Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. President, over the course of the last several days I have refrained from speaking on the floor about energy. But I have watched the floor very closely as I have seen kind of an interesting duel going on. An advocate of drilling, I found it fascinating that some on the other side of the aisle were saying that if we opened our outer continental reserves and drilled them, it would simply make no difference to the current state of play in the oil market or the price of gas at the pump. I find it not only interesting that that kind of conclusion is being drawn, but I also find it phenomenally naive that kind of statement can be made.

It is my opinion, and I think the opinion of a good many, that we are in a classic supply-and-demand situation in the Nation and therefore the world's oil markets. There is alleged speculation. There is alleged manipulation. I don't know whether any of that is true, but I do know the facts of what we live with and have lived with for the last several years.

There have been many of us in Congress who said there would be a day of reckoning if we continued to consume oil at a greater rate than we were producing and refining and bringing it to the marketplace. I believe it is very possible that day of reckoning is at hand. The world market in which we acquire our oil, the world market in which gas is refined from oil, is just that--a world market. It is not a domestic market. It doesn't happen down the street, only to be supplied on that street. It happens in the Middle East, it happens in Latin America, it happens in Canada, and it happens in this country. It all comes together in a world market, and we compete at the local gas pump for the price of the world market.

Here is a perfect example of the reality in which we live as America's consumers. I do not deny--in fact, I sympathize with and I am frustrated for America's consumers who today are facing $4 and $4.45 and $4.50 gas. It is taking a huge bite out of their back pocket, and they are not ready for it. They have not been eased into it. They should not have had to even be worried about easing into it because it should not have happened. But the Congress of the United States for the last 20 years has been in a perfect and absolute state of denial.

Energy was inexpensive compared to the rest of the world, and we could put this known reserve off, we could put this off, we could worry about that tomorrow because we didn't have to worry about it today. We could be environmental purists because it was easy to do.

Here is what was happening in America. The supply through the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s was dramatically dropping, but the demand was continuing to go up at an unprecedented rate. In fact, after the oil shock of the 1970s, when we adjusted some CAFE standards and we did a few other things, our

economy took off. As our economy took off, by definition we became ever increasingly larger consumers of oil, of hydrocarbons. It is that which lubricates the economy of our Nation. If we are going to be 25 percent of the world economy, guess what, we consume 25 percent of the world's energy. But we were not producing 25 percent of the world's energy. We, by this time, had begun to develop a huge dependency on other places in the world, all while we were having this phenomenal luxury of saying you don't have to drill in ANWR or Alaska, it may have 15 or 20 billion barrels, but we don't know, we can't touch it. We don't have to drill off the coast, we don't have to worry about oil shale. We don't have to worry about anything. We can be green and talk about the environment and deny the reality of the marketplace and grow increasingly more dependent on somebody else.

Here is an interesting chart. It is a chart I found in a book I am reading now that I recommend all Senators read. It is called ``A Thousand Barrels A Second.'' Think of that. That is the title of the book, but it is a title of reality. The reality is that the world in which we consume energy and from which we buy energy today consumes 1,000 barrels of oil a second. Do the math: 86.5 million barrels of oil a day. That is what the world marketplace is, and we consume 20-plus percent of it.

Here is what was happening from the 1970s on when we were in an oil shock. We looked at ourselves, we adjusted ourselves a little bit, and we began to try to figure other ways.

Oil production from 1970 to the year 2005, as demonstrated by the dark blue--as you notice, it was going up progressively. But something else was happening that allowed for adjustments in the market. This green area was the extra capacity the market was not consuming. So when there were bumps in the market, there was extra capacity. It didn't happen to be in the United States. It predominantly was in the Middle East and with the OPEC nations, but it was extra capacity.

Here we are in 2005. What had happened? China had come into the economy. India had come into the economy. They were beginning to consume at rates we did not expect. While they were consuming and buying out of the world's markets, the world's capacity was continuing to drop as it relates to consumption.

This is not necessarily a lecture in economics, but it is a lecture in supply and demand. For any Senator to deny the reality of the marketplace is either naive or politically incorrect. The marketplace is working in a way that none of us likes today, and our constituents are feeling it in their back pockets, and they are picking up the phone and calling their Senator and saying: Do something about it.

We are trying to figure out a way to politically dance that line. There is very little we can do about it tomorrow. There is a lot we can do about it in 2 to 5 years if we let the world begin to produce again. But we have not made that choice yet.

The President is talking about it. Other people are talking about it at this moment. They are talking about going into the known reserves. But here is also a reality of what has happened. See this declining line right here? Any time you drill into an oilfield, any time you begin to lift crude oil out of that field, you begin to deplete the field. An average oilfield in the world depletes at 5 percent to 7 percent a year. That is the historic natural level that the industry will tell you--you get a depletion rate. If you are depleting at 5 percent to 7 percent a year and the world demand growth is going up at about 1.5 percent, you have a problem if you are not producing more oil to the marketplace. That is where we are today as a world consumer of oil. We are not producing the increased volume necessary to fit the growth of the marketplace. It is really quite simple. We as country are producing increasingly less.

We have 80 billion barrels of reserve out there, we think. At least we know we have 25 or 30 billion barrels of known reserve in ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf. If we do the new geology, maybe we have 80, maybe we have 120. We don't know it, but we believe it is there. What is the value of drilling it; it is going to take 3 to 5 years? You bet it is going to take 3 to 5 years or more. The problem is today. Yes, we should have thought about it 3 to 5 years ago, but we were all running to look green, running to talk about the environment, wanting to do things we didn't want to do, but we did it because it was good politics. And we were denying the marketplace.

Here is the reality we got ourselves in. We don't control the marketplace anymore. Other nations of the world do control the marketplace. The Saudis control it, and on down the line. Eighty percent of the world's supply of oil out there is controlled by other nations, not companies--not ExxonMobil, not Chevron, not Marathon; they control way less than 10 percent of the total reserves. The rest of the world is now telling America where to go; that is, you go to the market and you buy off the market and we are not going to give you any margin. At the same time, we are denying ourselves production in the marketplace.

Here is what happened. It is a reality that all of us have to face. Oh, we said no California, Oregon, and Washington; we said no down the east coast because it was politically the right thing to do; we said no up around Florida; we said no up here in ANWR in Alaska; and we believe there may be as many as 80 billion barrels of oil. What does 80 billion barrels mean if you can develop it? It means maybe a couple of million barrels a day into the U.S. market and into the world market.

What does that mean? I believe--and I think the market believes--the true value of oil today based on today's consumption levels is maybe $85 or $90 a barrel. But that extra margin on top, that $40 of margin sitting on top that produces $130 or $140 of oil today, is speculation. It is speculation based on a futures market that says in the future, because America is not producing and the world is not producing to that decline chart, because we are not adding that extra 5 or 6 percent a year, out here in 2010 and 2015 that is going to be the real price. We have to secure that for our consumer. So we are going to bet on the future.

Mr. President, 2 billion barrels into the U.S. market, now or 5 years from now, what does it do to the price of oil today? Some futures speculators, some people who buy in the futures market say that if this country commits itself to drilling, if this country commits itself to development in the 2-year to 5-year period, the market will begin to adjust and come down. Why? Because of the belief that we are going to find it out there, we are going to add it to the pool, and we are going to develop that margin of protection, again, that the market historically had against an ever-growing market.

Is this the answer for 30 years from now? Of course, it is not. I have said and others are saying that it is a bridge to the future. It is the reality of where we are today because electric cars are not prevalent in the market. It is a reality of where we are today because hydrogen fuel cells are not in the market. But they are coming. It is a reality of where we are today because we are not producing enough ethanol, both corn-based and cellulosic. There is a huge new wave of technology coming, but it is 3 years out, it is 10 years out, it is 15 years out. What do we do in between? Do we simply turn to our consumers and say: Buck up; pay for the oil. Pay for the gas. Pay $5. There is nothing we can do about it.

Don't let your politician tell you that, because there is something we can do about it. We can bring on our known reserves. We can open them up to the market. We can let the bidding process go forward, and we can tell the world market that America is going to be producing again, in a timeframe of 3 to 5 years. As a result of that, the speculation will begin to move out of the market because there will be a sense of reality returning to what has been there through the 1970s and the 1980s and the 1990s, and that is additional supply to offset the depletion in the oilfield itself and the demand for about a 1- percent or 1.5-percent growth in the market as these new technologies begin to take hold.

Last year, Senator Dorgan and I passed a provision that we called the DOES Act which said, let's get the scientists out there, use the new geology and find out where the oil is.

Oh, no, we cannot do that. We might find it. And if we find it, we might want to drill it. And if we want to drill it, that is not green, that is not environmentally sound. Even if, as we

know, today's technologies allow us that kind of environmental protection, it was not politically popular to do.

We passed it out of the Senate. Thank you, Senators, for helping us. It was lost in a conference with the House. You see, even a year ago, Congress was in a state of denial, of denial of the reality of the marketplace, of a reality of depletion, of where we were and where we are going to go. So our consumers today are paying more than they have ever paid for energy. They are not happy, and they have every reason to be angry at a Congress that for 10 years at least, or 20, has been in a state of denial, not recognizing the reality of a market that would come home to rest on the price of oil. But it has. And it is today.

I am thinking if there are questions today whether we ought to drill in our known reserves and use all of our environmental tools to be sound, and some are still holding back at $4.50, what do you do at $5 a gallon? What do you do when the consumers' frustration turns from anger to fear? Because, you see, fear is a whole new emotion. What if they begin to fear they can no longer afford the home they have, or their food budgets, or the structure and security of their family? What happens when they still have to have energy to move to work, and it is going to cost them more than they have ever dreamed of paying in their lives? I think fear will turn politics in the direction of a marketplace, in the reality of what we can do, whether it is 2 years out or 5 years out.

So to the American consumer who is angry today, and may become fearful tomorrow, e-mail your Congressman, e-mail your Senator, call them. Tell them: Let's get this country back into production. Do it in an environmentally sound way, do it clean, do it right, but do it. Put your money into new technologies. Invest for the future, because oil is not going to be there, and the oil that will be there 10 years from now is going to be a lot more costly, because we have pumped all of the easy, we have reached all of the low-hanging fruit, and that which comes tomorrow will be more expensive because it is deeper, or it is in a sensitive area where we have to be more careful than we have been in the past.

Because we are always going to need some oil, we hope only for transportation, we can do it with electric cars, we can do it with plug-ins, we can do it with all the right kinds of things that begin to turn us away from an oil market.

For those who said Congress has not done anything in that area, we have done some things. We passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Policy Act of 2007. There was not production of oil in it. Many of us tried to get it in, but we were denied because it was not ``politically green correct.'' But then again, gas was $2, and now it is $4, or it is $4.50; it may soon be $5, because the world has awakened to the reality of supply and demand and need. They are going to wrestle for it, and they will wrestle in the marketplace. Those who can pay the highest price are going to get the fuel.

But to the average consumers, middle-class Americans, that will become a great frustration, as it should. They need to make sure they have a Congress that is willing to face the reality of the moment, and say, let us produce. Let us get this country back into production. Let us look at our offshores. Let us look at ANWR. Let us look at where we know the oil is, while we work to find out if there is anymore somewhere else. Let's encourage production here at home, so that not only can we enter the market with more oil, but we can be more secure, because this is a question of security, whether it is security in the home, or whether it is security as a nation.

Politically, this Congress for the last two decades has been doing the wrong thing when it came to petroleum and energy security. We grew increasingly dependent on foreign nations, and as we did, we not only put our Nation at risk, we have now put the energy-consuming American family at risk. We should not be a part of that. We are here to facilitate the possible so the marketplace can do what it can and does very well. Right now the marketplace is squeezing and squeezing hard and competing for the last remaining oil until more oil comes in production.

Here is the last thought of a simple equation. If demand is going up 1.5 percent a year worldwide, and depletion in the existing producing fields is going down at 7 to 8 percent a year, and you are not finding and bringing anymore on line, then the price goes up as the supply goes down. But if you find a little more to add, about 5 percent more annualized, you offset the difference and price stabilizes. That is the way the market works. We do not have control of that as politicians; we can only control access to future supply. That is what we ought to be about as a Senate and as a country.

So e-mail your Senator, write your Congressman, tell them to get going. Let's get this great country of ours back into the business of production so the supply and demand in the marketplace stabilizes and the American consumer can begin to become comfortable with where we are headed in energy policy and their pocketbook.

Mr. President, in 1923, a 14-year-old boy dropped out of school in Declo, ID, and began working as a potato sorter. He eventually became a potato and hog farmer, a forester, a miner, an entrepreneur, an industrialist, an investor, a billionaire, and today-- he is a legend.

John Richard Simplot was born in Dubuque, IA, in 1909--but his family moved to Idaho when he was young, and Idaho remained his home. At an early age, J.R. knew school was not for him, so he dropped out and began

working in the fields. He saved up and was able to buy 40 acres of land and several hogs. He planted potatoes and fed his hogs with a homemade feed recipe that allowed him to use his own spuds and meat from wild horses. That saved him some money on feed; moreover, as luck would have it, a harsh winter depleted the grain stock, and come market time, J.R.'s fat, home-fed hogs stood out against everyone else's skinny pigs, and the young man reaped the rewards.

He expanded his hog business, and by the time he sold it, he owned roughly 500 hogs. He took his earnings and put them into horses, farm machinery, and seed potatoes. From there, he rented some land and began to build what would later become his empire.

In 1928, at the ripe old age of 19, Simplot learned of a machine that had been built in eastern Idaho. It was an electrically driven potato sorter. J.R. saw potential and found a partner, and together they spent $254 on the new piece of equipment, which enabled them to sort not only their own crops but the crops of other farmers as well--for a price.

A dispute between J.R. and his partner forced them to decide who would keep the machine. J.R. said ``I'll flip you for it,'' and wouldn't you know it--he won the coin toss. He was off on his own.

Winning the toss was luck, but the rest of his success throughout the years can only be attributed to his devotion to hard work and his incredible resourcefulness. For years the young Simplot built hog pens, dug potato cellars, tilled soil, hauled sacks of potatoes, and did countless other tasks.

It was after the Great Depression, though, when Simplot's chance came to make a name for himself in the potato business. The Bureau of Reclamation was created, and projects like dams and canals began along the Snake River in Idaho. The projects would bring more water to the valley, which would lead to more farms, more crops, and more opportunity to diversify within agriculture. By 1940, J.R. had 33 potato warehouses and had also gotten into the business of onions and onion-drying.

When the United States entered World War II, there were only five companies that could dehydrate vegetables, and no one could dehydrate potatoes at least not until J.R. Simplot found a way. He began producing dry potatoes for U.S. troops and by 1945 was producing an average of 33 million pounds of dried potatoes a year. That was one- third of the U.S. military's consumption during the war.

As his success in potatoes expanded, his ability to save money by producing his own raw materials grew. In 1943, he didn't have enough boxes to ship out his dry potatoes, so he started his own box plant. When that company needed more lumber, he bought a lumber company. And when his supply for fertilizer for his potatoes was cut off, he developed his own. He went to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation looking for phosphate rock for his new fertilizer and ended up tapping into the largest phosphate mine in the West. He leased the land and built a fertilizer plant.

In 1945, J.R. Simplot became a cattleman when he built a small feedlot for the purpose of getting rid of the potato waste coming from his processing plants. Peelings and sprouts were mixed with alfalfa and barley to make feed for cattle, and yet another Simplot business flourished.

A huge discovery in the 1950s propelled the empire forward even further when Simplot discovered a way to freeze potatoes--and the frozen french fry was born. It was the 1960s when J.R. went into business with a man by the name of Ray Kroc. Kroc was a fast food operator who had begun a chain. That chain was McDonald's, and soon the Simplot Company became the largest supplier of frozen french fries to the fast food giant.

By the late 1960's, J.R. Simplot grew more potatoes, owned more cattle and land, and employed more people than anyone else in Idaho. He was the largest processor, drier, and freezer of potatoes in the world and owned processing plants, fertilizer plants, mining operations, and other enterprises in 36 States, Canada, and overseas--making him the largest industrialist in Idaho and one of the largest in the world.

But he continued to get into new businesses. Using his potatoes, he began producing ethanol in the 1970s, and with the manure from his cattle operations, he began fueling methane gas plants in the 1980s. At the same time, he invested in a small computer chip company that is today Micron Technology.

He left his footprint on Idaho perhaps more than anyone else in history. Dubbed ``Mr. Spud,'' he provided countless jobs for Idahoans in so many areas. He seemed to have his hand in everything that is Idaho, and everything he touched seemed to succeed.

But that is not the reason I admired the man. Even with all his success, J.R. Simplot had his failures. The difference between many people and Jack, though, was his never-ending drive and determination to get up and do something again, and to do it better. It was his persistence in wrangling successes from failures that made J.R. the kind of man everyone should admire.

He wasn't just a brilliant business man. He loved Idaho, and in fact, a few years ago, signed his home over to the State of Idaho to use as the new Governor's mansion. He also loved his fellow Idahoans. And although he never received a formal education, he always believed in getting one and therefore gave millions of dollars to universities and students in Idaho. He was also a major supporter of the arts.

Recently, at the young age of 99, J.R. Simplot passed away at his home in Boise. He had risen that Sunday morning, walked into his kitchen and insisted to his wife Esther that he was going to go to the office. That was the kind of man J.R. Simplot was. Even at the age of 99, even with billions of dollars, his last thought was that he needed to go to work.

I am going to miss my friend Jack, and my sincere condolences go out to Esther and his family. But it is important for the record to show that his passing has significance well beyond his immediate community in Boise. J.R. Simplot should be celebrated for the tremendous impact he had, not only on Idaho's history but on U.S. history. That impact, and his legend, will live on.

Mr. President, though the origin of Father's Day is not clear, fathers throughout the United States are made to feel special by their children every year, on the third Sunday in June.

Sunday, June 15, marks my 24th year as Dad to Mike, Jay and Shae. And in recent years, their seven children have made me a doting granddad to boot, doubling the joy of our celebration.

Throughout these years, I have never taken a Father's Day remembrance for granted--perhaps because I adopted my children when I had the wisdom and maturity to appreciate the pure joy of having them in my life. I have treasured the handmade trinkets, the interesting ties and the simple melody of their voices greeting me on that Sunday morning every year, ``Happy Father's Day, Dad! We love you.''

Father's Day always has been a time of reflection for Suzanne and me--to look back fondly on our kids' achievements and to take pride in how they handled life's disappointments. I remember Shae's first date and her first breakup, Mike's first car and Jay's first soccer game.

But nothing affected me as emotionally as my children's love and loyalty during the dark days of last August.

When I was under siege by the media, by my political opponents and even by some I thought were my friends, it was my three children who surrendered their privacy and risked being tarred by those demanding my head to take on their Dad's critics.

They were relentless in correcting the record--in television interviews and in doggedly responding to newspaper reporters' endless questions. And when I appeared before the media to respond to unspeakable accusations, my kids stood with me, looking my accusers squarely in the eye. In the privacy of our home, when I would despair, they were there to lift up their Dad.

Someone once said, ``If there is anything better than to be loved, it is loving.''

No father in America is prouder of his children than I. So this Sunday, the luckiest Dad in Idaho won't be just waiting around for his annual Father's Day calls and visits. This Father's Day, Dad is honoring the three who chose me to be their father--Shae, Mike and Jay.

Mr. President, this Saturday, June 14, our Nation celebrates Flag Day. It was on this day 231 years ago that the Second Continental Congress officially adopted the red, white, and blue flag to serve as an icon for our newly formed Nation. Living and working in the United States, one may find it easy to overlook the prevalence of our flag--it stands atop buildings, in school yards, next to libraries, and even in our neighborhoods. President Woodrow Wilson, in recognition of the significance of our flag, set aside June 14 as a day to observe our flag and take pride in our Nation.

The first flag, commonly known as the ``Betsy Ross'' flag--given the name after the legend that she designed the flag--contained 13 stars and stripes to symbolize the 13 original colonies. As our Nation grew, so did the stars in the constellation, finally leaving us with the 50 stars that we all recognize today.

One of the many beautiful aspects of our flag is that it can mean different things to different folks and is even open to your own personal interpretation. For many, the flag represents freedom; for others, individual rights or justice. For some, it is a reminder of those who fought to protect all Americans' right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our first President, George Washington, had this to say about the flag's symbolism: ``We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separate it by white in stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her.''

This year, we honor our flag the day before Father's Day. In light of this, I would especially like to pay tribute to all the fathers serving in our armed forces who will be unable to celebrate with their families this weekend. I ask that we keep these brave men--whose service ensures the freedom that our flag so gallantly symbolizes--in our hearts and prayers as we celebrate Flag Day.

In closing, let me read an excerpt from a poem that is familiar to many in our country, because it has been read at countless ceremonies where American citizens are gathered. It's entitled ``I am the Flag,'' and it was written by Howard Schnauber:

I am the flag of the United States of America.

My name is Old Glory.

I fly atop the world's tallest buildings.

I stand watch in America's halls of justice.

I fly majestically over institutions of learning.

I stand guard with power in the world.

Look up . . . and see me.

I stand for peace, honor, truth and justice.

I stand for freedom.

I am confident.

I am arrogant.

I am proud.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I join with my colleague from Florida to talk about an issue that is probably on the minds of nearly every American today, especially if they just pulled their big SUV away from a gas pump and they fed their credit card into that gas pump and it registered $100. That is the reality the American consumer is being subjected to today in an unprecedented way. So my advice to the Senate today goes back to an old country song that was popular a few years ago, by a female country artist, called ``A Little Less Talk And A Lot More Action.''

That is exactly what ought to be going on in the halls of Congress today: a heck of a lot less talk and a lot more action. What ought that action be for the American consumer who today is paying more money than ever in the history of our country for energy? In the short term, the ``more action and less talk'' ought to be production, producing oil out of our known oil reserves in this country. That is not the answer for the future. That is the answer for tomorrow, next year, and 8 or 10 years into the future. I call it a bridge solution to the reality of a new generation of energy that is the cellulosics, that is electric, that is the hybrid. But we are always going to need oil or hydrocarbons in our economy to produce the kind of transportation fuels for the big trucks and many of our rail engines and all of those kinds of heavy transportation needs. That is not in part what the consumer is paying for today. The consumer is paying $4-plus at the pump today, depending on where you live, because this Congress over the last 20 years has had an attitude that is quite simple: Put that in wilderness, protect it, deny it, we can conserve our way out of it. The Clean Air Act says it is too expensive to retrofit refineries so we take one, two, three refineries offline. We have taken many of them offline because they simply couldn't comply with the Clean Air Act and they were too expensive to retrofit and our overall capacity to refine, with our overall capacity to explore and develop, went hand and hand down while the American consumer was consuming more.

What does that ``a little less talk and a lot more action'' mean? It ought to mean this: It ought to mean going where you know you can get it, going where you know you can drill. Where might that be? Here is that reality that American consumers ought to know about, and then I hope they will pick up the phone and call their Senator or e-mail their Senator and say: Why did you do this? Why over the last 30 years did you deny us access to these areas where we have known oil reserves?

In a modern world, for me to quote 20-year-old statistics doesn't make a lot of sense. But for 20 years we have said: No, we are not even going to use new seismographic measuring efforts to determine where the other oil is. We are going to take the old information, 20-year-old information in the red zone represents this.

American consumer, listen, because you ought to be on the phone today, calling your Senator and saying: A little less talk and here is the action. Start drilling. Open these areas. Get the bid process going.

What can it yield? The U.S. Geological Survey says that in these red zones we have a known resource of 29 to 30 billion barrels of oil. In the undiscovered areas where we believe it is, there is 85 billion, or about 115 billion. You do the math.

If we could produce a few more million barrels a day, what would the market do? What would the speculators do? They would run for cover. We would take $30 or $40 a barrel right off the top of the market that is a speculative price today that is betting that America will not do this because they are betting Congress is going to be doing a lot more talk and no action.

If we act, if we do what we ought to do, if we go where we know we should go, where the oil is today, and we find that there are 120, 130, 150 billion barrels of oil, down comes the market.

If the market comes down for America, the market comes down for the world. That is the price in the market, because we are talking about market trends that are world trends--not only us. If you think we are having a bad time here and we are paying $4, what is a European paying? They measure by liters, but they are usually, probably at $9 or $10 now. So they are as angry as consumers as we are as consumers about the reality of the market in which we all live.

I am talking crude oil. I am not talking natural gas. In these areas we believe there could be as much as 633 trillion cubic feet of gas. For the chemical industry of our country, for the world as we know it, that is hugely important. For all of the costs of the goods and services we are buying at the market shelf today that are going up in price, they are reflecting their need to have the ingredients that flow from oil or that flow from gas. Whether it is the transportation that gets them to the shelf or whether it is the ingredients of the product that is on the shelf, this is a world today that is dominated by what we call hydrocarbons--oil and oil derivatives, and gas. We are all going to be paying a great deal more.

The thing that is most visible is the pump, that $4 or $4.20 or $4.50. The Senator from Alaska told me this morning that in areas of rural Alaska where they barge the gas up and offload it during the summer for the locals to use, it is well over $5 a gallon.

And it is going to that consumer at well beyond their inability to pay. They are growing frightened; they are relating to that Senator fear that they can no longer live their lives the way they would like to live them because they simply have to deny themselves access to gas, access to oil.

Well, that is the reality of where we live and what we have done to ourselves. It all started in this Congress 20 years ago in the name of the environment. We began to deny, deny, deny, and deny. Consumers are saying something much different today than they did then. Because they recognize that in a state of denial there is a price to be paid. They are now paying that price.

So what happened and what is happening? Well, on May 19, a Gallup Poll came out. They asked Americans: Shouldn't we allow drilling in the U.S. coastal waters and up here in the ANWR area, the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge?

A few years ago, a majority of Americans said: Oh, no, no, no. Let us protect those areas. Today, well, this was even before $4 gas, this was May 19, not this week, and 57 percent of Americans said: Drill it.

There is a new Rasmussen Poll out today which is even higher than that. Americans are saying: Drill it. Go where the oil is. Explore it. Develop it. Bring it online. Do it in an environmentally sound way.

And our technology today can take us there. We do not risk the environment when we do this. Anybody who stands on the floor of the Senate today and says: Oh, save the environment, is in a 20-year-old environmental time warp. And it is quite obvious why. They haven't seen the technology. They do not know what we now can do; that we have learned from the 1960s spill in Santa Barbara. Have you heard some Senators quote the facts about Katrina? Over a thousand wells were knocked offline, drilling rigs knocked off point. Not a drop of oil spilled. Why? Technology.

So America, awaken. Pick up the phone. Call your Senator and say: Get with it. A lot more action and a lot less talk. Because right now we are talking. We are jawboning, we are politicking, and the consumer is having their budgets burnt up by the reality of the marketplace that this Congress helped set decades ago.

Hear me. A lot less talk, Senate, and a lot more action. Let's go to work. Let's drill our reserves. Let's produce them in an environmentally sound way and let's give this consumer and our economy and the world a better place to go.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that for the next 30 minutes, an energy intern from my office, Carolyn Jones, be granted the privilege of the floor.

Thank you, Madam President.

Let me recognize at the beginning of my comments that yesterday I was on the Senate floor to talk about the incorporation of good forest policy as it relates to rejuvenating America's forests to increase their capability of sequestration of carbon out of the atmosphere. I said at that time there would be an amendment. That amendment has the cosponsorship of Senators Domenici, Allard, Crapo, and Barrasso and has been filed. It is an important amendment, if we ever get to that phase of this debate, where we will be able to effectively craft and shape a policy for our country.

We deal with striking the international intent within this bill to take our money to help others before we help ourselves. We define biological sequestration. We think that is extremely important because we know how to do that now at the Federal level. It is not the old business-as-usual model; it is establishing a baseline and being able to effectively measure from there. We allow forests to get credits from meaningful sequestration, and I think this is tremendously important to be able to do. It is not about the volume of a stand of timber; it is about the ability of that stand to sequester. If you have 400 trees per acre, you have overpopulated that area by as many as maybe 250 or 300 trees per acre. But that is the measurement of the Boxer amendment. It is absolutely counterintuitive to modern forest science. We change it to where we are and to where we know our forest scientists are today.

We use existing monitoring and measuring tools, which is very important. It is a product of 1992 legislation when we charged the U.S. Forest Service and their laboratories to get at the business of being able to effectively measure. We use internationally recognized sustainable forest management standards. We use RFS and productive tax credits for biomass and biomass removement, and of course we use stewardship contracting, which is critically important.

Let me take the Presiding Officer and those who might be listening today on a very interesting journey that starts at America's gas pump. Let me assume that the Presiding Officer has just driven up to a gas pump somewhere in America. You stick the hose in your car, you activate the pump, you slide your credit card, and you begin to fill. Depending on the size of your vehicle and the price--anywhere from let's say $3.85 a gallon for regular to maybe $4.44 in California--you begin to grow annoyed as the calculator on the pump goes: 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65--oops, you have maxed the pump and you have to get more by reactivating the pump to fill your SUV. Your anger is optimal now. You have just paid 100 bucks or somewhere near that, and you have never done that before. You move your view up to the pump and it says ``Chevron.'' It says ``Shell.'' It says one of the major oil companies. You focus your anger on that company and you say: It has to be their fault. They are making record profits. Somehow, there ought to be a way to stop them from doing what they just did to me and my pocketbook and my family's budget.

Let me take you, the consumer, then, a step further and suggest to you that you are part of a problem that has been growing in America for a long while. Your demand for the use of energy has

gone nearly straight up over four decades as you have increased your consumption of it. Why? Because the price was reasonable and you enjoyed it. The price was reasonable and your demand went up dramatically, but while that was going on, there were interests at work in our country that said: We are not going to produce any more, we are going to produce less, and we did. So our overall supply began to drop at about the time that our demand began to go up catastrophically. What happened was an interesting scenario.

So now you have hung your hose up from the gas pump, you have just paid 100 bucks, and you are angry as heck. You are part of the demand curve in our supply in our country that is dropping down, and you have just blamed Exxon or Chevron or Marathon or someone because you have spent 100 bucks to fill your SUV and you are not happy.

If you took all of these small companies and blamed them all and said they have to be the problem, they would only represent about 6 or 7 percent of the problem. The problem these companies have is that they are buying a substantial amount of their oil from this side of the chart. They are buying their oil from countries--from countries that don't give a darn about our problems. We have grown so dependent on foreign countries that now some 55 to 60 percent of our consumption comes from them, and we pay a phenomenal amount for it, or should I say you--you, the consumer who has just put up the hose on the gas pump and who has grown angry, wanting to focus your anger on these companies.

Is it Canada you want to blame? Well, let's see now, at $125 a barrel, we are paying Canada $280 million a day. Why should we blame them? They are supplying our needs. There are no gas lines today. There is no diminishment in supply. It is a price problem. Well, then let's blame Saudi Arabia. Oh, yes. They are over here. They are the big boys. The President just went over there, hat in hand, begging that they turn their valves on, and they said: No, Mr. President. Your problem, not ours. You are going to keep buying our oil. You need it. We are paying them $190 million a day. Maybe it is Venezuela, run by a little tinhorn dictator--$160 million a day flowing from our consumers' pocketbooks-- or it is Nigeria at $140 million or it is Algeria at $70 million.

The bottom line is, well over $1 billion a day comes right out of the consumers' pocket and goes primarily to one of these companies that buy from one of these countries. They buy the oil at the current world price, and they are allowed to take some profit from it; sure they do. Their profits are record highs because the charges are record highs, and the story goes on and on.

We search to blame. We have little alternative. The business of the oil economy has little elasticity to it. We can't switch over to something else unless we park the SUV and get a bicycle. But you can't haul your kids to the soccer game on a bicycle. You can't haul boxes of groceries home on a bicycle. So the American economy and its consumers are questioning themselves right now, saying: What do we do?

Let me suggest there is somebody to blame besides ExxonMobil and Chevron and Marathon. Why don't you blame the Senate? Why don't you blame the Congress of the United States which, by being subject to environmental pressure over the last 30 years, has largely denied the right of this country to effectively develop its oil reserves and create a less dependent relationship with all of these countries? That is what we ought to be doing, but we are not doing that.

Here is a map of the gulf region of Florida. In this region, we are developing this right now. We have just opened this area after we spent 2 years trying to get it open because politics would not allow us to open it, and we think there are about 2.2 million barrels a day starting in 2012 down here. This is lease sale 181. But over here, there may be as much oil as there was or is here, but this is politically off limits. We can't do it. Why shouldn't the consumers say: Well, what is the politics of it? You are draining my pocketbook dry. Is there value in those politics? Why don't you develop your reserves? Well, Florida, Presidential politics--you name it. Floridians are awfully frustrated by the fact that you might be able to drill there.

This area right down here is the Cuban basin, the northern Cuban basin. Cubans are letting leases out to drill there. The U.S. Geological Survey would suggest that there is some oil there--maybe quite a bit of oil--but we won't get it. It won't traffic through Exxon or Chevron because we have a policy that denies us access to that region of the world because, if you will, of the politics of Cuba, plain and simple.

So here is our problem with that and here is our problem with this interesting picture. We have about 115 billion barrels of reserve in gas, about 29 billion known, about 5 billion undiscovered resources. In gas, we have about 633 trillion cubic feet, 213 trillion known, 419 unknown. Now, that is information that is 20 years old because politically you dare not go out into any of these regions today with the new seismic technology and explore because if you did and you found oil, you might want to drill, and that would be environmentally unacceptable. Oh, how frightening.

I remember a time--and not all do unless you are about my age--come 1969 when there was an interesting oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in southern California. It made national headlines because it was one of the first major oil spills that did substantial environmental damage. I have oftentimes referred on the floor to our denial to access the Outer Continental Shelf as the ghosts of Santa Barbara that lurk in this Chamber and hide in the background of environmental arguments. That was Santa Barbara in 1969. But what is fascinating about Santa Barbara is that while we didn't drill offshore Santa Barbara because of a moratorium on the Federal waters, we continued to drill offshore Santa Barbara in the State waters. Today, offshore Santa Barbara, CA, is producing 731,000 barrels of oil a day. They just cut a new deal with some oil companies to drill in this area. Well, why aren't they allowing us to drill offshore further out in the Continental Shelf? Because California doesn't get the money. Oops. Sorry, folks. Money trumped the environment. Remember that. In Santa Barbara today, they are drilling for oil if it is within the 3-mile limit of the shoreline because that is State oil and that is State water. But out in the Federal reserve, Outer Continental Shelf, no, no, no, no, can't do, must not do that, something about a problem.

Well, what the ghost of Santa Barbara and the 1969 oil spill did was shove us into a period of technology unprecedented. Today, we are drilling offshore in the gulf, and the water is so deep that we didn't even imagine a decade ago we could be there. We are doing it appropriately and in a very clean fashion.

So here are the headlines in Los Angeles, April 20, 2008: Santa Barbara approves offshore drilling. Well, what happened to this picture here? What happened in 1969 with this oil rig spilling oil, sea lions dying, fish dying, muck, oily muck along the shoreline? That is Santa Barbara, 1969. We were led to believe they stopped drilling altogether, but they didn't. They just approved new drilling, but it is inside the 3-mile zone.

Now, Californians are selective, apparently, about their environment. If there is money tied to it, well, maybe we can drill, if we get all the money, but if we don't get as much of it, we won't drill offshore. That is the kind of politics that have gone on today.

So remember how I started these comments a few moments ago? You have just driven up to a gas pump, you just stuck the nozzle into the tank of your SUV, you just cranked out 100 bucks of regular at about $4.40 a gallon--in California, because of the boutique fuels of the Clean Air Act--and you have grown angry because somebody was ripping you off, and that somebody had to be an Exxon or a Chevron or a Marathon or someone else. But I hope I have been able to suggest to you some additional knowledge: That they represent maybe 6 percent of world production. It is the petropolitics of the world today where nearly 90 percent of the known oil and the reserves are owned by foreign nations that are sticking it to us, and they are sticking it to us today because of our own interesting greed, because we grew luxuriously fat on cheap energy and we developed cars that take

a lot. Now that we can't fill them for 20 bucks and it is costing us 100 bucks, we are angry and we want to blame somebody. Blame Saudi Arabia, blame Venezuela. But how about blaming us here in the Congress, because some of us have tried, but the body politic of America denied that we should touch our own reserves, develop our own oil, and that we should become dependent upon someone else.

So we have legislation on the floor today that doesn't help that. It creates, in fact, greater dependency. It doesn't move us forward to develop those known reserves. It doesn't allow us to do the geological exploration in the deep waters of the Outer Continental Shelf with the new technologies, in which we will find much more oil than we know is there.

America, blame your Congress--blame your friendly Congressman or your friendly Senator. Ask them how they voted. Ask them how they are going to vote on ANWR, on Outer Continental Shelf, on new development, on new refinery capacity. Oil is not the answer for 50 years from now, but oil is the bridge that gets us from where we are to where we need to be with new technologies. But our lack of foresight, our rush to be green, and our rush to deny the realities of the marketplace has produced the problems we have today, and there are people to blame. We ought to start right here with a Congress that would not listen.

But year after year, while I and others brought ANWR to the floor for a vote, and while we tried to get into the Outer Continental Shelf, politically, it was simply an unpopular thing to do, because some would say this would be the picture. Fellow Senators, this picture I display on the Senate floor is a picture of the past. This is of 1969 Santa Barbara. From that day forward, we began to apply technology to drill heads, to drill rigs, through our capability and talent. When Katrina hit the gulf and hit the coastline of Louisiana, parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, offshore, not one drop was spilled. Thousands of wells were shut down. Rigs were sent adrift. But what is depicted in this picture did not occur. This will not occur again because of the triple safety devices and all of the kinds of things that have been incorporated as a result of this.

So California today drills happily away within the 3-mile zone, because they get 100 percent. But outside the 3-mile zone, no, no, no, can't touch, might hurt the environment. Shame on us.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the managers of the bill, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee for the debate that has gone on.

The chairman was opining a few moments ago that the debate today had been focused on gas and high gas prices and that somehow her bill was going to push gas prices even higher. That may happen. I don't know that. What I do know today is that the American consumer is fed up with $4 gas, and anything we do that would even risk pushing gas prices higher ought to make the American consumer mighty unhappy.

So I say to the chairman tonight, I am not going to talk gas prices, I am going to talk something different because I was convinced, based on my time on the Environment and Public Works Committee and having crafted a bill that got hearings, got a markup, and was ready to come to the floor when the chairman's staff took it, turned it inside out, and brought it back to the floor in an unheard document, I was convinced then gas prices were going to go up, and I think my colleagues this afternoon who have spoken openly in opposition to this bill have strongly made the case that the American consumer is going to pay mightily for this bill that is before us if, in fact, it becomes law.

So I am a bit puzzled when I hear the title of ``Climate Security Act.'' I am confident that this might protect the environment, but what does it do for people? What does it do for the consumer who is going to be put through a financial wringer, not only with their home heating bill but continually at the gas pump, if the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Boxer, has her way?

Why don't we call this bill the China-India Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, because clearly those countries that are rapidly becoming the largest emitters of greenhouse gas are going to be allowed to run free in the world economy while we put the clamps on our economy. That is a reality we all know and to which the American consumer has already reacted. Fewer jobs in our country, more jobs in China--does that make economic sense at a time when our economy is struggling? We are just going to stick another hole in our economy and send those jobs to India or China? Or maybe we could call this the U.S. Recessions Act of 2008.

I have said it, I believe it, I have been in this Congress 28 years, and I have never seen a piece of legislation to equal this one. It is the largest single redistribution of wealth in our country ever tried by the human mind through the public policy process. To me, that is frightening--frightening for my grandchildren and their future, frightening for the Idaho economy, frightening for the U.S. economy. And what are we going to do about it? We are going to stand here and say: But it saves the world. I am not going to argue that the world isn't worth saving because I want to spend a few more years in it, but I want to make darn sure the world in which I live and my children live is a world that is at least as good as the one we have today from the standpoint of the environment and from the standpoint of the economy and the economic opportunities that come from that economy for my children and my grandchildren.

Is this micromanagement as I describe it? We just heard the Senator from New Hampshire begin to worry about $100 billion here, $100 billion there, and $100 billion over here, and the Senator from Virginia says: Well, we have to have some money. Yes, we do, but we are talking trillions of dollars. That is $6.7 trillion. And last I calculated it, that is a lot of money and it is going to be taken from the pockets of the American consumer,

passed through Government, and handed out in a variety of ways yet to be determined by the bureaucracy.

OK, that is all I am going to say about the economy of this bill.

When we were marking up another bill that never made it to the floor, I wanted to talk about substantive efforts, such as sequestration and revitalizing the American landscape in a way where we truly could take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into plants and put it in roots and put it in tree stumps and tree stems in a way that was true, vital, positive environmental sequestration of carbon. I was told: No, you couldn't do that. Oh, no, no. The chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee said: No, you can't do that; we won't allow that kind of amendment. We are not going to have forestry in this bill. You bring your amendments to the floor, Senator Craig. And that was the way the bill was crafted.

All of a sudden, we get to the floor, and guess what is in the bill: a 10-percent carbon credit for companies that invest in foreign forests--not U.S. forests, not the Payette National Forest in Idaho or the San Bernardino National Forest in California where 60 percent of it is dead and dying. No, we can't do that. It has to go to the Brazilian rain forest.

I am not going to debate rain forest politics tonight, but I will tell you that if we are going to tax the American people to improve the forested landscape of America, then by darn we ought to invest it in our landscape and not in Brazil's landscape or China's landscape. But that is what this bill does.

With that in mind, let me talk about forestry and forestry sequestration and what happens when you have a young, vital, growing forest across America and its ability to pull carbon down out of the atmosphere and store it in tree trunks, not just for a year or two or three but hundreds of years. It is the single greatest form of sequestering carbon from the environment that man ever thought about because Mother Nature was well ahead of the game before we came along and began to mess up the environment. Yet this bill does nothing about it.

The reason I get a little excited about this idea is because of, in the year 2000, in Belgium, a climate change conference. It was the last year of the Clinton administration, and they were trying to give away our forest credits to the world to try to convince them we believed in Kyoto. I stayed up 24 hours straight to stop them from giving away our ability to use our forest to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere into foliage and trees. I won and they lost. Now the world has changed and we can measure the reality of forest sequestration and we are not allowed to do it in a comprehensive way? That is where we are in this debate.

Fast forward with me, if you will, to where we are in the health of America's forests today. We have over 180 million acres of dead and dying forest in our country. They are no longer pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and bringing it down, they are doing what a tree does when it dies--they are releasing it back into the atmosphere.

We have unprecedented rates of forest burn in America today that we haven't seen in 60 to 70 years. That is what is happening in American forests--last year, 9.2 million acres, 2 million of it right in my home State of Idaho. The beautiful, clear, blue skies of Idaho were full of smoke all summer. Why? Because of a forest management and policy that is now simply allowing that to happen and because of a forest whose health is in such a state of dying, decaying, bug-killed trees, our great forests are now beginning to release carbon into the atmosphere at a higher rate.

This year alone, you would say: Well, Senator, we are not in the forest fire season in the West. No, we are not. But since January 1 through May 30, we have already burned 1.49 million acres of forested lands across our Nation. We have seen them burning in Florida and other places. What are they doing? They are releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

The reason I bring this chart along tonight is because it tells the story of the tragedy of the American forest. See this line? This is a result of a history of our forests as they evolve and they grow and they live and they die. We went through a period in the late 1920s and early 1930s of climate change, where we weren't hustling around trying to change the world but Mother Nature was changing, and we had a dust bowl era and we began to learn about El Nino and La Nina and Pacific decibel oscillation and all the changes going on in our environment that created a tragedy in our forests as they grew dry. And we began to see phenomenal fire burns in the late 1800s through the early 1900s, up until about 1920, when our Forest Service decided to change policy and go after fires. Now, remember, fires are burning, releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a tonnage rate unprecedented, at least in man's history.

Why did it plummet and why did forests become a sequesterer of carbon again instead of a releaser of carbon? Because we established a policy called 10 a.m. That is right, 10 a.m. in the morning. The U.S. Forest Service said that a fire that started the day before, we are going to have it out by 10 a.m. the next morning. And so we put phenomenal resources into putting out fires.

After World War II, when all the young men came home who had been jumping out of airplanes in Europe, they became smoke jumpers and dropped down on small fires and put them out. And the era of the smoke jumper in the U.S. Forest Service was born.

And what happened? It is right here on the chart. Forest fires plummeted, down to a period in 1945 on--1950s, 1960s--in which we simply weren't burning. We were putting out fires. And our forests became a net sequesterer of carbon.

I would be happy to yield to the leader.

I will not lose my momentum. I will keep it right here, Mr. Leader.

Mr. President, while the Senate majority leader is still on the floor, I want to talk about a fire that happened in his State just a few years ago because I was directly involved with that Senator in recognizing the dead and dying conditions of the Tahoe

Basin in both Nevada and California. He came to the committee--the committee that I chaired at the time--and said: We have to fix this problem; a lot of people live in that area. And we did. We sent money out to the U.S. Forest Service to get in and change the character of that dead and dying forest. But the courts and the environmental groups would not allow it to happen. Lawsuit after lawsuit stopped it. And a year ago, the Tahoe Basin burned--3,100 acres, 250 homes, and what is more important, or as important, 140,000 tons of carbon released into the atmosphere.

Do you know the second largest releaser of carbon into the atmosphere, after coal-fired utilities? Forest fires. The second largest releaser of carbon into the atmosphere. Yet this bill does nothing about it except give money to Brazil to save the rain forest because it is a popular environmental issue. That is what this bill is about, the politics of the environment, not the reality of the circumstance in which we all live, in which the Senator from California nearly saw the entire San Bernardino forest wiped out and a Governor of her State who had to declare a state of emergency and go in and try to stop it from burning.

So if you are going to create a new world, a greener world, a cleaner world, one that has less carbon in it, you have to have a forest policy--a forest policy--that begins to revitalize our forests, to thin them, to clean them, to change the kind of ecosystem in them that doesn't tolerate 180 million acres of dead and dying trees that will release hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the environment.

So what do we do? Six tons of CO2 is released every time an acre burns. Six tons. Up to 100 tons of CO2 can be released per acre, depending on the number of trees within that acreage--300, 400, 500. So that is a reality. Last year, in the 9.2 to 9.4 million acres that burned, we released the carbon equivalent emissions of 12 million passenger automobiles running for 1 year, or the entire passenger automobile fleet of the State of California, or somewhere close to that. Yet this bill doesn't address forestry? It doesn't address forest health? It doesn't address the kinds of things that we ought to be doing in an active management system to revitalize our forests? No, it doesn't. It is not environmentally popular to do. Environmentalists have spent the last 20 years shutting down our forests.

So tomorrow I will bring a comprehensive amendment to the floor to attempt to add to this bill, to get us back into the business of forest management, healthy forests, revitalizing our forests, and, hopefully, over time changing the ecosystem of our forests in a way that we don't burn 10 million acres a year and release hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And this can be done at very little cost. You don't have to have a cap-and-trade scheme that pours trillions of dollars into it.

That is what we will talk about tomorrow. Gas is today. Let's talk about trees tomorrow, one of the greatest storers of carbon, one of the greatest sequesterers of carbon in the world today.

I yield the floor.

Economic Stimulus Act.

Mr. President, in the rebuttal scheme, is there an effort to make comments back? No?

All right. I thank the chairman. And let's add one more word-- ``forestry sequestration.'' That is another new buzzword added tonight.

Mr. President, I pay tribute to Dr. James S. Holt, who passed away on April 28, 2008.

Dr. Holt was known to many Members of this Senate because of the outstanding contributions he made to developing sound Federal public policy related to agriculture, immigration, and employment. It was through his involvement in these issues before Congress that I got to know Jim and gained a tremendous respect for his wealth of knowledge and integrity--and especially his unwavering commitment to finding policy solutions that were correct, even if that meant they were also uncomfortable or difficult.

Jim Holt received his Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1965, and then served 16 years on the Penn State faculty as a professor of agricultural economics and farm management. From 1978 until the present, Dr. Holt headed his own consulting firm, as well as serving as senior economist to a Washington, DC, law firm, where his responsibilities included research, policy analysis, and government relations in matters related to labor, agriculture, immigration and animal welfare.

Dr. Holt authored more than 70 publications and served agricultural clients in more than 30 States. Jim was a recognized expert with unique knowledge of the H-2A program and served as a consultant to national organizations such as the National Council of Agricultural Employers and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform during his involvement in the major immigration and H-2A reform efforts in Congress during the past 30 years.

I first became aware of Jim's expertise when he helped farmers in my own State of Idaho to establish the Snake River Farmers Association an organization that helps obtain legally authorized workers through the H-2A temporary and seasonal foreign agricultural worker program. Earlier this year in Idaho, at a meeting of the association, Jim and I teamed up again to address the grave labor situation facing Idaho farmers.

I had the pleasure of working with Jim in the development of the AgJOBS legislation that I coauthored with Senators Feinstein and Kennedy. As my colleagues know, this bill has enjoyed broad bipartisan support and even passed the Senate in 2006. Jim brought his unique knowledge to the process of developing this historic legislation that brought together farm worker advocates and growers in an effort to provide a legal and stable agricultural workforce. During the past decade, Dr. Holt testified numerous times in both Chambers of Congress before the Committees on Agriculture, Judiciary, and Education and Labor in an effort to educate members on the importance of reforming our farm labor system and the severe economic consequences if we fail to do so. When we succeed in enacting the AgJOBS legislation and I am convinced that will ultimately happen--it will be in no small part because of the immeasurable effort Dr. Holt devoted to that cause over the past decade.

On behalf of the policymakers who have worked with Jim Holt and benefited from his wise counsel over the years, I would like to express profound regret at his passing. He will be sorely missed. Let me extend my deepest sympathies to Jim's many friends and colleagues, and to the family he leaves behind.

Mr. President, it gives me great pleasure to come to the floor in the final hours of the debate over agricultural policy in this country and to, first and foremost, thank the two principals, who are here on the floor, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Ag Committee. They have done yeoman work in a very difficult process--15 titles and 673 pages of policy--in what is, without question, one of the most complicated efforts at putting public policy and interest groups within the agricultural community together in some degree of harmony. I thank my colleagues for the work they have done.

Mr. President, I will be brief, as I have already come to the floor several times to discuss the valuable programs included in this bill. But I would be remiss not to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues--and this Congress--for producing a good product for the American people.

We have been ``tangled in inaction'' on so many issues. The American people want a functional Congress.

The 2008 farm bill conference report represents a monumental feat for the U.S. Congress. Every 5 years, we undertake the task of reauthorizing our farm policy. This version includes 15 titles; 673 pages.

Though some who have not yet served on an agriculture committee during the reauthorization of a farm bill may disagree, let me assure you this is one of the most complicated pieces of legislation considered by Congress, and it is also one of the most important.

In an age of skyrocketing energy prices, economic uncertainty, and now a global food crisis, there is at least one thing we should be able to be certain of: our Nation's food security. We cannot take for granted our ability to feed ourselves, lest we become dependent on other countries for our food in addition to our oil.

How do we achieve food security? Here are a few key principles.

First and foremost, we enact policy designed to keep our food producers productive and profitable, and ensure access to those foods for all Americans. This includes things such as a safety net to protect farmers from volatile price swings; and nutrition programs that give access to fresh fruits and vegetables in schools.

We enact policy that incentivizes state-of-the-art conservation practices to encourage the best possible stewardship of our agricultural lands. This will ensure these lands stay productive and profitable for future generations. And we enact policy that helps American agriculture continue to diversify--including becoming a larger player not only in our food security, but also in our energy security.

This bill does just that. This bipartisan work product--aptly named the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008--sets a strong and secure direction for our food, conservation and energy future.

The bill has broad support from virtually every corner of my State of Idaho, and every corner of the Nation.

Congress has heard from rural farmers to urban food banks calling for passage of this vital piece of legislation.

Mr. President, 500 farm, conservation, nutrition, consumer, and religious groups sent a letter supporting passage of the farm bill conference report.

These groups--with one voice--recognized that the bill ``makes significant farm policy reforms, protects the safety net for all of America's food producers, addresses important infrastructure needs for specialty crops, increases funding to feed our nation's poor, and enhances support for important conservation initiatives.''

It is not a perfect bill--we all will admit this--but it is a great bill. I commend my colleagues for their work.

The President has stated his intention to veto this bill. It is not often that I so strongly disagree with our Commander in Chief, but on this I must. There are too many great things in this bill to deny its passage over a few areas of disagreement, too many important things for my State of Idaho, and for the Nation.

We began several years ago to ensure that specialty crops were adequately recognized in this new farm bill. We now have a new title devoted to horticulture and organic agriculture. It dedicates approximately $3 billion for specialty crop, pest and disease, nutrition, research, trade and conservation priorities important to this vital industry that represents nearly half of all crop cash receipts in our country, including: $466 million for Specialty Crop Block Grants to support local efforts to enhance competitiveness of local products; $1 billion to expand the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program to all 50 States--which will help our school children develop healthy eating habits; $377 million for a pest and disease program to combat costly damage to crops such as our famous potatoes; $230 million for the Specialty Crop Research Initiative to address food safety, mechanization, plant breeding, and other priorities; $59 million for trade assistance and market promotion to maintain and grow our international markets; and many other programs.

Idaho's famous potatoes, our burgeoning table grape and wine grape industry, our apples and onions and carrots and nursery and ornamental crops--and this just touches the surface of both our current production and our potential to continue to diversify.

Now, it should be noted that this is only one part of the effort to ensure the competitiveness of our specialty crop industry. The next step is to ensure that we have an adequate workforce to conduct the labor in which the average American refuses to participate. The harvesting of those healthy fruits and vegetables--this, I contend, is as important, or more important, than these ``competitiveness'' priorities that we have finally set forward in the farm bill. So our work is not done.

And I could go on for a great deal of time, talking about: the commodity programs that create a vital safety net for our wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas, oilseeds, sugar, wool producers, and so on; the conservation programs that will help Idaho's booming dairy industry address environmental challenges associated with their growth, and our crop producers to incorporate better stewardship practices; the nutrition programs that are vital to improving the health of our youth; the rural development programs that will ensure funding for things such as water and wastewater programs, broadband, and rural housing; the energy programs that will help us reach the 36 billion gallon RFS by creating new incentives for cellulosic ethanol and beginning to pare down the subsidy for corn-based ethanol; the wildlife programs, such as the provision authored by my colleague from Idaho, that creates incentives for endangered species recovery; the forestry, trade, credit, disaster programs.

Those programs that will benefit the Nation--and my State of Idaho in particular--are simply too vast to cover.

I thank my colleagues once again, and urge support for this vital piece of legislation.

I will now speak, again, specifically to Idaho and to the specialty crops provision that Senator Saxby Chambliss spoke to that is now a very important part of agricultural policy.

We know specialty crops are about 51 percent of the gross revenue of American agriculture, and yet they were never mentioned in agricultural policy from a Federal level. Oh, yes, we had research and experimental programs, and we targeted money into the specialty crop area, but the program crops--those kinds of base crops we think about, be it cotton, soybeans, corn, wheat--all of those were the staples, if you will, of American agriculture, while today they do not represent the majority of the portfolio.

That is why several years ago I thought it was critically important we begin to work to include a specialty crop title. So we began that effort. Today, we have completed that effort with the help of these two Senators and a broad-based coalition to now have a title devoted to horticulture and organic agriculture.

In my State of Idaho, specialty crops are a big deal. Many people have heard about potatoes and Idaho. It is almost synonymous in the minds of the average American. Yet, by definition, that is a specialty crop. Is this a loan guarantee? No, it is not a loan guarantee. It is an effort to advance specialty crops in a variety of ways: specialty crop grants to enhance competitive local markets; expanding the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program in our high schools and grade schools in all 50 States; pest and disease management control; research programs in these areas; initiatives for food safety, mechanization, plant breeding and priorities to keep our edge, if you will, our world- class edge in the area of specialty crops; along with trade assistance and market promotion.

That is a full title. Not only did these two Senators--our chairman and ranking member--who led the effort for us, get this in the bill, they also got money behind it. Frankly, I thought maybe we would have to go the first 5 years simply authorizing the program and then beginning to fund it. But there is now substantial money behind it. It will go a long way toward helping the specialty crop areas and organic agriculture in the kind of farming many of our agricultural areas are moving into.

When you get at the edge of urbanization and agriculture and agricultural farmland, boutique farming, small specialty crop farming oftentimes becomes the transitional form of agriculture. To keep it profitable on the land, so we can keep the land in agricultural production, is very important, and I think that is offered in all of this.

I also thank my Idaho colleague, Mike Crapo, who has worked a long while on making the Endangered Species Act and those private properties that care for endangered habitat--to have a relationship, to have an advantage, to incentivize landowners to appreciate the reality of having an endangered species on their property. He has done that. Our colleagues have recognized it. It is very important we do that.

I could go on a great deal more about the programs that are there: the commodity programs that create a vital safety net for our wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas, oil seeds, sugar, wool products, and so on; conservation programs that are adjusted and important.

A great deal of effort has been focused on energy over the last several years and agriculture's role in that. It is not by accident that this bill has a title that recognizes energy, and that being a part of--a very valuable part of--American agriculture. To transition dollars out of a mature market in corn-based ethanol into cellulosics is a major step and a correct step in the right direction.

My time is up, but I want to thank my colleagues for the effort at hand. We had a solid vote out of the House last night. I think we are going to have a strong vote in the Senate today on this conference report.

Let me say in closing, to the White House and to our President: Mr. President, you and your people have been at the table working on this program with us for well over a year. It is time you recognize the value of this program, what has been put into new agricultural policy, and support us in that effort.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, let me also ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business.

Madam President, I thank the chairman because of the activity we are involved in on the floor with the legislation that he is shepherding at this moment.

Madam President, the reason I am speaking at this moment on the floor is that an event happened this week in Bonneville County, ID, in southeastern Idaho, that I think is significant not only to this Nation but ultimately to the world. A global nuclear service company selected that area of our country in my State to site a $2 billion uranium enrichment facility on a 400-acre farm west of Idaho Falls on Highway 20, a location that is very near the birthplace of global nuclear power and the nuclear industry. In 1951, the first light bulb was lit by nuclear power in Arco, ID. Of course, while that is a little known historical fact, the actual reactor itself is now a national historic location, so designated by the late President Lyndon Johnson a good number of years ago. Since that time forward, over 50 prototypes of nuclear reactors have been designed at the Idaho Nuclear Laboratory and our first nuclear plant for a submarine. In fact, I often laughingly say that out in a big bathtub in the middle of the high deserts of Idaho is a nuclear sub and that many who train to operate our nuclear Navy trained in Idaho. It was because of that significance and the relationship that Areva, this global company, could have with our national laboratory facilities that they sited this nuclear service company there and their enrichment plant.

Areva, the company, will employ, at a peak during construction, nearly 1,000 workers over an 8-year period. When operational, the plant will employ some 250 full-time workers, with a total annual salary of approximately $15 million. The plant will provide over $5 billion to the local economy of southeastern Idaho over the next 30 years.

The enrichment plant could be the first of many nuclear partnerships that Areva will have in the United States and with Idaho. The next generation nuclear plant being designed at the Idaho lab right now allows and puts Areva into an alliance relationship. UniStar, which some who track the nuclear industry know about, is looking at an opportunity in Idaho, and Areva and Constellation and other major energy companies of the world are involved in that. My colleagues have heard us talk about NGNP which, of course, is a nuclear global energy partnership. Once again, Areva is a part of that.

Over the last year, I, my staff, and the Idaho congressional delegation have worked with Areva. Because they showed interest in siting in Idaho or Washington or Ohio or New Mexico or Texas, we began to work with them to show them what Idaho had to offer, not only in a relationship with our national lab but a phenomenally talented workforce that is capable of doing the kind of work they need done. We worked very closely with the office of Gov. Butch Otter. As a result of those relationships, we began to work with the Idaho legislature to provide an economic incentives package for this kind of development. We also worked with

the Idaho Department of Commerce and Industry, with the city of Idaho Falls, ID, which has always had a very positive working relationship with the National Nuclear Laboratory that is located just miles from that city. Those are the kinds of partnerships the State of Idaho, the City of Idaho Falls, the Governor, the Idaho legislature, and the Idaho congressional delegation were able to put together that finally brought Areva to recognize the tremendous opportunity that rests in siting a world-class facility such as this in our State.

I mentioned a moment ago and got unanimous consent that Colin Jones be allowed on the floor if he chose. Colin is a fellow from the Idaho National Lab and he worked in a very close relationship with this company to make sure they had all the answers when they needed them to make this happen.

Now, why is all this significant? Right now, we are talking about climate change. We are talking about trying to rebuild an industry in our country and for the world that we nearly lost, and that is the nuclear industry. For 20 years, this country, for some reason, grew very fearful of the idea that we might advance generation of electricity by new nuclear plants, and we literally stopped. In so stopping it, we nearly lost the industry itself and the ability of the industry to build new nuclear reactors, tied with generating facilities for electrical purposes. Along came the growing concern of climate change and the emission of greenhouse gases and other environmental concerns that caused us, in many instances, to stop producing energy in the traditional ways we had produced it.

Nearly 60 percent of the energy in this country is produced by coal- fired generation facilities. Many of those today are emitters of CO2, and there are some who believe it is the concentration of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere that may be causing an increased or an accelerated rate of warming of our globe.

While we are trying to make those changes, the rest of the world rushes headlong. In fact, China is a perfect example of bringing at least one new coal-fired plant on line per week to supply its growing energy and economic needs. We had always been criticized for being the larger emitter of greenhouse gas because we were 25 percent of the world economy. Now, China, a country that we didn't think would become the larger emitter for several years, this last June measured as the largest greenhouse gas-polluting Nation in the world.

My point is quite simple. The need for new environmental and clean energy technology today is absolutely critical, and building the infrastructure that can supply us with abundant energy is even more important.

If our country is going to continue to grow, it has to have an abundant supply of all sources of energy. We have seen what happened just in the last several months as we have watched prices of gas at the pump go up to the level they are today, the shudder that has gone out from the consuming public, and the political reaction in Washington as we chase ourselves in circles trying to find an excuse to blame somebody for the inaction of the Congress over the last 20 years in the area of production and refinement and the overall development of energy itself.

The reason Areva's decision to site a facility not just in Idaho but in this country--a uranium enrichment plant--is a process that is key toward building the fuel to supply a nuclear reactor because that one technology that is available today beyond wind, beyond solar, to supply clean energy to the market is nuclear. While Sun is intermittent and solar is intermittent, nuclear reactors supply a strong base load of electricity to the American grid.

While we struggle with the technologies for clean coal, while we look to build other technologies, the one we can build today in a very demanding energy market is nuclear. Yet in a nuclear conference in Chicago just this week Excelon and other companies that are major utilities said because of this whole new demand the price of building a nuclear reactor has doubled from maybe $4 billion per single plant to now $8 billion or $9 billion.

This is the bottom line: The cost of energy is going to continue to go up until we bring online the technologies and the infrastructure to supply those technologies to continue to build an abundant energy supply for our country. So that is why I came to the floor today to talk about what got announced in Idaho this Tuesday, and that was a world-class, $2 billion uranium enrichment plant by the Areva company and International Utilities.

I am proud of my State and all of the people in my State for the work they have done to accomplish this. I compliment them all and wanted them to be a part of the Congressional Record.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that Colin Jones, a congressional fellow in my office from the Idaho National Laboratory, have floor privileges during the duration of my comments.

Madam President, what is the current state of the floor?

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, during consideration of the reauthorization of the FAA, a great deal of conversation has gone on on this floor about energy and the cost of energy. It is appropriate that we talk about it at a time when our airlines are struggling and we are attempting to reauthorize FAA. Part of the reason our airlines are struggling is the unprecedented aviation fuel prices. It is only one of the many reasons they are having difficulty today, but clearly the doubling of their costs are putting at risk their corporate structure and their ability to serve an American public.

But it is not just the airlines that are at risk. Every American consumer and every business is finding the tremendous increase in the cost of energy a significant problem. For example, just a few minutes ago, my BlackBerry buzzed. My wife Suzanne is out in Boise, ID. I got an e-mail about the temperature, which is 31 degrees in Boise this morning. At the bottom of the e-mail, she said regular gas just hit $3.53 a gallon. That is a lot of money. Now, that is not as much as others are paying across our Nation, but when an Idahoan fills their tank and they go from community to community, oftentimes they drive hundreds of miles--not just a few miles but literally hundreds of miles. Idaho is a great big Western State. Our distance is oftentimes a significant part of our commerce and our ability to conduct economic activity, and fuel prices have always been significant and important.

Idaho is also a large agricultural State. The cost of the production of foods today has gone up dramatically because of the cost of diesel, if you will, the cost of fertilizer, and all of those components that go into the production of food and the transporting of the food.

Part of the reason food is going up on the retail shelf of the supermarket today is the cost of getting it there, let alone the cost of producing and refining it. Many truckers are saying that just to fill up their truck now can be as much as $1,000. They are not able to change their freight rates to adjust as quickly to the high cost of energy, and they simply have to--this is the term--``eat it.'' Well, they cannot afford to eat it. Oftentimes, those trucks are simply turning off their motors and sitting idle.

So the impact of energy costs on our economy can be dramatic. I came to the floor yesterday to talk about it and to say that, in large part, the American consumer, in their frustration, is saying: Whom do we blame? I don't think they have to look any further than the U.S. Congress and the failure of this Congress--the House and Senate--over the last 20 years to do the things that were necessary to continue production, to ensure refinery capacity, to ensure exploration and the development of reserves, while we were doing all of the other things in conservation, in CAFE standards, assuring that we had a new form of transportation energy. But, no, we have failed to do the right things, and as a result of that, the American consumer is, in fact, paying a great deal for our failure.

What do we do to change that? Instead of just wringing our hands, there are all kinds of ideas out there about changing it.

Some would suggest that you just tax the big oil companies; if you just tax those big oil companies and put that money somewhere else, that will solve the problem. There is an old adage in economics that is quite simple: You usually get less of that which you tax. In other words, the higher you tax something, the less you are going to get from it. Do you want to, by taxation, nationalize America's independent oil companies? Is that a way to get production and more oil and gas at the pump? Remember, there are not any gas lines out there today. There aren't the kinds of lines we saw in the 1970s during the last energy crisis. There is supply. It is the cost of supply that we are frustrated about and the impact that cost is having on our economy.

Here is one of the problems we have. I talked about a Congress that failed, a public policy that failed, a policy that failed to continue to produce as demand went dramatically up--not just in this country but around the world.

The blue line on this chart is the supply line. As you can see, in the 1990s it peaked and it began to drop. That is, of course, U.S. production versus U.S. consumption. In other words, as a nation we began to produce less and less crude oil into our refineries.

Today, we are near 60 percent dependent upon other sources of energy, from outside our country, to come into our refineries and to go out of the gas pump to the consumer. In fact, you can see that the red line-- demand--has gone up dramatically as our economy continued to grow over the years, as more people were driving cars, and as more cars consumed more gas.

The only way you are going to keep price down is when the supply line and the demand line are somewhat in concert, somewhat tracking each other. That simply stopped in the 1950s, as we began to grow increasingly dependent upon foreign nations.

We passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, but it wasn't really directed at transportation fuels. Last year, we added to that and we began to address transportation fuels. We brought ethanol into the market by subsidizing that and allowing our farmers, and those who take corn from them, to produce ethanol to become increasingly effective in the market. That is working to some degree. In fact, it is estimated today that 20 cents would be put on the price of gas at the pump if

it wasn't for national and rural ethanol production. Now, it has caused other problems. Some would argue that it has caused problems in the food chain, and it probably has. I think the marketplace will work that out. So there are things we have been doing.

But I think, most importantly, it is the things we have not done. It is the failure of our country to recognize the increased dependency we were developing from other countries around the world. I think that has become one of our greater frustrations. While you have some on the campaign trail today talking about taxing the big oil companies, the big oil companies don't own the oil. It is the cartels. It is the nations. It is not oil companies, it is oil countries that we have to worry about today.

I didn't coin the phrase, but I use the phrase quite often, ``petro- nationalism.'' If I am a country and I am small but I am sitting on a pool of oil, I become rich overnight. The reason I become rich overnight is because Americans will come and buy my oil. If I want to form a cartel and I want to control the supply of that oil, then they will pay even more for it because Americans quit producing for themselves.

Here is a statistic that I find fascinating, and some have said that if we don't stop this in the near future, we will spend our Nation into poverty as we spend all of this money on oil. We are now spending well over $1 billion a day outside our country to buy oil. That is a phenomenal figure. Our neighbors to the north, we send them $280 million a day; to Saudi Arabia, we send $190 million a day; to Venezuela and Dictator Chavez, we send $160 million; to Nigeria, we send $140 million; to Algeria, we send $70 million. Do Venezuela and Nigeria and Algeria have our best interests in mind? I don't believe so. They have their own interests in mind. We are literally making them wealthy because we are buying their oil.

Many of us talk about energy independence, and last year when we passed that legislation I was talking about, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, we did some very good things in it. As I said, we looked at increasing production by conservation, by CAFE standards, and by renewable fuels standards. We said to the automobile industry: You have to design cars that burn less, and in doing that, we will improve our overall position on dependency by dropping it significantly by 2030. But it takes a long time to redesign a car, make it efficient, produce it, and then sell it into the market.

Those are the realities of a problem where you cannot just fix this tomorrow. We cannot just change the price of gas at the pump tomorrow because we cannot fix the underlying problems instantly. But as I said earlier, if Congress is at fault, the problem in this, then Congress ought to be doing more about it. And it is not just wringing your hands and wanting to tax. It is doing things that get us back into production while we learn to conserve, while we have cleaner automobiles, while we look at alternative fuel sources, while we get more hybrid cars and electric plug-in cars in the market. That is all coming, but that is 10 years, 15 years, and 20 years out.

What do we do in the interim? I believe there is something we can do, and we ought to do. In America today and in our territorial waters we are sitting still on a lot of oil, a dramatic amount of oil. Some would argue under old U.S. Geological Survey analysis that we are sitting on at least 100 billion barrels of oil. If we are sitting on it, why aren't we using it? Once again, the politics of Congress and the politics of States enter into the debate.

A couple of years ago, I began to talk about an issue I called the no zone. What was I talking about at the time? I was talking about that area of the United States and Outer Continental Shelf of waters that we knew had large volumes of oil. But California said no. We said no in Alaska. We have said no off the east coast. We have said no around Florida. Because we have said no, the American consumer today is paying the highest price for gasoline ever. That is a fact. It is a simple reality. Our dependency on foreign nations grew. As I just expressed, over 60 percent of our oil is coming from outside the continental United States when we know there is a significant amount of oil outside the continent.

When I introduced this chart a couple of years ago and I began to talk about the no zone and there were a few folks wringing their hands, we went to work. We went to work and we looked at oil sales in the gulf and the development in the Outer Continental Shelf in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Thanks to our effort, we did something. The American consumer needs to know we went into lease sale 181 off the coast of Florida. We looked at and found a tremendous amount of capability there and we began to develop it and we are developing it today. We have allowed other lease sales to occur. That is tremendously important. We are beginning to tap some of that oil supply that we know is out there and about which we ought to be doing more. That is what I think is important, and that is on what I think we ought to be focused.

To sit and wring our hands and tell the American people there is nothing we can do, and all we are going to do is go out and tax and tax, which will not produce--we ought to be talking about production. The legislation I have introduced today talks about production. It talks about production in a positive way.

I mentioned a few moments ago the action we took last year in lease sale 181. We were successful in bringing Florida along in their cooperation and understanding, which was phenomenally important.

We know there are millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas out there. What is most significant about oil development in this region is that the infrastructure is in place. What do I mean? Refineries, pipelines, capacity. We don't have to wait 5, 6, and 7 years just to build the infrastructure. It is there, and the oil is under it. That is why we did lease sale 181. But there is a lot more we can and should do. That is why the legislation I have introduced today does just that. It doesn't start drilling, but it says a couple of things that are quite simple.

As we have heard others talk about the fact we are putting money into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at this time, we are buying oil off the market and putting it underground in the salt domes in the South for a time of necessity, I suggest we stop doing that for the time being, and I suggest we take that money we are using for those purposes and we modernize our inventory of our known reserves, our unknown reserves, and our capacity because the true SPR--SPR means Strategic Petroleum Reserve--the greatest reserve in the world is to know what we have, where it is, and how we can access it. That is one of the most important things we can do for the consumers of America today.

I know it frustrated some of my Floridian friends when I talked about our inability because of policy to allow our companies to go in to the northern area off Cuba and drill because Cuba was allowing other countries to come in and develop. Just 90 miles--45 miles until you hit the zone--90 miles off our coast on the extreme of the Florida Keys there are foreign nations drilling oil today. India is there, and India has now discovered oil. China is there, and China has now discovered oil. We are not there today because our policy is 45 years old and still says: No, no, Americans cannot get involved with Cuba, even though we believe Cuba has phenomenal potential oil reserves. Shame on us.

America, listen up: It is Government policy today in large part that has caused you the pain at the pump, and it is very important that Government act today to reduce that pain.

The legislation I am offering would create an inventory that would do just that. It would allow us to know what our reserves are.

We have moratoriums off the coast of Florida, and yet we know there are huge oil reserves out there. Why are we not doing something about it? Well, it is local politics. It is national politics. It is green politics. It is politics. That is why we have the price of oil we have today, nothing more and nothing less but politics, and our economy is growing more fragile by the moment because of it.

Is it demagogic to say that? I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I pulled out the sign, the no zone. The no is a result of politics, whether it is the politics of the State of Florida or the

politics of the State of California or whether it is the national politics of this Senate that will not allow for us to drill for the reserves in what is known as ANWR, the Alaskan national wildlife area, where we know there is phenomenal abundance.

It was all done, all of this no, this political no was all done in the name of the environment. There was some reason at the time these old ideas were put in place. We had the oil spills off the coast of Santa Barbara, and as a result of that, Americans were concerned. So California said no more drilling there, and then we followed up.

A few years ago, we had a great national tragedy in the gulf area of our country. That tragedy was called Katrina. She came rolling up and through the gulf. We know what she did in New Orleans. She did something else nobody wants to talk about today. She knocked offline hundreds of oil wells that were producing out in the gulf--knocked them off. She even set some of the drilling rigs adrift. But not a drop of oil was spilled. Why? Because modern technology today and American know-how and a concern for protecting our environment has produced one of the cleanest deepwater oil drilling industries in the world. We are producing in this area of the gulf off the coast of Texas, off the coast of Louisiana, off the coast of Mississippi, and with 181, we just brought into or soon will be bringing into production off the coast of Alabama. Why not off the coast of Florida? Why not off the coast of California? Why not off the coast of the Carolinas, Virginia, and on up where we believe there is significant gas and oil reserves?

It is old politics of the past that is caught in the ghosts of Santa Barbara of decades ago. Yet our technology today will take us there, but our politics will not take us there. That is why I have introduced the legislation I have. The least we can do is inventory with modern technology to know where our oil is.

I notice the president of Shell said in a press release the other day: If Americans sent a message to the world that we were going to start drilling our own reserves and bringing them into production, the price of gas at the pump would drop dramatically, 25 or 30 cents a gallon or more. That is significant stuff, both short term and long term, to the economy of this country.

I say to my colleagues, I say to our country, and I say to our consumers: Is it a time to act? You bet it is a time to act. While some suggest we tax the big boys out of existence, we do not produce anything by doing that, while we can create all kinds of other structures. Do we produce more, do we build refinery capacity, and do we assure the American public while we are transitioning into hybrid cars and electric cars and hydrogen cars and all of those kinds of activities that we support and are doing research and development on today that they will still have an abundant supply of energy? That is our job. That is the job we failed in doing over the last good number of years, and that is the job we ought to stop and start over and do it right and reward the States that are the boundary States to the production of the Outer Continental Shelf.

We have huge oil reserves in this country, and yet we are letting the rest of the world have our wealth. Why not keep our wealth in this country by the development of these reserves?

The first step is the legislation I have introduced today. Let's at least in the next few years do the inventory, the modern, sophisticated seismographic inventory that USGS can do to let us know how much is out there because what we know today is simply old stuff. Those efforts were done years ago. Already out at the edge of this green line in the deepest waters in the gulf under the newest drilling technologies, we are finding phenomenal oil that just a few years ago we did not even know we could get to. We are getting to it. We are producing it. It is clean, and it is environmentally sound. We ought to be doing that everywhere else.

I have joined my colleague from Louisiana who just came to the floor, who introduced legislation that says when oil gets to $125 a barrel, we ought to give the States the option to allow the development of the Outer Continental Shelf off their State. You darn bet we ought to, and those States ought to be rewarded for it.

There is so much this country can continue to do instead of standing still and wringing our hands and trying to blame somebody else for our failure over the last 20 years to continue to allow this great country to produce for its consumers.

I will be happy to yield to the senior Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, I thank the senior Senator from Virginia. He is absolutely right. When I think oil, I think gas because, obviously, in lease sale 181 and in other areas where there is gas, there is oftentimes oil, and oftentimes where there is gas, there is no oil. We believe that to be the case off the coast of Virginia.

The Senator from Virginia has been a leader, without doubt, in that very kind of effort to allow at least the seismographic effort, the exploration that would determine for us the kinds of reserves we have and may have for the future.

I thank the Senator from Virginia for his leadership in this area.

Without question it is there today, and we know that. We are the leaders of clean drilling in deep water for the world, no question.

I will be happy to yield to the Senator from Florida.

I am more than happy to.

I do recognize that. I do appreciate what our military has said.

I also understand a few years ago we took offline a naval training area in Vieques. Why? It was no longer a popular thing to do.

If there is oil under this area--and we believe there is--and it is a training area, why couldn't we train here? Or why couldn't we train over here? The reality is, what is at this time more valuable?

It is very easy to say don't do it. Or is it possible to say can we do both? There are a good many experts and professionals in the field who said that. We can have a military training area, and guess what we also can do. We can pull the oil out from under. How do you do it? Quite simply. You put a location, a location and you slant drill thousands of feet and you do not have to pepper the area with all kinds of drilling rigs.

Today's technology is amazing. It is politically comfortable, I appreciate that, and I understand the State's politics and I do not deny that--but this is not the oil of the State of Florida. This is the oil of the citizens of our country. It is the politics of Florida today that deny us the oil, not the politics of America. So it is a simple question: Should we inventory it? Should we know what it is? And should we, under modern technology, reward the State of Florida for the potential benefit?

It is ironic we did not move at all to stop drilling 45 miles off the Florida coast. We could even take a 45-mile zone here, or more, consistent with what is going on in Florida today and still protect this.

But the Senator is right. It is a military area. Guess what. I am kind of a modern guy. I believe in technology taking us where we can go and having the best of both worlds. But right now the American consumer has the worst of the world we have created for them--a scarcity of a supply that is driving costs and impacting our economy in a significant way.

I suggest the legislation I have introduced, while it will not impact the State of Florida, will give us a base and an understanding and knowledge of what we have as a reserve. We are spending millions of dollars a day to buy oil and put it in the ground when, in fact, we ought to spend a few million dollars and find out about all the oil we already have.

Mr. President, during consideration of the reauthorization of the FAA, a great deal of conversation has gone on on this floor about energy and the cost of energy. It is appropriate that we talk about it at a time when our airlines are struggling and we are attempting to reauthorize FAA. Part of the reason our airlines are struggling is the unprecedented aviation fuel prices. It is only one of the many reasons they are having difficulty today, but clearly the doubling of their costs are putting at risk their corporate structure and their ability to serve an American public.

But it is not just the airlines that are at risk. Every American consumer and every business is finding the tremendous increase in the cost of energy a significant problem. For example, just a few minutes ago, my BlackBerry buzzed. My wife Suzanne is out in Boise, ID. I got an e-mail about the temperature, which is 31 degrees in Boise this morning. At the bottom of the e-mail, she said regular gas just hit $3.53 a gallon. That is a lot of money. Now, that is not as much as others are paying across our Nation, but when an Idahoan fills their tank and they go from community to community, oftentimes they drive hundreds of miles--not just a few miles but literally hundreds of miles. Idaho is a great big Western State. Our distance is oftentimes a significant part of our commerce and our ability to conduct economic activity, and fuel prices have always been significant and important.

Idaho is also a large agricultural State. The cost of the production of foods today has gone up dramatically because of the cost of diesel, if you will, the cost of fertilizer, and all of those components that go into the production of food and the transporting of the food.

Part of the reason food is going up on the retail shelf of the supermarket today is the cost of getting it there, let alone the cost of producing and refining it. Many truckers are saying that just to fill up their truck now can be as much as $1,000. They are not able to change their freight rates to adjust as quickly to the high cost of energy, and they simply have to--this is the term--``eat it.'' Well, they cannot afford to eat it. Oftentimes, those trucks are simply turning off their motors and sitting idle.

So the impact of energy costs on our economy can be dramatic. I came to the floor yesterday to talk about it and to say that, in large part, the American consumer, in their frustration, is saying: Whom do we blame? I don't think they have to look any further than the U.S. Congress and the failure of this Congress--the House and Senate--over the last 20 years to do the things that were necessary to continue production, to ensure refinery capacity, to ensure exploration and the development of reserves, while we were doing all of the other things in conservation, in CAFE standards, assuring that we had a new form of transportation energy. But, no, we have failed to do the right things, and as a result of that, the American consumer is, in fact, paying a great deal for our failure.

What do we do to change that? Instead of just wringing our hands, there are all kinds of ideas out there about changing it.

Some would suggest that you just tax the big oil companies; if you just tax those big oil companies and put that money somewhere else, that will solve the problem. There is an old adage in economics that is quite simple: You usually get less of that which you tax. In other words, the higher you tax something, the less you are going to get from it. Do you want to, by taxation, nationalize America's independent oil companies? Is that a way to get production and more oil and gas at the pump? Remember, there are not any gas lines out there today. There aren't the kinds of lines we saw in the 1970s during the last energy crisis. There is supply. It is the cost of supply that we are frustrated about and the impact that cost is having on our economy.

Here is one of the problems we have. I talked about a Congress that failed, a public policy that failed, a policy that failed to continue to produce as demand went dramatically up--not just in this country but around the world.

The blue line on this chart is the supply line. As you can see, in the 1990s it peaked and it began to drop. That is, of course, U.S. production versus U.S. consumption. In other words, as a nation we began to produce less and less crude oil into our refineries.

Today, we are near 60 percent dependent upon other sources of energy, from outside our country, to come into our refineries and to go out of the gas pump to the consumer. In fact, you can see that the red line-- demand--has gone up dramatically as our economy continued to grow over the years, as more people were driving cars, and as more cars consumed more gas.

The only way you are going to keep price down is when the supply line and the demand line are somewhat in concert, somewhat tracking each other. That simply stopped in the 1950s, as we began to grow increasingly dependent upon foreign nations.

We passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, but it wasn't really directed at transportation fuels. Last year, we added to that and we began to address transportation fuels. We brought ethanol into the market by subsidizing that and allowing our farmers, and those who take corn from them, to produce ethanol to become increasingly effective in the market. That is working to some degree. In fact, it is estimated today that 20 cents would be put on the price of gas at the pump if

it wasn't for national and rural ethanol production. Now, it has caused other problems. Some would argue that it has caused problems in the food chain, and it probably has. I think the marketplace will work that out. So there are things we have been doing.

But I think, most importantly, it is the things we have not done. It is the failure of our country to recognize the increased dependency we were developing from other countries around the world. I think that has become one of our greater frustrations. While you have some on the campaign trail today talking about taxing the big oil companies, the big oil companies don't own the oil. It is the cartels. It is the nations. It is not oil companies, it is oil countries that we have to worry about today.

I didn't coin the phrase, but I use the phrase quite often, ``petro- nationalism.'' If I am a country and I am small but I am sitting on a pool of oil, I become rich overnight. The reason I become rich overnight is because Americans will come and buy my oil. If I want to form a cartel and I want to control the supply of that oil, then they will pay even more for it because Americans quit producing for themselves.

Here is a statistic that I find fascinating, and some have said that if we don't stop this in the near future, we will spend our Nation into poverty as we spend all of this money on oil. We are now spending well over $1 billion a day outside our country to buy oil. That is a phenomenal figure. Our neighbors to the north, we send them $280 million a day; to Saudi Arabia, we send $190 million a day; to Venezuela and Dictator Chavez, we send $160 million; to Nigeria, we send $140 million; to Algeria, we send $70 million. Do Venezuela and Nigeria and Algeria have our best interests in mind? I don't believe so. They have their own interests in mind. We are literally making them wealthy because we are buying their oil.

Many of us talk about energy independence, and last year when we passed that legislation I was talking about, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, we did some very good things in it. As I said, we looked at increasing production by conservation, by CAFE standards, and by renewable fuels standards. We said to the automobile industry: You have to design cars that burn less, and in doing that, we will improve our overall position on dependency by dropping it significantly by 2030. But it takes a long time to redesign a car, make it efficient, produce it, and then sell it into the market.

Those are the realities of a problem where you cannot just fix this tomorrow. We cannot just change the price of gas at the pump tomorrow because we cannot fix the underlying problems instantly. But as I said earlier, if Congress is at fault, the problem in this, then Congress ought to be doing more about it. And it is not just wringing your hands and wanting to tax. It is doing things that get us back into production while we learn to conserve, while we have cleaner automobiles, while we look at alternative fuel sources, while we get more hybrid cars and electric plug-in cars in the market. That is all coming, but that is 10 years, 15 years, and 20 years out.

What do we do in the interim? I believe there is something we can do, and we ought to do. In America today and in our territorial waters we are sitting still on a lot of oil, a dramatic amount of oil. Some would argue under old U.S. Geological Survey analysis that we are sitting on at least 100 billion barrels of oil. If we are sitting on it, why aren't we using it? Once again, the politics of Congress and the politics of States enter into the debate.

A couple of years ago, I began to talk about an issue I called the no zone. What was I talking about at the time? I was talking about that area of the United States and Outer Continental Shelf of waters that we knew had large volumes of oil. But California said no. We said no in Alaska. We have said no off the east coast. We have said no around Florida. Because we have said no, the American consumer today is paying the highest price for gasoline ever. That is a fact. It is a simple reality. Our dependency on foreign nations grew. As I just expressed, over 60 percent of our oil is coming from outside the continental United States when we know there is a significant amount of oil outside the continent.

When I introduced this chart a couple of years ago and I began to talk about the no zone and there were a few folks wringing their hands, we went to work. We went to work and we looked at oil sales in the gulf and the development in the Outer Continental Shelf in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Thanks to our effort, we did something. The American consumer needs to know we went into lease sale 181 off the coast of Florida. We looked at and found a tremendous amount of capability there and we began to develop it and we are developing it today. We have allowed other lease sales to occur. That is tremendously important. We are beginning to tap some of that oil supply that we know is out there and about which we ought to be doing more. That is what I think is important, and that is on what I think we ought to be focused.

To sit and wring our hands and tell the American people there is nothing we can do, and all we are going to do is go out and tax and tax, which will not produce--we ought to be talking about production. The legislation I have introduced today talks about production. It talks about production in a positive way.

I mentioned a few moments ago the action we took last year in lease sale 181. We were successful in bringing Florida along in their cooperation and understanding, which was phenomenally important.

We know there are millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas out there. What is most significant about oil development in this region is that the infrastructure is in place. What do I mean? Refineries, pipelines, capacity. We don't have to wait 5, 6, and 7 years just to build the infrastructure. It is there, and the oil is under it. That is why we did lease sale 181. But there is a lot more we can and should do. That is why the legislation I have introduced today does just that. It doesn't start drilling, but it says a couple of things that are quite simple.

As we have heard others talk about the fact we are putting money into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at this time, we are buying oil off the market and putting it underground in the salt domes in the South for a time of necessity, I suggest we stop doing that for the time being, and I suggest we take that money we are using for those purposes and we modernize our inventory of our known reserves, our unknown reserves, and our capacity because the true SPR--SPR means Strategic Petroleum Reserve--the greatest reserve in the world is to know what we have, where it is, and how we can access it. That is one of the most important things we can do for the consumers of America today.

I know it frustrated some of my Floridian friends when I talked about our inability because of policy to allow our companies to go in to the northern area off Cuba and drill because Cuba was allowing other countries to come in and develop. Just 90 miles--45 miles until you hit the zone--90 miles off our coast on the extreme of the Florida Keys there are foreign nations drilling oil today. India is there, and India has now discovered oil. China is there, and China has now discovered oil. We are not there today because our policy is 45 years old and still says: No, no, Americans cannot get involved with Cuba, even though we believe Cuba has phenomenal potential oil reserves. Shame on us.

America, listen up: It is Government policy today in large part that has caused you the pain at the pump, and it is very important that Government act today to reduce that pain.

The legislation I am offering would create an inventory that would do just that. It would allow us to know what our reserves are.

We have moratoriums off the coast of Florida, and yet we know there are huge oil reserves out there. Why are we not doing something about it? Well, it is local politics. It is national politics. It is green politics. It is politics. That is why we have the price of oil we have today, nothing more and nothing less but politics, and our economy is growing more fragile by the moment because of it.

Is it demagogic to say that? I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I pulled out the sign, the no zone. The no is a result of politics, whether it is the politics of the State of Florida or the

politics of the State of California or whether it is the national politics of this Senate that will not allow for us to drill for the reserves in what is known as ANWR, the Alaskan national wildlife area, where we know there is phenomenal abundance.

It was all done, all of this no, this political no was all done in the name of the environment. There was some reason at the time these old ideas were put in place. We had the oil spills off the coast of Santa Barbara, and as a result of that, Americans were concerned. So California said no more drilling there, and then we followed up.

A few years ago, we had a great national tragedy in the gulf area of our country. That tragedy was called Katrina. She came rolling up and through the gulf. We know what she did in New Orleans. She did something else nobody wants to talk about today. She knocked offline hundreds of oil wells that were producing out in the gulf--knocked them off. She even set some of the drilling rigs adrift. But not a drop of oil was spilled. Why? Because modern technology today and American know-how and a concern for protecting our environment has produced one of the cleanest deepwater oil drilling industries in the world. We are producing in this area of the gulf off the coast of Texas, off the coast of Louisiana, off the coast of Mississippi, and with 181, we just brought into or soon will be bringing into production off the coast of Alabama. Why not off the coast of Florida? Why not off the coast of California? Why not off the coast of the Carolinas, Virginia, and on up where we believe there is significant gas and oil reserves?

It is old politics of the past that is caught in the ghosts of Santa Barbara of decades ago. Yet our technology today will take us there, but our politics will not take us there. That is why I have introduced the legislation I have. The least we can do is inventory with modern technology to know where our oil is.

I notice the president of Shell said in a press release the other day: If Americans sent a message to the world that we were going to start drilling our own reserves and bringing them into production, the price of gas at the pump would drop dramatically, 25 or 30 cents a gallon or more. That is significant stuff, both short term and long term, to the economy of this country.

I say to my colleagues, I say to our country, and I say to our consumers: Is it a time to act? You bet it is a time to act. While some suggest we tax the big boys out of existence, we do not produce anything by doing that, while we can create all kinds of other structures. Do we produce more, do we build refinery capacity, and do we assure the American public while we are transitioning into hybrid cars and electric cars and hydrogen cars and all of those kinds of activities that we support and are doing research and development on today that they will still have an abundant supply of energy? That is our job. That is the job we failed in doing over the last good number of years, and that is the job we ought to stop and start over and do it right and reward the States that are the boundary States to the production of the Outer Continental Shelf.

We have huge oil reserves in this country, and yet we are letting the rest of the world have our wealth. Why not keep our wealth in this country by the development of these reserves?

The first step is the legislation I have introduced today. Let's at least in the next few years do the inventory, the modern, sophisticated seismographic inventory that USGS can do to let us know how much is out there because what we know today is simply old stuff. Those efforts were done years ago. Already out at the edge of this green line in the deepest waters in the gulf under the newest drilling technologies, we are finding phenomenal oil that just a few years ago we did not even know we could get to. We are getting to it. We are producing it. It is clean, and it is environmentally sound. We ought to be doing that everywhere else.

I have joined my colleague from Louisiana who just came to the floor, who introduced legislation that says when oil gets to $125 a barrel, we ought to give the States the option to allow the development of the Outer Continental Shelf off their State. You darn bet we ought to, and those States ought to be rewarded for it.

There is so much this country can continue to do instead of standing still and wringing our hands and trying to blame somebody else for our failure over the last 20 years to continue to allow this great country to produce for its consumers.

I will be happy to yield to the senior Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, I thank the senior Senator from Virginia. He is absolutely right. When I think oil, I think gas because, obviously, in lease sale 181 and in other areas where there is gas, there is oftentimes oil, and oftentimes where there is gas, there is no oil. We believe that to be the case off the coast of Virginia.

The Senator from Virginia has been a leader, without doubt, in that very kind of effort to allow at least the seismographic effort, the exploration that would determine for us the kinds of reserves we have and may have for the future.

I thank the Senator from Virginia for his leadership in this area.

Without question it is there today, and we know that. We are the leaders of clean drilling in deep water for the world, no question.

I will be happy to yield to the Senator from Florida.

I am more than happy to.

I do recognize that. I do appreciate what our military has said.

I also understand a few years ago we took offline a naval training area in Vieques. Why? It was no longer a popular thing to do.

If there is oil under this area--and we believe there is--and it is a training area, why couldn't we train here? Or why couldn't we train over here? The reality is, what is at this time more valuable?

It is very easy to say don't do it. Or is it possible to say can we do both? There are a good many experts and professionals in the field who said that. We can have a military training area, and guess what we also can do. We can pull the oil out from under. How do you do it? Quite simply. You put a location, a location and you slant drill thousands of feet and you do not have to pepper the area with all kinds of drilling rigs.

Today's technology is amazing. It is politically comfortable, I appreciate that, and I understand the State's politics and I do not deny that--but this is not the oil of the State of Florida. This is the oil of the citizens of our country. It is the politics of Florida today that deny us the oil, not the politics of America. So it is a simple question: Should we inventory it? Should we know what it is? And should we, under modern technology, reward the State of Florida for the potential benefit?

It is ironic we did not move at all to stop drilling 45 miles off the Florida coast. We could even take a 45-mile zone here, or more, consistent with what is going on in Florida today and still protect this.

But the Senator is right. It is a military area. Guess what. I am kind of a modern guy. I believe in technology taking us where we can go and having the best of both worlds. But right now the American consumer has the worst of the world we have created for them--a scarcity of a supply that is driving costs and impacting our economy in a significant way.

I suggest the legislation I have introduced, while it will not impact the State of Florida, will give us a base and an understanding and knowledge of what we have as a reserve. We are spending millions of dollars a day to buy oil and put it in the ground when, in fact, we ought to spend a few million dollars and find out about all the oil we already have.