrats votes ``no.'' Now, I'm not going to blame those Members. They had tremendous Speaker power applied to them. There were Members who voted against energy who have never voted against energy in this Congress in that sitting.

A week or two later, we were going to offer our amendment again in the full committee, where you have about 75 or 80 Members. And I think somebody in the Speaker's office took a count, and when they didn't have the votes to beat my amendment, we didn't do the Interior bill. And here we are today, weeks later, we are still not doing the Interior bill. Why? Because Congressman Peterson has an amendment that would open up the Outer Continental Shelf that would open up drilling 50 miles out, from 50 to 200.

Like I say, I don't pass out any gold awards around this place in the last three decades on energy leadership, and I mean that sincerely. We haven't had a President. President Clinton didn't lead on energy. He vetoed the ANWR bill. And I personally think President Bush tried hard to do ANWR. I voted for ANWR, but if he would have put the same effort on offshore, we would have probably accomplished it, but he didn't. In fact, he has never supported offshore until a news conference two weeks ago. But he also--and I'm going to say this critically--there's a Presidential moratoria and there's a legislative moratoria, and he said, if Congress will lift their moratorium, I will lift mine.

Mr. President, I was disappointed that you didn't lead. I was disappointed that you didn't lift your moratorium. Now, your father put it on. It was not supposed to be long-term. It was supposed to be 5 years until they could assess what parts of our coastline might need to be protected. President Clinton came in, had no energy initiative. He extended it to 2002, and then come Bush II, and because he had a brother in Florida and offshore drilling was an issue, he didn't touch it.

In fact, last year we passed a major bill here in the House to open up offshore. The Senate wouldn't deal with it. They passed a small bill down here in the gulf that was tracked 181 that had been on the 5-year plan in the Clinton administration that had not been leased, was taken out of the 5-year plan because of its proximity to Florida by the Bush administration, and was legislated back into the 5-year plan by the Senate, and I had to lead the fight here to get that accomplished in the House. They wouldn't conference with us on our bill so we could merge the two bills, but I led the fight here to make sure that we got that passed. That lease sold for I think $3.6 billion and is on its way, and it was done rather quickly.

Now, there are those who say we can't do anything in 10 to 20 years just don't know what they're talking about. If we work close to the areas in the gulf first--and we will--that have been leased, there's infrastructure. And if we would expedite the permit process legislatively like we did with track 21, and force the hand of the bureaucracy not to sit on this and to get it done, we could have oil and gas production in several years.

We still have 27 platforms active in the western coast that were exempted by the moratorium. They're still functioning. In fact, the governor of California uses some of them to drill in his 3-mile zone, when he's telling us not to drill nationally. Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, issues permits, and California approves them or his administration does, to drill off the shore of California every year, drilling in the 3-mile zone. Now, they drill part of them from onshore with a slant drill. They go on our Federal platforms in Federal Waters and slant drill into the 3-mile area to produce oil.

I'm sorry, but California and Florida are huge users of energy and both of them have thwarted us. I've got to give credit to the Florida delegation. They have come around. Many of the Florida delegation realize--and the Florida citizens picked it up first--they're now supporting offshore production of energy. Offshore production of energy is not a threat to our coastlines. It's the best reserves we have. It's close to where the people are. We have pipelines and refineries there. It's what really works.

When you produce oil in some parts of the Midwest it's hard to get it to market. I'm not saying we shouldn't produce it, but when you produce it on your shorelines where your population centers are, it's the best place.

I find this Congress almost unbelievable that we use excuses like there's 68 million acres that are leased and are not producing. Well, if you punch 10 holes in the ground and they're all dry holes, you stop spending your money.

I know also there's probably hundreds of cases in the gulf where there's lawsuits preventing them from drilling a hole in the ground. Citizen lawsuits, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, all these organizations continually sue to stop the production of energy.

Yes, the problem we've had, we've had three Presidents in a row and 14 Congresses in a row, and all these 10, 11 environmental groups that said we must stop using fossil fuels. We must stop using these, and we're going to replace them with these. They're going to replace these with this.

I wish we could, but until we can, we better produce and we need to be doing coal-to-liquids and coal-to-gas. We need to be continuing to push hydrogen. We need to do all of the above.

And I want to tell you something, it's my opinion, my humble opinion, that if we drill offshore and we drill more in the Midwest and we do coal-to-liquids and coal-to-gas--they all take time--this country is going to be in an energy

crunch for a number of years, and there's going to be pain felt in this country. We're going to lose middle-class jobs. We're going to lose industries out of this country because they can't afford to be here, no matter what we do, because we've waited too long.

Would the gentleman yield?

That's one of the things I didn't mention is I think nitrogen fertilizer is 70 percent natural gas. Petrochemical, 55 percent natural gas, as an ingredient. Polymers and plastics, 45 to 50 percent natural gas. We have steel. We all know the manufacturing of steel and aluminum use huge amounts of natural gas.

My prediction is if we don't open up natural gas and get the price down, we'll make our bricks--bulk commodities like bricks that are easily made in our own neighborhoods from clay somewhere in a mountain nearby, those will be made in Trinidad, where gas is $1.60. Glass for our home windows will be made in Trinidad. In fact, car windows are coming in from overseas right now because of natural gas prices.

Natural gas is the mother's milk of the manufacturing process in this country. And if we don't fix the natural gas problem, we're not going to have a manufacturing base of anything. We will import everything that's manufactured. And at the same time, Americans, this winter and the winters ahead, are just plain going to struggle to drive their cars and heat their homes.

Could I ask you a question?

To the gentleman from Iowa, do you know of any energy bills scheduled for this week?

Do you know of any energy bills scheduled for next week and the week after, before we go on the August recess?

I would have to think, if I was a citizen back home knowing just a fraction of what I know now, I would be one angry citizen. Because this Congress, like the 14 Congresses in succession, have done little to formulate an energy policy for America and produce available, affordable energy. And it's doable, it's something we can do.

Oh, absolutely.

We heat 63 million homes, we heat five million small businesses, and a quarter of a million industrial companies use natural gas in great numbers, and they're all going to get hammered this year. Our hospitals and our schools are going to pay twice as much as last year.

Well, it's a delight to join you. It's a historic day. Natural gas hit $13.28 a thousand cubic feet. That's almost double what it was last year at this time. What that means is Americans heating their 60 million homes this fall will pay almost twice as much to heat them as they did last year, on top of tremendous price increases to travel in their vehicles.

This has all happened without a storm in the gulf, which always escalates prices, without any country having a major coup or problem, or without any terroristic attack on the system. I don't think anybody dreamed that we would have $135 to $140 oil at this time of the year. We are in the middle of June. We're not even into the heat of the driving season yet, and here we are with $13, I mean, we're within a few pennies of the peak of natural gas prices after Katrina.

Dow Chemical made a statement just a week or so ago that in 2002 it cost them $8 billion for natural gas to run their company. It now costs them $8 billion a quarter.

Here's what's happened. They used to be 60 percent onshore. Those were great American jobs. They're now 34 percent onshore.

In South America natural gas is a buck and a half. In Russia it's barely over a buck. I mean, there's cheap gas all over the world. If you're making petrochemicals, polymers, plastics, fertilizer, if you're melting steel, melting aluminum, I want to tell you, if this Congress does not change its view on offshore, shale oil and ANWR in the very near future, bricks and glass will be made in Trinidad, South America. They will be shipped here in a day and a half in a boat, and there will not be a blue collar job left in America, because natural gas is the mother's milk of manufacturing and processing.

They use it as an ingredient. Even the skin creams that our women love to soften, that's a derivative of natural gas. Natural gas is one of the most unique--chemists say we should never burn it. It's too valuable. But we are now using a lot of it for electric generation; 23 to 24 percent of our generation is now natural gas. And that is as we cease to permit coal plants around the country, they're all going to be natural gas plants. If the Senate continues its foolishness with carbon taxes and CO2s, that's all going to push the business to a natural gas which only emits one-third of the CO2 of other fossil fuels. But we're not preparing. We need to.

Today we had a committee meeting scheduled, and my chart here shows-- it's interesting the Democrat talking points say that 80 percent of available resources are available to the American companies. That's not true. Eighty-five percent of our offshore is not available, period. The whole west coast is not available. The whole east coast is not available. About a third of the gulf is not available. That's where the prime oil and gas is in this country. They have it locked up. They want it locked up. They like these high prices because it's forcing Americans to change to other fuels. That is true.

But let me tell you, I'm not sure how long the American economy can handle $130 oil and $13 natural gas without collapsing. And once this economy collapses and the world economy goes into a recession, we're going to be a decade digging ourselves out of the hole. There will never be money to balance the budget. There will never be money for heat and helping people winterize their homes. This country is on the verge of losing its economic base.

Cheap energy. I was born one mile from Drakes Well, the first oil well. It changed the world. The whole manufacturing process of the world began in this country because of cheap energy. We've had $10 oil and $2 natural gas most of our lifetime. We had a spike in the 1970s, we had a spike in the 1980s, and a spike in the 1990s. We went to renewables. We tried to do other things, but it always came back to cheap gas and cheap oil. Nothing could compete.

Well, folks, there's a philosophy around here that if we don't produce fossil fuels, we're going to produce something else. I'm saying ``what.'' What are we going to produce? If we double wind and solar-- and I'm for that in the next 5 years--but that doubling something in 5 years is ambitious. We're still less than one percent of our energy needs.

I mean, there is no renewable. The renewable that has been the most generous to us and the most growth is woody biomass. Nobody talks about woody biomass. Hasn't had any incentive. No tax incentives. There's a million Americans this year probably going to help heat their homes with a wood pellet stove. Burning sawdust pellets. That's biomass. Many companies

in my district--I come from the finest hardwood forest in America, northern Pennsylvania. Lots of mills. Lots of factories. The sawdust now is a byproduct. They heat their factories with it. Some of the coal plants use 20 percent wood waste because it allows them to sneak under the air standards if the coal is just a little dirtier than it should be. So it has found its marketplace.

And the cellulosic ethanol that we're betting on. We have a mandate of 36.5 million gallons of--or 36.5 billion gallons of ethanol annually by 2030. The first 15 to be corn, and we know what's happened there where we're now at $7.86 corn as the market closed today. It was $1.80 just a short time ago. We're competing food with fuel. I didn't protest it. I had my concerns. But $8 corn is not something you can afford to burn.

Absolutely.

What, $7.86.

That is true. But I want to make a point there. I'm not against ethanol. After the 15 million they want to go to--or billion gallons, they want to go to cellulosic.

But we have to remember we have a mandate on cellulosic ethanol that still is in the laboratory. We do not yet have the design of a successful cellulosic ethanol plant that we know will be productive that will compete. So that's pushing.

I wish we were pushing coal to liquids and coal to gas with the same fervor because we know Fisher Tropes and two or three other messes, we could make gasoline, we could make fuel oil, we could make jet fuel out of coal. But no. There has not been much pushing for that.

I am encouraged that the President came out for offshore, but that's a big move. We've been pushing him a long time. He didn't come out quite as strong as I had hoped. He said he would lift the Presidential moratoria if we lifted the congressional moratoria. I think he should have lifted his first and said, I'm lifting the Presidential. You lift. But he didn't. But I want to give him credit for going there.

I want to give candidate McCain credit. He's come out. Offshore. That was not his normal position. And someone said, Well, he's a flip- flopper. Well, folks, when you see the light, when you see the facts-- you know, just a few years ago the argument was we should use theirs. It was cheap. We shouldn't be using ours. Well, that's not true any more. At $135 a barrel and $13 a thousand for gas, it's time to use ours.

We enrich Americans. I mean, for us not to create the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs in the production of energy in this country and put Americans to work producing our energy, we could be self-sufficient in natural gas, we could have reasonable natural gas prices. Natural gas could actually fuel a third of our auto fleet. All of our short-hauled vehicles, all of our construction vehicles, all of the little vehicles running around at the airport, all of those could be on clean green natural gas. No NOX, no SOX, and a third of the CO2. It could be compressed gas or it could be propane. Either one. They all can run--that's known technology. Why we're not going down that road, I don't know.

It's hard for me to understand because natural gas burns cleaner than gasoline. And as we were talking, somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of our gasoline now comes from Europe. How does Europe have extra? Well, they've switched to diesel. They have diesel cars. They have extra capacity.

A year ago in the spring we had very high gasoline prices. Not this spring but last spring. And remember they were higher than they were in the fall when oil was much higher. I think oil was $60-some a barrel and we had $3 gas and everybody wondered why. Well, in the spring when we start switching and using more gasoline, Europe was short themselves. They had used more gasoline. They didn't have the surplus they normally supplied us, so they couldn't supply our needs.

So when you don't have enough, the market goes up. We didn't have enough gasoline in the world market, and so we paid higher gasoline prices last spring with $63 oil than we did last fall with $85 and $90 oil. Didn't make any sense, but that is the marketplace because Europe could not give us. But we're dependent on Europe.

But back to natural gas. It just amazes me because here is what scares me: $13 natural gas is not a world price. That's an American price. We have the highest natural gas prices in the world. So many Members of Congress can't seem to understand that that it's not a world commodity. It's country by country.

And so when you have the highest prices for natural gas and your company, like Dow Chemical uses $8 billion a quarter. That's $32 billion a year. You have got to produce your products where it's cheaper, and when it's a fraction of our cost--it's not like a half or a third--it's a fraction, sometimes, in some of those countries.

So we're going to lose all of the industries. We won't melt steel in this country. We won't bend products. We will be cooking products in other countries because you use a lot of gas for heat. Anything that uses a lot of natural gas, if we don't get that under control--and the silly part of that is, we could be self-sufficient in our total lifetime. There is no shortage of natural gas, onshore and offshore, and this country tried to lock up their own plateau.

In the last appropriations bill they locked up the shale oil in the west, sneaked it in the bill. Of course, the prohibition of drilling offshore is not legislation. It's stuck in the Interior bill. I was here 5 or 6 years before I knew it was there, and when I started talking about it, most Members of Congress didn't know it because it started 28 years ago. We have a vote every year. You know, today that vote was canceled. I'm not quite sure why.

In the first subcommittee last Wednesday we had six Republicans ``yes'' and nine Democrats ``no.'' Now, it's not totally been a partisan issue. This was the first time they locked up their vote.

This new administration here, the Speaker and her team, have been very good at locking up votes. You have to admire them. They can get people to vote against their districts, vote against what they believe. But they've decided they're not going to open up the Outer Continental Shelf.

Now, we were interested today whether they would still lock them up, whether they could hold them because in 2006 we passed a major offshore bill. We had 40-some Democrat votes. There are a lot of Democrats here who realize energy's important, and to produce your own is not some evil thing. With 67 percent dependency on oil, and half of that comes from unstable, unfriendly countries who gave us our tariffs, it would seem to me that everybody could agree let's eliminate at least half of our foreign dependence; let's stop feeding our enemy; let's stop allowing giving them the cash to buy up our Chrysler building, buy up our companies, buy up our industries. You know, industries in this country are getting purchased by foreign countries, and most of them are people who have our oil money.

I don't think this is the America that Americans want. But I want to tell you

something. I have faith in the American people. There's a debate going on right now. I have been on four different talk shows today. I have been on probably five or six radio shows today. Lots of print media yesterday. I did 15 different discussions. The American people are angry.

Newt Gingrich came out with a poll: 73 percent of Americans want offshore production. Rasmussen came out with a poll Monday: 63 percent in their poll. It's going up daily because this is a discussion going on in this country, and they're mad. They're mad as hell. And they ought to be mad because we are locking--this Congress for 28 years has locked up America's resources that every other country uses.

There is no country in the world--Norway, Sweden, are they environmentally friendly countries? You bet they are. New Zealand, Australia, are they environmentally-sensitive countries? You bet. They all produce offshore.

Offshore is not a threat to our beaches, it's not a threat to our shorelines. It's a savior. It's where our cities are, it's where our population is, it's where our refineries are, where our gas lines are.

You know, in New York City in zero weather, sometimes we will pay two and three times the American price for natural gas in zero weather because they can't get enough there. The price when the world is paying 10, they'll pay 25 or 30 for a few days at a time because if we had offshore production, we could feed them their--these cities wouldn't be paying these outrageous prices when cold weather comes.

Last year for the first time--because we use so much for electricity now--last year for the first time in the history of this country, in two summer months when it was really hot, we made so much electricity with natural gas because in a real hot week, all of the peaking plants run all day long. They run all day long because that's the only way to keep the grid up. We actually drew down gas out of the reserve.

See, at this time of the year we don't use all of our gas so we put it in reserve. We're putting $13 gas in the ground for next winter. Add storage costs, add pipeline charges, and a profit for the gas- distribution company, you're talking about pretty expensive gas. Last year we were putting $6.50 and $7 gas in the ground this time of year.

Americans do not know what is coming. The industrial users are already paying 70 percent more this year because it passes through quicker to them. But in my State, PUC, every 90 days they adjust the price. This fall Americans are going to get hit with another bullet. It's going to be expensive home heating. And we should be doing something about it.

If the gentleman would yield, the other success story we all hear about is Brazil. Doesn't everybody say Brazil is independent because of ethanol? Fifteen percent of their energy is ethanol. They went offshore. They just had a huge oil find offshore, but they are self-sufficient. They don't import energy anymore.

We keep hearing from over there that it was all ethanol. Ethanol was just a piece. It was 15 percent. The rest was normal oil and gas energy. But they had a plan.

I think we ought to have a plan for North America. Stop and think about Alaska and Canada. Canada is great. Canada produces oil and gas right off our main coast.

Fifteen percent of our natural gas comes from them, and they are our largest supplier of oil by far.

Right off the Washington coast they produce. They have produced since 1913 in Lake Erie and sell us the gas. They drill gas only in Lake Erie every summer. They don't do it in the winter, but they do it every summer and sell us the gas. And we aren't even allowed to drill under the lakes horizontally.

It makes no sense what we're doing in this country. Yesterday, I read an article that we ought to be partnering with Russia because they have so much resources and we need to be better friends with them. I'd rather help Mexico because they have great resources but aren't very good at producing them. They're not very efficient at producing energy. But they have a lot of gas and a lot of oil.

If we had a North American game plan, where Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and Alaska, where we said let's produce our own energy, we could get there. I don't think we can be self-sufficient on our own, I mean that sincerely. I don't see it ever will in our lifetime, but we could be self-sufficient in North America, and we could say to OPEC: ``So long, see ya.''

Well, we're so far behind the curve right now, we were talking to Minerals and Mines Management today. Many of our rigs went to Russia to drill because there's so much more activity there. The big owners go where the action is, and they're being paid bonuses to go to North Africa to drill. We don't have as many rigs in the gulf. Thirty percent of our rigs are gone. Our infrastructure has dwindled because we've not opened up.

Now, the issue of can we be self-dependent, we would have to open up everything. It would take years to get the rigs here. We'd have to do coal-to-liquids, coal-to-gas. I mean, it would take a long time.

Twenty percent of our grid is nuclear. We need 45 new plants by 2030 online to stay 20 percent of the grid, not grow. See, everything's shrinking. Hydro is becoming a smaller piece because we're not building dams. Everything's shrinking.

Nuclear stayed even because all of our nuclear plants today are producing beyond their design capacity. We have enhanced their ability to make energy. I mean, America on nuclear needs to get on to what France has been doing, the reprocessing and reuse the fuel we have instead of storing it, where we use it, and when you get down to the end, you have very little fuel.

But this country made a decision legislatively, we're not going to reprocess, we're not going to go down that road. So we've made a lot of bad decisions.

And I say, how did this happen? Eight years ago, natural gas was $2; oil was $10. The argument was, do we use theirs or do we use ours? Just 10 years ago. In fact, we hit that a couple times 6 or 7 years ago. We had some real cheap energy just for a few months there. We got so complacent.

$1.80.

$10 a barrel. That's been most of our lifetime.

That's right.

That's right.

If the gentleman would yield, how did this happen? I know how it happened. I'm going to give you eight--and there's more than eight--eight organizations that are running this Congress when it comes to energy.

It starts out with the Sierra Club. You know what their Web page says? They're against oil shale development. We're not doing it. They're against coal liquefaction. We're not doing it. They're against offshore energy production. We're not doing it. They're winning.

Greenpeace: Phase out fossil fuels. We're trying to do it and we don't have a replacement. That's really what's going on. We've caused the world shortage.

Environmental Defense: Must eliminate power plant smokestacks, enemy number one.

League of Conservation Voters: Coal-to-liquid, wrong direction, can't do that. We're not doing it.

Defenders of Wilderness: Every coastal State is put in harm's way when oil rigs go up. That's offshore. They're opposed. And they're winning.

Natural Resources Defense Council: Coal mining is evil. And tell me coal isn't under attack. Coal is under attack. Close to 70 coal plants have been turned down by the States in the last 7 months.

And those coal plants will all be natural gas plants which will further exacerbate the natural gas prices.

Center for Biological Diversity: Oil and gas drilling on public lands has devastating effects and must be stopped. They're winning.

Friends of the Earth: Liquid coal is dirty, costly, mustn't do it. They're winning.

These eight organizations are running this Congress.

Well, it's interesting, we have the talking points of the Democrats that they have 68 million acres under lease; there are--some are saying 5,500 leases, some are saying 10,000 leases: That's enough, they're not producing. I had one of them challenge me in a debate today that he wanted me to join on a bill with him to force the oil companies to drill where they are. Folks, if it's not productive, if they've drilled 10 dry holes, they're not going to drill anymore. And in some of those deep water leases, it's 7 or 8 years before you get to productivity.

They're drilling platforms, and it takes years to get there. So some of these are in process. A lot of them are old, tired leases where we're now drilling between wells. And the return, we're drilling three times as many wells as we used to and we're getting much less oil and gas because we're in old, tired fields.

That's right. We need to get out into the fertile fields where we'll drill less holes in the ground, but we'll get massive prime production where you get into a fertile field that's got great gas pressure and great oil pressure and we'll get huge volumes.

We've been deprived. In fact, on the Outer Continental Shelf, we're showing here, we've not even allowed seismographic in the last 35 years. We don't even have a modern measurement out there. We had old seismographic, what we're measured by; but new seismographic is like taking a black and white TV with a new modern flat screen TV. There's not much comparison, is there? No. Well, we've prevented that.

I mean, I guess what's scary is that while we're talking about this issue, you know what's going on in the Senate? They're talking about climate change. They just voted down, thank God. And Mr. Markey's committee here has a new climate change bill. If we go down the carbon tax road, we're going to add another 20 or 30 percent to energy prices. Nobody disputes that. That's insanity. I mean, available affordable energy for America is the number one issue facing this country, and anybody who isn't for that doesn't get with the American people. They understand this.

Let me say this: If we don't deal with this issue in this Congress, the middle class in America will be destroyed. We don't have more years, we're years behind. The middle class in America will disappear because by the time they heat their homes and fuel their vehicles, they're not going to have money. I have a neighbor lady who makes $300 and something a week. She pays $175 a month annual gas bill to heat her home. She has two kids, $100 a month to buy groceries. She said, if my gas bill doubles, I don't have any food money. She's going to have to get a second job and still try to raise two teen-age kids with a second job to pay. Folks, that's not what America is about. Last year, we had seniors in my district keep their houses at 58 degrees because they couldn't afford to keep them warm. That's not the America we should be providing.

If we don't deal with energy prices, the middle-class, blue-collar jobs are all going to disappear. The middle class is going to disappear. And we're going to have a country like so many other parts of the world where we have the rich and the poor. And the government is going to have to subsidize the poor because they can't afford energy.

It's a crisis in America. In fact, I think we're 4 or 5 years beyond when we should have started. I don't quite know how we catch up. Every day we delay, every month we delay, the American people are going to pay a bigger price. This is not the America my father gave me in my inheritance. I want to return our young people with hope, with affordable energy.

Eight years ago energy was cheap; it's never going to be cheap again. It's up to this Congress to do what's necessary and provide energy for America. And all those talking points that the Sierra Club have given the Democrats don't cut it.

If the Democrats win this debate and we don't produce energy--if we use these old statements of 68 million acres and 80 something percent is leased, that is not factual; 2.5 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf is leased, the good spots are not leased--then we are giving the future of this country away.

Mr. Speaker, today, June 11 of the year 2008, we had an interesting happening in the Capitol. We have had $4 gasoline for some time now, we have had $5 diesel, record high natural gas prices approaching $13 per thousand, the most expensive energy America has ever known.

We had a chance today in committee the deal with this issue. I was stunned. I have been working on this issue for many, many years. We passed a major bill in 2006 with good bipartisan support, a lot of Republicans, but we had probably 40-some Democrats. A lot of people in this Congress realize that we must produce more energy in America if we are going to deal with the prices in America.

Today the Interior subcommittee met. I offered an amendment to open up the Outer Continental Shelf. As you look at the chart to my left, that's the east coast and the west coast and down

here in the gulf on both sides of Florida. The red or pinkish areas are locked up. There's 86 billion barrels in those areas, by old standards, by old seismographic tests which was 30-some years ago. Most people feel there is many times that. There is 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas there.

My amendment today would have removed the moratorium. For 27 years Congress has had legislative language that says we cannot produce here. It's locked up. This Outer Continental Shelf is from 3 miles offshore. The first three miles is controlled by the States. Next 197 miles is owned by us, the taxpayers, citizens of America. Not by any company, not by the President, not by Congress, but owned by the citizens, not by any State. It's our resources.

The interesting and troubling fact is my amendment would have opened it up from 50 miles to 200.

Every country in the world that has energy offshore produces it. It's the most environmentally sensitive place to produce energy.

In most places the fisheries are better, they like the platforms, they like the places to hide. The fishermen love them being there because it's where the best fishing is.

Down here in this little blue area, 40 percent of our energy comes from there that we produce in this country, that little bit of the gulf.

Now there they produce right up to the shoreline. We were given a 50- mile buffer. There has not been an oil spill on a beach from a well except for the one in Santa Barbara in 1969, pretty good record, in my view. There has never been a natural gas well that's ever caused an environmental problem that I know of.

But today we had a vote of nine ``noes'' for the Democrats and six ``yeses'' for the Republicans. I don't like to be partisan. I like to have bipartisan support, and I worked very hard on this amendment. I thought I had strong support from both parties, and I was stunned today.

I guess it's another example of Speaker power.

I have been in the legislative business for 31 years, 19 years at the State and 12 years here. I have seen legislative bodies that were good process bodies where you debate the issues from the subcommittee to the full committee to the floor. Then when the House and Senate meet in a conference committee, that really gives you seven shots at a bill. That's not happening here.

This is the most top-down legislative body I have ever been a part of. Today showed that. I would bet the farm there are members on this subcommittee that wanted to vote for this, but for some reason chose not to. I am not going to name them, I am not going to second-guess them, but I was stunned.

I think America would be stunned. I believe this Congress is way behind the folks, approaching 60 percent of Americans at a recent poll, who want us to produce offshore, on shore, wherever we have energy. I find, in talking to town meetings and large groups, when you discuss the issue and explain the facts and explain the alternatives, almost all Americans want energy produced so it's affordable.

Our economy was built on affordable energy. The problem we have, the arguments today were that there are 68 million acres already leased, and that's enough. This is the percentage, and, actually, it's less than 3 percent, of the Outer Continental Shelf where there is a lease that has been offered. So there is a very small part of the continental shelf that actually has a lease on it.

They said, well, there are 68 million acres, we need lease no more. Well, if you have leased property--yes, there are leases, there are leases that are not active--but if you have leased property and spent millions and millions of dollars and you get dry holes, you don't drill anymore. You find out there is not oil in there.

As we look on here a little bit, this is interesting, this is a map. It's not as good as color as I had hoped to see. This is Cuba, this is Key West, this is Florida. These are the leases that have been granted by Cuba, China, Canada and Spain. I am not sure here, but these are the ones that are being negotiated now. Canada is going to be producing energy off our shores, and we absolutely disallow it.

Does that make any sense? No. Our biggest competitor, China, will be possibly producing our oil and our gas, using it to compete against us.

Natural gas is the one that's really in trouble in America. We know the oil prices today closed at $137, natural gas at $12.75. Natural gas is the one that we don't talk enough about. Oil is painful, but every country that competes with us pays that price. America may be the only country paying--now, this is not the price people pay. This is what the price today coming out of the ground is.

Now, what's sneaking up on Americans this year, they already know it costs a lot to travel. Those who are on propane and fuel oil last year know it was pretty expensive to heat their homes.

Natural gas did not rise a lot last year. But here is what happened to natural gas this year. This is the chart of natural gas for this year. This is what's happened this spring.

Never before have I ever seen natural gas prices--this is the time of year when we are not heating and cooling much, it's call the shoulder season for use, and this is when we usually put it in the ground for next winter's storage to heat our homes. We are putting gas in the ground at a price more than we paid for it last year. Now you have to add storage costs, transmission costs and processing costs.

Americans will be getting somewhere between a 60 to 100 percent increase of natural gas prices this winter. So those who are struggling to pay $4 to drive their cars are now going to struggle to heat their homes. The sad story is, with natural gas, our big employers like Dow Chemical in 2002 paid $8 billion for natural gas for a year's use. This year they are paying $8 billion every quarter, that's $32 billion.

Folks, here is what has happened to the jobs and what will continue to happen if we don't deal with energy prices because the rest of the world is. Natural gas will push petrochemicals, polymers, plastic and many other steel and aluminum jobs--I predict, glass will be made offshore, bricks will be made offshore. Bulk commodities will not be made in this country because of natural gas prices, because you use so much.

Here's what the arguments were. This is what people want to use. This is oil. From the middle over is history, this is what the Energy Department predicts for the future.

I don't quite agree with this chart, because we are turning down coal plants all over the country. The natural gas will be much wider, coal will be much shallower. I don't see the growth in coal. We also all had high hopes for coal-to-liquid. That's sort of on hold in this country. Why, I don't know, because of carbon, I guess. The concern of carbon has become a greater concern.

Nuclear, to stay here, we have to have 35 to 40 nuclear plants built in addition to what we have to keep nuclear where it's at as 20 percent of the grid.

Nonhydro, the amount, everybody wants--hydro is not growing because we are not doing dams. Nonrenewables are mostly woody biomass and hydro. That's what most of this is.

If we double wind and solar, and we hope we can, we are less than 1 percent of our energy needs in 5 years or 10 years whenever we do that. That's the scary part.

Now here's the dependence part. When I came to Congress, we were in the 40s. We are now 66.3 percent dependent on imports, and here is where we get it. Canada is our best friend to the north, Mexico is our next best friend, nonOPEC and Ecuador, and then we go down here.

These are the countries that are going to own us. These are the countries where our wealth is going. In fact, I think I heard a speaker a few moments ago on floor talk about the purchase of the Chrysler Building by one of the Mid East countries.

Ladies and gentlemen, if America does not deal with energy, we will not compete in the global economy of the world. We cannot have the highest energy prices known anywhere and compete. We will not have middle-class jobs. The middle class in America will disappear. That's not the America I want.

Now, how we get past this partisanship, how we get past that we can take the minuteness of wind and solar and replace fossil fuels, I wish I knew. I am

for hydrogen. I belonged to the hydrogen caucus for years, but it has not grown. Wind and solar has grown a very small amount.

Until we can store electricity, we are going to depend on fossil fuels to make it. If we continue with the chart I just looked at to not produce coal plants, that's going to come on natural gas. If we don't open up the Outer Continental Shelf and much of the Midwest, we are not going to have the natural gas--and natural gas, let's come back to the natural gas chart.

Natural gas, in my view, is the clean, green fuel. We would have been far wiser, in my view, to have used compressed natural gas in automobiles than ethanol. Automobiles, with a couple of thousand dollars addition can burn natural gas. That's a clean fuel.

If we open up the Outer Continental Shelf, if we opened up the Roan Plateau in the west and some of the new areas that we know are potentials in this country--but we have to drill a hole in the ground, and why aren't we doing that? Well, here are the people that I think have been successful.

I was having a debate late week with the Sierra Club on NPR radio in California. When the debate was over she assured the audience that she would be beating me back next week when I offered my amendment. They won today.

The Sierra Club, they are against shale oil development. They are against coal gasification, and they are against offshore energy. Then we have Greenpeace, and they want to phase out all fossil fuels. They want to eliminate all of these and replace them with these.

Now, I wish we could do that. They are opposed. Environmental Defense Fund, no power plants, no smokestacks, League of Conservation Voters, no coal-to-liquid, wrong way to go; Defenders of Wildlife, no offshore, no coastal production; Natural Resource Defense Council, no coal, coal is evil; Center for Biological Diversity, no oil and gas drilling. That's devastating on public lands.

Friends of the Earth, no liquid coal, that is dirty.

Folks, we have technology in this country today. We can produce energy cleanly. We can burn it cleanly. We have clean coal technology we are refusing to build to replace the old plants.

If we continue, we are the only country I know of in the world that is on a madness mission, I call it, that we are not going to use fossil fuels. Now I want to grow all of these. I would be building hydrodams. The only one that has grown on this chart, and I have another chart that shows it better, woody biomass has doubled in the last decade. That is wood pellet stoves. Almost a million Americans use them now. That is using wood for generators, small plants for electricity using wood waste, and heating small factories. I am from a wood area, the greatest hardwood forests in America are in northern Pennsylvania, and we dry kiln our wood. We used to use propane and natural gas, now we use wood waste. Wood waste has found a marketplace, and it is continuing. But that's the only one that has had measurable growth that you can put on a chart. I don't have that chart here.

But folks, we need to have a comprehensive policy. But until we have the renewables available to use, we have to use clean fossil fuels in the very best manner we can. But if this Congress says no in full committee a week from now, we will be doing our bill in full committee, if they say no again, partisanly, and if they say no on this floor when we do the Interior bill, America will miss its only chance.

My bill, the Outer Continental Shelf bill, has 170-some cosponsors, and can't get a hearing or a discussion. We are not going to talk about fuels in this Congress.

Now we passed a great bill a couple of weeks ago where the Democrats proposed to enable us to sue OPEC. We are going to sue a group of countries, I had the chart here a minute ago, that we don't think have produced enough energy, when we refuse to produce it at all. Now what is the logic of that? What court is going to listen to that, and how do you even have a serious face. Back home, people laughed about that. They thought it was stupid.

We also have proposals to tax oil companies. Who pays the taxes, the energy users. I know there is hatred for the energy companies. They are really a small part of the mix. The vast majority of energy in this country is not produced by Big Oil. It is produced by small producers in my district in Pennsylvania and all down through the south. It is mostly independents. They are the brand names. They own some of the refineries. They own a lot of product lines in their names, but they are a small part of the production of energy. Yet we want to punish energy production.

We passed a bill here once, fortunately the Senate didn't, that was going to tax all energy companies. And I have two refineries in my district, one who was struggling, American Refiners and United Refinery, and we were going to make them pay higher taxes than the businesses right down the road. Did that make any sense? No. That is taxing American energy; not taxing imports but American energy.

I believe this Congress is way behind the American public. When I go back to my office many times after giving one of these speeches, I have phone calls for hours, I have phone calls for days saying I believe in what you said; I believe America should be producing energy; thank you for speaking out.

I believe the American public in the next election, I believe energy availability and affordability will be one of the major issues that they will be looking at because I don't think we are done. I don't think $4.05 gasoline is the end.

We have these high prices today that have scared the American public. I have people in my district who don't know how they are going to get through the winter and how they are going to heat their house. They don't know how they are going to make it. We have these high prices today. We have not had a storm in the gulf, which interrupts a lot of production when it happens, for 2\1/2\ years. Everyone is predicting we are going to have major storms in the gulf, hurricanes, and that will eliminate a lot of energy production and prices will skyrocket.

We have not had a successful terrorist attack on our energy supply system. That could happen tomorrow. We have not had a major foreign country, and I had that chart of countries we get our oil from, most of those are dictatorships that could tip over. When there is a little trouble in Nigeria, energy prices skyrocket. When there were problems in Venezuela, prices skyrocketed. When Chavez was arguing with Exxon, oil went up $20 just because they were arguing.

The reason is there is no surplus in the system. Historically we had eight million barrels of oil that another country could produce if some country couldn't produce. Today we are down to where this is about a million barrels of oil. It is 86 million barrels a day countries use. We use 21, and so there is only a one million barrel surplus. So if a country has problems and produces three million less, there is not enough oil.

Now the reason these gas prices that I showed you earlier are going up, we are using more gas than we are producing. One of the big storage companies told me a month ago, they are not sure they can get their storage full this winter and they have always had it full by winter because we cannot produce enough gas, we have to put it in underground caverns and store it for winter.

I believe this Congress is at the root of the high prices of energy, and three Presidents, too, I am not going to hold them countless, because we have not had an adequate, thoughtful energy policy for America. While the rest of the world is building an energy supply for themselves, we are twiddling our thumbs and we are refusing to produce fossil fuels.

I think if this Congress before we recess in July does not deal effectively with energy and open up supply, you are going to see the beginning of the decline of the America we know. It is a national security issue. It is an economic issue. American companies cannot compete, and when they can't compete here, they will diminish their operations here and they will expand them over there. They have had other reasons to do that, but the biggest one has been energy. So I beg my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, let's get by this partisan bickering and let's support an energy policy for America.

The gentleman from Ohio has come to join us, and I yield to Mr. Latta.

I thank the gentleman from Ohio for his very thoughtful comments.

I now recognize the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp).

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee.

The president of DOW Chemical said in a letter I received, he said, We have a debate going on in this country and one side wants production, the other side wants conservation and renewables. He said you're going to need them all. You'll need them both. There's no room for choice.

At this time, I'm glad to be joined by my friend from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his fine comments, and we yield back the balance of our time.

Madam Speaker, today natural gas opened at $12.65 per 1,000 Btus. That is an almost 100 percent increase from this time a year ago.

Natural gas is the clean, green fuel that powers our manufacturing economy, accounts for 23 percent of the energy consumed in America and heats 52 million of our homes. Yet as prices continue to skyrocket and companies move offshore because America has the highest natural gas prices in the world, this Congress has done absolutely nothing to increase production.

Tomorrow, I will offer an amendment to the Interior appropriations bill that will lift the congressional moratorium on offshore production from 50 to 200 miles, which happens to be the safest and most environmentally friendly place to produce energy. There is no need to beg the Saudis for more oil and Canada for more natural gas.

We have vast reserves here in America. We need to produce American energy with an American labor force and give Americans energy they can afford.

Mr. Speaker, I find the testimony from the gentleman from New York interesting. He mentioned pellet stoves, one of the new future heat. 800,000 Americans now heat their homes with a pellet stove. There's 30 or 40 pellet mills sprung up around the country but with no government incentive.

Now, we ought to be incentivizing people to be able to heat their homes with woody biomass. Woody biomass has been the fastest growing energy but without government incentives. We need to be incentivizing that.

He also mentioned cellulosic ethanol, which is from woody biomass or garbage or sweetgrass. That's in the laboratory. We're all for that. But it's in the laboratory. There is no refinery producing that kind of energy today at any scale at all. In fact, we have not yet designed the first refinery. It's future.

The only thing in all of the bills he mentioned that produced energy was we stopped using 70,000 barrels a day in the Strategic Reserve, and that's when we use 21 million barrels a day for the country, we save 70,000. That's the only production that's been passed.

As we look to my left, we have a chart that shows offshore locked up. Oil and gas out there proficient. Lots of it. Locked up. Well, if we want to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, there's a way to do that. The NEED Act, H.R. 2784, my bill does that by producing offshore, putting a part of the royalties. We have 32 billion for carbon capture, 32 billion for renewable energy, 100 billion for the treasury, 150 billion for producing States, 20 billion for the Chesapeake Bay.

Now, these are at old gas prices. This is gas. Natural gas was $12.50 when I left my office. Last year at this time it was $6.50. That's the gas we were putting in the ground for next winter. Americans are going to get whacked this winter because we're putting gas at almost twice the value in the ground for winter storage than we did last year.

Folks, if we're serious about cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, we can get affordable energy for America by producing offshore. Every country in the world produces here. We're the only country that doesn't, and we can have $20 billion, which is exactly what the Chesapeake Bay people need to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and we can have affordable natural gas and oil for America.

Folks, we need to have supply.

I thank the gentleman from Utah, my good friend, for his wise words on innovation. I think we are going to be forced into innovation. That is good. But I will have to say the current prices of driving a vehicle and heating a home this year in my rural district are going to be prohibitive for some people being able to handle it.

Their budgets are not prepared for the prices. Because as we have felt the oil prices, natural gas only increased marginally last year, but today the price for natural gas out of the ground is $12 and 40- some cents. Last year at this time, it was between $6 and $7. We are approaching a doubling of natural gas prices.

At this time of the year, we don't use a lot of natural gas because we are not cooling much and we are not heating hardly anything. So we have surplus. We are using it for industrial purposes, which is big, and to generate electricity and to run our plants, but we are not using it at the home as much. So this is the time of year we normally put it in the ground.

Last year, we were putting $6 and $7 gas in the ground. This year, it's currently, in the last few months, $11, now $12 gas, and seems to be going up a few pennies every day. So we don't know where that is headed. But the fear is we have a storm in the Gulf, which always interrupts supply, we could have $15, $16 gas, and that would make home heating almost impossible next winter.

Just to share with you, as he was talking about innovation and change, I come from Titusville, Pennsylvania. I live in the little town of Pleasantville, Pennsylvania, 5 miles from there. But I was born 1 mile from Drakes Well, the first oil well in the world. It was drilled in 1859. And I vividly remember as a young boy, down the Oil Creek Valley, a stream called Oil Creek because it always had oil on it because the way oil perked its way out of the ground naturally. So there was oil on that stream.

And when we had the rush of oil, those hills were naked. There was no vegetation. The trees were gone. But today, it's almost like a virgin, beautiful oak-cherry forest. And the streams there, Oil Creek naturally produces both trout and bass, which is not very common. And the brooky trout streams flow into it all the way down. It's a beautiful, pristine area. And nobody did anything. They just left nature purify it. So oil is not the horrible thing. It's a hydrocarbon. It went back to dirt. The trees grew and the streams are pure and wildlife is very abundant.

Now I guess what we want to talk about is production. How did we get to $125 to $135 oil and how did we get to this tremendous price on natural gas? Many years ago, we had a legislative moratorium to lock up the Outer Continental Shelf. Now back then natural gas was $2, oil was $10, and many argued that we shouldn't use ours, we ought to use theirs. Whether that was a wise argument or not, I won't say, but they have won and it has been locked up ever since.

In the early nineties, President Bush I put a Presidential moratorium on top of the legislative moratorium. Now what is a moratorium. The Continental Shelf is from 3 miles offshore. The States control the first 3 miles. Then the Federal Government, we the taxpayers, own the next 200 miles. That is considered our Continental Shelf. And most every country in the world, in fact, every country in the world produces there. Canada produces right above Maine. Canada produces right above the State of Washington, Great Britain produces on their continental shelf; Norway, Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia. It's just common practice. In fact, everybody gives Brazil great credit for being energy independent, and they give credit for ethanol. Well, ethanol is 15 percent of their energy use. The rest of it, they opened up their Outer Continental Shelf, had a big find out there, and they are now self-sufficient. They don't have to buy from anybody. Wouldn't it be great if America would be self-sufficient?

I think we have a lot more oil than was anticipated in this country. I know we have a lot of natural gas. We are currently importing 17 percent of our natural gas. We wouldn't even have to do that. We get 15 percent from Canada and we get 2 percent from LNG, which is from foreign countries similar to where we buy oil.

So we have locked ours up. Now what does that do? Well, we have locked it up and so we have taken our supply off the market. Now what is this Congress doing to react to that? Two or three weeks ago, we passed a bill, very thoughtful bill. We said, We are going to figure out a way to bring OPEC into court. We are going to bring OPEC to court. We are going to force them to produce for energy so we have more petroleum. Currently, we import 66 percent of our petroleum, about half from that area of the world and about half from Canada and Mexico. So we are going to force them because they are not producing enough. I think Saudi Arabia produces 12 million, I think another one, 7 million; another one, 6 million; another one, 5 million. But someone has determined that is not enough so we are going to have to bring them into court.

Now how you take someone to court for not producing enough oil when we've locked up our Outer Continental Shelf, we've locked up most of Alaska, we've locked up most of the Midwest, now how a country can think that we can sue our neighbors for not selling us enough oil when we have refused to produce our own doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

My taxpayers back home laugh at that when they hear the debate, but it's not funny. But we actually passed a bill to do that, as if it would make a difference. And I don't know what court we would bring it into.

Let's look at our energy use today. We are about 40 percent petroleum, 23 percent natural gas, 23 percent coal, 8 percent nuclear, 2.7 hydro, 2.4 biomass. And this is the one people have not paid a lot of attention to. This is woody biomass. This one has grown measurably in the last few years. Eight hundred thousand Americans use a wood pellet stove today to heat their homes, and that is sawdust compressed. All our dry kilns in the country where we dry our wood uses wood sawdust to heat those rather than buy propane or fuel oil. A lot of factories in the rural areas are using wood waste also.

Surely. Be glad to.

Yes.

That's right.

That's one of the problems. Wood waste has great potential. I also have a company in my district that has built a wonderful wood waste boiler. It burns cleaner that natural gas and will burn even green wood, and it burns it cleanly. But the Democrats passed a bill that prohibits wood waste from public land from being utilized. We are not allowed to produce, which makes no public sense.

I don't know who got the theory that letting every tree grow makes sense. When you thin a forest, it grows much faster, which takes CO2 out of the air. The biggest place to get rid of carbon in the air is plant life for us. And tree growth. Because you lock the carbon up. The log we cut down is carbon. We take it and put a roof on our house or floor in our house or windows in our house or furniture in our house. That is carbon.

You lock the carbon up. So we have taken it out of the air. Well, by not pruning the forest, your forest becomes like a jungle. It grows very slow, and it dies naturally, which turns to CO2. As it dies naturally, it turns to CO2 and emits into the air, just the same as we do when we breathe and when we burn something. So nature itself puts CO2 back in the air.

But biomass is kind of a sleeper. I think it can do a lot. And if we could unlock the National Forests, if we could start marketing an appropriate amount from the National Forests. You know, 40 percent of America is owned by the government. I don't think people realize that. Almost 50 percent of America is owned by some level of government, when you include counties and State governments.

My State owns about 5 million acres in Pennsylvania. Most States don't have that much forest land. But the whole northern part of Pennsylvania is heavily owned, some by the Federal Government, much by the State, and a lot of that is not marketed adequately either. But when you market a forest adequately, when you prune it adequate, it is sort of like a garden. You prune the old out and you leave the young grow, and it is very healthy for the environment. It is much better for wildlife, and it is certainly better for clean air.

Geothermal, a good form of energy, but it is expensive installation. Wind, solar.

Now, here is the problem we face. How did we get here? I am going to tell you who I blame. I blame Congress. But who influenced Congress? Congress has pressure. Well, there is an organization. I made this statement the other day that Hugo Chavez and the Shah of Iran don't need lobbyists to keep us as a customer. The Democrats and the environmentalists continue to lock up domestic reserves, and that forces us to send billions of dollars over there to buy their oil.

Now, the Sierra Club is number one. They are against oil shale development, they are against coal liquefaction, they are against offshore energy production that I talked about a minute ago.

You have got Greenpeace. They want to phase out all fossil fuels. That means from here up, 86 percent of what we are using today has to go away. That is Greenpeace.

Environmental Defense says power plant smokestacks are public health energy number one. Folks, that is 51 percent of our electricity.

League of Conservation Voters. Coal to liquids. Most of us believe that coal to liquids or coal to gas is our future because we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. And when we learn how to do it, if carbon is the issue, I think we can could learn how to sequester the carbon, right along with the ability to make liquids from coal. Then we wouldn't be buying oil from other countries. We would be using the liquids made from our coal.

Defenders of Wilderness. It says every coastal State is put in harm's way when oil rigs go up in our coastal waters. Well, you know, folks, every country in America produces energy out there and has the rigs out there.

Next Wednesday, we are going to offer this Congress the first real chance we have for production. We are going to be offering offshore production. We are going to have legislation, an amendment to the Interior Committee, that will remove this. In the Interior Committee every year there is legislation that locks up, that says we cannot spend a dollar to lease the Outer Continental Shelf. That is 200 miles offshore.

We are going to remove that from 50 miles out. Now, 50 miles is giving a big cushion. A lot of countries do 20. Some do 25. Most don't do 50. We are going to give 50. Eleven miles is sight, so after 11 miles, it is four times the sight line, more than that, so there will be nothing anybody can see. And every person in the energy business, MMS, that is the minerals and mine management people who manage this program, said that the most environmentally sensitive way to produce energy is offshore. It improves the fishing. It doesn't hurt it. You are not disturbing wildlife. You are not disturbing anything. So offshore energy is our most environmentally friendly way to harvest energy and use it.

So we are going to give this Congress a chance next Wednesday, not the whole Congress, but just the Interior Subcommittee, to remove that moratorium. Then we will have to maintain it in full committee if we win and then maintain it on the floor, and then we will have to deal with the Senate, which is always our tremendous challenge.

So as we go down these, we have these groups, Natural Resource Defense, coal mining. They are opposed to coal mining. They want coal. That is 50 percent of our electric grid.

Center for Biological Diversity. Oil and gas drilling on public lands has devastating effects.

Folks, it is a new era. You talked about technology. We have new technology. We know how to do it right. You drill a 6 inch hole in the ground. With gas, you just let gas out. With oil, you pump out oil. It does not have to be an environmental disaster.

Then Friends of the Earth, the other one, the eighth one, liquid coal is dirty and a costly fuel.

Folks, these eight groups, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Environmental Defense, League of Conservation Voters, Defenders of Wilderness, Natural Resource Defense Council, Center for Biological Diversity, and Friends of the Earth, those are the people you need to thank for the energy of America being locked up. It is their influence on Congress that has prevented us from a providing energy for America. They are wrong, folks. They need to lose that argument. We need to show them that we can produce energy.

Now, as far as the world is concerned, you know, when it was $2 for gas and $10 for oil, maybe they were right. We should use their's. I remember that argument. Folks, at $125 to $130 a barrel, at $12.50 for natural gas, I think it is time to use ours.

What is the other benefit of using ours? When we produce American energy, the landowner makes money, whether it is the government or a private person. The promoter of the well makes money. The pipeline guy makes money. The driller makes money. The hydrofracking people make money. The processing station, whether it is gas or the refineries for oil, make money. Millions of dollars of wealth are created. Billions of dollars of wealth created. Hundreds of thousands of people have wonderful jobs and can maintain a family and home. So producing our own energy will put a lot of Americans to work, especially in rural America where I live.

Now, they claim, and when you hear all the talk, it is the bottom three that are ready to take over, with geothermal, wind and solar. If we double wind and solar in the next 5 years, we are less than three- quarters of one percent of our energy. We are all for wind. We are all for solar. We are all for geothermal. I led the Hydrogen Caucus 10 years ago. But, folks, we are not there yet.

Now, what can keep us going? Here is what the Energy Department has in their chart. From this middle line towards me is history. That is where we have been. From that middle line out is where the Energy Department thinks we are going to be.

To listen to many people, you would think we are ready. We have been holding back wind and we have been holding back solar and we have been holding back geothermal. We have been holding back hydrogen. We have been holding back electric cars. Folks, nobody is holding anything back. It has to compete. We have spent billions on every one of the new energies. But their projection is that not much is going to change.

I don't quite agree with their chart, because I look for coal to decrease. This administration has not been friendly to coal. This Congress has not been friendly to coal. There have been 50 coal plants turned down in the last 6 months in this country. They will all become natural gas plants. And when you have a power plant and you switch to natural gas, this is going to widen.

Really, that is one of the reasons that we have expensive natural gas in America. Twelve years ago, we didn't use natural gas to make electricity. Only 8 percent of our electricity was made with natural gas. Today, 23 percent of our electricity is made with natural gas, and it has put tremendous pressure on natural gas.

Clean, green natural gas is the fuel that we use to make ethanol, it is the fuel we will use to make hydrogen. It is the fuel we will use as the bridge. A third of our auto fleet could be on clean, green natural gas if it was less expensive.

So I look at natural gas as the savior for us to get us to the new generations of fuels. But in the meantime, we are going to need a lot of oil. We are going to need coal. We are going to need nuclear. The energy bill in 05 gave incentives. It took 10 years to get a permit for a nuclear plant. We now force that to be done in 4. So they say 4 years to build one. So I say with delays and problems, we can build a nuclear plant in 10 years. There are 50 on the drawing board and there are three or four ready to go, and that is because of the 05 Energy Act. But we need all of those 50 on line by 2030 to remain 20 percent of the grid, because electric use is going up so fast.

Folks, the energy problem in America is because of the environmental groups we have decided to stop producing fossil fuels, forcing us to be 66 percent dependent on foreign and forcing us to cause part of the world shortage of petroleum and gas because we don't produce. So I find it very frustrating that here we are today with the highest prices.

One more thing on natural gas. Natural gas is the one fuel that is not a world price. Neither is coal. When oil is $120 a barrel, it is that all around the world. But we have had the highest natural gas prices in America for 8 years.

What does that do to us? That affects the petrochemical companies, the polymers and the plastic companies and the fertilizer companies that use huge amounts. They use it as an ingredient. Polymers and plastic, 45 percent of the cost of making it is natural gas. Fifty-five percent of the cost of petrochemical is natural gas. From 50 to 70 percent of fertilizer cost is natural gas.

Half of our fertilizer plants have left in the last 3 years. We have lost 300,000 polymer plastic jobs in the last 3 years. A great percentage of the petrochemical industry has moved offshore.

Just to show you, our largest chemical company is Dow Chemical. They spoke out the other day about natural gas prices. In 02, they spent $8 billion to purchase natural gas. This year, they will spend $32 billion for natural gas. That is a 400 percent increase.

Now, here are the numbers that are scary. In 02, 60 percent of their revenue and jobs were in America. Today, 34 percent of their revenue and jobs are in America. Where are they? They are in foreign countries, where natural gas is a fraction of what it is here.

Many of the plants I have mentioned, polymers, plastic, steel, aluminum, those plants are moving everywhere because of energy prices. They are building every kind of a plant you can think of down in South America in a place called Trinidad, about a day-and-a-half by ship to here. My prediction is if we don't deal with natural gas prices, bricks and glass, heavy bulky commodities will be produced in Trinidad and be on our shores within a day-and-a-half.

Folks, that is not the America I believe in. If America is going to compete, we have to get gas prices under control. We have to get oil prices under control. We have to have energy that is affordable for Americans to heat their homes. We have to have energy prices that are affordable so companies will want to be here and produce the jobs here. I believe for the first time in the history of America we have to fight to compete with our competitors like China and India. They are huge. They are growing fast. They are building their own energy future.

China will be producing oil 50 miles off the coast of Cuba and 50 miles off the Florida coast, while we prohibit it. Does that make sense? I don't think so. They are going to be working. China, Canada and Spain will all have contracts to produce energy in waters that should be ours, off our coast, because we don't produce there and because it is an equal distance from Cuba.

It is time for this Congress, it is time for this administration, to lead. Recently the President has spoken out three times on offshore. He has never supported offshore production. But he said we should be offshore and onshore producing more energy.

I wrote him a letter 2 weeks ago and put a release out today that says the following: ``Mr. President, I commend you for speaking about offshore production of energy. But it seems like if you would lead by removing the presidential moratorium, that is yours, and urging Congress to remove their moratorium so we can start the process.'' It will take years to get out there. We have to get in a 5-year plan, we have to do the leases, we have to do the environmental impact statements, and then they have to go out and build the platforms and the pipelines and drill. It takes a long time.

Every day we wait we endanger the economic future of America. I think we are almost past the point. We need energy production in America today. Not next year. Today. We need to unlock what this Congress and three presidents have locked up. We need to produce our energy. We need to conserve. We need to use the innovation that my friend talked about a little bit ago.

We need it to do everything we can to produce every form of energy that is available. We need wind, we need solar, and we need to use less. We need to use it more wisely. But, folks, the day is today. We cannot solve this problem with just conservation. We have to produce energy.

I believe if we opened up the Outer Continental Shelf, we would take what we call the fear factor out of the market and we would get Wall Street out of the marketplace and we could drop energy prices 20 to 25 percent. The only other thing you and I can do is to use less and find alternatives. Folks, it is a crisis in America.

I want to thank my friend from Utah and my friend from California who have joined us for the opportunity to share some time with them today.

I thank the gentlelady from Colorado and gentlelady from Virginia and the gentleman from Tennessee for the right to join them this evening for an issue that I think is very much on the mind of every American.

I can't talk to a neighbor, a friend, anywhere but what they're talking about energy prices. And it's interesting that it's not being talked about in this House in a productive way.

In fact, 2 weeks ago we passed a bill that attempts to give us the right to get OPEC into our courts to force them to produce more energy, accusing them of not producing enough energy. Now, I don't know how a government who has locked up so much of its own supply--and I'll show you here on this chart--both coasts are off-limits to oil and gas production and a portion of the gulf. And out in the middle part of the country, millions and millions of acres are locked up.

And of course up here in ANWR, that part of Alaska that was set aside by President Carter for energy production, has been locked up. And we passed a bill in the Clinton administration, and he vetoed it. That was 10 years ago. They said it would take 10 years to get production here, but today we would have that energy if it had happened.

Folks, while we lock this up, we pass a bill trying to get us the ability to bring OPEC countries into a court somewhere to force them to produce. Now, people back home kind of laughed at me and they said, well, how do we force a country to produce when we won't produce our own? How do you rationalize that? But it sounds good if you don't look at the facts, I guess. But here we are, and now the Senate, this week, is working on carbon taxes, which will increase energy prices another 20 to 30 percent.

Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, and Americans, listen to the carbon tax debate. It will tax energy further and raise the cost of fossil fuels, hoping, I guess, we won't use them so that we will be forced--and we will get into the renewables in a little bit. But it seems interesting to me that, at a time when every American that I talk to has one thing on their mind, affordable energy, and Congress is the reason. I'm here to say tonight, this body and three Presidents are the reason.

This moratorium on our Outer Continental Shelf, that's from three miles offshore owned by the States to 200 miles that's owned by the Federal Government and us, the taxpayers, we own that. We're the only country in the world that's locked it up. It was locked up 28 years ago by President Bush I for 5 years to study and see where the best was and see if we had some sensitive areas we needed to protect. President Clinton came in, just extended it to 2012 and said they wouldn't explore out there. And then the current President has not supported raising this moratorium. In fact, I wrote him a letter 2 weeks ago, a man I love dearly, but disagree with very much on lack of energy leadership because he understands the energy issue--at least he should, he's from an energy family. But he has spoken three times recently in public about opening up onshore and offshore. So we sent him a letter saying, Mr. President, it seems like if you're serious about opening up offshore, that you would lift the presidential moratorium--because we actually have two moratoriums. We have a presidential decree that's been through three Presidents that says you can't produce out there. We have legislation that Congress passes every year in the Interior bill that says the Federal Government cannot spend one dollar to lease offshore leasing on either coast in the Gulf. Eighty-five percent.

This is where most of the world produces a lot of their energy, these great resources. It's the most environmentally sensitive place. Fishing in the Gulf is better where we produce oil than where we don't produce oil. And when we had the terrible storms in Katrina a few years ago, the fishermen were saying--some of the rigs were really damaged, and the platforms, so they said, you're not going to take them away, are you? They said, no, we're going to repair them and use them. Because that's where the best fishing is.

Now, with those terrible storms, the Minerals and Mines Management said we had no measurable spillage. Actually, we have more spillage on our ocean shores from ships and sporting boats than we have from drilling anywhere. We have not had an offshore incident since 1969 in Santa Barbara. Our technology today is tremendously improved. There is no viable reason that we're not producing energy offshore.

Now, I'll be offering an amendment next Wednesday, the 11th of June, in the Interior Appropriations bill that will open up and remove these moratoriums from 50 miles out for both gas and oil. That will allow us to produce. Now, it's not something that's just going to happen overnight, it still would have to be, once it's opened up and signed by the President, it would have to be part of the 5-year plan.

What's interesting is we know there's huge reserves out here, but has never been measured by modern seismographic and modern techniques that we use today. And it's like taking an old black and white picture tube, television, and comparing it to one of our beautiful flat screen TVs today of what you can see. Today they can know what's there, what type of energy is there, how deep it is, and how difficult it will be to produce it. But we, by law, this Congress has prohibited anybody from exploring out there, even to look at what's out there. Does that make sense? Of course it makes no sense.

Let's look for a moment at our energy use. This is the interesting part. We are 40 percent petroleum, 23 percent natural gas, 23 percent coal, 8 percent nuclear. Now, that's 94 percent of America's energy. That's fossil fuel, except nuclear.

Then you have the renewables. And, you know, I'm for wind and I'm for solar and I'm for geothermal and I'm for cellulosic ethanol and all of those good things, but we have to look at how small they are. I said to a gentleman on the plane this morning flying in, I said, if we double wind and solar in the next 5 years, how much of our energy do you think--oh, 10 percent? I said, less than three-quarters of 1 percent. Because when you get down here, the only one that's really grown a lot recently is woody biomass.

Now, we have almost a million Americans now, just under a million Americans heats their homes with pellet stoves; that's saw dust pressed into a pellet, and they use it to heat their home. We're heating factories today with saw dust and wood chips. I have a hospital in my district that just put in a new wood boiler that has saved 70 percent on their energy bill by burning sawdust and wood chips and their own cardboard and their own paper. So that's been the one that's been growing. Geothermal has been just constant at a very small fraction.

Wind and solar are fractions; these are fractions. Now, if we double them, they're still fractions. And I'm for them. But I guess the false hope has been--and I want to share with you who I think is really at fault. Now, Congress is at fault, but who has influenced Congress? Well, there is a group called the Sierra Club. And here is what is on their web page. They're against the oil shale development that's been talked about out west, where we think there's huge reserves. They're against coal liquefaction because we're the Saudi Arabia of coal and we think liquefied coal or coal-to-gas could get us away from the--66 percent of our petroleum now comes from foreign unstable governments. And that's where all our money is going, folks. We're enriching that part of the world who helped furnish us with 9/11.

They're against offshore energy production. Back to the map I had up here. The Sierra Club will lead the fight. I debated a Sierra Club member on NPR last week on a California radio station, and they said we'll be leading the fight to stop Congressman Peterson's bill from being passed.

Green Peace; you know what they want to do? They want to phase these out. And that's what a lot of Congress wants to do. They say, we can't use fossil fuels anymore. Well, okay, I'll buy that. I would like to be fueling our country down here. I will do anything and everything to fund these. And those who say we haven't spent billions on research in wind and solar are not being honest with you, we're spending billions annually to subsidize those.

So Green Peace wants to phase these out; can't do this anymore. But that's really what we're doing, that's why we have high energy prices; we're phasing out fossil fuels before we have a replacement. We've decided we're not going to produce fossil fuels. Because if we don't produce them--I've talked to Members here on the floor. Well, John, if we continue to produce fossil fuels and they're affordable, Americans will not use renewables. I said, but if you phase out fossil fuels before we have the renewables, we're going to have awfully high energy prices.

Now, we were arguing that when oil was $30 and $40 a barrel. I don't think any of us dreamed we would see $135 oil this year. I thought we might hit $100 oil this fall. That was my prediction. I did not dream . . .

Now, what's interesting that's happening now, oil I think was $122 when it closed today; that's not cheap, but it's better than $135. But natural gas prices, creeping, creeping, creeping. And natural gas is the fuel that I think is the bridge fuel.

Here's what natural gas prices have been doing. Natural gas prices are spiking again. This chart was made on the retail price. Today, natural gas was $12.40 out of the ground. And now what's ironic about that, this is a time of year when you don't use a lot of natural gas because you're minimizing heating and you're minimizing cooling. You're kind of at the period where we depend on natural temperatures. So we use much less natural gas at this time

of year. So this is when natural gas prices dive. And we put that cheap gas in the ground and we use it next winter because in the winter time, when we're heating the country, we can't produce enough gas for that period of time, so we store it. And my district has many caverns, salt caverns where we store gas for the northeast.

So we're now putting $12.40 gas in the ground for next winter. Last year at this time we were putting $6.50 and $7 gas in the ground. So the American public yet do not realize that we've had--they're paying very high prices for home heating oil, they're paying very high prices for gasoline and diesel, and they're paying very high prices for home heating oil and propane. But natural gas didn't increase much last year; it was kind of a soft year on natural gas prices. But this year, only the good Lord knows how expensive it's going to be because it appears, for some reason, it's going up like a quarter a day; so that's every four days you're up a dollar. I don't know what's causing it, it's increased use.

We have said no to about 50 coal plants that were designed to be built to replace old coal plants in the last 6 months in this country. States have rejected them because of the carbon issue now, or the fear of the carbon issue. So those will all be natural gas plants.

Now, up until about 12 years ago we didn't use natural gas to make electricity, and so we made about 8 percent of our electricity with natural gas. And that was peak power in the morning and the evening because you can turn a gas generator off and on, the rest you can't. Now that we use it unlimitedly, we're at 23 percent of our electric is being produced with natural gas. And it's a huge strain on the natural gas system.

Now, natural gas should never be a problem in America. We can't probably produce all the oil we need; we can do a lot better than we're doing. But there's no reason America can't have lots of natural gas. We have reserves onshore, offshore, but unfortunately most of them are owned by government entities and they're locked up. Congress has locked them up. Congress has said we're not going to produce. And these environmental groups--let me go back through them. Green Peace; phase out fossil fuels. Environmental Defense; they're against power plant smokestacks are public health enemy number one, so you can't have a power plant. League of Conservation Voters; coal to liquids, the wrong direction. They're going to fight it. Defenders of Wilderness; every coastal State is put in harm's way when oil rigs go up on our coastal waters.

Folks, I showed you the chart earlier about every country in the world, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, they all produce offshore, cleanly. The new technology, they turn the wells off when there are storms at the base. There has not been a major spill. And there has never been a gas spill that spoiled a beach. Gas is a clean fuel.

And in my view, if we had abundant reasonable natural gas, we could fuel a third of our cars with natural gas. In the cities, our buses, all our short-haul vehicles, our construction vehicles, could all be on clean, green natural gas. But the price is so high today, there is no incentive to do that.

To conclude here, here is the Energy Department's charts. The middle is now. This is history. This is what they project for our usage in the future.

Now, not long ago there were commercials on television by oil companies that led me to believe that renewables were ready to take over, they were ready to fuel this country, all we had to do was release them. Well, this is what the Energy Department thinks. Not much changed. Now, I don't quite agree with some of these. I think natural gas will increase measurably out here because the carbon issue is going to restrict coal. It may prevent us from doing coal-to-liquid. And it shouldn't happen, but it's actually happening. Coal plants are being turned down--clean coal technology plants are being turned down by environmental agencies to replace all dirty coal plants that we would like to replace because of the carbon issue.

So I look for gas to be--if we do a carbon tax, every country that has done a carbon tax, everybody has to go to natural gas because it's a third of the carbon when you burn it of any other fossil fuel. It's the cleanest fuel, it's almost the perfect fuel. But folks, we need oil, we need gas, we need coal, we need nuclear. We need all the renewables and hydros. And we need to grow them all as fast as we can. But our environmental groups want to eliminate all of the below and run the country on above. And it actually goes clear up to here, because they're not for nuclear. The environmental groups are not for nuclear, they're not for coal, they're not for gas, they're not for oil. But folks, that's how we run the world.

And with today's clean technology, there is no argument why we can't have affordable energy in America.

But it is the will of this Congress to open up. I hope next Wednesday on the Interior Subcommittee that we can be successful with our amendment that would open up the Outer Continental Shelf, from 50 miles out, to oil and gas production. Now, that won't change anything, but I just asked some oil company executives, who I don't talk to often but who were at a hearing, if we opened up the Outer Continental Shelf in its entirety, both coasts, and we opened up ANWR, what would that do to energy prices? He said, well, it would take the fear factor out because here is the problem we have in America.

Historically, there was capacity in the world of about 10 million gallons a day of oil that could be pumped if we needed it, from eight to ten. That has been historic. Recently, as China and India have increased their usage and as many of the countries--Mexico, Chavez, Nigeria, Russia, and all of them--have nationalized their oil companies and are now run by the government, they are not being run as efficiently, and they're not producing as much, so production has actually slipped in many of those countries.

We are down now to where there is about a 1.2-million-extra-barrel-a- day capacity in the world to meet the world demand. So, if you have a storm and when Exxon was arguing with Chavez over producing, the price went up. When we had the oil refinery a short time ago that was only a 78,000-barrel refinery, the price went up. Why? Because that is going to take some supply off the market. There is no slush. So, if you have any one of these countries--these dictatorships--topple and instead of producing 7 million barrels a day they would produce 5, there wouldn't be enough oil. So the fear factor allows Wall Street to play on those fears and run those prices up. If you took the fear factor out, the oil companies told me, it would probably reduce prices at least 20 to 25 percent. That's just theory. That's their thought. Take the fear factor because there is not enough oil in the marketplace.

What has happened and no matter what we do is China's growth in energy use and India's growth in energy use is 15 to 20 percent a year because, as they build a home and buy their first vehicles, they are now in the energy business. Where they used to have a donkey and a hut, they now have a house. Millions of people all over the world are joining our way of life, and to join our way of life, they need heat in their homes; they need a vehicle that needs fuel, and they're part of the energy business. Those are the developing countries in South America, in India, in China, in Malaysia. It's happening everywhere. We are soon going to be the second biggest user of energy because China is about ready to go by us.

I believe, if America continues to refuse to deal with energy and bring available energy to America, we will not compete in the new global economy. We are in an economy today where we have never had competitors like China and India before. We have never had this kind of pressure on us. We have to compete.

I want to make one final point on natural gas. Natural gas is not a world price. We have had one of the highest prices of any country in the world of natural gas now for 8 years. That is why half the fertilizer industry has left this country; they use huge amounts of natural gas. I'll just share with you some data here that's scary.

Dow Chemical announced a 20 percent price increase, but it's what you look at behind that that's scary. In 2002, their natural gas bill was $8 billion. In 2008, it was $32 billion. That's

four times. In 2002, 60 percent of their revenues came from American plants. Just a few years later, it was only 34 percent of their revenues. Why? They had to move offshore to compete in the global economy. Over half the fertilizer companies have left America in the last 3 years because of natural gas prices. The increase in the cost of natural gas has caused plastic resin prices to rise to record levels. It has put American-based plastic facilities--and my district is full of plastic plants--at a severe competitive disadvantage, says Josh Young of the American Plastics Council. As a result, the factories are closing or are moving offshore. They are leaving Americans jobless. Over the past 5 years, the plastic industry has lost nearly 4,000 jobs in Florida, which refused to allow us to drill, and more than 300,000 jobs nationwide just in the plastics industry. Petrochemicals have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, fertilizer thousands of jobs and steel makers, aluminum makers and glass that use huge amounts.

My prediction is that bulk commodities like glass and bricks, that should always be made close to home, will soon be made in Trinidad where gas is $1.50 instead of $12 coming out of the ground. We will make our bricks and glass in Trinidad, South America. It will come here in about a day and a half on a ship.

That's not the America I dream for. Available, affordable energy is available to us if this Congress will do what is right: Open up offshore, do coal to liquids, expand the use of nuclear, continue to subsidize the renewables and to incentivize the renewables. I think we also need to incentivize Americans. I mean Americans are conserving. They have to conserve, but we need to incentivize Americans with tax breaks that would help them write off any measurable improvement they made in their homes and in their lifestyles, whether it's heating their homes with more modern appliances or whether it's better insulation or better windows or better doors, so we can conserve the use of energy.

As was talked about here on the floor earlier, there is education. My school districts are getting hammered with energy costs. The hospitals are getting hammered with energy costs as are your agencies that give free aid to the people. I mean every social agency is getting hammered with energy costs.

I talked to a church person tonight who said they weren't sure they were going to be able to keep their church open next winter. The energy bills last year have made it almost prohibitive to keep their church open in the colder months in the winter. They are going to have to find a place to meet somewhere else.

Folks, this is a self-induced problem by this Congress and by three Presidents. In our Presidential debate, the number one issue ought to be who has the best plan for available, affordable energy for America.

That's right.

Mr. Speaker, let the record show that on Wednesday, May 21, oil hit $137 a barrel and closed at about $134. Natural gas has pushed by $11.50 per thousand and is approaching $12.

Yes, this chart I have shows the growth in energy costs. Price of oil continues to skyrocket. I guess the part that's surprising is, as a 12- year Member of this body, that it's not a crisis here. This Congress is not treating energy prices as if it was a crisis.

I was looking at my notes before I came down from an October time when I came down to the floor, and we talked then, as we were kind of climbing through the eighties, and that day we had hit $94 a barrel. And we all shuddered that we might be approaching $100, and here we are a few months later, not only past $100, but at $134 and actually hit $137 today.

Do we have a bipartisan task force by the House and Senate that would look at how we deal with this energy crisis and how we deal with these high prices that American consumers are struggling with? The answer is no. Do we have a special House committee looking for solutions? The answer is no.

Yesterday, the House had a bill. It was defined and named to cut costs, cut gas costs. Will it? Well, the first part of the bill dealt with trying to figure out a legal way that we can sue the OPEC countries for not producing enough oil. Now, Saudi Arabia alone produces 12 million barrels a day, and many of the other countries, 10, 9, 7, but we think they should produce more.

It's interesting, on this floor a few months ago, when we had some energy bills pass that didn't have any energy in them, we claimed that it was a new era. The era of oil was over. We were moving into the fields, the new fields, and energy dependence on foreign countries would disappear.

I've been in Congress 12 years. We've increased dependency almost 2 percent a year every year I've been here, and we're on a pattern that by 2015, if we don't change, we'll be 85 percent dependent on foreign, mostly dictatorship, unstable countries, not always friendly to us.

I think that's a serious crisis for the American people. It's a serious crisis for American businesses to compete. It's a serious crisis to our defense of this country.

I wish our governmental leaders, White House and legislative included, were half as interested in energy prices as our military was. Because when I talk to the leaders of the Air Force specifically, who use a huge amount of our energy flying our planes, they want 60 percent of their energy to be non-foreign, and they're working judiciously to do other fuels from coal and fuels from gas and trying to have other non-oil fuels because in oil we're just becoming majorly foreign dependent.

Today, the Senate determined that when they return after the May recess, they're going to deal in the week or two period with climate change. They're going to deal with carbon taxes because they think that a one-and-a-half percentage degree in temperature increase in this country, in this world, is a greater threat to our future than energy prices that most Americans can't afford, and most businesses can't compete in the global economy if they continue.

But the Senate is not talking about energy. They're talking about a climate bill and a carbon tax which will increase energy prices 25 to 30 percent. Much of America today hit $4 in gasoline. That means if the Senate acts as they say they're going to, a carbon tax

could easily, everybody agrees, could increase energy prices 20 to 30 percent. So 25 percent of $4 is another dollar so we would go to $5 gasoline. And only God knows what oil prices will be by the time they accomplish that.

Does America need to be in an energy crisis? I think not. We made a decision several decades ago, in fact 27 years ago, a very foolish decision. We locked up offshore production of energy on both coasts and in much of the gulf. Every country in the world, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, all green countries, all environmentally sensitive countries, they all produce offshore. They have different set-asides, some 20 miles, some 30 miles, some 15 miles. Eleven miles is the sight line. Once it's past 11 miles, nobody can see it. All those countries, every country produces.

Canada, thank God for Canada. We import more energy from Canada than anybody else, our friend to the north. They produce both oil and gas right off the coast of Maine, just above it, and right above the coast of Washington. And since 1913, they've been producing natural gas only in the Great Lakes, and today they're selling it to us. We get 15 percent of our natural gas from Canada, 2 percent from LNG, and the rest we produce ourselves. We could be totally self-sufficient in natural gas.

Now, a young lady said to me recently, she said, Mr. Peterson, I make $320 a week. I lost my other job so I have to travel a fair distance now to work. I'm now paying $130 a week to drive to work. She says, I don't know how I can continue to raise my two children and make ends meet.

What she didn't know was that the small house she has, her current natural gas bill, on a monthly basis, $175--she pays balanced billing-- what she doesn't know is that the $12 gas or $11.70 today we're putting in the ground now compares to $6.50 gas we were putting in the ground-- and you may say, what do you mean putting in the ground? Well, we have great storage caverns, much of them in my district in Pennsylvania, where we store natural gas in old salt caverns, and then we use it in the wintertime because we can't produce, we can't pump enough out of the ground in the heating season when we use tremendous amounts of natural gas. So we're putting it in the ground in storage today.

Now, one of the major storage companies told me last week at a luncheon, they're very concerned; they have not had their storage this low in a long time, and they're very concerned because they've been unable to buy as much LNG as they want.

And they're very concerned. I said, why are you putting $11.50 gas in the ground? Why don't you wait until the price comes down? They said, we're afraid the price isn't going to come down. Because usually in the spring of the season, when we're not heating our homes and we're not running a lot of air conditioning, we use the least natural gas of any other time of the year. So that's when we have ample supply, the price comes down, it gets reasonable, and that's when we put it in storage for next winter.

Later year at this time, it was $6.50, later in the summer it was $5 something. And last year we had a moderate increase in natural gas prices, about 7, 8, 9, 10 percent, depending on what part of the country you were in. That was moderate. Well, those who heated with home heating oil and propane had huge increases last year. And the sad story for Americans is those who heat with propane and home heating fuel are going to have enormous increases this year on top of last year's increases. And those who heat with natural gas are going to have a major increase. We don't know how much yet.

For the first time in 2 years we have not had a storm in the Gulf, the last two summers. That's historic. We always have storms in the Gulf, hurricanes, that disrupt oil and gas supply. And when it disrupts that supply, we never replace it, so it just takes it out of the system. And whenever we have a major storm in the Gulf--when Katrina hit, gas went from, like, $4 or $5 to $14. And that year we had a huge increase in natural gas prices because that's what we had to pay.

Now, the LNG issue I mentioned, you know, I had a debate with the White House some time ago, and they felt that LNG was our answer to natural gas. I argued then, 3 years ago, and I argue now, it's not the answer. It's a little piece of the solution. Now, what is LNG? That's liquefied natural gas, we buy it from foreign countries a long ways from here. Gas is cheaper in those countries. They liquefy it. They fill these huge tankers and they come here, and then we build controversial unloading stations. They're really not unsafe, but people perceive them to be. And we were in a flurry to build more receiving stations. We found out we really haven't needed them, we're hardly using half of the capacity we have today. Why? Because we can't buy it.

When a tanker with LNG gets loaded in one of these foreign countries, countries like Japan, who don't have any gas of their own, little countries like Spain, and on and on the list goes, they outbid us. Sometimes a tanker load of gas will be coming to the States, and they will get a higher price offered and they actually turn around and go to that country. In fact, in the heating season, when we need it, we can't buy it on a bet.

So LNG has not been the silver bullet that many thought. And the Secretary of Energy went around the world trying to entice LNG for this country. And I argued that LNG is helpful, but it's not a silver bullet, it shouldn't be our solution because, folks, between major gas areas in the Midwest and in the Pennsylvania Appalachian region, recent find, offshore we have an abundant volume of natural gas.

And natural gas is the clean, green fuel. And if it was more affordable, we could be using it in our auto fleets because autos can run on natural gas with a couple thousand dollar exchange of carbonation and storage tanks and so forth, maybe $2,000 or $3,000 a vehicle. We could run all of our school buses, short haul, all of our city buses, the Washington City. Many of them are on natural gas. State College in my district has been an all natural gas district for a number of years now. All of their bus system--it's the third largest bus system in Pennsylvania--they're all on clean, green natural gas.

Natural gas should be our bridge fuel. But at $12 now, and if we have a storm in the Gulf, it would be 15 or more, those prices, it's not our solution. But it could be our solution if we would open up the OCS, if we would open up Alaska, if we would open up much of the Midwest and start producing our own clean natural gas.

I have found it astounding that there is resistance to producing energy in America. What's really happened in America, and I'll just go a little bit more on natural gas here. Here is the natural gas prices. The blue line is what commercial pays--they pay a little less than households because they use high volume--and the red line is where residents are. And folks, this is today's price at the retail. In the fall, it's going to be off of this chart. There is going to be a huge increase, I predict, and everybody agrees. We will have to make a new chart because this chart won't work. Natural gas prices.

Now, is that problematic? Yeah, it's problematic, because not only do we use natural gas to heat our homes and to run our businesses, we use it as an ingredient. Fertilizer, about 70 to 90 percent of the cost of making it is natural gas because that's what we make it out of. The corn we're growing for ethanol uses natural gas to make the fertilizer to grow the corn. If we go to a hydrogen vehicle, we will use a natural gas.

The ethanol we use in vehicles today, the biofuels, biodiesel, those plants consume huge amounts of natural gas. One was just proposed in a southern State, and their projected natural gas costs for the first year was $3.5 million and they were looking for a cheaper fuel. Natural gas is the major ingredient in petrochemicals, polymers, plastics. We use it to bend steel, melt steel. We use it to treat all kinds of products. We use it to cook. We use it to bake. We use it in many, many commercial ways.

And natural gas prices are making American businesses noncompetitive. Dow Chemical, in 2002, a petrochemical company, the biggest in the world, American company, a good company, they used $8 billion of natural gas in 2002. Then we had the big spike in gas prices. In 2006, their gas bill went to $22 billion. And I don't know what it is

today, certainly much higher. They started building their plants. These are the best blue-collar jobs left in America, petrochemical plants, fertilizer plants, polymer and plastic plants, plants that heat, treat steel and bend metal and shape things. They all use natural gas as their fuel.

And they are being endangered because natural gas is not a world price. Nobody in the world pays this price but us. It's cheaper in Canada, a little bit. They're high because of us, because they're kind of hooked at the hip. It's cheaper in Mexico. At the wholesale side, it's $1 something in Trinidad, South America. In Russia, it's just barely over one dollar.

Many parts of the world--all parts of the world, in those countries, China and India, our competitors, their natural gas prices are probably a third of ours. That puts our companies at a huge disadvantage, not just labor disadvantage, not just because of other high costs in this country, energy costs have driven more jobs out of America than any other issue, not that they wanted to leave, they just can't afford to stay.

Now, with energy prices today, I talked about the young lady and her job, driving to work and her home, we're going to have seniors--you know, just the other day I had a gentleman tell me he put a new furnace in his mother's home. But when he went to visit her last winter, she had her temperature at 58 because she felt that was all she could afford. And he said, John, what do I do? I don't want my mother living at 58 degrees, I want her to be warm. So he's looking at some sort of heater in the one room where she sits in the evening so she can be toasty warm, maybe a pellet stove or a gas stove or something that keeps that room warm but the furnace down, not heating the whole house.

I went into a hardware store 2 weeks ago and they had their coats on. It was chilly in there. It was a frosty morning, we had frost that morning. And I said, it's kind of chilly in here. And he said, well, with energy prices today, in the spring and the fall I shut my furnaces off. We're a lumber yard, we're a hardware store, people come in here dressed for the outside temperature, and so we just dress for the outside temperature in our work. It saves me $800 a month in the spring and the fall, that's 4 months, so that's $3,200 that I don't have a gas bill--that I would pay in a gas bill, $800. Now, in the winter I pay a lot more than that, but it's cold then and you have to have heat, pipes will freeze, people won't come in your store if they can see their breath.

Folks, I don't think we have any idea what we're doing to the economic future of America, what we're doing to the quality of life of the average hardworking poor American. Now, those who are middle class will complain and groan and they'll pay because they have the money.

But below the middle class and the working class and the poor in this country, when they pay their driving bill--and rural people, I represent rural, we don't have mass transit; we drive to school, we drive to work, we drive to church, we drive to the doctor, we drive to the mall, we drive everywhere. And in rural areas, when the economy shifts and you lose your job at a plant, you don't move away, you go 50 miles down the road and you get a job and then you drive to work every day. I had a lady tell me today, my gas bill per week now is $180 a week. And now when she gets her heating bill next winter, will she have enough money to raise her family, heat her home, and drive her car? Many won't.

The current energy prices have the potential of stalling this economy. I had a person who has been dealing with energy all his life. He is a government official. He told me about 9 months ago that he thought $75 oil would put us in a recession and stall the economy of this country, and in time, the world. Now he said we bounced through that. We were just by that, and we were in the $80s then. He said, my people and I may have been wrong, but there is a price that our economy cannot absorb these energy prices. And folks, $134 oil? I mean, it's almost like we're talking fantasy.

How did we get here? How did we get to this situation? Well, here's some of the things--back to natural gas for a minute. In all of these products, natural gas is used in making them--steam, power, and all of these blocks. Huge amounts of natural gas. Even the skin creams that you ladies like to keep your skin soft, that's a direct ingredient of natural gas. The feedstock for making skin softeners is natural gas.

Well, here's where we are in energy use. Let's try to figure out how we got here. You can see the big part of our energy is oil. And now, 66.5 percent of our oil comes from foreign countries. Natural gas is the next largest, and coal--well, I guess coal would be the next, but let's go to natural gas. We're 83 percent self-sufficient. We get 2 percent in fraction from LNG and about 15 percent from Canada, our good friend in the north who drills offshore where we won't.

Now, coal basically is used in this country to make electricity, and about 50 percent of our electricity in this country is made from coal. Now, nuclear has been 20 percent of the energy in our electric system, not our energy overall, but our electric system. And of course the beige line here is hydro, and that's getting smaller because we're taking dams out. The environmentalists don't want dams. All the environmental community, they don't want dams in our rivers, and a lot of them have been tore out. And we're not adding hydro anywhere, so it's a declining factor.

Now, as you look at renewables, this is scary. Renewables are wind and solar and geothermal and woody biomass. And the only one of those that actually had real measurable growth in volume is woody biomass. A little growth in wind and a little growth in solar, but the big one that has really grown measurably is woody biomass. How did that happen? Well, we have between 800,000 and 1 million Americans heating their homes with pellet stoves. That's a fuel made out of waste sawdust, a good use of biomass. We use it to heat factories. Most of the dry kilns, where you dry your lumber, that used to be heated with fuel oil and natural gas are now heated with wood waste. Many factories that are in the wood business are all heated with wood waste boilers.

I have a company in my district now that builds very efficient wood waste boilers that actually burn wood waste cleaner than natural gas; it's an amazing ceramic-lined boiler. We recently placed those in a hospital in my district, that boiler, and that hospital is going to save 70 percent on their energy bill. And they're going to be using waste sawdust and wood chips. They can even burn green wood chips, like if a tree trimmer comes through and trims the trees and grinds it up-- and they usually find places to dump that--they can now blow that into a tractor trailer and use it for fuel, cardboard waste, paper waste. This hospital is going to burn all its cardboard, all its paper, all its clean fuel, and buy sawdust and wood chips. They are going to save 70 percent on their energy bill.

Woody biomass is finding a market of its own. Now, there have been a lot of windmills added, and they are going to be a lot more added. But the numbers are still, you know--I keep reading articles. I read one recently that in just a few years 100 percent of electricity could be from wind. Folks, that's just not accurate. I read an article last week that in a few years we'll have 20 percent of our electricity. Now, one of the problems, you know, the grid failed in Texas recently because they have some successful windmills. But there are two times of the day when we need a lot of energy, that's in the morning and evening, peak power. That's when we're running our homes and our factories simultaneously. We're running washers and dryers and we're running hot water and we're cooking and we're doing things, so we're using a lot of energy in the factory and at home. Those are called peaks.

Well, from 4 to 6 o'clock, if you just watch the weather, and I've watched it, you can have a very windy day, and between 4 and 6, for some reason, the wind calms down. There's not much breeze. So wind farms don't produce a lot of energy sometimes on a nonwindy afternoon from 4 to 6 when you need it. So what happens when it doesn't blow and it doesn't turn? You have to turn on a gas generator. For every wind and solar generator, we have to have a gas backup. Now, gas is 23 percent. Gas is now 23 percent of our electric generation. Just a decade ago, it was less

than 7. We only allowed it to be peak power. We didn't allow electricity to be made from natural gas. We thought it was too clean and perfect to fuel and there were too many other uses for it, but we've changed. Now we are at 23 percent. And on a hot summer day when you have 100 degree temperatures across America and air conditioning is just sucking up all the electricity we can produce and our grid is struggling to stay up, every power plant that only comes on when it's peak is running 24/7 when we have hot summer weather. Now, that's changed things. We have never taken gas out of storage in the summertime until last year. Last year we had 2 weeks, 2 different weeks, when it was hot enough that we were producing enough electricity with natural gas that we fully had a negative flow of gas out of our storage areas for winter instead of in.

Folks, if we were to have a terrible storm in the this year, and everybody says we're going to, and we went 2 years without it, and we would have a very hot summer where we would use a lot of peak power and a lot of natural gas for electric generation, we could be looking at unbelievable natural gas prices this fall.

Now, I know the news I'm giving you is all bad news. But, folks, it's because this Congress and three Presidents have chosen not to produce fossil fuels.

Now, I'm for every renewable source there is. I'm for hydrogen. I have been pushing hydrogen my whole time in Congress. We hope it becomes a fuel of the future. I'm for wind and solar. I'm for cellulosic ethanol because it's vital because I don't think we can get to where they want to be with biofuels with soybeans and corn. I don't think we can grow enough of it. I've been stunned that we haven't opened up a lot more farmland, but we haven't. Last year we grew 20 million more acres of corn, and corn prices went from 3 something a bushel to $6.40 and $6.50 at one point. It's just under $6 now. We doubled and tripled grain prices. Food prices are skyrocketing because we used 20 percent of our corn last year to make biofuels, and this year we're projecting to use a third of our corn, and this year we are not growing 20 million acres more; I think we are only growing 8 million acres more or we're growing 8 million acres less. Somewhere in there that number is correct. But we're not going to grow as much corn, and they're concerned now with the wet weather in the West that we are not going to get all the corn we need planted.

Now, when you use grain long term and food long term for energy source, what happens when you have a bad crop year? You're not going to have food to eat and you're not going to have warmth. That's why cellulosic ethanol is so important.

Now, cellulosic ethanol can be made out of switchgrass, it can be made out of garbage, and it can be made out of wood waste. Where I come from, we have lots of wood waste, and I think that will be of use. But I think the one that has the most potential if in the laboratory--and these are all ``ifs.'' But yet we have a mandate by 2030 that we have to have 36.5 billion gallons per year of ethanol, the first 15 made from corn and the next 20 made from cellulosic. This is a mandate, by law. This is a process where we have not yet proven we can make it cost effectively.

Folks, we are in a crisis in this country because we have chosen not to drill for gas, not to drill for oil, no new fields. We have people come up here and talk about all the unused permits, all the land that's been leased and not drilled. Folks, if it's drillable and there's money there to be made, it will be drilled. And they all talk about big oil, but 80 percent of our energy is produced by small companies, people that are in our own States. Big oil are the named marketers, but energy is basically produced by independents. But we keep talking about these terrible oil companies and they're the problem.

I think Exxon answered the question well. They were talking about their profits the other day, and they said, Folks, we would reinvest in America if offshore was open, if Alaska was open, if the Midwest was open, but you forced us to go to foreign countries. Now we have foreign countries nationalizing their oil patches and their oil refineries and their oil production systems, and big oil is being gradually pushed out, and oftentimes their investments have been captured. Sometimes they have been paid for, sometimes not. And big oil is prepared to produce here if we open up.

Folks, we need to open up oil and gas reserves in this country. We need to have six or eight coal-to-liquid plants so we're not dependent on oil forever because we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. We need to figure out how to have more nuclear plants. The 2005 bill streamlined the process, and there are about 50 nuclear plants in the permit process, and there are 3 or 4 about ready to be built. We need all 50 of them by 2030 to maintain 20 percent of the electric grid. Not an increase. Hydro will continue to decrease.

This is a chart put out by EIA of the Energy Department. I disagree with them. We have had 60 coal plants turned down, clean coal, not dirty coal, clean coal, turned down by States because of the fear of the carbon issue. All of those will be built in gas plants, and when they are all built in gas plants, you will see this blue narrow and you will see the greens widen. Natural gas is where we will be going. It's the only place we can go. It's the clean, green fuel. But, folks, for it to be affordable, we need to produce a whole lot more of it.

It's never polluted a beach. It's never caused pollution in this country. It's the cleanest fuel, no NOX, no SOX, a third of the CO2. It's almost the perfect fuel. It's cleaner than biofuels. But for some reason, three Presidents and Congress for 27 years have locked up not only our shorelines but much of the middle of this country and the part of Alaska that was set aside for energy production, 2,000 acres on a 70 million acre plot to produce energy. With modern drilling they drill multiple wells on the same site, and they go many directions. You don't have nearly as many sites.

Folks, America needs energy. We need energy we can afford to pay. The working people of this country not only are not going to be able to afford to heat their homes and drive their cars, but many of them will lose their jobs because these energy prices, as I showed you earlier, $14 gas, America is the only place that someone pays $14 for gas. Every other part of the world is cheaper. Oil prices are the same everywhere. It's a world price. But for 8 years the Dow Chemicals, the manufacturers, the fertilizer companies have paid the highest prices in the world for natural gas and have been asked to compete with the rest of the world.

Energy is a crisis in America, but Congress treats it like it's not a crisis. We do goofy things like trying to sue OPEC, and we know we don't have standing to sue other countries. They don't come under our court system. We're trying to wiggle our laws around so we can sue them. That's a waste of time. We need to produce energy.

Also, I have a natural gas bill, the Outer Continental Shelf. In my bill it's natural gas only, offshore. We use the royalties for renewable research. We use royalties to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. We use royalties to clean up the Great Lakes, San Francisco Bay, the Everglades. Folks, if we would produce energy offshore, we can allocate the royalties to fund the renewables.

Today we were arguing over and fighting over the extensions for the tax incentives for wind and solar and geothermal and all the renewables. We extended them for 1 year. Our investment companies are going to spend a billion dollars on wind and solar when in a year from now, there may not be that incentive there that makes it work.

Folks, this Congress has failed us. This Congress continues to fail us. This Congress needs an energy policy. This White House needs an energy policy. And the people running for President of this United States need to prove to the Americans before they elect them that they have an energy policy that they're going to bring to this country to provide us with the gas and the oil and the renewables and clean energies and it's going to be affordable for Americans to live their lives, run their farms, run their businesses.

Folks, I've listened to hours and hours of presidential debates. Energy was seldom mentioned, and it's certainly not been a platform of the current candidates. We need a person running for President, Americans need to demand of those running for President, ``How are you going to produce?''

We have those who talk about green collar jobs. I'm for green collar jobs. But let me tell you, if we don't bring affordable energy to America, the blue collar jobs won't be here. They'll be gone, and we don't know how many of the green collar jobs. We need them both.

I'm for plants to build windmills. I'm for plants to build solar. And when we learn how to store wind and solar so that we can make it during the night when we don't need it and use it in the daytime when we need it, then it will work. But until we do that, it's on the margins. If we double wind and solar in 5 years, it will be less than 1 percent of our energy. I hope we can do that, but that's still not very much energy.

But the American public have been led to believe that we are holding renewables back, that we're not for these energy-efficient cars. There are incentives, folks, of thousands of dollars to buy energy-efficient cars. There are incentives to do wind and solar. Unfortunately, they're not long term. Those who are investing are gambling because we just renewed them a little bit at a time. We just renewed them for a year. Folks, we need to renew them for 5 to 10 years. We need to have it out there, and then if it isn't working, we stop doing that.

But, folks, there are those who say we need to conserve, and we do, and we will at these prices. But let me tell you that in a later speech sometime I'm going to show you the American people are using far less energy in America per capita today than we did a few years ago. We've done more than people give us credit for. We have more efficient appliances and more efficient engines and things than we had many years ago. We have done better than any other country in overall energy conservation. Folks, we haven't done enough, but I want to tell you $4 gasoline or $5 gasoline and $14 gas to heat our homes are going to force us to do a lot of things.

But America doesn't have to be in this situation. Yes, we need the new kind of fuels, renewable fuels. But until they are ready, we can't decide, as a Congress and a White House, that we're not going to produce.

Let me just tell you who some of the perpetrators are. The environmental groups of America own this Congress. Sierra Club rails against shale oil production. Over a trillion barrels of shale oil in the West. We can't do that.

Green Peace says we must phase out fossil fuels. Folks, how do we do that? Ninety-six percent of our energy is fossil fuels. How do we stop that? That's what we're doing. We're phasing them out before we have the replacement.

The Environmental Defense Fund: ``Power plants and smokestacks are our public health enemy number one, and we must do away with them.'' That's our jobs, our factories, folks.

League of Conservation Voters; coal to liquids, wrong direction. Well, should we do coal to liquids or should we do more foreign dependence on the Mid East? That is our choice.

Defenders of Wilderness; every coastal State is in harm's way when an oil rig goes up. Folks, that is not true. We haven't had an oil spill since 1969. We have never had a gas spill. When a gas well lets gas out, it goes in the air. Dissipates. Natural Resource Defense Council; coal mining destroys land. Coal plant emissions cripple and kill. We have clean coal technologies with much cleaner emissions than we have ever had, but we are turning them down and not building them. We are using old dirty coal plants because they can't build the new ones. That's our environmental policy.

Center for Biological Diversity; oil and gas drilling on public land has a devastating impact. Does it have to? It can be done right. Friends of the Earth; liquid coal is dirty and costly. Liquid coal doesn't have to be dirty and costly. We have ways of doing it.

North Africa, or South Africa, I guess, is leading the way with liquid coal. That is making gasoline and diesel out of coal. And we have lots of it. We need to be working at it and learning how to do it cleanly so we are not dependent. Folks, we are 66 percent dependent on foreign unstable countries. We have no control over prices. A storm in the gulf and we have another major spurt in energy prices.

One of our sending countries, and here's who we get our energy from. We produce 33.7 percent of our own oil, we import 66.3 percent of our oil. Canada provides 12 percent of our oil; Mexico, 9.3; non-OPEC nations, 8.9; Ecuador, 1.3; Saudi Arabia, 9.6 percent; Venezuela, 7.5. Our friend, Venezuela, 7.5 percent of our oil comes from there. Nigeria, a stable country, questionable, 7.2; Angola 3.3 percent; Iraq 3.2; Algeria, 3.1; Kuwait, 1.2; other OPEC is .06. That is our oil. That's where we get our oil from.

Folks, we don't have to be dependent on it. America is rich in resources. Natural gas should be our bridge. Clean vehicles on natural gas. Natural gas should be the fuel of the future, and our industries shouldn't have to pay the highest price in the world for natural gas so they are forced to leave here. Americans shouldn't be forced to live in homes that are cold in the wintertime because they can't afford to heat them. People should be able to afford to drive to work.

Folks, it's a crisis in America. It should be a crisis in this Congress. Today, the White House again spoke about we need to produce more energy. Tomorrow I am going to write the President a letter. You know, if he means that, he needs to lift the Outer Continental Shelf moratorium, because we don't have one moratorium, we have a legislative one by Congress for 27 years and we have had a Presidential one for 27 years, and he can lift it in a moment. That is how it was put there.

Bush I put it there for 5 years until we assessed the Outer Continental Shelf, what was there. We have never assessed that. We have never allowed seismographic out there. Then Clinton came in and extended it to 2012, and also vetoed the Alaskan bill, ANWR, which would be producing major oil for us today. He vetoed that. Bush II has ignored it and refused to talk about the OCS.

Folks, we have three Presidents and a Congress with a 27-year history of not producing affordable available energy in America, and we are the only country in the world to lock up the Outer Continental Shelf, we are the only country in the world that has locked up most of our internal resources.

Congress and Presidents have been our problem. Congress needs to get the message that it's time to stop being our problem, and we need to have a President that leads us to energy, affordable available energy for America.