Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 54 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, April 18, 2008, at 9 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I believe that this is the 41st

time that I have come to the floor since 3 years ago, the 14th day of March, to talk about energy, specifically about oil.

Here is a copy of the Washington Times today. The main headline: ``Global Food Riots Turn Deadly.'' And then if I turn to the front page ``promo-ing'' what's inside, Business, Gas Hits Record: ``The upward trend in energy prices showed no sign of abating yesterday as gasoline set another record at the pump and crude oil topped $112 a barrel for the first time in the futures market.''

If I go back to the lead article, it says clashes likely to persist with soaring prices. ``Anger over spiraling world food prices is becoming increasingly violent.'' This is a quote from the head of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization: ``World food prices have risen 45 percent in the last 9 months, and there are serious shortages,'' serious shortages, ``of rice, wheat, and corn. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a personal appeal for calm in Haiti yesterday. At least five people have been reported killed in disturbances since last week after the cost of rice doubled and gas prices rose a third time since February.''

This could have been predicted 28 years ago. I will explain in a few moments why I use 28 years ago. It was an absolute certainty that at some point in time, roughly this time, that we would be here talking about this crisis.

This first chart is an interesting one. The motorist is looking at today $3 and 30 some cents a gallon for gasoline, and he says, ``Just why is gas so expensive?'' He has a tiny little supply there and a huge, big demand in his SUV. And, Madam Speaker, that's why gas prices are high. There is more demand for gas than there is gas available, and the marketplace demands that the price of gasoline go up.

This saga started 52 years ago, the 8th day of March, in San Antonio, Texas, when what I believe will be recognized shortly as the most important speech given in the last century was delivered to a group of oil scientists and engineers and executives in San Antonio, Texas.

The next chart shows the prediction that was made in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, who was this oil geologist. He was talking to a group of people representing the country, our country, which was then king of oil, producing more oil, consuming more oil, exporting more oil than any other country in the world. And he told them that in just 14 years, no matter what we did before or after that, that oil production would reach a maximum in our country and after that it would go down, down, down. What he said was audacious and disbelieved, but 14 years later, in 1970, right on schedule, we peaked in oil production.

And this is a chart which shows that peaking. It shows Texas producing a third or so of the oil at that time and the rest of the United States. Natural gas liquids added to that. And then it shows the enormous discovery of oil in Alaska, and I have been there to Prudhoe Bay, Dead Horse, and I have seen the beginning of that 4 foot pipeline through which for a number of years now a full fourth of our domestic production of oil flowed. That is now tapering off.

The yellow there are the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. You notice that in his prediction that we would reach a peak in 1970, there was just a blip in the downward slope produced by the huge discovery in Alaska. He had not included Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico in his prediction. It was just the lower 48. And notice there was hardly a ripple of those famed discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico.

The next chart shows another depiction of the Hubbert Peak. And I show this one because this is used by a group, CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, to try to convince you that you should not be alarmed by M. King Hubbert's prediction, that the world would be doing now about the same thing the United States did in 1970 because he was wrong about the United States in 1970. They said, you see, his prediction of what the production of oil would be are these yellow triangles and the actual production were the green squares and he missed it.

Well, maybe a statistician could give you an analysis which could say he had missed it, but I think to the average citizen, those two curves look pretty darn similar, don't they? And I think the average citizen would say I think he probably got it. We did peak in 1970, and in spite of what we have done then, in the lower 48, we pretty much followed that curve.

And then this is the red now. That includes the total production which includes Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1979 M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would reach its maximum oil production about now. And the next chart is a very insightful one. If you had only one chart to use to discuss this subject, this would be the chart that you would use. It shows the discoveries of oil. We discovered a whole lot of it back in the 1940s. I actually remember those times very well. My first car was a 1936 Ford, made just 10 years after I was born. Then lots of discoveries in 1950 and the 1960s and 1970s. And notice what has happened, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000, down, down, down in discovery. And that's in spite of ever better techniques for finding oil. 3-D seismic and computer modeling and, boy, we've mapped the world, and we know pretty much where oil is likely to be found because it's found in only very unique geologic formations and we know what they are and we know where they likely exist.

Now, the solid black line here is our consumption of oil, and it's also our production because we haven't been storing huge amounts of it anywhere. We have a small strategic reserve in our country, small in terms of the oil that we use in a year, really small. So we aren't storing it anywhere; so what we have consumed is what we have produced. And you see that that shows an ever-increasing slope here.

Up through the Carter years, every decade, we used as much oil as we had used in all of previous history. I want you to reflect on that for just a moment. What that meant was, of course, if we had kept on that trend, when we had used half of the world's oil, and it is finite, and when we used half of the world's oil, we would have just 10 years of oil left at that rate of usage.

Now, in the 1970s, late 1970s, we had the oil price spike hikes as a result of the Arab oil embargo, and that caused a worldwide recession. You see here that the use of oil actually dropped off. It caused a worldwide recession and we woke up. We said we can get things done more efficiently. So now with an increasing economy, greatly increased economy, we are now using oil at an ever less increasing rate. This slope, it's very much less than this slope, and that reflects the increased efficiencies that we have built in. Your air conditioner today is maybe three times as efficient as it was in the 1970s. Your refrigerator is two or three times as efficient as it was then.

Notice that ever since 1982 or so, we have been using more oil than we found. And we were able to do that because we had these huge reserves back here. So what we have been doing ever since the early 1980s is dipping into these reserves and using some of this oil that we found and didn't need because the area under this curve represents the oil that we have used. And, obviously, if you add up all these bars, it represents the oil we found, and you could put a curve over those, and the area under that curve would then represent the oil that we found. So we now have used this area here in terms of our reserves, and we used about this much reserves probably; so we have a whole bunch left.

So what will the future look like? Now, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would be reaching its maximum oil production about now. And this chart you see at about 2008, 2010, it shows it peaking. Now, you can within limits make the future look reasonably whatever way you want it to look like, but you cannot pump what is not there. If you are really aggressive and build a whole lot of wells and flood them with live steam and pump CO2 down there and flood them with seawater, which is what they do in Saudi Arabia, you can get the oil out quicker.

But what you use now will not be there to use tomorrow. How much more will we find? Well, they have shown a smooth discovery curve getting ever less and less. It won't be smooth like that. It will be up and

down. But if I were drawing a line and projecting it out, I wouldn't have drawn it quite that high. And I don't think you would either. You would draw it somewhere below that. I think that is maybe an optimistic assessment of what we will find in the future if what we have discovered in the past is any measure of what we will discover in the future.

The next chart is a chart which M. King Hubbert anticipated. This is an interesting one because it represents data from the two best organizations in the world for tracking the production and consumption of oil. Because as I said before, we use what we found pretty quickly. We haul it across the ocean, refine it and use it. This is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Energy, and the IEA, the International Energy Association. That one most people are familiar with because El Baradei is the head of that. And they have been kind of monitoring what is going on in Iran. You see them frequently in the newspaper.

Notice that for the last 3 years roughly they show the production of oil as constant. There have been several appeals. You will read about them in the newspaper: Saudi Arabia, OPEC, won't you please produce some more oil? What OPEC says is, we think we are producing enough oil. I think that the correct answer really is, we can't produce oil any faster than we are producing it. I think that they have probably reached their maximum production of oil. The little blue line here shows what has happened to price, and notice in the last year or so what has happen to price, up, up, up.

The first time I came to the floor here, as I said, was a bit more than 3 years ago and oil was, what, 50 and a couple of dollars a barrel. Now today it was $112 a barrel.

The production of oil has remained constant. The demand for oil has gone up. That is really a simple relationship. When the demand for a product is greater than the supply of the product, people bid it up. It is like at an auction. If two or three people want something, and there is only one of the thing they want, they bid it up to ridiculously high levels. And that is what is happening with oil. To get it, you have to outbid the other guy. And so now it is $112 a barrel.

The next chart is a schematic chart. And it shows the same curve we have been looking at. And by the way, it is obvious that we can make this curve really sharp by simply expanding the ordinate and compressing the abscissa. Here it is spread out. But in any event, this follows a roughly 2 percent increase in use. That doesn't sound like much, does it? As a matter of fact, our stock market gets really jittery when our growth is only 2 percent. It is going to have to get over that, Madam Speaker, because we can't continue 2 percent growth forever. With 2 percent growth, it doubles in 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years. It is 8 times bigger in 105 years. And it is 16 times bigger in 140 years.

Now, when your only perspective is the next quarterly report or getting yourself through the next election, this 2 percent growth, which in 140 years from now will be 16 times bigger, makes whatever is growing at 2 percent, 16 times bigger may not seem very important to you. But I have ten kids and 16 grandkids and two great grandkids. And I would sure like them to live in a world as comfortable as the world I live in and to have the opportunities that I've had.

This yellow here represents a growing gap. If, in fact, we are at this point, and the charts that we have just seen would indicate that we probably are, then the increasing demand is going to result in a deficit which will be reflected in higher oil prices and higher gas prices at the pump. The big focus that most people are talking about is, gee, how are we going to fill that gap? Let me suggest, Madam Speaker, that we are not going to fill that gap. There are no readily available substitutes for oil out there. A little bit of this and a little of that, if you sum them all up, they are still far short of the amount of oil we are now using.

Now we are going to continue to have oil. We are not running out of oil. What we are doing is running out of our ability to produce oil as fast as we would like to use it. There will be oil, gas and coal around for another 150 years, ever less and less, harder and harder to get, at higher and higher costs.

The next chart is really a quote from what I think will shortly be recognized perhaps as the most insightful speech given in the last century, given 51 years ago, the 14th day of this May. Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, gave this speech to a group of physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota. You can find that. There is a link in our Website to it, or you can simply do a Google search for ``Rickover energy speech,'' and it will pop up. It was a really insightful speech.

In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 AD, world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion. He kind of missed that. World population is about 7 billion people now. With 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent of that period, with way more than 90 percent of that growth taking place in the last 5 percent of that period. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to account the first doubling of population, 100 years from the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years. As a matter of fact, it required considerably less than 50 years.

The next chart is not a chart of population growth, but it could just as well have been. This is a chart showing the increase in energy availability, our consumption of energy. And if I superimpose on this a chart of population growth, it would follow this almost exactly. Our world population has grown from half a billion or so to 7 billion people, and most of it, as Hyman Rickover pointed, in the last little while. And look, I don't go back 8,000 years. I only go back 400 years, but if I went back the rest of the 8,000 years, it would still be pretty much down near zero.

The Industrial Revolution began with wood. And then we found coal. And boy, did it take off when we found gas and oil. Now here we see that discontinuity in the 1970s, what we have done here, of course, is to expand the ordinate and compress the abscissa so that we have a very sharp curve. That is the same curve we have seen several times before. But it looks different depending on the scale you have in the ordinate and in the abscissa.

The next chart is some data in Hyman Rickover's speech. And it is even more so today. With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living, he said. Thus, the enormous fossil fuel which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us a master of an army of mechanical slaves. This was 51 years ago. What he said then is true even more so today. He said that we represent, I have seen data a little more than this, roughly 35 watts of energy, sleeping and waking. Standing here and talking here, I am more like a 70-watt bulb. That is not very much, is it? As a matter of fact, if you look at the amount of food which you eat in a day, if you dried it, if you burned it and made a fire of it, it would hardly warm your fingers on a cold day. Just look at the C Rations that our military uses and how compact they are. You put water in them and they swell up. They look like a lot. But the actual dry material there is not much. In fact, he said 51 years ago, the household appliances that make life so comfortable for the family represented the work output of 33 men. He said that the machines which make our cars and refrigerators and so forth represent 244 men. Two thousand men push your automobile down the road. The energy it takes to move your car down the road is the energy of 2,000 men working. One hundred thousand men push the locomotive down the road. And 700,000 men push the jet plane through the sky.

When I first saw the data that said that one barrel of oil represented 25,000 man hours of effort, the work output of 12 people working all year, I said to myself, gee, that can't be. But then I thought, I have a Prius car. I bought the first one in Congress and the first one in Maryland. And a gallon of gasoline is still cheaper than water in the grocery store, by the way, if you buy it in the little bottles. I thought about how far that gallon of gasoline takes my car and how long it would take me to pull it those 47 miles that the gallon of gasoline takes my car. I said, gee, it is probably true that one barrel of oil represents the work output of 12 people working all year. Now we are the beneficiaries of an incredible quality of life

which is the result, the direct result of our access to all of this energy.

The next chart is another quote from Hyman Rickover, whether this Golden Age, and it is a golden age. Nobles of old lived nowhere near as well as we live today. The poorest in our country, maybe it's not quite true in other countries, live better than nobles of yesteryear because of the incredible access that we have to this energy. Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population. Now we haven't done that or we wouldn't have headlines like this today: ``Global food riots turn deadly.''

In a few moments, I will discuss the relationship between those global food riots and this other headline: ``Gas hits a record.''

Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of civilization. For if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength, mental and physical, to obtain the bare necessities of life.

This article on food notes that in much of the third world, 50 to 60 percent of the income of the family goes to food. Do you know what that is in our country? It is less than 10 percent. Food doubling in price in our country doesn't mean much. But if you're paying 50 percent of your income to buy food, and it doubles in price, then it takes 100 percent of your income to buy that food. So it really, really is important to the poor of the world.

A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always, in the past, led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.

The next is another quote in from Hyman Rickover. By the way, Madam Speaker, I am going through these quotes, and then I am going to use quotes from four studies that our government has paid for with our taxpayers' money and then ignored. And what I am going to be asking is, with this history, with this great speech given by Hyman Rickover 51 years ago, and with the warnings in these four studies released over the last several years, why aren't you hearing more about a meaningful program to address this energy challenge that we face?

There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserve. They were created by solar energy a long time ago, he says 500 million years ago, it took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, that's a great statement. Just reflect on this.

The exact length of time that these reserves will last is important in only one respect.

Now he didn't know how long they were going to last because he didn't know how long this Golden Age will last. But we now know pretty much. It will be, Madam Speaker, about 300 years long. We are about 150 years into it. We are now at the pinnacle of the Golden Age. Will it be in another 150 years as these fossil fuels become less and less available at higher and higher costs?

The exact length of time that these reserves will last is important in only one respect. The longer they last, the more time that we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift. Fifty-one years ago. Really prophetic.

Madam Speaker, with this kind of insightful advice 51 years ago, with headlines like this in the paper, with these four reports paid for by our government, why haven't we done something? Why aren't we doing something?

``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank.''

I love this statement. ``A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living, and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.''

With the shortages in oil, which have driven up the price of gasoline, they want me to vote to drill in ANWR and offshore. I have got 10 kids, 16 grandkids and two great-grandkids, and I ask them, if you can drill in ANWR tomorrow, what would you do the day after tomorrow? And there will be a day after tomorrow.

We are leaving our kids a horrendous debt, growing by leaps and bounds. Not with my vote, if you will check the record, but we are leaving them that debt. And I ask those who would like me to vote to drill in ANWR and offshore, wouldn't it be nice if I left my kids and my grand-kids and my great grandkids a little energy to deal with this horrendous debt?

The next is a quote also from Hyman Rickover. You can see why I believe this will be shortly recognized as perhaps the most insightful speech given in the last century. ``I suggest this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibility to our descendants.'' Wow, 51 years ago, and there are very few who are thinking soberly at all about this today.

``I suggest this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the fossil fuel age. We must give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption.''

Wow. 51 years ago. And what we have done since then, with no more responsibility than the kids who found the cookie jar or the hog who found the feed room door open, we just have been pigging out on energy, as if it were forever, as if there was an endless supply. It is obviously finite. The moon isn't made out of green cheese and the Earth isn't made out of oil. I see chairs and trees and grass and sticks and stones out there. Obviously it isn't all oil, and it is not going to last forever.

``So as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually will be made in a world without fossil fuel.''

A year ago, Christmas-New Year's break, I led a codel of nine to China to talk about energy. They began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. In an environment where it is hard for us to see beyond the next quarterly report or the next election, they are looking generations and centuries down the road. There will be a post- oil world. It is not going to be totally post-oil for about another 150 years, but increasingly there is going to be less and less, higher and higher costs, more and more difficult to get.

The next chart is just kind of a repeat of the wise advice he has been giving. ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. Ultimately the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant.''

I am going to show a chart a little later that shows that China is buying up energy oil all over the world. They kind of understand that. ``If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.''

I will show a chart in a few moments that shows we have 2 percent of the oil, we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and import almost two- thirds of what we use. We don't even come close to following the wise advice that he gave 51 years ago.

Now, four studies, and here they are. The Hirsch Report, February 2005. This is a big study done by SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, a big prestigious international corporation, paid for by our Department of Energy.

Here is a second report paid for by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, paid for by the Army, done by the Corps: ``Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations.'' It could have been U.S. or world, because our army is a microcosm of the U.S. and world.

A second Hirsch Report, ``Peaking of World Oil Production, Recent Forecasts.''

Then the third of these reports, which your government has asked for and paid for, as a matter of fact, this one I asked for as a senior member of the Science Committee, this is done by GAO. ``Crude Oil. Uncertainty About Future Oil Supply Makes It Important To Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production.'' Where have you heard anybody talking about this strategy? Where have you read about this strategy in the newspaper? This is a GAO report, February 2007.

The last of the studies. ``Hard Truths. Facing the Hard Truths About Energy. Comprehensive View to 2030 of Global Oil and Natural Gas,'' done by the National Petroleum Council.

I have quotes from all but the last of these. This is the newest one, and I will get some quotes to include. They are saying essentially the same thing as these others.

The next chart and the first few charts will be quotes from the Hirsch Report. I am going to spend a lot of time this evening going over the information that has been available to all of us, to our leaders, and I am going to keep asking the questions, how come it has been ignored?

The Hirsch Report: ``World oil peaking is going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade.'' This was several years ago. Others contend it will occur later.

Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult. In fact, you only know it has peaked after you look back and say gee, it was the highest back then. No matter what we do, we can't get more. So you will know it has peaked only in retrospect when you look back to see that it has peaked.

Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history to guide you. There is nothing that has happened in the past which will help you through this. The world has never faced a problem like this. ``Without massive mitigation,'' more than a decade before the fact, the chart you saw a little earlier, remember, EIA, IEA, 3 years, flat plateau, looks like we peaked now. He says ``Without massive mitigation,'' more than a decade before the fact, ``the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood-to-coal and coal-to-oil were gradual, and evolutionary oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.''

The next chart, additional quotes from this report. ``The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk-management problem. The world has never faced a problem like this. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically,'' $112 a barrel, ``and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. Food riots. People killed.''

Well, we will talk in just a few moments about the relationship between oil and food so that you will see why the crisis in energy is reflected in this crisis in food availability.

The next chart is another one from the Hirsch Report. ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules.'' This is going to be a new world. We are going to have to think differently. We are going to have to use energy differently.

As far as fossil fuels are concerned, I think the Hirsch Report is exactly right. I am more sanguine about electricity. More nuclear, wind, solar, with appropriate storage for those two because they are intermittent, more hydro, true geothermal. We can in some parts of our country tap the molten core of the Earth, as they do for all of their energy in Iceland. I think we can make reasonably as much electricity as we ought to be using. I am not at all sure that is true about liquid fuels. The substitutes for oil are just few and difficult, as we will see.

The next chart is an interesting one from the Hirsch Study. Most of the world's experts believe that we have found about 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil. There is a lot more out there, but it is locked in tiny little droplets in between grains of sand and shale and so forth, and with present technology we are likely not going to get it. And the cost of ever getting it may exceed its value when you get it, so it is maybe not practically recoverable.

Well, there are some people who believe that we are going to find as much more oil as all the reserves that we now know exist. And this is an interesting chart, because instead of talking about roughly 2 trillion barrels, they are talking about 3 trillion barrels of oil. Even if that is true, this is the same curve we saw before, remember, the stutter in the seventies with the worldwide recession, slower growth now, peaking now if we don't find any more. They say if we find as much more oil as all the oil we now know exists which is recoverable, it will extend the peak only to 2016. Wow. That is the power of compound growth.

After the discovery of nuclear energy, Albert Einstein was asked, ``Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big energy force in the world?'' He said, ``The most powerful force in the world is the power of compound interest, compound growth.'' Poorly understood. But that is what we are seeing here.

So if we found, which we are not going to, a little, vanishing small possibility that we are going to do that, but if we found as much more oil as all the oil which now is known to be recoverable, it would push the peak out only to 2016. And this curve shows what would happen if you use heroic techniques and enhanced oil recovery and get it out of the ground quicker. Then you fall off a cliff. You can't pump what you have not found.

The next chart is an interesting chart that shows the projections of our EIA, the Energy Information Administration. I don't have time to go into the strange use of statistics here, but somehow they went from a frequency mode to a probability mode, and they somehow have reached a conclusion that a 50 percent probability is more probable than a 95 percent probability.

So they were projecting that this green is where we were going with the discovery of oil. This is the 95 percent probability. This is the 5 percent probability. And, as one would expect, 95 percent is more probable than 50 percent. So the actual discoveries in red here have been following the 95 percent probability. So I would be very suspicious of projections using USGS data, which is where this comes from, of future oil production.

The next chart addresses this, and this is Jean Laherrere, one of the world's giants in this area. It says, ``The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate efforts to find the largest remaining prospects.''

I think he is right. I think there is little probability that we are going to find huge amounts of additional oil. As a matter of fact, most of the world's experts believe we have probably found about 95 percent of all that we will ever find.

The next chart, and now we have a series of charts we will go through quickly from the Corps of Engineers study, this was the second one done. ``Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility and cost.''

It is incredible, the energy density of oil and all the things that you can do with it. We live in a plastic world, a huge petrochemical industry. All of that starts with gas and oil, and some coal. Because once you have this long hydrocarbon chain, whether it is gas or coal or oil, the chemist can do with it about what he wishes.

The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then.

The next chart is a really interesting one. This is a study done by very knowledgeable people. The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per barrel range and it's expected to stay in that range for several years. It is $112 a barrel today.

They all missed it, friends. M. King Hubbert was right. The United States peaked in 1970. I use 28 years that we have blown. That's because by 1980, 28 years ago, we absolutely knew, looking back that M. King Hubbert was right about 1970. We did peak in 1970.

In 1979 he made the prediction the world would be peaking and, let me ask you, if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States and if, in spite of drilling more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together, why should we not be concerned about his prediction that the world would be peaking in oil about now?

Don't you think that someone might have said, gee, M. King Hubbert was right about the United States? Isn't the United States a microcosm in the

world? Mightn't he be right about the world and shouldn't we be doing something about that?

Oil prices may go significantly higher. They have, indeed, and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Goldman Sachs says that oil may very well be $150 to $200 a barrel by the end of this year.

The next chart, another one from the Corps of Engineers, petroleum expert Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Bryan Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Younquist and Albert Bartlett, no relative of mine, I wish I had some of his genes. He has given his speech on energy, I think, over 1,600 times.

Do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and energy. It will be the most 1-hour lecture you have ever listened to. Using various methodologies, all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur in 2005. It's 2008, I think it probably has occurred.

The corporate executive officers of these several companies also published estimates of a peak in 2005. The next chart from the GAO, and now I move to the third of the GAO studies, this shows this large number of experts, of sources, and when they thought peak would occur. Now, some of them are pretty indecisive.

It could be now, it could be a long, long time from now. But notice that a great many of them thought they would be occurring about now. There is a general consensus, and this was published 2, 3 years ago, general consensus, that peaking would be occurring about now.

Another chart from GAO, and this kind of puts things in perspective, the little bar on the right shows the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserves. Who has the oil, and 98 percent of that is resident in countries where the oil is owned by the country. Luke Oil, which is kind of not owned by the government, represents only 2 percent.

The left, and this is the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of production. This is how much they have, this is how much they produced. The giants that you read about every day making $40 billion a year profits, and, by the way, it's not their fault. It's not because they are gouging you. It's not because they are schemers. It's simply they are simply happy recipients of a windfall that results when you want to use more oil than there is, and that drives the prices up.

I wouldn't be critical of the profits. I would really be critical if they didn't use the profits properly.

Our giants, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch, BP, produce only 22 percent of the world's oil and 78 percent of the world's oil is produced by these country-owned companies.

The next chart shows essentially the same thing in another form. Here we see the OPEC oils, Saudi Arabia and OPEC and the remainder.

The next chart, now, I like this one because if a picture is worth 1,000 words, this is worth a few thousand words. This shows you the same thing as those last couple of charts.

But, boy, is this dramatic. This shows you what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil it had. Look at Saudi Arabia. It dominates the landscape and, indeed, in the oil world, it dominates the landscape. It has 22 percent of all the known reserves of oil in the world.

Little Kuwait, Saddam Hussein thought it looked like a little corner province in Iraq. Iran, first, second, third, fourth, northern Africa, our neighbor to the south, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, dwarfs us, what, three, four, five times as much oil?

Here we are, the United States, using a fourth of all the oil in the world, and we have 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world. The two countries from which we get our most oil, that changed a couple of days ago. By the way, it used to be Canada and then Mexico. I think it's Canada, Saudi Arabia and then Mexico now. That has because the second largest oil field in the world, the Cantarell oil field in Mexico, is in rapid decline, so they cannot produce at the rates they produced before.

Kind of keep this map in your mind. Look at China and India over there. Here they are. Look at Russia, huge compared to China and India. China and India together have no more oil than we, and they have, what, a third of the world's population, rapidly-growing demand for oil. In some parts of Beijing, bicycles are now banned. There isn't room for them on the roads because there are so many automobiles there.

The next chart simply shows some numbers that I have been using. Two percent of the world's reserves consume 25 percent of the world's oil, import almost two-thirds of what we use. Less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person in 22, produce 8 percent of the world's oil from only 2 percent.

What that means is we are pumping our wells four times faster than the average, right. So we now have only 2 percent of the reserves. We are pumping on down really fast, we are really good at that. We have more oil wells that I mentioned than all the rest of the world put together.

The next chart is a really interesting one. This shows what China has been doing. They are going around the world. You see the big symbols there for China going around the world and buying oil. They almost bought Unocal in our country. They are buying oil everywhere. In today's economy that doesn't make much sense because whoever has the dollars gets the oil. So why are they buying oil?

At the same time they are buying oil, they are also aggressively building the largest blue-water Navy in the world. Might the time come that the Chinese tell us, gee, I am sorry, the oil is ours? We have 1.3 billion people. They have got to have oil. I'm sorry, we can't share it. If they are going to make that a reality, they have to have a Navy big enough to control the world's shipping lanes.

Talking about geopolitical consequences, a statement by our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.'' Boy, this was 2006, 2 years ago. What have we done about the energy problem in the last 2 years? We do have to do something about the energy problem.

I can tell that you nothing has really taken me aback more than the Secretary of State about the way of the politics of energy. I will use the word ``warping'' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort for the all-out rush for energy supply.

She recognized that 2 years ago this month. What have you seen your country doing about that in the last 2 years? Why this gross denial? I think the evidence is clear to a third grader.

The next chart, a very recent one, January 22 of this year, ``By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be radically different from today. The world's current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step change in the rate of growth energy demand.''

Shell estimates that after 2015 easy-to-supply that easy access to oil and gas will no longer be able to keep up with demand. It may be sooner that than that, but that is not very far away. As a result, society has no choice but to add other sources of energy.

We have only a few minutes remaining. Let's put the next the chart up. This chart addresses some of those other sources of energy.

I will tell you that we are very much like the young people whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance. They now have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent of that money are they earning. And they look at how old they are, and the size of the inheritance, and it's going to run out long before they retire.

Obviously, they have got to do something. They either have to earn more or spend less. That's precisely where we are with energy. Eighty- five percent of the energy that we are using, coal, petroleum and natural gas, comes from fossil fuels, the grandparents' inheritance. It's finite, it will run out.

Only 15 percent of that is from other sources, generally referred to as renewable sources. A bit more than half of that comes from nuclear. We produce 8 percent of our total energy from nuclear, that's 20 percent of our electricity.

We have the largest nuclear electricity production in the world, but not

the biggest percentage. France produces about 75, 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear.

Then the 7 percent, now this is 2000, things have changed a little since then. Solar, 1 percent; wind, 1 percent, that's the .07 percent, so it has increased four-fold, 2.8 percent, big deal, .28 percent, \1/ 4\ of 1 percent? I am a big fan of nuclear.

I have an off-grid home, and I use solar panels, I use wind machines. I am a big fan of wind and solar. But they are now tiny contributors to our total energy supply.

Wood, that's not the mountain family, that's the paper industry and the timber industry wisely using a waste product. Waste, that looks huge, and it's not a bad idea to turn your waste into electricity. You can do that. We have a great plant up here in northern Montgomery County.

But that waste stream is not a solution to our problem, because what that waste stream represents, just go to the county dump and look at it. What that waste stream represents is a profligate use of fossil fuels. In a fossil fuel deficient world it's not going to be there. It's an expedient for the moment. It doesn't even come close to offering a rational solution to our problem.

Conventional hydro, we probably peaked out in conventional hydro. We can do a lot of microhydro. There are some really good microturbines now.

Alcohol, let me come back now, I only have a couple of minutes remaining. I want to make the tie between our food problems and the gas prices.

We have a program of converting corn to ethanol. The National Academy of Sciences have said that if we used all of our corn for ethanol, all of it, and discounted for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. They said that if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you would save as much.

Now, corn doubled in price because we were doing that. Farmers diverted land from soybeans and wheat to corn. So now we have doubled the price of corn, roughly doubled the price of soybeans. Since these commodities moved together, the price of rice has doubled.

Now we have global food riots turned deadly. What one U.N. official said was what we did innocently, we just hadn't thought it through, that what we did was a crime against humanity.

Our trifling contribution to displacing oil has doubled the price of corn, nearly doubled the price of soybeans and rice. There are people who spend 50 to 60 percent of their income on food. If the food price doubles, they are spending 100 percent of their income on food. No wonder they are rioting.

Well, this was an unintended consequence. The last chart, we have only a couple of minutes remaining, and I just want to say that I find this challenge really exhilarating. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge.

We are the most creative innovative society in the world. We are up to this with proper leadership. I am looking for that leadership. We are up to this.

We need a program that has a total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. I know what it was. Everybody raised a victory garden. No cars were made in 1943, 1944 and 1945. We needed the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, and we needed the urgency of the Manhattan project.

We can lead the world in moving from fossil fuel dependency to renewables. We are creative and innovative. We need leadership to do this.

I want to show you that we can do it. We can live very happily on less. On this chart, here we are, using more energy than anybody else in the world. And there are 24 countries using considerably less energy than we who feel better. This is how good you feel about your station in life, they feel better about their station in life than we.

The very last chart, in the very few seconds remaining, this shows you that Californians use only about 65 percent as much electricity as the rest of us in the United States. Challenge any Californian to admit that they live less well than we live.

We don't have to use the amounts of energy that we are using today to be comfortable, to feel good about life.

I really feel challenged by this. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. We can do this. We can once again become a manufacturing country. We can lead the world in this.

Madam Speaker, I am 82 years old on my next birthday; and there is nothing in my life, and I have seen more of life than every other Member of this Congress except Ralph Hall who is 3 years older than I, and I have seen nothing in my life that is so challenging, so exhilarating as this.

We are up to this. We need the leadership; where is it?

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 14, 2008, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I thought it might be instructive for the last couple of minutes of this hour to kind of put what we've been talking about in perspective.

When you say ``budget, ``you have to know which budget we're talking about because we have two budgets in Washington. We have the one we talk about publicly, and then we have the official budget that we have to deal with, and they're different. You will understand in a couple of moments why they're different.

When we generally talk about public, you'll hear what we call the unified budget. Now, the unified budget is all the money that comes into Washington and all the money that we spend. But about 10 percent of the money that comes into Washington shouldn't be Washington's money to spend because it's moneys that they've taken from you, like Social Security, Medicare, railroad retirement, and about 50 others, presumably to be put in trust for you. But they do not put those moneys in trust for you. What they do with them in Washington is immediately convert them to a nonnegotiable U.S. security and spend them.

When we talk about debt, there's the national debt and the public debt, and I will bet you, Mr. Speaker, that not one person in fifty out there knows the difference between the national debt and the public debt.

Our time's going to run out in just a couple of minutes, and I would like to come back to the floor to talk again. But there never was a moment in time during those years during the Clinton presidency when we said we were paying down the debt that, in fact, the national debt went down. Because what we were doing with the lockbox money, which was surplus money from Social Security and Medicare, we were taking that money and paying down the public debt. The public debt did go down, but for every dollar the public debt went down, the trust fund debt went up another dollar. So there was no change in the total debt, or the national debt. But there were some trust fund moneys that were not lockbox moneys. In fact, only two of them were lockbox, Social Security and Medicare; so we happily took that additional money and spent that, and so the national debt did go up. As a matter of fact, there was not a moment in time during those years when we said we had a budget surplus when, in fact, the national debt went down.

There's a lot of duplicity in Washington. It probably shouldn't surprise you to learn that you shouldn't believe everything that comes out of Washington. I have the numbers here for that debt, and a half hour ago when I came to the floor, the public debt was over $5.3 trillion. They call this the intergovernmental holdings debt, which was just a little over $4 trillion. I have $4 trillion here, $5 trillion here, and the total national debt was $9.446 trillion.

I would very much appreciate coming back to the floor at another time to expand on this because I think it's very instructive for people to know, as your budget school says up there, who have the right to know how Washington spends your money.

Mr. Speaker, I need to begin today with an apology first. I need to apologize to my very good friend and chairman of our subcommittee on Armed Services, Gene Taylor, and I need to apologize to Ron O'Rourke and Eric Labbs who are testifying in a very important subcommittee hearing that I was not able to attend between the two series of votes this morning because I had orthostatic hypotension and I could not maintain a standing hydrostatic column. What that means, Mr. Speaker, if I stood up too long I would faint because I was suffering through flu. So I want to apologize to Congressman Taylor and Ron O'Rourke and Eric Labbs and assure them that I was, indeed, sick. I was in the attending physician's office, and I want to thank the attending physician and his assistants there. They really do take good care of us.

I guess I ought to thank my parents, too, for the good genes they gave me because the recuperative powers of the human body are just amazing. Because of the great genes I got from my parents, I am really blessed to have more recuperative power than the average person, for which I am very thankful.

I wouldn't be here except, for me, this is a very important day. I think it is a very important day for the country and the world. You see, 2 months from today will be the 51st anniversary of what I think will be regarded very shortly as the most insightful speech given in the last century. This was a speech given by Hyman Rickover to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I will have a quote or two from his speech in our little discussion today, and I encourage you to do a Google search for Hyman Rickover and energy and it will pop up, and I think you will agree it is the most prophetic, insightful speech you have read.

Mr. Speaker, I think this is probably the 40th time I have come here, because this is the third anniversary of the first time I came here, which was on March 14, exactly 3 years ago. Between then and now, I was very privileged to have the widow of Hyman Rickover join me. She sat in the gallery up there where I, for an hour, read from her husband's speech and commented on it because it was a very historic speech.

Well, this is a very special day for me today because I have a very good friend, Kjell Aleklett. He is from the Uppsala University in Sweden, and he is the president of ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. They have been around for a long time, and if the world had been listening to them, we would not have $110 oil today. And I think you will agree with me as we go through the charts, that would be correct. He sits in the gallery, and thank you, sir, very much for joining us.

The first chart I have is a chart that I have used every one of the 40 times that I have been to the floor. I just wanted to start with this chart because apparently a lot of people have trouble understanding it. I just don't know what is hard to understand about this chart. This seems to me to be a very simple chart.

You need to go back to 1956 to kind of set this in context. In 1956 on the 8th day of March, just a few days ago was that anniversary, a speech was given that I think will be the most important speech given in the last century of Hyman Rickover. It was very insightful. I think the speech given to M. King Hubbert to those assembled oil engineers and oil company people in San Antonio, Texas, will be judged to be the most important speech given in the last century.

At that time, the United States was king of oil. We were producing, using, and exporting more oil than anybody in the world. In that climate, M. King Hubbert got up and told the assembled experts there that in just about 14 years, no matter what they did, the United States would reach its maximum production of oil. And after that, there was going to be less and less and less, no matter what they did.

Here is a chart which shows that, and I don't know what is so hard to understand about this chart. It has been out there for a very long time. The data has been out for a very long time. You could have constructed this chart very easily many years ago.

What M. King Hubbert predicted was that the lower 48 States, the rest of the United States plus Texas, and Texas was pretty big, that they would peak in 1970, and after that, no matter what we did, the production would fall off. Indeed it did. Now, we found a lot of oil in Alaska and we found a fair amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Those fabled discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico hardly made a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak. I have been to Alaska to the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which, for a number of years, 25 percent of our domestic production of oil flowed. And that made a little blip in the downward slide on the other side of Hubbert's peak, but it didn't reverse the slide except for momentarily.

Now, the reason I ask what is so hard to understand about this chart is that the same man who predicted this in 1979, I believe, predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. I think the obvious question that any rational person would ask themselves is: If M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, which certainly has to be a microcosm of the world, why shouldn't he be right about the world? If, in fact, by 1980 it was very clear that he was right, that we have peaked in 1970, that was 28 years ago, shouldn't the United States and the world have been doing something about the inevitability that the world would probably follow this same kind of a pattern, that the world would reach its maximum production of oil, and no matter what they did after that, it would tail off.

Let me tell you what we did in our country to try to make M. King Hubbert a liar. That is not why they did it, but that is the effect of it. We have drilled more oil wells in our country than all of the rest of the world put together. In spite of having 530,000 producing oil wells, today we produce a bit more than half the oil that we produced in 1970, in spite of the fact that we have large amounts of oil from natural gas liquids, from oil from Alaska, and from oil from the Gulf of Mexico.

I have used this chart 40 times here, and what is so hard to understand about this chart?

In 1956, we were here, and he predicted in 1970 we would be here. And then he predicted, in spite of enhanced oil recovery, in spite of the best discovery techniques and modeling in the world, in spite of drilling more oil wells than the rest of the world put together, we are still producing in the lower 48 way less than half of the oil than we produced in 1970. What is so hard to understand about this?

And the same man who predicted that predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. Well, you know, it is hard for me to understand why with this knowledge that the world wouldn't have said, gee, we really ought to be doing something because this oil is not going to last forever.

Mr. Speaker, it was probably 40 years ago, maybe it is because of the scientist in me, that I started asking myself that question. I looked around the world and there was rock and stones and trees and grass, and I said, you know, oil has to be finite. There has to be a finite amount, and how much is there. And when should I start being concerned about the amount of oil that is there. Is it a year, 10 years, 100 years? Maybe it is a thousand years. But at some point I knew we would be where we are today.

Again, Mr. Speaker, what is so hard to understand about this chart? And why has there been denial worldwide, just forget it, don't think about it, ignore it? Ignoring it won't make it go away.

The next chart is a statement by Condoleezza Rice, and this comment was mirrored in the President's State of the Union. ``We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word 'warping' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' That was April 5, 2006, about 2 years ago. What have we done since then? This was a recognition of a real problem.

If you look at what this Congress has done in the last 2 years, what this administration has done in the last 2 years, what the world has done in the last 2 years, what have we done in response to this recognition by the Secretary of State that this is a huge problem?

Well, one country has been doing something. China has been doing something. China has been going all over the world, and you can see by the symbol here for China, they have been going all over the world. They wanted one in the United States. They almost bought Unocal. Remember the furor over that. I wasn't that disturbed because the reality is in today's world, it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil because almost all of the oil is owned by countries, most of them, but he who comes with the dollars gets the oil. So whether they own Unocal I didn't think made all that much difference, but symbolically it made a difference. And fortunately, they didn't buy it.

The next chart is a really interesting one. I guess if there were only two charts to look at, this would be one of them. And several charts from now I will point to the second one that I think is the most instructive. These are the two most instructive charts that I have seen.

This is what the world would look like if the size of the country were relative to how much oil reserves the country had. That is a different looking world, isn't it.

Here is our hemisphere over here, kind of an anemic hemisphere. Venezuela has way more than half of all of the oil in all of our hemisphere. But look at where most of the oil is. The land mass of Saudi Arabia would be 22 percent of the land mass of the world if the size of Saudi Arabia was relative to the amount of oil that it held.

Look at little Kuwait. You look at Iraq, way down to the east is what looks like it ought to be a province of Iraq, and that is what Saddam Hussein tried to do in the Gulf War. They have the second, third, or fourth depending on what you believe about the numbers they give us for their reserves. Iraq is huge. And Iran is big. The little United Arab Emirates, you almost have to have a magnifying glass to find them on the globe, but they have quite a bit of oil there.

Look at where we are over here. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil, and we get most of our oil from Canada and Mexico. Notice that Canada and Mexico, each of them has even less oil than we have.

So how come we're getting oil from Canada and Mexico? Well, there aren't very many people in Canada so they can ship us surplus oil. And although there are a lot of people in Mexico, they're too poor, most of them, to use much oil, so they can ship oil to us.

But notice how Venezuela just dominates the map here in our hemisphere. Look at Russia there. They're really a huge country. They go through 11 time zones, they go nearly halfway around the world. They're not so big relative to oil as they are relative to actual land mass, but they're still a pretty big country. They're a major shipper. Russia has many fewer people than we, and they still are not using near as much oil per person as we, so they are in the happy circumstance of being able to be a major shipper of oil.

What I really want you to look at for a moment here is China and India. Together, they have, what, about as much oil as we, which is 2 percent of the known reserves. China has 1.3 billion people. India has, I guess, a bit more than a billion people now. So between them they have, what, about a third of the world's population and 2 percent of the world's oil.

And China's doing something about that by going about and buying reserves all over the world. Why would they do that? Since in today's world, it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil, he who comes with the dollars, buys the oil. It's impossible to get inside their head to know why they're doing this, but one might note that simultaneously with buying up all this oil, they're doing two things: one is, they're pleading for international cooperation.

I led a codel of nine Members to China a year ago this last Christmas/New Year's break. And we had a chance to spend several days with the Chinese talking about energy. And they began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. You know, it's hard for us in this country to think much beyond the next quarterly report if you're in business, or much beyond the next election if you're in Congress. But the Chinese are thinking generations and centuries ahead, and there will be a post-oil world. And they have a five point plan. It ought to be the world's five point plan.

The first point in this plan is conservation. With oil at $110 a barrel, we have run out of excess oil to invest in alternatives, and we've run out of time. And you could free up some oil and buy some time if you had a really aggressive, worldwide conservation effort.

Their second and third points were, get energy from alternatives, and as many of those as you can from your own country.

The fourth one is one that may surprise you, and that is, be kind to the environment while you do that because now they're the world's biggest polluter and they know that. But they have 1.3 billion people. They have 900,000 people in what they call rural areas, which, through the miracle of information technology, know how the rest of the world lives, and they are clamoring for the benefits of the industrialized society. And I think that China is concerned that if they're not able to provide those benefits, that their empire may unravel the way the Soviet Empire unraveled.

The fifth point in that five-point plan is a really significant one, international cooperation. They know that if only one country does it, that you really could have kind of a Jevons paradox, that is, the harder you work the worse it gets.

Let me give you an example from our country. I suppose that we, alone, I don't think that we have any alternative, Mr. Speaker, we use a fourth of the world's oil. We're a fourth of the world's economy. We are a role model. We're a leader, whether we like it or not, and people are watching us.

But suppose that we decided that what we were going to do was to have an aggressive conservation program. What that would do is to drop the price of oil and gas and coal because energy is fungible and those prices will move somewhat together. And then that would make oil even cheaper for the Chinese who are already aggressively competing with us economically and militarily. So it would make them easier to compete with us economically and militarily. So maybe from a national security perspective one might argue that, gee, let's pig it all up as soon as possible so there won't be any for the Chinese or anybody else. Of course that's a grossly irresponsible, irrational response.

But this points out Jevons paradox, that our unique local situation could in fact be made worse if we didn't seek the cooperation of the world, and if we unilaterally, and I don't think we have any choice, Mr. Speaker, because we are a world leader, and the world is headed for some really rough bumps if we don't do something. So I think that we've got to move and hope that the world will follow. But if the world didn't follow, it would simply make more oil available at cheaper prices to our adversaries, both economic and military adversaries. This is known as Jevons paradox; the harder you work the worse the problem gets.

Well, this is one thing that China is doing is pleading for international cooperation. But at the same time they do that, and I can't get inside their head to know why they're building, very aggressively building a blue water navy, but one might suspect that if you had all that oil around the world and you envisioned that a time might come when you would have to say, gee guys, I'm sorry, but we have 1.3 billion people and the oil is ours and we can no longer share it, the only way to make that happen is to have a blue water navy big enough to protect the sea lanes. At the moment we have the only blue water navy that's large enough to do that.

The next chart is one that inspired, oh, maybe nearly 3 years ago now, 30 of our prominent Americans. Jim Woolsey and McFarlane and Boyden Gray and 27 others, retired admirals and generals, sent a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the reserves of oil in the world and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is really a totally unacceptable national security risk. We've really got to do something about that. That is true, of course. That is a totally unacceptable national security risk. And the President has mentioned that risk in his State of the Union messages. That recognition, in my view, has not been followed by appropriate actions on either the part of the administration or of the Congress.

A couple of other interesting numbers here. We really represent less than 5 percent of the world's population. We are one person in 22 in the world, and we use a fourth of the world's energy, and that statistic is not lost on the rest of the world. As oil becomes critically short, and the prices rise, they will be looking more and more at this relatively little land mass across the Atlantic and Pacific that's using a fourth of all of the world's energy.

This 8 percent is really interesting. We have only 2 percent of the world's reserves, and I mentioned that we had 530,000 functioning oil- producing oil wells, so we are pumping our oil down about four times faster than the average in the world.

This group of people, and they're a sizeable number of them and I commend them, who are really concerned about the price of oil and peak oil and

its availability and who has the oil and who uses the oil, these people are concerned about our national security. And their solution to that problem, of course, is to use less fossil fuels and move to other sources of energy, like nuclear and wind and solar. These are all electric, by the way, and liquid fuels are going to be the real challenge. And there it really is a challenge. There is no silver bullet. It's going to be a little of this and a little of that.

And at the end of the day, I was privileged to spend a week in South America with the chairman of our Agriculture Committee. And he believes at the end of the day that the world will be able to produce about a third as much liquid fuels as we are now using, and I will tell you that that's probably okay. I think that we could live very comfortably with a third of the liquid fuels that we now have with appropriate conservation and efficiency. So this is one group that has common cause with those of us who are concerned that the oil just isn't going to be there.

There's a second group that has a common cause that I wanted to mention because what I think these three groups ought to do is stop criticizing each other's premise and simply lock arms and march on because all three want to do exactly the same thing. They want to move away from fossil fuels to alternatives.

This third group are those that believe that our excessive use of fossil fuels and releasing the CO2 that was bound there in these ancient subtropical seas a very long time ago that produced our oil and gas, and it wasn't seas, but the furnace and stuff that produce the coal. They are now releasing that CO2, and this is a greenhouse gas and it's trapping the infrared radiations that come back from the Earth after the broad number of bandwidth that come in from the sun heats up the Earth and it radiates back just in the infrared, and these are called greenhouse gases because they do for our world what the glass in the greenhouse does for the greenhouse temperature or the glass in your car does for your car which may be 140 degrees on an 80-degree day this summer when you open the door.

Now, what the climate change global warming group wants to do is exactly the same thing. Their solution is the same solution as those who are concerned about national security and those who are concerned about the fact that it just isn't going to be there. They want to use less fossil fuels and move to renewables.

And the question I ask is, Mr. Speaker, why do we criticize each other's premise? Since we all have a similar path to achieving our goal, why don't we just lock arms and expend our energies addressing the challenge by moving away from fossil fuels to sustainable renewables?

The next chart, I wish this could go back the 8,000 years that Hyman Rickover referred to, but it goes back only about 400 years. But it wouldn't matter because if you extend it this way, it's going to be the same. The amount of energy used by mankind is going to be so small that it hardly shows above the baseline. This shows the revolution, the Industrial Revolution. The brown line is wood, the black line, appropriately, is coal, and the red is gas and oil. Wow, look what happened. When we found gas and oil and we learned how to use the incredible amounts and quality of energy and gas and oil, the use of energy just exploded. And with it, by the way, the world's population. If I had a population graph, it follows that same curve. It goes from a half a billion or so down here to roughly, what, 7 billion now, approaching 7 billion people in the world.

Notice what happened in about the 1970s there. And notice the amount of trouble we would have been in if that hadn't happened. We had the embargo-inspired oil price spike heights in the 1970s and there was a worldwide recession. And notice the dip in gas and oil consumption. And then when we recovered from that recession, the slope, and that will show up better on some future graphs where the abscissa is spread out, the slope is very much less than it is here.

The slope there, if we'd continued on that slope today, we would be above the chart there, wouldn't we? The statistics there were just stunning. Every decade the Earth used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that meant, of course, was that had we continued on that path, and we'd used half of all the oil that we could ever recover, we would have had 10 years remaining.

Hyman Rickover, in his speech, and in just a moment I'll have a quote from that speech. I just want to note something here before we put his quote up. He recognized that there would be an age of oil. That age of oil started back here, what, in the late 1800s. They were about 100 years into the age of oil and gas and coal because you can move this back a little bit for fossil fuel energy, about 100 years into the fossil fuel era because oil and gas have so dominated that you could refer to it as the age of oil. And he noted that there would be an age of oil like there was a stone age.

Now, I know the cute remark is the stone age didn't end because they ran out of stone; and, therefore, the age of oil won't end because we ran out of oil. That gets a smile and an applause line. But I think if you believe that we can just go through business as usual and we're going to come out okay, that you probably also believe that you'll solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery, because I think the odds of that happening are about the same.

Well, this is the first part of the age of oil. As you will see from M. King Hubbert's predictions, the other side of this should be a mirror and come down like this so we know pretty much how long the age of oil will be. We are about 150 years into this Golden Age, and in another 150, it will be gone.

Now, the quote from Hyman Rickover. This is his speech given the 14th day of May, 1957, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota: There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves that were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuels are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. I love this statement. It so correctly describes the collective attitude of the world. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living, or wanton drilling and consumption of oil might be substituted there, and care not one wit how his offspring will fare.

I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and 2 great-grandkids. We are going to bequeath them a horrendous debt, not with my votes if you will check the record, but they're going to get the debt anyway.

I tell those who would like me to vote to drill in ANWR and offshore that wouldn't it be nice if I left them a little oil. By the way, I will vote to drill there when I have a commitment that they're going to use all of the energy and the money that they get from pumping those reserves to develop alternatives.

The next chart, and this may be my last chart because the hydrostatic column that I mentioned I had difficulty maintaining is giving me some problems. This is the second one. There were two charts that were very insightful, and this is the second of those charts. This shows the discoveries, and notice that those discoveries occurred a while ago.

Here we are over here. Huge discoveries behind us, very few currently in spite of lots of money spent, lots of drilling and so forth.

This solid black curve is the same curve we saw before. This is the use of energy. A system was compressed and the ordinate expanded, and here's a very sharp curve. Here is the recovery with much more efficiency after that recession in the 1970s as the result of the Arab oil embargo.

Now, where will we go from here? Unless we find a lot more oil, we have these reserves that we can pump in the future. If we pump them very aggressively and bleed them down quickly, we may get more for the moment and less

for the future. And you can vary the slide down the other side of the world's Hubbert's peak there by some of the things you do with aggressive drilling and enhanced oil recovery. But remember, you cannot pump what you have not found.

I want to look at one more chart, and then I will have to yield back my time.

I have been saying for 3 years now that we were about to reach peak oil, and I started saying that back here 3 years ago. And at just about that time, the two big agencies in the world that track the use of oil have found that it's flat. One is the IEA, the International Energy Agency. This is a group that tracks what is happening in Iran, among other things. The other is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of the Department of Energy. Both of those have the production of oil flat for about the last 3 years. And while that's been flat, the price of oil has gone up, as it should with a flat production, and increased demand has gone up from $55 a barrel to $110 a barrel. You can see that spike here.

Mr. Speaker, I'm very sorry that the flu and its effect on my ability to maintain a hydrostatic column means that I am going to have to yield back my time and sit down.

But I want to reemphasize how important this subject is. There is a solution, by the way. That solution will require the total commitment of World War II, the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, and the urgency of the Manhattan Project.

I'm excited about this. It's exhilarating. It's a huge challenge. There's no exhilaration like the exhilaration of overcoming a huge challenge.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 316, 110th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until Monday, March 31, 2008, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, in just a few days now will be the third anniversary of the time I came to this floor to talk about this subject. I believe this may be the 39th time that I have come to the floor, and what an auspicious time to come, because when I got up this morning and turned on the television, I could hardly believe it, oil was $105 a barrel.

There are three groups in this country that are interested in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. They have very different agendas, they have very different concerns, but they have common cause in wanting to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. One of these groups is the group that is concerned about the national security of our country. This first chart speaks to that.

There were 30 people about 3 years ago leading Americans: Boydan Gray, McFarland, Jim Woolsey, and 27 others, retired Four-star admirals and generals, who really understand the problems we face, who wrote a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security exposure. We really have to do something about that.

A couple of other statistics on this chart are interesting to note. With our 2 percent of the world oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. We are pumping our wells four times faster than the average of the rest of the world. What that means of course is if there is the end of oil, our wells will go dry before the others because we are pumping them faster.

The last statistic here is truly a bit less than 5 percent. We are one person out of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's energy, and this fact is not lost on the rest of the world. They recognize this.

The next chart is a statement by our Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She had in mind the statistics that you just saw, and she had some other things in mind that we will come to in a few moments. When she said we do have to do something about the energy problem, I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way the politics of energy is, I will use the word, warping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply. So our Secretary of State recognizes the national security implications of the world's oil energy supply.

One of the things she had in mind was this next chart. This is a really interesting one. This shows what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil that it had in reserve. Boy, this is a warped map of the world, isn't it? There is China and India over there, so small you can hardly find them because they have very little oil.

Saudi Arabia is huge. It just dominates the landscape. Saudi Arabia has 22 percent, more than one-fifth of the world's reserves of oil. And notice little Kuwait through there, a tiny little province way down in there in the southeastern corner of Iraq, and Saddam Hussein thought that would look good as a province of Iraq, which was a problem about 12 years, 16 years ago, I guess. But look at the size of their reserves. Iraq and Iran, the United Arab Emirates, just dots on the map, and look at how much oil they have. Then across northern Africa, Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, and so forth.

Look in our hemisphere. Venezuela of course dwarfs everything else. Venezuela has more oil than all the rest of our hemisphere put together. Russia, big, but not huge compared to these other reserves. Little Kazakhstan, you see it's fairly large there.

So some really striking things about this map. One is the size of the reserves in India and China. About almost one-fourth of the world's population lives in India, about one-third, really, live in India and China, and they have no more oil than we have. Notice that our two biggest suppliers of oil are Canada and Mexico, and they have less oil than we. Now, there aren't very many people in Canada to use the oil, so they can export it to us. Although there are a lot of people in Mexico, most of them are too poor to use the oil, so they can export it to us. But look how Venezuela is dominating this hemisphere.

Another thing that Condoleezza Rice had in mind when she made that statement about how oil is warping the world's diplomacy was the distribution of the reserves of oil. On the right over there, we have the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserve holdings in 2004. Notice that 98 percent of those are governments, nationally owned oil reserves. LUKOIL in Russia, big, and they have 2 percent, and they are kind of quasi-government, really.

But notice over here on the left. Now, this is the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of production. The graph on the right shows how much oil they have, and the graph on the left shows how much oil they are producing. The big boys up here, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and BP and so forth, they weren't even big enough to show up over here on the right. They are not numbered among the top ten. So they don't own much oil but they are pumping a lot of oil that somebody else owns. So they are pumping 22 percent of the oil. But notice still that 78 percent of the oil is pumped by these national companies that own it there. Condoleezza Rice I'm sure had this in mind when she made that statement.

She also had this next chart in mind. This is an interesting one. This looks at holdings around the world. World energy picture of January of 2005. You will notice the symbols there for China. China is buying oil all over the world. Why would they do that? Because in today's world, it really doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. We own very little of the oil. We have 2 percent of the world's reserves, but we are using 25 percent of the world oil, and we do that because we come with our dollars. Let's hope it continues to be dollars rather than euros. We come with our dollars and we buy the oil.

So why are the Chinese buying up the oil when it doesn't make any difference in today's world economy who owns the oil? The person, the company, the country that comes with the dollars buys the oil. Well, at the same time that they are buying up all this oil, and I am sure Condoleezza Rice had this in mind, they were also very aggressively building a blue water navy. You see, you would need a blue water navy. We have the only one in the world now. You would need a blue water navy to protect the supply routes if you wanted to take the position that the oil was yours and you couldn't share it.

They have 1 billion 300 million people, and I can imagine that one day they may, with pressure from their people, tell the world, gee, I am sorry, but this oil is ours and we can't share it. They have 900 million people in what they call rural areas that, with the miracle of instant communication and television, have observed the benefits of the industrialized world, and they are clamoring for some of those benefits. I think that the Chinese recognize that they must do something to meet those demands or they might see their empire unraveling the way the Soviet empire unraveled.

So this is one group of people that have a concern about moving away from fossil fuels to alternatives, renewables. We have very few fossil fuels and so we have a big incentive to move away and develop renewables, and these are those who are concerned about national security interests.

There is a second group, and I don't have any charts for this group, but you have seen so much of this that you don't need me to have charts. This is a very large group of people who believe that our excessive use of fossil fuels, which is some releasing of carbon dioxide that has been sequestered through the ages when the sun shown on ancient subtropical seas and algae and small animals and plants and so forth grew there. Then at the end of the season they drop to the bottom and silt came in, and then more the next season. And then finally the tectonic plates opened up and they went down to a proper point where, with pressure and temperature and time, this organic material was converted into what we know today as oil and gas.

Coal is a little different. As a boy, I knew very well where coal came from because we lived in coal mining country. As a matter of fact, we had a coal mine on our farm, and the coal would come out of the mine, dust up to big chunks of coal. And we'd have to break some of those chunks to put it in our furnace. I remember taking that sledgehammer where it leaned against the wall and breaking a lump of coal and there it opened up and there was a big fern leaf. I remember as a kid the feelings I had. I wonder how long ago that fern grew. So I knew where coal came from plants. It came from plants that died. We can see the beginning of coal in the bogs of England, by the way.

But what we are doing in burning these fossil fuels is releasing the carbon dioxide that was sequestered in these plants over very long time periods. You see, what happens in photosynthesis is carbon dioxide is taken out of the air and oxygen is released into the air. If you now bury that plant, you now have sequestered the carbon dioxide. When you take it out and burn it, you are releasing the carbon dioxide.

In the last 100 years or so, we have doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Now this is what we call a greenhouse gas. You see the effects, the greenhouse effects when you go out to your car in the parking lot in the summer and you open the door and that blast of heat hits you. What has happened is that the rays of the sun have come in over a broad spectrum of ways and they have heated up the interior of your car and that re-radiates in the infrared, and the glass of your car is relatively impervious to infrared, so it keeps that heat in there. The same thing happens in our world. The sun shines down and warms up things down here and they radiate back.

These greenhouse gases act very much in the atmosphere like the glass in your car or the glass in the greenhouse. It reflects the infrared back in, so it keeps us warmer. There are a growing number of people who believe that this increase in carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse gases are producing climate change in our world and producing a global warming. Of course, enough global warming could melt, it would take a very long time, couple of hundred years, probably, but could melt the polar ice caps. That would raise the level of the oceans about 200 feet. If you look around the world at the number of people who live in less than 200 feet above sea level, it's a big, big part of the world's population.

So these people who are concerned about global warming and climate change, and by the way, I would note that very small differences in temperature make huge changes in climate. During the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, our Earth was about 5 degrees Centigrade cooler than it is now. That is about 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That is not a whole lot. That is about like going from here to Minnesota. But that 9 degrees Fahrenheit difference in temperature caused the ice age.

So when you're looking at a temperature change and saying I go from one room in my house to another and there's a bigger change than that and the sky isn't falling, how come that is a big deal? Just remember that relatively small temperature changes can make huge climate changes.

Now, the solution to the problem that the climate change-global warming people see is exactly the same solution to the problem that the national security-concerned people see, and that is we have got to move away from fossil fuels. We have got to move to renewables where we are recycling the carbon dioxide. You see, if you burn something that grew this summer, if you burn it this fall, like burning wood from a tree that may have been growing for 30, 40 years, and taking CO2 out of the air and storing it in the tree, then when you burn the tree, you put the CO2 back in the air, but that is the same CO2 the tree had taken out, so it's a balance and the CO2 doesn't go up.

So what the climate change global-warming people want to do is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and the concomitant release of carbon dioxide and instead substitute these renewables which simply recycle the carbon dioxide.

Now, if you are going nuclear, by the way, it is even better. After you have paid a carbon cost for building the nuclear power plant, then there is no carbon dioxide produced for the duration of that nuclear power plant.

The third group that have common cause, and before I talk about this group, I want to note that I think that the best interests of mankind, the best interests of our country, the best interest of Republicans and Democrats, will be served if we don't criticize each others' premise. There are those who believe that the global warming thing is just silly. There are others who believe that the foreign countries that own all this oil are going to play nice and give us the oil, so why worry about the national security interests.

But rather than criticizing the premise of these others, why don't we just lock arms, because what we want to solve the problems, and in just a moment I am going to talk about the third problem, which I think is really the big one, is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and increase our reliance on alternatives.

The next chart, and I have got to go back 52 years to talk about the origin of this chart, because this all began 52 years ago. As a matter of fact, that anniversary will be the day after tomorrow. The 8th day of March in 1956, a speech was given in San Antonio, Texas, that I believe within a few years will be recognized as the most important speech given in all of the last century. That speech was given here in 1956, so we are right here on the chart now.

The United States is king of oil. We are producing more oil, using more oil, exporting more oil I think than any other country in the world, and an oil geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert in this very famous speech in San Antonio, Texas, told a group of oil people that in 14 years, roughly 14 years, it turned out to be 14, you will peak in oil production, and no matter what you do after that, you will not be able to produce more oil.

Now, remember, the United States then is king of oil. Oil wells everywhere, Oklahoma, Texas. A little interesting sidelight here, why were there so many? That is because, as I understand it, of the law of capture. If the oil came out of your well, you owned the oil, even though much of it might have been sucked out of the ground of the person that owned the land next to you. It was called the law of capture, I think. So if you wanted to get some of those revenues, you had to drill your own well. I understand that wells were drilled in graveyards and through the foyers of churches. If you look at some of those pictures, it looked like a forest of oil rigs out there, and I think the reason was this law of capture. But, right on schedule, in 1970 we peaked in oil production. This is a chart of that peak. We reached a peak here in 1970.

Now, M. King Hubbert had included only the Lower 48 in his prediction. He had not included Alaska, where we found a lot of oil. He had not included the Gulf of Mexico, where we found a meaningful amount of oil. But you notice that the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak just had a little blip from the oil that we found in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

So, right on schedule M. King Hubbert and his prediction of a phenomenon which we call today peak oil, said that we would reach that maximum in the United States in 1970. Now, this same forecaster, with the enormous credibility of having been right on target for the United States, said that the world would be peaking about now.

The next chart is an interesting one, and if you had only one graph, one chart you could look at to talk about this, it would be this one, because this has so much information on it. The little bars here show the discoveries of oil. You notice that we started discovering it way back there, some of it in the Depression really, and then after the end of the Depression just before the war, and then huge discoveries in the fifties, the sixties and seventies. But ever since then, down, down, down, down. Kind of a ragged down, because every once in awhile you hit a pretty big field, and here is the spike here. But on average every year since the seventies and eighties it has been down, down, down.

The solid black line here represents the oil that we have produced, which is

also the oil we have used, because there is no big store of oil anywhere. We use it as we produce it. And a really interesting curve.

Notice the shape of this curve here. If nothing happened to change that curve, it would have gone off the top of the graph by this time. Well, something did happen to change the shape of that curve. You notice that changed in the seventies, and these were the oil price spike hikes engendered by the Arab oil embargo, and it caused a worldwide recession. Here is the worldwide recession, and, boy, we woke up, we and much of the rest of the world, and we found ways to do things more efficiently. Now we are recovering from that and the economy is great for most of the world, there is a little tremor now, but it has been a great economy. But you notice the slope of this curve after that is very much less than the slope of this curve.

There is an interesting statistic during the Carter years, up to the Carter years, as a matter of fact, that every decade we use as much oil as had been used in all of the world in all of previous history. Wow. What that means is, of course, when you have used half the oil, you have only one decade left. Well, we have really slowed down now. You can see the slope of this curve is very much less.

Now, when will the world reach its maximum oil production? See, what we have been doing since about 1980, we have found less and less oil, but we have used more and more oil, so this area here, the area above the oil that we found has been filled in by the oil that we found way back.

Now, we have got a lot these reserves left, and the makers of this chart say that this is the average of what we will find in the future. It won't be smooth, it will be up and down, but that is probably about the quantity that we will find. But we are using more. And they are suggesting that we will be peaking about now, as you can see, and that this area here will have to be filled in by reserves that we found back here, because we aren't finding any meaningful amount of oil now. So those who made this chart believe that oil in the world should be peaking about now.

The next chart shows the estimates of a number of authorities. Some of them have enormous uncertainty in when they think peak oil might occur. Here is one that says it could occur anytime between now and 2120, between 2020 and 2120. Here is one that says, gee, it could be anytime. But a great number of them believe it could be as early as about now. Here we are at about this point. A great many of them believe it could be now or shortly after this. So there is general consensus through most of the authorities in the world that peaking could be now.

The next chart kind of puts all of this in perspective, and this is an interesting chart. Let's just refer to the upper part of it. The lower part of it is a blowup of the upper part separating out gas from oil.

Hyman Rickover, who gave a great speech the 14th day of May, 1957, so this will be the 51st anniversary of his speech, noted that we were in an age of oil. I will have some quotes from his speech in a few moments. That we were in an age of oil. And he said in 8,000 years of recorded history we were, when he gave his speech, about 100 years into the age of oil.

This is a chart that looks not back through 8,000 years. But if we went back that far, the amount of energy used by mankind would be down here so near zero you could hardly see the difference. We go here about 400 years and the industrial revolution began with wood. And then we found coal, and, boy, it jumped up. And then we found gas and oil, and, wow, the quality of the energy, the extractability, how easy it was to get, how easy it was to use. And look what happened to energy use. It just spiked. Here we see that same discontinuity in the seventies, the worldwide recession, the oil price spike hikes.

Now, let's look at the next curve here, because this shows exactly the same curve. What we have done here is to expand the abscissa, that is this bottom, and compressed the ordinate, so now it is a low, smooth curve. If you pull this in and push that up, you can make the sharp curve that we saw over there. We had only gone this far over there. Now we really dip down the other side.

But I want to focus here on the yellow area of this chart. If we in fact are peaking in oil production, and if the world follows the pattern that we have been following in the United States, then the production of oil will look, it has looked up until now about like this, and in the future it will slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

Today in the United States we produce half the oil that we produced in 1970, in spite of finding a lot of oil in Alaska and a fair amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and in spite of drilling more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together. So we are about at this point, I believe, and the demand is about 2 percent.

Now, 2 percent doesn't seem like much, does it? As a matter of fact, our stock market doesn't like 2 percent growth. It thinks that is anemic and it is likely not to do well. But 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years, and here we are talking about long time periods. It doubles in 35 years, it is four times bigger in 70 years, it is eight times bigger in 105 years, and it is 16 times bigger in 140 years.

This phenomenon of exponential growth caused Albert Einstein to respond to a question, gee, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big energy force in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the world is the power of compound interest. The next, of course, after nuclear energy.

So, with this 2 percent growth, and I would submit that it is going to be hard to hold growth to 2 percent, because we have India and China coming on board. I was in Beijing about a year or so ago and they had banned bicycles in parts of Beijing because they were getting in the way of cars. With the demand of oil in India and China, I think it will be hard to hold it to 2 percent growth. But this is 2 percent growth, and it doubles in 35 years. So this period is 35 years.

Many people looking at the problem we face with peak oil say, gee, let's fill the peak. I think it is manifestly impossible to fill the peak, and I don't think we need to fill the peak. I would be happy if we were reasonably sure that we could just fill the area below this peak so we would have a plateau out here. I am not sure that the world will be able to do that. Neither am I sure that we have to do that to live well, actually.

The next quote is a quote from this really great speech given by Hyman Rickover. If M. King Hubbert's speech was the most important speech of the last century, and I think that it may have been, then I think maybe the most insightful speech of the last century was that speech given 51 years ago the 14th day of this May.

I came to this floor on the 50th anniversary of that, and Hyman Rickover's widow sat in the gallery there when I read largely from the really, really insightful prophetic speech that he gave.

These are some of the quotes. ``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants.'' I do a lot of that. I have 10 kids, I have 16 grandkids, and I have two great grandkids, so I think a lot about my descendants. ``Those who will ring out the fossil fuel age.''

Wow. I was thinking of this statement when I led a CODEL to China the last holiday, not this Christmas and New Year's, but the one before that, and we went there to talk about, the nine of us, went to talk to the Chinese about energy. And it was really interesting.

They began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Wow. As Hyman Rickover said, there will be a post-oil, because if there is a fossil fuel age, the age of oil, then there will be some time after the age of oil. We in this country think in terms of the next quarterly report and how am I going to get myself elected the next time, and it is really interesting that people in that part of the world tend to think more in terms of generations and centuries. But the Chinese recognize that there will be an age of oil.

``Those who will ring out the fossil fuel age, we might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels. There will one day be a world without fossil fuels.''

I think that has to be obvious. If you look at the world, the whole thing is

not oil, and, even if it was, it wouldn't last for oil. But it is certainly not. So there will be one day be a world without oil, and Hyman Rickover was suggesting 51 years ago was a good time to start thinking about how we make that transition.

The next chart shows a reality that I don't know how many have thought about. This is a chart which shows on the abscissa the amount of energy you use, and on the right over here it shows how happy you are with your station in life.

Now, we use more energy than anybody else, and so there we are, the furthest one over here to the right, but we are not the happiest Nation in the world. There are 24 countries, everybody above this line, feels better, not just as good, better, about their quality of life than we feel about our quality of life, and some of them use only about half as much oil as we use. And when I look at the future and the huge challenges that we have from the future, I note that we have a lot of opportunity to live more efficiently and to live, not just as happily, but to live more happily, because there are 24 countries that use less oil than we, some only half the oil that we use, who feel better about their quality of life than we feel about ours.

Now, this third group that has common cause with the first two, the first two being those who are concerned about our national security, we get far too much of our oil from over there and, as the President appropriately said, from people who don't even like us. The second group is concerned about global warming and releasing all of this sequestered CO2 from these fossil fuels and dumping it into the atmosphere and producing these greenhouse gases that reflect back the infrared radiation to the Earth and warm up the Earth.

By the way, I lived in Siberia. You might have a hard time convincing me that a warmer Earth would be all that bad. And I would note that, if they played nice over there, these guys who have all the oil, that may not be a problem, so the national security thing may not be a problem.

I would submit that the Earth has been very much warmer in the past. That is the only way we could have had subtropical seas in the north slope and the North Sea and ANWR and so forth. A warmer Earth will be very different, better for some people, worse for others, and I don't think it is a risk worth taking. But many will argue that, gee, the sky may not fall if the Earth gets warmer.

But I will tell you that this third group of people, the people who are concerned about peak oil, there is no way that we are going to get through that without a very bumpy ride unless we aggressively pursue this challenge.

Now, I am excited about this. My wife tells me that I really shouldn't be talking about this because people in ancient Greece killed the messenger that brought bad news, and I need to get myself reelected and I shouldn't be talking about this. I tell her, this is a good news story. The good news is that if we start today to meet this challenge, the ride will be less bumpy than if we start tomorrow.

But the really good news part of this is that there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge. And, boy, this is a big challenge.

Many of the problems we have with our unemployed and our kids and so forth in this country are because time weighs heavily on their hands, and they end up doing sometimes hurtful things to themselves and society. I lived through World War II, the last war, by the way, in which everybody was involved. It was the last war in which our country was at war. Now, our military has been at war since then and our military families have been at war since then. But, boy, World War II, our country was at war. Everybody knew we were at war. Not a single automobile was made for public consumption in 1943, 1944, and 1945. You had to have a ration coupon to buy gas. If you convinced them you were a good churchgoer, they would give you enough to go to church; otherwise, you stayed home or walked to church. You had to get a coupon to get sugar to do your canning with. There was a real scarcity of automobile tires. We saved our household grease and took it to a central repository. We had daylight savings time, that comes this weekend, and we had daylight savings time because then we had an extra hour to spend in our victory gardens. And there was no law from Congress that said you had to have a victory garden, but, boy, everybody who could, talk to your grandparents, they probably dug up their backyard and they put a garden there. I saw pictures of vacant lots in New York City where they took all the rubble and piled it up in rows and planted gardens between them. Everybody was involved in that war.

And I will tell you, if we are going to get through this, this is a huge challenge, it will require the best of us. But we are the most creative, innovative society in the world. And, with leadership, which is I think fairly conspicuously absent today, I think that we can rally to this cause.

What we need to get through this is the total commitment we had in World War II. We need to have the technology focus of when we put a man on the Moon and we need to have the urgency of the Manhattan Project.

By the way, that technology focus would do other really nice things for us. I talk to a lot of businesses that cannot find enough technically trained people. Our young people today just aren't turned on to training in science, math, and engineering. Many of them are becoming lawyers and political scientists. I think we have quite enough of both of those, thank you.

I remember during the less than a decade, our President challenged us to do it in a decade and we did it in less than a decade, putting a man on the Moon. And I remember how turned on, it captured the imagination of the American people and inspired our young people to go into careers of math, science, and engineering. I remember a cartoon of a little redheaded, freckle-faced buck-toothed young fellow who said, ``Six months ago, I couldn't even spell `engineer' and now I are one.''

Everybody wanted to be involved in this. And we need to have the technology focus that we had then, and what that will do is inspire more of our bright young people. We have really bright young people, and they need to be going into pursuits that will really be productive like science, math, and engineering. If we inspire them to go into those positions, we might once again become a manufacturing exporting Nation.

By the way, the technologies that we will need to develop to exploit these renewables, I think we could become the center for that in the world and, once again, could become a major exporting Nation.

Again, I say, we are the most creative, innovative society in the world. Somehow, somehow, the genius of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution they gave us, which really, really respects the rights of the individual, created a milieu, a climate in which creativity and entrepreneurship would flourish, and it is still flourishing. Just look at our small businesses, that they are responsible for bringing us out of recession. So I am really enthusiastic about this.

Everybody needs to be committed. We need to have the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon. And this is urgent. Just in the last few days, I have three things in front of me here where others are recognizing that this is urgent. There is a 2-day summit with our National Academy of Sciences, and they are looking at America's energy future. It is about time. They are going to be looking at America's energy future.

We have a huge challenge. We use one-fourth of the world's oil, we have 2 percent of the world's oil, and the President very correctly said that we are hooked on oil. And, like the cocaine addict who is hooked on his drug, he has just got to have another fix, and so now there is a clamor to go out and drill for that oil up in ANWR and drill for that oil offshore.

I haven't voted for those. I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and two great grandkids. We are leaving them a horrendous debt, not with my votes, but a horrendous debt. And I just ask, wouldn't it be nice if we could leave them a little energy?

I was asked to vote to drill in ANWR, and my question was: If you could drill and pump ANWR tomorrow, what will you do the day after tomorrow? And for

my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, there is going to be a day after tomorrow.

Now, I will vote to drill in ANWR and offshore when a commitment is made that all of the energy that we get from those fields will be invested in alternatives. You see, today we have a situation where we have run out of time and there is no surplus energy. If there was surplus energy, oil wouldn't be $105 a barrel this morning.

When I say we have run out of time, I am really very critical of what we, the world, has done in the last 28 years. I say 28 years because that takes us back to 1980. And, by 1980, it was absolutely certain that M. King Hubbard was right about the United States. We peaked in 1970. By 1980, we are sliding down the other side of what is called Hubbard's Peak. So we knew he was right about the United States. Now, I believe it was in 1979, just a year before, that he predicted the world would be peaking about now.

And I ask you, if M. King Hubbard was so right about the United States, shouldn't there have been some concern that maybe, just maybe, he might be right about the world? And wouldn't it have been appropriate to look at that possibility and put some programs in place that would address that potential eventuality?

You know, it is very difficult to look back on what we have done without using a couple of not very complimentary analogies. When we first found that incredible wealth under the ground, and, boy, that was incredible wealth. One barrel of oil, and we use about 22 million barrels a day in our country, by the way. One barrel of oil has the work output of 12 people working all year, 25,000 man hours of work.

When I first saw that number, I thought that can't be true; 12 people working all year, one barrel of oil has that much energy in it? And then I thought about that one gallon of gasoline, still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you are buying it in little bottles, how far that takes my Prius. Our Prius now is 47 miles per gallon averaging over the last maybe 20,000 miles. Now, I could pull my Prius 47 miles. That is almost all the way from here to my home in Frederick. That would take me a long while. I would have to get come-alongs and hook to the guardrail and so forth to pull the car. I could do it. And so I finally said, gee, that is probably right. Every barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of work, 12 people working all year for you.

As a matter of fact, I saw a statistic recently that was really interesting. If there was no gas, oil, or coal, no nuclear, no sun, no hydro, if the only power available was the power of human activity to enjoy the quality of life that each of us enjoys, there would have to be 300 people out there working. That is the amount of energy from fossil fuels that each one of us consumes. We live as well as if there were 300 people out there working to support our quality of life. No wonder Hyman Rickover referred to this as a golden age.

The next chart kind of shows where we are and where we are going. All three of these groups want to move away from fossil fuels to alternatives, of course for very different reasons and, again, I stop criticizing each other's premise, because what we want to do to solve the problem as we see it is exactly the same thing: Move away from fossil fuels to renewables. How are we going to do that?

Now, there are some finite resources that are really quite unconventional, and we are exploiting some of them now. From the tar sands in Canada, we are getting about 1 million barrels of oil a day. That is with heroic efforts. They are using local gas which is stranded, which means that it is far away from any population and, therefore, it is cheap and so you can use it for something like this. They have a huge tailings pond which is full of all sorts of noxious chemicals. And the vein, if you are thinking of it as the vein, is on top and it will soon have to duck under an overlay so they have to exploit it in situ, and they don't know how to do that yet. They have a shovel, which lifts 100 tons at a time. They dump it in a truck, which hauls 400 tons. They haul it to a cooker, which cooks it until it loosens up its stiff oil and it flows, and they add some chemicals to it to keep it flowing when it cools down. They are getting about 1 million barrels a day, and that is 1 million out of 88 million that the world is producing. So a bit more than 1 percent, but it is not sustainable and they know it is not. They are going to need more oil, they are going to run out of water by and by.

But if they could continue this exploitation, there is more potential oil in the tar sands of Canada than there is in all of the huge oil reserves that we showed on that map of the world that we showed earlier. So there is a huge potential there.

But remember, in any one of these things, you need to look at energy- profit ratio, how much energy you need to put in to get out a unit of energy. And if you are putting in more energy than you get out, obviously you are not going to do that, and you are going to move on to some other source.

The oil shales in our western United States, they have reserves at least as large and maybe some larger, some believe, up in the trillions of barrels of oil.

By the way, and we will come to the number later, but the world had about we believe 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil. We have recovered about 1 trillion of those barrels. Most authorities believe there is another trillion to be recovered. Some believe we can find more and get more out of the present reservoirs.

But in spite of the brightest people in the world, the most aggressive economy in the world, we have not been able to reverse our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So when you are listening to people speaking about a rosy future with abundant oil, remember that the United States with all of our superiority has not been able to reverse our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

There are a number of organizations looking at exploiting that. It is called ``the rocks that burn'' by the Indians. When you heat it up, it becomes oil. It is not exactly oil in the form that it is found. Can we develop that, how quickly, how much will we get from it, we will certainly get something from it by and by, but remember this energy- profit ratio.

Coal. We have a lot of coal. Not as much as we thought we had. The National Academy of Sciences took a new look at that, and they said that the conventional wisdom that there was 250 years out there at current use rates, and be very careful when someone mentions current use rates when making projections for the future because, with growth, that time duration really shrinks.

The National Academy of Sciences now says we have something like 100 years of coal at current use rates. I have a chart that shows what that really means in terms of energy that is available to us.

Then we have nuclear. We have three different potential sources of nuclear energy. The one that the world is using for producing energy is fusion, light water reactor plants. France gets about 75 to 80 percent of their electricity from fusion. We get about 20 percent. We are much bigger than France and so we produce more electric power than France produces, but not so high a percentage of what we use.

Fissile uranium is a finite resource. The world will one day run out. I have no idea when that will be because I get wildly divergent estimates when I ask people how long will it last: 10 years, 30 years, 100 years. We need an honest broker. It is hard to have a discussion when there isn't agreement on the facts. I would like to commission the National Academy of Sciences to help us decide on what the reserves are and what the resources are so we can have a productive dialogue. But even when we run out of fissile uranium, we still can get nuclear power from what we call breeder reactors.

They have problems, and you are producing stuff that is potentially weapons grade and you are hauling it around for enrichment, and there are opportunities for terrorists. Then there is an end product that you need to store away for a quarter of a million years. I understand there are potential breakthroughs there where we can burn more of this fuel, and we end up with a waste product which is much less radioactive with a shorter half-life. So the storage problems are going

to be reduced. There is lot of new technology in the nuclear area, and I will tell you that some who have been stout opponents of nuclear, when they are considering a likely alternative in an energy-deficient world of shivering in the dark, nuclear is looking better to them.

Nuclear fusion. That is the only energy source out there that is a silver bullet. If we find that, we are home free. By the way, we have a great fusion reactor. It is called the Sun. And the Sun is the source of almost all the energy we use. It was the shining of the Sun a long while ago that produced the plants that produced the gas, oil, and coal. It is the shining of the Sun that produces the differential temperatures and makes the winds blow. It is the sunshine that lifts the water from the ocean and the plains and drops it on the mountains and it flows down through the dams to produce hydropower. There are only a few sources of power that don't come from the Sun: nuclear, a trifling amount of chemical, and the tides don't come from the Sun.

By the way, there is a huge potential amount of energy in the oceans, but it is so disbursed that it is just hard to collar it. There is an old axiom that says that energy or power to be effective must be concentrated. Look at the tides. The Moon lifts the oceans 2 or 3 feet. I carry two 5-gallon buckets of water, and that is heavy. How much energy would it take to lift the whole ocean, 75 percent of the world's surface, 2 or 3 feet? But the problem is harnessing that energy.

But there are other potential ocean energy sources, like the ocean thermal gradients. In the tropics, it is very warm on the surface and very cold on the bottom. And there are several technologies for getting energy from that temperature difference.

Then we get to the true renewables. By the way, there are many people who don't really think it is necessary to talk about this because they are market enthusiasts, and they will tell you that the market will solve this problem. The market will solve this problem. You may not like the way that the market will solve this problem because the price of oil, unless we do something and move aggressively towards alternatives, may go really high. I hear people telling me gas may go to $20 or $25 a gallon in an energy-deficient world. So the market will solve the problem, but you may not like the way the market solves the problem.

There are two problems. One is that the resources are not infinite and they are not available in the time in which the market would like to have them. The second problem is that the market signals are not timely enough.

One of the big studies done, our government, your government, has paid for four studies. They are ignoring all of them. The first one, the Hirsch Report, said that the world has never faced a problem like this, and challenges us to plan for this a couple of decades ahead because they said if you haven't started to plan for this two decades ahead, there will be some economic consequences. If it is only a decade ahead, there will be big economic problems. And if you wait until it is upon you, and apparently it is, they said the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history.

The next chart shows those things in an interesting form. I would like to use analogy for this chart, and that is, the young couple whose grandparents have left them a big inheritance and they have a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and 15 percent is from their income. They look at the inheritance and it is going to run out a long time before they retire at the rate they are spending it. So they have to either make more or spend less.

Here we are: 85 percent of all of our energy comes from coal, gas, and petroleum, the oil. So 15 percent is left. A bit more than half of that is nuclear electric power, and the rest is renewables. Now, some people have it 86-14, but it is roughly 85-15. Notice the breakout here of the renewables. In 2000, solar was 0.07 percent. So maybe it is 10 times bigger. That is still a tiny, tiny amount.

Wood. That is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely burning what would otherwise be a waste product, filling up landfills.

Waste energy. That is a great idea, a whole lot better than putting it in a landfill. We ought to recycle what we can productively recycle and then burn the rest of it. And there is a great facility in Montgomery County, and it is really a class facility. I wouldn't mind having it next to my church. It is a great-looking building. You don't see or smell the trash, and it is producing electricity. But that is not a solution to our energy problem because most of the trash that they are burning is the consequence of profligate use of fossil fuel energy. And in a fossil fuel-deficient world, that trash stream is going to be very much less. So for the moment that is a good idea, but it is not a solution to our problem.

Wind. Wind is the most rapidly growing alternative today. The leading country in that is Denmark. They produce electricity at a cent and a half a kilowatt hour. We can do it here for 2.5 or so cents a kilowatt hour.

Conventional hydro. We are tapped out on that, probably. Some believe we can get as much hydro from what is called microhydro. It is much less environmentally threatening, small devices in streams to produce electricity.

Alcohol fuel. I have just a moment to spend on that. The National Academy of Sciences says that if we turn all of our corn into ethanol, all of it, and discount it for fossil fuel input, that it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. This is not Roscoe Bartlett saying that; this is the National Academy of Sciences. They noted if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you could save as much energy as you would get from all of our corn converted to ethanol. We haven't converted it all, but the amount that we have converted has doubled the price of corn. And our farmers diverted land from wheat and soybeans to corn, and there was an increased demand for wheat and soybeans, so now the price of all three, for these major foods, for poor people around the world is up.

In fact, a member of the United Nations said what we had innocently done, inadvertently done, unintended consequences, was a crime against humanity because now three of the basic four foodstuffs in the world, rice, corn, wheat and soybeans, have increased in price because we had this government-subsidized corn ethanol program.

We will get something from biomass, from cellulosic ethanol, something from corn. But Hyman Rickover cautioned wisely in his speech 51 years ago, you should be careful eating your food. He also said you should be careful you don't burn up the fertility of your soil by removing the organic material which produces what we call tilth, which is what makes the difference between topsoil and subsoil. It holds nutrients and water. We will get something from these. I think now there is an irrational exuberance, as was said about the market a few years ago. We will get something, but it is not a silver bullet. It will not be a huge amount. And we use so much oil, it will barely make a dent in it.

Geothermal. That is true geothermal, tapping the molten core of the Earth. That is one source of energy that didn't come from the Sun. We need to exploit that more. That is not tying your air conditioner, your heat pump to ground temperature, which is a great idea. In the summertime to cool your house, you are trying to heat up that 100- degree air outside. It is easier to heat up the ground at 56 degrees. In the winter, you are doing the opposite.

The next chart looks at coal. This assumes 250 years. If you grow only 2 percent, and I think we will need to dip into our coal more than 2 percent, if we have less and less oil, it shrinks to 85 years. If you use some of the energy from the coal to produce a gas or a liquid, and it is not fair to make the comparison if you don't, then it shrinks to 50 years.

Now another interesting phenomenon here, which is unavoidable, we are going to have to share that with the world because if we use the oil that we produce from coal, then the oil we might have used someone else will use. So in effect you are sharing it with the world. So now 12 divided by 4, we use a fourth of the oil, is 12.5 years. It is even less if it is only 100 years, maybe 6 years or so.

The next chart is a great example of efficiency. This shows producing light from the incandescent bulb, the fluorescent, and the light- emitting diode.

The green on the top is the light. It is the same in all of these. The blue is the energy. And notice that the incandescent bulb is a better heater than light source. I brood my chickens with that.

Notice the light-emitting diode. If you have an LED flashlight, you will forget when you put batteries in it, and we need to move to these kinds of technologies.

I have one final chart to end this discussion with. There are two major entities in the world that follow the production and consumption of oil, and they make assumptions about the future. I wouldn't pay much attention to their assumptions about the future because they have been consistently wrong, but they are very good at charting what we have used.

This is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Energy; and it is the IEA, the International Energy Association, this is a part of the United Nations. This is a group that has been following what has been going on in Iran. Both of them have been tracking what we have been using in oil, and these are their lives.

And these are their lines. And notice, for about the last 3 years, 30 months or more, they're essentially flat. And during that time, that's just about the time that I have been coming here to the floor. It'll be 3 years the 14th day of March that I made my first speech on the floor here relative to this subject. And during that time, oil has doubled in price. Here we are at about $50 a barrel. And there we are up there at, well, off the chart now, above $100 a barrel.

In the few moments remaining to us, I'd like to look at a couple of charts. This is a very recent statement, January 22, by the CEO of Shell Oil. By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be radically different from today. Boy, will it. The world's current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step change in the growth of energy demand. And Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy to access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand. He's saying it's going to peak about then.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to close by saying again that this is an enormously invigorating challenge. America's up to this challenge. What we need is the leadership necessary to make this happen.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that this is the 38th time that I've come to the floor to talk to my colleagues and, through the miracle of television, to the American people about a phenomenon that is becoming more and more apparent and more and more important to us.

This phenomenon is what we call peak oil. When I first started talking about this, I wasn't even sure what we were going to call it, the great rollover at that point in time when we've reached our maximum production to produce oil and we're rolling over to slip down the other side of that slope, or peak oil. We decided to call it peak oil, and now that is a pretty well-known terminology around the world.

When I first started talking about this, oil was $40 a barrel. Now oil is over $100 a barrel. In our Frederick News Post, a local paper, a headline today says: ``Oil Spikes Above $102 a Barrel for the First Time.'' As I left my office, oil was above $101 a barrel and going up. The euro was, I think, $1.51; gold was about $960.

And America doesn't seem to be responding. I asked one of my colleagues why, and he said, well, it's a problem of addiction. We're addicted to oil. The President appropriately said that in one of his State of the Union messages. He said, when you're addicted, what it costs really doesn't matter. If you're addicted to alcohol or cocaine, if it costs you your marriage, your job, your house, meeting the demands of the addiction is the important thing.

The chart that I have here I think shows the problem. The disgruntled citizen is down here saying, ``Gee, just why is gas so expensive?'' More than $3 a gallon. And there it is, a tiny little supply and a huge demand. It's a matter of supply and demand. In the time that I have been talking about peak oil, when it has risen from $40 a barrel to over $100 a barrel, the production of oil worldwide has remained essentially constant while the demand has been increasing. And when that happens, of course, there will be an increase in price; and we have seen that increase in price.

The next chart kind of places this in a perspective, and what it shows is the enormous importance of energy from fossil fuels, particularly the energy from gas and oil, enormous importance to the economies of the world. In 8,000 years of recorded history, I show here about the last 400 years. If I went back the rest of the 8,000, it would be the same. So near zero you couldn't see the difference. And here we show the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It began with wood and then coal, and it was stuttering a little with coal, and then we discovered gas and oil, and, wow, it took off. Look at that slope. Incredibly, during the Carter years and up to that time, every decade we used as much oil as we had used in all of previous history.

Mr. Speaker, if you reflect for a moment on what that means, what that means is that when we had pumped half of all the oil that would be pumped in the world, we then would have 10 years left. Now, we have become much more efficient since then, and that was induced by the oil price spike hikes of the 1970s and the world-wide recession that followed that and an attention to efficiency, and your air conditioner and refrigerator are probably three times as efficient as they were back then.

If we had a population graph, you would see the population following this, now nearly 7 billion people in the world, most of us living incredibly well. Each person in our country has a life-style that if it were not for fossil fuels would require the work of 300 faithful people powering the industry and manning your household to permit you to live the quality of life that you're living.

That's the amount of energy that we get from these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year, 25,000 man hours of effort. When I first saw that, I thought that can't be true. Just 42 gallons of oil and has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year? And then I thought about my Prius car and how far that gallon of gasoline, still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you buy it in the little bottles, how far that takes my Prius, 47 miles averaging now over the last 15,000, 20,000 miles.

Now, I could pull my Prius 47 miles, but it would take me quite a while with come-a-longs and using the guard rail and trees and so forth to pull my Prius 70 miles. So I thought maybe that is true. And that is true, that each barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. So our use of this fossil fuel energy has produced for us an incredible quality of life.

The next chart is a history of how we got here, and this begins about 51 years ago, a speech given by M. King Hubbert to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas, on the 8th day of March, when he predicted in 1956 that we would be peaking in our country in oil production by 1970. Nobody believed that. We were then king of oil, producing more oil than any other country in the world, consuming more, exporting more. But right on schedule, in 1970, we peaked in oil production.

In spite of two things, in spite of finding a good deal more oil in Alaska and a good deal more oil in the Gulf of Mexico, this is the Alaska oil and this yellow is the Gulf of Mexico oil, and in spite of finding considerable oil in those two places, we now are producing about half the oil that we produced in 1970. And that's also in spite of drilling more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. We have about 530,000 producing oil wells in our country, and that's more than all the rest of the world put together.

The next chart is an interesting one because it again shows what is referred to as Hubbert's Peak; and if you want to know a lot about this, you can do a Google search for Hubbert or Hubbert's Peak and a lot of this information will pop up for you.

The yellow triangles here represent M. King Hubbert's prediction of what oil production would be. The green is the actual production, and the red shows the total production from the United States including Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, because M. King Hubbert had not included Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico in his analysis. This chart is presented by CERA to convince you that you shouldn't be too concerned about M. King Hubbert's prediction that the world would be peaking about now because he was wrong about the United States, and I think this is a statistician's debate because they're making the point that those green squares are materially different than the yellow triangles.

Now, I've had a course, an advanced course, in statistics; and I might, using the magic of statistical math, prove to myself that there is a meaningful difference there; but, boy, just looking at that, I think that the green curve looks pretty much like the yellow curve, doesn't it? We produced a bit more with Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, but that was just a blip in sliding down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and there we are today at about half of the production that we had in 1970.

The next graph shows us the reality of where we are. And if you had only one chart to look at, this would be that chart. It's said that a picture's worth a

thousand words, and this is worth more than a thousand words. The little bars here show when we found the oil. And you see we started to find a lot of it in the 1940s and the 1950s; and, boy, did we find it in the 1960s and another peak in the 1980s. And ever since the 1980s, in spite of ever better techniques for finding oil, it's been down, down, down.

The solid line here represents our consumption of oil. It's the same chart that you saw previously. And this shows what happened in the 1970s. And it shows here dramatically the difference in the slope. We were increasing our use of oil at this rate. And you see if we had continued that, by now it would be off the chart, wouldn't it? Just extrapolate from this curve and you're off the chart. But we really learned how to be more efficient in the 1970s; so now the growth rate is about 2 percent a year and much slower than that.

Now, what will the future look like? Ever since 1980 we have been using more oil than we found. And the difference between what we found and what we used is made up from reserves. We're now pumping some of these reserves from the past.

What will future discoveries be like? These forecasters have indicated slowly declining production. It won't be smooth like that, but will probably average about like that because most experts that I know believe that we have probably found about 95 percent of all of the really recoverable oil that we will find in the world unless the prices are very high and we have technologies that are now only conceptual.

So what the future will look like will depend upon how quickly you think we can and ought to use these reserves because the difference between what we use, and, of course, you can't use what's not pumped, but the difference between what we use and what is available to use is this space in here, and that's going to be filled up by the reserves back here. With enhanced recovery and aggressive techniques of pumping live steam down there and sequestering CO2 down there and flooding it with seawater the way they're doing it in Saudi Arabia, we might get it more quickly and we might get a little more of it, but it won't dramatically change what the future looks like.

The next chart is a schematic, which I think shows where we are, and this is again what we've referred to as Hubbert's Peak. And it reflects a 2 percent growth and decline after that. Now, you can make this peak look sharp or flat. Here we have expanded the abscissa and compressed the ordinate so that it's kind of flat. You can make it a really sharp peak if you do the reverse, but that yellow area there represents 35 years because, you see, 2 percent growth, just 2 percent growth, which is so small that our market really doesn't like that, if it's only 2 percent growth, Wall Street doesn't do very well. But 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years. It's eight times bigger in 105 years. It is 16 times bigger in 140 years.

Now, we've been here a long time, and I hope we're here another 140 years; and if we have only 2 percent growth, we would be using 16 times as much energy in 140 years from now. I will tell you categorically there will not be 16 times as much energy to use so things in the interim will need to change. I think we're about here, and I will present evidence from a number of sources that corroborate that.

And most people are now concentrating on how do we fill the peak. Because with our addiction to these fossil fuels, this is what we would like to use, but we're only going to have this much available; so we have got to somehow fill in that peak. I will tell you that as far as liquid fuels are concerned, I don't think there's a prayer that we can fill in that gap. I think that we will be more than lucky if we can continue with a plateau, that what we can get from oil will be this curve and we can now have some renewables which will fill in to give us a plateau. We can live very comfortably with that. A chart a little later will show that.

The next chart is an interesting one. It's by a major organization, CERA, and they're one of the few entities in the world now that still is kind of in denial on peak oil. Although they say that, undulating plateau versus peak oil, but what they're showing there is a peak. And what they're showing here is that if we don't find much more oil, because we've found roughly 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil and we've used a trillion barrels of those and that's just 1.92 trillion, and so if we find oil as depicted in that earlier chart we showed, then peaking would occur about here, which is imminent, is it not?

Now, if we find as much more oil as all the recoverable oil that still remains to be pumped, then that moves the peak out to this point. That's my kids. That's not even my grandkids. That's my kids that will have to deal with that. Even if that is true, then there's some unconventional oil, and I have no idea how much of that we can exploit. There are huge reserves in the Canadian tar sands and our oil shales of the West, Utah and Colorado. Heroic attempts are being made to exploit those. We're getting about a million barrels a day. That seems big, but the world is using more than 84 million barrels a day, and I just don't know what the potential will be. It is very uncertain what that potential will be. They are huge potential amounts of energy, but so are there huge potential amounts of energy in the tides. Because it's in the tides doesn't mean it's in the gas tank of your car, and the same thing is relatively true of these alternative sources of unconventional oil. Now, that also includes the heavy sours, and those we are converting and can convert; so there's some of that there too.

The next chart is a very recent one and very informative.

There are two major entities in the world that track production and use. And, of course, the use and production are essentially the same thing because we have no big reserves of oil in the world. We are kind of using it as we produce it because we are hungry for oil in our economy. One of those is the IEA, the International Energy Agency, and El Baradei, and that is the one that is keeping track of what is going on with the nuclear thing in Iran, and you see them frequently in the news. And the other is our own Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Energy. And I would caution you to be kind of suspect on their predictions for the future because they are using what I think, and what a good many think, are highly speculative prognostications by USGS as to how much more oil we are going to find. But they do a very good job of tracking.

And look what they have found. Look what they have found. If you smooth out the ups and downs of the red and the green, the red for IEA and the green for the EIA, we have been essentially plateaued in oil production for the last 30 months. Now, in the same 30 months, that is about the time it took oil to go from $40 a barrel to $102 a barrel. And isn't that what happens when you have a static supply and an increasing demand? If there is inadequate supply for the demand, the price goes up. The little blue line here shows the cost of oil. And it is now above $100 a barrel there, and it shows how dramatically the cost of oil responds to the availability of oil. There are a number of experts.

The next chart shows a quote, a very recent quote from Shell Oil Company, ``By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be radically different from today.'' It will indeed be radically different from today's. The world's current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step change in the growth rate of our energy demands. And Shell estimates that after 2015, that is just around the corner, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand. That is Shell Oil Company saying that we are going to peak out in the very near future in the production of gas and oil. We will not be able to meet the world's demands.

The next chart is a quote from our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, noting the incredible geopolitical consequences. ``Yes, we do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of the State than the way the politics of energy is. I will use the word warping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something now about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' In 2006. We are now nearly 2 years later, and I will submit this was a very appropriate warning. We have done little.

The next chart is a really illustrative one, and this chart shows what our world would look like if the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil reserves that it contained. And you see in this chart that Saudi Arabia dominates the landmass of the world. Indeed, 22 percent of all the oil reserves in the world we believe are in Saudi Arabia. And notice how large Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, just little dots on the map in the Middle East, and look how large they are in terms of how much oil they have. Venezuela, in our hemisphere, dwarfs the United States.

Here we are with 2 percent of the oil in the world, and the yellow indicates that we use a whole lot. Why, we are the only yellow one in the world, aren't we? We have 2 percent of the oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. This is a shocking picture.

The next chart shows the concerns of some of our leading thought people in our country on the implications of this for national security. Jim Woolsey, McFarland, and Boyden Gray and 27 other prominent Americans, several Four Star retired admirals and generals among them, about 3 years ago wrote a letter to the President saying, ``Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security exposure. We really have to do something about that.'' The President mentioned that in his State of the Union that we were addicted to oil, much of it coming from people, as he said, that don't even like us very much. And we really need to do something about that. Tragically, we have not done much about that.

We represent less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person out of 22 in the world. We use a fourth of the world's oil. That statistic is not lost on the rest of the world, by the way. They note that, that they're paying $8 a gallon for gasoline in France. We are still paying $3 in our country. Note that although we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are using 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the average in the world. That is understandable since we have more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together.

The next chart really is an illustrative one. It has two bars. And the bar on the right, the top ten oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserves, and notice that 98 percent of all of the oil reserves, this is among the top ten, 98 percent of all the oil reserves are Middle East. Lukoil, Russia, has only 2 percent. So that is who has the oil.

Now, who pumps the oil? Gee, we think that ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP and so forth are huge companies. They are huge companies. But look, 78 percent of the top ten producers of oil, again, are these countries in the Middle East that are big giants, produce only 22 percent of the oil.

The next chart is a quote from a speech given 51 years ago the 14th day of this May by Hyman Rickover to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. And if you do a Google search for ``Rickover energy speech,'' it will pop up, an enormously prophetic speech. He noted that at that time we were about 100 years into the age of oil, and he had no idea how long the age of oil would last, but this is a quote. ``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy a very long time ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.''

In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, they are indeed finite. They are not inexhaustible. The exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: The longer they last, the more time that we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

He had no idea how long the age of oil would last. We were then 100 years into it. Now we pretty much know. With some confidence, I can tell you that the age of oil out of 8,000 years of recorded history will occupy about 300 years. As Hyman Rickover noted, this is but a blip in the long history of man. He said, ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use this capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.'' I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and two great grandkids. I am really concerned about their future relative to energy.

Do you know what we should have done when we found this incredible wealth under the ground, a barrel of which equaled the work output of 12 people working all year? We should have stopped to ask ourselves, what can we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did. With no more responsibility than the kids who found the cookie jar or the hog who found the feed room door open, we have just been pigging out.

And incredibly, with all the evidences that we have been going through here and more, that we are either at or very near peak oil, we still want to rush to drill and pump the last little reserves that we know might be out there. If we could pump ANWR and the offshore oil tomorrow, what we would do the day after tomorrow? And that is the plea that Hyman Rickover makes in his speech. There will be a day after tomorrow.

The next chart is an interesting one, and it shows some of the misconceptions that are out there. These are projections by our Energy Information Administration as to what production will be in the future. And we don't have time to go through the interesting transformation from frequency to probability, but somehow from USGS data to EIA charts, we went from a frequency to a P, which is a probability, and there they are making the bizarre statement that a 50 percent probability is greater than a 95 percent probability. And of course that can't be true. And this is the 95 percent probability. This is the 50 percent probability.

And their projection is that world oil production, this is, by the way, a smoothing out that chart we saw before with a lot of discoveries around the 1970s and 1980s and they have just drawn a relatively smooth curve over that. They were projecting that we were going to find more and more, and we were going to follow the green line. But look what has been happening since they made this projection, what you would expect might be happening: 95 percent probable is more than 50 percent, and it has been following the 95 percent probability.

The next chart is an interesting observation from Jean Laherrere, who is an expert in this area. And he is looking at the prognostications that are used to project that green curve that we are going to find more and more, so don't worry about the future. He says that the USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, computer modeling and 3-D seismic, the worldwide search and the deliberative effort to find the largest remaining prospects. Indeed, it really is quite implausible.

The next chart shows that even if that happened, even if that happened, even if we found as much more oil as all the known recoverable reserves today, it still wouldn't make that much difference. Because here we are, and here is that recession in the 1970s and our slower rate of increase because we are now more efficient. And the red curve indicates that we will find another roughly trillion barrels of oil, as much more oil as all the oil that we now know can be reasonably recovered. And if that happens, it pushes the peak out to 2016. Big deal, 9 years from now. That is the power of compound growth.

When Albert Einstein was asked, after the discovery of nuclear energy, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big force in the universe? He said that the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. And you see that here.

And by the way, if we now use heroic efforts with enhanced recovery and we get it out quicker and maybe a little more, then it follows this curve, but then you pretty much fall off a cliff. You can't pump what is not there.

There have been four studies. The next chart is a quote from one of those

studies. There have been four studies. The chart just up was a chart from that same study. There have been four studies paid for by your government, and pretty much ignored by your government. The first of these studies was the big study done by SAIC, known as the Hirsch report, published in 2005. And this is SAIC, a big prestigious organization of worldwide respect. He said that the world has never faced a problem like this. World oil peaking is going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That happened in our country in 1970.

The same man who predicted it would happen in our country in 1970 predicted it would be happening in the world about now. If he was right about our country, why shouldn't we have been concerned about the probability he might have been right about the world? The world has never faced a problem like this.

The next chart shows a couple of more quotes from the Hirsch Report. ``. . . will present the United States and world with unprecedented risk management problems, but the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.'' There is nothing in history to prepare us for this.

The three other reports, I mentioned that there were four, three other studies, actually, two reports from the Hirsch study, the second one was done by the Corps of Engineers, also in 2005. They said essentially the same thing in different words, that the peaking of oil is either present or imminent, with potentially devastating consequences.

The third one was by the Government Accountability Office in 2007, just last year, and they said essentially the same thing, in different words.

The last one was by the National Petroleum Council, again last year, saying essentially the same thing. ``The peaking of oil is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences.''

I have here I think a couple of more references to this very recent reference. Here is one. This is just out from the Deutsche Bank. There are several quotes in that, and you can pull this up and look at it. The 100 million barrels per day peak oil market, we are now somewhere 84 and 88 million barrels a day. We use about a fourth of that, 21-22 million barrels a day. I am not sure we will ever get to 100. But many people are prognosticating 120-150 million barrels a day. There is little probability that will happen.

Several CEOs are quoted in this of the large oil producing companies, and they are all saying essentially the same thing, that we are probably at peak oil.

Now, what do we do about that? I want to use the remaining time to talk about that.

The next chart is a chart of where we get our energy from today. Well, this was in 2000. That isn't quite today, and there have been some changes since then. But you can see we were getting, according to this chart, 24 percent of our energy from natural gas, 30 percent from petroleum, and from coal we got 23 percent. That adds up to 85 percent of all the energy that we are consuming comes from fossil fuels, and they are finite. They will not last forever.

Only 7 percent of that energy comes from true renewables, of the additional energy, to make up to 100, and 8 percent comes from nuclear electrical power. Now, that is 8 percent of the total energy in our country. That is almost 20 percent of our electricity is produced from nuclear power.

We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance, and they now have established a really lavish lifestyle, where 85 percent of the money they are spending comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent of it from their income. They look at what they are spending and how old they are and when they will retire, and, ``gee, the inheritance is going to run out before we retire, so we really got to do something. Either we got to spend less or make more.'' And that is precisely where we are.

This 85 percent, because we are reaching the maximum production of oil and gas, we will be tailing off, so there will be the necessity of replacing that. Just as this young couple would have to replace the limited resources in their grandparents' inheritance with more money or spend less money, that is where we are.

Now, these roughly represent the renewables. This was the picture in 2000. It has changed a little. But in terms of the big picture, the dramatic changes since 2000 are really pretty trifling.

At that time, solar represented 1 percent. Solar has been growing 20- 25 percent a year. That is really big growth. But 1 percent of 7 percent is .07 percent. So it is five times bigger, 0.35 percent. Still trifling, isn't it? Still way down, kind of in the noise level.

Wood. This is the paper industry and timber industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product, waste to energy. You can do several things with your public waste, and burying it is probably the least productive thing you ought to do with it. You can recycle it, and that ought to be done, to the extent that it is rational. Or you can burn it to produce energy.

But be cautious. This is not a solution to our fossil fuel problem, because most of that waste stream represents the profligate use of fossil fuel energy, and in a fossil fuel deficient world, it just won't be there. So for the moment it makes imminently good sense to do that, but recognize that will be a diminishing resource. As the world has less and less fossil fuels, we are learn to live with less and less waste.

Wind. Boy, that one is growing, maybe 40 percent a year. Denmark is the world leader in that. They have now freed themselves from the need of imported oil. Their huge wind machines produce electricity at about 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour. We are doing it for about 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. That is very competitive. And there is the potential for a lot of growth. Again, in 2000, that was only 1 percent of the 7 percent renewables, which is 0.07 percent. So to get to be a really meaningful percent of our total energy production, we have to have a long time and huge growth there, don't we.

Conventional hydro, you see that is a big part of the renewables. That is truly renewable. As long as the sun shines and the water evaporates and it is carried up to the clouds and it drops on the mountains and flows down to the rivers, we have conventional hydro. That probably can't grow much in our country. But we could grow micro hydro. The big macro hydro, we probably tapped out on it. But the rest of the world has some potential for growth in hydro.

Alcohol fuel, just spend a moment talking about that. This seems like such a great idea. Our farmers are so good at growing these grains, and you can ferment the sugar and corn to make alcohol. The first cars that Henry Ford built ran on alcohol, so we are kind of just going full cycle if we turn back to alcohol.

We produced a fair amount of alcohol, and it doubled the price of corn. So our farmers, recognizing they could make more money growing corn than they could soybeans and wheat, they diverted land from soybeans and wheat at the same time that the world population is growing and the demands for these things are increasing.

So now we have an increase, double the price of corn, and a huge increase in the price of wheat and soybeans. And what that means is that three of the world's staple foods for people, corn, wheat, soybeans and rice, three of those have gone up because of our corn ethanol program. A UN official, noting what we had done and the consequences of this and the world increase in corn, wheat and soybean prices, said what we have done is a crime against humanity.

The National Academy of Sciences, now, this isn't Roscoe Bartlett saying this, I am just repeating the National Academy of Sciences, although we did some back-of-the-envelope computations and came to essentially the same conclusion, the National Academy of Sciences says if we took all of our corn and converted it to ethanol, and discounted it for fossil fuel input, which you really have to do to be fair, you can't be using fossil fuel energy to produce ethanol and pretend you are displacing fossil fuels, that we would in that case displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline.

That is trifling. In fact, it is so trifling that they noted that if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you would save as much gas as converting all of our corn to ethanol.

They further said that if we converted all of our soybeans, no soybean oil for your salads, no soybean oil meal for your pigs and chickens and cows, converted all, but you still have the soybean meal left that you could use, but all the oil, convert all the oil to soy diesel, it would displace 2.9 percent of our diesel.

The reality is that these fossil fuels are incredibly rich in quality and quantity of energy. They have been easily exploitable. You put in our big oil fields one unit of energy and you get out 100 units of energy. It is the energy-profit ratio. In many of our wells today, we put in 1 and get out 1.5 or 1.2, but it is still profitable, so we still do it.

Geothermal. Now, that is true geothermal. That is not tying your heat pump to the ground temperature, which we really ought to do. When I got up this morning it was 18 degrees. If you had a heat pump, what you were trying to do to heat your house was to cool that 18 degrees outside. You had to take heat from out there and put it in your house.

Now, if you were tied to the ground, here it is 56 degrees. That looks really warm compared to 18, doesn't it? And the reverse in summer, of course. Your air conditioner in summer is trying to heat up that 102 air outside to cool your house. It would be a whole lot easier to work against a 56 degree ground temperature, wouldn't it? But this is talking about the true geothermal. That is where you are tapping into the heat produced in the molten core of the Earth.

Now, for all practical purposes, that is inexhaustible. It is not, of course, but you are talking in terms of millions and millions of years, so as far as we are concerned, it is inexhaustible. We have some real potential for that. There is not a chimney in Iceland that I saw, because they run everything there on geothermal. We have some places in our country where we can do that, and we can and should.

The next chart is a look at all of the potential substitutes, supplements, for fossil fuels. The first of these are some finite solutions, and that is the tar sands and the oil shales and coal. It is worth just spending a couple of minutes talking about those, because there are potentially huge, huge reserves there.

Conservatively, there are probably 1.5 trillion barrels of oil at both the tar sands and the oil shales, in each of those. There are potentially about 1.5 trillion barrels of oil in both the oil shales and tar sands. That is 3 trillion barrels between the two. And we have about 1 trillion barrels of recoverable oil in the known oil fields in the world. That is a huge amount, and some people will tell you, don't worry about the future, because we have all that oil there and we will get it out.

Well, they are working very heroically in Canada to exploit the tar sands. They have a shovel up there which lifts 100 tons at a time, they dump it into a truck which hauls 400 tons, and they haul it to a cooker that uses natural gas and cooks this really stiff oil so it will flow, and then they add some chemicals to it to keep it flowing when it cools.

They are producing about 1 million barrels a day. But they know what they are doing is not sustainable, because they are going to run out of the water it takes to do it, they are going to run out of the natural gas that they are using, and they are talking about building a nuclear power plant. And this seam, if you think of it as a seam, it is pretty much on top of the ground, but soon it ducks under an overlay and it would be prohibitively expensive to remove the overlay, so they will have to determine how to do it in situ, and they don't know how they can do that in situ. So because it is there doesn't mean it will be in your gas tank. But we really need to work at that.

But with these heroic methods, it is 1 million barrels a day. That is just a little over 1 percent of all the oil we use. So don't become too sanguine about the future because it is there, because there are huge engineering challenges in exploiting it.

The oil shales of our West, and conservatively there is 1.5 trillion barrels there, but to date nobody has found a way to competitively get that out, even with oil near $100 a barrel. There are several companies and consortiums working on some breakthrough technologies that may make exploitation of that possible. But there is still an enormous amount of uncertainty in that, and to bank on that solving your energy problems would be sort of the equivalent of banking on winning the lottery to solve your personal economic problems. It would be real nice if that happened.

But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. You ought to have a plan B, so I think we ought to have a plan B here.

Whoa, some people will tell you, no problem about the future, because we have 500 years of coal. That isn't true. There is nobody I know who believes we have 500 years.

But for a long time the figure 250 years was tossed about. That's 250 years at present use rate. There may be a chart later that shows this, but I will just go through the numbers now because they are really simple to understand. That 250 years shrinks to 85 years if there is only 2 percent growth.

Again, that's the power of compound growth. Then if you convert that coal to a gas or liquid and use the energy from coal to do it, which is the only fair thing to do, you have now shrunk to 50 years. If you share it with the world, and if you think about it, you think about it, there is no way you can avoid sharing it with the world. Because if we use oil produced from coal, then the oil we might have bought from the Middle East is available to somebody else.

So the end result is just as if you had sold three-fourths of that oil to the rest of the world, the oil they would get from coal, because they will be buying that three-fourths you didn't use from the countries from which you would have bought it. In that case it lasts 12\1/2\ years.

But just recently, the National Academy of Sciences has said that we haven't really looked at coal reserves since the 1970s. And they have looked at coal reserves, and they say it's not 250 years of reserves, it's 100 years of reserves.

So if we use that same dynamic of compound growth, that 100 years shrinks to something probably less than 5 years if you convert it to a gas or liquid, use energy from coal to do that, and share it with the world.

Now, there is a lot of coal out there, and we are fortunate in being one of the major repositories of coal in the world, and you can convert it to a gas or a liquid. Germany did that during World War II. South Africa learned to do it when their trade was restricted with the rest the world. But this is not a panacea. It's there, and we will use it. But we need to use that as a bridge to get the true renewable, nuclear.

Now, nuclear is kind of in a class by itself. There are three basic types of nuclear power plants; two of them we have, one of them is a dream. The two that we have is the light water reactor using fissionable uranium. That's the only one used worldwide to produce electricity. France produces about 75 or 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear. We still produce more electricity with our 20 percent than the total amount they produce because we are so much bigger than them.

By the way, and that uses fissionable uranium, and there is a finite amount of that in the world. It is not infinite. I get wildly divergent estimates of how much remain, but it's not in hundreds of years. It's in decades, not in hundreds of years.

A second type of nuclear energy is the breeder reactor, which, as the name implies, produces more fuel than it uses. That has been used in producing nuclear weapons in our country and other places in the world. It has big problems in transporting weapons, potentially weapons-grade materiel to enrichment and so forth, and of storing away some products that will be hot for a quarter of a million years.

Now, just intuitively, something so energetic that I can't get near it for a quarter of a million years just ought to have enough energy in there to do something useful with it, and they now are working at that, and there are now some exciting new technologies that may permit us to get a whole lot more energy out of these fuels than we were getting in the past. So there is a real opportunity for nuclear to kind of take up the slack, but note that that produces electricity.

Unless you are going to go to electric cars, that doesn't help much in liquid

fuels, and the real crisis in the future, the real challenge for the future, is going to be liquid fuels. Now, the only silver bullet that I know of, and, again, this is not liquid fuels, but you can have electric cars, was some challenges in producing batteries and with the raw materials necessary for those and disposing of the batteries and so forth.

Fusion is inexhaustible, if we get to it. That's what the sun is doing. It's a huge nuclear fusion plant. We may get there. We spend about $250 million a year doing that, and we are always about 30 years away from a functioning fusion power plant.

I gladly support the $250 million, but I will tell you that I think the odds of getting there are relatively small. The rewards are so huge that it's worth the investment even if the chance of success is small, so I happily vote for this.

But please have a plan B. If we get there, wonderful. But the probability that we will get there is, I think, quite small, so we really need a plan B. You can't count on that as the future energy source for your kids and your grandkids.

Now, here are the renewables that we have been talking about. Let's see if there are some here. Ocean energy. Lots of potential from energy from the oceans, the ocean waves, the ocean tides. The Moon lifts the whole ocean, three-fourths of the Earth's surface, several feet a day.

I carry two 5-gallon buckets of water, that's heavy. When I think about the huge amount of potential energy in just those tides, it's more than we are using, but it's disbursed, very difficult to capture. There is an old axiom that says, energy, to be effective, must be concentrated when the tides are just so disbursed. Very difficult.

There is ocean thermal gradients. Some places the surface of the ocean is very warm, the deep waters are very cold, and you can, with the principle of the thermocouple, get energy from that divergent temperature difference. So there are a lot of opportunities, potential opportunities from energy from the ocean, and we ought to be exploiting all of those.

Methanol. Methanol is simply an alcohol made from wood rather than grain. Grain alcohol has two carbons, wood alcohol has one carbon, but it burns with roughly the same amount of energy.

A biomass, and a lot of talk about biomass today, and you look out there at all of that wasteland and those trees and that grass, and, gee, if we could just take that and convert it into alcohol. You can do that with some little organisms that we have bioengineered that mimic what the organisms do in the gut of the sheep or the goat or the cow or the cecum of the horse and the guinea pig. They can break down the cellulose molecule into the constituent glucose molecules. Then, of course, you can ferment those glucose molecules. But we have not yet perfected that technology so that it is amenable to huge, large-scale production, but maybe we can get there.

I have a major concern that Hyman Rickover talked about in his great speech, and again, I would urge that that's a very instructive speech. Hyman Rickover, energy speech, Google, search it. It will pop up for you.

He noted in that speech that we shouldn't be competing with food for energy. That's corn ethanol, biodiesel. We should be careful in competing with a humus for fuel, because, you see, the weeds that grow today in that vacant lot, that will grow this summer, are in at least some measure growing because last year's weeds died and are fertilizing them.

I remember back, I was born in 1926, so I lived during the Depression, and I remember farmers in the Depression which said, gee, I have now worn out my third farm. What they did was to go in and mine the farm simply by planting crops that drew from the soil far more energy than he or the plants put into the soil. So soon, the soils were nonproductive and there were few of us in a big country, and he just moved on.

You can't move on today, and so we have to have sustainable agriculture. I don't know the extent to which we can exploit what might be a huge potential from energy from biomass, but I would caution that we really need to look at sustainability.

If you have ever gone to the tropical rain forest that looks to be a hugely rich dynamic, and, gee, if I only could get all of that stuff off of there, I could grow tremendous crops on that soil.

But when they did that, there was bitter disappointment, because what they found was that essentially all of the nutrients in that ecosystem were involved in the growth, death, decay, regrowth. When they took that material off the soils, for what they called laterite soils, they baked like a brick. It would take a very long time by secondary succession to come back to a rain forest. We need to be very careful about sustainability.

I have been a big proponent of what we call ARPA-E, and we voted that. It's not been funded, and the administration is not recommending funding it, and I hope they reconsider.

ARPA-E kind of mimics our DARPA, which has been an enormously successful organization in exploiting leading-edge technologies, and the net out there is their creation. They have been the creator of a lot of really exciting technology, because what they do is to fund leading-edge things that are so far out there and so risky that business rationally can't do it, and probably in terms of fidelity to their stockholders should not be doing it.

We think the future demands very creative approaches to selecting which of these alternatives we invest our limited amount of time and money and energy in.

My wife tells me that I shouldn't be talking about this. She said that don't you remember that in ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news. I tell her this is really a good news story. It's a good news story in two respects. One is that the sooner we start, the less bumpy the ride will be.

Now, we should have started at least 28 years ago. I say that because by 1980 we knew absolutely that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's peak. We have now blown 28 years when he should have been doing something, but if we start today, the ride will be smoother than if we start tomorrow.

But even more importantly, I think this challenge is just exhilarating. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a huge challenge, and, boy, this is a big one.

A year ago, the holiday season, I was privileged to lead a codel of nine Members to China, and we went there to talk about energy. Incredibly, they began their discussion of energy by talking about post oil. Gee, you know, in our country, we tend to think in terms of the next quarterly report, and the next election. We are kind of dominated by what's called the tyranny of the urgent, which frequently sweeps the important off the table. But in that part of the world they seem to think in terms of generations and centuries. And so with that perspective, they were talking about a post-oil world, and they talked about post oil, and they had a five-point plan.

Number one, conservation. That's where it has got to begin is conservation. That will buy some time and free up some energy because we have run out of time. There is no surplus energy to invest in alternatives. Their oil wouldn't be $100 a barrel.

The second and third points of their five-point program was find alternatives, and as many of those as you can from their own country.

The fourth one will interest you, it's be kind to the environment, and they know that they are big polluters.

The fifth one is international cooperation. They are pleading for international cooperation.

What we need, and I will close with this brief statement, what we need is a program that has a total commitment of World War II, the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. We are up to the challenge. We need leadership. We can do it.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, March 3, 2008, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, our government has paid for four studies looking at the world energy situation, particularly at oil. Two of those studies were reported in 2005, and two of them were reported in 2007. The two in 2005 were the SAIC report known as the ``Hirsch Report,'' and then later in the year there was a report by the Army Corps of Engineers,

and then in 2007 there were two reports, one of them by the Government Accountability Office and the second one by the National Petroleum Council.

They all said essentially the same thing in different words. I have here some quotes from the first one of these, and the largest one. Remember, this is now in 2005, and this is from the Hirsch Report. ``Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management'' was the title of their work.

World oil peaking is going to happen. By peaking, we mean that time at which the world reaches its maximum capacity for producing oil. After that time, regardless of the demand for oil and regardless of the desire to produce more oil, the world will not have the ability to ramp up in oil production to produce more oil.

World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of confident forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge.

And then they make this statement: the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history that we can use to judge what the impact of this peaking will be. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.

The second chart has some additional quotes from this same report. The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk-management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. A couple of weeks ago, oil was $100 a barrel. And without timely mitigation, and there has been essentially none, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented, unprecedented, meaning nothing in the past can we use as a guide to what the consequences will be.

Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides. But to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.

Now, as we will see in a chart or two, it is very probable that peaking has already occurred. So, obviously, we can't prepare for it a decade ahead. Dealing with world oil production, peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. This is from the SAIC, a very prestigious organization, a report paid for by our government.

The next chart is a graph of oil production in the United States. To see the impact of this we have to go back more than half a century to 1956, the 8th day of March, in San Antonio, Texas, when M. King Hubbert gave a speech to a group of oil engineers and executives which I think will shortly be recognized as the most important speech given in the last century.

What M. King Hubbert told that group was that in just 14 years from 1956, that is, 1970, the United States would reach its maximum oil production, and after that, no matter what it did, the United States would not be able to increase its oil production.

At that time, the United States, that means in 1956, the United States was king of oil, I believe producing more oil, using more oil and shipping more oil than any other country in the world. Nobody believed M. King Hubbert. He was derided. But when in 1970, right on schedule, we peaked in oil production, he became a legend in his own day. He died just a few years ago.

What he predicted was oil production in the Lower 48, that is, Texas and the rest of the United States, that is the gray and blue part of the graph here, we found a lot of oil in Alaska and we are able to get some natural gas liquids, and when you add those two together, you see there was a little blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. But in spite of feverishly drilling, we have drilled more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together. We have about four times as many oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, about 4,000, about four times as many in the Gulf of Mexico as in all of Saudi Arabia, for instance. In spite of finding oil in Alaska and in spite of finding oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the yellow wedge there, we are now producing about half the oil we did in 1970.

The next chart shows a quote, a very recent quote from the Shell Oil Company, January 22. ``By the end of 2100, the world's energy system will be radically different from today's.''

It will indeed.

``The world's current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step change in the growth rate of energy demand.'' China and India and the Third World are coming on line to industrialize.

Shell estimates that after 2015, that is just around the corner, ``after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.'' A very significant statement. ``As a result, society has no choice but to add other sources of energy.''

The next chart is also some very recent data. Now, remember, M. King Hubbert made his prediction in 1956. Remember that it was in 2005 that SAIC, the Hirsch Report, made their predictions.

There are two agencies in the country that do a very good job of tracking the production and consumption of oil, and, of course, since we use all we produce, those lines are the same. We are not storing it up in large quantities anywhere, significant quantities. One of these two agencies is the International Energy Agency, the IEA. You see them referenced in the news relative to Iran. They are the international group that is watching the development of nuclear energy activity in Iran.

Then there is our own EIA, Energy Information Agency, an arm of our Department of Energy. They do a very good job of tracking the use of oil. Here are their curves. The red curve is the IEA and the green curve is the EIA. You notice they are very similar. They should be, because they are looking at the same data. Notice for about the last 30 months, both of those have oil production essentially plateauing.

The same gentleman that predicted that the United States would reach its maximum oil production in 1970, that was M. King Hubbert, predicted that the world would be reaching its maximum production about now. It would appear, it would appear from Shell's statement and would appear from the graph here from these two organizations that are tracking the production and consumption of oil, that indeed it looks like we are plateauing, which would mean that we very probably have reached a peak.

Notice what has happened with price. There is a lot of volatility, which was predicted by the Hirsch Report. And notice what has happened in the last few months; up, up, up. It at one time touched $100 a barrel. It now is down just under $90 a barrel. When I first came to the floor about 2\1/2\ years ago to talk about oil, it was about $40 a barrel. Look what has happened to the price of oil since then.

There are three groups that have common cause in a rational solution to this problem and two other problems. The first of these three groups are those that are concerned about global warming and climate change. What they would do to ameliorate this problem is to shift from the use of fossil fuels, which are releasing CO2 which was sequestered a very long time ago, now present in oil and gas and coal, they would replace that with renewable sources where you are simply recycling the CO2. The trees grow and they use CO2 to grow, and then when they are mature, you cut them and you burn them and oxygen is consumed in burning them and the CO2 is released, so there is no net CO2 increase when you do that.

A second group that has common cause in wanting to replace our fossil fuels with renewables are those who are concerned about our national security. The President noted that we were far too dependant on foreign oil. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world. We use about 25 percent of the world's oil. We import almost two-thirds of what we use. The

obvious solution to that problem is to get our energy from somewhere else so that we don't have to import this oil, and the rational place to get that is from renewables.

Then there is the group of people that I am kind of representing tonight when I talk about this aspect of energy, and those are the people who believe that there is a finite amount of oil in the world and that at some point in time the world will reach that maximum capacity to produce oil. That happened in the United States, as that chart showed, in 1970. After that, no matter what we do, reasonably, no matter what we do, the production of oil will fall steadily off.

Now, we aren't running out of oil. We are not falling off a cliff. What we are running out of is our ability to produce oil as fast as we would like to use it. That point is called peak oil. What the peak oil concerned people would like to do is to move to some alternative which is a substitute for oil.

So we have these three groups with very different agendas, very different premises, but all three of them have exactly the same solution to their problem; climate change and global warming. What you want to do is stop releasing this sequestered CO2 in the fossil fuels and use renewables.

What you want to do if you are concerned about our national security and the fact we are so dependent on foreign oil is to find a substitute for oil so we don't have to buy that foreign oil.

If you are concerned about peak oil, that it just isn't going to be there in the quantities you would like to use it in the future, obviously you have got to find another source of energy. So these three groups have common cause.

I am joined this evening by one of my colleagues that is a real expert in the first one of these I mentioned, Wayne Gilchrest, Wayne, thank you very much for joining us. Wayne is perhaps the best authority in the Congress on climate change or global warming, and different people talk about this problem in different ways.

Wayne, thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much for joining us in this discussion of energy. You know, Congressman Gilchrest, some might say, gee, won't the global warming problem be solved if, in fact, we were at peak oil? It would be nice if that would solve the problem, but it won't.

You see, we have now used about 1 trillion barrels of oil. That's about half of the oil that we ultimately will use. There is about another 1 trillion barrels of oil to use. So as we go through this last half of the age of oil, we will release as much CO2 from burning that oil and gas and coal as we have released now in the first half of the age of oil.

So the CO2 contributed during this industrial age and burning the fossil fuels will double. It will be twice as big at the end of this time.

I have here an interesting graph, a little cartoon here. There is a huge SUV there and it's labeled ``demand,'' and there is a gas pump there and it's labeled ``supply,'' and it's little, and the motor is saying, Gee, just why is gas so expensive? Well, that's the reason, of course: There is a big demand and a little supply. When you have that, that makes prices go up.

The next chart is a quote from the second of these studies, which your government paid for and has pretty much been ignoring. This is the Corps of Engineers: ``Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today.'' The President recognized that in his State of the Union a year or so ago.

``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic quality of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as a front-line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are just as relevant today as they were then.''

Oil is, indeed, an incredible energy source. One barrel of oil, and when I first heard this statistic, I said, gee, that can't be true, one barrel of oil has the equivalent of 25,000 man-hours of labor, that's 12 people working all year. I thought, gee, can that be true, just 1 barrel of oil, 42 gallons of oil.

Then I thought how far that gallon of gasoline, still at $3, by the way, cheaper than water in the grocery store, how far that gallon of gasoline carries my Prius. I drive a Prius and we get just a little under 50 miles per gallon with it. I could pull my Prius 50 miles, but how long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles?

When I looked at that and I figured, gee, maybe it's true that a barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 men working all year.

The incredibly high quality of life that almost all the world enjoys today is the result of our ability to tap into the stored energy in fossil fuels.

The next chart is a quote from Admiral Hyman Rickover. He gave a speech, it will be 51 years ago the 14th day of this May, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. These are some excerpts from his speech. He really was prophetic. He is the father, of course, of our nuclear submarine.

``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy'' he says, 500 million years ago ``and took aeons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite,'' and they are, ``the exact length these reserves will last is important in one respect. The longer they last, the more time we have to invent ways to live off renewable or substitute energy resource and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''

Fifty-one years ago we were only then about 100 years into the age of oil. He had no idea how long the age of oil will last. Now we know pretty much how long the age of oil will last.

He said that how long it lasted was important in only one respect, that the longer it lasted, the more time did we have to plan for the transition to renewables, which ultimately we will do. Geology will ensure that eventually we transition to renewable fuels.

``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance.''

I thought often of that very sage counsel. You know, it doesn't even come close to our attitude towards oil. With no more responsibility than the kids who found the cookie jar or the hog who found the feed room door open, we have just been pigging out. We have been pumping oil as fast as we could all over the world eager to find new places from which to pump oil.

We just found some more oil in the Gulf of Mexico under 7,000 feet of water, 30,000 feet of rock. We aren't starting to exploit that yet because oil at $100 a barrel or $88 a barrel apparently is not high enough.

``A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.''

Boy, that is quite precisely what we have done with this incredible wealth under the ground. When we found that wealth 150 years ago, we should have stopped and said, gee, what can we do with this to do the most good for the most people for the longest time? Rather than doing that, what we did was to act as if oil were forever, that there would never be an end of oil, just keep drilling, just keep pumping, and it will always be there.

The next chart shows the industrial age and the transition from wood, the brown line here to coal, and then to gas and oil. Boy, look what happened. Look at the slope of that line.

Now, if I put world population on this, it would be hardly indistinguishable from that energy curve, because the world's population just shot up. It was less than 1 billion people for a very long time. Now it's approaching 7 billion people, and that increase in population follows exactly this dramatic increase in the release of energy from the use of gas and oil.

A couple of interesting things about this chart, notice where that line would be if it kept on going up, way off the top of the chart by this time. That dip there, as you notice from the abscissa, occurred in the 1970s, was the Arab oil spike price spots and the worldwide recession that resulted from that. There was demand destruction. We didn't need as much oil because we were in a recession, a depression in many places.

The production went down and, boy, did the price go down. It dropped, do you remember, about $10 a barrel. All of those activities, which were looking at producing substitutes, they just all died because you can't compete with oil at $10 a barrel.

We now are very much more efficient than we were at this time. The slope of this curve, by the way, is really interesting. That's during the Carter years. During the Carter years, every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That's a stunning statistic.

What that means is that when you have used half of your oil, how much will remain, 10 years. We are now very much more efficient than we were then. We are able to live better than we were then, using less energy because your air conditioner is probably three times as efficient; so is your refrigerator. Your car is more efficient. If they would keep them small, they would get better mileage even.

The next chart is really an interesting one, and looking at this chart causes you to do a lot of reflection. This is ``The World According to Oil,'' and it depicts two things. One is who has the oil. And the other one is who uses the oil. The yellow and the green there are the people who are using the oil, and the blues and the grays are the people who have the oil.

You notice this is what the world's map would look like if the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil it had in reserve. Saudi Arabia is huge. It represents about 22 percent, almost a fourth of all of the oil reserves in all of the world.

Little Kuwait here, a tiny country, Saddam Hussein thought it looked like an errant province of Iraq and he went to reclaim it a decade or so ago, but little Kuwait has as much oil as Iraq. There is Iran. United Arab Emirates, you can hardly see them on the map. Look at Venezuela. It dwarfs us.

Here we are with 2 percent of the reserves. We are yellow because we use 25 percent of all of the world's oil. Notice that Venezuela is several times larger than we are.

Russia is pretty big, what three, four times bigger than we are, but they aren't using anywhere near as much oil as we are per capita so they are a big exporter and they have lots of money.

What is striking on this map is the size of China and India. Notice them here. Together they don't have as much oil as the United States, but together they have 2.3 billion people. With booming economies, China growing 11.4 percent, that was the statistic I saw for the last quarter.

Mentioning China, the next chart looks at what China is doing around the world. China is going around the world and buying oil wherever they can. And they are not just buying oil; they are buying goodwill. Would you like a soccer stadium, maybe a hospital, or roads is what you need in your country. This symbol here is for Unocal. They almost bought an oil company in our country a few years ago.

Why is China doing that? In today's world it doesn't make one bit of difference who owns the oil. From that previous chart when you saw those huge reserves of oil in north Africa and the Middle East, those people are using very little oil. He who comes with the dollars, let's hope it stays dollars and not your euros or we'll be in a world of hurt, he who comes with the dollars gets the oil. It doesn't make any difference in today's world who owns the oil, so why is China buying oil?

China has 900 million people in what they call rural areas. They may be in rural areas, but many of them have television and they are seeing the results of industrialization and they are demanding for themselves the increased quality of life that comes from the industrialization that they see in other countries in the world. So China has a problem in providing adequate industrialization to meet the emotional needs of these people so, and this is a judgment call on my part, so they don't become a problem and revolt.

I think the day may come when China may tell the rest of the world, Gee, guy, we're sorry, this is our oil and we have 2.3 billion people and we can't share it with you. To make that a reality, they will need a big navy. They will need a big navy to hold open the sea lanes and get that oil to their country. They are growing a navy very rapidly. This is open source literature. You can do a Google search for ``China'' and ``navy'' and you can see how aggressively they are growing their navy.

What China is doing here resulted in a statement in 2006 by Condoleezza Rice which is in our next chart here. ``We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word warping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of the diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.''

The next chart presents some numbers that I went through a bit ago. These numbers, by the way, prompted about 3 years ago now, 30 of our prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, and McFarland and Jim Woolsey and 27 others, among them retired four star admirals and generals, they wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserve and we use 25 percent and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. We need to do something about it. You may remember the President mentioned this in one of his State of the Union speeches. Indeed we do have to do something about that.

We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We are one person in 22 in the world, and we use a fourth of the world's oil. That statistic is not lost on the rest of the world, by the way. They are noting that.

With only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. What does that mean? Very simply, it means we are pumping our oil four times faster than the rest of the world, which means that our supplies are going to run down faster than the rest of the world.

We have 630,000 producing oil wells in our country. That is more than all of the rest of the world put together, so we are really good at pumping oil.

The next chart is really a very important chart. If you were going to talk about energy, oil, and the world's future, and you had only one chart, this would be the one that you would use. This comes from the oil chart. You can do a Google search for ``oil charts'' and you can find this and a lot more information.

Peak oil, the growing gap. The bars here represent when we discovered oil. Boy, it started way back in World War II, back in the 1940s. Then we discovered a whole lot in the 1950s, a whole bunch, and a lot of oil in the seventies. Oil in the eighties, and look at what has happened. Down, down, down, down. And that is in spite of ever-better techniques for discovering oil, computer modeling and 3D seismic, and it is in spite of an ever-greater effort in going out and drilling new wells.

The solid black line here represents the amount of oil which we are producing and using. We use everything we produce, so it is the same line. Notice again up to the 1970s what has happened. If that line kept going up at that rate, we would be off the top of the chart here. But the Arab price oil spikes, at this point produced a worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil, and then we became very much more efficient. Notice the low slope of this line compared to this one. Maybe that was a wake-up call that we needed, because if we hadn't had that, we would be in even more trouble today because we wouldn't have invested in those efficiencies.

But notice that since about 1980, we have been using more oil than we produce by this amount. So we have been dipping in reserves we had.

What will the future look like? One thing is certain: You cannot pump oil you have not found. So you can make your own judgment as to how much more oil we will find. Most of the world's experts believe we have probably found 95 percent of all of the conventionally recovered oil that we will ever find.

The light shaded area here represents the future, and they are showing peaking at about 2010 and downhill after that.

This area tails out until it comes down to zero, which will be another 150 years from now, because that is about how long we have been in the age of oil.

The difference between the amount you discover and the amount you are using has to be filled in by the reserves you have here. Now, you can make that future look a little different by enhanced oil recovery and going out and pumping live steam and pushing CO2 down there to push the oil out, but if you do that, you will simply move this peak out a little, and then you will kind of fall off the cliff because, again, you can't pump what you haven't found.

The next chart is an interesting one. We show again here Hubbert's peak and the production of oil in our country. The yellow symbols here are what M. King Hubbert predicted for the lower 48. The green is what actually happened. This is a really interesting chart. It was produced by CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. They produced this chart in an effort to convince you that you shouldn't have any confidence in M. King Hubbert's predictions because he really got it wrong. Maybe to a statistician they might reach a conclusion that he got it wrong, but I think to the average layman this green curve and those yellow triangles are not all that different. He seemed to get it pretty right to me.

The red here is the additional oil that we found in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. M. King Hubbert's prediction was just for the lower 48. And by the way, we are pumping 25 percent of our oil through that four-foot pipeline. I have been up to Deadhorse where it begins. Even with that, we had just a blip on the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

The next chart is interesting. It is another one from the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, CERA. There are only two major entities that I know of in the world today that will claim that peaking of oil is not either present or imminent. One of those is ExxonMobil. The other oil company, I started with a quote from Shell saying we are probably there, are on board with the peak oil concept, and CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

I mentioned that we have discovered about 2 trillion barrels of oil. Here they have 1.9 trillion. That is pretty close to 2. If that is the amount of oil available, which is what we showed on the previous chart, if you add up all on the bars on the previous chart, they will come to about 2 trillion, and we have now pumped about half of that. We have the other half to pump. If that is all of the oil we have, they now show peaking here at about now, right? About 2010, roughly now they show peaking.

They are presuming that we are going to find another trillion barrels of oil, that we are going to find as much oil as all of the oil that we used in the 150 years since we started using oil. If you believe we are going to find that much more oil, then you push the peak out to about 2035. That's just the take after tomorrow really, isn't it?

They are also projecting that we may find some unconventional oil, like we will be able to exploit a lot of oil from the tar sands and the oil shales. There are incredible amounts of potential oil there. The problem is can we really get it out in any timely fashion. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day in our country. The world uses 84 million barrels of oil a day. Try to get your mind around that, 21 million barrels of oil a day, each one of them with the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. Wow, no wonder we live such great, high- quality lives.

The next chart shows a schematic. By the way, you can make this peak look sharp by compressing the abscissa and expanding the ordinate. But this is 2 percent growth. And 2 percent growth is small. Our stock market doesn't like 2 percent. If it is only 2 percent, they think that the sky is going to fall and stocks drop.

But 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. It is 4 times bigger in 70 years. It is 8 times bigger in 105 years. It is 16 times bigger in 140 years.

Albert Einstein said that the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound interest when he was asked: Gee, Dr. Einstein, after the discovery of nuclear energy, what is the next big force in the universe? That was his answer: It is the power of compound interest.

I believe we are about here, just about at peaking. This is where we would like to be in 35 years, two times higher than we are now, and we have a huge gap to fill. Most people are looking at how can you fill that gap.

I don't think that there's even a prayer that we can come close to filling that gap. I think we'll be more than lucky if we can produce enough energy from alternative sources to fill in this area, if we simply have a plateau in production of oil.

The next chart is the one from our Energy Information Agency, and it's an interesting chart. The USGS has estimated the amount of reserves by doing a lot of computer modeling. And of course, as you know, in computer modeling, the quality of what you get out is dependent on the quality of information you put into your model.

And they take the mean of what they get from this modeling, and they say that that's the 50 percent average, ``F'' for frequency. Somehow that got translated to ``P'' when it went from the USGS report until it appears now in the Energy Information Agency report. And so now they're dealing with probabilities. And they make the bizarre statement that something which is 50 percent probable is more probable than something which is 95 percent probable.

And I'm going to spend just a moment on this. They have here, they did this projection back here, what, about 1995 or so. And they have four different curves there. One is the 95 percent probability; that's the yellow one. The green one is the mean, which they say is the most probable, 50 percent probability; and the blue is the 5 percent probability.

Well, these probabilities are kind of like the picture on the weather channel of where the hurricane is going. Tomorrow you know pretty precisely where it's going to be. A week from now you have some uncertainty, so they have a big funnel out there.

So if they are going to do this, there should be another green line down here and another blue line down here. You don't have the foggiest notion hardly what it's going to be if you have only a 5 percent probability.

But notice the actual data points, which are in red here. By the way, these are discoveries, and this is that big peak back, you know, in the 1950s, and this is the big peak up here. This is kind of rounding out those bar graphs that we had in the previous chart. Notice the actual data points have been following what you would expect them to follow, the 95 percent of probability.

The next chart is one from the Corps of Engineers study again, and they quote Jean Laherrare, who is a French expert in this area. And he says the USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements over the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects. Indeed, I think it is most implausible that that's going to happen.

And the next chart, again, this is from the ``Hirsch Report.'' And then even if that did happen, the real question is, so what? What if we found as much more oil as all the oil that yet remains to be pumped? And that's what they're assuming here. This is about 2 trillion barrels. They're assuming we're going to find another trillion barrels, and that's what this red curve is. And you see, it peaks in about 2016. So it pushes that peak out only about a decade. That's the power of compound growth. So even if we found as much more oil as all the oil that yet remains to be pumped in the world, according to this chart it would push it out only to 2016.

Now, you can push it out even further if you use enhanced oil recovery, but you can't pump what you don't have, so then you fall off a cliff. That's not what you want for your children and your grandchildren, I think.

The next chart shows a number of experts and when they have predicted it would peak, and you see most of them, some of them thought it would be from here way out to 2100. But most of them have it, it could start or would start fairly quickly.

I have one more chart, and then I've got to close very quickly because time is running out. This chart shows quality of life and how good you feel about

your station in life compared to how much energy you use. How good you feel about life, how much energy you use: the United States out here using more energy than anybody else; 24 countries use less energy than we and feel better about their quality of life than we.

Now, my wife tells me I shouldn't be talking about these things because don't I remember that in ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news. I tell her this is a good-news story. The sooner we start, the easier the trip will be. I'm really exhilarated by this. There's no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge. This is a huge challenge. We have the most innovative, creative society in the world. Properly informed and properly motivated, I think we're equal to the challenge. I see this as a very challenging fun future, where we really have something we can all pull together to accomplish.

I hope we'll be back here next week, and at that time I want to spend most of the time talking about what are the potential replacements for oil, what are the potentials, and which are the most promising, and what do we need to do.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, February 8, 2008, at 10:30 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, just a few days ago, Shell Oil Company sent out a press release saying that by no later than 2015 the world would not be able to meet the demands of our economies for oil and natural gas. At just about the same time as that, a group came to my office to brief me on the Automotive X PRIZE. You may have noticed how much harder people will work for a prize than they will for money. Just note the Olympics and what these athletes will do for a prize. So I am very, very supportive of this fantastic idea. I bought the first Prius in Maryland, I bought the first Prius in Congress, and I want to buy the winning car from this competition.

I have here a note from Donald Foley, who is the executive director of the Automotive X PRIZE, and he has noted my desire to buy that winning car. So hopefully we will be driving that to the Congress in not too long.

Thank you very much for yielding.

We have about 1 trillion barrels of recoverable known reserves. The undiscovered reserves are going to be a relatively small fraction of that. If we could pump those undiscovered reserves tomorrow, what would we do the day after tomorrow? And there will be a day after tomorrow.

I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids and two great grandkids. We are leaving them a horrendous debt, although not with my votes. Wouldn't it be nice to leave them a little oil? I am not anxious to find and exploit these undiscovered reserves.

I really would like to vote for this bill, because we desperately need an energy bill. The world, and particularly the United States, faces a real challenge on energy in the future. I cannot vote for this bill primarily because of the corn ethanol mandate.

A recent article in The Economist noted that our use of corn for ethanol doubled the price of corn about 1 year ago. Farmers then moved lands that would have been in soybeans and wheat to corn. We have now further increased the cost of corn, and we have increased the cost of soybeans and wheat the world around. One of the members of the United Nations said that what we have done is a crime against humanity. And the effect we have had on gasoline use has been absolutely trifling. The National Academy of Sciences says if we converted all of our corn to ethanol and discounted for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline.

Mr. Speaker, this really represents one of those times, as the old farmer says, that the juice ain't worth the squeezing. We can do better.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. As ranking member of the Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, I would like to thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), chairman of our subcommittee, for his wisdom and profound concern for the safety of our servicemembers and the security of the United States.

Further, I would like to recognize our chairman, Ike Skelton, and our ranking member, Duncan Hunter, for their continued leadership and support. This bill contains farsighted provisions which I believe are critical to this Nation's future security, none of which would have been possible without the steadfast advocacy of these visionary leaders. Thank you.

I also want to recognize the superb staff without whom this bill would not be possible.

There are a handful of provisions in every annual defense policy bill that stand apart in terms of their impact. This conference report is no different. This year the Congress has clearly established that it is the policy of the United States to utilize nuclear propulsion for all future major naval combatants. It is a vital step to secure our Nation's national and energy security.

Nuclear propulsion for naval ships is the right thing to do from economic, combat effectiveness, homeland defense, and energy policy perspectives. Without congressional action, budgetary pressures would forever prevent the Navy from making this farsighted commitment to its future.

Studies have consistently shown that life-cycle and operational costs are lower for nuclear propulsion in large combat vessels, such as cruisers. The most recent naval study shows that the break-even cost for a nuclear fueled cruiser is $60 per barrel of oil. It's now about $90. What's more, the National Petroleum Council projects future shortfalls in the supply of oil clear through 2030.

Last spring, a DOD Office of Force Transformation and Resources commissioned report found that the risks associated with oil will make the U.S. military's ability to rapidly deploy on demand ``unsustainable in the long run.'' It said it is ``imperative'' that DOD ``apply new energy technologies that address alternative supply sources and efficient consumption across all aspects of military operations.''

Congress has responded. As recently as last year's Defense bill, Congress found that the Nation's dependence upon foreign oil is a threat to national security and that other energy sources must be seriously considered. It noted the advantages of nuclear power, such as virtually unlimited high-speed endurance, elimination of vulnerable refueling, and a reduction in the requirement for replenishment vessels and the need to protect those vessels. Congress directed the Secretary of the Navy to evaluate integrated power systems, fuel cells, and nuclear power as propulsion alternatives within the analysis of alternatives for future major surface combatants.

The Navy is conducting such an analysis for the next generation cruiser. However, in hearings this year, our subcommittee saw no evidence that the Department of Defense was seriously willing to consider making the investments required to enable that future. Quite simply, the conferees decided that we could waste no further time because these investments must begin to be made next year for the CG(X) next generation cruiser. Therefore, this conference report requires integrated nuclear propulsion for future major combatants.

This conference report reflects a fair and balanced treatment of the remaining issues facing the United States Navy and Marine Corps, and I respectfully ask full support for this very important bill.

Mr. Speaker, today oil's about $93 a barrel. It was higher than that a couple of days ago. If you look at CNBC, they're still scrolling it in red which means it's kind of out of previous limits.

There are two bills before the Congress, and I want to mention those before we start. These would be pretty good bills if we were offering them 25 years ago, but this is not 25 years ago. And I would submit that these bills are woefully inadequate to address the challenges that we have today. Let me just mention briefly what's in these bills, and I will note and I hope you will agree after we've spent these few minutes together that these bills do little more than nibble at the margins of the problem.

Our children, our grandchildren looking back on today will wonder how could we ever have thought that these bills would address the enormous challenge that we face today in energy.

H.R. 3221, the House-approved omnibus energy bill, which they say promotes efficiency and renewable energy, it includes a controversial renewable portfolio standard and a net tax increase, but it excludes increases in CAFE standards, the standards that we set for how many miles per gallon you're going to get from your car or your pick-up truck, and it also excludes mandated volume increases in biofuels.

Now, the Senate bill does quite the opposite. It increases CAFE standards and a mandated volume increase in biofuels, but excludes a renewable portfolio standard and the tax provisions.

Now, President Bush wisely has indicated that he's going to veto either one of these bills, or a combination of these bills that might come out of conference.

I note these two bills before we begin our discussion because I hope you will agree with me when we have finished our discussion that they might have been pretty good bills to start down the road that we should have been traveling for 25 years, but they're woefully inadequate to meet the challenges of today's world.

Here we have a chart which I think kind of says it very well. Here is the fellow standing by the very shrunken gas pump here because our supplies are down. He has a huge SUV beside him. He asks, ``Just why is gas so expensive?'' Gas is expensive because the demand is exceeding the supply. As a matter of fact, the world production of oil has now held constant for about 30 months, but the world's demand for oil has been steadily going up. So if you look back over the last 30 months, the price of oil has been doing exactly what you would suspect the price of oil has been doing. It's been going up because the supply has been constant and the demand has been going up.

Mr. Speaker, it was absolutely inevitable that today or some day like today near this date in history that we would be here talking about $95 oil.

If you listen to the experts out there, they are telling you that they expect, in the next few days, that it will go through $100 per barrel.

The next chart is one that kind of puts this in perspective. Let's just refer to the upper chart. The upper chart looks back through only about a little less than 400 years. But if we extended this on to the left here about another 7,000 years, we would have gone through all of the recorded history of man, and it would look just like it looks here. In this scale, the amount of energy that we were using in 1630 and 1650 is hardly wider than a line, so it's hard to distinguish the baseline here from the energy that we were producing.

Then the Industrial Revolution started, and it started with the steam engine and that sort of thing and wood, of course. That's the brown line there. Then you see that we found coal and, boy, we produced a lot more energy with coal, so the Industrial Revolution roared on. It was stuttering when we discovered oil. Boy, then did it take off. Just look at that curve and how sharp that curve is.

If we had another curve here on population increase in the world, it would mirror this, follow this pretty exactly. For thousands of years, through 8,000 years of recorded history up until fairly recent history, the population of the world was somewhere between half a billion and 1 billion people. Now that population has exploded until there are nearly 7 billion people in the world. By the way, nearly 2.5 billion of them are in India and China.

Notice one other thing about this curve. Look what happened back in the 1970s. The oil price spike hikes of the 1970s, where oil was less, even with inflation correction oil was less than it is today, it still resulted in a world-wide recession with sufficient demand destruction that the production of energy decreased for several years. Now we are back on a big upswing slope again.

The next chart has some data that was used by 30 of our prominent Americans, Boyden Gray and Woolsey and McFarland and 27 others, among them a number of Four-Star Admirals and Generals, retired, and they wrote a letter to the President, and this was several years ago. They said, now, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import just about two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that.

Two other data points here which are of interest, one is that although we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we produce 8 percent of the world's oil. Now, you don't have to be very far along in arithmetic in grade school to understand that if that's what's happening that we are now exploiting our oil reserves four times faster than the rest of the world.

So if there comes a time when the well will run dry, you would expect that our wells would run dry before the average well in the rest of the world, because we are pumping our oil four times faster.

Note, also, this says 5 percent of the world's population, we are a bit less than that. We are one person out of 22 in the world, and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. The subject for another discussion is why. What's so special about the United States that this one person out of 22 is so fortunate that we have a fourth of all the good things in the world?

The next chart is a really interesting one. This chart shows what the world will look like if the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil that it had. Now, the colors here indicate how much energy you are using and the size indicates how much energy you have.

What this shows is that the countries which have the least energy are using the most energy.

But notice that Saudi Arabia here totally dominates the world. About 22 percent, almost a fourth of all the known reserves of oil in the world are in Saudi Arabia. There is Iraq and little Kuwait. Saddam Hussein thought that looked like a corner province in Iraq, and, indeed, if you look in the map, it is tiny compared to Iraq, but it has just about as much oil as Iraq.

Iran, notice how big Iran is there.

Look over here at the United States. We are dwarfed. We have only 2 percent of the world's supply of oil. The people we get most of our oil from are Canada and Mexico. Gee, they aren't very big either. Look at Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, huge, would swallow up the United States several times with its oil reserves.

Something I would really like you to note is the size of China and India. Between the two of them, they don't have as much oil as the United States, and they have about 2.5 billion people between the two of them.

Now, as a result of this disparity between how much oil they have and how big their population is, the next chart will show us what China has been led to do. This is a map of the world which shows where a number of people have staked their claim, that is, own oil reserves. Notice in how many parts of the world the symbol for China appears.

This chart is a little old, and at the time we started using this chart, China was dickering to buy Unocal, an oil company in our country. Well, a lot of people thought that was just awful. I didn't think the sky would fall if they did that, because the reality is in today's world it doesn't really matter who owns the oil. We own an absolute trifling amount of oil in the world.

The fellow who owns the oil and the fellow who comes with the dollars, and if, by the way, if the currency ever changes from dollars to Euros, that will be a tough day for our country, but the person who has the dollars gets the oil. So you might ask why is China buying up all this oil.

I asked the State Department that question, and they told me it's because they don't understand the economic realities. They don't really understand that it doesn't matter who owns the oil, that the person who has the dollars buys the oil. My response was, gee, it's a little hard for me to believe that a country of 1.3 billion people, which is growing for the last quarter, I saw data, 11.4 percent, we never grew at anything like that. Japan in its heyday didn't grow anything like that. A country growing 11.4 percent that doesn't understand economics is hard for me to believe.

You may note at the same time they are buying up this oil they are aggressively building a blue water navy. They don't have one. Blue water navy is one that goes out in the deepest waters. We are the only one in the world the Chinese are competing with.

Could it be that they envision a time when there won't be enough oil to go around, and since they own it, they are going to say to the rest of the world, gee, guys, I am sorry, there is not enough oil to go around, and we have 1.3 billion people and so we are going to use it. To make that stick, they are going to need a really big navy to protect their sea lanes. Only the future will tell.

I led a codel of nine people to China talking about energy. It was over last New Year's. I spent last New Year's Eve, as a matter of fact, in Shanghai. They began their discussion of energy there by talking about post oil. Wow. They get it, and I wonder why very few people in our country get it.

They have a five-point program. The first step in their program is the first step in any rational program to address the challenge we face, and that is conservation. The second and third points in their program was get as much of it as you can from your own country and diversify as much as you can.

The fourth one may surprise you, because they pled for protection of the environment. They are the biggest polluters in the world, and they know that. They are kind of pleading for help, because, gee, we have got 1.3 billion people, 900 million of those in rural areas that are clamoring for the benefits that accrued through industrialization. We have got to really do something about that, and help us to be more efficient.

But the fifth point in their five-point program was a really interesting one. They are pleading for international cooperation.

As they plead for international cooperation, which they hope they get, I doubt that they will, but they have a backup, they are going to buy the oil so that if we don't get international cooperation, at least they have a go-it-alone reasonable probability of doing well in the future.

The next chart shows how we got here, and this tells you why I mentioned the 25 years. It's actually 27 years.

In 1956, a Shell Oil geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert, and if you haven't heard his name before, you will hear it, and I think that the speech he gave 50 years ago last year, I think it was the 8th day of March, to a group of oil executives and engineers and scientists and so forth in San Antonio, Texas. When the United States was king of oil, producing more oil, exporting more oil, I think, than any other country, M. King Hubbert told that group that in just 14 years, by 1970, we were going to reach our maximum oil production. No matter what we did after that time, it was going to go down.

Shell Oil Company asked him, please don't give that speech. You are going to make a fool of yourself and us. He became something of a pariah for a number of years and was relegated to the near-lunatic fringe.

But right on schedule, as this chart shows, in 1970 we peaked in oil production. He predicted that here in 1956, and in 1970 we peaked in oil production.

His prediction was only for the lower 48. We got a bunch of oil in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska and a lot of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, where, by the way, we have drilled more oil wells than in all of Saudi Arabia, four times as many as in all of Saudi Arabia.

It has been downhill ever since 1970 except for a little blip produced by the enormous amount of oil that we got from Prudhoe Bay. I have been there. I have seen that pipeline where it begins, a 4-foot pipeline.

For a number of years a fourth of our total domestic production went through that. Despite that enormous find, it's still down, down, down, and today we are producing half the oil that we produced in 1970.

Remember several years ago those fabled oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico which were supposed to secure our future? There it is. That's what it did. Pretty trivial, wasn't it.

The next chart shows an attempt of one of the major think tanks in our country on energy to debunk M. King Hubbert. This us the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and they present this data, which they say proves that M. King Hubbert didn't know what he was talking about.

Now, if you were a person who dealt with numbers, a statistician, you might see some relevance in that argument. But for the average citizen, this is what you see in the chart.

The yellow symbols here are the predictions of M. King Hubbert. The green is the actual lower 48 production.

Now, he said that it would follow this curve, but it actually followed that curve. Cambridge Energy Research Associates said, gee, isn't that awful, he really missed it, didn't he. I think for the average person looking at that, I am a kind of a layman here in this area, but I am a scientist and I have had courses in statistics, that looks pretty darn close to me. I think he kind of got it, didn't he.

The actual total production, when you add the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, these red symbols here, and if you add the next chart, if you only had one chart to talk about energy, this would be the one, because this tells you so much.

If ever a picture is worth 1,000 words, this one is. This shows the discoveries of oil. We were discovering lots of it very early, the 1940s, 1950s, huge, huge amounts in the 1960s and 1970s. At just the time when M. King Hubbert predicted we would reach our maximum oil production, 1970, here, we just previously had found enormous amounts of oil.

During those 14 years, 1956 here to 1970, we had found more oil than we ever found before and ever found after that. No wonder, gee, they thought this guy must be an idiot.

But right on schedule we peaked in 1970. By the way, just a little explanation of how he was able to do that. He had observed that each oil field followed a pretty constant kind of curve. The oil was easier and easier to pump until you pumped about half of the oil.

Then you reach the maximum production, it's reasonable. The last half would be harder to get, so it came out slower and slower. It kind of followed a bell curve. He rationalized if he knew how many oil fields there were and what was in there, he could have all the little bell curves, and you would get a big bell curve that would tell us when we were going to reach the peak. He said that was going to be 1970. Right on schedule it happened. He also said that we were going to reach peak oil, the maximum production of oil in the world about now.

Now, the question I've been asking for 30-some times I've been on the floor

here talking about this, over the last couple of years is, if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? And why shouldn't we have been paying some attention to this?

I was interested in this subject probably 40 years ago. I knew that oil couldn't be forever. I mean, you know, the Earth isn't made out of oil; it's not going to last forever. At that time I had no idea how long it would be before we had to start being concerned about oil. Was it next year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? But I knew at some time we would need to be concerned about oil. Apparently, that time has come.

Well, the solid black line here indicates our consumption of oil. It also represents our production of oil, because there's no big stockpile of oil somewhere unused, so what we produce is what we use. So it's either the consumption curve or the production curve.

If we were to put a smooth curve over these discoveries, and there we have little bars for each year, it's obvious that what you've done is to add up all of the discoveries year by year. So the area under that curve, for the person who doesn't understand what integration is, the area under that curve represents the total amount of oil we've found; so much this year and this year and this year. And the area under the curve adds them all up.

Now, the area under this black curve here is going to indicate how much oil we use. Now, it's really obvious that you can't use oil that you haven't found. So the area under the consumption curve is going to have to be the same thing as the area under the discovery curve.

But look at what's been happening to discovery since, what, before 1970. It's been down, down, down, down, down, down. The lightly shaded part of this graph to the right is just a guess as to what's going to happen in the future, but an absolute certainty is that you're not going to pump oil that you haven't found.

Now, ever since the 1980s here, we have been pumping more oil than we've found, so this area here now has consumed reserves that we found in the past. So we have all this amount of reserves that we can use in the future. That represents the area under this curve.

They're predicting here that we will have ever less and less discovery. It won't be that nice smooth curve. It will be up and down. But on the average, that's what it should be because that's what it's been.

And by the way, for the past 20 years or so we have had incredibly improved techniques for finding oil. So for those of who tell you not to worry, it's out there, where? We've been scouring the world for the last 20 years with computer modeling and 3-D seismic, and our discovery has been down, down, down. And these people are wisely projecting that's probably what it's going to do for the future.

There's another chart here, and this is another chart from CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. And they are predicting that we're going to find two and three times as much more oil as all the recoverable reserves that we now know are there. And even if that is true, it moves the peak out only a relatively few years. This is the curve, if we don't find any more than that previous chart showed.

Most of the experts in the world believe that the total amount of oil that we have pumped and will pump is somewhere in the category of 2 trillion barrels. We've pumped about a trillion, we have about another trillion to pump, more or less. So the peak, if that is so, is imminent, isn't it?

If we find 2.93 total, wow, that's another trillion barrels of oil. It pushes out only that far. And they say we're going to add some unconventional oil. That we will. And so they, and this was in an article that was debunking peak oil, and this was a major chart in that article and, by golly, it shows a peak. They say it will be an undulating plateau. I agree. I don't agree that it's going to be out there another 50 years, but I agree that it's going to be an undulating plateau.

The next chart is an interesting little exercise. And this is from EIA, our Energy Information Agency, which, by the way, does a really good job of tracking the use of energy. And it has done a pretty poor job of projecting how much energy we're going to find, because this was their projection. These are the discoveries of oil.

Remember that previous bar chart? These are the big spikes, the discoveries of oil. And they, really misinterpreting some data from USGS, predicted three different possible paths here. There was an F for frequency in the USGS data, and somehow that got translated to P for probability when it came to this chart. I have no idea how you'd do that, and I have had a course in statistics, so I understand a little about that.

But they said that the 50 percent probability was the mean and that that is the most probable thing that would happen. Therefore, the discoveries of oil were going to go up.

This is the 95 percent probability. If it's truly a probability, obviously, if you're 95 percent more certain than 50 percent, and this is the 5 percent; by the way, there should be another green line here and another blue line here because it's a little bit like the path of the hurricane. It's pretty tight today, but where it's going to be a week from now you're less certain, so it kind of fans out. So that's what these 50 percent and 5 percent represent.

But notice where the actual data points have been. The actual data point have, as one might suspect, followed the 95 percent probability because 95 percent probable is more probable than 50 percent probable.

The next chart is a chart from a report and I'm going to mention in just a moment four major studies that have been done, and I have a number of quotes from those. Because what I'm saying today is based on not just my perception of what's going on, but the reality as indicated in these four different studies.

This is EIA projections. And if we found as much more oil as all the known reserves of oil today, that is going from roughly the 2 trillion to 3 trillion barrels of oil. That will push the peak out only from here to 2016.

And this shows another interesting thing. If we get really good at enhanced oil recovery, and we drill a lot of wells and we suck it out faster, we might move the peak over to 2037. Then you fall off a cliff; because you can't pump what's not there.

Now, enhanced oil recovery will get a little more, but it may get it a lot faster. There will be some additional oil pumped from enhanced oil recovery, but it will not be a huge amount.

Now, I want to go through a number of quotes from five different sources actually. One of those is a very famous speech given by Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine. He gave this speech 50 years ago, the 14th day of this May, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a group of physicians. He was incredibly prophetic in that speech. There's a link on our Web site to that that you can simple do a Google search for Rickover and energy, and this speech will pop up. I will tell you, it is the most interesting speech that I have ever read. You'll be fascinated by it.

Just a quote from this speech: ``Whether this golden age,'' and boy is this a golden age, and he notes in this speech, by the way, that the amount of energy that we have available to us represents a huge amount of people working for us. The energy in a single barrel of oil represents the work of 12 people working all year.

When I first saw that, I said, it can't be. But then I thought of how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel, by the way, still cheaper than water in the grocery store, how far that takes my Prius, I drive a Prius, takes my Prius nearly 50 miles. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 5 miles? I could do it. If it was on the level, I might strain and do it very slowly. If it was uphill, I'd have to have you come along to do it. But how long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles? An incredible amount of energy. This is indeed a golden age, this age of oil.

He noted that every housewife 50 years ago had available to her the work equivalent of 34, I think he said, faithful household servants. I think it was 700 manpower efforts push your airplane through the sky, and 100,000 the train down the track and so forth.

``Whether this golden age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.

Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of civilization, for man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles. He must expend all his strength, mental and physical, to obtain the bare necessities of life. A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.''

The next quote is another one from Hyman Rickover: ``High energy consumption has always been a requisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resource will become dominant. That control today is represented by having the necessary dollars to purchase it. Tomorrow it may be indicated by who, in fact, owns the oil fields. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes. We will ensure this dominant position for our own country.''

I would submit that we have done none of this. We have not acted wisely. We have not anticipated today. And it was absolutely inevitable that there would come a day when the supply of energy would be inadequate to meet the demands for energy, which is why it's roughly now 93, $95 a barrel.

There have been four studies paid for by our government. And much to my chagrin, they have pretty much ignored what all four of these studies have said. One of those was a study done for the Army by the Corps of Engineers.

Now, these were published just September of 2005, just a couple of years ago. There's another quote from him in just a minute. It's really interesting. Jean La Harerre made an assessment of the USGS report, that's the report we were looking at just previously that said we were going to find as much more oil as all the oil that we now knew existed which is recoverable in the world. And this was what Jean La Harrere, he's a French expert in this area, said: The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, I mentioned those, computer modeling and 3-D seismic, the worldwide search and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.

The next chart is another quote from the Corps of Engineers: Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today.

By the way, all four of these reports said the same thing in slightly different words, that peaking of oil is either present or imminent. By peaking, we mean we've reached the maximum of production to produce it. Try as hard as we will, it will not increase after that, but just go down, down, down. It's being doing that in our country since 1970; that's in spite of the fact that we have drilled more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together.

Putting a dozen straws in the soda will not result in more soda, will it? It's a limited amount. There is a limited amount.

Historically, no energy resource equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then.

The next chart is from the first report that came out. This is the ``Hirsch Report'' that came out a few months earlier than the Corps of Engineers report. And they made some really startling statements there. World production to conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade.

I have a chart in a few moments which will show you those and when they predicted it.

``Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult.'' It is indeed. And you will only know that it's peaked historically looking back to see that, in fact, it peaked. And the production of oil, as I mentioned, has been constant for the last 30 months. As a matter of fact, conventional oil production has fallen off, but the total production is constant because we've been producing some unconventional oil. Heavy sours, sour oil is oil that has a lot of sulfur in it and you need to get rid of that. And the Alberta, Canada tar sands that we will talk about in a few moments.

``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. ``The world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history to prepare us for what will happen. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, if oil has now peaked,'' which it looks like it has, they said, we should have started a decade ago, and if we didn't, there are going to be meaningful consequences is what they are saying.

The next chart is a really interesting statement by our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.'' Thank you. We should have been doing something about it for the last 27 years. I say 27 years because by 1980, we knew absolutely that M. King Hubbert was right that the United States had peaked in 1970. It takes about that long to be really certain that peaking has occurred, but I think we knew it, absolutely knew it.

``We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is--I will use the word `warping'-- diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.''

It was bad then. In April of last year, oil was nowhere near $95 a barrel then.

The next quote is another quote from the Hirsch Report. This is a big report done by SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, a very prestigious international engineering scientific organization. They say that the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. ``There is nothing in history to prepare us for the economic, social, and political cost of the peaking of oil.'' And that is not me saying that. This is a report from a major study done by a very reputable scientific engineering organization paid for by our government, by our Department of Energy. Have you heard the Department of Energy talking about this? You might ask them why not?

The next chart, this was 50 years ago: ``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the fossil fuel age. We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.''

I think I noted earlier that when you talk to the Chinese about energy, they talk about post-oil. The age of oil is now about 150 years old. That's out of 8,000 years of recorded history. In another 150 years, we will be through the age of oil. There will, for all practical purposes, be no more gas, oil, or coal. What will our world look like? By the way, this is exhilarating for me. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and this is a huge challenge. So this will be very invigorating.

The next chart is another one from the Corps of Engineers: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines.'' They are just validating what M. King Hubbert said more than 50 years ago.

``The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak but when.'' Of course it will peak. It is inevitable.

You know, our descendents will look back on us and ask themselves how could they have done that. What we really should have done when we found this incredible wealth under the ground was to stop to ask ourselves what can we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time. That obviously is not what we did, with no more responsibility than the kid who found the cookie jar or the hog who found the feed room

door open. We have just been pigging out. And, incredibly, with all the evidence that we are probably at or nearly at peak oil, we want to continue doing that.

They keep asking me will I vote to drill in ANWR. No, I will not. I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, 2 great-grandkids. We, without my votes, are going to leave them the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. Wouldn't it be nice if I left them a little energy?

By the way, I will vote to drill there when they convince me they are going to use all the energy they get from ANWR and offshore to invest in renewables, because we have a huge challenge in developing enough renewables.

The next chart, this is an interesting one. In September 2005, ``The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per barrel range and is expected to stay in that range for several years.'' It is now twice that, more than twice of $45. Now, this is a very thoughtful group of people that did this study, but they missed it, didn't they?

``The supply of oil is increasingly inadequate to meet the demand. Oil prices may go significantly higher.'' Indeed they have. ``And some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Who knows?'' We assume we will be at $100 a barrel. How long will it take to get to this $180 a barrel?

The next chart is an interesting chart. And what this shows is a number of authorities, and we can get you this list, all these A to U, nearly an alphabet of them, and when they have predicted peaking will occur. Now, some of them are really uncertain. It could be now or any time in the next hundred years. But most of them believe that it will occur very soon or there is a probability it will occur very soon. So there is wide, wide concurrence in the scientific world out there that the peaking of oil is either present or imminent. And these four major government studies, I don't have quotes here from a study done by the National Petroleum Council. They have reached essentially the same conclusions. And another one was done by the Government Accountability Office. And all four of these said essentially the same thing: Peaking is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences.

The next chart is just a little schematic that shows the peaking curve. By the way, you can obviously compress the abscissa and expand the ordinate and make that a very sharp curve, or you can spread it out, as we've done here, and make it a gradual curve. The significant thing is that yellow area there represents 35 years. You see, at only a 2 percent increase in use, it doubles in 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years. It is eight times bigger in 105 years, and it is 16 times bigger in 140 years. Well, no wonder a namesake of mine, and I wish I was his relative, who really is a bright guy, Albert Bartlett, says that the biggest failure of industrialized society is to understand the exponential function. Albert Einstein in responding to what will we find after nuclear energy, he said that the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. And that's what we see.

The next chart, and this is a really interesting one, shows on the ordinate here how happy you are with your state in life, your sense of well-being. What it shows on the abscissa here is how much energy we use. Guess where we are. We use more energy than anybody else in the world, and we're pretty happy about things. But notice that, I think, 20-some countries who use less energy than we, some of them less than half as much, feel better about their quality of life than we feel about ours. I put this slide up here to show you that we can use a whole lot less energy and still live well, still be very satisfied with our life.

The next one, and we need to come and start one of these 60 minutes we have together and just focus on this chart, because this is the future and this is where we are going. We will, of necessity, ultimately transition from fossil fuels to renewables. When the fossil fuels are gone, and one day they will be, the only argument is not whether but when. And when they are gone, we will have transitioned either smoothly because we chose the route or a really bumpy ride because we didn't plan ahead.

There are some finite resources that we can use. The finite resources include the tar sands, and previously you heard some discussion of the tar sands. They are now producing a million barrels a day. That's a lot, isn't it? But the world consumes 84 million barrels a day. We consume 21 million barrels a day. So they are producing a little bit more than 1 percent of the oil that the world uses, and they know that what they are doing is not sustainable. They will run out of water. They will run out of energy because they are now using stranded natural gas. Stranded gas is gas that is somewhere where there aren't very many people, and since it is hard to ship, they say it's stranded, and it's cheaper. So they are using stranded natural gas there in this process. What they do is have a big shovel that lifts 100 tons at a time. They dump it in a truck that hauls 400 tons, and they haul it to a big cooker where they cook it so that it is really stiff. All the volatiles will come out of that because it's near the surface, and they cook that until the oil flows, and then they add some solvents to it so it will flow at normal temperatures. And if you think of the thing they are now mining as a vein, that vein shortly ducks under an overlay so that they are going to have to develop it in situ, and they have no idea how they are going to develop it in situ. So the Canadians will tell you that what they are doing is not sustainable. They might for a bit ramp up and produce a little more, but ultimately it is certainly not sustainable.

By the way, there is a huge, huge amount of potential energy in the tar sands. One and a half times as much energy there as all the known reserves of oil in the world. It is incredibly large. But let me note to you that there is an incredible amount of energy in the tides. So just because it is there doesn't mean it is in your gas tank, and just like the tides, which are very difficult to harness, this has proved difficult to harness.

What's even more difficult to harness are the oil shales. And we have more in our West, roughly 1\1/2\ trillion barrels of oil. The world has only about 1 trillion recoverable barrels of oil in all the world. So we have one and a half times as much as all recoverable oil in the world. Then why not rest easy? Because it is enormously difficult to exploit. The Shell Oil Company was the last company that conducted a major experiment there, and they aren't certain that it is economically supportable to develop this. We put a lot of money in that in the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo, and we still are a little closer to exploitation of these shales than we were then.

Then there's coal. You've heard that we have 500 years of coal. That is just flat out not true. A more correct statement until we knew better was that we had 250 years of coal. But that's at current use rates. The National Academy of Sciences has reevaluated the data. This is not me saying it. This is the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific organization perhaps in the world. And they have said that they have not looked at this data since 1970. That's a long time ago. In relooking at the data, they say there is probably 100 years there. But let's look at what happens if there are 250 years there. At a 2 percent growth rate, remember we talked about the 35 years it doubles, at 70 it is four times, 16 times bigger in 140 years? That now shrinks to 85 years. And if you convert some of this, if you use some of the energy to convert it to a gas or a liquid, it now shrinks to 50 years. And it is inevitable that you will share it with the world. Let me explain. If we are using liquids produced from coal, we are not buying oil; so that means that oil is available to India and China, isn't it? Energy liquid fuels are fungible. So it is inevitable we will have to share it with the world because if we are not buying the oil, someone else will. That 50 years then shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. And, by the way, if the real amount, as the National Academy says, is 100 years, then that shrinks to about 5 years. So we have 5 years of coal at 2 percent growth to be converted to a gas or a liquid and share it, as we must, with the world.

So for those who tell you rest easy, we have got this huge amount of coal, not to worry, 250 years, that's at current use rates, and they just do not understand what happens with exponential growth.

Now, back to the chart we were looking at.

This really should be a separate category because nuclear is, if it's the right kind of nuclear, totally sustainable.

There are three ways we can get nuclear energy. One is from the light water reactor. All of the electrical energy in the world, I think, is produced from light water reactors. France produces about 75 percent of their energy; we, 19 or 20 percent of our electricity.

But fissure uranium is limited in the world. There is not enough to meet all future demands. But then we can go to breeder reactors. The breeder reactors do as the name implies, they produce more fuel than they use. So that is kind of a forever thing. With that, you buy some huge problems in transporting and enrichment. And you are hauling around weapons grade material, and then you're having to store away the end product for maybe a quarter of a million years. So although we have the potential for a lot of energy from breeder reactors, that comes with some big problems that we need to address.

Then there is nuclear fusion. We have a great fusion reactor; it's called the sun. And it, by the way, is the source of almost all of our present energy and past energy. All of the fossil fuels are there because the sun was shining a long time ago to make the plants and microbes and so forth grow. Well, we put about $250 million a year into nuclear fusion. I suspect we are a little closer now than we were 15 years ago when I came to the Congress. By the way, I happily vote for that $250 million because it's the only thing that gets us home free, if we can find fusion.

If you think you're going to solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery, you're probably content that we're going to solve our energy problems by developing fusion. I think the odds are roughly the same. But because it is so incredibly important, because it gets us home free, I happily vote for the roughly $250 million we spend there.

Then the renewables, solar and wind. I want to spend some time talking about these.

I'm pretty sanguine about our future for electricity. We can produce a lot of electricity by nuclear; France produces about 75 percent of theirs. There are huge potentials from solar and wind. More solar energy falls on the Earth each day than we use all year long. It may be in less time than that that it falls on the Earth; it's an incredible amount of energy. The big problem, of course, is harnessing that energy. It is, by the way, the sun that makes the wind blow. The wind blows because there is differential heating, and so it makes the wind to blow. So all of this is kind of solar energy; wind, kind of secondhand solar energy.

The problem with solar and wind is the sun doesn't shine all the time, and the wind doesn't blow all the time. But we have a pretty constant demand for energy, so you've got to store it. And this is a huge challenge. And if you're talking about running your car on batteries, then you have to think, but, do we have the raw materials necessary for making enough batteries to run all the millions of cars in the world with batteries? I think we could produce enough electricity to do that. I'm not at all sure that there is enough raw materials out there to make the batteries necessary for these cars.

Then there is geothermal. I'm not talking about the heat pump that you tie to groundwater or ground temperature, which really, by the way, is what you ought to do. If you think about your heat pump, in the summer it's an air conditioner. It has to warm the outside air. It may be 100 outside, no matter. The heat pump has to increase the air, that temperature, in order to decrease the temperature in your house.

And in the winter time, what is it trying to do? When it's 10 degrees outside, the heat pump has to make it even colder outside so it can make you warmer inside. The 56 degrees, which is what it is here, looks awfully cool in the summer time, doesn't it? And awfully warm in the winter time. As a little boy, I was confused about how the spring house we had on our farm could be so warm in the winter time and so cool in the summer time. Of course when I went to school, I kind of figured that thing out.

Ocean energy. I mentioned an incredible amount of energy in the ocean, but harnessing that energy is a difficult thing. The waves and the tides represent, by the way, the tides are produced by the movement of the Moon, of course. That's an exception to energy produced in the past or now from the sun.

But the challenge there is that because this is so spread out, it's so difficult to harness. A good axiom is that energy, to be effective, must be concentrated. And, boy, is it concentrated in gas and oil and coal, just an incredible amount of energy there. Both the quantity and the quality of that energy is superior to anything that we can produce to take its place.

Now, agricultural resources, and this is an area, let me flip to the next chart. Let's look at corn.

Earlier this evening you heard quite a discussion of ethanol and its potential. And I don't want to quote Roscoe Bartlett here; I want to quote the National Academy of Sciences here. They did a study, and they concluded, and this was an article that appeared, I think, was it The Washington Post, and they said that if we took all of our corn for ethanol and discounted it for the fossil fuel input, which they said was 80 percent, by the way, some people think that we use more energy producing corn than we get out of the ethanol from corn; but even if it's 80 percent, and that's a realistic number, I think, if we used all of our corn for ethanol, no tortillas, no fattening of pigs and chickens from corn, used it all for ethanol, it would displace only 2.4 percent of our gasoline.

Now, if you just start with the corn and ignore the energy it took to produce the corn, then you get a whole different figure. So you need to be careful when people are talking to you about energy from ethanol. You know, the sun gratuitously produced that energy that put the oil in the ground; it doesn't gratuitously grow our corn.

We put huge amounts of fertilizer, this lower pie chart shows that nearly half the energy that goes into producing corn, and not one person in 50 outside of the farmer knows this, almost half the energy that goes into producing corn comes from the natural gas from which we make the nitrogen fertilizer. Nature does this, by the way. You may notice that your lawn is never as green watering it as it is after a thunderstorm; we used to call it ``poor man's fertilizer.'' The nitrogen in the air is converted by the lightning into a forum which is carried down into the ground. That's fertilizer by the rain.

This is their data. The National Academy of Science said if we use all of our corn for ethanol and discount it for fossil fuel, a little silly, something to burn the fossil fuels in another forum, which is corrosive, you can't put it in our pipes. You have to add it pretty much at the last minute because we don't have the infrastructure to move ethanol around. They wisely noted that if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you would save as much oil as using all of our corn to produce ethanol.

They then noted if we use all of our soybeans for diesel fuel, soy diesel, all of it, no soybeans exported to China, which was, a few years ago, our largest dollar export, by the way, because tofu, bean curd, as they call it, is the energy staple of the Orient, none of that, if we used all of our soybeans for soy diesel, it would displace 2.9 percent of our diesel.

Now, there are, I think, 70 million acres of corn, 60 million acres of soybeans planted on our best soil, pampered with fertilizers and pesticides and insecticides. And we would get, if we used it all for energy, 2.4 percent of gasoline and 2.9 percent of our diesel would be displaced.

Now, how much energy should we expect to get from weeds and switch grass and trees? I don't know. But I suspect that it's going to be difficult, sustainably, to get huge amounts of energy there because today's weeds and so forth are growing in large measure because last year's weeds died and are rotting and fertilizing them.

When you take the growth away from the rain forest, which looks like an incredibly wealthy environment in terms of nutrients, you leave laterite soils that will hardly grow anything because most all of the nutrients were in the plants that were growing.

The Department of Agriculture came to me and they were hyping cellulosic

ethanol. And I asked them, Are our topsoils increasing in quantity and quality? And the answer is no. Then I said, Pray tell, how are we going to get these enormous amounts of energy? Because topsoil is topsoil. Because of humus, humus is the material from plants that grew yesterday and are rotting today. It holds nutrients; it holds water. For every bushel of corn we grow in Iowa, three bushels of topsoil go down the Mississippi River. In spite of our best practices, it used to be many bushels, by the way. In spite of our best practices, three bushels still go down the river.

We will certainly get something. What if we got four times as much, which is unlikely, from our wasteland and woods and so forth, as we can get from all of our corn and all of our soybeans? That would be roughly 20 percent. Exploiting. Now, this would not be sustainable. You might, for a few years, mine the topsoil and take off this biomass, but by and by you will pay for that because you will no longer have the same quality or quantity of topsoil.

The next chart has a little pie chart on it, which is really interesting. We're a little bit like the couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance and they have now established a lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their paycheck. And, by golly, the grandparents' inheritance is going to run out before they retire. So obviously they've got to restructure their lives; they have to make more or spend less, or some combination of that. That's where we are as far as energy is concerned. Eighty-five percent of our energy comes from natural gas, petroleum and coal. A bit more than half of the remainder comes from nuclear power.

And here are the true renewables over here. This is an old chart, several years old.

I appreciate the opportunity to address the House. And we will return shortly to talk more about these very important subjects.