Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 41 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, November 5, 2007, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank one of my constituents, Pastor Eric W. Jorgensen of St. Stephen's Reformed Episcopal Church in Eldersburg, Maryland, for serving as a guest chaplain of the House of Representatives and providing us a beautiful prayer before we begin our work.

This is a tradition begun by Benjamin Franklin that has been followed ever since by the House of Representatives and the Senate. Benjamin Franklin, then 82 years of age, rose during a moment of crisis during our Constitutional Convention. This is part of what he said: ``In the days of our contest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. If a sparrow cannot fall without his notice, can a Nation rise without his aid?

``I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we begin to proceed to any other business.''

Thank you, Mr. Franklin, for this precedent. Thank you, Pastor Jorgensen, for helping to continue this great tradition.

Thank you very much for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 1483 and urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill.

The Journey Through Hallowed Ground is not Mr. Wolf's bill. It is a

Democrat substitute bill that has been added to a larger bill, H.R. 1483, that is also a Democrat substitute bill. H.R. 1483 reflects a big government, big spending philosophy that tramples over taxpayers' interests and private property rights established and considered fundamental by revered American leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. What's more, it is being brought up under a closed rule. An amendment I offered to ensure majority voting control by congressional district residents over decisions by management entities affecting sites in their district located within heritage areas was rejected.

I was an enthusiastic supporter of the establishment of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground when it was perceived as a collective marketing effort. I thought, gee, what a great idea to include in one marketing effort all these grand historic sites in these four States, many of which are in the district I have the honor of representing. The Battle of Monocacy, the Battle of South Mountain, the Battle of Antietam, the C&O Canal that was mentioned by my friend, Mr. Regula, are all in my district. What a grand name for it, the Journey Through Hallowed Ground. In fact, this was such a great idea, it was such a fantastic name, that I was a little embarrassed when I thought to myself, gee, Roscoe, why didn't you think of that, such a great idea. Then, regrettably, it has metamorphosed into this big government, big spending bill. If you read the fine print in this bill, you will see that there is a Virginia-based, Virginia-controlled designated management entity that has an exclusive vision that I don't think is consistent with most of the voters in my district.

I have consistently stated and testified on both September 28, 2006, and March 8, 2007, that any Federal legislation to create the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Heritage Area should retain local control of its management by Marylanders concerning sites in Maryland. I also believe that if the value of land is reduced as a result of actions by the management entity, or local zoning ordinances, for instance, then affected property owners should be compensated at fair market value. I don't only think this, this is a requirement of the fifth amendment of the Constitution. We have taken value from their land, and we need to compensate them for that. We almost never, ever do that. If the fifth amendment of the Constitution were, in fact, honored, most of the governments would be bankrupt because they couldn't pay for the value they had taken from their taxpayers' lands. It is unwarranted to spend $15 million of taxpayers' money to protect and promote the Journey Through Hallowed Ground. This is such a great idea. There is plenty of money out there in the private sector. We don't need Federal money to do this. Supporters of H.R. 1483 have consistently refused to incorporate protections of taxpayers and private property owners. That is why I introduced an alternate bill, H.R. 1270, and approved an amendment to remove the Sixth District of Maryland if we couldn't have majority voting rights. That was defeated in committee on a party-line vote. Actions by management entities and the $135 million in taxpayers' money that will be matched and spent by management entities speak louder than the weak and toothless language in section 2009.

Let me just quote a couple of things from some outside groups that have looked at this. First from Americans for Tax Reform/Property Rights Alliance Vote Alert: ``We urge all Members to side with Americans and protect the right of land use by voting 'no' on H.R. 1483.''

From the National Taxpayers Union: ``NTU urges all Members to vote `no' on H.R. 1483. NTU testified against H.R. 1483 in committee, and we're dismayed to see that the bill has grown in both cost and potential harm since introduction. Rollcall votes on H.R. 1483 will be significantly weighted in our annual Rating of Congress.''

From the Heritage Foundation, in a report that they issued called ``National Heritage Areas: Costly Economic Development Schemes that Threaten Property Rights, Backgrounder 2080:''

``In fact, non-National Park Service funds amount to nearly 70 percent of the costs associated with the national heritage areas. If this pattern continues, H.R. 1483 would lead to an additional $270 million in NHA spending by Federal, State, local and not-for-profit entities.''

``One of the most controversial aspects of H.R. 1483 is the establishment of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground,'' which is in my district. ``The effort is sponsored and promoted by mainly two factions, Virginia-based environmental groups with a long history of opposition to most residential and commercial development in the region and wealthy estate owners who would benefit from the cachet and exclusivity that the designation might bring. The opposition includes local property owners and a large majority in Congress.

``Other NHAs have used their federally acquired authority to impose restrictive zoning requirements on the region's property owners to limit development and/or to force it into directions agreeable to those who guide the management of the NHA.''

Let me review. Members may be concerned that H.R. 1483 would, one, increase Federal funding by 50 percent from $10 million to $15 million per national heritage area, an amount neither requested nor reviewed in hearings, with total additional Federal spending of $135 million.

Two, it would expand the boundaries of three existing national heritage areas and, in addition, it would create six new national heritage areas, including the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, at a total initial authorization of $90 million.

It would reauthorize, increase and extend Federal funding for nine existing national heritage areas through 2012 at an additional cost of $45 million.

All of our Nation's founders knew of the intimate connection between personal liberty, taxpayers' interests and property rights. H.R. 1483 tramples over, rather than honors, these hallowed principles.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I have been, for the last couple of hours, doing what is seldom done in this House. I have been listening to every minute of this debate. And I felt compelled to come to the floor.

When I was listening to the debate, I was reminded of the story of the father who was looking at the white shirt that he wore yesterday to see if he could wear it again.

And his daughter observed, daddy, if it's doubtful, it's dirty. And I thought of that when I was listening to this debate because obviously this bill is doubtful. We're amending it on the run. And I wonder if, Mr. Chairman, maybe the little girl isn't right, that if it's doubtful, it's dirty.

There's been a lot of talk about protecting the rights of the little guy. In a former life, I had 20 patents. And I'm really committed to protecting the rights of the little guy because I was a little guy, not just because of the little guy, but because most of our creativity and innovation comes from the little guy.

And what I would suggest is that if this bill is so flawed that we're modifying it, amending it on the run and hope to make it okay when we come to conference, wouldn't it be better just to send it back to committee and do it right the first time?

Will the gentleman yield?

I was simply quoting what you said.

I just wanted to clarify the basis for my observation that the bill was being amended on the run. I was simply quoting the chairman, who said that they worked late last night changing the manager's amendment, that they were going to continue to work through conference so that they could change the bill to make it better. So obviously the bill is being amended and being changed on the run.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the career of Mr. Myron K. Kunka. Having served his country for 32 years, he retired from the Federal service on September 1, 2007. His record of achievement during this period reflects great credit upon himself and upon the organizations with which he has served.

Mr. Kunka began his Federal career as a budget analyst at Letterkenny Army Depot, Chambersburg, PA, on August 1975 after receiving a master's degree in public administration from the University of Pittsburgh. He has served in successive financial management positions within the Department of Defense. These assignments include: 7th Signal Command, Ft Richie, MD; Headquarters United States Army, Telecommunications Center, The Pentagon; Headquarters Army Material Command, Alexandria, VA; On-Site Inspection Agency Dulles, VA; and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Ft Belvoir, VA.

Mr. Kunka joined the ranks of the Senior Executive Service on November 7, 1999, when he was appointed to serve as the Comptroller, Director of Resource Management, and finally the Associate Director of the Business Enterprise for DTRA.

Mr. Kunka received numerous awards and decorations for his outstanding public service. The significant awards include: the Director's Award for Achievement in Equal Employment Opportunity, 1997; On-Site Inspection Agency Exceptional Civilian Service Medal, 1998; the Department of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Medal, 2000; and the Presidential Rank Award--Meritorious Executive, 2003.

As Mr. Kunka brings closure to this chapter of his Federal career as a public servant, he begins a new chapter serving the public as the associate dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Madam Speaker, I am honored to ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Mr. Myron K. Kunka on his retirement from Federal service. He epitomizes the dedication and professionalism that makes our Federal Government a model all over the world.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 59 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, July 23, 2007, at 10:30 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, in the few moments that we have together this evening, I wanted to talk briefly about three different subjects. The first one is a very timely one. It refers to a Supreme Court decision that I think is a very momentous decision.

When our Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution, they thought that they had implicitly placed in that Constitution all of the great guarantees of freedom and individual rights that were needed for this new Nation. But the ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before they wondered if people would really understand that it was the people who are to be preeminent in this new country, that there was to be a very limited government, and it would truly be a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Because they felt that what was very implicit in the Constitution might need to be stated explicitly, they developed 10 amendments, actually I think a dozen started through the process and 10 of them made it through the process, and we call them the Bill of Rights. They were adopted, of course, in 1791. And I think that it's no accident that that first amendment addresses two of the huge concerns they had from their past that should never blemish their new country.

The first of those dealt with what was a common practice in the countries they came from, that is, it was a State religion that was empowered by the State and supported by the State with revenues, taxes from the people, and this church could and did persecute other churches, and they wanted to make very sure that in this new country that that wasn't going to be a problem. So they wrote the establishment clause of the first amendment, which seems to me very clear language. A lot of people have trouble reading this and understanding what it says. I think the words say what they say. ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.''

The government cannot establish a religion. ``Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'' No church religion and everybody free to practice their religion as they please. Somehow we are interpreting that as requiring that there not be any religion in the public place, which is clearly not what they were concerned about. They wanted freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, and, too often, we're interpreting as freedom from religion.

But then the second part of this is equally important, and it addresses a second major challenge that they saw in establishing this new country. Because most of them came from a country where there was a king or an emperor who claimed and was granted divine rights, and the people had very few rights, only what the king chose to give them. Hard for us to understand that. It is so foreign to us that the king or the emperor should have divine rights. By that it means that the rights came from God to the king or the emperor, and he would then give what rights he wished to his subjects.

Abraham Lincoln understood four score and seven years after the establishment of our country, that is after the establishment of the Declaration of Independence, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new Nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That was very foreign to them. It's very commonplace to us, and we read those words and don't have any swell of pride or lump in our throat when we read them, as we should.

But then they wrote that second part of the first amendment, which, along with the second amendment, they believed would assure that never, ever could the government persecute the people. In this first amendment they said, ``or abridging the freedom of speech or the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.''

Now, the speech that they clearly were most interested in preserving was political speech, because that's the speech that made this country different from all the other countries that our Founding Fathers came from.

Tragically, it's just that political speech which was prohibited by the Campaign Finance Reform Act that we passed, and there was a court case, Right to Life, Wisconsin Group, broadcast ads before the 2004 race, in which they talked about issues. But they did mention the name of a candidate, I believe.

I am so proud of the Supreme Court decision. I am a little distressed that it was only 5-4. I would have thought that this would be such a clear-cut case that it would be 9-0, but let's be thankful for 5-4 rather than 4-5.

I really like the position of the majority. The portion of the law in question in this case states that labor unions and corporations, including nonprofits, cannot use money from their general treasuries to broadcast ads that run 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election.

On a nonpresidential year, my primary is in September, which means it is 60 days from November, so there can't be any ads during that time, and no ads before the 30 days before the primary. I would submit that very few people are thinking anything about an election 90 days before it occurs.

So what this legislation did was essentially prohibit any education before an election. The Supreme Court, in their ruling, created a constitutional safe harbor for genuine issue ads. It stated that only if the ad, and this is a direct quote, ``is susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate,'' can the ad be prohibited during the blackout period.

This is consistent with our philosophy in our country that we are innocent until proven guilty. The ad has to explicitly ask you to vote for or against a candidate. Mentioning his name, that's okay, if you don't indicate specific guidance to vote for or against the candidate.

I am very pleased with this legislation. You know, we are 1 person out of 22 in the world and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. I don't know if you have ever asked yourself the question, how come we are so darn fortunate?

I think one of the reasons we have is the enormous respect we have for the rights of the individual. There is no other country, there is no other constitution that gives so many rights to the people, to the individual.

I think that this has established a milieu, a climate, in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish. I think that's one of the reasons why we are this world superpower, with only less than 5 percent of the people in the world. I think we put at risk who we are, and our preeminence as this golden city on a hill, if we put at risk these very precious individual rights and, prince among them, the right of speech. So I am very pleased. I am very pleased with the Supreme Court decision.

There is another thing which happened fairly recently last week, about less than 10 of us, I guess, were called to the White House from the Congress here, when the President gave his message on his veto of the embryonic stem cell bill that would have necessitated the destruction of embryos and the creation of embryonic stem cell lines.

What the President vetoed was S. 5, that's the Senate bill, and in the House we simply voted on S. 5. When you do that, then there is no question but what the two bills are the same, so you do not have to go to conference. So it went immediately from the House vote to the President's desk, where he vetoed it.

The Senate also passed S. 30, which is a very similar bill to our House bill 322. It was called the HOPE Act in the Senate, and it got 70 votes out of their 100 senators. We have 130 cosponsors of our bill in the House.

I hope that the House can do what the Senate did, and that is pass S. 30. If we pass S. 30, then it doesn't have to go to conference, and it can go directly to the President's desk, and S. 30 is sufficiently similar to our H.R. 322 that I can, with good conscience, support that bill.

I want to spend a moment, and have the first slide, I want to spend a few moments looking at embryonic stem cells so that when this comes to the news we have a familiarity with this so that we can understand the issues and what the President is talking about. We are talking about stem cells, and this slide here points to three primary stem cells in the body.

You see, we begin as two single cells, a single cell from the mother and a single cell from the father. Each of them having only half of the requisite number of chromosomes. They have a haploid number and the total number is a diploid number, so these two halves come together here in what we call the zygote, the two gametes come together to form a zygote, and then that begins to divide, and each us began our life as a single cell.

It divides, and we will have a chart a little later which will show a number of the other steps in this division process. But here we wanted to go very quickly to the gastro stage of the embryo where the three germ layers, and that's the first time we have a germ layer, where the three germ layers have developed, that's the ectoderm, the mesoderm and the endoderm. As these Greek terms imply, the ectoderm is outside; the meso, middle, is what's in the middle, and the endoderm is what lines the inside.

Here in this chart it shows the major tissues that develop from these three germ layers. It's very interesting that they retain their individuality throughout your life. I believe that a cancer metastasizes only to tissues of the same germ layer. So these characteristics that are established very early in the development of the embryo, a few hundred cells here by this time, this continues throughout the life of the person.

The ectoderm produces primarily your skin and your nervous system. The mesoderm produces most of your weight, it's the muscles and the bones, blood and so forth. Endoderm is the tissues which line the gut, lungs, in some our glands and so forth.

A unique, over there, a fourth category, the most unique germ cells, these are the germ cells themselves. These are the gametes, the sperm in the male and the ova in the female, from which the next generation will be produced. These are produced, these germ layers producing these things are resident in this very early embryo.

The next chart talks about several processes that you will hear a lot about in this discussion, but it might be worth looking at them, this is fertilization. In the fertilization process, the cells divide again and again in the body. The sperm divides many, many times and they end up as millions and millions of sperm. There are hundreds of the female sex cell and millions of sperm.

The last division, or the near the last division is what we call a miotic division, and the number of chromosomes are cut in half. After that miotic division, you then have the egg cell with only half of the needed chromosomes and the sperm with only half of the needed chromosomes. When they are combined, that's called fertilization, and that occurs, of course, to produce the zygote, which begin then to divide over and over again and ultimately to differentiate, that is to break down into these different kinds of cells, to differentiate into all of the cell types of our body.

There is a lot of talk since Dolly about cloning, and here's a little chart which looks at cloning. What you do in cloning is to take the nucleus out of an egg cell, and then you put another nucleus by one of two different routes, either by fusion or taking the nucleus out itself and putting it into the egg.

If you had done that right, and you have tricked this nucleus you put in there to believe that it is a zygote, and that requires a little doing, then it goes on to divide, and now you have a, I guess it's an asexual way of reproducing.

We now have done that with lots of animals and different kinds of organisms. I saw two clones from the world's best Holstein cow, Zeta was her name, request she had two clones which, interestingly enough, didn't look like her mother and that's because the black and white Holstein cows, only whether it is predominantly black or white is determined by the genes. The actual spread of the pigment is not genetically controlled, and so her two daughters, which were clones of her, didn't look like her. Kind of interesting it, isn't it.

Parthenogenesis. Parthenogenesis occurs when there is no male sex cell involved, and it occurs in some lower organisms. Parthenogenesis is common, and it can be produced in others, in the frog, for example. What happens is you stop the miotic division of the oocyte up here.

You stop that miotic division so there is a diploid number of cells here. Then under appropriate circumstances, and usually in higher organisms, it requires some artificial stimulation. It will go on to develop a normal, adult, ultimately.

The next chart shows this process as it occurs in the body. Now, what we're talking about, when you're talking about cloning and embryonic stem cells, this all happens in a Petri dish. But what we, that's in vitro or in glass, as contrasted to in vivo or in life. And this is what happens in the normal fertilization and development of an ovum. The ovary has maturing cells in it and ordinarily, just one of those ruptures every 30 days, every 28 days. Sometimes it will be more than one, in which case you can end up with fraternal twins. But usually, just one. They don't always, by the way, get picked up by, there's a little funnel shaped end of the Fallopian tube here called the infandibulum. They don't always get picked up by that, and sometimes they just float out into the pelvic cavity.

And the sperm which are released in the uterus, in the vagina really, and then they make it up through the cervix into the uterus, they make their way all the way up the Fallopian tube, and some of them get out into the body. And if the ovum has not made it into the Fallopian tube, they may be fertilized out in the body, and we call that an ectopic pregnancy, and that has to be interrupted because neither the fetus nor the mother will make it if we let that continue.

But ordinarily, the fertilization occurs well up in the Fallopian tube. Several days, you see the days here as it gross and divides into two and four and eight cells and then on down until it finally implants, what, 8, 9 days later before it implants. And some of the birth control that we use simply prevents the implantation. The intra- uterine devices that were common a number of years ago, that's what they did. They simply prohibited the fertilized and several hundred cell stage embryo from implanting in the uterus.

Now, what we're going to be talking about is this eight-cell stage. That's about day 4 in the development of the embryo, and at that eight- cell stage, that's the time when an in vitro fertilization, they choose to take a cell from that. This is in a Petri dish remember, take a cell from that. Sometimes they get two to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to make sure the baby's not going to have a genetic defect. And then they implant the remaining cells. And several thousand times we've had a perfectly normal baby from that.

The next chart simply shows in schematic form the development of twins. And they can split, either at the two cell stage, or they can split at the inter cell mass stage and we can get some indication of when they split by how the babies present themselves, whether they present themselves in a common amnion or in two different amnions.

I wanted to put this slide up here because what it says is that in nature, you can take half the cells away from the early embryo, sometimes a very early embryo, and each half grows into a perfectly normal baby.

And back in 2000, when this was first being discussed, before the President came out with his executive order, knowing this, and having had a course in a former life in advanced embryology, I suggested that we could ethically create true embryonic stem cell lines by using cells from an early embryo which should not hurt the embryo, because half of all the cells can be taken a way to produce identical twins, and each half produces a perfectly normal identical twin.

The next chart simply shows a little more detail on this, and it shows how the babies can be presented in separate chorionic sac or in a common fused chorionic sac, depending upon the time in which they, and they may share an amnion or not share an amnion, depending on the time when they finally split.

The next chart shows us some of the techniques that are used to try to get the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell, since the President and a large number of citizens object to the destruction of one life, the frozen embryo, with the hope that it will help another. And these are the techniques that have been tried to produce the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell. Reprogramming using embryonic stem cells and using embryonic stem cell and donor cells, and you fuse them and the hybrid cells, hopefully, will act like they were embryonic stem cells.

Or you could use differentiation using cell proteins. What is not understood by many people is that all of the

genes are not in the nucleus. There are a number of control factors that are in the cytoplasm. Indeed, they are really very important because they determine when genes are turned on and when genes are turned off. And each cell in your body has all of the genes there. And a liver cell is very different than a kidney cell or a skin cell. And that difference is determined by the control proteins out in the--some of them are smaller than proteins, out in the cytoplasm called here cell soup, for instance, which then turns on or turns off these genes inside the nucleus.

Well, we can, hopefully, get this cell soup from embryonic stem cells or something that behaves like an embryonic stem cell, which will then make the donor cell believe that it is, in fact, an embryonic stem cell, so maybe it will behave like an embryonic stem cell.

Then there's de-differentiation, using chemicals, antibodies or specific proteins. You see, when it differentiates to produce the individual germ layers, we have to de-differentiate it, bring it back to its primordial state so that it will now behave more like an embryonic stem cell. You can de-differentiate by using a lot of chemicals and so forth. These may be harsh. You may end up killing the little embryo. But if you do it right, you can trick these cells into believing that there's something other than what they are, and they then will behave as if they were an embryonic stem cell.

You've heard a lot of talk about some really good places to get cells that have some of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells. There are now umbilical cord blood banks, because of the belief that if you freeze the cord blood, which is the blood from the infant, if you freeze that cord blood, it may have in it cells that you can use in the future to help in restorative medical processes or make body parts.

These are not true embryonic stem cells, but they're certainly better than cells you get from somebody else. At least they're from that person and they have, they're more closely aligned with embryonic stem cells than if you simply got an adult body cell.

Then there's the bone marrow cells. And more recently you may have heard a lot about amnionic fluid. The amnion is the fluid in which the baby develops. He's very tiny. The embryo starts there. And obviously some cells will be sloughed off of these embryos, and as those cells will show up in the amniotic fluid, and so there's good opportunities to get something that behaves something like embryonic stem cells there.

The next chart shows, I think, four of the processes that were included in the President's white paper from the President's Council on Bio ethics. And altered nuclear transfer is one of those. This is kind of a cloning where you've altered the nucleus, so that it can't be truly said to be cloning, which is prohibited by law.

Altered nuclear transfers, oocyte assisted reprogramming, it's simply using the oocyte and it's primarily the proteins, that factors out in the cytoplasm which are doing this.

Embryo biopsy, and I have a chart in just a moment on that because this is the process which I suggested in 2000.

And then a really, really interesting one, cells from dead. And boy, put that in quotes because what we're talking about here are embryos that are the equivalent of the brain dead person, from which we get very good body parts. And there are embryos that will not go on to divide. They will ultimately die, and that state can be ascertained, and if they are not going to go on and divide, they will die. But they still may have viable cells that could be used to establish embryonic stem cell lines.

Obviously, some problems with this, you know. Who's to say that it's really going to die? And then there's the question about, are you really going to get a good stem cell line from a cell taken from an about to die embryo. But this is one possibility, and there are some strong proponents to this.

The next chart simply shows a quote from the white paper of the President's Council on Bio Ethics. And it quotes me down here at the bottom an asterisk, a similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001. They said here, ``It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells extracted from early embryos and in ways that do not harm the embryo. Thus biopsy.

But the initial success of the Verlinsky Group efforts at least raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them.

Now, this statement was made before the British, and they pioneered this, started doing the pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that I mentioned a few minutes ago. They now have, in several thousand cases, taken one, and sometimes they get a second cell, taken cells from the 8 cell stage embryo to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. If there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells. And as far as I know, they always had a perfectly normal baby.

Now, the big surprise would be that the baby wasn't perfectly normal. I've had people tell me, gee, it's eight cells, and you take two of them away so it's only three-fourths of a person.

No, when you take half the cells away to from an early embryo to produce identical twins, is each one of them only half a person? Ask one. There are a lot of identical twins around. They'll just laugh at the notion that they're half a person. Of course they are not.

So this, the medical profession now has run past us with this technology. So we could today establish embryonic stem cell lines from that second cell that they inadvertently take. And there have been hundreds of those that are just discarded because they have no use for them. Just one cell is all you need to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. And Verlinksy and Lanza, Lanza with a somewhat questionable publication, but both of them have claimed that they can produce a stem cell line from a single cell line.

Well, I thought I would spend these few minutes talking about this because this is of current interest and the Senate will be shortly trying to override the President's veto. They almost certainly will not be able to do that. His veto will be sustained, and our hope is that S. 30 will then be brought up in the House so that we can sign that so it gets to the President's desk. And I join those tens of millions of people in our country who believe and hope that there ought to be some really important contributions made to health care from embryonic stem cell lines. And we don't need to harm or kill an embryo to get an embryonic stem cell line. So we hope that S. 30 will be brought up to the House and we pass that. And the President already indicated that he will happily sign it.

Peak Oil

The next chart now begins a discussion I want to spend the rest of our time on. And we have a number of charts here and again, I think this is the 32nd or 33rd time I've come to the well to talk about this subject. It wasn't cool to talk about energy and peak oil when I started talking about this, what, nearly 2 years ago I guess. But now it's common fodder for many discussions.

And this is an interesting little cartoon, and the fellow with his humongous SUV. The demand is filling up at the pump. The supply, and he's saying, just why is gas so expensive?

One of my colleagues asked me what he should tell his constituents when they ask him what can be done to reduce the price of gas? I told him it is very simple. Just tell them to drive less. Not only will they spend less on gas, but if they aren't using it, the supply and demand will be more in sync and the prices will come down. I can assure you that the prices will come down.

The next chart, it is this observation that Hyman Rickover referred to 50 years ago, the 14th day of last month, when he gave a very interesting talk to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. He noted the enormous transformation, and they were then but 100 years into the age of oil when he gave his talk. Now we are about 150 years into the age of oil. But he noted the enormous transformation that this energy had made in the development of civilization. And this is energy here on the ordinate. It could just as well be population, by the way, because as we were able to mobilize more energy, our

population went up. We were able to grow more food, and, therefore, we could support more people. And if you could support more people, there were kind of automatically more people to support.

Well, this is the little depiction here, only 400 years out of this 8,000 years of recorded history. And his observation was that in span of human history, 8,000 years, the age of oil will be but a blip, about 300 years out of 8,000 years.

The Industrial Revolution, of course, started here with wood and then coal. And it was already sputtering when we discovered gas and oil, and then it took off, and population followed it. There is an interesting quote from Hyman Rickover's article. I didn't bring it, but he thought there would be 4 billion people in the world by the turn of the century. There were, in fact, almost 7 billion people in the world by the turn of the century. So even he had underestimated the contribution that energy would make to the increase in population.

I want you to note something up here at the top of this curve. Notice that if that little perturbation had not occurred there in about 1970, the Arab oil embargo, and if that curve had kept going up, it would be over the top of the chart a couple of times, wouldn't it? That curve was rising very steeply.

As a matter of fact, if you look at that curve, in each decade during this sharp rise, in each decade, the world used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Now, think about that for a moment. Had that continued, what that meant was that when we had used half of all of the recoverable oil in the world, we would have how much more time at current use rates? Ten years. Well, very fortunately, that slowed down. There was a worldwide depression, recession, you may remember, and we really learned how to become very much more efficient. So we have slowed that growth rate down. But notice more recently how rapidly that has been increasing. Largely because of the third world, China and India, industrializing. I think the last year for which I saw data, China increased their demand for energy 13 percent.

The next chart is a very interesting chart, and this depicts what the world would look like if the size of the country was determined by how much oil it had. A really distorted picture of the world, isn't it?

Look at Saudi Arabia there. Front and center, and you probably can't read the small print over there, between a fifth and a fourth of all the oil in the world. Now, I say that with a little trepidation because we really don't know how much oil is there. We know what they tell us. But you need to remember that most of these countries are OPEC, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. And for years the OPEC countries were permitted to pump a certain percentage of their reserves. So if you wanted to pump more oil, all you had to do was to have more reserves. And since there wasn't anybody looking over your shoulder, you could say you had whatever reserves you needed to have to pump as much oil as you would like to pump to support your economy. And that is true of most of these countries. Nobody looks inside, but this is the best guess as to how much oil these countries have.

A very important recent book was written by Matt Simmons called Twilight in the Desert. He questions that there is as much oil in Saudi Arabia as we believe, and he believes they may already be peaking in Saudi Arabia.

Talking about peaking, I just wanted to mention an article that appeared above the fold in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, and it was about the second largest oil field in the world. The largest one, of course, is in Saudi Arabia. It is the giant Ghawar oil field that is still running down, still produces 5 million barrels of oil a day. The world produced 84 million, and it produces 5 million of that from that one field. The second largest field was the Cantarell oil field in Mexico. And it was named after a fisherman Cantarell, whose nets kept getting fouled, and if his nets were fouled, they knew who was at fault. There was only one oil field in Mexico, and that was Pemex. So he would take his nets to be replaced and they finally said, Where are you finding all that oil? And he said, Come, I will show you. And it was kind of bubbling up out of the ocean. And they drilled there, and for years it was the second-largest yielding field in the world, 2 million barrels a day. In the last 2 years, it has dropped down 10 percent a year. It is now 1.6 million barrels per day. So that field has peaked.

Just look at how anemic the United States is compared to Saudi Arabia. We would have fit in Saudi Arabia many times. We have 2 percent of the known oil reserves, and Saudi Arabia has 22 percent. So we would fit in there 11 times, and that is what it shows here.

Look at little Kuwait there that Saddam Hussein thought looked like a little corner province of Iraq when he went to take it. They are, I think, the fourth largest reserves. Iran is number two, Iraq is three, and Kuwait is four. There is some question about whether Iraq and Kuwait should reverse places.

Another interesting thing about this chart. Look at the pitifully small amount of oil that India and China have. A third of the world's population is over there in India and China, and they have a trifling amount, between them they have less oil than the United States.

The next chart shows how much oil we have. We have 2 percent of the known reserves in the world. We use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. Some people think, and they are right, this represents a huge national security risk.

Note that with only 2 percent of the world's oil, we pump 8 percent of the world's oil. So we are really good at pumping oil. We ought to be. We have more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together. And we are pumping our oil fields four times faster than the rest of the world.

The next chart, and we could spend a long while on this chart and we have only a very short time to look at it, but the gist of this chart is available immediately when you look at it. The big bars here show you when we found the oil. And the ordinate here shows how much we found. And you will notice that we started finding it way back in the 1930s, a big slug of it in the 1940s and 1950s, and we really exploded in the 1960s, didn't we? But from 1980 on down, though, there has been less and less, and that is in spite of the fact that we have ever better techniques for finding the oil, 3D-size, computer modeling, and we have a pretty good idea of the geology of the world. And it is only in unique geologic formations that you can expect to find gas and oil.

The solid black line here represents our consumption. It also represents our production because there is no big puddle of oil anywhere. We have used all we have produced; so this is a curve. We can call it the consumption curve, but it is also the production curve because we have used all we have produced. Notice since about 1980 we have been consistently losing more than we found.

Again, this perturbation in the 1970s that you saw before. We have been borrowing all this oil we used here that we didn't find. We borrowed it from back here.

And what will the future look like? We can use enhanced oil recovery and get it more quickly. But if we do, you can't pump it twice. If you pump it now, you won't pump it later.

The next chart, and this was predicted by M. King Hubbert in 1956. That is about here. M. King Hubbert predicted that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970. That was a brash statement. We were then king of oil, I think producing more oil than any other country in the world, and I think we may have been the biggest exporter of oil in the world. And he says in 14 years we are going to peak in oil production.

Notice the little blip here on the down side of what is called Hubbert's Peak. The next chart looks at the details of this, and we can see why this perturbation.

What M. King Hubbert predicted, by the way, was the lower 48; that is, Texas and the rest of the United States.

By the way, West Texas Intermediate is still the grade of oil, although they aren't producing very much now. It is still the grade of oil which you will see in the paper, West Texas Intermediate.

There are two other oil wells in the world now that may take over as the benchmark. One of them is Brent, which is really an inferior oil. It is heavier and sour. By ``sour'' we mean it

has a lot of sulfur in it that is hard to get out, and it is polluting if you don't get it out. That used to be the North Sea oil that the British produced, but now there are other oils that are grouped with that. And then there is a third oil, which is the Asian oil benchmark. And there is some argument now about which of those benchmarks we should refer to as the price of oil. We have been referring to West Texas Intermediate, which is a slight sweet crude, but there is not very much of that now, and because of the demand, the Brent, which always used to be lower in price, is now several dollars to $5 or $6 higher. So there is some and it would be interesting to watch what happens if they sort this out.

But notice what caused this blip on the way down. It was the oil found in Alaska that used to be a fourth of our production. It has now dwindled down. And notice here the big finds in the Gulf of Mexico, and you can hardly see a perturbation as we run down that slope.

The next chart is a chart which is used by one of the primary organizations that believes that you don't need to worry about oil, that it is going to be there for a long time. This is CERA, the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and they use this chart to try to convince you, and I don't find it very convincing but I just will ask you to look at it to see if you think it is convincing, that M. King Hubbert really didn't know what he was talking about. The little yellow symbols here are M. King Hubbert's predictions. The actual lower 48 are the green ones, and they are telling you that these two curves are so far apart that you should question the validity of M. King Hubbert's analyses. They look pretty close together to me. And they also show the total U.S. production, which is the Alaska production. And, of course, that produces this little perturbation, slipping down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

This chart is a quote from one of four different agencies, groups that have done studies on peak oil. This is the first one, and this is the so-called Hirsch report and it was done by SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, a very prestigious science organization paid for by the Department of Energy. And they produced a big report with very serious language:

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 confident forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others contend that 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 time 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 nothing in history that we can rely on to help us through this 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,'' is his statement.

The next chart is from a second of these studies, and there are a couple of these that we will go through very quickly. The Army Corps of Engineers did a study for the Army. And you can take their report and put in U.S. or world wherever they put Army. And the Army is clearly a microcosm of the United States and the United States is a microcosm of the world. But they say essentially the same thing; peaking is either present or eminent, with potentially devastating consequences.

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. And you really need to emphasize each of those.

The next chart. I wanted to show you this one because this was written just a couple of years ago. ``The current price of oil is in the $45-$57 per barrel and it's expected to stay in that range for several years.'' I think it's, what, $69 a barrel today? And after this it went up to $78 a barrel, then fell back and is rising again. Oil prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Were that to occur, by the way, it would have disastrous effects on our economy.

The next chart is a schematic. And you can make this peak look steep or flat. Here we've spread out the abscissa and compressed the ordinate. But it's still a 2 percent growth, which doubles in 35 years, four times bigger in 70 years, eight times bigger in 105 years. Albert Einstein said that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. Very few people understand the power of exponential growth. It doubles in 35 years. That's the yellow shaded area. If, in fact, we are here near the peak where the demand is a bit more than the supply, which is why gas is $3 a gallon at the pump rather than $1, which it was not all that long ago, in 35 years the demand will be double? And if, in fact, we're peaking, the supply will be not more and maybe less than the supply now.

The next chart is a very interesting one because it includes a couple of predictions by CERA. There are two major organizations that I think are kind of in denial, one of them is CERA and the other one is ExxonMobil. All the other oil companies, watch their ads, they're pretty much admitting that we're at peak oil. BP is Beyond Petroleum. And Chevron has ads. It's very clear they believe that we've probably reached or we're about to reach our maximum production of oil.

Here we are, common curve, you've seen this a number of times, a stuttering in the 1970s and rising again. And they are predicting, and we don't have time this evening to go over some very interesting statistics. They're predicting we're going to find as much more oil as all of the known reserves yet to be pumped. And if we found that much more, in other words, if we go from the roughly two trillion barrels, which most authorities believe was the amount of oil which was recoverable, and we've recovered about half of that. If we went to three, then that moves the peak out they say to 2016. I just want to emphasize that for a moment. Even if we find as much more oil as all the known reserves in the world today, we push the crisis point out only 2016.

This chart further points out that if we use really aggressive techniques to develop that oil, like pumping live steam down there and sequestering CO2 down there, pumping seawater down there, all the things we do to recover, we might recover a more quickly, which would push the peak out, but then look what happens? You fall off a cliff after that. You can't pump it twice; if you pump it now, you won't pump it then.

The next chart is a really interesting one. This occurs in one of their publications where they are saying there won't be any such thing as peak oil. And look what they show. They say it will be an undulating plateau. I won't argue. It's up and down. The price of oil is up and down. The price of gas is up and down. But they say it will be an undulating plateau. But notice, the undulating plateau falls off. There clearly is a peak. If there is only roughly two trillion barrels, then the peak is here. If we find another trillion barrels, that pushes the peak out to here. And then they have some confidence, I don't know how well-founded it is, that we're going to get a huge amount of oil from unconventional sources. And when we have more time another evening, we'll talk about the potentially huge amounts of oil that we can get from things like our oil shales in the west and the Canadian tar sands.

This next quote is an interesting one from one of the giants in this area. This is a quote from Laherrere, who 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, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.'' I think that he's right, that this is absolutely implausible.

The next chart is a quote from Hyman Rickover, as I mentioned earlier in that very famous speech he gave just a little over 50 years ago now. I suggest it's a good time to think soberly about our responsibility to our decendants, those who will ring out the

fossil fuel age. I led a delegation of nine members to China; we spent New Year's Eve in Shanghai. They began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Post-oil. Mr. Speaker, I wish our guys got it as well as they.

We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safe margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels. There will be a world without fossil fuels.

I have a few charts on conservation. California uses 65 as much electricity as we use; hard to argue they don't live as well as we. The next chart is a really interesting one. It shows the enormous potential for saving energy with lighting. And the incandescant bulb, we use that for brooding our chickens because 90 percent of all the energy is heat. Fluorescents are very much more efficient. Same amount of light from all of these, by the way. But look at the light emitting diodes, LEDs, over there; very little heat produced. Get an LED flashlight, you will forget when you put batteries in it, they just last and last.

The next chart is a really interesting one. I wish it were in living color so it's a little sexier to look at. This shows how satisfied one is with life compared to how much energy you use. Satisfaction with life here, how much energy you use there. Obviously we are way out there to the right. There we are, USA. But notice, there are 20- something countries that are as happy or happier with life than we are who use less energy than we. We don't need to use as much energy as we use to feel good about life.

The next chart is a really interesting one. It shows us the huge challenge that we have. And 85 percent of all of our energy comes from fossil fuels, only 15 percent of it from something else. And a bit more than half of that from nuclear. And 7 percent, and by the way, in 2000 our solar was 1 percent of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. It's been growing rapidly. It may now be .5 percent. But that's still a tiny, tiny percentage.

The next chart, I just want to look very quickly at something which has been in the press recently. And I have a couple of articles here I want to refer to very quickly. This is the energy that goes into producing corn. And if you see down here, almost half the energy that goes into producing corn comes from natural gas, and natural gas is a fossil fuel. There was a study done by the National Academy of Sciences, and then two of the authors there of that study wrote an article for the Washington Post, and it was March 25 of this year. And in both of these, in both the paper, and I have the paper here from the National Academy of Sciences and here is the article that was in the Washington Post. They point out that if we use all of our corn for ethanol, all of it, and discounted it for the fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline, only about one-fourth, less than one-fourth, one-fifth, they have 80 percent fossil fuel input. They noted that you can save that much gas by tuning up your car and putting air in the tires.

A lot of people today are focused on soybeans and diesel. They said, and this is National Academy of Sciences, if we use all of our soybeans for diesel, it would displace 6 percent of our diesel. And if you discounted it for the fossil fuel input, and it's much more efficient producing biodiesel from soybeans, that 6 percent shrinks to 2.9 percent. Well, both of these are trifling. And obviously we're not going to turn all of our corn into ethanol and all of our soybeans into diesel. But if we did, it would displace, what, 2.4 percent of our gasoline and 2.9 percent of our soybeans. We have huge challenges.

And the next chart is really interesting. When people tell you, don't worry about energy, we have all this coal, 250 years at current use rate. It's true. Grow only 2 percent, remember that compound growth? It shrinks to 75 years. Use some of it to convert it to gas of oil, you have now shrunk to 50 years. And remember, in today's world there is no way not to share your energy with the world because energy is bought and sold on a world market. So if we share our 50 years with the world, it's now 12\1/2\ years of coal energy, with only 2 percent growth in the use of coal. Think about it for a moment.

The next chart, and we will come here to the floor again and we will spend the whole time talking about this one, because we have a huge challenge. I'm really very enthusiastic about challenges. There is no exhilaration like the exileration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and boy have we got one in this energy. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world, and with proper motivation, I think we can do it. But we need to understand the challenge before us, and that's when I will come to the floor again. And we're going to talk about all of these, the finite sources, the nuclear sources and all of these renewables. What is realistic to expect to get from them? Is there a silver bullet out there? I'll tell you now, except for one, the only silver bullet out there is nuclear fusion. I don't see any other silver bullet. And the chances of them getting nuclear fusion I think are about the same as the chances of you solving your personal economic problems by winning the lottery; great if it happens, but don't mortgage the ranch, don't bet it on happening.

I would just like to end with a very interesting quote from Hyman Rickover. ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite 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 resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for the necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.''

This, Admiral Rickover says, is a huge challenge for us today, with only 2 percent of the known reserves, using 25 percent of the world's oil and importing about two-thirds of what we use.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back with the promise that I will come to the floor again and spend the whole time talking about the enormous challenges we have and the satisfactions that we will achieve as a nation when we do it, in spite of the difficulty.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, June 26, 2007, at 9 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit for the Record two short articles, one from Business Week and the other from the Washington Post, at the end of my remarks.

It's been roughly 2 years now since I have been coming to the well to talk about energy and, more specifically, about peak oil. When I first came here to do that, we had quite a discussion in our office what we would call it because it was a phenomenon that very few had any interest in or any knowledge of.

And I had heard two descriptive terms. One was peak oil, which is the one we finally decided to use, and the other was the great rollover. When we talk about it this evening, you will understand what the great rollover is. It's the rollover from adequate production. You come to the peak and then you roll over the peak and start down the other side. We wisely, I think, chose to call it peak oil because that's apparently what everybody else is calling it.

And I wanted to start this evening with two articles that a couple of years ago when I started coming here I would never have dreamed that I would be able to come to this well and one day find two articles like this in two of our major publications. One of them is from the Washington Post and the other is from Business Week, and I'd like to begin this evening by reading from these articles. It's the kind of thing that I have been saying for 2 years, and it's very satisfying to be able to read it now from somebody else's pen.

This is the one from the Washington Post called, ``A Wind-Powered Town, an Energy Bill and a Lot of Hot Air.'' You might suspect by that title that the author is Dana Milbank.

``There's a certain irony in Washington's failure to devise a modern energy policy. This is, after all,'' he says, ``the one place on earth that is powered almost entirely by wind.

``Lawmakers are growing further apart on energy legislation, as Democrats demand alternative fuels and Republicans insist on more drilling. But for both sides, the ability to talk about energy is both plentiful and renewable.

``While the Senate held its fourth day of debate on an energy bill, three congressional committees held hearings on the subject yesterday, and the House and Senate Renewable Energy Caucuses held an all-day `expo and forum' in the Cannon Caucus Room. Democratic senators held two news conferences on the subject, Republican senators held a third, and bipartisan groups of lawmakers contributed a fourth and fifth.'' And this is all in one day.

``Not to be left out, the National Association for Business Economics, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission,'' before whom I testified this afternoon, ``the Electric Power Supply Association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and a coalition of environmentalists all hosted energy events of their own.

``Talk about a large carbon footprint. The amount of CO2 emitted from the mouths of all these lawmakers, lobbyists and activists was enough to cause part of Greenland to melt into the sea.

`` `This bill's going to have a tough time,' said Senator Larry Craig . . . That's a safe guess, given that the Senate plans for about eight days of debate on the bill, and Republicans such as Craig are hinting at a filibuster that could derail the whole thing.''

``The Senate energy legislation is fairly modest. It stays away from radical policies, such as a carbon tax or a cap on carbon emissions. Its toughest provision, a plan to increase fuel-efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020, is under siege by a bipartisan group of lawmakers from car-manufacturing States.

`` `The Senate energy bill started out fairly weak, and we don't see the debate getting any better,' complained Eric Pica, who represented Friends of the Earth at a protest by environmentalists on the Senate grounds yesterday.

``Minutes later, Republican lawmakers assembled in the Senate television gallery to voice similarly bitter objections to the bill, for completely opposite reasons. `It doesn't do anything to lower the price of gasoline,' argued Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader.''

``Did that message get out? Not without some difficulty. The Republican event was squeezed in between a Senate hearing on `the impact of rising gas prices,' and a pair of House committee sessions on biofuels and `climate change mitigation.' Within minutes of the GOP's departure from the television studio, Democrats walked in with a rebuttal.

`` `We do not believe in the President's theory, the Republican's theory: Drill, drill, drill, more of the same,' Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, taunted. `It reminds me of Iraq.' ''

Over in the Cannon Caucus Room, where the Renewable Energy Caucus was caucusing among displays of pea pellets, switch grass and filament-free lightbulbs, exhibitors were on hand to talk about landfill gas and to hand out lollipops and bumper stickers saying I love wind energy.

``It was a festive gathering, but Representative Roscoe Bartlett, Republican from Maryland, a champion of renewable energy, delivered a somber message about progress in the capital. `We've been crawling at a snail's pace,' he said. `We've been doing little more than nibbling at the edges.

Now, for the article from Business Week, and we will kind of be reading this together because I have seen it for the first time just a couple of moments before I came to the well.

It's by Eugene Linden, and it's called, ``From Peak Oil to Dark Age?'' And this is what he says.

``Oil output has stalled, and it's not clear the capacity exists to raise production.

``With global oil production virtually stalled in recent years, controversial predictions that the world is fast approaching maximum petroleum output are looking a little bit less controversial.''

I would note as an aside that a couple of years ago when I began to talk about this, I ran the risk of being relegated to the lunatic fringe. But in another life I was a scientist. I'd been concerned about this problem for 40 years, and I thought these statistics in reality were on my side.

``At first blush, those concerned about global warming should be delighted. After all, what better way to prod the move toward carbon- free, climate-friendly alternative energy.

``But climate change activists have nothing to cheer about. The U.S. is completely unprepared for peak oil, as it's called, and the wrenching adjustments it would entail could easily accelerate global warming as Nations turn to coal. Moreover, regardless of the implications for climate change, peak oil represents a mortal threat to the U.S. economy.''

This isn't some wild, left-wing publication. This is Business Week who is saying this.

``Peak oil refers to the point at which world oil production plateaus before beginning to decline as depletion of the world's remaining reserves offsets ever-increased drilling. Some experts argue that we're already there, and that we won't exceed by much the daily production high of 84.5 million barrels first reached in 2005. If so, global production will bump along near these levels for years before beginning an inexorable decline.

``What would that mean? Alternatives are still a decade away from meeting incremental demand for oil. With nothing to fill the gap, global economic growth would slow, stop, and then reverse; international tensions would sore as Nations seek access to diminishing supplies, enriching autocratic rulers in unstable oil States; and, unless other sources of energy could be ramped up with extreme haste, the world could plunge into a new Dark Age.

Even as faltering economies burned less oil, carbon loading of the atmosphere might accelerate as countries turn to vastly dirtier coal.

When I read this, I was reminded of the observation of one of the giants in the area, one of the experts, Kenneth Deffeyes from Princeton University, who said that the least bad outcome from peak oil would be a deep worldwide recession that might make the 1930s look like good times.

Sound familiar to what I just read? He says, if you don't like that, try the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or famine, pestilence and death.

``Given such unpleasant possibilities, you would think peak oil would be a national obsession. But policymakers can hide behind the possibility that vast troves will be available from unconventional sources, or that secretive oil-exporting nations really have the huge reserves they claim. Yet even if those who say that the peak arrived are wrong, enough disturbing omens--for example, declining production in most of the world's great oil fields, and no new super fields to take up the slack--exist for the issue to merit an intense international focus.''

When I read about the decline in our big oil fields, I thought of another article about 3 weeks or so ago in the Post about the second largest oil field in the world, the largest one in Mexico, the Cantrell oil field, whose discovery was quite interesting. A Mexican fisherman by the name of Cantrell kept having oil-foiled nets. When oil foiled his net, he knew where to go, because there was only one oil company in Mexico, Pemex, so he went to Pemex, look what you did to my net, give me a new one.

So they did, but he came in so many times they wondered, do we really spill that much oil? So they asked, where are you finding all that oil? He said, come, I will show you. He showed them oil bubbling up out of the ocean. They drilled there, and for a number of years that has been the second largest field in the world, producing 2 million barrels of oil per day, the Cantrell oil field. It has declined down to 20 percent, down to 1.6 million barrels a day in the last 2 years.

The reality is that it will be here much sooner for the U.S. in the form of peak oil imports. Since we import nearly two-thirds of the oil we consume, global oil for export should be our bigger concern.

In that article about 3 weeks ago in the Post, they noted that in 8 years they estimate that Mexico will be an oil importer. I think it was in that same article that noted in 10 years Iran may very well be an oil importer. Maybe it has something to do with the reason they are interested in nuclear energy.

Fast-growing domestic consumption of oil-exporting nations and increasing appetites by big exporters such as China portend tighter supplies available to the U.S., China now the number two importer in the world, with an economy growing at 11.4 percent, the last quarter for which I saw data. With our economy barely 2 percent, how soon might they be the biggest oil importer in the world?

Unless world oil production rises rapidly, but output has stalled, call it de facto peak oil or peak oil light, it means that the United States is entering an age when it will have to scramble to maintain existing import levels.

We will know soon enough whether the capacity to raise production really exists. If not, basic math and the clock will tell the story. All alternatives, geothermal, solar, wind and so forth, produce only 3 percent of the energy supplied by oil.

If oil demand rises by 2 percent, while upward remains flat, a generation of alternative energy would have to expand 60 percent a year. That's more than twice the rate of wind power, the fastest- growing alternative energy.

All this incremental energy would somehow have to be delivered to transportation, which consumes most of the oil produced each year just to stay even with the growth in demand.

Nuclear and hydropower together produce 10 times the power of wind, geothermal and solar. But even if nations ignore environmental concerns, it takes years to build nuclear plants and even identify suitable, undammed rivers.

There are many things we in the United States can do and should have been doing other than the present policy of crossing our fingers. If an oil tax makes sense from a climate change perspective, it seems doubly worthy of it if it extends supplies. Boosting efficiency and scaling up alternatives must also be a priority. Recognizing that nations will turn to cheap coal, recently 80 percent of growth in coal use has come from China. More work is needed to defang this fuel which produces more carbon dioxide per ton than any other energy source.

Even if the peakists are wrong, and I will tell you each night I pray I am wrong, because if I am not wrong we are in for a pretty rough ride. Even if the peakists are wrong, we would still be better off taking these actions. If they are right, major actions right now may be the only way to avert a new dark age in an overheated world.

Again, I would like to emphasize, these are not articles from some left-wing environment magazine. These are articles from Business Week and the Washington Post.

Now I would like to turn to the first slide here on the easel, and this is a kind of an interesting slide, I think, that points to our problem. Here is a fellow looking at the gas pump and the $3 gasoline, he is in his huge SUV there. Demand, and looking at the supply in the pump, just why is gas so expensive?

Mr. Motorist, it's expensive because of supply and demand.

One of my colleagues asked me, what can I tell my constituents who are asking me what can we do to reduce the price of gas? I told him, tell them to drive less. It will certainly reduce their cost if they are driving less, and also, if collectively we drive less, then there will be more supply and less demand, and the price of gasoline and oil will drop. They are both exquisitely sensitive to supply and demand.

The next chart is one of my favorites, and this was referred to by Hyman Rickover who gave a speech 50 years

ago, the 14th day of last month, to a group of physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I would encourage a reread of this article several times over, very, very perceptive article.

He talked about 8,000 years of recorded history, and on our chart here we have only about 400 years, the last 400 years of that 8,000 years of recorded history. If we extended it this way, the others, 7.6 thousand years, it would be the same thing, very little energy being used. You could hardly see that energy was used here. It looks like zero because of this scale, it's hard to differentiate the tiny amount of energy that prehistoric man used that's compared to the energy we use today.

Then we began the industrial revolution. We see it here with brown, which was wood, and that industrial revolution was sputtering when we found coal. Then we found gas and oil. It took off. That's the red curve there. Look how sharply that is rising.

Now, this is a compressed abscissa because we have 400 years, and we will see that curve again, and it will be very flat, but that's because we will have stretched out abscissa and made the curve look flatter.

But notice what happened up about the 1970s up there. Had that curve kept going, we will be through the ceiling right now. Notice what happened in the 1970s where we had a drop in use, a world wide recession as a result of the oil price shocks, and much increased deficiency. The efficiency of your refrigerator today is probably three times of the 1970s, and your air conditioner the same thing.

Hyman Rickover pointed out, when he gave his speech 50 years ago, that we were 100 years into the age of oil, and he wondered how long the age of oil would be. We have, today, a much better understanding of that, because in the last 50 years, we have seen the peaking of oil in our country. It occurred in 1970. The peaking of oil, and I think 35 of the 48 top oil producing countries in the world, he noted that the age of oil would occupy but a relatively brief moment in the stretch of human history, and 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will occupy about 300 years.

We are not running out of oil. There is a lot of oil left. But it's going to be very difficult to get. That's going to make it very expensive, and each year we will get less and less. That happened in the United States.

Now, we work very hard to prove that M. King Hubbert was a liar. He was mentioned in one of the articles. M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956 that we would peak in 1970.

Now, we knew by 1980 that he was right, because we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's speech. Our response to that was exactly the wrong response. Our response was let's see if we can't find more. So we gave tax incentives to see if we couldn't get the oil people to drill more, and it worked. They drilled more, but they didn't find more.

Now, in spite of having drilled more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together, we're producing about half the oil today that we produced in 1970s, in spite of the fact that we found enormous amounts of oil in Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico.

The next slide is a very interesting slide. This is the world according to oil.

This imagines that the size of the country would be relevant, consistent with the amount of oil that they have. So, if you are thinking about oil, who are the biggies in oil?

Obviously, Saudi Arabia dominates the landscape. They have about 22 percent, not quite a fourth of all of the oil reserves in the world.

Then there is Iran and Iraq and Kuwait. Kuwait, it looks like a little province. That's what Saddam Hussein thought, a little province that ought to belong to Iraq, so he went to take it. Tiny little country. Look at the amount of oil that it has. Here we are in the United States, pretty anemic, 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world.

But I want to point to something even more alarming than that. If I lived in China, look at it over there, 1.3 billion people. Today they are getting about 70 percent of all of their energy from dirty coal. They are near suffocating under it. Even worse in China, with 1 billion people and growing, soon to surpass China's 1.3 billion is India, which has only half the energy of China, and China has less oil than we do. So the world is poised if we are approaching peak oil. The world is poised for some very serious times.

The next chart is one that inspired 30 of our leading Americans, and I had the privilege of testifying with one of them yesterday, Jim Woolsey, and McFarland and Boyden Gray and 27 others, several of them, very senior four-star admirals who wrote a letter the President saying Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that.

The President mentioned this at one of his State of the Unions, and he noted that we get this oil from countries which, as he said, which don't even like us.

Two more facts on this chart. We represent, it says here, 5 percent. We are less than that. We are one person out of 22 in the world, less than 5 percent of the world's population. We use 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use.

The other figure on here really is an interesting one. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil.

What that means, of course, is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the rest of the world. It's not hard to understand that when you realize we have drilled, as I said, more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together.

The next chart here, this isn't really a very good one, because you have to read the numbers and don't pay much attention to the symbols, because they make it look kind of even, but these are some data from Hyman Rickover's speech. He went through a development of civilization and, particularly, our industrial civilization, and the role that energy played, and if in fact that is going to be a bell curve kind of experience, as we go down the other side will we retrace in reverse the steps that he so well defined in the contribution of energy to the development of our civilization.

He noted that each person, I generally use about 75 watts, but that's, I guess, sitting here, and he had them sleeping, and he said that we are about 35 watts of electricity, or \1/20\ of a horsepower.

That's how much energy we represent, \1/20\th of a horsepower. In modest activity, you're something like a 70-watt bulb. That's all the energy that you are producing.

The household appliances he said that were available to the housewife of 50 years ago, it would be more than that today, wouldn't it, he said that represented the work of 33 faithful household servants is the way he expressed it. This energy has been such a cheap servant.

We had some factories then. We don't have many now. We had some factories then, and he said that the energy available to assist that factory worker in his productivity was the equivalent of being supported by 244 men. The automobile, and they got roughly the same mileage then as now. The automobile, he said, when going down the road, represented the work output of 2,000 men, and the locomotive that pulled the cars, 100,000 men, and the jet plane, 700,000 men.

Each barrel of oil has an energy equivalent, and you can see it here from these numbers. Each barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 men working all year. And you will pay $125 roughly at the pump. So you can buy yourself the work equivalent of 12 men working all year with a barrel of oil.

When I first read that number, I said, that can't be. And then I thought about it, and I drive a Prius, and we've been averaging, for the past several thousand miles, it's 49 miles per gallon. And I asked myself, how long would it take me to pull my Prius 49 miles? That little gallon of gasoline, still cheaper at $3, by the way, still cheaper than water in the grocery store, pulls my car 79 miles. How long would it take me to pull the car that far?

Another statistic that really helped me understand that that's probably right is that if a man works really hard in his yard all day, his wife could get

more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. Now, that may be humbling to recognize that we're worth less than 25 cents a day, but that's the reality of this incredibly dense, cheap, so far ubiquitously available fossil fuel energy. It's just been everywhere. We assume it's there just like we assume that water and air are there.

The next chart, and if we could have only one chart to speak to, so that we can understand where we are and where we've come from and where we're going, this would be the chart. This shows the discoveries of oil. And you can see them there. Way back in the 1930s we found them, a bunch in the 1940s, and, boy, did we start finding it in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s.

And then starting from 1980, down, it just has been going down, down, down. And that's in spite of the fact that we're drilling more and more wells. We have computer modeling and three-D seismic technologies we didn't know back when we were finding most of this oil. We pretty much have mapped the Earth geologically. We know the kinds of the formations oil is found in.

It is unlikely, very unlikely we will find any more large reservoirs of oil. The solid black line here represents the rate at which we've been consuming oil. Well, actually the production and consumption has been the same. There are no big lakes of oil anywhere so we've been using all we've produced. So this is the consumption curve. It's also been the production curve because up till now we have consumed everything we produced, or we've produced everything we would like to consume.

But look what happened to this curve. This was an exponential curve. And up through the Carter years, the Carter years about here, up through the Carter years we used as much oil in each decade as we had used in all of previous history. That is a stunning statistic. That means that when you've used half the world's oil, there would remain only 10 years of oil at present use rates because we would have used as much oil as in all of previous history.

Well, things really change. If they hadn't changed, extrapolate this. It would be above this graph, well above this chart. So really good things happened as a result of the shocks we had at the Arab oil embargo. We're very much more efficient than we were.

And by the way, our citizens in California use maybe two-thirds the energy that we use here. Do you think they're less happy than we are? I have a lot of colleagues in California. They would really debate that if you suggested that.

Well, since about 1980, as these curves show, we have not found as much oil as we've been using. Today we're pumping what, 4 or 5 barrels for every barrel we find. So now we've been dipping into the past reserves. This chart says that peaking should be occurring, what, about now, or 2010, something like that.

Now, we can make the future look different within limits, depending on how aggressive we are with enhanced oil recovery, sending live steam down there, flooding it with the CO2 for CO2 sequestration, flooding it with seawater as the Saudis do. They pump 3 or 4 barrels of seawater for every barrel of oil that they pump.

They have suggested here in the lightly shaded areas to the right what future discoveries will be like. They certainly won't be that smooth curve. They'll be up and down. But I'll tell you, if you were smoothing a curve out you wouldn't have come that high, would you, if you just look at this chart. So they're being generous, I think, in how much oil we might find.

Well, unless you think we're going to find enormously new reservoirs of oil, and I know of no responsible experts who believe that, it's clear that you cannot pump what you have not found. And unless we find a great deal more, the area under our consumption curve cannot be larger than the area if you put a smooth curve around this, the area under the discovery curve.

And so these two articles I read were reflecting the reality that we're probably at peak oil and face a very challenging future.

The next chart shows one depiction of what's called Hubbert's peak. This is U.S. oil production. This is the whole country's production. He predicted only the lower 48, by the way. But you see we've reached a peak. In about 1970 we reached a peak, and now we're about half the oil production in spite of having more oil wells than all the rest of the world.

The next chart is really an interesting one, because this chart is used by one of the few groups that I think are in denial. This is the Cambridge Energy Research Associates. They are predicting that peak oil, if it occurs, is going to be an undulating plateau somewhere well out into the future, not to worry about it today. And they need to discredit M. King Hubbert, because M. King Hubbert predicted that the United States would peak in 1970 and we did peak in 1970. And in 1979, I think, or 1969, I forget which date, he predicted the United States would be peaking, I'm sorry, the world would be peaking about now.

Well, a very obvious question, if he was right about the United States, which is clearly a microcosm of the world, why shouldn't he be right about the world?

And knowing he was right about the United States by 1980, because we peaked in 1970, we've now lost 27 years when we should have been addressing this problem.

Well, they use these curves to try to convince you and me that you shouldn't have any confidence in M. King Hubbert; therefore, don't worry about the future. Hubbert peak for the lower 48 was the red going up this side and the yellow coming down over there.

Now, the actual lower 48 was the green, and they think that deviates a great deal from the yellow. Gee, I think they're pretty close. From my perspective, I think that they confirm the predictions of M. King Hubbert.

And then the red, now, the red is off a little bit. That's because he didn't include Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. And this little bump on the way down is the oil from Alaska, from Prudhoe Bay. I've been there, Prudhoe Bay. A 4-foot pipe right where 3 starts there at Prudhoe Bay. For years, less now, it's running down. For years a fourth of all our domestic production came through that pipeline.

The next chart is just one of many quotes from one of four studies, a fifth one, which is now out, but it's been embargoed so we can't really talk about it until they've released it. This is from the first report paid for by the Department of Energy, done by the big prestigious SAIC, Science International Applications Corporation, known as the Hirsch Report because Robert Hirsch was the principal investigator on it.

And I just want to mention the highlight here. He says the world has never faced a problem like this. There is nothing in history, which is what these articles were saying, right? There is nothing in history that is a precedent to this. There's nothing to guide us as to what will happen and where we should go.

The next chart is a schematic of the peak. Now, I said we were going to spread out the abscissa and flatten the peak. That's exactly the same peak that you saw before when we compressed the abscissa in a 400- year scale. This is the schematic. The yellow area is about 35 years. Two percent growth, by the way, doubles in 35 years; four times, bigger in 70 years; eight times bigger in 105 years.

No wonder Albert Einstein, in response to a question, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big energy force in the universe after nuclear? And he said the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. Exponential growth. And we see it here.

So if this is, in fact, where we are, and it's now being more and more widely recognized that that's probably correct, this is what the future will look like. That dark green area represents the amount of oil that will be available. If our economies are going to continue as they are now, with just a modest 2 percent growth, this is a 2 percent growth curve, we're going to need that much more oil. We're going to need twice as much oil at the end of 35 years. That is a daunting challenge.

When you represent that, when you remember that we use 21 million barrels of oil a day in our country, a fourth of the world's production and the total amount we get from all of the usual alternatives is something like 3 percent of everything; and they're growing rapidly, but it's still only about 3 percent of all of our energy use.

The next chart, it's really an interesting chart and it points to two things that I'd like just for a moment to emphasize. Here we see that typical curve. You saw it before, the rise and then the stuttering in the '70s. We became more efficient or this would be off the top of the chart here. And I won't this evening go into how they got there, but using some very suspect data, our energy information agency is predicting that we will find as much more oil as all the reserves that we now know exist.

Even if that is true, from their own chart, that pushes the peak out from only now to 2016. That's 9 years from now. And the Hirsch report said, unless you started preparing 20 years before peak oil, you were going to have a pretty rough ride.

Now, if they're not going to find this enormous amount of additional oil, and I think the odds are very good they will not, then peaking is about now, and the curve starts down here.

Let me point to the other thing they note here; that is, if you have some really vigorous enhanced oil recovery, and you extend that peak production of oil, you might push it out to 2037. But then look what happens. You fall off a cliff. Obviously, the area between these two curves has to be the same as the area between these two curves down here. You know, you can't pump what's not there.

Now, you may get a little more. You will get a little more by enhanced oil recovery. But compared to the trillion barrels of oil that we've used so far, the trillion that we will use in the next 150 years as we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak, the additional oil we get is going to be fairly limited.

The next chart has a quote by one of the giants in this area, Laharrere, who 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, and I would agree, 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.

Boy, we have plowed that ground and Laharrere is exactly right. Their predictions I think are implausible.

The next chart is one that I hope more and more of us look at and reflect on. This is an interesting one. I wish it was in living color. It's just kind of plain Jane. But on the abscissa here we have how much energy we use per person, and where would you expect to find us using more energy per person than any other person in the world. There we are, way up there. And the ordinate here is how happy we are with life, how content we are.

And we are okay. We are pretty content. But notice on this chart that there are, I think, 20 some nations, all of those from here up, that use less oil than we, less energy than we, who are happier than we. Not just as happy as we, happier than we are.

Now, it is obvious at this end of the curve it is really hard to be happy when you don't have much energy. When you are burning cow dung and so forth for your heat, you are not really happy. But many nations with about a fourth of energy that we use are just about as happy as we are.

So this is very encouraging. What that means is that you don't have to use as much energy as we are using to be happy. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. We can use far less energy and be, I think, happier because we will have the satisfaction of really making a contribution.

The next chart kind of points to some of the difficulties, and these two articles I read mention those. I use a really simple analogy to help us understand where we are. We are like the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance, and they now are lavishly spending that inheritance, and 85 percent of everything they live on comes from their grandparents and only 15 percent from what they earn, and the inheritance is going to run out a long time before they retire; so they have obviously got to do something. They got to make more or spend less or some combination of those two.

I use those figures because that is where we are in terms of the amount of fossil fuel energy we use, 85 percent. Some will say 86 percent. Coal, oil, and gas make up about 85 percent of all the energy we use. More than half of the rest comes from nuclear power.

By the way, we are the biggest nuclear power producer in the world. France produces 75 percent of their electricity. We produce 20 of ours. But since we are so much bigger than France in terms of total quantity of electricity, we produce more than France does at a much smaller percentage. Well, nuclear power could and maybe should increase, but it comes with problems, as you know. And, also, unless you go to some different technologies, there is not a forever supply of fissionable uranium in the world. That is a very finite supply. So you are going to be going to burning something else or using a breeder reactor, which has problems of enrichment and moving fuel around that is weapons grade and so forth. So this comes with some obvious drawbacks. But shivering in the dark has some obvious drawbacks too, and we need to trade those off as we are looking at maybe using more nuclear power.

Then we come to the true renewables. And I will tell you that we will transition, the world will transition, to sustainable renewables, either because geology demands it as we run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and for the last 150 years of this glorious age of oil, we will move to sustainable renewables. If we do it on the terms of geology, it may be a really rough ride. If we do it on our terms, it will be a much less rough ride and it could really be fun because there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a challenge and, boy, this is a huge challenge. I can see this really turning Americans on. This is a far bigger challenge than we faced in World War II and that turned everybody on. I am 81 years old. I lived through that. Everybody had a victory garden. We had daylight savings time, I think, for the first time so you could work in your victory garden. There were no new cars for us. We made all sorts of sacrificing. We did it because we knew we needed to do it.

And before I forget as far as what we ought to be doing for the future, let me tell you that I think we can get there with our enormous creativity and innovation if we have proper leadership. We need a program that has the total commitment of World War II, that has the technology focus of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. And I think Americans could be marshaled. I think we could make a tremendous contribution and really feel good about it. In that little chart that showed how satisfied we are with life, I think we would be even more satisfied with life, living just as well as we live now on a whole lot less energy and feeling good about the fact that we are able to live that well with less energy.

I want to spend a moment looking at the renewables that we will be turning to increasingly. This is a 2000 chart; so there are more now. But in 2000 solar was 1 percent of 7.07 percent. So it is five times bigger now, 0.35 percent. Big deal. And I am a big solar fan. I have on off-the-grid home and I get all of my electricity from solar and wind, but I recognize this is a tiny contributor now and has a long way to go.

Wood: That is waste products, and the timber industry and paper industry probably can't grow a whole lot without raping our forests.

Waste energy: We can do a whole lot more of that. But please note when you look at that waste pile that is going into the furnace, much of it came from oil. In an energy deficient world, that huge stream of waste will have really shrunk. There will be nowhere near as much.

Wind: The rapidest growing, at 30 percent per year that industry is growing. Still a tiny percentage. A huge frontier: conventional hydro. We don't have any more big rivers to dam in our country. We could get maybe as much more hydro from microhydro. Microturbines, that technology is really improving now.

Let's look at the next chart because that helps me talk about fuel from food. This is a chart on comparing the energy history with petroleum and with corn. And 75 percent of all the energy you get from corn comes from the fossil fuels you use to grow the corn

and haul it to the mill and ferment the grain and so forth.

The article in the Washington Post of a couple weeks ago noted that if you use all of our corn for ethanol, all of it, and discounted it for the fossil fuel input, which they said was 80 percent, and this is a little optimistic but 80 percent is not bad, that it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. And they noted correctly that you could save that much gasoline if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires. That just points out the incredible challenge we have. The enormous amounts of energy that we get from this, 21 million barrels of oil we use a day, 70 percent of it in transportation.

Just to look at this bottom pie chart here, why it is not more efficient. Look at this purple section here. That is almost half of it. That is nitrogen fertilizer that we produce from natural gas. Not much in this country because it is too expensive. We produce it some places overseas from gas where gas is stranded. That is, there is gas and nobody to use it and it is hard to haul; so it is cheaper. So we make the nitrogen fertilizer there. Enormous investments of energy in growing corn.

I have several charts that relate specifically to agriculture. Farm productivity and number of farms: And to nobody's surprise, the number of farms have been going down, down, down. You see it in the red line there. While the productivity for the farm has going been going up up, up, up. That is because the farms have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Now, to support all of that big expensive equipment, you have to have to farm, you need to farm several thousand acres. I bought a farm in Frederick County. I milked cows. I had 144 acres. I milked 60 cows, and I grew almost everything on the farm that I fed those cows. You can't do that today. The farms are very much bigger and they have huge equipment and just a very different kind of agriculture.

There are several charts here that present a very disturbing story for the family farm. Today, only 2 percent of our people farm, but almost everybody remembers an uncle or aunt or grandparent whose farm you went to. There is a lot of nostalgia in our country for farms. And this shows a percentage of U.S. farms. And these are the little farms. The small family farms are more than 90 percent of all of the farms. But look at the value of production. This little 7.5 percent of the farms which are large-scale family farms, the big family farms, represent 60 percent of all of the productions. And we will see in some future charts that almost all those small family farms are losing money. The people are working off the farm to support them.

Here is the next chart. These are things that our farm bill is going to have to take into consideration. This is a share of farm business assets, acres owned, and acres enrolled in a conservation wetland reserve program. These are the assets. And you see again that most of the assets are in the small farm. And land owned is nearly the same as assets because the land is the biggest asset the farmer has. That is why that little circle there looks very much like this one. The assets and the land owned are about the same thing because 90 odd percent of all the assets are the land. And this shows that our small farms are really cooperating with these programs. Notice these small farms. That part of the circle has gotten larger. Our small farms are doing a really good job of respecting our wetlands and putting their land in reserve and so forth.

The next chart is almost one that almost makes me weep because I represent a farm district. It still is the biggest industry in my district. And this shows the size of farms and whether they are making money or not. The yellow is if you are making 20 percent or more. The next one is if you are making 10 percent or more, and then 0 to 10 percent in the red. Look at it. Losing money. This is by size of farm. Every farm group loses money. Generally speaking, the smaller you are, the more you lose.

But even our big farms, our biggest farms, large-scale farms, more than a fourth of them are losing money. There is no other segment or society that has as much capital at risk who work so hard and get so little for it as our farmers. Please remember your farmer when you go to the grocery store tonight. When I was a kid 25 percent of the average family budget went for food. Now it is less than 10 percent. And that farmer is subsidizing your quality of life by 15 percent because of his ingenuity and hard work and his willingness to work for less than nothing. He is losing money here. So he is subsidizing your quality of life. Please remember your farmer when you go to the grocery store. You are living as well as you are because he is working as hard as he is.

The next one shows the farmer on the tractor. And, boy, has he got a red tractor. And these are the low sales and the medium sales farms, and if you sell a little more, you don't lose as much.

You have to be a pretty good farmer today to break even, by the way, and a really good farmer to make money.

The next chart: Principal farm operators reporting off-farm work. Boy, the small farms, they are working a lot off the farm, aren't they? I guess you heard the story of the farmer who won $5 million in the lottery. They asked him what he was going to do with it. He says, ``I guess I will just keep farming until it's gone.'' And that is kind of a sick joke but it is true. That is what our farmers are doing. Many of our farmers are farming away those huge assets you saw in the form of land. They are farming those assets away.

The next chart, this is principal farm operators and self-employed workers and nonagriculture industries who are at least 65 years old. Every year the average age of our farmers gets almost 1 year older. I know a lot of farmers. I know almost no farmer whose kids want to farm. It is really tough work. There is little financial reward for it. Huge risks, risks that you can't control. Drought, cold weather, frost in the spring, you can't control any of these things and you are at risk by all of those. A very serious problem. Our farmers are getting older and older and who is going to replace them?

Next chart: Gross sales of $1 million or more. And it is still the family farm but these are, many of them, big family farms. They farm their farm and they lease maybe ten farms around them. And the others have the nice quality of life of living on a farm. And you can have cover 100 acres of land and you lease it to one of these big farmers, and they will be a family farm and they may spend 6 days a year on your farm. They come in with two combines and cut the whole thing. They put Paraquat on it that kills the weeds in the spring and then in 1 day they will plant the whole farm to corn, for instance. They may spend 6 days a year on your farm total.

The next chart is a really interesting chart, and this shows the problem that we would be in if we hadn't been as efficient as we have been. And you saw from those previous charts how our efficiency has slowed that rate of increase in the use of oil, of energy generally, and this shows the avoided supply. That is our efficiency. Wow, that is about a third of it, isn't it?

We would be using a third more if it weren't that we were as efficient as we are.

So what do we do now? Well, I mentioned that I thought that we needed a national program that had the total commitment of World War II. Everybody has to be involved. These two articles, boy, I was appreciative for these two articles. We scheduled this time with you before these articles came out. This was great that they came out because they make my point. We face huge problems.

I have a bill, H.R. 80, the Self-Powered Farm Energy bill. If our farmers can't produce enough energy to run their farm and a bit more for the guy who lives in town, we're in for a really rough time, aren't we? So this is a bill which challenges our farmers to be energy independent. And there's a reward for that. This is not going to cost the taxpayer much money. You know, people work really, really hard for an award, maybe harder than they would work if you were paying them. We are going to give an award for this, for the farms that do the best in this. And we think there is a lot of creativity and ingenuity out there and we should do very well with this.

Another bill that's a good bill, H.R. 670, the so-called DRIVE bill, and

American Energy For America's Future, the bipartisan DRIVE Act, Dependence Reduction through Innovation in Vehicles and Energy Act. By the way, driving that SUV does not make you safer. Look at the fatality statistics. They are higher in the SUV than the family car. Because they turn over so easily, the actual fatality figures are higher for the SUV than they are for the standard family car. You don't need to be in an SUV to be safer.

Well, Mr. Chairman, I think that Americans will really rally to this challenge. As I have said, there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and boy, this is a huge challenge. And I think properly motivated, the American people will turn to and demonstrate to the world that we are still the most creative, innovative society in the world. I think we can again become an exporting Nation.

There is going to be a lot of technology associated with moving to these sustainable alternatives. Who better than we to develop those technologies. And let's sell them to the world. Let's not turn over the manufacture of these technologies to somebody overseas, let's sell them to the world.

There are two reasons for doing this. One is that if we are going to maintain anything like the quality of life we have now, we really need to do this. And the other thing is there is going to be a mad global scramble for energy. If we haven't led the way, if somebody hasn't led the way to move us to renewables, what will the world do when we come to the reality that there just isn't going to be enough oil there?

Just one little note in closing. We need to rethink a lot of things. Our whole financial structure needs to be rethought. If you think about our financial structure, and I am not an economist, I don't think you have to be an economist to understand obvious things. When we put more money in circulation, it is printed by the Feds. And they put it into the circulation by loaning it to somebody. Now, if there are only two of us in the world, and I borrow money and I have to pay interest on it, one of two things has to happen, either there has to be growth so that I have the money to pay the interest with, or you, if you are the only other guy in the world, you have to lose money. So I have some of your money so that I can pay interest on the money that I borrowed. That's why we start to shudder about the economy when it drops below 2 percent growth. Because we can't imagine an economy that doesn't include growth because our whole financial system is predicated on growth. We have got to have growth.

Now, we can have growth without using more energy if we become more efficient. That's a challenge. So we still can grow some. But that is not limitless growth because that you can't be infinitely efficient. So we will have to, one day, sooner or later, come to the realization that we've got to have a financial system that doesn't require growth. But we can do that.

We have met a whole lot of challenges in the past and done very well with overcoming. And Mr. Speaker, I am very encouraged that with proper leadership, and you know, I will tell you, we don't have much oil in this country, but we have even less real leadership on energy. But with responsible leadership in this country, I think that Americans will heed to, and we will surprise the world with what we can do in meeting the challenges of peak oil.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, June 18, 2007, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I rise today in honor and memory of a great constituent of the 6th District of Maryland--The Honorable Ralph M. Burnett, Jr. Ralph M. Burnett was a Maryland district court judge and pioneer in the fight against prostate cancer. Judge Burnett died from the disease on May 9, 2007 at the age of 64.

Judge Burnett was born in 1943 in Seneca Falls, N.Y., to the late Ralph M. Burnett, Sr., and Betty Burnett. He graduated from St. Paul's High School in 1961 and earned a BA from Dickinson College, in 1965. A Vietnam Veteran, Judge Burnett was sent to Korea and served as First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army until 1969. He then enrolled in the Baltimore School of Law and received a degree in 1972.

Judge Burnett began practicing law in Oakland, MD, and served as Garrett County's State Attorney from 1974-1978. In December of 1993, he was appointed an associate district court judge. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Maryland Judicial Conference, and served on the Editorial Board of Justice Matters until his passing.

Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996, Judge Burnett became a devoted advocate for the prostate cancer community. He served as chairman of the National Prostate Cancer Coalition, NPCC, from 1999- 2001. Under his leadership, federal funding for prostate cancer research doubled and the NPCC tripled in size.

After stepping down as chairman, Judge Burnett stayed on as a board member and doggedly pursued more prostate cancer treatment options for patients. He was also an advocate for the Johns Hopkins University's Specialized Program of Research Excellence and served on several panels within the Department of Defense where he worked to leverage the DOD's investment in prostate cancer research and participated in discovering the lethal phenotype that causes the disease.

Judge Burnett is survived by his former wife, Lucy Burnett, a son, P. Chase Burnett and his wife Jaime, three grandchildren, Ian, Eli, and Sophie Burnett, a daughter, Catherine Burnett, and one sister, Clara Tordella.

Ralph M. Burnett's funeral was held on Saturday, May 12, at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Oakland.

On behalf of the residents of the Sixth District, I am honored but humbled to offer this token of appreciation for the distinguished service of Ralph M. Burnett to others and his many accomplishments. I hope that this simple testament provides some comfort to ease the grief of his family, neighbors and friends over his loss.

Madam Chair, I rise in strong support of

Mr. Speaker, this is really a very important day in our history. Exactly 50 years ago today in St. Paul, MN, Admiral Hyman Rickover gave a very famous speech. In a few moments, I will have here a copy of that speech, and I want to spend most of the hour that we have this evening going over that speech, because he was amazingly prophetic. This was a speech given to a group of physicians, and it was about energy. Of course, his primary interest was nuclear energy, and this was a speech about energy in general.

As I said, he was amazingly prophetic. He understood some relationships, which today, with 50 years of history behind us, he couldn't have seen. He was amazingly more cognizant of some realities than many of our people today.

We, of course, recognize that for several reasons we need to be moving away from fossil fuels. There are several groups of people with different interests who have really a common goal in their desire to move away from fossil fuels to renewables. And these several groups find common cause, and I hope that there will be less discussion of the potential limitations of the other groups' premise and more focus on a common goal, and that is to help our country and our world move away from fossil fuels to renewables.

The groups that have common cause in this are, first of all, environmentalists, and there are two groups in the environmentalists who are concerned about this. One is a group which is large and growing, and that is a group that believes that our excessive use of fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide that was sequestered a very long time ago, perhaps millions of years ago, with subtropical seas and plumes of organisms like our algae today, which then fell to the bottom and were covered by sediment washed in from the adjoining hills and then later submerged by movements of tectonic

plates and with time and pressure became what we know today as gas and oil. Coal is a little simpler. It wasn't buried so deep, and you can see in the broken block of coal the ancient fern leaves from which the coal was produced. I saw that many times as a little child in western Pennsylvania, coal country, when I broke lumps of coal to feed our coal furnace. And what we are doing today, of course, is releasing that carbon dioxide very fast. It took maybe millions of years to sequester, but we are releasing it very fast; and so it is producing greenhouse gases, which are warming the Earth and producing temperature changes.

For those who may wonder what difference does it make, a degree here and a degree there. I would like to remind them that during the last Ice Age about 10, 12,000 years ago, our world was only 5 degrees centigrade colder than it is today. That is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. And what this says is that very small temperature changes can make huge changes in our weather.

A second group of environmentalists who have common cause in wanting to move away from fossil fuels are those who believe that our air is polluted enough and why would we want to pollute it further.

Then there are those who yearn for the day when America was a leading exporter, and they believe that moving from fossil fuels to renewables, sustainable renewables, that we can develop technologies which will be saleable world-around.

And then there is a growing group of people who have major concerns that, with only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil and using 25 percent of the world's oil and importing almost two-thirds of what we use, that this represents a totally unacceptable national security risk, and so their desire is to move from fossil fuels, which we have very little of, to renewables, which we hopefully could produce more of.

And then there is the last group of these five, and by the way, I subscribe in varying degrees to all of these other goals, but the last one is particularly significant because we might somehow make it through, luckily, the other crises that may be there. But the peak oil crisis is one we won't make it through, and that is one that Hyman Rickover talked a good deal about.

Here is his speech. It was for delivery at a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association, St. Paul, MN, May 14, 1957. That is exactly 50 years ago today, and I am very pleased that in the gallery with us is the widow of Admiral Hyman Rickover.

Mrs. Rickover, welcome.

And we are here to celebrate a great American who gave a really, really prophetic speech. And I am going to spend most of the time pretty much reading this speech, and I will put up here some charts from particularly significant quotes from his speech and some others which will help illuminate what he said. The title of his speech was ``Energy Resources and Our Future.'' He starts out by saying:

``I am honored to be here tonight, though it is no easy thing, I assure you, for a layman to face up to an audience of physicians. A single one of you, sitting behind his desk, can be quite formidable.

``My speech has no medical connotations. This may be a relief to you after the solid professional fare you have been absorbing. I should like to discuss a matter which will, I hope, be of interest to you as responsible citizens: the significance of energy resources in the shaping of our future.''

Now, all of this is 50 years ago. I want you to listen to how profound his statements were and how completely he recognized the problems that we would be facing.

``We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93 percent of the world's energy; water power accounts for only 1 percent; and the labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6 percent.'' Now, those figures have changed somewhat since then.

``This is a startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850, only a century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5 percent of the world's energy, and men and animals 94 percent. Five-sixths of all the coal, oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel Age has been burned up in the last 55 years.'' Now if you were to bring that forward, it would be a bigger percentage than that.

``These fuels have been known to man for more than 3,000 years. In parts of China, coal was used for domestic heating and cooking, and natural gas for lighting as early as 1000 B.C. But these early uses were sporadic and of no economic significance. Fossil fuels did not become a major source of energy until machines running on coal, gas, or oil were invented. Wood, for example, was the most important fuel until 1800, when it was replaced by coal. Coal, in turn, has only recently been surpassed by oil in this country.

``Once in full swing, fossil fuel consumption'' had been ``accelerated at phenomenal rates. All the fossil fuels used before 1900 would not last 5 years at today's rate of consumption.'' And that was 50 years ago. What would it be today?

``Nowhere are these rates higher and growing faster than in the United States. Our country, with only 6 percent of the world's population,'' today a bit less than 5, ``uses one-third of the world's total energy input.'' Today it is about 25 percent because much of the rest of the world is catching up with us, but, still, 25 percent for less than 5 percent of the world's population is very significant.

``This proportion would be even greater except that we use energy more efficiently than other countries.'' Still true today, only we use 25 percent of the world's energy. We use it more efficiently than most of the rest of the world.

``Each American has at his disposal, each year, energy equivalent to that obtainable from eight tons of coal.'' This was just 50 years ago. It would be more than that today.

Time magazine, a little while back, had on its cover, and you may remember that, a pile of coal that they said was a quarter of a ton, and that was the amount of coal that would be saved for power production if you unscrewed that incandescent light and put in it one of the little fluorescent bulbs that you can screw into a regular socket.

This is six times the world's per capita energy consumption, what we were using in this country. Though not quite so spectacular, corresponding figures for other highly industrialized countries also show above average consumption figures. The United Kingdom, for example, uses more than three times as much energy as the world average.

I want you to look at this first chart while I am reading this because you have to look at the colors and what each of the men stand for and each of those different colors to understand this. But this was in his day, 50 years ago. What would these numbers be today?

With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or 120th horsepower. That is on a 24/7 basis. It's a bit more than that. I generally think of about a 70 watt bulb if you're awake and not working much. Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer, as you can see on the chart, controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men, each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, he says, the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions and disasters, the hundred years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age. And we have continued that Golden Age another 50 years, until today. And then he says, whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.

Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of energy resources and the rise and falls of civilizations. And as I read, you may look at the next chart because some of the quotes in the next couple of paragraphs are in this chart.

I would like for you to pay particular attention to this because he describes very well the contribution that energy has made to the development of civilization. And if we understand how energy contributed to the development of civilization, we will get some clue as to what will happen when we start down the other side of this curve.

He mentions a little later that 8,000 years of recorded history in the age of oil will span but a brief time, probably about 300 years. We are about 150 years through the age of oil. So, concentrate on what he is saying about the contribution of energy to the development of civilization, because unless we are really clever and using the new technologies we have found, it is possible that we will see a reversal of this as energy becomes less and less available. Will civilization decline with decreasing energy as it increased with increasing energy?

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

Surplus energy provides a material foundation for civilized living, a comfortable and tasteful home instead of a bare shelter; attractive clothing, instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing food, instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom from toil without which there can be no art, music, literature or learning.

There is no need to belabor the point. What lifted man, one of the weaker mammals, above the animal world was that he could devise with his brain ways to increase the energy at his disposal and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and spirit. He refers to us as one of the weaker mammals, and that is true. We cannot run nearly as fast as many. We have nowhere near the strength. A chimpanzee our size has several times our strength. Our sense of smell is really very poor compared to a dog, and a dog very poor compared to male moth that can detect the presence of a female 10 kilometers away and detect the concentration gradient so that he knows which direction to fly to find her. We are indeed one of the weaker mammals, but we have dominated the world because of our ability to control energy.

Where man must rely solely on the energy of his own body, he can sustain only the most meager existence. Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from his discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy resources, he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization he needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor of dependent members of large patriarchal families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this type of energy.

Now, some of the things he says here you are going to have to relate to 50 years ago. He talks about India and China in a few moments. And clearly they now have entered the industrialized part of the world and are growing very rapidly. But what he said about them then was very true of them then and true of other just beginning to develop countries today.

Slave labor was necessary for the city-states and the empires of antiquity. They frequently had slave populations larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were lacking. And this is a really interesting statement. ``This may well have been the single most important reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times.'' Through all of the Dark Ages, centuries, civilization advanced very little because engineering advanced very little, and he thinks this may have been because of the availability of slave labor.

The next chart. 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. And he gives some fascinating examples. For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the primary reason for the fall of the Mayan civilization on this continent and the decline of once fourishing civilizations in Asia. India and China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East. Deforestation not only lessened the energy base, but had a further disastrous effect; lacking plant cover, soil washed away. And with soil erosion, the nutritional base was reduced as well.

Another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure of population on available land. A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally, even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man, who is 2.5 times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agricultural machines increase productivity per man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation. And as he points out, the press of populations will eventually lead to this state in much of the world.

It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia, who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger completely satisfied, and remember, this is 50 years ago, were once far more civilized and lived better than the people of the West. And not so very long ago either. It was the stories brought back by Marco Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes to the riches of the East and induced adventurous sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels searching for a direct route to the fabulous Orient. The ``wealth of the Indies'' is a phrase still used, but whatever wealth may have been there is certainly not evident in the life of the people today. This is 50 years ago. They are now using energy, very large amounts of it. China probably has a greater percent increase in energy than about any other country and their economy is growing; the last quarter for which I saw data, 11.4 percent.

Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing population and sank into such poverty that in many places man has become again the primary source of energy since other energy converters have become too expensive. This must be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply a reversion into a more primitive stage of civilization with all that it implies for human dignity and happiness. But very fortunately, technology is moving into this part of the world and the quality of their life is now increasing.

Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker, and again, this is 50 years ago, strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java, the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads, anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone realizes the degradation of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded.

Where slavery represented a major source of energy, its abolition had the immediate effect of reducing energy consumption. Thus, when this time-honored institution came under more censure by Christianity, civilization declined until other sources of energy could be found. Slavery is incompatible with Christian belief in the worth of the humblest individual as a child of God.

As Christianity spread through the Roman empire and masters freed their slaves in obedience to the teaching of the church, the energy base of Roman civilization crumbled. This, some historians believe, may have been a major factor in the decline of Rome and the temporary reversion to a more primitive way of life during the Dark Ages.

Slavery gradually disappeared throughout the Western world, except in its milder form of serfdom. That it has revived a thousand years later merely shows man's inability to stifle his conscience, at least for a while, when his economic needs are great. Eventually, even the needs of overseas plantation economies did not suffice to keep alive a practice so deeply repugnant to Western man's deepest convictions.

It may well be that it was unwillingness to depend on slave labor for their energy needs which turned the minds of medieval Europeans to search for alternative sources of energy, thus

sparking the Power Revolution of the Middle Age which, in turn, paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.

When slavery disappeared in the West, engineering advanced. Men began to harness the power of nature by utilizing water and wind as energy sources. The sailing ship, in particular, which replaced the slave- driven galley of antiquity, was vastly improved by medieval shipbuilders and became the first machine enabling man to control large amounts of inanimate energy.

The next important high-energy converter used by Europeans was gunpowder, an energy source far superior to the muscular strength to the strongest bowman or lancer. With ships that could navigate the high seas and arms that could outfire any hand weapon, Europe was now powerful enough to preempt for herself the vast empty areas of the Western hemisphere into which she poured her surplus populations to build new nations of European stock. With these ships and arms, she also gained political control over populous areas in Africa and Asia from which she drew the raw materials needed to speed her industrialization, thus complementing her naval and military dominance with economic and commercial supremacy.

And then he notes, when a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter. The Europeans not only achieved standards of living vastly higher than those of the rest of the world, but they did this while their population was growing at rates far surpassing those of other peoples. In fact, they doubled their share of total world population in the short span of three centuries. From one-sixth in 1650, the people of European stock increased to almost one-third of world population by 1950. Clearly, with the industrialization of other parts of the world today, their populations are growing so that the European percentage of the world is not as high as it was 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world did not even keep energy sources in balance with population growth. Per capita energy consumption actually diminished in large areas. It is this difference in energy consumption which has resulted in an ever-widening gap between the one-third minority who live in high-energy countries and the two-thirds majority who live in low-energy areas. These so-called underdeveloped countries are now finding it far more difficult to catch up with the fortunate minority than it was for Europe to initiate transition from low energy to high-energy consumption. For one thing, their ratio of land to people is much less favorable. And we see this in much of Africa, Darfur, for instance, where the arable land is really very small compared to the people. And you see what that has done to their standard of living and to their culture.

For one thing, the ratio of land to people is much less favorable. For another, they have no outlet for surplice populations to ease the transitions since all the empty spaces have already been taken over by people of European stock.

This was a correct observation 50 years ago.

``Almost all of today's low energy countries have a population density so great that it perpetuates dependence on intensive manual agriculture, which alone can yield barely enough food for their people. They do not have enough acreage per capita to justify using domestic animals or farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil management and better hand tools could bring some improvement.''

I think he would be very pleased that today that has happened and they can live better, even with this high population density per arable land than they could then.

``A very large part of their working population must nevertheless remain on the land, and this limits the amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these countries must choose between using this small energy surplus to raise their very low standard of living or postpone present rewards for the sake of future gain while investing the surplus in new industries.''

A very good explanation of how difficult it is for some of these undeveloped countries to enter the march of the developing countries.

``The choice is difficult because there is no guarantee that today's denial may not prove to have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity with which public health measures have reduced mortality rates, resulting in population growth as high or even higher than that of the high energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice. It accounts for much of their anti-Western feeling and may well portend a prolonged period of world instability.''

That is quite prophetic, isn't it? We see a period of world instability now, and how much has this energy imbalance contributed to it?

``How closely energy consumption is related to the standard of living can be illustrated by the example of India.''

Then he goes back to the India of 50 years ago, where the people lived really a hand-to-mouth existence, where their infant mortality rate was four times ours and life expectancy for people less than one- half of that of industrialized nations. Fortunately, India is now industrializing, and these numbers are changing.

He says, ``I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our future. Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels.''

And this is a really significant statement. ``What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels.''

Let me repeat the question again. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? ``The answer is, in the long run, none.''

He saw this 50 years ago. There are a lot of people today in our country and in others also who, with the 50 years of history since Hyman Rickover, still don't understand that in the long run, there is no assurance that fossil fuels will meet our energy needs.

Then he goes on to say, ``The Earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect, our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations.''

A major report done by SAIC called the ``Hirsch Report on Energy and the Energy Future'' says that the world has never faced a problem like this, and Hyman Rickover understood that 50 years ago.

``In this respect, our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals too are non- renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves.''

Some of these quotes appear in the next chart.

``They 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 fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect.''

Wow, I wish that our leaders could read this.

``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.''

And in spite of increasing evidence from the engineering and scientific world, a large percent of our people and, unfortunately, of our leadership, are effectively in denial of this.

Then this next paragraph is just priceless: ``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. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.''

He is using this and talking about energy and our relationship to energy and how we are using it.

When we found this incredible wealth under the ground, and Admiral Rickover understood how incredible it was, we really should have stopped and asked ourselves the question, 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 just have been pigging out, and we want to continue to do that.

They asked me to vote to drill offshore and in ANWR, and I asked them, if you could pump ANWR tomorrow, what would you do the day after tomorrow? And there will be a day after tomorrow. I have 10 children, 15 grandchildren and two great grandchildren, so I really relate to this description of a selfish and irresponsible parent.

One of the writers has noted that future generations looking back on us may ask themselves, how could the monsters have done that? How could they have taken this incredible wealth without any thought for tomorrow and just gone through it?

Now the urge is just to find what little remains as quickly as we can. Where is the moral responsibility for our kids and our grandkids? Where is the moral responsibility for generations yet unborn?

``Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics; far- seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor which must enter into all planning for the future; responsible governments who realize that the well-being of their citizens and the political power of their countries depend on adequate energy supplies; all these have begun to be concerned about energy resources.''

Boy, if that was true then, why, something happened, because far too few people today are concerned about energy resources.

``In this country,'' he says, then 50 years ago, ``in this country especially, many studies have been made in the last few years seeking to discover accurate information on fossil fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs. Statistics involving the human factor, of course, are never exact. The size of useable reserves depends on the ability of engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and use.''

The next chart is one that I will spend just a moment on, because it really amplifies what he is saying. This is referred to as the oil chart, and you can get a very large one if you do a Google search for that, and this is simply an insert in it.

What this shows in the bars is the discovery of oil, and anyone who has been through a seventh grade math class knows that if you add up all of these little bars, you will have determined the total amount of oil that we have found. Indeed, if you make a smooth curve over them, the area under that curve will be the total amount of oil that we have discovered. The heavy black line here represents the oil that we have used.

Now, one thing is certain: You cannot use oil that you haven't found. So what will the future look like?

You can extrapolate from this chart, which shows that ever since about 1980 we have progressively used more and more oil than we have found. The discoveries of oil have been falling off. You see they started back there in the 1960s or 1970s. There were very large discoveries, and they have fallen off ever since then.

Now, there are those who would have you believe that we are going to find much more oil as all the oil which still exists, all the recoverable oil which still exists, and that is about half of what was ever found. This represents all the oil that was ever found, and the area under this use curve up, until this point, represents about half of that area under the curve.

So we have used about half of all the oil we have found, and there are some who would have you to believe that we will find as much more oil as all the oil which still exists that is recoverable.

``The size of usable reserves depends on the ability of engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and use. It also depends on discovery of new methods to obtain energy from inferior resources at cost which can be borne without unduly depressing the standard of living. Estimates of future needs in turn rely heavily on population figures, which must always allow for a large element of uncertainty, particularly as man reaches a point where he is more and more able to control his own way of life.''

The next chart shows the estimates made by a number of different sources as to when we will reach that point where we can no longer increase the amount of oil that we are producing per day. As you can see, some of them have enormous uncertainties. Some have very little uncertainty. They are pretty sure when it is going to occur.

As you notice, the vast majority of them believe it is going to occur before 2020. Indeed, 35, I think, of the 45 oil-producing nations in the world have already peaked, and you may have noted an interesting article, upper right hand of the Wall Street Journal a week or two ago that the big oil field, the second largest oil field in the world, in Mexico, has declined 20 percent in production in the last 2 years.

``Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an astonishing degree.''

It was true then; it is true now.

``In part this is because the results differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded; or if in calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required to process inferior substitute metals. We are rapidly approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals will force us to turn to poorer grades, requiring in most cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal.''

That really hasn't seemed to matter, simply because we have had so much energy available. The best iron ores in our country today I understand are the taconite ores with one-half of one percent iron. In years gone by, our iron ores were so rich in iron that you could literally smelt them in a backyard smelter. If you drive up into Frederick County just a few miles above my home, you will come to Catoctin Furnace and the hills up there in northern Frederick County were denuded making charcoal for that furnace. But we couldn't do that today, because the grade of iron is much too poor to smelt in a furnace like that.

The next chart shows a very interesting one, and I just want to read his comments relative to this:

``But the most significant distinction between optimistic and pessimistic fuel reserve statistics is that the optimists generally speak of the immediate future, the next 25 years or so, while the pessimists thinks in terms of a century from now. A century or even two is a short span in the history of a great people. It seems sensible to me to take a long view, even if this involves facing unpleasant facts.''

What we have here is a very interesting chart. A little later, if time permits, we will read his discussion of the growth of civilization and how it is rapidly expanding now.

Actually, if this were a chart of the growth of civilization, it would not look much different than this, because civilizations have grown as energy has become available. This goes back only about 400 years. We could extend this line back here, this is burning of wood for fuel, we could extend it back another couple of centuries and you would still have about the same population. Very low population.

Then we discovered the industrial age with wood, and then coal, and then look what happened when we found gas and oil? The energy production just exploded, and, with that, the population. He has a very interesting discussion of population in a moment or two.

I want you to note on this graph what happened in the 1970s. The rate of rise of that curve before the 1970s gave us a stunning statistic. Each decade, the world was using as much oil as it had used in all of previous history. If you think about that, what that means is when you have used half your oil, just 10 years of oil at that use rate remains.

Now we are doing much better than that now, and you can see how this has tipped over and is following a different curve.

``For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost are likely to run out at sometime between the years 2000 and 2050.''

So he was predicting that we would reach this point sometime in this half a century.

If present standard of living and population growth rates are taken into account, oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the Earth, but it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs will rise to economically intolerable

heights so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically.

For more than 100 years, we have stoked ever growing numbers, and this is a poetic the way explains this. For more than 100 years, we have stoked ever-growing numbers of machines with coal; for 50 years we have pumped gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, ships, planes and homes without giving a thought to the future. Occasionally, the voice of a Cassandra has been raised only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised estimates of our oil reserves upward or a new coal field was found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can be expected in the future, especially in industrialized countries where extensive mapping of resources has been done. Yet the popularizers of scientific news would have us believe there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last thousands of years, and that before they run out, science will have produced miracles. Our past history and security have given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will never really happen, that everything turns out right in the end, but prudent men will reject these tranquilizers, he says, and prefer to face the facts so they can plan intelligently for the needs of their posterity. Wouldn't it be nice if we were doing that?

Looking to the future from the mid-20th century, we cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of living will of a certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will begin to rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy from remaining reserves.

I suspect oil was $2 or $3 a barrel when he wrote this. Today it is over $60 a barrel.

It is likely also that fossil fuel costs will soon definitely be more expensive. Can we feel certain when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone, science will have learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy sources?

I believe it would be wise to assume that the principal renewable fuel sources which we can expect to tap before fossil fuels run out will supply only 7 to 15 percent of our energy needs.

I would like to look at the next chart because he was really prophetic in what he said in 1957.

Here we have a chart that shows where we get our energy from. I use the analogy of a couple whose grandparents have died and left them a large inheritance and they now have established a quite lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from the inheritance and only 15 percent earnings. They note with their age and the amount of inheritance and the way they are spending it, it is going to run out before they retire. They either have to spend less or make more or a combination. I use that 85-15 because it is pretty precisely where we are relative to energy. So 85 or 86 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels: Coal, petroleum and natural gas. And only 15 percent of it comes from what they call renewables, something other than these fossil fuels. More than half comes from nuclear here. So it leaves only 7 percent to come from the true renewables. And those that we will have to increasingly depend on in the future, and this is a 2000 chart, solar was 1 percent of 7 percent. That is 0.07 percent. So today it is 5 or 6 times bigger. Big deal. It is still less than 1 percent.

Wood waste products is from paper industry and lumbering. Waste energy is a really great idea, but remember that these enormous piles of waste are the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. In a fossil fuel deficient world, there will be diminished piles of waste. Wind can produce electricity at 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour, growing roughly at 30 percent a year, but when you start at 0.07 percent, it takes a lot of years to matter much.

Nearly half of all of this renewable comes from something we cannot increase in our country, that is major hydro. Micro hydro, where you are using energy from small streams, with small turbines, some guess it may produce as much as this, but that is thousands of these streams and energy produced locally for a home or a couple of homes. We cannot increase conventional hydroelectric because we have probably dammed up all the rivers we should have and maybe some we shouldn't have.

Alcohol fuel 1 percent, 0.07 percent. I would like to note a recent article in the Washington Post and I think I have a chart. Let's put that chart up.

This is the energy produced from corn by converting it into ethanol. I refer to the bottom first because this points out something that very few people know. Farmers know it because they are paying an enormous amount for nitrogen fertilizer. It is almost all produced from natural gas. Almost half of the energy used to produce a bushel of corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer, ordinarily produced from natural gas and little of it is in this country. It is produced where natural gas is stranded; that is, there is natural gas but not very many people to use it, and it is hard to transport. So they are using it to produce nitrogen fertilizer.

This shows a comparison what you get from petroleum and what you get from corn ethanol. They are noting here that you get 0.75 million Btus for every one that went in. This recent article in the Washington Post said if we use all of our corn to produce ethanol, that is no tortillas for Mexicans and no corn for our pigs and chickens, all of it for ethanol, and you discounted for the fossil fuel input, which this says is 75 percent, they used 80 percent, some would say it is 100 percent, we use as much energy if you cost all of the energy that goes into producing as you get out of it, but the article assumed 80 percent, that it would replace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. That is discounting it for the fossil fuel input. And they noted if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you would save as much gas.

So this points out some of the challenges we have. This is because of the enormous energy density in these fossil fuels.

One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of the work output of 12 people for a year. That means in terms of work output, the energy you get from these fossil fuels from oil, represents hiring a man for $10 for a whole year. No wonder we have such a magnificent quality of life with energy this relatively cheap. Gas at $3 a gallon is still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you buy water in small bottles.

My next chart is one that Hyman Rickover referred to as more promise for nuclear fuels. I want to spend just a moment on some of his concerns for the sources of energy that we are lauding today. He says wood fuel and foreign waste are dubious as substitutes because of growing food requirements to be anticipated. He anticipated the tension between food and energy. In just 2 months last year, corn almost doubled from $2.11 a bushel to $4.08 a bushel, and tortillas went up in price for the Mexicans and my dairy farmers are going bankrupt because of the price of feed for their cattle.

Land is more likely to be used for food production than for tree crops. He was thinking of biomass. Farm waste may be more urgently needed to fertilize the soil than to fuel machines.

There is a lot of hype today about biomass, and it is worth noting that you will never get more energy from any biological source than you can by burning it. What we do in the other ways of using it is sometimes just a slow process of burning it, but you end up with the same product. You end up with carbon dioxide and water.

Our topsoil is our topsoil because of organic material, and his caution was if you keep removing this organic material, you are mining the soil and you will end up with poorer soil and not enough food production.

Wind and water power can furnish only a very small percentage of our energy needs. That was true then because we didn't have the big wind machines we have today that produce electricity at 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour, but that is such a tiny percentage of the total production it will take a long time to ramp up.

More promising is the outlook for fossil fuels. These are not properly speaking renewable energy sources, and let's take a look at this chart. We have finite sources here, and actually the second bullet looks at nuclear energy which is not really finite. Fissionable uranium may be. There is a limited supply of that in the world. That

fuels the light water reactors that essentially every nation today uses for its electricity production. In France, it is 75 percent of their electricity.

In spite of that, we are still the largest nuclear energy producer in the world. It is only 20 percent of our electricity, while in France it is 75 percent of their electricity. We are so much bigger economy than France, quantity-wise, we are the biggest producer of energy from nuclear today.

Let's look at the finite resources which he talks about. The tar sands, the oil shales, coal. There is more potential energy in the tar sands in Canada than all the oil reserves in the world. So why then aren't we complacent about the future because there is potentially so much energy there? And there may be more energy in the tides. The Moon lifts the whole ocean 2 feet a day. The problem is harnessing the energy, and we have a similar problem harnessing the energy in the tar sands. They are getting about a million barrels a day, a bit over 1 percent of the 84-85 million barrels a day of oil production. They have a shovel which lifts 100 tons. It dumps it into a truck that hauls 400 tons. They haul it to a cooker which I am told uses more energy from natural gas than they get out of the oil. The gas is stranded so it is not worth much in dollars and cents, and they are producing oil at about $18 to $25 a barrel and it is selling for over $60, so it is economically productive to do. But they know this is not sustainable because they will run out of the gas, and now they are thinking of building a nuclear power plant. But if you think of this as a vein, it is largely surface and they can do surface mining. But it will shortly duck under a heavy overlay, and they will have to develop a technology to develop it in situ, and they don't know how doable that is. There has been some experiments in doing that by Shell Oil Company. They believe it will be several years before they know if it is economically feasible for getting energy. So there are potentially huge amounts of oil available in the tar sands and the oil shales, but the big problem is the difficulty in getting them out.

We have a chart that I would like to look at that looks at coal because everybody is going to tell you not to worry about nature because we have got so much coal. Okay, we don't have that chart.

Let me talk about the coal chart. We have 250 years of coal. That is true at current use rates. But if you increase the use of coal only 2 percent, that 250 years drops to 85 years.

Well, a 2 percent increase doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years, and it's eight times bigger in 105 years, and we're talking about 250 years. So now our 250 years of coal shrinks to only 85 years if we are increasing its use only 2 percent, and we will certainly have to increase the use more than that as we find less and less readily available oil and gas.

But for most uses, coal is not very convenient. So we are going to have to convert it to a liquid or a gas, and that will use some of the energy of coal. So now it shrinks to 50 years, but the reality in today's world is that energy is fungible, particularly liquid fuel energy, and we're going to have to share that with the world. There's not much of a way not to share that with the world. If you do that, since we use 25 percent of the world's energy, that now reduces it to 12\1/2\ years.

Be very cautious when somebody tells you about a resource that will last so many years at current use rates. It was Albert Einstein I think who said that the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound interest.

We are running out of time, and I wanted to get to another quote here from Admiral Rickover's speech because he was so prophetic in his speech. ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D. world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion.'' He kind of missed that. We are what, over 6 billion today, but that is an enormous growth. ``With 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent of that period.'' It would be more than 95 percent because we are now over 6 billion rather than 4 billion. ``It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.'' Matter of fact, it occurred in less than 50 years.

And then another chart from Admiral Rickover's talk: ``One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite 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 resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.''

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if Admiral Rickover would think that we have done that. ``If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.'' That's the dominant position where you control a lot of the energy. We have only 2 percent of the world's energy. We use 25 percent of the world's energy. In a chart which shows the 10 largest oil containing countries we're not even near that.

Our oil companies, which pump a fair amount of oil, own very little oil. They are pumping somebody else's oil. The oil resources which we own in this country are very small. The largest, 70 percent, of all the resources of course are in the Middle East and northern Africa.

As I read this talk from Admiral Rickover, I was reminded of how wise and farseeing he was. He says, for instance, ``It will be wise to face up to the possibility of the ultimate disappearance of automobiles, trucks, buses and tractors.''

Let me read that paragraph. That's a pretty interesting paragraph. ``Transportation, the lifeblood of all technically advanced civilizations, seems to be assured, once we have borne the initial high cost of electrifying railroads and replacing buses with streetcars or interurban electric trains.''

He's talking about nuclear energy, which could be huge, compared to the rate at which we are using now which produces electricity. Of course, today we don't have much that runs on electricity. We have torn out all of our streetcar lines. We're now replacing what we call light rail, I think that's what streetcars were, and we are using railroads. Very little for transportation of people.

``But, unless science can perform the miracle of synthesizing automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown,'' and I thought here of our corn ethanol and we were going to get so much from that. That article says if we turn all the corn into ethanol, discounted it for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline.

Well, I commend this reading of Admiral Hyman Rickover's speech to anyone who's interested in energy. He was really farseeing.

Madam Chairman, I hold here a major study done by the Center for Naval Analysis entitled ``National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.'' Their Military Advisory Board contains five admirals and four generals, including Sullivan, Lopez and Zinni.

In their recommendations, ``Recommendation No. 1,'' they say the national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated with national security and national defense strategies. Two of the specifics of this have been included in the National Defense Authorization Act, including the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Quadrennial Defense Review, all of which, they say, should consider climate change. A specific related to the intelligence community should incorporate climate consequences into its National Intelligence Estimate.

A letter from the chairman of this board said that ``we made that call because we are concerned that climate change may affect our military.''

This conservative Republican proudly joined Mr. Markey in requesting that this become a part of the base bill; and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for making it so.

Mr. Speaker, I want to spend the first few minutes this evening talking about oral arguments that were recently made before the Supreme Court. It was on the Wisconsin Right to Life, Incorporated, versus the Federal Election Commission.

Now, it is not clear from that title what we are talking about. What we are really talking about is a test of the constitutionality of a clause in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that prohibits any issue advocacy advertising, electioneering they call it, 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election.

Now, in the State of Maryland in a nonpresidential year, our primary is in September, and it is, as a matter of fact, less than 60 days before the general in November. So we are prohibited from issue advocacy ads 30 days before the primary, which are added immediately to the 60 days before the general. So for 90 days, 3 months, before the election, we cannot communicate with our constituents.

I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that few people are seriously considering the next election 90 days before it occurs. So for all practical purposes, we in Maryland, and many other States like us that have primaries close to the general election, are almost completely prohibited from communicating with our constituents through issue advocacy ads.

This is political speech, and what this Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act does is to deny political speech 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election.

I think to put this in context to see how really important this is, we need to go back to the founding of our country and to understand why our Founding Fathers came here.

Most of them came for one or both of two reasons to escape tyrannies in the country that they lived in. One of these was the tyranny of the church. In the British Isles it was the Anglican Church, and on the continent it was the Roman Church. And in most of the country there was a state church. And these state churches, the Anglican Church in England and the Roman Church on the continent, could and did oppress other religions. So our Founding Fathers came here to escape that tyranny.

They also came here to escape the tyranny of the crown. And it is incredible to us. We can't understand it because we live in a whole different culture. But almost every country from which our Founding Fathers came had a king or an emperor which claimed and was granted divine rights. What that said was that the rights came from God to the king and the king would give what rights he wished to his people. Some magnanimous rulers gave considerable rights to their people; others gave very few. So our Founding Fathers came here intent on escaping those two tyrannies.

So it is no accident that after writing the Constitution in which it was very clear that this was to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln said four score and seven years later, and that the government was to reflect the wishes of the people, that the people through collective government would govern themselves. That was really quite implicit in the Constitution because article I, section 8 of the Constitution gave very few rights to the Federal Government.

But the ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before they wondered if people would really understand that what they wanted was a very limited Federal Government and that they wanted most of the rights to belong to the people. So it is no accident, I think, that in that first amendment, which they wrote, that they addressed both of these tyrannies. From the very beginning, they wanted to make it crystal clear that we were to have freedom of religion, and they say it very simply, that they wanted to avoid what they came from, what they came here to escape, and that was an established religion, a religion established by the government. So they said very simply ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.''

I don't know why we have trouble understanding that, Mr. Speaker. It is just plain English. It has nothing to do with a wall of separation between Church and State. Indeed, our Founding Fathers were deeply religious people, and they believed that we should have religious people running our government. President Adams said that our Constitution was written for a religious people which serves the purposes of no other. So it is no surprise that in the first amendment they addressed both tyrannies actually. ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.'' Don't establish any State religion. And, furthermore, let everybody worship freely. They said ``or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''

And then they addressed the tyranny of the crown. And I have here an article that was written by James Bopp, who was the primary person to argue this case before the Supreme Court. He said that the American government was to be an act of self government by the people and the first amendment was to ensure the people's participation in their own government by protecting the four indispensable democratic freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and petitioning the government. Thus the first amendment was intended to deprive the government of the power to silence criticism of official actions, which is precisely what this well-intentioned but, unfortunately, otherwise directed Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act does. It limits the criticism of the people who are making our laws, of anybody in the government or anybody running for government.

The first amendment says it this way: ``or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.''

Mr. Speaker, this is a very important case before the Supreme Court. It is just not an issue of political speech, which, by the way, was the speech that our Founding Fathers most wanted to protect. And how ironic that a law that

concerns elections is a law which strikes down the very speech freedom that our Founding Fathers most wanted to protect.

But this is significant beyond that, Mr. Speaker, because if our Congress can deny this right to the American people, what else can it deny? We are a great, free country, 1 person out of 22 in the world and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. How did we get here? I think it is very instructive to ask that question and to have it answered for my satisfaction. You may come to different conclusions. But I think there are two major reasons that we are this very unique country, this 1 person out of 22 in the world, less than 5 percent of the world's population that has a fourth of all the good things in the world. And I think that both of the reasons that we are this great, free country are addressed in this first amendment. Our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the amendments, and I think they were right. And I think we put at risk who we are when we deny the religious role in the establishment of our country.

And the 10 commandments are coming down from the court house walls. Nativity scenes appear less and less frequently in public places. And we are now, of all things, going to debate whether it's okay to say ``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Mr. Speaker, I reread the Declaration of Independence recently, I think it is well to read that every so often, and I noted that God is mentioned four or five times there. I wonder if our courts might declare the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional.

There is, on a lighter side, a really great clause here. I have no idea what the king had done, but I think that there could be no better description of our regulatory agencies, and I don't know how our Founding Fathers could have been so prophetic in describing our regulatory agencies; this is what they said, Mr. Speaker. ``He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.'' They had a way with words, didn't they? And I think that there could be no more concise definition of the unfortunate frequent application of our regulatory agencies and their limitation of the rights of the American people.

Well, I would encourage Americans everywhere to listen, to watch for the report of the Supreme Court. They promise to hand down their decision sometime before the end of the court's term in June. This is a very important decision, it goes beyond just this case of ``Washington right to life.'' Just what was that case? The right to life people were sending out educational information. And unfortunately, one of the Senators was running, and since always right to life, abortion and so forth are issues in political campaigns, the FEC decided that this was prohibited advertising, although I don't think that either Senator was even mentioned in the advertising. And so the right to life committee there, I think very appropriately, has decided to make this a Supreme Court test.

Indeed, when this law was passed many people thought that it was unconstitutional. The President thought that it was unconstitutional and said so, that the court would strike down this provision. Indeed, I think those who wrote the law thought that this provision was probably unconstitutional because they put into the law language that said that if any one part of the law was struck down, that the rest of the law was still applicable. That appears in very little of our legislation. It's an indication, I think, that they felt that this part of their legislation was on pretty shaky constitutional ground.

So I would encourage you to watch this. This is a very important decision, not just for this case, but I think that that will be read very broadly as an indication of how much power does the Congress have to infringe on our constitutionally--our God-given liberties, by the way. These came from God, they didn't come from our Constitution. All the Constitution seeks to do is to make sure that the government can't take them away from us.

I want to spend our remaining time, Mr. Speaker, talking about a subject that was highlighted today in the ACORE, the American Council on Renewable Energy, ``The Outlook on Renewable Energy in America.'' And there are several recent articles that deal with this. There was a very interesting exchange between T. Boone Pickens and Steve Forbes. T. Boone Pickens believes that the world has reached its maximum capacity for producing oil; that try as hard as we wish, the oil-producing countries will not be able to increase their production of oil, and this phenomenon is called peak oil. And T. Boone Pickens said several weeks ago that he believes the world has reached peak oil. Steve Forbes took exception with that and indicated that he believed that the marketplace could take care of this. And if it didn't find more oil, it would find alternatives to oil so there would be no decrement in our growth when we're growing at roughly 2 percent a year in energy use. By the way, that 2 percent a year may not sound like much, but that doubles in 35 years, it's 4 times bigger in 70 years and it's 8 times bigger in 105 years. Now the world will still be here in 105 years, and my great, great grandchildren will still be alive in 105 years. I don't have the foggiest notion where we would get 8 times the energy compared to the energy that we are using now. So clearly that is not a world we should look forward to. T. Boone Pickens had an interesting discussion with Steve Forbes; and if you use those two names on a Google search, you will pull up their conversation.

There are many people who seem to worship the marketplace, they believe that it is both omniscient and omnipotent, it is all wise and all powerful. I point out to them that there are some things that even God can't do; God can't make a square circle, and the marketplace can't make oil where there is not oil. And the marketplace cannot provide alternatives to oil faster than technology will permit us to do that.

There is an interesting article, and this one appeared on March 25 in the Washington Post. This was really an interesting article. It says, ``Corn Can't Solve Our Problem.'' Corn, of course, is the source of ethanol, which is an alternative renewable energy. And the article pointed out that if we took all of our corn ground, every bit of it, no tortillas for Mexicans and no food for pigs and cows and chickens and no cornbread for us, all of our corn is made into ethanol, that if you discounted that for the fossil fuel input, which they said was 80 percent. By the way, there are some scientists who believe that we use more energy in producing ethanol from corn than we get out of the ethanol. I generally use 75 percent in my discussions, this article said 80 percent. But if you discount the ethanol you produce by 80 percent, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. Now, that's making all of our corn into ethanol. It would displace, after you discounted it for the fossil fuel input, because you are just burning fossil fuel in another form if you don't do that, if you discounted for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline.

The authors of the article pointed out something very interesting. They said if you are really interested in saving gasoline, you could save that much gasoline by tuning up your car and putting enough air in your tires. And I heard nobody who disputed that. So if we use all of our corn for ethanol, you could save as much gasoline by simply tuning up your car and putting air in the tires.

Then on April 5 there was another very interesting article that related to these renewables, and this was an article in the Wall Street Journal, upper right, very important, above the fold. It says, ``A Dying Giant: Mexico Tries to Save a Big Fading Oil Field.'' ``Canterell's Drop Off Faster Than Expected, Turning to Technology'' is the title of the article. Canterell was the name of a Mexican fisherman who kept getting his nets fouled in crude oil, and he would take these nets to Pemex, and he knew who was at fault because there was only one oil company in Mexico, and said look what you did to my net, and they would give him a new net. And he came in so frequently they finally said, gee, we didn't think we were spilling that much oil. And they asked

him, where is this oil coming from? And he says, come and I will show you. And so he took them and showed them oil kind of bubbling up out of the ocean and they drilled there. This was named after him, the Canterell oil field. It was the second largest one in the world. The largest one in the world is the Ghawar oil field, the granddaddy of all oil fields, producing still, down from what it was at its peak, still producing 5 million barrels of oil a day. Canterell, until 2 years ago, produced 2 million barrels a day. In the last 2 years, it has dropped off 20 percent in production. Thus, the article, upper right in the Wall Street Journal on April 5.

Obviously, if we don't have oil, we're going to have to find alternatives, so this relates to the subject of this conference today on alternative renewable energy.

And then May 1, there is an article about Hugo Chavez ``aims to weaken the U.S.,'' it says, ``China to get preference with oil from projects now under state control.'' And he was celebrating his nationalization of the fields of four companies. I think that maybe all the oil now in Venezuela has been nationalized.

In addition to nationalized oil, he made the point that he was going to make China, with whom he is partnering, a preferred customer for his oil, and it would be shipped there rather than the United States. And his aim is to hurt the United States.

This pending critical shortage of oil has resulted in a common cause by five groups in this country. The ``peak oil'' group is just one of the groups that have common cause. And I wanted to spend just a moment talking about these people of common cause, all of whom want to move from fossil fuels to renewables, for different reasons.

The first group are those who are concerned about national security. A letter was sent by Boyden Gray and 29 others, Jim Woolsey, a number of retired four star admirals and generals to the President, this was a couple of years ago, saying, ``Mr. President, the fact that we have less than 2 percent of oil in the world and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and we import about two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that.''

The next slide is on this same subject, and this is a statement by Condoleezza Rice, a very interesting statement. ``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.'' Concerned About National Security. So this is one of the groups that has common cause, Concerned About National Security.

The next chart shows a second group. This group has a lot of visibility now. Al Gore came here to the House 2 or 3 weeks ago and testified before our Science Committee. This is the group that believes that greenhouse emissions, primarily CO2 produced by burning these fossil fuels which were sequestered away, some believe as much as millions of years ago when the sun shone on subtropical seas, as in the North Sea, in ANWR, in Prudo Bay, very different world then. And the algae-like organisms grew and dropped to the bottom and silt came in and the tectonic plates opened up, this is the conjecture of how we got our gas and oil. And this was moved down to a depth where there was the right temperature, the right pressure with a rock dome over the top to contain the gas, which is why you don't find gas and oil everywhere; that with time this then was converted into gas and the volatiles, of course, were oil. Well, these are the climate change, the global warming people who really want to move from fossil fuels to the renewables. Because when you are using a renewable, you release the same amount of CO2 perhaps, but that's the CO2 that was sequestered in the spring. If you're burning this in the fall, you are releasing the CO2 that was sequestered in the spring and summer while the plant was growing, so there is no net increase, it's simply recycling of the CO2. So this is the second group that has common cause.

A third group that has common cause are the peak oil people. And this is a classic name here, Hubbert. In 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970. That was considered to be totally ridiculous. The United States was then king of oil, producing I think more oil than any other, and exporting a lot of oil at that time. And just as he predicted, in 1970 we peaked in oil production, and we've been going downhill ever since.

The red curve here, by the way, is the Soviet Union. They kind of fell apart when they came unglued and now they are going to have a second small peak. And a little later we will have a chart which shows you relatively the amount of oil which each of the major oil-producing countries in the world has.

We have two bills, and my next slide is one of those. This is a bill which our office has filed. This is to support Federal research development demonstration and commercial application activities to enable the development of self-powered farms. Our rationale is that if a farm can't be energy independent, we face a very grim future.

This is because as fossil fuels become less and less available, we have to move more and more to alternative fuels. Many of those are going to be produced on the farm, so if the farm can't be energy independent, we are going to have some tough times ahead. So this bill challenges our American farmers to become independent, and there will be prizes for doing that.

The second one is a broad act, America's Energy for America's Future, the bipartisan DRIVE Act as it is called, the acronym, Dependence Reduction Through Innovation in Vehicles and Energy Act, H.R. 60. So there are a number of bills before Congress. These are two important ones.

What I want to do now is to go through three reports that we have had, the first one in February of 2005, the second one in September of 2005 and the third one just released in February of 2007. These reports all say, and I have a few slides from each of these so you can see, Mr. Speaker, that they were delivering the same message to the American people. Paraphrasing what they said, each of these studies concluded that peaking of oil is imminent, if not present, with potentially devastating consequences.

Let's look at the first slide. This is from the Hirsch Report. The first of these reports, February of 2005, is the Peaking of Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. This is by the very big, prestigious SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, and Robert Hirsch was the project leader, so this is frequently referred to as the Hirsch Report.

These are some quotes from that report. They said that ``the peaking of world oil production presents the United States especially and the world generally with an unprecedented risk management problem.'' Unprecedented. That ``the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.''

Another authority in this area, Kenneth Deffeyes, says that ``the least bad outcome of oil peaking will be a deep worldwide recession that may make the thirties look like good times.'' Then he goes on to say, ``If you don't like that, try the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, famine, pestilence and death.''

A second chart here from the Hirsch Report, and I will just read the highlighted part here, ``oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. And then they make the statement ``the world has never faced a problem like this.'' There is no precedent in history to guide us. Unprecedented. ``The world has never faced a problem like this.''

The next chart is another quote from the Hirsch Report. ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules.''

What they are talking about, any program that would provide energy from other sources to make up for the energy that won't be there once we have reached peak oil production, and the world's demand for energy keeps going up at about 2 percent, doubles in 35 years, four times bigger in 70 years.

The next chart shows us we are not going to drill our way out of this. This is a very interesting chart. When the Reagan Administration came in, we knew that M. King Hubbert was right. We were already 10 years down the other side in 1980, it peaked in 1970. Ten

years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and we knew something was wrong.

What the administration proposed, and this was my second favorite president, by the way, but he was wrong in this. What the administration proposed was to incent the American oil producers to go out and drill for oil. So we gave them some tax incentives. This is what the drilling was, and, boy, did they drill. But notice, the more they drilled, the less oil they got, because we went from positive, producing a bit more than we needed, to negative, not producing as much. If the oil is not there, drilling won't find it.

By the way, we really drill for oil in our country. We have drilled more wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together. In spite of drilling all those oil wells, currently I think 530,000 operating wells, 4,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico, more than four times as many as all the wells in Saudi Arabia, in spite of that, we have not reversed the prediction of M. King Hubbert that our country would peak in 1970, and then it was down, down, down.

The next chart is a schematic which I think depicts the situation and where we are. This is a 2 percent growth here. By the way, you can make this very steep, we simply compress the abscissa, or make it very shallow, this has a long scale on the abscissa. But it doubles in 35 years. This has been following a roughly 2 percent increase in use. Obviously, up until today we have been able to produce as much oil as we are using. It costs more because there are some tentative shortages. That is why the price of oil has gone up.

So once we get near the peak and the demand keeps going up and the production is leveling off, that yellow area represents a gap between the amount of oil which is available, the green part of the curve, and the amount of oil we would like to use, which is this ever-increasing 2 percent growth rate.

Many people believe that what we ought to do is to fill that gap. I don't think, Mr. Speaker, we can fill the gap, and I don't think it would be productive to try to fill the gap, because there is only so many options out there for filling the gap.

I have 10 children, 15 grandchildren, and 2 great grandchildren. Wouldn't it be nice if I left them a little energy? Which is why I don't vote to drill in ANWR and I don't vote to drill offshore until they convince me that the energy they get from those projects is going to be invested in alternatives. Because we have known for 27 years, since 1980, we have known that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We peaked in 1970. Down, down, down since then. He predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, if he was right about the United States, which is clearly a microcosm of the world, why shouldn't he be right about the world and why shouldn't we be doing something about that?

Well, in their report, I think unwisely, the Hirsch Report looked at ways of filling the gap. The next chart shows a stylized approach at filling the gap.

What it shows is when you decide to start doing these things, you won't get anything for quite a while. We have, what, about 3\1/2\ years before you get anything. So you have to anticipate the need before you start.

Notice that enhanced oil recovery, coal to liquid, heavy oil, gas to liquid, these are all finite resources. They won't last all that long. The only renewable one, the only one that will continue there is efficient vehicles. So they now are trying to fill the gap with clearly finite resources. There is only so much oil. If you get it there, it won't be there later. There is only so much coal. If you liquify it now, you won't liquify it tomorrow. There is only so much heavy oil. If you use it now, you won't be using it later.

The second chart from the Hirsch Report shows something very interesting, and we don't have time this evening to look at all of the information on this chart. But they are making an assumption here, which this is repeated from the Energy Information Agency, this is not what the Hirsch Report is predicting, by the way. They are repeating information from the Energy Information Agency. And somehow the Energy Information Agency, which stands not quite alone, but near live alone in this view, believes that we will find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists which is recoverable.

If we find that much oil, it will simply push peaking out to 2016. This chart was in 2000, and if we didn't find any more oil, it was going to peak then and start down, which is about what M. King Hubbert had predicted.

By the way, conventional oil probably peaked about then, but we are now getting a lot of oil from things like the Canadian tar sands, the heavy oils, the heavy sour oils and so forth. So we are now getting a fair amount of oil from what is called unconventional oil sources. But the conventional oil probably has already peaked.

They show another very interesting thing here, that if you use enhanced oil recovery and get it more quickly, you may move the peak out, what, about 20 years. But notice what happens after that. You can't pump it later if you pumped it now, and look how it falls off after they have used enhanced oil recovery to get it sooner.

The next chart is a very interesting one. This is projections by the Energy Information Agency. There is a lot we could talk about on these charts, because they are using data from the USGS and the USGS was using a frequency thing, which somehow gets translated to P here. I guess if you don't write clearly, F can look like a P. I have no idea how they got from frequency to P.

They say that we have three possibilities for the amount of oil that we are going to find in the future. The P is for probability. They say that there is the 95 percent probability. They say the mean is the 50 percent probability, if in fact it is probability. Obviously if it is 95 percent probable, it is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable. But they somehow take these frequency figures that USGS used, and what they did with frequency was simply make a lot of assumptions and they ran models from these assumptions and they ran these things many times and they got different numbers. So the frequency indicates the number of times that they predicted that quantity of oil. So this has to do only with their simulations and not with reality in the field.

But somehow Energy Information Agency translated the F to P and to 95 percent probability, 50 percent probability, which they said was the mean. Now, if it is a frequency thing, the 50 percent thing could be the mean, but in probabilities it doesn't make any sense.

They were predicting in, what, a little bit before 2000, that if it followed the 95 percent probability, you would get that much oil. If you followed the 50 percent probability, it would follow this line, which they said was the most probable. And the 5 percent probability would follow this line.

What they didn't do, of course, was to include the other half. When you see the path of a hurricane it is a pretty narrow for today. Tomorrow it will be uncertain, because we are uncertain about it. The 50 percent has another line which goes down here and the 5 percent another line that goes down here. Really a big funnel. If you are only 5 percent certain what the future is going to be, obviously it is a big range that you are looking at.

But look at what the actual data points follow. The actual data points follow, as you would expect them to, follow the 95 percent probability, because that is what 95 percent probability means. It is more probable than 50 percent probability.

The next chart shows, and this again is from the Hirsch Report, we are going to go over two more of these reports quickly. This is the Hirsch Report. They here have listed the projections of some of the world's experts on when we would reach peak oil.

Notice this first group, 2007, 2009, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2010, then 2010 to 2020, and then a couple of them, one no visible peak and then CERA and Shell say it would be after 2020 or 2025 or after.

The next chart shows a very interesting chart produced by Cambridge Research Associates. This is the CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. They produced this chart to try to convince the reader that they shouldn't have any confidence in the predictions of M. King Hubbert. Let's look at this.

The total U.S. production is the red. The green is the actual lower 48, which, by the way, is what M. King Hubbert

predicted. He didn't have in his prediction any oil from Alaska or any oil from the Gulf of Mexico. He was looking just at the lower 48. And the yellow ones here are Hubbert's lower 48 prediction.

He said that it would follow a curve like this, and the lower 48 actually followed a curve as shown by the green squares there, and CERA says that proves that M. King Hubbert was wrong and you shouldn't have any confidence in it. I think the average person looking at that says, gee, those green ones are pretty darn close to the yellow ones and he may a pretty good prediction, didn't he?

Now why did the red ones deviate from it? That is because we found a bunch of oil in Prudo Bay. A fourth of our total oil production came from Prudo Bay. So there was a little kick here in it. But notice, down, down, down after that. There was just a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak produced by this huge oil find in Prudo Bay from which a fourth of our oil has come from the last number of years. And you can't even see there the contribution of that fabled oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico which is now being pumped by about 4,000 wells.

The next chart is a chart by CERA, and they put this in an article in which they said that this whole peak oil notion was a farce and them are debunking it. But, boy, when I looked at that chart, it looks like it has a peak to me. It goes up and it goes down. And they said it is going to be an undulating plateau.

By the way, they now are predicting, using the USGS figures, that we are going to find as much oil as all the oil that exists which is recoverable in the world.

Leherrere says that this is absolutely implausible considering all the advances we have had in discovery of oil, computer modeling and 3-D seismic and so forth.

If we don't find that extra oil, and you can make up your mind whether you think we are going to find it or not, we would have been peaking about here. Boy, that is about now, isn't it.

If we find much more oil, we will be peaking later. They have an enormous amount of oil from unconventional there. Maybe, maybe not. We are getting a million barrels a day from the Canadian tar sands. That is a part of the 84-85 million barrels a day that we are burning, a little more than 1 percent. And that is not sustainable because they are using huge amounts of energy from natural gas which will run out. The vein will shortly be ducking under a big overlay so they will have to develop it in situ rather than shovel it out with a shovel that shovels 100 tons, they dump it in a truck that holds 400 tons, and they take it and cook it to get this real heavy, stiff oil out. When it flows, they then mix it with a volatile so it will keep flowing in the pipelines. They know it is not sustainable, and they are going to run out of natural gas. They are thinking about building a nuclear power plant; and, furthermore, shortly they will need to develop in situ and they have no idea how to do that.

Now we are going to look at some charts from the second study. All three of these studies are saying essentially the same thing: The peaking is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences if we don't do something about it.

The question everybody needs to be asking is why aren't we doing anything meaningful about this? We are barely nibbling at the margins of the problem, and this is a huge problem.

The U.S. Corps of Engineers, experts Colin Campbell, Jean LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett, who is no relative of mine, and I wish I had some of his genes. If you do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and energy, you will pull up the most fascinating one-hour lecture I have ever heard. He has given it over 1,600 times. It is honed to perfection. You will be fascinated by it. Please pull it up and read that article.

They have all estimated that a peak in oil production will occur around 2005. This is concurred with by the CEOs of several companies.

The next chart is another one from the Corps of Engineers, and they are quoting Jean Leherrere. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. This is his quote. ``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 effort to find the largest remaining prospects.''

This is a repeat of the chart that we just looked at. It shows the peaking currently if we don't find this additional oil, and it shows that if we find as much more oil as all of the oil we have found now, that the peak is pushed out to only 2030 or so. It is most unlikely that will happen.

Another chart from the Corps of Engineers study, this is the second of these big studies, let me just refer to the underlying part. ``A careful review of all of the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years after which it will decline. Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease.'' With limited supply, the price of oil will go who knows where.

The next chart, again from the Corps of Engineers study, ``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. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then.''

Just a word about the quality of this oil. One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. You pay just a little over $100 for it refined. You are hiring the equivalent of a person working for you for a whole year for less than $10. If you have some trouble getting your mind around that, imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel, still cheaper, by the way at $3 a gallon than water in the grocery store, how far that takes your car or your SUV.

I drive a Prius. A gallon takes me about 50 miles. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles? I can't pull it unless it is on the level, and then I work really hard and go very slowly. If it is uphill, I couldn't do it without a come-along and hooking it to the guardrail or a tree or something and inching it up the hill. How long would it take me to pull my Prius that 50 miles that a gallon takes me.

Another way of looking at the quality of fossil fuels is to recognize that if a strong man works hard all day, you can get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. That may be humbling to recognize that we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel energy; but that is why they say in this report, ``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities.''

My next chart, this is a fairly recent article and they say, ``The current price of oil is in the $45-57 per barrel range.'' It is now $64, $65, $66. ``It is expected to stay in that range for several years.'' It didn't, it went up to $78. It has now dropped. There was a fear factor that looks like it was about $18 because it pretty quickly dropped from $78 to $60 when the fear factor went away.

Oil prices may go significantly higher and some have predicted $180 a barrel in a few years. This is from the Corps of Engineers study, and they are a very credible organization.

Now I am going to move to a third study, a GAO study. I asked for this study because I wanted to see if it corroborated the conclusions drawn by the other two studies. This one came out in February 2007, and it was embargoed for 30 days and then it came out a month or so ago. ``Crude oil. Uncertainty about future oil supply makes it important to develop a strategy for addressing a peak and decline in oil production.''

This is their curve for Hubbert's peak, peaking about 1970. This is the increased production from Prudhoe Bay, but down, down, down. Now we are at about half of the oil we were producing in 1970. That is in spite of the fact that we have drilled more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together.

The next chart is very interesting. This chart has only the top 10. We are

not in the top 10. This lists the top 10 companies on the basis of oil production and reserves. Here it is on the basis of production and reserves.

Our big oil companies, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, you see those names on the pumps, they produce this much. They don't even appear in the top 10 over here. They don't have any meaningful oil reserves. They are pumping somebody else's oil. The top 10 reserves over here are Luke Oil, 2 percent, and then all of the rest of the top 10 are guess where, Saudi Aramco, National Iranian, Iraq National, Kuwait, Venezuela, Dubai, and so forth. Libya, Nigeria.

The next chart shows the same kind of data in a pie chart. Some people like to look at pie charts. This is the world oil reserves, OPEC and non-OPEC nations.

Now we have blown up the OPEC nations here to see who owns most of the oil. Obviously Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela and so forth contain the oil there. By the way, Saudi Arabia is not included in that pie chart because it is so big it stands alone.

The next chart shows pictorially what these have shown in these little pie charts. This is what the world would look like, the world according to oil, and this is what the geography of the world would look like if the nation had square miles relative to the amount of oil it has. If the amount of oil determined the size of a country, this is what our world would look like.

Boy, look at Saudi Arabia. It dominates everything. The United States, we are squeezed over here, but we are in good shape compared to India. Look at India with a billion people and China with 1.3 billion. Boy, are they dependent on somebody else's oil.

Russia, a huge oil exporter, but they don't have that much oil compared to the Middle East countries. This is very sobering. What it shows is that most of the oil in the world, and the President said it very well in his State of the Union message, most of the oil in the world is controlled by countries that don't even like us. Just look at the names of these countries, and you can figure that out.

Venezuela dwarfs us. They have several times as much oil as we have. Alaska, that is pretty big, a half or third of what we have in the lower 48.

The next chart, this is from a very interesting speech that I hope to spend an hour talking about next week here on the floor. It was given 50 years ago by Hyman Rickover in 1957. He said some really fascinating things in that speech.

Mr. Speaker, you will be amazed at how prophetic Hyman Rickover was. He is the father of our nuclear submarine. We generally think of him in that venue, but he was wise beyond his time relative to energy. You will be amazed at the predictions and observations he made.

``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power.'' Boy, look at where the political power is going to be if political power is relative to the amount of enery you have. Just think of that last chart that we looked at.

``Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant.'' I read that and I thought of China who is now going around the world buying oil wherever they can find it for sale. In terms of the economies of buying oil, whoever has the dollars today buys it and it doesn't matter who owns it. That may change in the future. That may be a very true statement in the future.

``If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have,'' and we obviously didn't do that. I have made the observation that when we found that incredible wealth in the ground, we should have stopped as a culture and asked: What can we do with this to get the most good for the most people for the longest time? That is clearly not what we did.

With no more responsibility than the hog who found the feed room door open or the kids who found the cookie jar, we just pigged out. We want to continue doing that. The call now is to drill, drill, drill.

As I mentioned earlier, I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids, and 2 great- grandkids. I am going to leave them an incredible debt. Not with my votes. Look at them, and I didn't do it. But am I also going to leave them a world largely devoid of easily accessible energy, which is why, again, I don't vote to drill in ANWR and offshore.

``If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for the necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.''

We haven't done that.

Because we have not done that, we now have a real challenge. By the way, I have no doubt that the American people, with proper leadership, which I do not see a whole lot of for the moment, can meet this challenge. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world.

A couple of real quick charts here because our time is running out.

This chart looks at proven oil reserves by investment risk, and about a third of this pie chart; there is no investment because it is not allowed by the companies that own it. Then there is high investment risk. In some of the other countries, you make an investment risk like Hugo Chavez just did. They take the facilities away from you and nationalize them. There is a tiny piece of the pie chart here that has a low investment risk.

The next one looks at political risk, how unstable are these countries, what is the political risk. Boy, more than a third of it high risk, nearly a third of it minimum risk. So you look at these two risks, and that really means that we need to look carefully at the future.

Next chart, and this is an interesting one. This is a prediction of when we will peak. Now, several authorities here do not have any idea exactly when, but they said it could occur as early as this and maybe as late as that, but all of these have occurred before 2020. All of these have occurred before 2020. Very few believe that peaking could not occur before 2020.

The next chart, and I wish we had more time to look at this because this is a fascinating chart. This chart shows the discovery of oil. These bar graphs are the discovery. Obviously you add up all those bars, you will get the total amount of oil that we have found. You will get the same thing if you put a smooth curve over there. The area under the curve will equal the oil we have found.

The solid black line here is the oil we have used. Now, obviously up until about 1980 we were finding more than we use, but since then, we have been borrowing from what we found and we are now peaking.

And what will the future look like? They are predicting here we will find it not smooth like that, but on average that much, less and less. Most experts believe, by the way, we have found about 95 percent of all the oil we will find.

What will the future look like? We can change a little of the detail, but we cannot pump what is not there. If you use enhanced oil recovery, you may extend this out a little bit and it will drop off very quickly, as you saw on that chart.

The next chart is one which I really think is very productive to look at, and Hyman Rickover mentions this. In 8,000 years of recorded history, and we have here only the last 400 or so years of recorded history, roughly 400 years, but in 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will occupy about 300 years. We have been about 150 years into the age of oil. Hyman Rickover in his speech of 50 years ago said that we are about 100 years in what will be called a golden age, and clearly it has been a golden age.

World population, if we put it on this chart, exploded at just about that rate, and if we reach peak oil, it will drop off the other side as quick as we have gone up. Notice what happened in the 1970s, Arab oil shock, more efficiency. If that had not happened, by the way, we would be in even more trouble today because up until the Carter years we had used as much oil every decade as we had used in all of previous history. That means if we had used half the oil, which is I think where we are now, you would have 10 years at current use rate.

Well, what do we do? I would just like to note in the remaining minutes that we have here, that I believe America is up to this challenge. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration in meeting a big problem and overcoming it, and properly motivated, we are the most creative, innovative society in the world.

I said there were five groups early on. I mentioned only two of them. The two other groups that have common cause in moving to alternatives, one of those is the environmentalists that believe that our air is polluted enough; why would you want to burn more fossil fuels and pollute it more. The other is a group who is longing for a return to dominance in manufacturing. We are very creative. We could become a major exporter of the technology for exploiting these renewable alternative sources.

So there are these five groups. I do not want to argue with whether we have global warming or not because what they want to do for global warming is exactly what we need to do for peak oil. It is exactly what we need to do for national security. It is exactly what we need to do to clean up our air. It is exactly what we need to do to have some manufacturing superiority again. So these five groups have common cause.

We need to buy time by an aggressive conservation program. We need to use it wisely, to invest the time and energy in renewables that will pay off. The benefits, of course, I have indicated. We will now be a major exporting country again.

The last chart, and I am sorry we do not have time to look at this more, but we are very much, and I will close with this, like the young couple that has gotten a big inheritance. Fifteen percent of what they spend they earn, 85 percent is from the inheritance, and it is going to run out. Fifteen percent of what we use, more than half of that nuclear power, is renewables. The 85 percent is fossil fuels which will not last. So the big challenge is the challenge the young couple has. Obviously in the future they are going to have to either spend less or earn more, and that is exactly the challenge we have.

Last chart, and I really want to look at this one in the moments we have here. It is not like we are going to be living in a world that is not comfortable. Interesting chart here, it shows on the ordinate how satisfied you are with life. On the abscissa, it shows the amount of energy you consume. We are way out there in the far right. We use more energy per capita than anybody else in the world. But notice, all these countries, 20 some of them that use less energy than we, which are happier with their station in life than we are. You do not need to use the amount of energy we use to be happy.

We have a really challenging future. I think we are up to it with proper leadership.