Floor Statements

I rise in support of the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2013, the 51st consecutive conference report for this committee and the National Defense Authorization Act.

I have had the honor of serving as the chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. Under the full committee leadership of Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith, the support of Silvestre Reyes, our subcommittee's ranking member, and a truly superb staff, ours is a really bipartisan effort.

Our first priority and immediate requirement has continued to be to fully support our personnel serving overseas in Afghanistan and the many other countries where we have asked them to serve under the daily constant threat of their personal survival. We have worked diligently to support the armed services and provide additional resources to support the warfighter. This conference report properly reflects these immediate requirements.

Consideration of this conference report comes during a continued period of critical challenges to our national security--from the rapidly growing national debt, cybersecurity threats, and across the threat spectrum to include security of chemical weapons stockpiles and proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Nation's fiscal circumstances and world events continue to challenge our government's will and capacity to constructively address the enormity of the challenges we face. The challenge is to develop an effective National Military Strategy that matches available resources and reflects the current and projected threat and fiscal environment. A fundamental objective appraisal of the national strategy is needed to enable the committee's full and balanced consideration of force structure and equipment investment plans and programs.

I am concluding my service to Congress. It has been my great honor to serve our servicemembers and their families, the people of Maryland's Sixth District, this committee, and the House of Representatives for 20 years now. It has also been my honor to put national security interests first in my service to the Armed Services Committee.

I strongly urge all of my colleagues to support the National Defense Authorization Act conference report.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I would like to echo the concerns of my colleague. We are changed, we are affected by what we see, by what we hear, by what we listen to, by what we watch. You cannot swim in a sea of violence and not be affected by it. I know we have a Constitution and an amendment which guarantees freedom of speech, but you don't have a right to do what is wrong, and it is wrong that our entertainment media is placing before, particularly our impressionable young people, these unending scenes of violence in these video games.

You know the unbridled expression of when one right infringes on another, we limit that right. You do have a right of freedom of speech; but still, you can't yell ``fire, fire'' in a crowded theater if there is no fire because people could get hurt in trying to get out. That same philosophy, I think, would permit us to limit the kinds of entertainment and violence that pervade our society.

I know there are many factors as to what caused this tragedy, but certainly this could be one of them, particularly to people who don't have all of the faculties that the average of us have for contending with changes in our environment.

I would like also to refer back to comments that my good friend Dan Burton made that so little is known about us here. We kind of appear here, Madam Speaker, almost as if we were the products of spontaneous generation and there we are in front of the microphone and a million, a million and a half people out there are watching us. Just who are we? So I thought I would spend just a moment doing what I probably should have done 20 years ago and kind of introduce myself.

I was born in 1926. If you are doing some quick math, yes, that means I'm in my 87th year. Our family hardly knew that there was a Great Depression. We were just as poor before the Depression as we were during the Depression.

I was the first member of my immediate family to graduate from college. I wanted to be a medical missionary, and so I was studying theology and I was taking science courses so that I could go to med school. And I had a really, really good science teacher, and I took all of the courses he offered and enough more so that when I graduated from college, I not only had a degree, a major in the Bible and a minor in homiletics--that's a degree in theology--I also had a major in biology and a minor in chemistry. And I had decided not to go to medical school, and I wanted to go into the ministry; but I was 21 years old and I looked 17 and I wasn't married, and you don't have a big, immediate, bright future in the missionary looking 17 and not being married and so they advised me to occupy myself until I got older and got married.

And so I went to graduate school, and I got a master's and a doctorate and

committed myself to being a very serious basic researcher. I taught medical school for 4 years. I worked at the National Institutes of Health. I went to a lot of professional scientific meetings. I have about 50 papers in the basic scientific literature.

And then I had kind of a strange twist to my career when I went as a basic researcher to the School of Aviation Medicine at Pensacola, Florida. They had some problems that I thought I could solve. I was a farm boy. I live on a farm now; I've always lived on a farm. You kind of learn to make do. I thought I could fix some of the problems they had. That resulted in the awards of 19 military patents as a result of fixing some of those problems that they had.

That started a career of working 20 years for the military. I should mention that I returned to my basic first love and that was teaching, and I taught for another 20 years. Also, my wife and I ran a home construction business. Congressman Ben Cardin said Roscoe was green before it was cool to be green. I was building solar houses back in the late seventies and early eighties and selling them for, I remember, as much as 17 percent interest.

Then I was retired for 5 years, and I ran for Congress. I tell you, there's nothing I have done that has given me the fulfillment and the satisfaction as serving the constituents of the 6th Congressional District of Maryland. For 20 consecutive elections, 10 primaries and 10 general elections, they returned me to the Congress. I want to thank my constituents very much for that vote of confidence. That was really largely due to the fact that I had such an incredible staff that did a really good job of making me look good in spite of all of my limitations and frailties.

Most of my commitment in the Congress has been in the Armed Services Committee. You can only have one chairmanship here. And for the last dozen years or so, those chairmanships have been in Armed Services. I shared leadership of one of those subcommittees, the one that has responsibility for the Navy and the Marine Corps, with my good friend Gene Taylor from Mississippi. I was his chair for 4 years and then he was my chair when we changed leadership here in the Congress for 2 years. We are term limited on our side of the aisle, so I had to leave that subcommittee.

But while I was there, Gene and I changed the course of our Navy for the future. In the future, all of our major surface combatants will be nuclear. It didn't make any sense to us that our aircraft carriers, which are nuclear and fueled for 30 years, cannot function without their escort ships that are fueled for about 5 to 7 days. And if there are no tankers out there to refuel them, our aircraft carriers cannot function. That didn't seem to make any sense to us, and so we pushed and finally got it through. Our future Navy major surface combatants are going to be nuclear.

We also had responsibility for the Marine Corps, as I mentioned, and the IEDs and MRAPs; and I was honored to work with my friend, Gene Taylor, and we shepherded the MRAPs and its development--$47 billion. It saved a lot of lives in the most asymmetric war in the history of the world.

I thought I might spend the few moments that remain kind of looking back at those times I've come to the floor. I came here to talk about four different things in Special Orders, and I thought I might spend just a few moments talking about those things.

I probably got more calls in our office about a talk that I have given here probably four or five times. I called it ``What Made America Great.'' What I was trying to do was to go back and look at our history, to refute two big lies that are out there in our land. One of those is that our Founding Fathers were largely atheist and deist and they wanted to set up a country that was devoid of religion.

If you look at our history books, of course, that isn't true. What I did in that talk was simply go back to our Founding Fathers and look at their statements. I went back to our early Congress and looked at what they did, like buying 20,000 copies of the Bible to give out to our early constituents; like sending, paying for missionaries to go to the American Indians for 100 years. Our Congress did that.

And then I looked at our Supreme Court. Until they made that big decision about three-fourths through the history of our young country, they were devoutly supportive of religion. A case came to the Supreme Court about using the Bible in schools, and they said: Why shouldn't you use the Bible in our schools? Where else can you find so clear a definition of what is right and what is wrong?

And then I went to our schools and the ``McGuffey Reader.'' Some of our schools went back to that because we were graduating kids from college who couldn't read their own diploma. And so in desperation, they looked at, gee, what did work when our kids graduated from school and could read. The ``McGuffey Reader'' was one of those. He makes no apology. He quoted more often from the Bible than any other source.

One of our Founding Fathers was Benjamin Franklin, and some others, like Thomas Jefferson, were said to be deists. Now, what is a deist? A deist is someone who believes there is a God. They believe He created you, but He also set in motion some laws, and don't bother praying to Him because your destiny is going to be determined by how you relate to those laws.

I'm going to give a quote, not an exact quote, but pretty close to what Benjamin Franklin said, and let you decide if you think he was a deist or not. It was in Philadelphia. The Constitutional Convention was deadlocked. They might not get a Constitution. Benjamin Franklin, I believe, was the oldest member of that delegation, probably the most respected Governor of Pennsylvania.

And he rose to speak, and this is what he said:

I'm an old man. I've lived a long time. And the longer live

the more certain I am that God controls in the affairs of

men. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His

notice, can a nation rise without His aid?

And then he went on to say:

I move that, henceforth, we begin each of our meetings with

prayer.

That started a precedent. I know that the 10 Commandments are coming down from the walls of the courthouse, and I know the nativity scene is disappearing from the public square. You still see it here, ``In God We Trust.'' And we begin each of our meetings here with prayer, and they do the same thing in the Senate on the other side of this building.

We've probably got more responses in our office to that talk, what made America great, and it's easy to refute those two great lies. Our Founding Fathers were Christians. They wanted to set up a Christian nation, and that First Amendment is very simple, very simple.

You know, they came here, most of our Founding Fathers came here to escape two tyrannies: the tyranny of the church and the tyranny of the crown. If you think about it, they all came from countries that had a king or an emperor, and so there was the tyranny of the crown.

If you also think about it, there was a state church. In England, it was the Episcopal Church; on the continent, it was the Roman Church. And those churches could and did oppress other religions, so they came here and they didn't want that to happen in their country.

And so they said something very simple and very straightforward, that they'd make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The state cannot establish a religion; otherwise, leave men free to worship as they please.

I have no idea how that's gotten warped into this idea that you can't be religious, that government has to be totally separated from religion.

By the way, that clause is in the Constitution. The separation of church and state, it's in the Constitution of the USSR. It's not in our Constitution.

Well, the second thing I came here to the floor to talk about when the debate was raging was the ethical embryonic stem cell procurement. Remember when George Bush came to office, there was a lot of research in stem cells, and we'd been using adult stem cells, but experts in the area--and I'm probably the only Member of Congress who has had a degree in advanced embryology, and so I knew a little bit about embryonic stem cells. And the experts all believed that there ought to be more usefulness of embryonic stem cells than

adult stem cells simply because they're totipotent; they will develop into anything and everything the body needed. An adult stem cell that's already kind of differentiated, you're somewhat limited in what you can do with it.

But to get these embryonic stem cells, they were destroying the embryo. Now, every year there's something like 40,000 embryos that are just discarded because the owners don't want them anymore and they won't pay for keeping them. They're frozen in liquid nitrogen, and so they're discarded.

And the argument was you can take one of these discarded embryos, it's going to be discarded anyhow, and you can crush it and you can get the stem cells from it. But before you do that, you look at it under the microscope, and there you see it, living tissue. Gee, that might be the next Albert Einstein.

When you're talking about them collectively, 40,000, it's easy just to say they're going to be discarded; when you're looking at that one under your microscope, a unique human being if you just give it the chance to be implanted and to grow in the womb.

But I knew that we could get cells from these early embryos and not hurt the embryo. How did I know that? How was I so sure of that? Well, you can take half the cells from an early embryo and it goes on to develop a perfectly good child, infant. How do I know that? Because the other half of those cells went on to produce another perfectly good twin.

In every case of twins that you see, identical twins that you see, half of the cells were taken from the embryo, and the other half went on--the Chairman of the President's Commission on Ethical Embryonic Stem Cells was an identical twin, and I asked him if he felt any less of a person because he was only half a person, because he's only half the embryonic cell. It's a perfectly silly question, of course. But then he said, Gee, that is a silly question, isn't it?

And I said, But that's what people are saying; if you are going to take a cell or two from an early embryo, somehow it's going to be less of a person when it develops.

I worked 5 years, nearly 6 years with the White House, with the Council of Catholic Bishops, with the right-to-life community, and we developed a bill that was passed unanimously in the Senate, and it failed on a technicality in the House. It came up on suspension. It got way more than half the votes, but not two-thirds of the vote.

So Bush gave it the effect of law because he supported it by making it an executive order. And the first executive order of this administration, the hand had hardly come off the Bible when our new President reversed that executive order. Had it become law--

And people ask me what was the greatest disappointment of my 20 years, and that was that my bill passed unanimously by the Senate couldn't have become law because it would still be because you would have to overcome a veto, and we would not have two-thirds of the votes to do that.

Well, a third thing that I came here to the floor to talk about was electromagnetic pulse. I had no idea when I first learned about this, but I called my friend Tom Clancy, because I knew that he had written a book where this was a scenario in his book, and he does really good research. So I asked him about EMP. He said, If you read my book, you know all that I know about it. Let me refer you to the smartest man hired by the U.S. Government.

That's a tall order because we hire a lot of people, but in his view, that was a Dr. Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore. And this was pre- cell phone days. Remember the pagers?

I paged Lowell Wood. He was supposed to be in California, Lawrence Livermore. Went up to the satellite and down, and he was within Washington and he got it, and within an hour he was sitting in my office.

Well, an electromagnetic pulse, we have only one brief experience with it in our country, and that was in 1962 in Johnston Island and the Starfish Prime, the only time we ever detonated a weapon above the atmosphere and we had no idea what would happen. It produced an electromagnetic pulse that caused a lot of disturbances in Hawaii, which was about 800 miles away.

The Soviets had a lot more experience than we. They actually developed, designed--we designed but never built them--an enhanced EMP weapon, a single, large nuclear--oh, I shouldn't say that because it doesn't have to be a large bomb because it could be a relatively small bomb that is EMP-enhanced.

A single appropriate bomb detonated 300 miles high over Nebraska or Iowa would blanket our whole country, and if the EMP radon was robust enough, it would essentially fry all of our microelectronics. The grid would be down for a year or more, and your car wouldn't run. And there have been a couple of books written on that subject. One I would recommend that's an easy read and a very well-researched book--and I commend Newt Gingrich, he brought the author to my office, and he mentioned this on the campaign trail.

Thank you, Newt.

This is Bill Forstchen's book called ``One Second After.''

I came to my office one day and there was a big book on my desk and there was a handwritten note in it. It was from a Dr. Lowrie. He was retired, a Ph.D. electrical engineer in his hospital room recovering from cardiac surgery, and he was surfing the television and he happened on C-SPAN and I was giving one of the half dozen talks that I've given on EMP, and he listened to it and got turned on and did a lot of research and wrote a book, about 700 pages.

I didn't think I could read a novel that long. It was so captivating. I read it, and it's called ``The Satan Legacy.'' The Satan was a big SS-18. It was one of the Soviet missiles with 10 nuclear warheads. And the story had one of them missing when they transferred from the Ukraine to Russia.

Now we know that several other things could also bring down the grid.

Oh, by the way, as a result of my work on EMP, we now have a permanent EMP task force in the Pentagon looking at our preparedness militarily. We have the EMP Commission, which functioned for four terms, that is 8 years. They have written classified and unclassified reports, and I would recommend that you get one of their unclassified reports.

But now there are several other things that could also bring down the grid. One of those is cyber. This is a whole new warfare that we've been in, and we hardly knew about it, but there it was raging. An appropriate cyberattack could bring down our grid.

And something that will bring down the grid--this is not an if, this is a when--and that's a giant solar storm. The only question is when will the next one come. And if we are not prepared for it--and we are not now--and if we do not prepare for it, it will bring down the grid.

And McClelland, the top person in that part of FERC, sat in my office and said that the grid would be down for a year and a half to 2 years.

That's a very long time to hold your breath. And there's another thing that could bring down the grid, and that is a terrorist attack. If you knew what the important substations were and you know which insulators to take out, it wouldn't take more than a dozen or so people with a .22 rifle.

Now why, when the grid goes down, can't you bring it back up? That's because in all of these instances, there's going to be surges of electricity that blow the major transformers. They simply won't melt down. We have a few spares, but a very inadequate number of spares. We don't make them in our country. You just order them. There's none available to order, by the way. You order one and they will build it for you. And it takes a year, year-and-a-half to 2 years to build one. And we don't build them in our country.

So I'm pleased that my efforts--which I started here on the floor talking about EMP--have resulted in a recognition that this is something we really need to deal with.

There's a fourth thing that I came to the floor to talk about, and I will spend the last few minutes of our time here together this evening talking about that, and that is energy. I have been to the floor, I think, 52 times; and most of those times I came here, I talked for a full hour. I was talking about not just energy generically, but a specific type of energy, and that is liquid fuels. Because when you're talking about energy, we really do have to separate liquid fuels from the other major carrier

of energy. It's not energy. It's the way you carry energy. That's electricity.

We shouldn't have any deficit of electricity with more nuclear power plants. Yes, they are safe. We've never lost a person operating them. With more wind machines, with more solar, with more micro-hydro, with more true geothermal, we need another word for these heat pumps that are looking not at the zero cold and trying to heat that up. It's like trying to make it colder to heat your house up in the wintertime or trying to heat up hot air to make your house cooler in the summertime.

If you're looking at 56 degrees here, that's a whole lot more efficient. We call that geothermal. We've got to have another word for that, because true geothermal is tapping into the molten core of the Earth. That, for all practical purposes, is infinite and will be there for a very, very long time. With these sources, we can produce all the electricity that we would like to produce, but that is not true of liquid fuels. They are finite.

One of the first people to recognize that--and he was for several years a pariah and then he became an icon--his name was M. King Hubbert. He gave what I think will be recognized as the most important speech of the last century. I believe that speech was the 8th day of May in 1956. And he gave that speech in San Antonio, Texas. He was an oil geologist. He gave it to a group of oil people.

As you look back in your history books, you will find that at that time we were king of oil. We produced more oil. We used more oil. We're still doing that. We're using more oil than anybody else. And we sold more oil and exported more oil than any other country in the world. And M. King Hubbert told them something that was just audacious and seemingly ridiculous. He said, Notwithstanding the fact that we are so big in oil today, in just 14 years the United States will reach its maximum oil production. And no matter what you do after that, oil production in the United States will go down.

How can he make that kind of a prediction? He made it because when he looked at an individual oil field, he saw that the exploitation of that field produced kind of a bell curve. Sometimes a little distorted bell curve, but kind of a bell curve. When you first started pumping, it really came out. And then you reached a peak and then it was harder and harder to get it out until finally it tailed off and you'd gotten all you could out of the well.

So he rationalized that if he could add up all the little fields in the United States, he could get all the little bell curves and you get one big bell curve. When he did that, it reached its maximum in 1970. And so he made that prediction in 1956. Right on schedule, in 1970, we reached our maximum oil production. And no matter what we've done since then, like building more oil wells in all the rest of the world put together, for instance, today we produce about half the oil we produced in 1956.

The second speech--and I don't know if these two men even knew each other--was given by Hyman Rickover just about a year later. It was the 14th day of May, 1957. It was a speech given in St. Paul, Minnesota. And you can pull this one up. It was lost until a few years ago. Just Google for Rickover and energy speech and it will come up. I think you will agree with me that it was probably the most insightful speech in the last century.

And in it he noted that oil is finite. He said in the 8,000--I didn't think it was that long; those are his numbers--in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil will be but a blip. We're behaving as if it's going to be forever. He called it this ``Golden Age.'' Please, please Google for Rickover and energy speech and pull it up. I think you'll be fascinated by the speech.

One of the things he said in it was how long it lasts is important in only one regard: the longer it lasts, the more time we'll have to plan an orderly transition to other sources of energy. That's not quite what we're doing. And I'm not sure that he would agree that drill, baby, drill is an orderly transition to other sources of energy.

I have just two charts of the probably hundred-or-more charts that I've used from time to time in talking about this subject--and the subject is peak oil.

Let me show you these two charts. This is a chart that ends in 2008, and it has the oil production followed by the two major entities in the world that have the most credibility in this--the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, and the IEA, the International Energy Association, which is a creature of the OECD in Europe. And these were their two curves. You see they're leveling out up there. The headline was: ''Peak Oil: Are We There Yet?''

And I want to show you another chart. And you can not find these curves anymore. They were kind of disquieting, and they're taken down from the Web site. These are the curves put up by the IEA, International Energy Association. Here we're following the production of oil. You can go back here--way, way back for hundreds of years. Every time we needed more, we could produce more oil.

The different colors here, natural gas, liquids on top--they have that growing. That will grow. Nonconventional oil, that's from the oil shales. That's growing. That will grow. The dark red there really should be a part of the blue down here. It's just enhanced oil recovery, squeezing a little more out of the fields we're pumping from, like putting live steam down there and CO2 and so forth to force it out. This is the fields we're now pumping, and they're admitting that we're reaching peak oil, plateau here, because they have them tailing off.

Now, this chart was done in 2008, and the one below it was done in 2010. I'll come to that in just a moment.

In order to keep the total liquids going up, you notice what they've done is projected two huge fields here, that by 2030 they said a fourth of all the liquids we're getting, only a fourth of it will come from the fields we're now pumping, that three-fourths of it will come from something else. And half of the total is going to be from fields that we're not getting anything from now. That's a pretty tall order.

Then, in 2010 they did this other curve down here, and they have reversed the two on top here. And different colors. But they're the same thing. And they've included the dark red here down with the oil fields that we're now pumping. And notice this goes to 2035. Up here, by the way, they were going to peak at 112 million barrels a day. Now we're stuck at 84 million billion barrels for 5 years. They have it going up to 112. Two years later, reality is setting in. Now it goes up to only 96. And they go out 5 years further to 2035. Notice the precipitous drop-off in the fields that we're now pumping.

Now, we have some irrational exuberance, as Alan Greenspan would define it, in our country about our ability to get some additional gas and oil out of things like the Marcellus shales and the fields out in the West by horizontal drilling and fracking; and these are represented in these two curves here. I think that one can say, in analyzing history, with considerable confidence that these two wedges here will not occur. By the way it's 600,000. It sounds like a lot, doesn't it? 600,000 barrels.

We use 84 million barrels a day. In 11 or 12 days, we--the world--use a billion barrels of oil. So if we're getting 600,000 from the Bakken oil fields out in the West, that's almost literally a drop in the bucket, isn't it?

I'd just like to close, this last chance probably that I have to come and chat with you here on the floor. It's been a huge honor to represent 660,000 people in the First District of Maryland, to come here to the Congress to talk to maybe a million, a million and a half people listening to us out there. Thank you, constituents, for this honor. Thank you for listening.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, in November of this year, the members of the Cumberland Valley Athletic Club will once again answer President John F. Kennedy's challenge to promote national physical fitness and hold the 50th annual JFK 50 Mile run.

This run also answered another President's challenge; Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order to challenge the United States Marine Officers to run 50 miles in 20 hours; The JFK 50 Mile run, the nation's oldest ultra marathon attracts 2000 runners and thousands more to cheer on the participants to one of the most beautiful parts of the sixth district of Maryland, Washington County.

At the inception of the JFK 50 Mile, all members of the United States Armed Forces have always been welcome and have met this challenge by former Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt over this historic course marked by the history of the Nation over the Appalachian Trail and the C & 0 Canal passing over hallowed ground near Crampton's Gap, Maryland, Weaverton Cliffs, Maryland, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and Antietam Battlefield.

On the 50th Anniversary of the JFK 50 Mile run, I would like to send our best wishes for another successful run to the Cumberland Valley Athletic Club and those members who make this event one of the premiere athletic events in the nation.

Madam Speaker, tomorrow is the 15th Annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency EXPO and Forum from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the Cannon Caucus Room as well as in room 340 Cannon. It features more than 50 exhibitors, including six from Maryland; and it features 30 speakers, including Members of Congress, the executive branch, and the private sector.

Come and learn the present status and near-term potential of how the cross-section of renewable energy--that is biofuels-biomass, geothermal, solar, water, wind--and energy efficiency technologies are creating jobs and meeting 11.7 percent of domestic U.S. energy production and 12.7 percent of net U.S. electrical generation.

I encourage Members, staff and visitors to attend tomorrow's 15th Annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency EXPO and Forum.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor two very special schools in the Sixth District of Maryland which were honored this year as Federal Blue Ribbon Schools: Bel Air Elementary School in Cumberland and Oklahoma Road Middle School in Eldersburg.

Since 1982, the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program of the Department of Education has recognized schools where students achieve the very highest academic level.

I would like to particularly mention the women who lead these schools.

Mrs. Autumn Eirich brings a spark of excitement to Bel Air Elementary with her positive attitude and her dedication to the school community. She facilitated the Bel Air philosophy: School Centered on Reaching Excellence, or SCORE.

The Oklahoma Road Middle School has adopted the motto, ``Good, Better, Best,'' to encourage educational and social achievement for all their students. Ms. Catherine Hood symbolizes that motto with her leadership style of collegiality and stewardship, which has created an atmosphere of trust and fosters a positive learning environment.

With educational leaders like Autumn Eirich and Catherine Hood and dedicated students like those at Bel Air Elementary and Oklahoma Road Middle School, America's future is bright.

Mr. Chair, I submit the following list of organizations supporting Amendment 8, the Bartlett/Flake Amendment:

American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC)

Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC)

Associated General Contractors (AGC)

Business Coalition for Fair Competition (BCFC)

Construction Industry Round Table (CIRT)

Independent Electrical Contractors (IEC)

Merit Elevator Contractors Association of America (MECAA)

National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC)

National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC)

National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)

National Right to Work (NRTW)

National Taxpayers Union (NTU)

Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBEC)

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Women Construction Owners & Executives, USA (WCOE, USA)

Madam Speaker, I would like to invite America to join me in celebrating a belated birthday party in Frederick County, Maryland.

Just 100 years ago on the 22nd of last month, William Howard Taft convened 700 business leaders in the United States, and they established the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Just 1 day later, through the miracle of communication by wire, delegates from Frederick County asked to be chartered as the first county chamber of commerce in the United States.

Please join me in celebrating this very important belated 100th birthday celebration in Frederick County, Maryland.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This is a very simple amendment. I would first like to make two statements that I think are generally recognized facts. One of those is that only 11.8 percent of our workforce belongs to a PLA; secondly, that PLA contracts in the government on the average cost the taxpayer 12 to 18 percent more than a non-PLA contract.

Our amendment is very simple. It is not prescriptive. It is simply permissive. It says that the government will not discriminate in awarding contracts whether you're a PLA, not PLA, whether it's a mixture of PLA and non-PLA companies, that they will be considered equal and fairly. If, in fact, a PLA contractor is more efficient and does better quality work as they contend, then that will be taken into account in the award of the contract. You do not have to award to the lowest bidder. You can award on the basis of best value.

I think that this amendment is a commonsense amendment that anybody who believes in the free enterprise system ought to support, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to my friend from Arizona (Mr. Flake).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Walberg).

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire how much time remains?

I yield 1 minute to my good friend from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. Chairman, maybe it's because I am a scientist, but I'm having some trouble understanding how an amendment that specifically says that it is nondiscriminatory, that it's going to be totally agnostic to whether an organization is PLA or not PLA, somehow excludes PLAs in contention. That is certainly not what the amendment does.

I think this is a very commonsense amendment. I think that very few Americans would like to exclude nearly 90 percent of American workers in contention for Federal contracts. This is a fair, commonsense amendment, and I urge it's acceptance by both sides.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, if we don't buy these aircraft, it doesn't mean that we won't be buying other rotorcraft because there are missions that must be accomplished. This airplane will replace the CH 46E, and compared to the CH 46E, it has four times the range and carries twice as many combat-loaded personnel.

So the gentleman's goal of reducing spending, his amendment might result in exactly the opposite because obviously for many missions this will be far and away the most efficient aircraft.

Mr. Chairman, we need to reject this amendment because if we pass the amendment, it could very well result in increased costs to our military, not decreased costs, and less efficiency on many missions.

Thank you very much for yielding.

In the late seventies and early eighties, I was a land developer and homebuilder, among other things I was involved in. And I built 41 houses in one subdivision that used direct solar.

Direct solar simply means that you're using the sunlight directly without having it differentially warm the air so that you get wind blowing or turning a wind machine or it's shining on some solar panels that produce electricity.

You can use direct solar for a couple of different things. One is space warming. You simply have a lot of gas on the south side of the house and design it open so the air flows through it, or you can use it for lighting. There is no better light. Any building that's on the top floor, you don't need any windows on the side; you need windows on the top to let light in. It's an enormous energy saver. It's a very efficient use of light. I have no idea why every building shouldn't incorporate direct solar as much.

Thank you, sir, for your amendment. I urge its adoption.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Currently, 189,000 acres of land under control of the Bureau of Land Management adjacent to the Marine Corps Ground Air Combat Center, Twenty-Nine Palms, California, is designated by the 1980 California Desert Conservation Plan as an off-highway vehicle recreation area.

The Marine Corps wants to acquire most of this land, 160,000 acres to 189,000, including the Johnson Valley area, most heavily used for recreation.

Currently, only 2 percent of the California desert is open for motorized off-highway vehicle recreation use with half of this 2 percent being in the Johnson Valley area. The recreational community use of Johnson Valley brings in over $70 million per year to the local economy. The recreational community includes rock hounds, off-highway vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles, campers, hikers, birdwatchers, turtlewatchers, model-airplane groups, and the commercial movie industry.

The Marine Corps has been working very closely with the recreational community in the Bureau of Land Management to find a compromise that's acceptable to all parties. My amendment simply codifies an ongoing process, recognizing the intent of the Marine Corps to submit a report to the Congress recommending the accommodation of the interest of the stakeholders.

I do not believe there's any opposition to this amendment. Indeed, the Marine Corps helped to write these talking points. The Congresspersons who do have districts close enough to be materially affected by this are not opposed to this amendment.

If there's no overt opposition to the amendment, I am prepared to yield back the balance of my time.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I rise in support of H.R. 4310, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013. I have the privilege of serving as the chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. Our jurisdiction includes approximately $65 billion of Department of Defense research, development, and procurement programs within the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and the Air Force.

I want to first thank the subcommittee's ranking member, Silvestre Reyes from Texas, and an incredible staff for their support in the hearing process and in completing the markup of this bill. Under the leadership of Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith, the committee effort is truly bipartisan.

The committee's focus is to support the men and women of the Armed Forces and their families, providing the equipment they need and the support they so deserve. Our first priority is providing the equipment to support our military personnel serving in Afghanistan and other areas where they may be under threat of hostile actions.

Over $2 billion in the President's budget request is recommended to be authorized to address urgent operational needs for the warfighter, to include counter-improvised explosive device requirements. An additional $500 million is provided for the National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account.

The committee bill sustains the Nation's heavy armored production base by maintaining minimum sustained production of upgrade modifications for Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Hercules recovery vehicles. The Army's budget request would result in a production break of 3 to 4 years for the upgrade of these heavy-armored vehicles, which would negatively impact many small businesses.

The committee believes maintaining a minimum sustained production is a better alternative for taxpayer dollars than closing production lines and then paying to reopen the production lines years later. Minimum sustained production would also retain the valuable workforce and supplier base that would otherwise be lost and provide upgraded vehicles to the Army Heavy Brigade Combat teams.

The committee bill would also retain the Air Force's Global Hawk Block 30 unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft to support the deployed warfighter rather than placing these aircraft in storage, as the Air Force plan would do.

In addition the committee bill would fund over 150 helicopters of varying types for the Army and approximately 70 fighter aircraft of varying types for the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith for their support in providing an excellent bill to support the men and women of our armed forces.

I strongly urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to file a supplemental report on the bill, H.R. 4310.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today and urge my colleagues to join me in saluting the 150th Heritage Celebration of what is now known as the Great Frederick Fair of Frederick County, Maryland. I have been attending it now for a third of its life, for 50 years. It will take place May 19 and 20 at the E-ventplex at the Frederick Fairgrounds.

Our Civil War and influenza outbreaks were among the events which precluded consecutive exhibitions since the inception of the first fair with competitions and exhibitions of livestock and other entries organized by the Frederick County Agricultural Society in 1821.

The first such event was entitled the Cattle Show and Fair and was held on May 23 and 24, 1822, at George Creager's Tavern at the Monocacy Bridge. Today the Frederick County Agriculture Society still exists, with 250 life members.

The next venture was the Farmers Club, organized on November 22, 1849, which then held an exhibition where the Maryland School for the Deaf now stands on October 12 14, 1853.

The present site of the Great Frederick Fair was purchased at 797 East Patrick Street in the early 1900s. Construction began in 1911 with the grandstand, which is still used today. The Great Frederick Fair is a testament to the ongoing contributions of farmers to the economy and civic life of Frederick County, Maryland. You need to come. It's the best fair in Maryland.

Mr. Speaker, Baltimore, Maryland, was site of the first blood that was shed in our Civil War on April 19, 1861. The next year, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest one-day military battle in America's history took place on farms along Antietam Creek near the small town of Sharpsburg in Washington County, Maryland.

The 24th Antietam National Battlefield Memorial Illumination will take place on Saturday, December 1, 2012. At twilight, 23,110 luminaries prepared by 1,400 volunteers will be lit, one for each soldier who fell there. Twenty thousand people will personally witness 23,110 individual lights not divided into camps, one Union, the other Confederate, but one unbroken formation across peaceful, rolling farmland on a silent winter night.

The first illumination in 1988 was spearheaded by Georgene Charles, the event's founder, who continues each year to coordinate this monumental effort. Local Girl and Boy Scouts, the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, and others take pride in preparing North America's largest memorial illumination.

I highly recommend you make time to attend the 24th Antietam National Battlefield Memorial Illumination on December 1, 2012. It powerfully reminds us of the true costs of war and the sacrifices by generations of the members of our military and their families. It is a truly moving event. Please come.

Thank you very much for yielding.

I would like to spend just a couple of minutes putting this discussion in context.

I'm from Maryland. I have been there 51 years now, and for 12 years my wife and I ran a small business, meeting a payroll every Wednesday morning. That's pretty good discipline. I wanted to give you some statistics from Maryland.

Now, we're an average, a little smaller than average State. We have only eight Representatives in the Congress. We have something over 5 million people. In our little State, we have 106,441 small businesses. That is a lot of individual businesses. They have between one and 500 employees, and they totally employ 1,105,200 individuals. Now, this is in a little State like Maryland.

It's interesting to see who employs these people. The top three industries by employment:

Over 157,000 in health care and social assistance. This is one of the most rapidly growing segments of our society, which we have to kind of calm down or we won't be able to afford it;

There are over 135,000 employees in professional, scientific, and technical services. And Maryland is probably either number two or number three in biotech in the whole country, so we're proud of that;

We have 133,000 employees in construction. That's down. We used to have more than that, of course, and we hope we can have more in the future.

According to the Census Bureau, of the small businesses in Maryland, 15,717 are women-owned, and they employ 147,751 employees.

I would just like to note that, before the recent increase in employment in Hispanic small businesses, that women-owned small business are the fastest growing small businesses in our country. They are better employers than men. Men and women are different. Our military has a little trouble figuring that out sometimes, but they are different. They are ranked to be better employers by their employees, so let's give a way to women who are entering the small business community.

In addition to this, to these small businesses, in 2009, Maryland was home to 365,492 sole proprietorships. These are small businesses with one person in them, sole proprietorships.

Many of these self-employed small businesses also benefit from the 20 percent small business tax cut in H.R. 9, which is one of the things we are focusing on this evening, because I understand that we're voting on that tomorrow.

A couple of interesting statistics:

Between '05 and '08, small business created a net total of 63,576 new jobs in Maryland, but in just '08 and '09, we've lost 57,433. So we just are barely up in small business now because of how many of those small businesses we lost.

One of the previous speakers mentioned the Tax Code and how we need to make it simpler and fairer. Let's just talk about the Fair Tax for just a moment.

If we went to the Fair Tax--that's a tax on consumption--then let's repeal the 16th Amendment. Don't give the government any chance to ever come back with a personal income tax again. If we did that, we could have a bigger tax revenue with no increase in tax burden, because the tax burden today is not just the tax as you pay, but the $200 billion that it costs businesses and individuals across their country every year to comply with the code.

I don't know anybody out there who wouldn't be happy to roll that compliance cost into the tax burden so that now the revenues will go up with no increase in tax burden. That's one of the things that we need to do to balance the budget. If we just went to the Fair Tax with no increase in tax burden, we'd have $200 billion a year more money flowing into the U.S. Treasury and small business would be a big part of this.

Mr. Speaker, when I looked at the television this morning and at that little crawler across the top of one of our stations, I noticed that oil was $103 a barrel--$103 a barrel and we're in a recession. What's happening here?

So I've got a chart here that goes back a few years--in fact, it ends in, what, 2008. There we have oil at something less than $100 a barrel. But if you extended this chart out just a little bit, you would see that it had jumped up to $147 a barrel, and that's of course aided by the housing bubble collapse. The economy came tumbling down and the price of oil dropped down to something under about here, $140 a barrel. Now it has crept back up slowly, slowly, as supply was not able to keep up with demand, until we now have oil at $103 a barrel and we're in a recession.

This is an interesting chart because it was maybe predicting something that we were sure was going to happen at some time or other, but we weren't sure when it was going to happen, and that's a phenomenon called peak oil. Peak oil is that highest production that you can achieve for a country--it occurs in a country, it occurs in a region, it occurs in the world. That peak for us occurred in 1970.

Today, in spite of all that we have done in the most creative, innovative society in the world, the United States, today we produce half the oil that we did in 1970, and we've drilled more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together. Well, here we see that the two entities which do a really good job of tracking the production and consumption--which are the same; we don't have any big stores anywhere of oil, so the consumption is the same thing as the production of oil--and they looked like they had plateaued. They had been going up and up and up. Every time we needed more oil, we could produce more oil. But we ran out of our ability to do that. And as the production stagnated and the demand kept going up, wow, look what happened to the price. It really spiked in the price, and it went up to $147 a barrel.

We weren't sure then that this might not have been just a little ripple in the upswing of production of oil, but we

now know that it wasn't, that the caption up there is right, ``Peak Oil, Are We There Yet?'' Apparently so, as you will see subsequently.

This is an interesting chart and a very new one. This was produced by Deutsche Bank and their economist there. It is looking now not at the production of oil, but at the rate of increase. The little left-hand bar here I think is quite optimistic--I hope that that happens. I doubt that that will happen as we will see in a few moments. But they're looking at an increase in production of about 5 billion barrels a day. The world has been stuck now for 5 years at 84 million barrels of oil a day, and this looks at increasing that production by 5. This is capacity by the way, this is capacity at any price. This is how much more you could produce no matter what the price was. Obviously you could produce more oil if it's $200 a barrel because you could develop fields that you can't develop at $100 a barrel, and you'll produce more oil if people are willing to pay $7 a gallon for their gas rather than $3.80 a gallon for their gas.

So this is their optimistic projection of what capacity increase could be, and this is a reality of what demand will be. This is the increase in demand--not total demand, because we still are the biggest consumers of energy in the world. But our demand rate is not going up. As a matter of fact it's fallen off a bit. We used to import 21 million barrels a day, that's one-fourth of the world's oil. Now we're importing I think about 18.5 million barrels a day. That's nice that we became more efficient, because the Chinese, in their economic growth, needed more oil. And the fact that we're using less has made more available to them because they're increasing about 6 percent a year in their use of oil.

Well, what this shows is that there is a 20 percent deficit here. This is capacity at any price. If we went full bore--just producing oil everywhere we could produce it--their prognostication is that by 2015 we're going to have a 20 percent shortfall in supply, even if we maximize capacity by having very high prices for oil.

Now the next chart will show you why I think this is an optimistic assumption of what will happen. Let me show you this chart.

There are two charts here. The first one of these, the top one, appeared in 2008, the bottom one appeared in 2010. This is the International Energy Agency, it's the world energy outlook. This is a creature of the OECD in Europe. We have a kindred organization, the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, which is a part of our Department of Energy. And I don't have them with me, but they have very similar charts that are saying essentially the same thing.

The top chart they had on their Web site in 2008, let's take a look at that. It's really a very interesting chart. This bottom dark blue here--if the chart was very long and it went way over to the far wall over there back 100 years ago when we started using oil, it would have started at zero. And every time we needed more oil, we could pump more oil, and so it just kept rising and rising and rising.

And now here we are at a total liquid fuels of 84 million barrels a day. Not all of that is usable in your gas tank. The top one here is natural gas liquids that will increase. We found a lot more natural gas. The price has dropped now to about $3.

The green one here, which is small now and projected to grow, and that will grow, that's unconventional oil. That's oil that you get from things like the tar sands in Alberta, Canada.

But, as you notice here, they're predicting a fairly precipitous drop-off in production from the fields that we're now pumping. This is crude oil currently producing fields. Up until now, every time we've needed more oil from those fields, all we had to do was to suck a little harder in the wells and the oil came up. What they're predicting here is that that won't be true for the future, that the world is now going to experience the situation the United States has been in since 1970, that is, no matter what you do, production of oil will drop off from the fields that you're now pumping.

The dark red here is enhanced oil recovery. That really should be a part of the bottom one here because it's just squeezing a little bit more oil out of the fields you're presently pumping by putting live steam down there, or CO2 down there or seawater. Saudi Arabia uses a lot of seawater to force their oil out. It's easily separated after you've gotten it to the surface.

Now, they're predicting that by 2030, on this chart, that we'll be producing 106 million barrels of oil a day, up from the 84 million barrels of oil that we are producing today. In order to do that, with the production dropping off from the fields that we are pumping now, we're going to have to get oil somewhere else, and there are two somewhere elses that they're talking about.

One of those is this light blue, and that's developing fields which we have now discovered which are too difficult and expensive to develop, even with oil at $100 a barrel, like a big find in the Gulf of Mexico that was under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. But at some price--and I heard $111 a barrel, that sounds pretty precise-- that at $111 a barrel, they could begin developing that field.

Then the red here, the bright red is fields yet to be discovered. These are fields we haven't discovered yet, but we will discover them, and they're projecting that we'll be able to develop those fields.

So we have these two big wedges in here that will keep the production of oil going up from the 84 million barrels a day now for liquid fuels to 106 million barrels a day in 2030.

Now, 2 years later, the same organization did another prognostication, and that's the one on the bottom here. This time they go out to 2035 instead of 2030. They go out 5 years further, and now they have reduced their expectations from 106 million barrels of oil a day to just 96 million barrels of oil a day. As they look at the prospects out there, they are persuaded that we're not going to be able to reach that 106 million barrels a day, so now they're prognosticating, 5 years later, only 96 million barrels a day.

The top two curves here are exactly the same thing. They've flipped them, and they've changed the colors. The top one here now is unconventional oil, and the second one is natural gas liquids. Notice here that, even taking the enhanced oil recovery and putting that little wedge down here with the production from the fields currently producing, they have a really precipitous fall-off. They're looking at those 2 years later and say, Look at them. Wow, they are really decreasing in production faster than we thought they were, so we're going to have even less oil than we thought we would have. So now they have two huge wedges.

If you look at this line, this heavy dark line here, that's the liquid fuels that can go in your gas tank, and that's barely moving up, isn't it? It's just about flat there, and they keep it flat by having these two wedges that are really, really large. By 2035, what, three- fourths of all the liquid fuels that we're producing are going to come from fields that we're producing nothing from now.

Now, I want to go back to the previous chart where they had this prognostication about the growth of 5 billion barrels a day by '15. This goes clear out to '35 and they're only up to 96. But we need to note that that was capacity no matter what the cost, and that may be true. That may be true that could you get there, but, you know, we'd not like to see oil at $200 a barrel, would we? Our economy would not respond very well to that.

By the way, if you go on their Web site, you may have difficulty finding the lower chart. Some have told me it's not there at all, and you won't find the upper chart. It's a little embarrassing to have these two charts side by side showing how much your predictions changed in just 2 years, from '08 to '10.

The next chart kind of puts this in perspective of the world, and this is a very interesting chart, and it's one--you know the old saying, a picture's worth a thousand words. Boy, this says it, doesn't it?

This is the world according to oil, and this is what the world would look like if the square miles of terrain on a country were equal to the amount of oil they had; what would the world look like?

You see here that Saudi Arabia is dominating the world. They have 22 percent of all the reserves in the world. We're not really sure that's what they

have; that's what they tell us they have. But, you know, they won't open their books. None of these OPEC countries--and you see they have the lion's share of all the oil reserves. None of them will open their books, and we don't really know for sure how much oil is there, but we do know that they're still pumping large amounts of oil. And that's what they say they have, and so that's what the chart here depicts.

I want to take just a moment to commend our military. They're taking some flak recently for what they're doing. I think that they're doing exactly the right thing for several different reasons.

They're moving as quickly as they can from fossil fuels, from oil to alternatives, and they're doing that for a couple of very good reasons. One is, if you can avoid transporting that oil, if you can use the-- create the alternatives nearer to where you are using them, you will avoid a huge cost in both treasure and lives, because a significant number of the people killed in these wars are killed in the convoys that are bringing fuel.

I understand that the weight of the fuel that they bring is--about 70 percent of everything they haul to the warfront is fuel. It reminds a little--I understand that in the canal boats on the C&O Canal that about 70 percent of what they carried was food for the mules. And so it hasn't changed a lot, has it? We still--this energy source is about 70 percent of all the weight that we carry.

So I want to take just a moment to commend our military for doing exactly the right thing. They are really forward-looking. For the moment, you know, you may pay a little more for the alternatives, but, you know, since the liquid fuels from conventional sources just aren't going to be there in the future without something happening that almost nobody who's knowledgeable in this field thinks will happen, they're doing exactly the right thing, and I want to commend them for what they are doing.

They are recognizing that the world will inevitably--inevitably-- transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The first person that articulated that--although it would seem that anybody would understand, since the Moon isn't made of green cheese and the Earth isn't made of oil, that the fossil fuels are finite and one day they will be gone.

But the first person that I know of who really recognized that, a prominent person, was Hyman Rickover, who made the statement, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. He had no idea how long it would last, but he said how long it lasted was important in only one regard: The longer it lasted, the more time we would have to find an orderly transition to alternative sources of energy.

Our military is doing exactly that, and they are not totally understood by everybody. And I just wanted to commend them for their foresight and their tenacity in pursuing these programs.

Let's just spend a couple more moments with this chart because it is so meaningful.

Here we are, the United States. We're this yellow color because we use a lot of oil per capita, and we're that size because that's all the oil we have. We represent reserves of about 2 percent of the reserves in the world and we use 25 percent, maybe a whisker less than that now, of oil in the world, and we import about two-thirds of what we use.

Our number one importer, by the way, is Canada, and they have less oil than we, but they don't have very many people, so they can export. The number two importer was Mexico, but now they have fallen to number three and Saudi Arabia is now our number two importer.

A very interesting experience in Mexico, a fisherman by the name of Cantoral kept bringing his nets into the national oil company saying, Your spilled oil messed up my fishing net; you need to give me a new one. PIMEX is the national company, and so they would give him a new net. He kept bringing them in. They said, Gee, we didn't think we spilled that much oil. Where are you finding this oil? He said, Come, I will show you. And it was kind of bubbling up out of the ocean, and they drilled there, and for a number of years they had the second largest field in the world in terms of production, second only to Garwar, which is the granddaddy of all fields. It's been pumping now for half a century in Saudi Arabia, and I still think it pumps something like 5 million barrels a day, which is about what we pump from our country, and that's from a single field in Saudi Arabia.

The European Union, Europe, is a bit bigger than we are in terms of economy, and let's see if we can find them on the map. Well, there's Norway. It looks pretty big compared to some of the other countries, and here they are with essentially no oil production, totally dependent on liquid fuels from this part of the world.

But even more alarming is looking over there at India and China; 1.3 million people in China and a billion people in India, and look at the little bit of oil that they have. Here is India; here is China. While collectively they have about as much oil as--less than the United States because we have a big chunk of our oil coming from Alaska up here.

Recognizing this reality, the Chinese are now buying oil all over the world. Not only do they buy oil; they also buy goodwill. What do you need? A hospital? Roads? A soccer stadium? I asked the State Department, you know, we have only 2 percent of the oil in the world, and we are using 25 percent of the oil in the world. How come we aren't buying oil all over the world?

Well, you don't really need to own the oil. It really makes very little difference who owns the oil because the person who comes with the money--and its dollars now, and let's hope it stays dollars or we have a big problem--they go to the global oil auction and they buy oil at the going price. Today it was $103 a barrel.

So I asked the State Department why is China buying oil and we're not buying any oil. They said, We don't think China understands the marketplace. Well, at that time I think China was growing at 16 or 18 percent. There was some, I think, some presumptive indication that a country that's growing at 16 or 18 percent kind of understands the marketplace.

So why would China be buying oil?

Let me suggest something--I hope I'm wrong: China has 900 million people in rural areas that through the miracle of communications know the benefits of an industrialized society; and they're saying, Hey, guys, what about us, because they are not sharing in the benefits of an industrialized society. If China can't bring some modicum of the benefits that accrue to a citizen in an industrialized society, they see perhaps their empire unraveling, much as the Soviet empire unraveled, and so they are bending every effort to make sure that they have adequate resources for these 900 million people and the other 600 million people who are in urban areas.

At the same time that China is buying up oil all over the world, they're very aggressively building a blue water navy. A brown water navy is what they're concerned about as protecting their coastal area, and it serves them quite well, by the way; and it is cheaper and more quickly developed. But they're very aggressively building a blue water navy and access-denial technologies that will keep us away if they wish to.

I hope the time doesn't come when the Chinese say, Gee, I'm sorry but it's our oil. And it will be their oil, and they bought it, and we can't share it because right now it doesn't matter who has the oil. It's shared in the global oil auction.

Well, so this map indicates that the future is fraught with some possibilities of some pretty meaningful geopolitical tensions; and, again, I want to commend our military for their foresight recognizing this reality and the reality that oil is $103 a barrel. By the way, when oil goes up just a dollar a barrel, it makes a big dent in what they can do. They can provide less health care, they can have less people, have less R&D, buy less of platforms when oil goes up because energy is a huge part of the cost of the military. So, again, applaud the military for their foresight and what they're doing.

This is a chart that was predicted in 1956. Here we were in 1956 in the United States. At that time we were the king of oil. We were pumping more oil. We were using more oil. We were exporting

more oil than anybody else in the world. Texas had a bigger chunk in that oil, you see, than the rest of the United States here.

On the sixth day of March, 1956, an oil geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert, and I've got his actual curve here in the next chart in just the next moment, made a prediction in 1956--here we are. Get the picture. The United States, king of oil, biggest producer, biggest consumer, and biggest exporter. He is saying in 14 years, by about 1970, we're going to reach our maximum oil production, and no matter what we do after that, oil production is going to go down. How could he predict that?

What he had done was to notice the production and exhaustion of individual oil fields. By 1956 we had enough of those that he could see there was kind of a bell curve kind of up and then down as you were developing, exploiting, and pumping those fields out.

So he rationalized, gee, if I could add up all the little oil fields that we will have in our country, then I will get one big bell curve and I can predict when it's going to peak. He did that and said it's going to peak about 1970. Sure enough, right on target, it peaked in about 1970.

Now, we shortly found a huge amount of oil in Alaska. Oh, by the way, the top one here is natural gas, liquids again, and we were just learning how to use those, and so they were a meaningful part of our energy availability.

There was a little blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak with this enormous supply of oil from Alaska for awhile. I don't know what exactly it is today, but a fourth of all of the oil production in our country came from Alaska. Then the fabled discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico; and we see them down here, and they hardly made a ripple in the slide down the other side of what's called Hubbert's peak.

Now, here's a curve. This is kind of a chart that a statistician, I guess, would use. Here we are 1970, and Hubbert said we're going to be sliding down the other side, and Hubbert's peak is the little triangles with the yellow in them. The actual lower 48 production is the green, and the total production adding in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico is the red. Of course, he didn't include Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. It was only the lower 48.

A statistician might argue that these two curves are different. I think the average citizen looking at it would say, gee, I think M. King Hubbert got it about right, didn't he.

The next chart is a very good prediction of where we are and the challenge, which is recognized by our military.

This is where we get our energy from today. And this is 2004. It hasn't changed a whole lot since 2004. But coal, this much. Natural gas--natural gas is going up a little more. That's getting bigger because it's now really cheap, and it's pushing some of coal out, and some people are afraid of nuclear, may squeeze a bit of that out. Here's petroleum, about 40 percent of all of our energy.

Here are renewables.

Now, as Hyman Rickover indicated, one day these two things, renewables and nuclear, are going to fill this whole circle. It is inevitable. It's not tomorrow, by the way, and we are not running out of oil. We have more oil to pump than all the oil that's been pumped in all the history of the world. What we're running out of is our ability to pump this oil as fast as we would like to use it.

Here is a gross breakdown of the renewables. Solar, wow. Look at how small it is there. Wind is growing now, and these two things might be a bit bigger now if we updated this chart. But the important thing here to note is hydroelectric; that's been there for a while. Biomass, and that's primarily burning waste and paper mills and things like that and much of that is not new technology.

Geothermal, that's true geothermal, tapping into the molten core of the Earth. That could be bigger. It should be bigger. Whenever we can do that, we really need to take advantage of that. That's essentially an inexhaustible source of energy.

But this shows us the challenge that we face. We really are up to this challenge, and a part of this, this is green. Now, people who are green-focused, they say we need to be doing more. This is for a couple of reasons. Some because of the carbon footprint, and others because they say, gee, the fossil fuels just aren't going to be there. No matter what your premise is, the solution is exactly the same thing.

So rather than criticizing each other's premise, I would hope we would lock arms and march forward to go to more renewables.

Here is our last chart, because our time is about up today. Five years ago, I led a codel to China. Nine of us went to China, and we spent about a week there, and we went there to talk about energy.

I was stunned--we all were stunned--because China began its discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Wow. Of course, it would be a post-oil world. I mean, Rickover predicted it. Gee, everything is not oil out there. One day, it will come to an end. Yet this is not tomorrow. This is probably 100, 150 years from now. So this is a really long-term policy. Everybody we talked to--and it wasn't just the energy people--everybody we talked to talked about this post- oil strategy, and here are the five points:

One, conservation: the cheapest oil you will get is the oil you don't use.

Two, domestic sources of energy.

Three, diversify those sources as much as you can.

Number four will surprise you.

Four, be kind to the environment.

They know they aren't, but they have these 900 billion people who are requiring the benefits of an industrialized society, so they're choking on coal-fired power plants that they build one of each week. They're building, I understand, 100 nuclear power plants, and I'm sure they will retire the coal-fired plants when they get them.

I will close with the fifth point.

Five, they are pleading for international cooperation.

If you think about it for just a moment, we have a real problem here. If the United States really gets serious about conservation and efficiency and about saving energy--and we'd better--some will argue, wow, that will just empower the Chinese more because then they're going to use that energy that we make more available and cheaper, and they're going to compete with us economically, and that's not a good thing.

So from a selfish perspective, unless everybody does it, nobody is going to do it, which is why the Chinese are pleading for international cooperation, because they know that it's not going to have as happy an ending if we don't have international cooperation. Yet while they plead for international cooperation, they have plan B: What if it doesn't happen? We buy up oil in the world, and then we have a navy big enough to make sure that we have access to that oil in the world.

We are the most innovative, creative society in the history of the world, and I can see America once again an exporting country, and it should be green technology. Much of what we're now importing from China and from other places in the world we created here, and then it migrated over there for production. That's why every 15 hours we have another billion-dollar increase in the trade deficit. I want that thing reversed, and I think we can reverse that by recognizing that we have a huge challenge--following the lead of our military and going to renewables as efficiently and as quickly as we can.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.