Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to address two very timely items. One is a just-released report by the General Accountability Office entitled: ``Crude Oil: Uncertainty about future oil supply make it important to develop a strategy for addressing a peak and decline in oil production.'' This report was released at a news conference at two o'clock today, and so we want to spend some time discussing this report.

But there is also the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and so I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about this Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

This is the fifth anniversary. In 2002 when we debated this law, there were those who looked upon our deliberations as inconsequential because they thought that either the President would veto the bill or the Supreme Court would overturn the law. Indeed, the President did not veto it because he said that the Supreme Court would probably overturn at least a very important part of that law. Except the President signed the bill and the Supreme Court upheld it.

As it turned out, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act has great consequences, the erosion of Americans' first amendment rights to freedom of speech. With regard to speech, the first amendment to the Constitution simply States Congress shall make no law 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.

I think it is worth just a moment, Mr. Speaker, to reflect on how we got here in this country and the milieu in which our Founding Fathers wrote this first amendment to the Constitution.

Our Founding Fathers came here primarily from the British Isles and the European continent, and they came here to seek relief from two tyrannies. One was the tyranny of the church and the other was the tyranny of the Crown, and they address both of these two tyrannies in the first two amendments.

Indeed, in the first amendment, they address their concerns both for the tyranny of the church, shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, do not make a State religion, and furthermore, let people free to worship however they wish. And the tyranny of the Crown. They wanted to make sure that the people could say whatever they wished about governing. It was political speech that they most wanted to protect.

And to understand that, you have to go to the second amendment. The second amendment again was to assure that our people would never ever be persecuted, oppressed by a central government, because they said that every citizen had the right to be a member of the militia and to carry a gun. They said that was in order to secure freedom in our country, that every person should have the right to carry a gun.

So this was the milieu in which this amendment was written, and the speech that our Founding Fathers found most precious was political speech, and it is just this speech that this unfortunate legislation denies our people of all rights derived constitutionally. The Framers dedicated little formal debate to freedom of speech. It was not until the 20th century that Supreme Court actions began to address the definition of free speech. Until that time, the only limitation placed on the press involved slander or libel. They felt they did not have to talk about it because it was generally understood how important that right was to the people.

Freedom of speech did not generate great debate amongst the Founders, who believed that this freedom was so basic that no lengthy debate or independent editorials were needed.

One can only surmise that by its prominent location in the Bill of Rights that the Founders agreed that freedom of speech was an obvious right of any citizen. The Bill of Rights was designed to protect rights so important that it was necessary to explicitly restrict the government usurping these rights from the people. Our government serves the people, not the other way around. You might wonder about that from some of the laws we pass here.

The concept of freedom of speech depends on truth and opinions expressed openly and honestly by an individual or an association with others by groups. It is a right of our Founders reserved for us. Here in America we cherish being allowed to question our government, to criticize our government and advise our government, those individuals who are elected or appointed leaders of our government.

Freedom of speech does have limitations. You can't falsely shout ``fire, fire'' in a crowded movie theater to falsely cause panic. You can't threaten violence or use fighting words to invoke violence. You can't knowingly lie or libel, although here there is a higher standard for proving libel against a public official.

Until BCRA, this Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a 1976 Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Vallejo, helped define the framework of public discourse regarding political speech. In part, the decision states, ``Discussion of public issues and the debates on the qualifications of candidates are integral to the operation of a system the government established by our Constitution. The first amendment affords the broadest protection to such political expression in order to assure the unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.''

Not my statements, the statements of the Court.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 chips away at the unfettered interchanges of ideas the Buckley decision strove to ensure. Of all the provisions in the Campaign Reform Act, I am most concerned with the chilling effect it inflicts on labor unions, trade associations and nonprofit organizations.

These are associations that individuals choose to join. The restrictions of these organizations on behalf of Members to engage in issue advocacy under this law must be addressed and reversed.

The authors of this legislation were so unsure of the Campaign Reform Act's constitutionality that a severability clause was inserted which provided that if any provision of this Act is held unconstitutional, the remainder of the Act would not be affected.

This is hardly the language of a steadfast law, but, rather, language used when treading on shaky constitutional grounds when forging a new dimension or direction of law. This change in the wrong direction limits freedom. I believe it needs to be reversed before more laws limiting freedom of speech are adopted.

In particular, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act limits a citizen's freedom of speech and freedom of association by banning specific groups of issue advocacy before elections at precisely the time when that advocacy is most advantageous to affect change in government. This is the time when voters are most focused on government and whether they are satisfied with their elected representatives.

Specifically, this law bans unions, grassroots organizations and trade organizations from using their general Treasury funds to broadcast, issue advocacy and advertisements 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general.

Last year, in my home State of Maryland, due to a September primary date, these groups were banned 90 days from advertising before the general election. Few people were thinking about the general election 90 days before that date.

Fortunately, there are two courses of action which are currently being taken. As in past Congresses, I am offering the First Amendment Restoration Act, H.R. 71. This Act simply repeals the most onerous sections of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which contorts citizens free speech by lifting the current ban on electioneering communications 30 days before primary and 60 days before a general election.

This legislation hopefully may not be necessary. On April 25, the Supreme Court will hear the arguments in the case of Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. v. FEC. Wisconsin Right to Life has prevailed in a lower Federal court. The facts of the case are these, and I am paraphrasing from the James Madison Center for Free Speech, which is closely watching the case:

In 2004, WRTL, Wisconsin Right to Life, challenged a 2002 provision of campaign finance law that prohibits citizens groups from broadcasting communications that mention a Federal candidate during blackout periods before elections. Now, listen to this, because this is very interesting. WRTL had been running grassroots lobbying ads about the filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees. The ads informed citizens they could call Wisconsin Senator Kohl and Senator Feingold and ask them to oppose the filibusters. This ad did not state the position of either Senator or on the filibuster. Since Senator Feingold was then a candidate, WRTL had to stop its ad many days before the election because of the Campaign Finance Reform Act, which banned electioneering communications.

In December, 2006, a Federal district court in D.C. held that the ads were constitutionally protected. I hope so. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

Members of Congress have intervened in the case so that they could argue that the government has every right to restrict WRTL's ads because they criticize a candidate on the issue. The ad, in fact, did not criticize Senator Feingold. Even if it had, WRTL's brief argues that criticizing official actions by public officials is a bedrock foundation of our government and exactly what our Founding Fathers tried to protect in this first amendment. The people are sovereign, and the government may not silence their criticism. That is what led to the first amendment mandate that Congress should not restrict the people's expression, association and petition.

I understand the goals of my colleagues who supported the Campaign Reform Act, disclosure and transparency. I support these goals. Disclosure of how much money was being spent by whom; transparency in identifying the citizens' groups which were sponsoring any electioneering communication. But I maintain that this disclosure is not for the government to demand from the people, but, rather, for the people to demand from the government.

Disclosure and transparency are better served when it is the government official who should disclose his votes both on the floor and in committee, his earmarks and direct campaign contributions over which he exercises complete control. It is up to the public to decide motives of elected individuals. Motives of citizens should not be suspect. We cannot be afraid of honest debate. Citizens have the right to express themselves individually or by association. The rights of the citizen must be paramount.

That is why on rise I the fifth anniversary of BCRA and to urge support of H.R. 71 to repeal its electioneering communication provisions. I hope the Supreme Court will rule these provisions as unconstitutional.

Mr. Speaker, there is another very important thing that happened today, as I mentioned as I began. That is the GAO, the report is dated February 2007, but it was embargoed until today until our press conference, which released it.

I have several charts here from that report. I think that might be a good way to begin this discussion. Let's look at the first chart.

Now, I have been to the floor a number of times before, and I have shown other versions of this same phenomenon, and that is the reality that our country a number of years ago reached its maximum oil production, and it has been downhill since then. This was predicted in 1956 by a Shell Oil Company scientist to a group of oil engineers and executives in San Antonio, Texas, on the 8th day of March, just a little over 51 years ago.

In 1956, he predicted that the United States would reach its maximum oil production in 1970. Now, in 1956, we were perhaps the largest producer of oil in the world. We were a large exporter of oil, and oil was king.

The industrial revolution was in full swing, and Shell Oil company told M. King Hubbert that he should not give that speech because he would certainly embarrass himself and them because he was employed by them. He gave the speech anyhow. For 14 years, he was a pariah.

On schedule, as he predicted, in 1970, we reached our maximum oil production. He had indicated that at that point about half of all the oil that we would ever produce would have been produced, and the second half, which is reasonable, would be harder to get and, therefore, would be produced more slowly. It would be downhill after that.

Yes, you know, advertise a little bump on the downhill. That little bump is that huge supply of oil that we found in Prudhoe Bay, up in Alaska. M. King Hubbert's predictions were for the lower 48. He didn't include the Gulf of

Mexico. There is a little wiggle in the curve, hardly discernible by those discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico. But there was a little blip in the downhill slope, when we lowered the top of Hubbert's peak. So, right on schedule, we peaked in 1979. M. King Hubbert indicated, I think, it was in 1969, he predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

The question I always asked myself, if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and he gave us the basis of his analysis, which was very logical, if he was right about the United States, and since the United States is obviously a microcosm of the world, why shouldn't he be right about the world? If he was right about the world, shouldn't we have been doing something in anticipation of reaching a maximum oil production beyond which additional oil production would be impossible, prices would rise, oil, $65 a barrel today, and production would inexorably decline.

There is nothing that we have done in the United States to stop that. We have drilled more oil wells in the United States than all the rest of the world. Still we have not stopped that downward slope, just that blip from Prudhoe Bay; and now we are down to a bit over half of the oil that we produced in 1970, in spite of a vastly improved technique for enhanced oil recovery, for discovery of oil, 3-D seismic computer modeling and so forth.

The next chart that they showed is an interesting contrast, and this is a chart from our Energy Information Agency. In spite of the fact that they know that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, that we did peak in 1970, and in spite of the fact that they know that he predicted that the world should be peaking about now, and there is every indication that he may have been right, they still are forecasting that the total production of oil, which is now they have it about 80, I think it's now about 85 million barrels a day, will do nothing but go up and up. They have this clear through 2030.

Now, they do show that the non-APEC nations are peaking and will fall off. That is true. Most of them have peaked, and they are falling off. But they believe their oil production will simply go up and up.

The chances that that is true, by the way, Dr. Lahere, who has written a couple of books on this subject, says it is absolutely impossible, considering the vastly improved techniques we have for finding oil. They are predicting that we will have as much more oil as all of the reserves we now know to exist in this country, that we are going to find at least that much more oil.

The next chart is a compilation of a number of authorities and their predictions of when peaking will occur. Some of them have very, narrow projections. A number of people think that peaking has already occurred. Others have gross uncertainty in their predictions. It could be any time between now and the next century. But if you look at the preponderance of these, most of these authorities believe that peaking will occur or could occur before 2020.

Now, of course, this kind of a consensus by the world's leaders is grossly inconsistent with the chart that we just saw where our Energy Information Agency is projecting an ever upward and upward projection production of oil.

The next chart is an interesting one which they showed us, and this is worldwide proven oil reserves by political risk. This is a very good report, and they are a very credible organization, which is why I asked them to do this report a bit more than a year ago. I am pleased it is out now, because they do have a lot of credibility. When the GAO speaks, people tend to listen.

They note that there are a lot of uncertainties about when the peak will occur, and probably the biggest uncertainties have less to do with how much oil is under the ground rather than risks above ground. One of these risks is a political risk. A lot of oil comes from places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and Iraq and Iran and Kuwait and so forth. So they list here the high political risk, the medium political risk, and the low political risk.

You see here that about two-thirds of all the oil in the world is in countries where, by their judgment and the judgment of experts which they quote, either high risk or medium risk. Indeed, the night before last, when England and Iran were kind of yelling at each other over the sailors that Iran has taken, oil jumped up $4. Now, it quieted down by yesterday morning, so oil was only up a bit more than $1 yesterday. But this shows the volatility of the market relative to the political uncertainty in these areas.

The next chart is a really interesting chart, and it shows another risk, and that is investment risk. A venture capitalist is unwilling to invest in places where they may lose their capital or a country, for instance, which now will permit venture capital but tomorrow may decide they are going to nationalize all the oil fields. Then you have lost all of your investment. So they are listing this by high and medium and low.

By the way, for about a third of all the places that oil comes from, there is no foreign investment, also no foreign visibility. We just have to go by faith on how much oil is in their reserves, because they won't let our people in. You can't make any investments there.

But I think here about 95 percent of all the oil in the world represents, in their view, high and medium risk. So when you add the political risk and the investment risk, you have a lot of uncertainty as to how much oil we are going to produce in the future, and this is added to the uncertainty of how much is there and when we will, in fact, reach that maximum capacity for producing oil.

The next chart is an interesting one. And I should have brought another one that shows it in a very poignant way by showing what the world would look like if the nations' size was determined by how much oil they have. And of course we are dwarfed in that because Saudi Arabia has many, many times as much oil as we. We represent a fourth of the world's economy and we have two percent of the world's oil. We use a fourth of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use.

Here they have the oil in the non-OPEC nations and the oil in Saudi Arabia. Look how big Saudi Arabia is. And then the rest of the OPEC nations, and then they have blown this up over here so you can see who else is involved in the OPEC nations. Notice that, what, over three- fourths of all of the oil is controlled by OPEC nations, and about a fourth of all of that oil comes from Saudi Arabia alone.

The next chart is a really interesting one and this shows, the two bars here, and one, these are the top 10 companies on the basis of oil production and reserve holdings. Now, these reserve holdings are sort of iffy, because for most of these countries there is little or no transparency, and they really won't let us look at their data. But we do know who is producing oil.

And here we see that big guys like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and BP and so forth are producing 22 percent of the oil. And Saudi Arabia, a bunch of national companies are producing 78 percent of the oil.

But look at the next bar over there, and that shows you who owns the oil. Ninety-eight percent of all that oil is owned, our big guys here that are pumping it, they don't own any of it. They have leases. They don't own the oil. The oil is owned by mostly OPEC Middle East countries and there they have up top, and that ought to be shaded gray because LUK Oil, I don't know if LUK oil is private or whether it is national. It is a huge oil company in Russia.

Well, this points to the problems that we have, and these problems encouraged 30 of our prominent citizens, Boyden Gray and Jim Woolsey and McFarland and 27 others, a couple of years ago to write a letter to the President with these facts in mind saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and import two-thirds of what we use, and as the President says, much of that from countries that don't even like us, read down that list, this represents a totally unacceptable national security risk. And, Mr. President, we really need to do something about that.

Well, the next chart is the one that I stopped with a couple of weeks ago when I was on the floor here, and I

want to spend the rest of the time that we have today in talking about this chart. And, indeed, we could spend a couple of weeks talking about the chart, because what this looks at is the potential alternatives to these fossil fuels.

I would like to mention that there are several groups that have common cause in that area. Al Gore came to the Congress last week, I believe it was, and testified before obviously a packed committee room. He believes that we have global warming. Indeed, I think, a majority of our citizens and a majority of scientists now believe that we have global warming. You may or may not agree with whether our Earth is warming or not, but if you believe that we have a national security risk because we get too much of our oil from overseas, or if you believe that it simply may not be there because the world will peak out and there won't be enough oil because the demand keeps going up at about 2 percent, exponential growth, then you would want to do pretty much exactly the same things that those people who believed we have global warming want to do.

They want to get away from the fossil fuels because what we are doing in using these fossil fuels is releasing carbon dioxide that has been locked up by nature for a very long number of years. And we are now releasing that over a very short time period. We have about 8,000 years of recorded history in the world, and the age of oil, from pumping that first barrel of oil to pumping the last economically feasible barrel of oil, will probably be about 300 years. We are about 150 years into the age of oil, and in another 150 years we will probably have transitioned out of the age of oil and gas and coal. This is a relatively short time in the history of the world.

As I mentioned before, with the knowledge that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and we knew that of a certainty by 1980, because when we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's peak. And the Reagan administration, my second most favorite President, decided that the thing to do, which by the way was totally the wrong thing to do, the thing to do was to encourage, to give our oil people a profit motive to go out and find oil. Now, you can't find oil that is not there. And you can't pump oil you haven't found.

But they were encouraged to drill, and drill they did. We now have 530,000 operating oil wells in our country. That is more oil wells than drilled in all of the rest of the world. They drilled and drilled. And if you have a pot that compares drilling with production, you will see that there was little or no increase in production as a result of this drilling, because this was 1980. We are already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's peak and you can't pump what is not there. And M. King Hubbert was right, and we couldn't reverse that by drilling more wells. So now we are faced or will be faced very shortly in the future with the reality that we can't pump more oil; that we will have reached peak oil. And as you saw, a majority of all the experts in the world believe that that is either present or imminent. So we began to look for alternatives for this.

Now, I know that for the last several years we have had some programs in Congress where we have been sponsoring green things like corn, ethanol and so forth; and this is supposed to free us from our large dependence on fossil fuels. There are some finite resources. These are fossil fuels, but they are not the oil that we ordinarily, or gas or coal we ordinarily exploit. And they are exploitable. And we will get some energy from them. How much is yet to be determined.

Let me mention some of those. There are the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. These are huge reserves. They represent as much potential oil as all the known reserves of oil in the world, perhaps more than that. So why should we worry since there is that much there? They are now aggressively exploiting those fields. They have a shovel that lifts 100 tons at a time. They dump it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and they haul it to a big cooker where they cook it and this oil, which is too stiff to flow, now is heated up so it will flow and some short chain volatiles are added to it so it will continue to flow when it is cooled.

And they are now producing about a million barrels a day. Boy, a million barrels a day. I can hardly count to a million. That sounds like a lot. And it is a lot. But it is just barely over 1 percent of the 84 or 85 million barrels a day that our world produces and our world consumes. And they are using enormous amounts of energy, from what we call stranded natural gas. Now, natural gas is stranded when it is in a place where there aren't very many people. And since natural gas is hard to transport, it is very cheap there and so we say it is stranded. So they have some cheap gas there and they are using this gas, and I am told, everything you are told is not true, but I am told that they may be using more energy from the natural gas than they are getting out of the oil.

But from a dollar and cents perspective, it makes good sense because it takes them somewhere between 18 and $25 a barrel to make the oil, and it is selling today I think for about $65 a barrel, so that is a pretty good markup.

But the profit ratio you really should be looking at is the energy profit ratio. How much energy do you get out per unit of energy that you put in. And they may be getting out less than they put in. They know that what they are doing now is not sustainable for two reasons. One is the natural gas there will not last forever. Indeed, talking about natural gas, we have peaked in natural gas in our country. That stunned us. It was a couple of years ago we reached our maximum production of natural gas. We thought that was way off in the future. We reached that a couple of years ago. They know the natural gas will run out so they are talking about building maybe a nuclear power plant there to get energy to cook this oil. But another problem looms.

This vein, if you can think of it as a vein, is now near the surface or on the surface and so they are in effect mining it with huge pits. And they have a huge lake they call a detailing lake. It is really pretty noxious stuff there. And environmentalists are very concerned about it. But, soon, this vein will duck under an overlay and economically, they won't be able to take off that overlay. So what they are going to have to did is develop it in situ. And they yet don't know, economically, whether that is doable or not. So although there are potentially enormous amounts of energy available there, how much can we really get out, net energy?

Now, we may be getting out less than nothing net energy. We may be putting in more energy from natural gas than we are getting out of the oil. But the natural gas is stranded. It is hard to ship and the oil is in high demand and so it makes dollar and cents sense to do this.

Then we have the oil shales and they are a little different. They are not just a very heavy oil. It is bound in a rock, and it can be released with heat and pressure. And these reserves, primarily in Colorado or Utah, are enormous, perhaps as large as the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. So why aren't we sanguine about our future since we have a lot of this in our country?

None of this has really been economically exploited so far. In the last few years, Shell has conducted an interesting experiment there. They have gone in and drilled a number of holes and frozen those so as to kind of make a frozen vessel because they don't want this oil they are producing to leak out to contaminate aquifers. And then they cook it for a year, drill some other holes in the middle and cook it for a year. And they have gotten meaningful amounts after some processing because it doesn't start out as an oil. They get some meaningful amounts of oil from it. But, you know, how much can we surge that? How much will it cost to build? What is really the energy profit ratio from that?

The news accounts of this have been much more optimistic than the Shell Oil scientist who gave a report in Denver, Colorado, a couple of years ago that I attended. And he said, I think, that it would be 2012 or 2013 before they even knew whether it would be economically feasible to develop those oil shales the way they were developing them. Potentially, there is an enormous amount of energy there.

Let me note also that there is an incredible amount of energy in the tides. The moon lifts the whole ocean, what,

2 or 3 feet. I carry two 5-gallon buckets of water, and they are heavy. This is a lot of energy. So why should we worry about the future? We have got all that energy from the tides. The reason to worry is that the energy is out there, but it is frightfully difficult to harness it. There is an old adage that says energy, to be useful, must be concentrated; and it is certainly not concentrated in the tides. And we have huge engineering problems in getting energy out of these oil shales. It may be there, but it is not something you would want to bet the ranch on.

The third one is coal. And there will be people who tell you don't worry about our future; we have 250 years of coal at current use rates. That is true. But be very careful when people say at current use rates because if we increase our use of coal only 2 percent, and I submit we will have to ramp up its use more than that as we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak and more and more energy is needed, but if we increase our use of coal only 2 percent, that 250 years shrinks to 85 years. You have to understand that at 2 percent increase, it doubles, that it is compounded, exponentially compounded, it doubles in 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years. It is eight times bigger in 105 years. This phenomenon, Albert Einstein said, was the most powerful force in the universe. He was asked, after the discovery of atomic energy, Dr. Einstein, what will be next? And he said, well, the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest, and that is what we have here in this exponential compound growth.

But for most of our uses, we can't use coal. You can use electricity with it, but you can't run your car with it. So if we are now going to gasify or liquefy the coal, which, by the way, is very easy to do. Hitler ran his whole country on it, and South Africa did a lot of that, too. So we know how to do that, but it takes energy to do that. And if the energy to do that comes from coal, now you have reduced the supply of coal to about 50 years.

But we live in a world economy, and we share our oil with the world. It really doesn't matter today who owns the resource. He who has the dollars can buy it. It is bid up, which is why it is different prices different days, and he who has the dollars buys it.

So if we have to share our oil with the world, there is not much of a way to do that. Since if we keep all our coal, we won't be buying oil from someplace else, and they will therefore have the oil, and to a very large degree energy is fungible. So our 50-year supply of oil, if we share it with the world, shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. Big deal. With only a 2 percent increase and the use of coal, if we convert it to a gas or a liquid and share it with the world, our 250 years shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. There is a lot of energy there.

And, by the way, when you use coal, you have reduced more greenhouse gasses than using either gas or oil. So those who are concerned about climate change will have some big concerns about using coal. If your only concerns are national security and peak oil, you have less concerns about using coal.

But, in any event, it is not our savior. You can't sleep well tonight because we have 250 years of coal at the current use rate. Because with an increased demand of only 2 percent, converting it to a gas or a liquid and sharing it with the world, that shrinks to 12\1/2\ years.

The next two subjects we are going to talk about briefly are sources of energy from nuclear. We get 8 percent of our total energy from nuclear. We get 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. When you drive home tonight, note every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if it weren't for nuclear energy.

I have some friends who were strong opponents of nuclear energy. They are very bright people. And now they are looking at a future where the trade-off may be between having more nuclear and shivering in the dark without enough energy for light and heat. And when they look at those two alternatives, they are taking a new look at nuclear.

There are problems with nuclear. There are three fundamentally different ways you can produce nuclear energy. One is from the light water reactor. That is the only energy source we use. It uses fission nuclear uranium, and there is a finite supply of fission nuclear uranium in the world. We need an honest broker to tell us how much is there at current use rates and how much will be there if we ramp up the use, and we will ramp up the use.

China is now aggressively designing new nuclear power plants. They are building a coal-fired power plant, two a week. They have got to. They have got 1.3 billion people who want to abandon their bicycle and buy a car, and they are faced with kind of a mass revolt if they don't permit their people to enjoy the benefits of an industrialized society like the rest of the world does.

By the way, China has a bit less coal than we. They are mining more of it, so their coal will end before ours. So they are building a lot of coal-fired power plants, but they are also, I understand, planning to build 50 nuclear power plants. We haven't built one in about 30 years in our country. There has never been an accident or a death. There are accidents in coal mines, a lot more in China than here. We do a pretty good job, but still we have accidents and people die. They die from black lung disease from breathing polluted air. They die at the railroad crossing being hit by the train. We never seem to have a concern about the people who die as a result of using coal.

No one has ever died, there has not been any serious accident with nuclear, and a large number of people are concerned about nuclear. And there are problems with the waste product of nuclear because the second choice is a breeder reactor. If, in fact, we run out of fission nuclear uranium, then we will have to go to a breeder reactor. Our only experience with that in this country is building nuclear weapons. We have no commercial breeder reactors. They do, as the name implies, produce fuel; and they produce more fuel than they use. So you are kind of home free, except you have a huge problem with moving this stuff around and enriching it, and it is weapons grade kinds of stuff, so there are a lot of concerns.

I just have a notion, Mr. Speaker, that anything that is so hot that I can't get close to it for a quarter of a million years ought to have enough energy left in it to do something useful in it, wouldn't you think? You see, we call this spent fuel, and we have taken out only a relatively few percent of the energy of this fuel.

I would like to challenge our engineering and scientific people, and we have the most creative and innovative society in the world, to figure out what we can do with this thing which is now a huge liability and we are fighting over where to put it. We have put billions of dollars into Yucca Mountain out in Nevada, and we may not put it there. It is now stored in the back 40 or underwater in our roughly 800 nuclear power plants in this country. So there are problems with nuclear.

But there are also problems with not having energy and not going to be able to make nitrogen fertilizer for corn and not having heat for your house, and we need to rethink those.

The type of nuclear that gets us home free is fusion. By the way, we do have a huge fusion reactor. It is called the sun. That is what it is doing up there, and we have lots of energy from the sun. I understand that more energy from the sun falls on the Earth on any one sunny day than we use in a whole year if we could only capture that.

By the way, we are using sun energy, of course. Almost every energy source we use comes from or came from the sun. It was the sun that caused the plants to grow from which coal was made. Boy, do I know that. As a little kid in Western Pennsylvania, we had a coal furnace and we bought coal, which went from dust to big blocks of coal, some so big I couldn't put them in the furnace. There was a sledgehammer there leaning against the wall, and I would break the lump of coal to put it in the furnace, and sometimes it would break open and there was a fern leaf. Boy, I remember the feelings that went through me, and they still kind of do, when I looked at that fern leaf. And I said to myself how long ago did that grow and fall into the bog and with time and pressure and Earth being washed over, it became whole.

Most people believe that all of the oil and gas that we have is the result of subtropical lakes from a very long time ago. We see it now in algae that grows and it falls to the bottom. It has

a cycle. It matures and falls to the bottom. Dirt washes in from the surrounding hills, more the next year. More dirt washes in. So most of our oil and gas is not in big lakes down there. It is trapped between grains of sand and rock and so forth. All of this, of course, is secondhand sun energy.

We get some direct sun energy. You can warm your house if your window faces south. It can produce electricity for you if you put solar panels on your roof. If you put a wind machine up, by the way, that is secondhand sun energy because the wind blows because of differential heating of the Earth.

It is no wonder, Mr. Speaker, when you look at what the sun does for us why many of our ancients worshipped the sun. As a matter of fact, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox was an ancient pagan holiday because a new spring had come. The day and night were of equal length. So the first Sunday after the first full moon, and I have no idea why after the first full moon, it was a celebration to the goddess of fertility. Let's have lots of animals and let our crops grow well, and they were appealing to the goddess of fertility to make that happen.

I wondered as a little kid what relationship chickens and eggs and bunnies had to the Resurrection, because we call it Easter; and I was a big boy before I learned that, of course, it didn't have any relationship. But as a little kid I lived on a farm, and I knew rabbits didn't lay eggs, but in my Easter basket were rabbits and eggs, and that confused me. And then I went to church and we talked about the Crucifixion. What in the heck do rabbits and eggs have to do with the Crucifixion? The answer, of course, is nothing.

But very early in Christianity we wanted to make it attractive to the pagans, so we attached pagan significance to Christian holidays, and these are symbols of fertility. I once had a few rabbits, and pretty soon I had a whole lot of rabbits. And we now have bantam chickens, and if you let them do what they would like to do, they steal a nest out and they hatch and you would have a lot of bantam chickens by fall. So these were examples of fertility, and that is why we had them there.

If you are counting on nuclear fusion to solve our problems, you are probably counting on the lottery to solve your personal economic problems. I would have plan B, and I support all the money, about $250 million a year, we spend in nuclear fusion. But, boy, I want to have a plan B. We are really home free if we have nuclear fusion, because it is producing the same kind of energy that is produced from the sun. We have essentially an infinite supply of the raw materials here to make it, and it is nonpolluting except for the heat that it produces. But that is my personal conviction. Others think that they are better; some think they are worse. I think the odds are about the same as the odds of your winning the lottery. So if you are comfortable with solving your personal financial problems winning the lottery, you are probably comfortable believing we are going to solve our energy problems with nuclear fusion.

Well, once we are through those and whatever we can get from nuclear for the long term and are willing to live with, then we come to the true renewables: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy, agricultural resources. There are a whole host of those. Let's just look at those one by one.

The solar industry, that is, the solar panels, quite miraculously just a little bit of silicon there, and it is converting sun rays into electricity, and I have them and they produce electricity and charge some big batteries, and we get lights and run power tools and so forth from the energy stored in the battery. That industry in 2000 represented .07 percent of our total energy. That has really grown since 2000. Today, it still represents far less than 1 percent. It is growing 30 percent a year, more than 30 percent a year.

They had some recent problems with silicon, because they are competing with the semiconductor industry, and they are growing so rapidly, and there weren't enough silicon plants. The silicon people were very edgy because they built some plants in the 1970s when oil was way up and then it dropped down to $10 a barrel and nobody wanted solar panels anymore, and they got stuck with factories for which they had no market for their product, and so the investors were unwilling. I think they are kind of getting by that because most people think that oil is not going down to anything near $10 a barrel in the future.

Solar electricity today is produced at about 25, 26 cents a kilowatt hour. That is high. But the cost of electricity is going up. And, by the way, the more we learn about these solar panels, the more we make and the cost comes down. But, unfortunately, the price of lead is going up; and still the cheapest, most cost-efficient battery for storing energy is the lead acid battery. So as the cost of the solar panels comes down, the cost of batteries goes up. So if you want a self- sufficient system, the cost of that total system is not declining. If you simply want a grid tie, produce enough electricity, you can run your meter backwards.

We are trying to get legislation through to encourage our States, and I think that is all we ought to do, because I am an advocate of States' rights, to enact what is called net metering, that if you produce more electricity to use, they will buy it from you. This distributed production, by the way, is enormously important from a national security perspective.

Unlike electricity, if you put a gallon of oil in a pipe and it goes a thousand miles, you get a gallon of oil out. You put electricity in a wire and if you run it far enough, you don't get anything out the other end, what is called line losses. So having distributed production has a lot of advantages. Not everything is down when the power plant is down. And, furthermore, you have less line loss because you are producing it closer to where it is used. So we ought to be using that a whole lot more than we are.

There are thin films and there are still some technical problems in developing those economically, but these thin films, and some of the silicon things, too, can be put in things like the shingles on your roof. They look just like any other shingle, but they produce electricity. The siding on your house. Indeed, there is glass that you can get. It will look like the glass with a dark filter on it, but there is glass that you can put in your windows that will let light in and produce electricity at the same time. So there are some exciting things that are being developed in this area.

I spent New Year's Eve in Shanghai, and we met in China and had lunch with the young man who about 5 years ago started what is now the second largest solar panel manufacturer in the world.

Suntec, I think he calls his industry, and they now have a subsidiary in this country.

By the way, the top five producers of solar cells are in China and Japan. Number one is Sharp, and that is Japan. We used to have Solarex out in my district, now BP Solar, used to be number two in the world. Now they are not even among the top ten in the world.

This is the most creative, innovative society in the world that invented the solar cell. I worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. We put the first solar powered satellite in space. The United States invented that. Like so much of the technology we invent, somebody else is benefiting from it.

I want the United States to be a leader in these areas. Indeed, I believe that we have such a creative, innovative society, that if we really challenge our people, we can become a world leader again; not just a world leader in how much oil we use, but a world leader in moving to these alternative ways of producing energy.

So I think there is a great future for solar, and I would like legislation out there that encourages people to put it on their roofs and encourages companies to build the plants. It is a national security issue.

Wind. Wind is now producing electricity in our country at about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. By the way, the leader in this in the world is little Denmark. Again, shame on us. The largest industrial country in the world, the leader technologically in the world, and Denmark is leading the world in building wind machines. They are really efficient.

The little ones we used to produce, the blades turned very fast and they might kill birds and baths. Now they have huge blades. A single blade may be 60, 70 feet long. You may have seen them being moved down the highway. They move very slowly. It would have to be a really debilitated bat or bird that got caught by one of those.

Indeed, if you are really concerned about bats and birds, then don't have picture windows. I am sure, not so many for the bats, but the bird, you are are going to lose more birds on your picture window than you will ever lose from that wind machine that you put up to produce electricity.

We have wind farms out in the West. In the East here there are some Senators that are big proponents of wind, but not in my backyard. The NIMBY factor is very prominent. They would like that, but not in their view shed, thank you.

You know, pretty is as pretty does, and I think these wind machines are beautiful. Knowing what they do, I think they are very stylish just on their own. But knowing what they are doing they become even handsomer.

Geothermal. Now, this is true geothermal. If you go to Iceland, there is not a chimney in Iceland because all of their heating, all of their energy like that in Iceland comes from geothermal. They are close enough to the molten core of the Earth that they can get hot water. That is how they heat their houses and produce their energy there.

We call geothermal something which is a really good idea, but it is not geothermal. We call geothermal those heat pumps that we tie to ground or groundwater, rather than rather stupidly to the air.

If you think about your air conditioner in the summer, what you are trying to do is heat up the outside air. That may be 90 degrees. If you are trying to heat up groundwater in Maryland here, it is 56 degrees. That is really cool compared to 90 degrees, isn't it? And what you are trying to do in the wintertime is to cool the outside air with your heat pump.

It is a whole lot easier to cool 56 degree air. That looks really warm compared to 10 degree air. That 60 degree water is very warm compared to 10 degree air. So you get a lot more efficiency out of your heat pump. People will call that geothermal. That is okay. Please put it in quotes, because it is not true geothermal. True geothermal ties you to the Earth.

We are going to have to come back another day to talk about the rest of this, because I just wanted to skip down here to ethanol. Because there was this week, and we have only about 5 minutes remaining, there was this week in the Washington Post on Sunday, the Outlook Section, a really interesting article. ``Corn Can't Solve Our Problem,'' it says.

The first paragraph is really interesting. ``The world has gone full circle. A century ago our first transportation, biofuels, the hay and oats fed to our horses, were replaced by gasoline. Today, ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans have begun edging out gasoline and diesel. Lost in the ethanol induced euphoria, however, is the fact that three of our most fundamental needs, food, energy and a livable and sustainable environment, are now in direct conflict.''

Interesting. I have here an article, and again we will come back again to talk about this, a really interesting talk given by Hyman Rickover 50 years ago the 14th of this May to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he talks about this. He cautioned that if we try to get energy from our agriculture, we are going to be in competition with food.

Let me read from the jump page here what they say about this. It is really interesting.

``But because of how corn ethanol currently is made, only about 20 percent of each gallon is new energy.'' Eighty percent of all the energy you get out of a gallon of ethanol simply comes from the fossil fuels that are kind of recycled. The natural gas which made the nitrogen fertilizer, almost half the energy producing corn comes from that. The oil that made the tractor and the tires and the diesel fuel that pulled it through the fields and the energy used to mine the phosphate and potash rock and so forth, only 20 percent of every gallon represents new energy.

So they say this: If every one of our 70 million acres on which corn was grown in 2006, if we use all of that corn to produce ethanol, we would displace only 12 percent of our gasoline. And if you discount that for the fossil fuel simply recycled by growing the corn and processing the corn to produce ethanol, you now get just 2.4 percent of our gasoline displaced by ethanol. If we use all of our corn to produce ethanol, they very wisely note that you could have reached that same objective by getting your car tuned up and putting air in your tires.

Now, we are making a lot of corn ethanol. But compared to the 21 million barrels of oil that we use a day, 70 percent of that in transportation, we have produced relatively negligible amounts of ethanol. But it was enough to drive the price of corn from $2.11 a bushel in September to $4.08 a bushel in November, and up from that. And the poor Mexicans now are hungry because their tortillas have doubled in price, and my dairy farmers are going bankrupt because the cost of the food they feed their cows is up.

Just a caution, that one needs to be realistic rather than euphorically optimistic about how much energy we are going to get out of these alternatives.

I would like to say in closing, Mr. Speaker, that I am exhilarated by this. There is no exhilaration like meeting and overcoming a big problem. And we have a huge challenge. I believe with proper leadership, we may not have much energy, we have even less real leadership in this area, with proper leadership, I think that Americans could be exhilarated by the challenge. I think we would again become a major exporter with all of the technologies for producing energy from these alternatives.

Mr. Speaker, this is not a bad news story. This is a really good news story. America can lead the way. They can again be a real leader in the world. And I can imagine Americans going to bed at night saying, today I used less energy than I did yesterday and I am just fine. Tomorrow I am going to do even better. I think there would be fewer people on alcohol and watching bad movies and so forth if they had some real direction.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 24 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, March 30, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, with my colleagues Mr. Gallegly and Mr. Blumenauer, I have introduced H.R. 137 to establish felony-level jail time of up to 3 years for those who violate the law against animal fighting. H.R. 137 would amend current law to toughen the maximum jail time from a one-year misdemeanor.

The penalties in the existing federal animal fighting statute are too weak. The upgraded penalty better aligns federal law with state law. Almost all states have established felony-level penalties for illegal animal fighting activities. State laws commonly authorize jail time of 3 to 5 years or more for animal fighting.

George Bernard Shaw once stated, ``The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them, that's the essence of inhumanity.'' We should not be indifferent to the reprehensible underground organized crime of animal fighting, which is not only cruel but poses threats to public health and safety.

The Humane Society of the U.S. estimates that there are at least 40,000 dogfighters in America. Cockfighting has been tied to the spread of bird flu. Animal fighting spawns a number of other criminal activities, such as illegal gambling and using and selling drugs. Even more disturbing is the conclusion by many experts that acts of cruelty against animals are precursors to violence against humans. The felony- level penalties against animal fighting in H.R. 137 are necessary, and I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Madam Speaker, I want to talk about a subject today that at least five groups in our country have a common cause in. They come from quite different perspectives, but they all end up at the final common pathway. And these groups are those who are concerned with national security. They are concerned because our country has only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use. And as the President says, we get a lot of that from countries that don't even like us.

And so those who are concerned about national security are urging that we make a transition from these fossil fuels, most of which are owned by countries over there, and move to renewables so that we can have a sustainable source of energy for our country from a national security perspective.

There is a second group of people who believe that our burning of these fossil fuels is polluting the environment to an unacceptable level. And it is not just the greenhouse gases, because that introduces us to a third group. But it is all of the other pollutants that come in the atmosphere as a result of using these fossil fuels in all the ways that we use them to produce energy, coal, fire, power plants, our automobiles, our trains, heating our buildings, all the ways that we use energy.

By the way, you can make an argument that even if you are producing more CO2, that may not produce global warming if you are producing it by burning hydrocarbons in a way that puts a lot of other pollutants up in the atmosphere.

I remember a number of years ago when Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, was noting that if we had a nuclear war we might go through what he called nuclear winter; and the trash thrown up into the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear explosions, he

thought, might block enough of the Sun's rays that there would be a cooling of the Earth so that we would go through a kind of an ice age. Indeed, there is some natural phenomena that give some credibility to that possibility.

Whenever there is a major volcano that goes off, an eruption that throws millions of tons of trash up there that may circulate for a couple of years before all the fine particles finally come down, we can see a degree or two of temporary cooling in the Earth as a result of that. So there is the environmental group that is concerned about our excessive burning of these fossil fuels and the pollutants that come from that, and they are very interested in conservation, in efficiency, and moving to true renewables.

And then there is the growing group of those who are concerned that the release of these greenhouse gases, CO2 being one of the major ones, is warming our Earth.

Now, it is true that our Earth is warmer than it has been in the last 10,000 years, since the last Ice Age, and maybe as warm as it has been, some say, in the last million years if in fact we have been here that long. It is not certain that there is a cause-effect relationship between CO2 and warming.

But when you go back through history, and they do this in Antarctica by doing ice borings, and that is a desert down there; they have less than 2 inches of precipitation per year; it doesn't fall as snow, it falls as tiny little ice granules, and that accumulates very slowly. There is nearly 2 miles of ice piled up at the South Pole down there. And so with borings you can go in there and you can look back through tens of thousands of years, and the scientists can tell pretty much what the climate was like and what the temperatures were by the kinds of materials that were deposited there during that time. And they note that every time that CO2 was up, the Earth was warmer. So that at least is a presumptive evidence that CO2 certainly as a greenhouse gas is the cause of the present global warming that we are looking at.

And, of course, what the global warming people want is to move away from fossil fuels, because what we are doing with fossil fuels is releasing into the atmosphere carbon dioxide that was sequestered by plants a very long time ago.

As a little boy, I knew that that is what was happening, because we lived up in western Pennsylvania and we had a coal furnace; as a matter of fact, we didn't buy it, we mined it on our own farm.

There was an abandoned mine on the farm and we got the services of a miner in the little local town and he opened up the mine and we shared the coal that he got from it, and we would use coal as it came from the mine, some big chunks and down to very small ones, and some were too big to put in the furnace. And as a little boy, when it was my time to tend the furnace I would have to go down and sometimes break a lump of coal so that I could get it into the furnace.

I remember taking that sledgehammer that stood by the wall there and breaking the lump of coal, and once in a while it would open up and there would be a fern leaf. I remember as a little kid looking at that fern leaf and wondering, how long ago did that fern live and die and fall over and now be compressed under dirt and with time it finally converted to coal? So as a little boy I knew that the coal that we were burning came from plants that lived a very long time ago, and they had sequestered the CO2 then over thousands of years perhaps.

And now what we are doing in a relatively few years, because we are in the age of oil, only about 150 years now in the age of oil, and we are now releasing into the atmosphere all the CO2 that has been taken out of the atmosphere over a very long time period.

So what the global warming concerned people are interested in is an energy economy that uses the energy that we are producing. If you are burning the tree that grew, you are now releasing into the atmosphere the CO2 which the tree took out of the atmosphere. So although, and if it was possible, I am not sure that it is, that we could get as much energy from these alternative renewable sources that we are now getting from fossil fuels, you can use them to your heart's desire and you wouldn't increase the CO2 in the atmosphere because for every pound of CO2 that you released into the atmosphere, that pound was taken out of the atmosphere by the tree or the grass or whatever grew that you were getting energy from.

And so what the people concerned with global warming want us to do is to move as quickly as we can from fossil fuels to these renewables. So they have common cause with the environmental people and with the national security people.

And then there is a group of people growing, not large yet but growing, who believe that, even if you don't have any concern about the environment, even if you don't have any concern about global warming, even if you don't think that it is a national security risk to be getting so much of our oil from over there, it just isn't going to be there because we are going to have such a phenomenon as peak oil. By the way, our country reached that plateau in 1970. We will talk about that in a few moments.

And then there is a fourth group that really ought to have common cause here, and that is the group that is concerned about what could America do to get back as a premier manufacturing Nation? And you know that we are not now, because all you have to do is to look at the cars on the road and where they are made, and I think more than half of them are now made overseas. And all you have to do is go into a store and buy things and just look at the tag at where it is made. And I have to look and look and look to find something that is made in the United States anymore. You would make a lot of money if your wager was that the first thing you pick up is going to be made in China, because almost always the first thing you pick up is made in China.

So we desperately need an area in which we can be premier, in which we can export to the world, and I would submit that that would be in the energy efficiency and alternative energy area. There is no society in the world that is half as creative and innovative as the American people if we are challenged and if we see the need and if we see the goal.

So I wanted to talk today about this phenomenon which I think that these five groups have common cause in: Those that are concerned about national security, those that are concerned about the environment and isn't our air polluted enough, those that are concerned with global warming, those that believe that by and by the oil just isn't going to be there, the Moon isn't made out of green cheese and the Earth isn't made out of oil and, quite obviously, it is not going to last forever, and then the group that is looking for something where we can again become a premier engineering and manufacturing Nation. And, of course, we have now relinquished that premier position to other parts of the world.

The first chart that I have here kind of explains a lot of our dilemma, the World According to Oil. And I found this, and I found it so intriguing that I have shown it now a couple of times. But what this does is to show you what our planet would look like if the size of the nation was relative to how much oil it had. And, boy, do we have a warped geography here.

Here is Saudi Arabia, and it dominates. Look how big Saudi Arabia is. How many times could we put the United States in Saudi Arabia, 20? That is about how much more oil they have than we have. Canada looks pretty big here; they have got a meaningful amount of oil compared to the lower 48, compared to their size. Look at Venezuela down here, it just dwarfs the rest of South America. And look at the North of Africa here.

The countries that we think of as being important in the world economy like England and Europe and so forth, look at them there, they look like little splotches here on the globe if the countries were sized according to the amount of oil that they have.

Iraq. So you can see why people are concerned about Iraq, it is a pretty big reservoir of oil. Little Kuwait. If you look at a map of that part of the world, you will see that Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein thought that it looked like a province down there in the most southeastern part of Kuwait that he wanted

to reclaim it and that is why he went in more than a decade ago, but it is tiny compared to Iraq. You could fit the United States into Kuwait five, six times. Here is Qatar, a little nation so small you can hardly see it on the globe but there it is probably as large as the United States. Iran, now problems with Iran, note how large Iran is.

Something of particular note on this. The two countries that contain about 2\1/2\ billion people total, more than 1 billion now in India, and 1,300,000,000 in China, and look at how big they are relative to oil. Russia north of them, which has only 140 million people, dwarfs them. By the way, notice how big Russia is, 1\1/2\ or maybe twice as big as the United States, it doesn't have all that much oil. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves, this is about 2 percent of that total volume of oil nations there. And Russia looks big as an oil exporter because they don't use that much oil so they can export, but they really don't have all that much oil compared to countries like Saudi Arabia and so forth.

The next chart is a prediction that was made by a very famous speech that was given 51 years ago the 8th day of this month. And I will submit that, within a decade, this may well be recognized as the most important speech given in the last century. It was a speech given by M. King Hubbert, who was an oil geologist and he worked for the Shell Oil Company. And there was a convention of oil people in San Antonio, Texas on the 8th day of March 1956, and he got up and gave an absolutely audacious speech. It was inconceivable and unbelievable when he gave the speech.

What he said was that the United States, and if you look back in your history at that point in time we were king of oil; we were producing more oil and I think exporting more oil than any other country in the world. And he predicted that this giant in oil would reach its maximum production of oil in just about 14 years, and he was predicting that by about 1970 we would reach our maximum production of oil.

Now, he was talking only about the lower 48. He couldn't imagine at that time that we would be able to go out and drill in the Gulf of Mexico where there are now 4,000 oil wells, I think, and he did not take into account that we might find oil. I expect the technology for getting it out of there probably would have been very difficult at that time. So he was predicting the lower 48. And that would be everything here of the rest of the U.S. and Texas. You see how big Texas was here. Maybe a third in total oil we have ever produced has come from Texas. And that would be the lower 48.

As you see, right on schedule in 1970, his prediction came true. That shocked a lot of people. And whereas he had been an object of ridicule before that, now he became kind of a legend in his own time.

And then we found that huge strike of oil in Alaska in Prudhoe Bay up at Dead Horse, I have been there; I saw the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline, through which for a number of years now about one-fourth of our total oil has flowed. And then the nongas liquids you see up here. If you add those two in, there was just a bump on the way down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

And here we are today. In the lower 48, we are producing considerably less than half of the oil that we produced in 1970. And if you even add to that the liquids made from gases and the Gulf of Mexico oil, now that is recent enough that people can remember that, and you may remember the hype that went on over that. Gee, we don't have to worry about oil for the foreseeable future. We found this enormous amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico; and, as I mentioned, there are about 4,000 oil wells there. Notice that hardly made a blip in our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

The next chart shows a depiction of Hubbert's Peak, and this is from a very interesting publication. This is in a publication by CERA. Now, CERA is one of the few organizations that believes that you don't need to be worrying about oil for the next number of years, and they have this chart in their publication and they intend to repudiate and ridicule M. King Hubbert with this chart. And they are saying that M. King Hubbert couldn't have been right because look at the actual data here.

Now, this is the total U.S. production, the red, and the yellow is the Hubbert's lower 48. And what he is saying was that Hubbert must have been all wrong, because the actual lower 48 production are these green things down here, and they think that is far enough away from the yellow that his prognostication is repudiated by this.

I would think the average person looking would say, well, gee, he was right on. Wasn't he? He said it was going to peak in 1970, that is 1970. He said it would go downhill after that. Well, it didn't go downhill quite as fast as he thought it would, but it certainly has gone downhill after that. Maybe he couldn't have imagined that we would drill more than \1/2\ million oil wells in this country. We have more oil wells drilled in this country than all the rest of the world put together.

Now, the red here reflects that contribution from Prudhoe Bay and from the Gulf of Mexico that we saw in the previous one, that little blip going down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much for his kind words.

This is, in fact, the 25th time that I have been here. And, wow, it was the 14th, just about a year ago I came here

for the first time, the 14th of last month, March. And we were putting our charts together and we were trying to decide what to call this phenomenon. Were we going to call it the ``great rollover,'' when you reach the top and start down the other side, or were we going to call it ``peak oil''? And we had a long conversation in the office about what we should call it, and we finally decided we would call it ``peak oil.''

Now, I didn't know that there were some other people out there already calling it ``peak oil'' because I am a whole lot wiser now than I was then, but this kind of indicates the status of the recognition of the problem a year ago, and I was one of the more interested people in the Congress in this and I didn't even know what to call it. I was arguing with myself and with the staff. We were discussing it. Should we call it the ``great rollover,'' and it will be a great rollover, or should we call it ``peak oil''? We finally settled on ``peak oil,'' and now today there is an increasing number of people who are concerned about peak oil.

Yes, sir.

Well, thank you. I think there are several reasons for this. One is an irrational confidence, worship almost, of the marketplace, and technology. And the third is that people just don't like to think about tough, hard things. I love to think about those things because there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting a big challenge and overcoming it. So this is exhilarating to me, and there are many people that don't like this. And my wife tells me that I shouldn't be doing this because don't you remember that in ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news? And my response is this is a good news story. If we start today, we will have a less bumpy ride than if we start tomorrow.

Yes, sir.

I want to thank my friend for joining me. This is absolutely a bipartisan issue. I don't know that energy and oil knows the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. So I am very pleased that you joined me on the floor.

I might say just a word about these two philosophies that are keeping us from really focusing on this issue. One is an almost reference for the marketplace. There are many people who believe that the marketplace is both omniscient, it knows everything; and it is omnipotent, it is all powerful and it will solve everything. Well, I believe the market is really very powerful. But, you know, there are some things that even God can't do. God can't make a square circle, can he? So there are some things that the marketplace won't be able to do.

I do not think that the market signals will be able to be responded to quickly enough to meet this challenge. If there were infinite resources, then this blind faith in the market might have some relevance. But there clearly are not infinite resources. The amount of oil out there is, in fact, finite.

The other is the near worship of scientists and technology: Don't worry, they will fix it. I mentioned to one of our really high officials in government that peak oil was a reality and that it just wasn't going to be there in the future in the amounts that we need for our economy. And he said, Well, I guess when that happens, the price will go up and people will use less and they will find something else and that solves the problem. Don't worry about it, they will fix it.

Well, I point to two different societies: The Mayan society down in Central America. That didn't get fixed and they are gone. Our cliff dwellers out in the West. I am sure that a number of folks have been there and seen those cliffs, and their world is gone. And I am sure when it was deteriorating, they were saying to each other, Don't worry, they will take care of it.

Easter Island, a vigorous civilization there, and when we finally found the last survivors of it they were living in caves. They were eating rats and each other because they had done, in that little part of the planet, what we may one day do to our total planet; that is, they were living beyond the renewable resources of their little island there in Easter Island and somebody didn't fix it. There wasn't somebody there to fix it.

The next chart looks at a number of the experts and what their predictions are as to when this peak oil that Mr. Markey was talking about is going to occur. And we are now here in 2007 and notice that there is a large number of them here: Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, Matt Simmons. Several of these I know personally. And their predictions are all in the very, very near timeframe. As a matter of fact, Deffeyes believes that we now have passed peak oil. He said he used to be a prognosticator and now he is an historian. He is now looking back at the event of peak oil. And then we have a few that believe it will be between 2010 and 2016. And then CERA. CERA is the largest one here. Shell. No visible peak. Very few who believe that it may be some time off in the future.

We will have an opportunity in a few moments to talk about CERA and some of their projections. But notice that most, the large percentage of all of those who have been looking at this and studying this believe that peak oil is either present or imminent.

The next chart is a really interesting one. And if you had only one chart to look at, this I think is the most instructive of all of the charts that we have because on this one chart, it shows the discovery, and that is the large bars here. And you see that back in the 1940s we were discovering lots and in the 1950s, and, boy, in the 1960s and 1970s huge amounts of oil. But notice what has happened. Since about 1980 it has been down, down, down. And that is in spite of ever better technologies for discovering oil and ever better incentives.

When Reagan came to office, that was in 1980, and we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak; so we knew darn well that M. King Hubbert was right, that the United States had reached its peak and we were sliding down the other side of the peak. And I really liked Ronald Reagan. I can like a person without liking everything that they do. And I thought then and I am more convinced now that his solution to this oil problem was totally the wrong solution. His belief was that if you gave them a profit incentive they would go out there and find it. So they gave them a profit incentive, and, boy, did they drill. And I don't have it with me, but I have a chart that shows the number of wells that were drilled and how much oil was found. And drilling didn't help. You can't find what is not there and you can't pump what you haven't found. So in spite of ever better techniques like 3D seismic and computer modeling, we now pretty much know what the whole globe looks like geologically except maybe we would like to know a little more about Saudi Arabia and some of

the countries around the Caspian. But largely we are pretty aware of what the geology is, and we know that gas and oil can occur in only certain unique geological formations.

The dark line here represents the use of oil. And you see that for a long while we were finding enormously more oil than we were using. But from about 1980 on, we were finding less and less and using more and more.

By the way, notice this little blip here in the 1970s. This is the result of the Arab oil embargo, and had this curve kept going up at the rate it was before, where would it be? There was a stunning statistic up through the Carter years, through this time; every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Wow. What that says is that when you have used half of all the oil in the world, there would be what, one decade left at current use rates? Now, obviously, that couldn't happen because you are not going to use it and then fall off a cliff at the end because the last remaining oil is going to be harder and harder to get. But since about 1980 on, we have now been eating into or reserves, and you will have to take some of this surplus here and fill in this area here. And then what will the future look like?

This chart presumes that it will peak in about 2010. And you can make the future, within limits, look differently, depending upon how aggressive you want to be in using enhanced oil recovery and if you want to drill everywhere in the world the equivalent of the half million wells that we have drilled in this country. If you drilled 10 wells rather than one in the Oil Patch, you obviously would get the oil out quicker. You are not going to get any more oil out probably, but you will get it out more quickly.

So there may be some argument about what the future looks like, but there can be no argument that you can't pump what you haven't found. Now, if you put a smooth curve over this discovery curve, the area under that curve represents the total amount of our discoveries. That is the equivalent of adding up all these little individual bars. And if you look at the area under the use curve, that will be the amount of oil that we have used.

Now, obviously, at the end of the day, those two areas are going to be the same. So unless you think that we are going to reverse this discovery curve and find a lot more oil, and some people do think that, by the way, and we will talk about that in a few moments, but unless you think that we are going to find a lot more oil, the future cannot look very much different than this because you can't pump what you haven't found.

Because you can't pump what you haven't found, and the area under this discovery curve cannot be different than the area under the use curve. There are many people who are projecting uses that would just indicate that we are going to have to find enormously more oil in the future. One of those projections is in the next chart.

This is from our Energy Information Agency, and this is projections of discoveries. Now, they didn't draw a really smooth curve. They took in some of the big humps, but they could have smoothed this whole thing out.

This is the discovery curve we were just looking at. I think you can recognize that, way up here in the seventies and down, down, down since then. Back in about 2000 they were projecting what we would find in the future. Now, they used some very interesting assumptions here.

The USGS has done a series of simulations. They have some computer modeling, and they have done a whole series of computer modelings, thousands of these, with different inputs. If this was true, if that was true, then what would the likely amount of yet-to-be-discovered oil be. And they have charted those things, and they have the frequency on the ordinate, and on the abscissa they have the amount of oil yet to be found.

Now, this is all a computer game. They simply are making some guesses, assumptions; and they are putting those into this computer model and they are running that model; and as they change the assumptions, they will change the amount of oil they think we will find.

So they have gone to the midpoint of that, and they have said that was F, they call it F, and somehow that got distorted to P and they are now talking about probabilities, which is just bizarre, because these are not probabilities. But this is the fraction of oil that you will find more or find less than this.

So what did they have here? Three of these curves. They have the P- 95, that is 95 percent probability they say. Then they have the P-50. That is really F-50 in the data they took this from. And then they have the 5. What they are saying is that since 50 is halfway between 5 and 95 it is the mean and therefore that is the most probable. So their projection when they made the chart was that this downward slope was now going to be reversed and we were going to start going up.

Of course, if they really are probabilities, and it didn't start as that, it started as these fractional things, but it ended up being projected here as probabilities, if they really are probabilities, there should be another green line down here and another blue line down here.

It is like that little funnel-shaped thing you see from the hurricane. Tomorrow you are pretty certain where it is going to be. The day after tomorrow, you are less certain, so that gets to be a big funnel as you go out. So that is what these various probabilities are.

Now, not surprisingly, the actual data points have followed the 95 percent probability. If you say those are probabilities, obviously this 95 percent probable is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable. But for what it is worth, the actual data points for a decade or so have been following the 95 percent probability.

The next chart, this is from the Hirsch Report. I might digress for a moment to note what the Hirsch Report is. There have been two major studies that are financed by our government. One was financed by the Department of Energy and that was SAIC report. Dr. Hirsch, which is why this is called the Hirsch Report, Dr. Hirsch was the leading investigator on that, and this came out, oh, a year-and-a-half ago roughly. I think we will have some quotes from it a little later. But they looked at this situation, peaking of world oil production, impacts, mitigation and risk management. It is going to peak. What should we do about it, what can we do about it, is what was in this report.

This is one of the charts from this report, and these are USGS estimates of ultimate recovery. This is the F that I was talking about. They somehow changed it to P. But this is low, 95 percent; high, 5 percent; and the mean, or expected value, 3,000.

Just a word about what these numbers are. These are thousand gigabarrels. Now, we use gigabarrel because a billion in England, I understand, is a million million. A billion in this country is a thousand million. So if you are talking about billions, you may confuse some people. But apparently everybody knows what a giga is, and a giga is our billion. So we are talking about gigabarrels of oil.

So this is 2,248 gigabarrels of oil. That is about, what, 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. That, by the way, is roughly the amount of oil that most of the world's experts believe we have found, and we have used about half of that. We have used about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil, so there are about another 1,000 that we have yet to use.

But what this prognostication indicates is that we are going to find as much more oil, another roughly 1,000 gigabarrels to bring this 2 up to 3, we are going to find as much more oil as all the oil that is still left in the world. Now, that is conceivable. I think it is about as likely as winning the lottery. I don't think there is much probability of that happening.

But even if that was true, and that is the stunning thing that this chart shows, even if that is true, that only takes the peak out to 2016. That is just around the corner. That is 9 years away, even if that is true.

This is the power of the exponential function. One of the most interesting lectures I have ever heard was given by Dr. Albert Bartlett, emeritus, University of Colorado, no relative of mine. I wish he were. I wish I had some of his genes. He gives some fascinating explanations of the exponential function. One of them I think is worth spending just a moment on.

The story is told that chess was developed in an ancient kingdom, and the king was so pleased at the invention of chess that he asked the inventor to come in and he promised him any reasonable thing. And the inventor of the chess game said, O, king, I am a very simple person. I have simple needs. If you will just take my chess board and put a grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the fourth square and keep doubling until you have filled all of the 64 squares on my chess board, that will be reward enough.

The king said to himself, simple fellow. He could have asked for something meaningful, and all he has asked for is a few grains of wheat on a chess board. Of course, the king could not deliver, because it is my understanding that it would take the world's harvest today of a decade to fill the chess board. That is the power of exponential growth.

Albert Einstein was asked about what the next great power in the universe would be after the discovery of nuclear energy, and he said the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound interest.

Well, Dr. Albert Bartlett's fascinating 1-hour lecture, and just do a Google search for Dr. Bartlett, Albert Bartlett and energy, and you can pull it up, and he has some very interesting illustrations in there.

He says the biggest failure of our industrialized society is the failure to understand the exponential growth. But even if we were to find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists, it would push the peak out to only 2016.

Now, if you use enhanced oil recovery and pump a lot of CO2 down there and live steam and so forth, maybe you can push it out to 2037, but look what happens after that. Then you fall off a cliff, is what they say in this prognostication.

The next chart is an interesting chart from CERA. In an article entitled ``Undulating Plateau Versus Peak Oil,'' it says there is not going to be any peak. I looked at this, and, by golly, it looks like a peak to me. It goes up and then it comes down.

Now, they have several different assumptions in here, and they are pretty easy to sort out, I think. This is roughly that 2 trillion, the current known amount of oil; and if that is all the oil there is, they agree that the peak is pretty imminent. But they believe that we are going to find about as much more conventional oil as still exists in reserves. If that is true, then the peak moves out only this far.

Then they think we are going to get a lot of oil from the unconventional oil sources, like the Canadian tar sands and our western oil shales and the really heavy oil from Venezuela; and if we get that, then we are going to go up that high plateau. But this is still a plateau

I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids and 2 great grandkids. Wouldn't it be nice if we left a little energy for them? We are bequeathing them, not with my votes, but we are bequeathing them the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. I would like to leave them a little energy, thank you, which is why I don't vote to drill in ANWR and I don't vote to drill offshore. I think there is a real moral element to this discussion.

If we are going to bequeath them this horrendous debt, which I think is immoral in itself, then I think it is doubly immoral that we give them a world from which we have raped all the readily available energy. Someone suggested in the future they may look back at what we have done and say to themselves, how could the monsters have done that? I hope that they won't be able to say that about this generation, because I hope that we will do better.

Well, this curve that they meant to repudiate, peak oil, I think confirms there will be a peak oil.

The next chart here is a statement from one of the experts in this field, Dr. Laherrere, and this is what he says. The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery, to reverse the current trend, which is going down, and it is going to go up, 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, he says, 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.

And we found a pretty big one just recently out in the Gulf of Mexico, under, what, 7,000 feet of water, roughly 30,000 feet of rock. If you notice, they aren't developing that yet. I am told, and not everything I am told is true because it is sometimes hard to get the correct facts, but I am told that they will start developing that when oil is $211 a barrel, because that is what it is going to cost to get it out of there. I am not sure whether that is true or not.

The next chart, I mentioned the oil chart that we showed before as being the single chart I would use if I had only one. If I was awarded two charts to use to talk about this, this would be the second one I would use, the upper part of it. This is a really revealing chart.

This goes back through about 400 years of, I generally say 5,000 years of, recorded history. Hyman Rickover referred to it as 8,000 years of recorded history.

I might digress for just a moment. I hope to come to the floor the 15th of this May to talk about a really, really interesting speech that Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, gave to a group of physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 50 years ago the 15th of this May.

He notes that we have 8,000 years of recorded history. He said at that time, 50 years ago, we were about 100 years into the age of oil. This now introduces us to that age of oil.

It was introduced, of course, by the Industrial Revolution which started with wood, the hills of New England, the mountains that were denuded, taking charcoal to England to make iron. Up in Frederick County, which I have the honor of representing, there is Catoctin Furnace up there, which is a little smelter up there, and they denuded the hills up in Gambro where Camp David is. They denuded those hills to make charcoal for that furnace. It is now a historic site. The Industrial Revolution began with the use of wood. The Stanley Steamer used wood.

On the ordinate here is the quadrillion BTUs. This is a measure of the total amount of energy produced. Notice that is pretty far down here. Then we found coal. Boy, then the Industrial Revolution took off. But it really took off when we found gas and oil. And notice how that is standing up on end. And notice what happened at the Arab oil embargo here in the seventies.

Where would we be if that hadn't happened? That was really a wake-up call. As a result of that, we have enormously more efficient appliances than we had then. Your air conditioner is probably three times as efficient as it was then. Too bad our cars didn't follow that path, isn't it?

Well, the interesting thing is that the world's population just about followed this curve. For these 8,000 years of recorded history, we had half a billion to a billion people worldwide. Now with the industrial revolution, the population has exploded. We now have almost 7 billion people in the world.

There is, in Hyman Rickover's speech to those physicians 50 years ago, a fascinating discussion of the contribution of energy to the development of civilization.

I hope to come to the floor on May 15 and we will spend the whole hour talking about his speech. It was so prophetic. As a matter of fact, he predicted that if we start making too much energy from a food substance, the price of food will go up. We have made trifling amounts of ethanol from corn, and we have doubled the price of corn. We are hurting the poor people who use tortillas because they are made out of corn. My dairymen are financially dying because the price of corn has doubled and the price of milk does not justify that feed cost. They are losing money month by month.

Well, this is striking symbolism here. In another 100-150 years, we will be down the other side of the age of oil. This is going to fall off.

Is there any reason that the world shouldn't follow the microcosm of the United States? M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956 that we would peak in 1970. We did. He predicted the world would be peaking about now. If he was right about the United States, why

shouldn't he be right about the world, and why shouldn't we have been doing something about that?

Since 1980, we have known very well that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. If he was right about the United States, maybe he would be right about the world. If it is true that the world's oil production would peak about now, then no matter what we do, drill a half million wells, like we drill in the United States, which would be millions worldwide, it still goes downhill no matter what we have done. Our production is downhill.

Very interesting, in 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a blip: 300 years. What will our world look like? Our next chart introduces us to that.

Sooner or later, whether we like it or not, we will transition from fossil fuels because they will one day be gone. We will transition from fossil fuels to renewables. This chart looks at the options that we have. We have some finite sources, and we need to come back for another hour and talk in detail about some of these finite sources that we have here and what their potential is, and then let the listener judge as to what contribution they think will be made from this.

One of the challenges we have is the fantastic density of energy in our fossil fuels. One barrel of oil has in it the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year long. Hyman Rickover gives some fascinating examples in his speech to those physicians nearly 50 years ago. He said that each worker in the factory had at his disposal the power equivalent of 244 men turning the wheels and so forth; that every family had the mechanical system, stoves and vacuum cleaners, toasters, that represented the work of 33 full-time faithful household servants. He said 100,000 men pushed your car down the road, and the equivalent energy of 700,000 men pushed a jet plane through the sky.

Two little examples to help realize this, just think how far one gallon of gasoline or diesel, how far that one gallon of gasoline or diesel takes you. I drive a Prius. It drives 50 miles on a gallon. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles?

If you go out and work really hard all day, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now energy-wise electricity is about half the cost of gasoline, but about 25 cents worth of electricity, and that may be humbling to represent that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel, but that is the reality. And that is why we have such an incredibly high standard of living, we have this incredible energy source at our disposal.

The challenge is to transition to renewable forms of energy that will provide the same quality of life. We have some finite resources that we can go through. The tar sands, the oil shales, the coal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion. We don't have time today to talk about these in detail. We will come back and talk about those in detail. And then all of the renewables. These will one day be gone, except for nuclear. We will talk about nuclear. If we ever get fusion, we are home free. I think that is most unlikely. If we go to breeder reactors, we buy some problems, but then we have relatively secure energy if you can handle the waste, and so forth, from that.

But there are only so much tar sands, oil shale, and coal. They come at great expense. They are pretty polluting processes. Ultimately, we will be down here, getting all of our energy from these resources: Solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy, agricultural resources, soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass.

Now there is a lot of talk about cellulosic ethanol. I understand the President on television was saying that there is going to be limited amounts of energy we can get from ethanol because already we have doubled the price of corn. So now we need to turn to biomass, to cellulosic ethanol.

Cellulosic ethanol is liberating the glucose that is so tightly bound in the starch molecule that enzymes in our body can't liberate it, but there are microbes that live in the guts of the wood-eating cockroach, cryptocercus, and in the stomach of cows and sheep and goats and so forth that does that for them. So the cellulosic ethanol is liberating the glucose from the big cellulose molecule.

Waste energy. Just a word of caution, that huge stream of waste we have is the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. In an energy deficient world, there will be nowhere near as much waste as we have now. We jolly well ought to be using the waste energy now. It is a much better use of this waste than burying it in a landfill, but it will not be the ultimate solution to our problem.

Hydrogen. I want to make sure that everyone understands that hydrogen is not an energy source. We talk about it because when you burn it you get water that is pretty darn clean, and it is a great candidate for fuel cells, if we ever get fuel cells. Think of hydrogen as a battery, something to carry energy from one source to another.

We have only a few moments remaining, and I would like to put the last chart up. That will introduce us to a longer discussion we will have next time.

We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and they have inherited a lot of money. They have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from what they are earning.

Here we are getting 85 percent of our energy from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from anything else, and the fossil fuels are not going to last. The kids look at what they are doing and say gee, that is going to run out. We have to do something. Either we have to make more or use less. That is exactly where we are.

A bit more than half of all of this other than fossil fuel energy is nuclear power: 8 percent of total use in our country, 20 percent of electricity, it probably could and should be more than that, and then 7 percent. That is going to have to grow until it is 100 percent, but some don't have much potential for growth.

Conventional hydroelectric, that is peaked out. We will come back and spend a full hour talking about the potential of these. There are exciting challenges here, and I think it will inspire the best of America

Madam Speaker, I come to the floor this evening to talk about embryonic stem cells. With all of the pressing issues of global importance that our country and the Congress is dealing with, you might ask, why are you going the talk about embryonic stem cells this evening; why are you not talking about the potential for global warming and what that might hold in store for our world.

We might be talking about the pending energy crisis and the concept of peak oil, and certainly we might be talking about the war in Iraq and the funding resolution that will shortly come before the House. Or we could be talking about a very interesting subject: the debt limit ceiling and why we have to increase the debt limit ceiling and what is that and how does it relate to the debt and the deficit and so forth?

We come to the floor this evening to talk about stem cells because a stem cell bill will very shortly come up in the Senate, perhaps even this week. Very probably if not this week, next week. But to put this in context, we have got to go back to last year when there were two embryonic stem cell bills that came before the House and the Senate. One of those started in the House and was known as the Castle-DeGette bill. This was a bill that would permit Federal funding for cells taken from embryos that were surplus in the fertility clinics across the country, and I understand there may be as many as 400,000 surplus embryos that are now frozen in these fertility clinics. This would result in the death of the embryo, and a meaningful percentage of our population does not believe that it is appropriate to destroy one life in the hopes that you might help another. So although this bill got a positive vote in the House last year, it was nowhere near enough to override a presidential veto.

There was a second bill that was introduced. I introduced that second bill along with my friend Dr. Gingrey, and that bill garnered 273 votes in the House. You might say that is enough to win, but it was brought up under suspension, which means we need two-thirds majority, and that day that would have been 286 votes; so we failed by 13 votes to get the necessary majority, the two-thirds majority, to pass it.

Both of those bills were our bills, the Senate 2754 and the House bill 5526. And along with the Castle-DeGette bill and the alternative bill, which would not result in the destruction of embryos, our bill got 100 percent of the Senators. That is, 100 Senators voting for the bill. It is interesting that there were 63 Senators that voted for both of these bills. They included Senator Arlen Specter, who introduced both of these bills in the Senate; and it also included Senators Reid, Harkin, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, and Schumer. Those Senators voted for all of these bills.

We have now passed, essentially, the Castle-DeGette bill again in the House with 253 ayes and 174 noes, and that is nowhere near close to the number that it would take to override a presidential veto. And in the last Congress, the President vetoed the Castle-DeGette bill, and he has promised to and certainly will veto it this time should it get to his desk. This is the bill that the Senate will be voting on next week. So that is why we are on the floor today talking about this bill. By the way, our bill is 322, and it has been cosponsored so far by 34, truly bipartisan support for which I am very pleased.

I thought to begin this discussion of embryonic stem cells we might go back to the basic physiology of what we are talking about here. And the first chart I have here shows half of the reproductive tract in a woman. There is another half to this on the other side, a mirror image of this. Most things in our body are mirror images. Things like the liver are not and the stomach. We have two arms and two eyes, and the lady has two ovaducts and two ovaries and so forth. And this shows the stages of development of the embryo. And, of course, what we will be talking about is not what happens in the body but what happens in a petri dish in the laboratory. But the embryo goes through the same stages of development in the petri dish in the laboratory as it does in the ovaduct of the prospective mother.

Here we have the ovary, and it contains a very large number of primary cells, which when they develop will become ova. And once a month typically, every 4 weeks, typically, one of the ova matures and the little follicle then ruptures and the ovum comes out. And it is interesting that the ovary is not connected to the rest of the reproductive tract of the female. But there is a funnel-like thing, and we see only a part of the funnel here. This part and this part goes clearly around it. And it is called the infundibulum, and this process is called ovulation. The egg now is released from the mature follicle, and it is usually picked up by the infundibulum and directed into the ovaduct. On occasion it may not be and it may escape out into the body cavity or the celium, which simply means the cavity. And these sperm, millions of which were released in the uterus and they make their way into the fallopian tubes, and some of those sperm actually get out into the body cavity. And this egg that is not picked up by the infundibulum may be out of the body cavity and it may be fertilized by the sperm that gets there, and this is called an ectopic pregnancy. And it is very bad news for the mother and the embryo, and it has to be terminated with surgery. But usually, most of the time, the ovum is picked up by the fallopian tube and it begins its way down the fallopian tube.

Notice that fertilization takes place, and that is when the clock starts running, called DZero. Fertilization takes place well up into the ovaduct. And there is a several-day journey. You see them here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, on down. And the fertilized egg now is called a zygote, and it begins to divide. And here you see it is at a two-cell stage, and a little later we will have some charts that show what can happen at this two-cell stage and even later. But frequently these two cells will simply separate until you have two cells that look like the original one you started with here, and that is what we called identical twins. Then they will make their way down the fallopian tube together and implant in an interesting way in the uterus as we will see later. And then the two cells divide and develop into four cells and then the four cells into eight cells. And we will come back and talk about this eight-cell stage because that is the time at which some procedures are done in the petri dish which promise that we can get true embryonic stem cells from embryos without harming the embryo.

Well, the cell then goes on to divide beyond the eight-cell stage. And you

now have a morula, a ball of cells which may be a fairly large number of cells, maybe 100 or fewer cells. And then it goes on to divide into a very large number of cells, and that is the gastrula stage. The morula and the blastula and then on to the gastrula down here. The gastrula stage develops into three germ layers.

The next chart shows a little more clearly what is happening. And here it started with a zygote and it skipped all of the stages that we talked about here, the two-cell, four-cell, eight-cell stage and so forth. And it goes directly now down to the blastocyst and then on down to the gastrula. And then the gastrula, we see the three germ layers developing.

And notice that most of what we have here is not going to end up as an embryo. What is going to end up as an embryo is this little bit of material here, and the rest of it is going to end up as supporting tissue, the amnion and the chorion and the fetal contribution to the placenta and so forth. But at this stage, just about the time the egg is implanting, as you saw, and by ``implanting'' we mean it connects itself to the uterus, this cell is implanting at about the time that the three germ layers are developed.

From these three germ layers will develop all of the tissues of the body. These three germ layers are called the outer germ layer, or the ectoderm; the middle germ layer, or the mesoderm; and the inner germ layer, or the entoderm.

From the ectoderm develops our skin, the integumen, which is defined as an organ. It is about the biggest organ in the body, actually, and a very complex and interesting one. And then the brain and spinal cord all of our nervous system develops from the ectoderm.

From the mesoderm develops most of the mass of our body, the muscles and the bones and the blood. Here you see the blood, which is a tissue that develops from the mesoderm. From the entoderm develops the lining of the gut and the lining of the lungs and so forth, although the mass of the entodermal tissue is nowhere near as large as the mesoderm and the ectoderm. In some organs they play a very essential role.

It is interesting that when you have a cancer and it metastasizes, it metastasizes usually only two tissues of common embryonic origin. What that means is that if you have a cancer on mesodermal tissue, when these cells break loose and float through the lymph system, it will metastasize only to tissues that develop from mesoderm. So it is very interesting that all through the life of the person, these tissues retain some of the original characteristics of these three germ layers. And the body cells, the T cells and so forth are programmed to know the difference between these body tissues.

I mentioned T cells. I shouldn't do that without explaining a little bit of what they are. Very early in our embryonic development, there are some unique cells that will end up in the blood. Some unique cells are developed, and they are now imprinted with who you are, and this is very early in development. And it is their role all through your life after that to keep track of who you are and identify any invader that is not you. So if a virus or a bacterium or something like that gets in, the T cells immediately detect that as being foreign and they now alert the leukocytes, which are the white blood cells, which have phagocytic, which means they can envelope and ingest. These organisms have phagocytic activity, alert them that that is an enemy and you need to take him out. And that is called our response system to infections and so forth. And, by the way, if you have a little pus pocket, that is the remains of thousands, maybe millions of these leukocytes that have come to do battle for you, and they have died in the process. But not to worry. Your bone marrow and lymph system are making a whole lot more lymphocytes.

Sometimes these T cells get confused, and it is not really clear to them what is you and what is not you. And sometimes they will falsely identify some of your tissues as being foreign to you, and then the leukocytes will come in and attack the other body defenses will come in and attack these tissues.

We refer to these diseases, and there are a whole long list of them, as being autoimmune diseases. I have one of those diseases, and many, many people have that. Some types of arthritis is an autoimmune disease. You have the arthritis because your T cells have inappropriately identified these joint tissues in your body as not being used, so they are now being attacked by the body defenses.

I want to look at just one more slide and then call on a colleague of mine, Dr. Gingrey, who has joined me in filing this bill.

This is a little illustration of what happens with monozygotic twins. Mono means one, and you saw what the zygote was. That is the fertilized ovum. Monozygotic twins, we call them identical twins. It begins with the fertilized egg, the zygote, the two-cell stage, then it may develop to two inner masses. Actually, the division can occur at the two-cell stage. The division, we have some reason to believe it can occur as the two inner cell mass stages. These will later develop into the three germ layers we talked about.

You can differentiate when that division occurred by how the babies present themselves at birth, whether they are in two amnions or in a common amnion. They, of course, should always be in a common chorion. The chorion is the big tough sac on the outside. The amnion is the thinner sac on the inside filled with the fluid called the amniotic fluid that protects the baby during its development.

I would like to note, by the way, that one of these two identical twins is a clone. I didn't think the sky was going to fall when we talked about cloning, because nature has been doing it for a very long time. But sometimes we should let nature do things and not mimic or interfere in what nature is doing, and I understand the concerns relative to cloning. But it is just of interest to note that nature has been doing this for a very long time.

Dr. Gingrey has joined us. Let me now yield to him.

Thank you very much. I am very appreciative of the contribution that Dr. Gingrey is making. Being a physician and having delivered a very large number of babies, he obviously brings a level of authenticity and credibility to this discussion.

On this chart, we have another couple of sequences which shows--the previous one we looked at showed the development of identical twins-- this one shows the production of paternal twins. The mother may slough two eggs. As a matter of fact, with the in vitro fertilization, since we aren't sure that any one of them is going to be potent to implant properly, frequently the doctor will place several in the uterus and more than one may implant. I have a good colleague here, Dana Rohrabacher, whose wife had three babies. That is nice. That gets the bottle feeding and diaper changing all over pretty quickly, doesn't it?

But this is what happens when the mother sloughs more than one egg naturally. Both of these eggs will be fertilized, because there are millions of sperm there, and they start to divide, and this is what is going down that little C-shaped fallopian tube in the uterus that we saw before.

Then at the blastula stage, it gets down to the uterus, and usually they will be somewhat separated and they will implant some little distance from each other, so when they present at birth the doctor will know immediately they are fraternal twins, because they have separate amniotic sacs and separate placentas, just two different babies, one attached to one side of the uterus and the other perhaps attached to the other side of the uterus.

But sometimes if they implant very close together in the uterus, they will develop with a fused chorionic sac which may mimic the single chorionic sac that is produced with identical twins. Then, of course, you will know whether they are identical or not, whether they look alike or not; and if you aren't really certain of that, you can do DNA to determine if they are identical twins.

Madam Speaker, President Bush appointed a council on bioethics to look at this whole embryonic stem cell debate. When he came to office, of course, money was being spent on a number of embryonic stem cell lines, and all of those stem cell lines were produced by destroying embryos, and the President was faced with a dilemma, was it right to take one life because when you destroy an embryo you are taking a life, to hopefully help another. His own personal ethics would not permit him to do this, so he set up a council on bioethics to determine were there techniques where one could get embryonic stem cells without killing embryos or harming embryos.

This is from page 25 in this white paper. It said, ``Thus, apparently normal children have been born following removal of one or two blastomeres from the six to eight cell embryo. However, long-term studies to determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later developing injury in children born following PGD,'' preimplantation genetic diagnosis, ``have been recommended and are sorely needed.''

Well, maybe we need those studies, but I think nature through the years has conducted a very large number of studies for us. I want to show you this identical twin slide because in identical twins, half the cells of the embryo are taken away, and each half produces a perfectly normal child as far as we can tell, and it has been going on for roughly 8,000 years of recorded history. No one has ever suggested there is anything deficient in an identical twin.

As a matter of fact, when President Clinton appointed a commission to look at this, it was an identical twin who chaired the commission, and I asked him when he was on the Hill here if he felt less a person because he was only half the original embryo. Of course, that is a silly question because he certainly doesn't feel any less a person. But that is what many people

would have you believe. That somehow taking a cell or two from this early embryo, if you take two cells from an eight-cell embryo, the result will be three-fourths of a person because you took a fourth of his cells away. Well, no identical twin feels half a person because the other half of that original embryo produced his or her identical twin.

So one would be enormously surprised if this had any effect because, as I say, in 8,000 years of recorded history with millions and millions of identical twins produced, no one has ever hinted that there is any deficiency in an identical twin because they shared the cells from an original embryo with their mate.

It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. These are the single cells that are taken out up here, extracted from early embryos, and in ways that do no harm to the embryo.

Now medicine has marched on, and as I will explain, we have the evidence that we can do this. The initial success of the Verlinksy group efforts raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells, which means the pluri is many. It is not totipotent. Totipotent is totally potent. That is the cell can produce anything and everything, including another embryo.

When I first started exploring this potential, I had the nagging concern that the single cell I took from that early embryo would be totipotent and what I was dealing with was just another embryo, in other words I was king of making identical twins. But I am very pleased that no one out there believes that the cells taken from the 8-cell stage are totipotent.

What this means is you shouldn't be able to get an identical twin from something beyond the 8-cell stage, and clearly you can, so there are some things going on here that we may not be totally familiar with. But there are a lot of things going on in the body that we can't explain.

As an example, if you remove part of your liver, and there are very few organs in the body that have this potential, but the liver will now regenerate what you have taken out. The question I have always asked myself, as long ago as 50 years ago when I first had these courses, no, 60 years ago now when I first had these courses, how did those cells in the liver know, millions of them, how did they know enough was enough, that the liver was now reconstituted to its original size so they could quit dividing. I have asked that question of current physiologists, and no one knows the answer to that.

And if you have a bone broken, in the healing process you have a callus developing on that bone. There is a thickening of the bone, and then gradually that is taken away and the bone is returned pretty much to its original shape. How do those cells know they have taken enough away? Or how do they know that they have developed enough of a callus to strengthen the bone until it is well calcified, until it is strong enough.

What we are going to be talking about is this and a number of other techniques that are included in the legislation that I talked about, H.R. 322, and the one that was passed in the last Congress.

The next slide shows some of the techniques that were reported by the President's Council on Bioethics as potentially offering the hope that we could get embryonic stem cells from an embryo without killing the embryo.

Our first depiction here is normal fertilization. The cells divide and grow in the mother. One of the last divisions is what we call a meiotic division. The usual division is a mitotic division. Before the mitotic division, the chromosomes divide so when the cells separate, each cell has the normal number of chromosomes called the diploid number, and the single unit of chromosomes is called the haploid number.

Well, obviously if you are going to have a human being who has the normal number of chromosomes, you have to end up with half as many of those chromosomes in the egg and half as many in the sperm, and that is accomplished by a process known as miosis. So in the egg and in the sperm cell, there are only the haploid number of chromosomes, only half the full complement of chromosomes, and they now join in the egg. There is quite a miraculous process that occurs there. There may be millions of sperms trying to fertilize the egg, but essentially instantaneously when one cell makes it into the egg, then the covering of the egg becomes absolutely impervious to any other sperm. If that wasn't true, you would end up with two sperm getting in, and then you would have triploid, or three, and that would be fatal for humans. Trisomy 21, for instance, is what happens to a human when just one of those chromosomes, mongolism, when only one of those chromosomes is three in nature, and sometimes that happens in the division of the cells, and that is called trisomy 21 or mongolism.

It is very interesting in plants that many replications of the chromosome, or polyploid, is a very beneficial effect. The flowers get bigger with better colors, and that is one of the things that plant breeders do is use a chemical to produce polyploid, bigger and better plants, and some that aren't any good but you can just discard them. That is how we have gotten many of miracle crops, by polyploid.

The second depiction here is of cloning. In cloning, you take an egg cell and you take the nucleus out of the egg cell so now you have an egg cell without a nucleus. And then you have a donor cell, and you can get the nucleus from this donor cell into the egg two different ways. One, you can fuse the two and the nucleus will then migrate to the egg; or you can simply take the nucleus out of the donor cell and put it in the egg.

Now all of the controlling material in the egg is not in the nucleus. There are a number of cytoplasmic factors that control what the genes, what the chromosomes and the nucleus does. So this goes on to what appears to be a fairly normal birth.

In parthenogenesis, that is an interesting one, in parthenogenesis, miosis does not occur and the egg retains its diploid number of chromosomes and the egg goes on and divides. And some animals, by the way, reproduce by parthenogenesis. That rarely happens in humans. Some animals reproduce almost exclusively by parthenogenesis.

The next slide is another depiction of some of these same techniques, and it goes just a little further. Here we have the classical development and embryonic stem cell derivation. What they do here is when you get to this blastocyst area, you have two choices. One, you either implant it or freeze it to keep it for implantation later; or you destroy it and get your embryonic stem cells. This is classic technique for getting embryonic stem cells. This was the technique that the President had ethical concerns about which is why he issued his executive order which said that Federal money could be used to support research using the embryonic stem cell lines in existence at that time, what, 60 or more, now down to 20 or 22, and we knew that they would eventually run out, and now we are faced with a crisis because what do we do, these stem cell lines are running out. There is a big hope in the medical community that we can get some fairly dramatic cures from embryonic stem cells.

Here are embryonic stem cells from a single blastomere. This is what we have been talking about. You take a single blastomere cell from the embryo, and you can implant what is remaining. They have done that more than 2,000 times. They have done what is called a PGD. It started in England. There are a number of those labs in our country, and the parents would like to know whether or not their baby is going to have a genetic defect.

So they take a single cell out and they do a genetic diagnosis. If there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells in the mother, and more than 2,000 times now we have had what appears to be a perfectly normal baby. Indeed, the big surprise would be if it wasn't a perfectly normal baby because in nature in producing normal identical twins, half the cells are taken away and nobody argues that identical twins are not normal people.

Then the process of nuclear transfer, and one of the techniques that is suggested here is a modification of that, modification of that cloning, and this is altered nuclear transfer. This is the modification.

In this one they make sure that you are not going to have a clone because they deactivate one of the genes. CDX2 I think it is called there. They deactivate one of the genes so that it will

simply develop into a cell mass with no organization. You can now get from that cell mass the cells that you wish, but there is no organization and it is not an embryo. You can see some obvious objections to this. You are just producing a freak and why would you want to do that to a perfectly normal zygote that you started with.

The next chart shows this altered nuclear transfer in a little more detail. We have seen this one before. Altered nuclear transfer is where you knock out the gene for normal development so when you have taken the nucleus from the egg and replaced that with a nucleus from the donor cell, you now have knocked out the gene in this nucleus for normal development, so you are simply going to get a growth of cells. It is not going to be an embryo, and there obviously some ethical questions about this, but this is being debated.

This is an oocyte-assisted reprogramming. What this says is that in the oocyte, and I mentioned the factors that are out in the cytoplasm, and if you intensify those and let them work, they will assist in this and it increases the genes for embryonic stem cell growth without producing an organized embryo.

And this is the technique which I suggested, embryo biopsy. I went to NIH way before the President issued his executive order, and having had a course in advanced embryology nearly 50 years ago, and recognizing what identical twins were, it occurred to me you ought to be able to take a cell from the early embryo without hurting the embryo.

I asked the NIH researchers when they had an open house out there one day while the President was making up his mind, and they invited Members of Congress and staff to come out. I do not remember any other Members of Congress. There was a lot of staff there.

I asked them should this not be possible? They said, well, it certainly should be possible. In fact, you know, it is certainly easier just to take the embryo and disaggregate, they call it. That means stir it all up. Disaggregate it and take your embryonic stem cells from what grows from that.

There is another interesting proposal of how to get embryonic stem cells without killing embryos. If you deal with in vitro fertilization, you produce a number of embryos and you have eight of them that you have thawed out and you are going to look at them to see which ones look strong enough to be fertilized to place in the woman.

There are some of these embryos that will not make it. They appear to be alive, but they will not go on and divide. So, in just a little while, they are going to decompose and die, and the proponents of this technique argue that they are a bit like the brain-dead person, that is, an individual that is not going to make it but the parts. We take body parts from brain-dead people for transplant. So they argue you ought to be able to get good cells from an embryo that is not going to divide any further. I have several slides, and I did not bring all of them, which show the criteria which are fairly reproducible and verifiable that the embryo is, in fact, dead--because you would not want somebody to say, gee, I think that embryo is going to die so I am going to take it because I would like to get a embryonic stem cell line from that embryo.

The next slide slow shows a bit of an expansion on this. Embryonic stem cell assisted reprogramming, and the acronyms, particularly DOD and much of the other professional societies have lots of acronyms. I guess that is so they appear more erudite and you cannot figure out what they are saying.

Differentiation using cell proteins, this is the assisted development I mentioned because this cell suite, this is from the cytoplasm, and this contains factors that controls what happens in the nucleus. They turn on genes and turn off genes and so forth during the development of the embryo. You can modify that.

Differentiation, a new term, should not use these terms without describing what they are. When you start out with the cell mass and the developing embryo, so forth, those cells are undifferentiated, they are all the same. They then begin the differentiation process where you have an ectoderm, a mesoderm, and an intaderm. Then it goes on to differentiate from that. You can get bone from mesoderm. You can get muscle from mesoderm. You can get blood cells from mesoderm. So the differentiation goes on from that.

Then there are postnatal tissues, and these are the tissues from which we can get adult stem cells. It might be worth just a moment to mention the dialogue that is going on between the enthusiasts for adult stem cells and the proponents of embryonic stem cell research.

Most of the medical applications have been made from adult stem cells, and that is because we have been working with adult stem cells for more than 3 decades. It just takes a while for something to go from the laboratory to the hospital, and we have had that time for the adult stem cells. We have not had that time for embryonic stem cells because we have been working on them for only a few years.

Now, this permits some people who are very zealous for protection of the embryo to say, gee, we really should not be looking at embryonic stem cell research because all of the contributions so far have been from adult stem cells and so, therefore, why would you want to go this route because presumably all the applications in the future are also going to come from adult stem cells.

That may be true but I will tell you that there is nobody that I know of in the professional community who believes that that ought to be true. These embryonic stem cells may be like the rambunctious teenager. They can be somewhat uncontrollable, and in some of the early experiments, they have gone on to produce cancers and growths and so forth, and who knows what the ultimate will be.

But I will tell you, and you know from what you see in the papers and hear on television and so forth that there are a number of people who believe that diseases like Parkinson's disease and diabetes and spinal cord injuries and so forth could maybe be cured with the application of embryonic stem cell research and medical developments.

It is true that theoretically, philosophically, there ought to be more applications from embryonic stem cells just because of what they are. They are pluripotent cells. They can make any and every cell in the body. We have some adult stem cells, and we generally get them from the bone marrow, the blood, and there are stem cells with a variety of blood cells that are produced and you can sometimes trick them into believing they are not what they are so they can also make some other tissues.

The next slide shows the little schematic on the dead embryo, and what this shows is that you can tell--and these are reproducible and verifiable--you can tell that an embryo is probably--well, not probably--is not going to make it, and then the argument is that you ought to be able to take cells from that embryo ethically. Of course, the other argument would be if the embryo is about to die, why would I want a stem cell line from cells that are suspect.

Clearly, clearly, if we can make the altered nuclear transfer work, where you can take the donor cell which is a cell from the patient, if you can make embryonic stem cells from that, that is the route we want to go because then the organ you are making, whatever you are making for that person, is going to be them, and you can implant it in them. There is not going to be any rejection. If it comes from any other source, you are going to have a rejection phenomena, but we have developed clinical techniques for handling that. There are lots of people with organ transplants, and they lead productive, comfortable lives for quite a number of years.

When I first started this discussion, we conferenced with a lot of individuals, and one of those was a representative of the Conference of Catholic Bishops. Sometimes in life, you see something or somebody says something, you say to yourself, gee, why did I not think of that; it is so obvious and so right and so productive. That happened in this dialogue.

We were talking about taking cells from the early embryo that would not hurt the embryo, but then you get the idea that, gee, it might. You can make

the argument and certainly should not because you can take half the cells away in identical twins and obviously it has not hurt the embryo at all, so why should taking a cell out of the embryo make any, yeah, I know, but it just might. So you need to do some work with that to make sure it does not hurt the embryos. There is always an outside chance that the person lives to be 90 and they determine some defect that was as a result of taking the cell out earlier.

So the suggestion was made by Mr. Dortlinger that, gee, the first thing you do with that cell you take out is to make a repair kit. Wow, why did I not think about that? It is obviously such a right thing to do. What you do to that cell now is to make your replacement, which by the way is what parents are hoping to sort of do when they freeze umbilical cord blood. Now, those are not embryonic stem cells in umbilical cord blood. They are adult. So when the baby is born it is an adult. As a matter of fact, the day you are born is the day you start to die. Things start to go downhill from the day you are born. So these are adult stem cells, but they have characteristics that may be more amenable to alterations, to modifications than adult stem cells taken from a 50-year-old.

By the way, there has been a new technique which some heralded, now we do not need to think about embryonic stem cells because you can take amniotic fluid, and as the baby is growing from the earliest stages on, but it has to be in amnion before you can get these cells in the amniotic fluid. You can get some embryonic stem cells there, and so a big push was made, gee, let us stop talking about embryonic stem cell research because now we have got these stem cells from amniotic fluid.

But the person who discovered that made the observation that this was complementary to embryonic stem cells and should not be considered in place of embryonic stem cells. It is certainly a good place to get cells that are more easily reprogrammed to believe that they are not what they are at that stage of development, but he said that it should be considered complementary to embryonic stem cells and not in place of stem cells.

Well, the Senate is going to vote on this in a few days now; that is, they are going to vote on the Castle-DeGette bill. It will certainly pass, and I think they are voting on exactly the same bill. So it does not even need to go to conference. It will then go to the President, and the President will do what he did in the last Congress. He will veto the bill.

So here we will be with only a few embryonic stem cell lines running out. They are all contaminated with mouse feeder cells, and so they may or may not be amenable to actual therapy, but in any event, these stem cell lines do run out. With the enormous potential that many people believe embryonic stem cells have, we will be in a situation where there is only a few embryonic stem cell lines which are running out and a public out there which is demanding and they come to our office. One of those compelling things are these kids with this big thing in their body like a hockey puck which is pushing insulin because they have juvenile diabetes, and they are very brittle and they have to trickle that in little by little during the day to maintain the status quo.

So here we will be with embryonic stem cell lines running out, with a cry from the public and the professional part of the public that we need to move on with this. My hope is that when the President has vetoed this bill, the Castle-DeGette bill, he will, he did last time and he will again, that then they pass our bill which was passed 100-0 in the Senate last year, by 273 votes in this House. In fact, they got more votes than the one that is being sent on to the President from this House. So, hopefully, that bill will come up next and can move to the President's desk, and he will certainly sign that bill and we can get on with ethical embryonic stem cell research.

Mr. Speaker, I would hope that all of our listeners out there who have a Representative that they believe may not be supportive of this, would they please contact that Representative and urge them to support this bill. It will provide ethical embryonic stem cell research. Neither I nor any of the others know what the ultimate result of this will be, but I will tell you the potential for clinical cures and application because of embryonic stem cells being what they are has to be greater than adult stem cells.

Mr. Speaker, let us hope that we can move this clock very quickly because there are a lot of people out there that need this kind of help.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 14, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to share with my colleagues a recent column by a constituent that offers timeless advice about healthy eating for healthy living.

[From the The Tentacle, Feb. 14, 2007]

Our Government, Our Health, Ourselves

(By Patricia A. Kelly)

There's a movement underway to ban the use of trans fats,

but New Orleans isn't going along. Their chefs don't use them

much anyway. They choose real foods, like butter, for their

renowned cuisine.

Eating margarine began during World War II with bags of

lard and coloring packets that you mixed in. There was a

shortage of butter because of the war. Margarine use

continued in my Washington suburban family because of price,

I think, and, of course, the government said it was okay.

I started eating butter when in my 20s. I read something in

health food literature that said butter was actually better

for you than margarine. Hydrogenated (trans, polyunsaturated,

hardened) fats have extra molecules attached to their chains

by clever scientists. They are harder for the body to break

down than natural, softer, animal fat molecules, or

minimally-processed vegetable oils. They are thus more

harmful to, and persistent in, the body.

Of course, the recommendations included other things, but

actually allowed in the diet the star of the government

nutrition wars--the infamous, then out, now in, but only a

little in, egg. Drum roll, please. . . .

We've been paying taxes for this: for government nutrition

experts to tell us that we should be eating margarine; that

we should, or should not, eat eggs; that we should only eat

special margarines; that we should not eat the margarine they

were saying we should eat last week--for the past 35 years,

at least. The truth was available to me, a reasonably

intelligent person and an ordinary mom of limited means,

surfing around in the health food literature, looking for the

best way to feed my family. I read it. It seemed logical. I

believed it.

If you eat artificially altered foods, you are taking a

risk, because we don't yet know the long term effects, or

whether there is alteration in the nutrition available from

these foods, or contamination. We do all know how convenient

it is for large food producers to grow cornstalks that are

the same height, tomatoes that don't spoil, and apples that

last, unchanged, for a year in storage. We also know how

these wonder foods taste. If you can't remember the

difference, go to another country and taste the fresh

produce.

You can fool your vegetarian cow into eating the ground-up

bones of dead animals in her feed. That doesn't make them

good for her. She's not a vulture. She would never eat them

on her own. If you eat her meat, it might not be too good for

you either. You might not know this for 20 years, of course,

until you get Jacob-Crutchfeld disease, and die horribly.

Ground-up bones are really cheap, though, and our

government said they were safe.

Animals raised in close quarters with processed feed do

better if they're given antibiotics. You might do better with

them, too, if you were standing in your next-door neighbor's

poop. Our government says there aren't any antibiotics left

in the meat that might increase antibiotic resistance and

endanger our population.

Our government also thinks it is safe to use bovine growth

hormone on cows; and I'm sure the cows don't mind tripping on

their own udders. We are wondering why so many nine-year-old

girls are reaching puberty now, though. I'm sure it can't be

due to anything they're exposed to. If you're wondering, just

ask our government.

Logic dictates that, if you eat a balanced diet, you have a

better chance of getting the nutrients you need. If you live

on sugar and caffeine and fast, high-fat, overly refined

foods, your spirit might be happier for the moment, but your

body will suffer in the long run. These foods are being

advertised to make money, not to help you. Eating less meat

and a greater variety of whole plant foods reduces the impact

of people on the environment because it takes so much more

grain to feed a cow than to feed a person.

Eating a variety of seeds, grains, fruits, nuts and

vegetables increases your chances of getting all the

micronutrients you need. Cow's milk is really good for cows.

If you eat more calories than you need, you will gain weight.

Reading the labels will tell you what's in your food. Nobody

reading this column would have any trouble figuring any of

this out. We don't need to, though. We have the government.

Don't get me started on HPV vaccine, and how girls mostly

get the virus from boys, and boys from girls; but it's only

recommended for girls.

Whatever you do, don't ask my opinion on the recent, widely

publicized estrogen replacement study. It reported the

outcome of giving a specific combination of mare's urine

estrogen/progesterone pill to 64-year-old women who were way

past menopause with no prior hormone replacement. Huge

numbers of litigation conscious doctors withdrew every form

of hormone replacement from virtually all of their female

patients because of this one. Our government thought it was

safe to take Prempro, and then, suddenly, not safe at all.

I think it would be a good idea for our government to

narrow its focus back to life, liberty and the pursuit of

happiness. To me that means keeping us safe and free and

unbothered with expensive nonsense, paid for with our tax

dollars.

Maybe our nutrition scientists could spend their time

making sure there's no poop in the ground beef, and that the

cows are dead before they're skinned. I know I'd sleep

better.

Mr. Speaker, I believe this is the 24th time since the 14th day of last March that I have come to this floor to talk about a subject which is growing in importance. That subject is energy.

I had the privilege of leading a codel to China. We left just after Christmas and we spent New Year's in Shanghai. There were nine of us who went there, and the primary purpose of that congressional delegation was to talk to the Chinese primarily about energy.

I was both surprised, shocked, and really pleasantly surprised that they began their conversation about energy by talking about post oil. This just wasn't the energy people in China, it was high officials in other parts of the government. Everywhere we went and spoke with them, they talked about post-oil, a recognition that oil cannot be forever, and they talked about a five-point program.

The first point of this program was conservation, a recognition that the world has no surplus energy to invest in developing alternatives. If there was any surplus energy, we wouldn't be paying $60 a barrel for oil.

Conservation not only frees up oil, but it buys some time because if we in

fact are producing oil at the rate at which it is consumed and we cannot easily increase that production, then we have not only run out of surplus energy, we have also run out of time. So an aggressive conservation program will buy some time and free up some energy that we can invest in alternatives.

So the first part of their five-point plan was conservation. The second and third points was diversify, get energy from as many other nonfossil fuel sources as you can, and get as much of it as you can from your own country. From a national security perspective, that makes good sense.

The fourth point in their five-point program, and again, it wasn't just the energy people in China talking about this, it was leaders in government in several other parts of the government, the fourth part of their five-point plan was be kind to the environment. You think, gee, that is strange they would say that since they are the world's biggest polluter. They are the world's biggest country. Their economy grew at 11.4 percent for the last quarter. And they know they are a big polluter. They are apologetic. They have 1.3 billion people, and they don't know how to use energy wisely, and they are asking for cooperation so they might use their energy as efficiently as we use ours.

The fifth point was that we need international cooperation because this planet is a little spaceship, not all that big. It once seemed absolutely enormous when we sailed the ocean in sailing ships, but now with airplanes it seems much smaller. We are here together, so we have a global responsibility.

I thought of this attitude on the part of the Chinese when I read an article that appeared in the New York Times on page 1 on March 5. It says, ``Oil innovations pump new life into old fields.''

Bakersfield, California. That is out in the desert. I used to teach medical school out there and drove through Bakersfield coming east. This states the Kern River oil field, discovered in 1899, revived when Chevron engineers here started injecting high-pressure steam to pump out more oil. The field, whose production had slumped to 10,000 barrels a day in the 1960s now has a daily output of 85,000 barrels. In Indonesia, Chevron has applied the same technology to the giant Duri oil field discovered in 1941, increasing production there to more than 200,000 barrels a day, up from 65,000 barrels a day in the mid-1980s. And in Texas, ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, expects to double the amount of oil it extracts in its Means field which dates back to the 1930s. Exxon, like Chevron, will use three-dimensional imaging of the underground field and the injection of gas, in this case carbon dioxide, to flush out the oil.

I might pause to interject here that this is a very appropriate use of carbon dioxide. It is a greenhouse gas. Its concentration in the atmosphere has about doubled in the last couple hundred years, and most of the world's scientists who study weather believe that the Earth's temperature is increasing and that the greenhouse gases, chief among them carbon dioxide, are responsible. So sequestering the carbon dioxide and pumping it down into these wells to force the oil out is a doubly good thing. It keeps it from going into the atmosphere, and it gets some additional oil.

This article continues, within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and at the same time higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world's reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil will be found than ever before.

Well, I have a chart here which looks at the oil discoveries back through the last number of years, last 70 years, and we see here in the bar graph the discoveries of oil and we see there were some big discoveries in the 1940s and 1950s and 1970s and down in the 1980s. And ever since that time, it has been down, down, down. That is in spite of ever-better technology for discovering oil.

They mention the 3-D seismic computer modeling they are using. We now have a pretty good idea of the Earth's geology, and so we know where we might find gas and oil. Some very unique geological conditions are necessary in order to have gas and oil. We don't really know how the oil and gas got there, but there are some reasonable conjectures, and if you understand these conjectures and if they are correct, it gives you some clue as to how much more gas and oil we are likely to find.

The most popular theory goes that a long time ago when the Earth was more uniformly warm than today, there did not appear to be the torrid equator or the frigid poles, and because there were subtropical seas at the North Slope and in ANWR and in Prudhoe Bay, and those subtropical seas had a seasonal growth and then death of algae-like organisms and maybe some small, animal organisms with them like the algae that grows on your pond today. I don't know that they had winters, but they had seasonal growth, and each season it would mature and die and then sink to the bottom, and Earth runoff would mix in and overlay it, and then the next year another layer of the organic material was deposited. This continued until there was big buildup, a lot like at the bottom of a lake.

Then the theory says that the tectonic plates of the Earth moved and surface seas with all of the organic material mixed with the inorganic, rock and sand, were now submerged down under considerable pressure and near enough to the molten core of the Earth there was just the right combination of pressure and temperature. And with time, this organic material was converted into what we know as gas and oil.

Now the products were some very short-chain products such as gases, methane, the shortest of the chains; and then very long chain ones which end up as Vasoline or waxes or something like that. If there was not a rock dome over this, kind of an umbrella of rock, then the gases would have escaped through the years and what would be left was some tarry stuff that you couldn't pump because you would have to heat it up. That is known as heavy oil where it exists today. You have to heat it up or mix it with volatiles to get it moving.

This dome keeps the gas from escaping. This was the explanation why for many oil wells when you finally pump down into the oil, it is not a pocket of oil that you are sucking out like a soda through a straw. It is all mixed with sand and rock, fractured rock and so forth, but it will flow. For wells that were gushers, this gas pressure that accumulated under the rock dome was now pushing down on this oil, and it pushed it up the well pipe. So we had these gushers.

Well, this may not have been the way that oil and gas was produced, but it certainly sounds logical because that is where we find it, where we have these rock domes and so forth. What that means is, of course, that with these current techniques that we have of mapping the world, we can find those areas which have rock domes, which were likely to and with the location relative to the edges of the tectonic place, we can now identify where it is probable that you might find gas and oil production. And with ever-increased capabilities, computer modeling and 3-D seismic, we have found less and less oil through the years.

Now, this chart has another curve on it, and that is the consumption curve. Interesting curve. You will notice for a long time we were finding enormously more oil than we were using, because we were using this much, but we had found that much. But from about 1980 on, increasingly we have found less and less oil and used more and more oil.

I would like you to note the interesting change in the curve here in the 1970s. There was a stunning statistic up until the seventies, the Carter years, with this rate of increase and use. Every decade the world was using as much oil as it had used in all of previous history. Now that is a stunning statistic. What that means is that when you have used half the world's oil, there would then be 10 years left at current use rates. Well, we had a big shock in the 1970s at the Arab oil embargo, and we learned how to be much more efficient. For, what, 10 years or so here, there was essentially no increase in oil, and now it is slowly going

up again as the world's economies grow. In China, bicycles are banned on some of their streets. I was late getting to one of the appointments there because of traffic jams in Beijing. I was, a couple of years ago, in Moscow, and traffic jams in Moscow. I was there in 1973, and the streets were essentially deserted. The only cars I saw there were a few government cars. So all over the world there is a surge in interest in automobiles, and they are now being bought by the Indians. And not very long, the Indian middle class will be as big as our whole population. Information technology, which they excel, is increasing this middle class.

Now, this chart looks at what the future may hold. This article that I just read, ``Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells'' says that we are going to have more oil than we have ever found. Now, we are not really finding new oil, most of this is oil that is in some of these fields, and these bars will go up higher here because now, with enhanced recovery, we are able to get more oil out. And they are making the projection that we are going to find as much more oil as we have remaining. And one projection is, and I will come to that in a few moments, that we are going to find as much more oil as we have ever found.

The next chart shows an interesting picture. This is the same consumption curve that you saw there with the same perturbations between the seventies and the eighties as a result of the Arab oil embargo.

Now, this chart, which is from our Energy Information Agency, is assuming something that I think is not rational to assume, and that is that we are going to find as much more oil as all of the reserves which we now know to exist.

A couple of congresses ago, I chaired the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and one of the first things I wanted to do was to determine the dimensions of the problem, and so we had oil experts from all over the world come in. How much oil did we find? How much of what we found is still there? And there was surprising unanimity from just under 2,000 giga barrels to just over 2,000 giga barrels. That is their figure here of 2.248,000 billion barrels.

Now, we use giga barrels. They said billion barrels here, that is because it is for an American audience. But if you were in England, a billion is a million million, in this country it is a thousand million. So you may confuse the audience when you are talking about billions. If you use giga, apparently gigs is a billion the world around. But what I want to point out in this chart is that even if they are correct, that the main amount, expected amount of oil that we will find, is 3,000 giga barrels, that moves the peak out from the present to only 2016. So even if they are right, and I think the probability that they are right is small, and I will give you several evidences of that as we go along, but even if they are right, even if we find as much more oil as all the reserves that we now know to exist out there, that will move the peak out only from about now, when most of those who work in this area believe that peaking has occurred or will shortly occur. If we find there is much more as that which remains, and by the way, of this 2,248,000 giga barrels, we have used about half of that, and about half of it remains. Now, with this enhanced oil recovery that this article is talking about from the New York Times, we will get a bit more of that. How much more remains to be seen. But if we find this extra roughly thousand giga barrels, that will only move the peak out to 2016. Now, one of the authorities in this area believes that we will find another thousand giga barrels, and we will be up around 4,000 giga barrels total. If that is true, since this is an exponential curve, and this was only, what, 16 years? The next may be only 12 years. So that moves the peak out only to about 2028. And that assumes that we are going to find as much more oil as all the oil that has ever been found.

The next chart shows an interesting prediction, and the data that was collected following the prediction. This shows the discovery curves. What this does here is to kind of round out those big bars that you saw in the previous one. And here they have done a very interesting thing. They have taken the F-5, F-50 and F-95, which was fractional, and I don't have the chart to how they got there, but I can tell you how they got there. What they did is run a lot of simulations. And they had the number of simulations on the ordinate, and they had the amount of oil that the simulation indicated would be found on the abscissa. So, they put these numbers into their computer simulation, and they got numbers out, and they graft all those numbers. And then they found the mean of those numbers, and they found that 95 percent, which meant that 95 percent of the predictions indicate you would find more oil than that and so forth. And so they assumed that the most likely thing would be the mean. Now, it was a mean of their projections. But somehow that F got translated when it went from USGS to the Energy Information Agency, it got translated to P, which is the probability. Now, if this is really probability, this is a bizarre use of statistics.

So they show here three probabilities. They show the P-95 probability, the P-50 probability and the P-5 probability. Now, if these really are probabilities, there should be another green line coming down this way; because if you are only 50 percent certain, obviously that is a pretty broad funnel you create out there. If you are only 5 percent certain, it is really broad. It is like the path of the hurricane. For the next 24 hours, they know pretty well where it will be, so that is pretty narrow. But as you go out in time, 2, 3 and 4 days, why it gets wider and wider because you are less and less certain of where it is going. So there should have been another green line down here and another blue line down here because you have a broad uncertainty if you are only 5 percent certain.

But notice what the actual data points have been doing. They have been following, as you might suspect, the 95 percent probability, if in fact it is probability. Obviously 95 percent probable is a lot more probable than 50 percent probable.

In a wide-ranging study published in 2000, a U.S. Geological Survey estimated that ultimately recoverable sources of conventional oil total about 3.3 trillion barrels, that was this little mean number in the previous chart right here, of which a third has already been produced. What has been produced is a half of what we have discovered. They are predicting that we will discover for that mean, as they call it, as much more oil as all of the reserves that we now know to exist.

More recently, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultant, estimates the total base of recoverable oil, and here they have 4.8 trillion. The little chart I showed you before had that at just under 4 trillion, you will remember. But notice from the peaking chart that even if that is true, that will push peaking out to only a bit before 2030. That is not all that far into the future.

Then they say there is a minority view held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some Members of Congress, that would be me, that oil production has peaked, but the theory they say has been fading. Well, they should have told that to T. Boone Pickens, because an Associated Press article, March 1 of this year, just a few days ago, this is from Doha, Qatar, he is over there talking about oil. And by the way, I didn't know until I read this article that he started his professional life as a petroleum geologist. We know him as a very wise investor on Wall Street. Legendary Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens sees today's stubbornly high price as evidence that daily global production capacity is at or very near its peak.

If demand for crude rises beyond the current global output of roughly 85 million barrels a day, Pickens told the Associated Press, prices will rise to compensate, and alternative sources of energy will begin to replace petroleum. If I am right, T. Boone Pickens says, we are already at the peak. If that is true, the price will have to go up.

And then he makes this statement: ``I think there are less reserves around the world than are being reported.'' Well, the two sources I mention are reporting greatly increased reserves. T. Boone Pickens says that he believes that they are over-reporting, said the 78-year-old former--by the way, young people can be very bright, but wisdom comes with age, and so T. Boone Pickens has 78 years of wisdom--who now

heads the Dallas-based Hedge Fund BP Capital. There are no audited reserves in the Mid East. It makes me suspicious, he says. We really don't know how much oil is in the Mideast because they do not open their books for us to see.

Forbes publisher, Steve Forbes, challenged Pickens' assumptions during an exchange during the conference saying political, not technological or geological, road blocks stood in the way of increasing the world's oil production. Now, I know Steve Forbes, and I admire him very much, but I think that he gives far too much credit to the marketplace. Many people believe that the market is both omniscient, that is, all knowledgeable, and omnipotent, all powerful.

If we had unlimited resources, the market might do what Steve Forbes has confidence that it will do. With the right incentives in places, such as Mexico, more oil could be brought to market and prices could drop, Forbes said. Pickens responded by saying that Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries, indeed. Thirty- five out of the top 43 oil-producing countries in the world have already reached peak.

Pickens responded by saying that Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries, naming the United States, Norway, Britain and soon Russia. By the way, Russia did peak once already, and then they kind of fell apart with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They are reaching a second peak, which I believe will be less than the first peak.

``The world has been looked at,'' Pickens told Forbes. ``There is still oil to be found, but not in the quantities we have seen in the past. The big fields have been found and the smaller fields, well, there is just not enough of them to replenish the base. Global consumers, led by the United States, have already pumped 1.1 trillion barrels of oil, roughly half of the 2.2 trillion barrels that have been discovered,'' or what Pickens describes as nearly half of the world's estimate. He thinks we will find a little more, 2.5 trillion barrels of oil. Other experts put reserves at 3 trillion, Energy Information Agency; or 4 trillion barrels of oil, Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

``From now on,'' Pickens said, ``rising demand will be met by higher prices, rather than ever larger crude oil production. Alternative energy sources will begin to take a share of the energy market until the world evolves from a hydrocarbon-based economy to something that is a mix of hydrocarbons and something else. Everything from nuclear, coal, wind, solar, hydrogen and biofuels stands a chance to assuage growing demand for energy.''

I would just like to make a comment about hydrogen. All the others are truly energy sources. Nuclear, coal, wind, solar, biofuels are energy sources. Hydrogen is not an energy source. So why do we list it there? You can't mine hydrogen; you can't pump hydrogen. The only way you can get hydrogen is to make it from something else. Unless you are going to violate the second law of thermodynamics, it will always take more energy to make hydrogen than you will get out of hydrogen.

It is made today largely from natural gas. It can also be made by electromagnetizing water, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Well, if you will always use more energy to make the hydrogen than you get out of the hydrogen, why would we be interested in hydrogen?

Well, for two reasons. One is that when you finally burn it, you get water. Water is the oxide of hydrogen. When you burn hydrogen, you get hydrogen oxide. We commonly call it water. That is pretty nonpolluting.

The second reason we are interested is that it is a great candidate for fuel cells if we ever get economically supportable fuel cells. We have been working on them for a long time, experts tell us, maybe 20 years. We will have economically supportable fuel cells, but that's the reason we talk about hydrogen.

A lot of people believe hydrogen is an energy source. Hydrogen, think of it as a battery, is something that carries energy from one place to another place. You can't put the falling water in your car and run it, nor can you put the electricity, unless you have a lot of batteries in your car to run the car, but you can take the electricity you get from the hydroelectric plant, split water, compress the hydrogen, put the hydrogen in your car. So you are really running your car on the energy from the waterfall.

But secondhand you produce hydrogen with it, and if you have a fuel cell in your car, now you will not only be running your car, polluting, just with water, which is pretty nonpolluting, but you will also get at least twice the efficiency out of that as you get out of the reciprocating engine.

The next chart is a very interesting one that shows us the sources to which one might turn to get energy other than the energy we get from fossil fuels. This chart reminds me very much of a young couple whose grandmother has died and left them a big inheritance, and they now have established a pretty lavish lifestyle. Eighty-five percent of all the money they spent came from their grandmother's inheritance and only 15 percent of the money they spend comes from what they earn.

They look at their grandmother's inheritance and how old they are, and, gee, this money is not going to last until we retire, so obviously we have got to do something, and that something is going to be either make more money or spend less money. That is pretty much exactly where we are relative to energy.

Eighty-five percent, some people will tell you 86 percent, but 85 percent of all the energy that we are expending today comes from natural gas, from petroleum, and from coal; and that leaves only 15 percent of the gas to come from other sources, of energy to come from other sources.

A bit more than half of that 15 is nuclear energy. That is 20 percent of our electricity, and in France, by the way, about 80 or 85 percent of their electricity comes from nuclear; and in our country, about 20 percent, but it is 8 percent of our total energy.

So when you look at the true renewables, only 7 percent now, it is a little different that this today, because this is a 2000 chart, and we have been really ramping up with solar cells, for instance, producing solar electricity. That market has been growing at about 30 percent a year. That is incredible growth.

But this started out as 1 percent of 7 percent, that is .07 percent. Suppose it is four times bigger today, that is .28 percent, less than a third of a percent, big deal. We have got a long way to go.

Thirty-eight percent of this renewable energy comes from wood, but that is not the person heating their house with wood so much as it is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product to produce energy. Waste to energy, 8 percent of this 7 percent.

There is a really state-of-the-art plant up here in Dickerson. They will be happy to have you come visit. It is really a showcase, and they are burning waste to produce electricity.

Now, one word of caution about waste: that huge stream of waste represents a big investment of fossil fuels, and don't count on having that big stream of waste in an energy-deficient world. We will live comfortably, we can live comfortably, but we will be producing far less waste in the future because all of that waste represents the use of fossil fuels.

If T. Boone Pickens is correct, and, by the way, he is not the only one, there are a number of experts out there who believe that we have peaked or are about to peak, there will be less and less of this waste. But at least for a moment it is a great use of this waste material, much better, I think, than putting it in a landfill. Recycle what you can; what you can't recycle, why, burn it to produce energy.

Wind. That is growing; it is really efficient. Our big wind machines today are producing electricity at about 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. By the way, none of those big ones are made in our country. I hope we can change that, but Norway makes them, for instance.

These are huge machines with blades that turn very slowly. You have to be a really sick bird or bat that flew into those. These aren't the little ones they had first where the blades twirled around quickly and did kill some birds and bats. You may have seen them. They are really quite large, and, I think, quite handsome.

That could and should grow. It is really growing in California. It is a totally renewable resource. By the way, the wind is simply secondhand sun. The wind blows because the sun heats the Earth unequally and so it is differential temperatures on the surface that cause the winds to blow.

Then the big chunk of these renewables are conventional hydroelectric. Now, in our country we have pretty much tapped out on the conventional hydroelectric. We probably dammed every river that should have been dammed and maybe a few that shouldn't have been dammed. They are now building fish ladders, and we are blowing up some of those dams because we think that the environmental pressures are greater than the relatively small amount of electricity we get from some of those.

That probably can't grow much in our country, conventional, but microhydro produces far less environmental impact and some believe might be as big as conventional hydro. This is a little dam and small amounts of electricity, maybe only watts, but 100 watts, 24/7, that will produce a fair amount of light for your reading, for instance.

At this 2000 chart, alcohol fuel represented 1 percent of 7 percent, that is .07 percent. Today it represents more than that. We have a number of ethanol plants; it is growing very rapidly. There is a very interesting speech given by Hyman Rickover to an audience of physicians. The 50th anniversary of that will be in just a few days, few weeks, the 14th day of May. In that article he noted, that speech, really, we used to have a transcript of it, he noted that one day there would be competition between energy and food for our biological crops.

I thought of that when I spent some time on a couple of occasions recently with our dairymen; and what has happened is that with the relatively small amount of ethanol we have made from corn, the supply demand has been so changed that in September of last year corn was $2.11 a bushel, and in December it was $4.08 a bushel, nearly double. The price of tortillas in Mexico has gone up, which is hurting poor people there, and our dairymen are going bankrupt because of the high cost of feed. Now, this is a boon to the corn producer, but it is anything but that to the animal feeder, because with the relatively small amount of ethanol that we have made, we have doubled the price of corn.

Well, this pretty much is where we are going to have to find alternative energy sources, and it is quite obvious, if you stop and think about it. You may want to put this off into the future, but at some point we will reach peak oil. I think we are there or nearly there for conventional oil.

Then at some point in the future, oil and gas will be so hard to find, and so expensive, that other sources of energy will be more attractive. We will look back in the future at the age of oil, and what an incredible age it was.

If you do a Google search for Hyman Rickover and energy, you will pull up the transcript of this fascinating talk that he gave almost 50 years ago. He, in that talk, goes through a very interesting history of the development of civilization and the role that energy played in the development of that civilization.

All one has to do is kind of reverse the tape, as you may see, when somebody jumps into a swimming pool, and you reverse the tape and they jump back out of the swimming pool. So we can see the contributions energy made to the development of civilization, and you reverse that tape, you can get some idea as to what would happen to our civilization if we are not able to derive energy from other sources equivalent to that, which we are getting from fossil fuels.

The next chart is a very interesting one from CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and this has several projections of peaking on it.

Now, the title of this article is ``Undulating Plateau Versus Peaking,'' and what they are contending in the article is that those who believe in peaking probably also believe in the tooth fairy, that they are about as probable. But in that article they have this graph which shows a peak. I agree with them that it will not be a smooth plateau, that it will be undulating.

I disagree that it will be that far in the future and it will be that broad. But let's look at this chart. They agree that if we find no additional large quantities of oil, that's the roughly 2 trillion barrels that will have been found, that's the current discovered oil in the previous charts, the peaking will be occurring fairly soon.

If we find another, roughly another trillion barrels by enhanced recovery and going under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock, as that last oil find in the Gulf of Mexico was, that we can get that much more conventional oil. So peaking will be pushed out to about this point.

And then they are looking at unconventional oil. And just a word about some of that unconventional oil. There are incredibly large potential reserves of unconventional oil. For instance, the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, contain more potential oil than all the oil that has been discovered so far. The same thing is true of our oil shales out in Utah and Colorado.

So why aren't we resting easy then that there is no problem for the immediate future because there is this incredible reserve of oil? Now, they believe that we are going to tap a pretty large amount of that.

In Alberta, Canada, they are exploiting this field. They have a shovel which lifts 100 tons at a time. It dumps into a truck which hauls 400 tons, and they carry this 400 tons to a cooker. They have what is called stranded natural gas in Alberta, a lot of gas and not many people. And since gas is hard to transport, it is not worth much because there is not many people there to use it, so we call it stranded. So its value is low. And from a dollar and cents perspective, they are making a lot of money in Alberta. It is costing between $18 and $25 a barrel; that is bringing $60 a barrel. That is a very handsome profit, so they are aggressively exploiting this field. They are using natural gas to cook the oil. The natural gas will not last forever. They know that, so now they are looking at the possibility of building a nuclear power plant there.

I have asked: How long do you have to operate a nuclear power plant before you get back to the fossil fuel energy it took to build the nuclear power plant? I get wildly divergent estimates of how long that is, which makes the point that we really need for this dialogue, which we really need to have, we really need an honest broker to help us agree on the facts, because it is very difficult to have an enlightened discussion when you can't agree on the facts. That honest broker might very well be the National Academy of Sciences. They are very knowledgeable. They are highly respected, and I think that they would assume this responsibility and I hope that we can find the resources so that they can do that.

Now, the Canadians know that this is not sustainable. The gas will run out. And, in addition to that, this vein, if you think of it as a vein which has now pretty much surfaced, it will shortly duck under a heavy underlay so there will be a lot of material to remove above it, so much so that they could not economically continue to mine it and carry it to the cooker. So then they will have to develop it in situ, in place. They really don't know yet how they would do that.

Now, the real profit that you need to look at in any of these things is what is called energy-profit ratio, how much energy you put in and how much energy you get out. In the big oil fields, and we have no giant oil fields in our country. We have never had one. The Ghawar War Field, perhaps the grand daddy of all oil fields in Saudi Arabia, has been producing oil for a very long time, and for much of its life, it was producing $100 worth of oil for $1 worth of investment, energy- profit ratio of 100.

Our oil was never that good. It started out maybe 10 or 20, and now it is down to 1 or 2 energy-profit ratio, how much energy you have to put in compared to how much energy you get out. And so although there are very large potential reserves in these unconventional oil fields, the net that you get out will be very much less. Even if it is feasible to get it out, the net will be very much less than the amount of oil which is there.

Now, they are working very hard in Canada. It is a huge enterprise. They are producing about 1 million barrels a

day. That is a lot. But that is less than 5 percent of what we use in this country, and just a bit more than 1 percent of the 85 million barrels a day that the world uses. So even though this is a tremendous effort and a lot of oil produced, it still is making a fairly small contribution to the total amount of oil in the world.

Now, I would ask the listener, Mr. Speaker, to draw their own conclusions: How much additional oil do you think we will get from current fields with enhanced oil recovery? Even if we get as much more as all of the present projected reserves, that will only push the peak by their own chart, which we saw a bit ago, out to 2016. And if we find double the amount of oil that we have ever found, it pushes it out only to about 2027 or 2028. That is not the distant future.

The next chart is really an interesting one, and I think graphically this kind of presents the dilemma that the world is in, and this is what the geography of world would look like if the size of a country was relative to the amount of oil reserves that it has. It is a really interesting map; isn't it? Saudi Arabia dwarfs everything else. And notice little Kuwait, a tiny corner of Iraq. You can see now why Saddam Hussein was interested in Kuwait, a tiny province down there at the southeastern corner of Iraq, just a fraction of the geography of Iraq, but nearly as big as Iraq. It dwarfs the United States. Here we are; we would fit five times into Kuwait. They have five times the reserves that we have.

Notice the two largest countries in the world, China and India; 1,300,000,000 people in China; 1 billion in India and growing. They don't have the birth control, the population control they have in China, and it won't be very long until India's population is equal to that of China. I mentioned a bit ago that it won't be too long before the middle class in India is the size of our total population, 300 million people. They all want cars. They all want heated and air conditioned homes. All of this takes energy.

So the traditional roughly 2 percent increase per year in energy demand is going to pick up with the development of countries like China and like India. Russia, which is now a huge exporter of oil, notice, they are only four times the size of the United States, a fraction of the size of Saudi Arabia, probably a bit smaller than Kuwait.

Notice where most of the world's oil is. There is some in this hemisphere, in Venezuela, but the rest of it is all northern Africa and the Middle East. Someone had noted that it is very strange that the world of Islam has most of the oil and the Christian world has most of the arable land. It seems to me there ought to be some opportunity for partnering. We can produce the food; they can produce the energy. But those kind of relationships in this confrontational world are hard to achieve.

The next chart is one that further develops this picture. And what this shows is the world, not as that would be proportioned by oil but as it is, and it shows what the symbols here, who is buying oil where. And these symbols for China, you notice one here, they almost bought Unocal in our country, and China is now buying up oil around the world very aggressively, not just buying oil, but in the process making friends. ``Would you like a hospital? How about a soccer field?'' And the Chinese are doing this all over the world. You can see their symbols where they are all over the world, and notice many of them in that oil rich crest of Africa and the Middle East.

Why are they doing this? The Chinese economy is growing at over 10 percent. The last quarter for which I saw data was 11.4 percent. They have to have observed that oil is fungible; that it really doesn't matter who owns the oil, which is why I didn't have any big problem with them buying Unocal. It doesn't really matter who owns the oil. The country, the company that gets the oil is the high bidder because oil moves in a global marketplace. Today, it was roughly $61 a barrel. So it doesn't make one bit of difference who owns the oil. The person who has the money, who bids the highest, gets the oil.

So, if this is how oil moves on the world market, why would China be buying up all of this oil? We happen to have one of the largest reserves of coal. We have 250 years of coal at current use rates. But if you increase the use of coal only 2 percent; by the way, this exponential growth is poorly understood by most people. After the discovery of nuclear energy, Dr. Einstein was asked what the next great energy source in the world would be, and he kind of jokingly responded that there was nothing quite like the power of compound interest.

Let me tell you just a little story to help understand this. The story is told that chess was developed in an ancient small kingdom. And the king was very appreciative, and he told the inventor of chess that, ``You have made such a contribution to our culture that I will give you anything reasonable that you ask.''

And so the inventor said, ``Oh, king. I am a very simple man. I have simple needs. If you would just take my chess board with, what, 64 squares on it, and if you put a grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the fourth and so forth until you filled all of the squares of the chess board, that will be an adequate compensation.''

The king said to himself, ``Foolish fellow. I would have given him anything reasonable. All he is asked for is a little wheat on his chess board.''

The king of course could not do that, because the amount of wheat that would have been on that chess board I understand represents a decade of world harvest of wheat. That is what exponential increase does.

Well, the world has been increasing at about 2 percent a year. That rate of growth will increase. There is an easy formula that you can use. If you divide the percentage growth into 70, it will give you doubling time. So 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years; 10 percent growth doubles in 7 years. So you can now get doubling time if you divide the percent into 70.

This coal that would last us 250 years, if you have only 2 percent increase in growth, that exponential function decreases the duration of its use to just 85 years. And since coal will not be useful for many of the uses of energy that we have, we are going to have to convert it into a gas or a liquid. And the energy to do that if you take it from coal will now reduce the amount of time that that 250 years of coal will last to 50 years.

But since energy sources move on a world market, we might be expected to share that liquid from coal or gas from coal with the rest of the world. And since we use \1/4\ of the world's energy, that 50 years divided by 4 comes down to 12\1/2\ years. So this amazing 250 years of coal suddenly shrinks to just 12\1/2\ years at only 2 percent growth if we are sharing it with the rest of the world.

Well, we may decide that, since the coal is ours, that we won't need to share it with the rest of the world if there is an acute energy shortage here.

That would be a logical decision that a country would make.

Now, if we, if there is a possibility we would not want to share our coal with the rest of the world, is there a possibility that China might not want to share their oil, which they have now bought in all of these countries around the world; that they would not want to share their oil with the rest of the world?

Mr. Speaker, with that thought in your mind, you might reflect on the fact that China today is aggressively building a blue water navy. Some I think 60 percent of their oil goes through the Straits of Moloch. We now could cut off that oil.

From a national security perspective, I can understand why they would have a meaningful interest in a blue water navy large enough to protect their supply lines for oil.

By the way, talking about choke points for oil, I think 40 percent of the world's oil moves through the Straits of Hormuz. And if that were mined, or if super tankers were sunk there to block that, 40 percent decrease in the amount of oil would bring all of the world's economies to their knees, essentially overnight. I hope that we are guarding well the Straits of Hormuz because that would, indeed, be the ultimate in asymmetric attack.

I have here a little article called, ``Corn Based Plastic Coming Soon.''

Now, of course, we live in a plastic world. And all of these plastics are made from oil. If you will look at your car, if you look at your home, you look at your television set, you look at almost anything in your environment, and I suspect this rug was made out of oil. Our pesticides, our herbicides, our pharmaceuticals, our make up, this is all made out of oil or a great part of it is made out of oil. So there is an interest in getting the things we make out of oil, much of our clothing is made out of oil, interested in being able to get these fibers, this material from something else, and so this is an article, ``Corn Based Plastic Coming Soon.''

Every bushel of corn that we produce requires a lot of fossil fuel energy. And almost half that energy comes from natural gas, which currently is used to make nitrogen fertilizer. Corn, as a plant, is a pig. It requires and uses incredible amounts of nutrients. And we have now engineered hybrid corn so that it can be planted close together. It grows rapidly. It uses the sunlight efficiently, and it uses enormous amounts of energy. And so, this corn based plastic that they are talking about, I don't know what the efficiency there is. But if it is no better than the efficiency of making ethanol, and ethanol, remember, every gallon of ethanol represents at least three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuel to make it. Some, Dr. Pimenthal, for instance, believes that if you really cost-account all the energy that goes into producing corn, that you use more fossil fuel energy to produce the corn than you get out of the corn. I hope he is wrong. I believe he is wrong. Anyway, after you have produced the ethanol from the corn, you still have a pretty good feed left, and I don't think his calculation took that into effect.

So this corn based plastic really is, in large measure, just recycling fossil fuels. It may make you feel good to say that my shirt is made from corn. But when you recognize the incredible amounts of fossil fuel energy, if it is the same efficiency as using ethanol, at least three-fourths of the fiber of your shirt might just as well have been made from oil because that oil or some fossil fuel source was used in growing the corn from which the plastic was made.

Mr. Speaker, we will continue next week.

Mr. Speaker, there is a question that often comes to my mind, as I sit here in these Chambers. I have spoken about it often, what made America great. I have been reminded of this question in my past speeches on this topic as the debate evolved regarding the inappropriately named Employee Free Choice Act, H.R. 800. We had a debate that I never thought would take place here in the Chambers of the House of Representatives of the United States, questioning the use of the secret ballot.

Now, I am asking myself again, what keeps America great? It is what our military is fighting for in Iraq, it is what they fought for in our American Revolution, our Civil War, World War I and World War II and every war great and small when our country has put our greatest treasure, the lives of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen at risk.

What keeps America great is our commitment to the vigilant defense of the cause of freedom as expressed by the will of the people. Expressing their will by voting with secret ballots is integral to keeping America great.

Our Constitution guarantees us freedom of speech and of religion. These are precious freedoms that allow us to prosper, to learn, to own property, to start a business, to teach our moral and civic values and build a legacy of wealth and knowledge for the next generation.

But it is the greatest freedom for citizens to decide or to vote using a secret ballot that sets our Republican forum of government apart. Secret ballots allow people to freely make decisions through our elected process, decisions made about not only who will represent them here in the Congress but also in their hometowns, decisions about what new amendments will be made to the Constitution, State or Federal.

There are codicils in the contracts we have with our government about how we want to be governed. Voting is a basic tool of a free society. Thomas Paine said in his dissertation on first principles of government that, and I quote, ``the right of voting for representatives is the primary right which other rights are protected.''

Voting is basic and natural to us. We have learned from an early age as school children voting for class presidents, and we expect it in adulthood as we elect representatives to our local, state and Federal elections.

It took a long time in this country to universally use secret ballot to make freedom's choices. But once in use, the secret ballot is not only the norm, but also the pinnacle tool which permits our countrymen to make these decisions, great and small, freely, without fear of intimidation or reprisal.

Mr. Speaker, we surely can't be serious when we pursue taking away from the rank and file worker the use of the secret ballot as the main vehicle for making decisions to unionize or remain an open shop. There may be problems with the unionizing process, but voting by secret ballot, I can assure you, is not one of them.

We here in the United States have acted as counselor to other governments and governing bodies on the requirements of a free and fair election. After all, we are the longest enduring republic in the history of the world.

I am going to reference such advice given on the U.S. Department of State Web site. If you search for principles of free and fair elections, you will find the requirements of an election. We here in Congress can benefit from relying upon this advice when considering the path to conducting union recognition process. And I quote, ``universal suffrage for all eligible men and women to vote, democracies do not restrict this right for minorities, the disabled, or give it only to those who are literate or who own property.'' Obviously, we want all people affected by union decision to have a right to vote.

I am going to add a few words about American history's path to universal suffrage here, because it is useful to understand our painful evolution to reach a point where voting went from the select few to every adult.

It has only been in my lifetime that true universal suffrage has been realized in our great country. We fought a great civil war that only put us on the path toward universal suffrage. We still had many battles to come. From 1865 to 1870 the Constitution was amended three times to guarantee equal voting rights to black Americans, but still the struggle continued. There were setbacks as States and localities undermined this Federal guarantee.

At the turn of the last century, there were barriers to achieving universal suffrage. Poll taxes and literacy tests denied many black American men the ability to exercise their right to vote. Jim Crow laws protected segregation. Not until the 1950s did our laws begin to change to put an end to segregation. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the means to the Federal Government to ensure the ability to vote by black citizens that is guaranteed under our Constitution.

Suffrage for women was long in coming. In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote, to her husband, John, who was attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, she asked that he and other men who were working on the Declaration of Independence remember the ladies. John responded with humor but got his point across; that the Declaration says that all men are created equal applied equally to women, he told her.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association, an organization for white and black women and men dedicated to the goal of universal suffrage. Other organizations followed. Still, in 1868, 3 years after the end of the Civil War, the 14th amendment was ratified but only provided for male suffrage. It was not until 1920, after many struggles, and only 86 years ago, that the 19th amendment was ratified and women in this country achieved the right to vote.

Let me go back now to that Web site of the U.S. State Department. Principles of free and fair elections: And I quote again, ``freedom to register a voter or to run for public office, these are the qualities, the characteristics that society must have if they want to have free people and fair elections.

``Freedom of speech for candidates and political parties: Democracies do not restrict candidates or political parties from criticizing the performance of the incumbent.

``Numerous opportunities for the electorate to receive objective information from a free press: Freedom to assemble for political rallies and campaigns.

``Rules that require party representatives to maintain a distance from polling places on election day: Election officials, volunteer poll workers and international monitors may assist voters with the voting process, but not the voting choice.

``An impartial or balanced system of conducting elections and verifying election results: Trained election officials must either be politically independent, or those overseeing elections should be representatives of the parties in the election.''

And now, the next two points, especially the last, are points that we really should well remember. ``Accessible polling places: Private voting space, secure ballot boxes and transparent ballot counting.''

And then this one, Mr. Speaker. ``Secret ballots.''

This is our advice on our State Department Web site to those who would like to emulate us and establish a government as free and fair and great as ours.

This is what it says. ``Secret ballots. Voting by secret ballot insures that an individual's choice of party or candidate cannot be used against him or her.''

It is only through the use of the secret ballot allowing for privacy voting without fear of reprisal that we can determine the true will of the people or the true will of workers. Do they want to be represented by a union or not?

If we keep in mind the advice that we so freely give to those outside our country, we can create a system for America's labor which will work for them. And frankly, who should be more protective of this basic tool of our society? Who should understand that the secret ballot should be the tool of choice for the members and their political members, but the union leadership themselves?

The union history is as painful as the struggle for the basic right to vote endured by blacks and women. The Industrial Revolution did usher in one of the most ugly periods of our history. Worker abuse, child labor abuse was, in fact, a huge problem. Brave men and women who formed unions led the efforts that addressed intolerable working conditions.

There will always be a place for employee unions. However, employee abuse by employers should not be replaced by employee abuse by unions.

In today's Los Angeles Times, not, I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, a conservative paper, in today's Los Angeles Times, there is an editorial entitled ``Keep Union Ballots Secret. Doing away with Voting Secrecy Would Give Unions Too Much Power Over Workers.'' This is the title of their article. This editorial outlines the issue well and, I believe, reflects the sentiment of the country.

Indeed, in recent polls, 87 percent of the American people believed that we should have secret ballot elections for determining whether a group of employees wanted to unionize or not.

We, in this body, are privileged to serve, because we were elected to represent our constituents in secret ballot elections. We took an oath, and we have the obligation to serve not big labor or big business. Our sole obligation is to uphold the Constitution and serve the individual residents of our districts.

I agree with Los Angeles Times editorialist. In part, I would like to quote that editorial, with which I wholeheartedly agree. And this is what it says. ``Unfair labor practices deserve tougher penalties. But improper influence can work both ways. As a rule, union membership improves worker prosperity and safety. Even so, the bedrock of Federal labor law is not unionism under any conditions, but the right of workers to choose whether they want to affiliate with a union.''

This, from the very liberal Los Angeles Times. ``Unions once supported the secret ballot for organization elections. They were right then and are wrong now. Unions have every right to a fair hearing. And the National Labor Relations Board should be more vigilant about attempts by employers to game the system. In the end, however, whether to unionize is up to the workers. A secret ballot insures that their choice will be a free one.''

Mr. Speaker, I ask again, in conclusion to these remarks, what keeps America great? It is our commitment to a vigilant defense of the cause of freedom as expressed by the will of the people, and the will of the people is best and freely expressed by secret ballot elections.

As I read this, Mr. Speaker, my mind goes back to a comment made by Benjamin Franklin as he came out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Many copies of the Constitution may have this little quote on the front leaf page. He was asked, tradition has it, by a woman, who said, Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? And his answer was, a republic, madam, if you can keep it.

There are two things about this statement, Mr. Speaker, that deserve some reflection. The first is a republic. We do the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and we note the republic for which it stands. And then we all too often get up and talk about the great democracy in which we live.

What is the fundamental difference between a democracy and a republic? And why was Mr. Franklin explicit in a republic, madam; if you can keep it?

A couple of examples of a democracy may be helpful in permitting us to understand why Benjamin Franklin was so specific. A somewhat humorous example of a democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner. You see, in a democracy, the will of the majority controls. And if these two wolves and a lamb were in a true democracy and they were voting on what they should have for dinner, I suspect that the result might be lamb.

Let me give you another example of a democracy. And I kind of hesitate to do this because I don't want to be misunderstood. But I think it says very clearly what the difference between a republic and a democracy is.

If you will stop and think about it, I think you will agree that a lynch mob is an example of a democracy. Surely, in a lynch mob, the will of the majority is being expressed. Aren't you glad, Mr. Speaker, that you live in a republic?

Now, what's the fundamental difference? To help me understand this, I reflect back on an experience in our country with a President, Harry Truman, ``Take Charge Harry,'' who made a very abrupt decision when the steel mills were going to strike. Then we did some manufacturing in this country, and it would have mattered. And our economy was already in trouble and was going to be in bigger trouble if the strike occurred. And so President Truman nationalized the steel mills. What that meant was that the workers at the steel mills were now Federal employees, and as such, by law, they could not strike. And so this averted the strike. This was a very popular action.

The Supreme Court met in emergency session and, in effect, what they said was, and by the way, Mr. Speaker, this is just one of two times in our history that the Supreme Court has set aside an executive order of the President.

This is in layman's language what the Supreme Court said to the President: Mr. President, you can't do that. You can't nationalize the steel mills because that is unconstitutional. You see, in a Republic we have the rule of law, no matter what the majority wanted, and clearly then the vast majority of Americans wanted what their President did. They were approving of nationalizing the steel mills, which avoided the strike. But the Supreme Court said you cannot do that because, you see, that is unconstitutional. The fundamental difference between a republic and a democracy is that in a Republic, we have the rule of law.

This Constitution that I hold in my hand is the fundamental law against which all other laws are measured. Now, we can change it. We have done it 27 times. But that is a very thoughtful process. It is two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate and it bypasses the President and goes to the State legislatures, and three-fourths of the State legislatures must ratify it.

It has been quite a while since we amended the Constitution. The last time we tried to amend the Constitution, it was the so-called ``equal rights amendment.'' Nobody argued that women should not have equal rights, and nobody argued that we didn't need to do something to assure that women had equal rights. And that amendment almost made it through the three-fourths of the State legislatures. But suddenly it began to dawn on people that what that amendment required was not quite what we wanted. What the amendment required was that you could not differentiate between men and women. If you are going to have a draft for the military, you would need to draft women as well as men. And so ultimately the equal rights amendment failed. It did not pass.

I think that if we could be so fortunate as to have some of these Framers of our Constitution be resurrected and join us here that they would counsel, as Benjamin Franklin did when he answered the woman's question by saying ``A republic, madam, if you can keep it.''

Abraham Lincoln understood that this was a new experiment that might not work: ``Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new Nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.''

We read those words and we slide through them so easily: ``that all men

are created equal.'' Of course, they are, you say. But to most at that time this was a revelation because most of the pioneers that established this great country came from either the British Isles or the European continent. And in almost every one of those countries there was a king or an emperor who incredibly, from our perspective, demanded and was granted divine rights, which said that the rights came from God to the king or the emperor and he would give what rights he wished to the people. Sometimes they were few, and sometimes there were more than a few rights that were given to the people.

But our Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator. Mr. Speaker, do you think our courts might declare the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it mentions God, it mentions our creator? Endowed by our creator with inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I don't know what was in Benjamin Franklin's head when he made the second part of that statement to the lady: ``A republic, madam, if you can keep it.'' Do you think he was concerned about some foreign power coming and conquering our country and taking our Republican form of government away from us? I doubt it. We are on the other side of a really big ocean. It took a lot of ships and a long time to gain any meaningful number of troops here. I suspect that he was more concerned about the threat to our Republic from within.

It has been said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You just can't ever, ever let down your guard. We are the longest enduring Republic in the history of the world. And I have asked myself many times how did we get here and why are we so fortunate, this one person out of 22, or less than 5 percent of the world's population, and we have fully one-fourth of all the good things in the world?

I think very often about this question as I recognize that we no longer have a population with the best work ethic in the world. I just came from China about 6 weeks ago. We no longer have a population that is focused on science, math, and technology. We no longer have a country that prizes the nuclear family. We no longer have a society that prizes that. Nearly half our kids are born out of wedlock today. I would suggest today society is at risk when half of the kids are born out of wedlock. So what is it about this great country that makes us so special that we have a fourth of all the good things in the world?

I think there are two things, and I want to focus for just a couple minutes on one of them, and that is the incredible protection that our Constitution gives to our civil liberties. There is no other constitution, there is no other country that has such respect for civil liberties. I think that in large measure it was this respect for our civil liberties that established a climate in which creativity and entrepreneurship could flourish. And I rise tonight because I am concerned about any threat to these civil liberties, and I think when we change the way we vote for any process from the traditional secret ballot process to something where your vote is exposed that in some little way you put at risk the civil liberties and start down a path that I don't think America needs to go down or wants to go down. Civil liberties are always a casualty of war, and I guess I am a little sensitive now because we are in a war.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. In World War II, my friend Norm Mineta, with whom I served here, a few years younger than I, a Japanese American, now Secretary of Transportation, told me, he said, ``Roscoe, I remember holding my parents' hand when they led us into that concentration camp in Idaho.''

That war is over and we are embarrassed we did that. Civil liberties are frequently, perhaps always, a casualty of war. And I remember that counsel that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. So excuse me, Mr. Speaker, if I seem to have maybe a bit overreacted to the dialogue that occurred here today because I am just so jealous of who we are and the great privileges that we have.

And now I want to turn our attention in the remaining time to a subject that I have come to the floor 22 previous times to talk about. And I think the great freedoms that we have are going to be tested as we meet the challenges that are ahead. I want to begin this discussion and will be discussing energy and one particular aspect of energy which is now fairly conventionally referred to as peak oil. I would like to note that it was the 14th day of last March that I gave my first speech on the floor here on peak oil. What I wanted to talk about was the probability that the world was about to reach its maximum ability to produce oil.

Obviously, that had to come at some point. The Earth isn't made out of oil. The amount of oil is finite. At some point we would reach our maximum capacity for producing oil. Few people ever thought about that because oil was just so ubiquitous. It was everywhere. Thousands of cars on the road. Electricity, heat whenever you needed it. And I was trying to decide what to call this and to label the charts, and you may see in the charts we use in a few moments some labels on top of the charts and they are put on with scotch tape because I wasn't sure what to call it.

I was debating between the ``great rollover.'' You see, when you have reached your maximum production of oil, you then roll over and start down a slope where you produce less oil, and it becomes harder and harder to get. So I thought maybe I would refer to it as the ``great rollover'' and finally decided that I would refer to it as ``peak oil.'' It is a good thing because now everybody is referring to it as ``peak oil,'' and I would have been a little out of step talking about the ``great rollover.''

I have here an article that appeared today from the Associated Press published March 1, 2007. That is today. And it is an interview. T. Boone Pickens says global oil production has reached its peak. T. Boone Pickens. I didn't really know who he was. I knew he was a very rich and capable man who had an incredible talent at deciding where the market was going and has become very rich as a result of that. I didn't know that Pickens started his career in the 1950s as a petroleum geologist. I don't know if in 1956 on March 8, and we are coming up to the 51st anniversary in a few days, I don't know if he was in that audience in San Antonio or not when a very, very famous speech was given by M. King Hubbert that I will refer to in a few moments.

The article begins by saying: ``Legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens sees today's stubbornly high oil price as evidence that daily global production capacity is at or very near its peak. `If demand for crude oil rises beyond the current global output of roughly 85 million barrels per day,' Pickens told the Associated Press, `prices will rise to compensate and alternative sources of energy will begin to replace petroleum. If I'm right,' he says, `we are already at the peak. And if I'm right, the price of gas will go up. I think there are less reserves around the world than are being reported. There are no audited reserves in the Mid East. It makes me suspicious,' he said.''

Now, he was challenged in this by a friend of mine, a person that I really admire, Steve Forbes. Forbes publisher Steve Forbes challenged Pickens' assumptions during an exchange in the conference, saying political, not technological or geological, roadblocks stood in the way of increasing the world's oil output.

Just give them an incentive to go drill and they will find more oil. With the right incentives in place, more oil could be brought to market and prices could drop, Forbes said.

Forbes referred to Mexico and what was happening there. Pickens responded by saying Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries. Indeed, 33, I think, out of the 45 oil-producing countries have already reached their peak and are already in decline.

Pickens responded by saying that Mexico is a declining producer of oil, as are most other countries, naming the United States, Norway, Britain and soon Russia. Indeed, I think Russia now has a second peak that they are declining from. They had an earlier

peak, the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union fell apart, and they now have recovered from that and are reaching a second but smaller peak.

The world has been looked at, Pickens told Forbes. There is still oil to be found, but not in the quantities we have seen in the past. The big fields have been found, and the smaller fields, well, there are not enough of them to replenish the base. This is T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens predicted oil prices will rise this year to an annual average of around $70 per barrel. It was $62 a barrel today. Global consumers led by the United States have already burned through 1.1 trillion barrels of oil, or what Pickens described as nearly half. Many observers will tell you it is half of the world's estimated 2.5 trillion barrels of oil.

This is his prediction. This is a man who has been able to make really good predictions, because he has gotten incredibly wealthy doing it.

From now on, Pickens said, rising demand will be met by higher prices rather than ever larger crude production. He says the days of meeting the demand with producing more are ending. Alternative energy sources will begin to take a share of the energy market until the world evolves from a hydrocarbon-based economy to something that is a mix of hydrocarbons and something else.

Now, since hydrocarbons are not infinite, they are finite, ultimately everything will be the something else. Everything from nuclear, coal, wind, solar, hydrogen and biofuels, stands a chance to assuage growing demand for energy, Pickens said.

I will put up the first chart now. What this chart does is to list the predictions of many of the world's experts, and T. Boone Pickens is not on here because he just made this prediction today and this is a chart made some time ago. It shows here a number of authorities, their background and references and the projected peaking date. What you can see here is that most of the authorities believe that peaking will occur quite soon.

I would like to digress for just a moment to talk about what we mean by ``peaking.'' Traditionally, peaking has meant to refer to conventional oil sources, the kind of oil you will get by drilling a hole in the ground and then pumping it out.

It is almost certain that the production of conventional crude oil has peaked, but we now are able to get the equivalent of crude oil from other sources, like gas to liquids, like oil from the tar sands of Canada, where it is really thick. It won't flow. They lift it up in a shovel that lifts 100 tons, they dump it into a truck that carries 400 tons, and then they cook it, add some volatiles to it so it will flow, and then you have the equivalent of oil. Or really heavy oil, like some of the oil that Venezuela is producing.

Then you might also include an unconventional oil, oil that is in places that is really, really hard to get to, like that last find in the Gulf of Mexico, which I think was under 7,000 feet of water, more than a mile of water, and several miles of dirt. They aren't pumping that yet. I have been told, and you are told a lot of things that may or may not be true, but I have been told that we will start pumping that oil when oil is $211 a barrel, because that is what it will take to get it out.

There are some who believe that the peak is a bit down the road, but you see that they all are pretty close.

There are several others who have made predictions about when peaking will occur. I have been talking about T. Boone Pickens and his prediction that it is now, that we are here. I noted all of these.

I have some remarks here from one of those, and we will look at the next chart now, and this is the chart from a study that was done at the request of the Energy Department and paid for by the Energy Department, by the SAIC, big SAIC organization. The principal investigator was Robert Hirsch, so it is frequently referred to as the Hirsch Report.

In this report, and I have highlighted here something that I thought was significant, he says, the world has never faced a problem like this. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak.

A number of competent forecasters, I have just shown you a list of those, project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Predictions of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity and political influences. Peaking will happen, and he should have really underlined that, peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.

The next chart shows some additional quotes from the Hirsch Report. The peaking of oil presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management. Remember in the previous chart it said the world had never faced a problem like this.

As peaking is approached, and note how similar this is to what T. Boone Pickens said in the article today, as peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and without timely mitigation, and then he says this, economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.

Another chart from the same Hirsch Report makes reference to another projection of when oil will peak, and this is a projection made by our own Energy Information Agency using data from USGS. I will spend just a moment on this chart because it holds the essence of a pretty big debate that is going on out there.

The black curve here represents our use. Notice what happened in the 70s, the Arab oil embargo. If that line had kept on going up, as it had been going up for years, it would be way up there, wouldn't it, and there wouldn't be anywhere near enough oil. Eighty-five million barrels wouldn't begin to meet the world's demand if that were true.

There was a stunning statistic during this rapid rise up to the seventies. In every decade up until the Carter years, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That is stunning. What that means is that when we had used half the oil, there would only be 10 years left. That is not 10 years at that use rate, because it is going to be harder and harder to get, so it is going to fall off in what can be pumped.

But, fortunately, we had a wake-up shock, and we found out how to do a lot of things a lot more efficiently. Your refrigerator and air conditioner today may be three times more efficient than it was at the time of the Arab oil embargo. I don't think anybody will argue that we aren't living as well today as we did in the seventies, and we are using precious little more oil than we did in the seventies with a fair sized increase in the population. So efficiently really is possible, isn't it?

Well, back to this chart. USGS uses a very interesting technique for predicting how much oil is yet to be discovered. They have some very elaborate computer simulations, and they make some assumptions, and they put these assumptions into the computer simulations and then run these simulations. And they change the assumptions, because it might be a little higher or might be a little lower. So they have done this a very large number of times. Then they graph the frequency of certain predictions, of how much oil will be produced against the quantity that will be produced. Then they pick the mean of this.

This is the mean of their computer projections. They pick the mean of this and they say that that mean is the expected value. This is simply the result of putting some assumptions into some computer models and then running it a number of times.

Now, this says probability, but in their charts it says frequency. I don't know how frequency got translated to P for probability, but there is a bit of miscommunication here. They say that the low probability is the 95 percent probability. Of course, this was the number where there was 5 percent of predictions on one side and 95 percent of predictions on the other side of this point on their graph.

Now, what they called the 95 percent probability is what T. Boone Pickens said, you remember he had 2.3, that is slightly different from this, 2.5, something like that, slightly different from that, as the total amount of oil that had been discovered in the world, a little over 1,000 gigabarrels. And we use ``giga'' rather than billion, because a billion in England I think is a million million, and a billion here is 1,000 million. So if you use billion you may be misunderstood, but giga apparently around the world means a billion, and,

of course, 1,000 gigabarrels is a trillion gigabarrels, and this is 2.248 trillion gigabarrels, 248,000, which is 2.248 gigabarrels of oil.

Now, their mean, they say, reflects the probability that we are going to find half as much oil as we have ever found, half as much more oil as we have ever found in the past. And they even have a high 5 percent probability where they say we might find twice as much oil as all the oil we ever found in the past.

Now, even with this assumption, and this is really important, even with this assumption of the mean, and that is the red line here, you see, the mean, even with the assumption that we are going to find half as much more oil as we ever found, or to put it another way, we are going to find as much more oil as all of the reserves that now exist, even with that assumption, look where peaking occurs. 2016. That is just around the corner.

Now, if we don't find that additional oil, then the peaking would occur here. This is 2000. We are now in 2007, slightly after that, which is when T. Boone Pickens said it has occurred.

The second part of this chart shows another interesting thing, and that is if you use enhanced oil recovery, you will certainly get the oil more quickly. You may get some more oil, too; but the primary thing you will do is get it quicker. But if you pump it now, it won't be available later; and so they show a very steep drop there.

The next chart shows a comment by one of the giants in this field, James Laherrere, and he made an assessment of the USGS report which was the basis for this prediction of our Energy Information Agency that we are going to find this incredible amount of new oil. This is what he says: ``The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented,'' no evidence other than their computer modeling. ``Such an improvement in performance is 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.''

We now have vastly better discovery techniques. We have computer modeling. We have 3-D seismic, and we pretty much have mapped the world. And oil and gas can occur only in fairly unique geological formations, and we know what those formations are, and we know pretty much where they are.

The next chart is very interesting. It shows the EIA projections of discovery, how much oil we were going to discover. This is the discovery peak, not the use peak because we in the past discovered enormously more oil than we used. But this is the discovery peak. They made this chart in about 2000 and this red line was the discovery peak in the past up to that time. Then they made three projections for the future.

One was their 50 percent probability. The mean, which is the 50 percent; the P 95 which is the yellow one; and the blue one, which is the 5 percent probability. They said there was a 5 percent probability we would find an incredible amount of oil, and they said there was a 95 percent probability that we would find only this tiny little bit done here. And the mean was this green line, and they saw it going up better and better.

But look at what happened. The red data points show that the discoveries were precisely what you would have predicted them to be if in fact it is a probability, 95 percent probable, it is certainly a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable, and the actual production curve has followed the 95 percent probability.

All of this has given rise to a statement by Condoleezza Rice, and this is a very insightful statement on April 5, 2006: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word warping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomat effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.''

Let me put the next chart up, and this chart comes from an incredible speech given by Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine. I just want to quote a couple of things. By the way, if you do a Google search, Mr. Speaker, and ask for Hyman Rickover and energy, I think you can probably pull up this speech he gave on May 14, 1957. He gave this speech at a banquet of the annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota. Let me just read a couple of things that he says in this speech because he was so prophetic:

``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living.'' And this was 50 years ago. What would he say today? ``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 \1/20\th horsepower. 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 controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, 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 100 years just gone by may well seem like a golden age.''

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.''

And if all of these experts that I have quoted are right and if T. Boone Pickens is right, we have now reached the maximum production of oil, which means that we are going to have to learn to live with what we have got for the moment, and then there will be a time when it is going to be harder and harder, and less and less will be found.

Ultimately the nation which controls the largest energy sources will become dominant. We don't own them, but we control them with our dollars because we now are buying a fourth of all of the oil in the world. China is buying oil around the world. Why would they do that? You don't need to own a single oil well and will get all of the oil you want if you simply have the dollars to pay for it. I think it is an interesting exercise to reflect on why China might be buying these oil wells.

If we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have, I have a notice we haven't been doing much of that, and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.

What are these people talking about? What is peak oil, the next chart, and this chart is a chart from the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and you will see them referred to as one of the major authorities in this area. They do not believe what T. Boone Pickens said today. They think that peaking is quite a ways out, and they created this little chart to ridicule the scientists who predicted that the United States would peak in 1970 and we did peak in 1970. By the way, he predicted the world would be peaking about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world?

They used this chart to ridicule him, and I think it gives credibility to what he said. The total U.S. production is the red curve. M. King Hubbert predicted that we would peak in 1970. In 1970 we reached a peak. He was making that prediction only from the lower 48. He couldn't have known that we were going to find a lot of oil in Alaska, and we did. What that lot of oil in Alaska did was to produce this little bump here.

I have been at zero miles of that 4-foot pipeline that for many years produced a fourth of all the oil that we produced, and it only made this little blip in the downslope of Hubbert's peak. CERA says because this was the curve rather than the predicted curve of Hubbert here, he was therefore a fraud and not to be believed. I think there is reasonable concurrence between these.

The actual, by the way, for the lower 48 which he produced follows pretty well his prediction, and we found the additional oil in Alaska which kicked it up a little. But in spite of everything that we have done, we now are producing half the oil that we produced in 1970.

My last chart, and this chart, I could spend the whole hour talking about this, and I may do that some evening, but this chart has an enormous amount of information on it. These are the discoveries. This is when we discovered it. The black curve is how much we used. For many years we found very much more than we used. But starting in 1980, we started finding less and less and less, and our use rate went up and up and up. Here is the 1970 blip, and it keeps on going up. For all of this time we were dipping into reserves. We have a lot of reserves left.

What will the future look like? One thing is certain, you cannot bump what you have not found. These graphs, the area under these curves represents the volume, the amount. So the area, if you put a smooth curve over this one, the area under that curve would represent the amount of oil that we have found.

The area under this consumption curve would represent the amount of oil that we use. You can't use oil you haven't found. Within some limits we can make the future look like we want it to look with enhanced recovery and feverish drilling and so forth. But I would submit that you can't pump what you haven't found, and I would like the listener to make his own judgment as to how much we can change what they predict here will be the future production of oil.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, March 5, 2007, at 12:30 p.m., for morning hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, when the original resolution that brought our military to intervention in Iraq came to the Congress, I interpreted it as asking the Congress to turn over to the President our military to use anytime he wished, anywhere he wished, against any country he wished, now and forever more.

Feeling that this was patently unconstitutional, I was very pleased when the International Relations Committee, chaired at that time by Henry Hyde, revised the resolution and narrowly focused it on Iraq. That resolution had strong encouragement for the President to obtain a U.N. resolution so that when we went into Iraq it would be a part of a U.N. coalition. The U.N. would own that war; we wouldn't own it.

When the President did not get the U.N. resolution so strongly encouraged by that original resolution that we voted on, I then voted for the Spratt substitute because I felt that if we were going to send our young men and women into war, that it needed to be with the full support of the American people through their elected officials, and we needed to have that additional debate. That didn't happen. I felt that we went in with unrealistic expectations.

There is no country around Iraq that has anything like the government that we would like for them to have. Several of the countries have dictatorships. We call them royal families. Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, but they are dictatorships. Several countries, Jordan and Syria, have kings. Iran is essentially a theocracy ruled by the mullahs. The only country that comes even close is the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, where they have a sort of democracy, but several times in the last few years the military has thrown out the civilian government, telling them they need to start over, hardly the kind of government that we have in this country and that we envision for Iraq.

So I thought that there were very unrealistic expectations. That was a very steep hill to climb; that success was unlikely, and therefore, I wanted to go in under a U.N. resolution.

What now? I hope I am wrong, but I believe that there will be one of two

likely outcomes, either another strong man, hopefully more benevolent, than Saddam Hussein, or three loosely federated states with an overarching entity that pumps the oil and distributes the revenues on a per capita basis.

Now, we have a resolution before us and how should one vote? If you believe that the President is the Commander in Chief and has a right to pursue the war in the way he chooses, then you would vote ``no'' on this resolution.

If you believe that this resolution sends the wrong message to the enemy that we are losing our resolution, our resolve, then you would vote ``no.''

If you believe this sends the wrong message to the troops, I know the first clause says we support our troops, but then one might argue that the right hand is taking away what the left hand gave because in the second clause we say that we do not support the surge, which some may interpret as not supporting our troops; then you would vote ``no.''

But if you believe that the Iraqis need to stand up so that we can stand down, then you would vote ``yes.''

If you believe that the surge will not help, which is very likely, then I think you need to vote ``yes.''

If you believe the surge might actually hurt by placing more of our brave young men and women in harm's way, I understand that a fair percentage of the violence over there is directed against us, if that is true, then how do we reduce the violence by putting more of us there, then you would vote ``yes.''

If you want to send a message to the President, the Congress and the American people, that this war can't go on forever, then you would vote ``yes.''

If you want to send a message to the troops that we are watching, that you won't be there forever, that you have the support of your citizens and your Congress, then you would vote ``yes.''

This is obviously a very complex vote. Whether you vote ``yes'' or whether you vote ``no,'' there will be unintended, unwanted messages that will be sent. Being required to vote either ``yes'' or ``no'' on a resolution like this is a little bit like requiring the husband to answer the question, ``yes'' or ``no,'' ``Have you stopped beating your wife?''

If that is true, then perhaps the best vote on this is a ``present'' vote.

It is so true here that what you see depends on where you stand. There has been a lot of quite intemperate rhetoric on both sides. It is hard sometimes to imagine that we are debating the same resolution.

It is so true here that he who frames the question determines the answer.

Mr. Speaker, we shouldn't be here. After the debate, this vote is somewhat irrelevant. Indeed, the listening Americans have each cast their own vote. In spite of all the divisive rhetoric, I want one thing to be certain, that all 435 of us want only what is best for America, what is best for our troops, a good and bright future for the Iraqis and especially want to assure our brave young men and women there that they have the total thanks of a grateful Nation.

Madam Speaker, there are three different groups in our country and indeed worldwide at least for some of these issues that have common cause in campaigning for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. These three groups come from very different perspectives, but as you will see from our discussions this evening they really do have common cause. Because to solve the problems that brings them to this dialogue, all three of these groups are advocating essentially the same thing. That is, a reduction in our use of fossil fuels.

The first of these groups is a very large group which has genuine concern about national security interests. Probably 2 years ago now, or nearly that, 30 of our prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, McFarland, Jim Woolsey and 27 others, some of them senior retired military people, wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that in our country we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of world oil and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, importing almost two-thirds of what we use, represents a totally unacceptable national security risk.

The President himself recognized this in his State of the Union a year ago when he noted that we get some of this oil from countries, as he said, that don't even like us very much. That is a bit of an understatement for some of those countries.

The next chart shows a recognition of this on the part of our Secretary of State. This was April 5 of last year. We do have to do something about the energy problem.

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

I am sure that in her head she had a mental picture of this really interesting map of the world. This shows what our world would look like if the size of each country was determined by its reserves of oil. And you can see how in America right here, tiny on this map of the world, we represent about less than 5 percent of the people of the world and we have only about 2 percent of the oil in the world, but we are using 25 percent of the oil.

Look how small we are. We would fit many times in Saudi Arabia. We are about the size of Qatar here. We would fit four times in Kuwait, if the size of Kuwait, if the land mass of Kuwait was relative to how much oil they have.

Russia up there, they are a big exporter now, but they can be a big exporter because they aren't using anywhere near as much as we have. You see Russia is two or three times as large as we are.

Well, that large community in our country which is genuinely concerned about national security interests understands our problems that come from this distribution of oil. Many of these oil reserves are in countries that, what we call the royal families. They are really dictatorships, aren't they? And Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. And then in Iran, that is run as a theocracy pretty much totally controlled by the Mullahs. And here we have Venezuela, a Communist state.

The President very wisely said in that State of the Union message a year ago that we are getting oil, many of the reserves are in countries that don't even like us very much.

Now, fortunately, our imported oil doesn't come from the mix as we see it here, because we are getting oil where it is cheaper to ship it and so forth. So a lot of our oil comes from Canada. They are pretty tiny in terms of total reserves, but there aren't many people there, so they are an exporter. We get oil from Mexico, and we get oil from Venezuela simply because of economics. It is just cheaper to ship it the short distances around the world.

So this is one group that has common cause in wanting to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, particularly oil, because we are so dependent on the rest of the world which, as Condoleezza Rice says, presents a very real national security problem.

A second group that is interested in reducing our use of these fossil fuels, particularly oil, is the group that believes that, whereas the United States reached its maximum production of oil in 1970, that the world is about to approach that point now. And if you aren't concerned about national security risks and if you aren't concerned about climate change, which is going to be the third one that we talk about, you would really be concerned about oil if you recognized that there is not going to be enough of it in the future. It is going to be a real economic problem.

What we have here, it says here, the United States production Hubbert versus Actual. This is a report from CERA, the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who were trying to point out that M. King Hubbert was not very accurate in his prediction of what the United States would do, and therefore you shouldn't take him very seriously when he predicted the world would be peaking about now.

The average person looking at this would say that they were kind of nitpicking, because this is the Hubbert's Lower 48 Projection, this yellow line here, and the red is the actual. And of course added to the Lower 48 was our big discovery in Dead Horse and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and our oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, I think that these two curves here run pretty darned close together; and for that growing community of people that have a genuine concern about the availability of oil in the future, this chart has real meaning.

I might look at the next chart here before we move to those who are concerned about climate change. This is a chart which presents the challenge that we face from what is called peak oil, and these bars here represent the discoveries of oil. You note that the big discoveries were back in the 1960s and 1970s; and ever since 1980, on average, the discoveries have been reducing, going down, down, down.

Now, anyone who has had any math and charting and so forth in school

knows that if you draw a smooth curve over this, the area under the curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have found. Indeed, each of these represents a reservoir of oil. If you add up all these little bars, why you have the total; and that is what you do when you smooth them out. You, in effect, add them all up.

The solid dark line here represents the amount of oil that we have been using. We started out really rich, didn't we? We found this much oil, and we are just using this tiny bit down here.

It looked like oil was going to be forever. When would it run out? Look at how little we are using and how much there is out there.

But now look what happened. We continued to use more and more as the industrial revolution grew and as our population grew and we found more ways to use energy to make our lives comfortable. The use continued to grow and grow, but the discovery started falling off.

In 1965 or so, they started falling off, down, down, down, and that is in spite of ever better techniques for finding oil, computer modeling, 3-D seismic and so forth. We now have a pretty good idea of what the geology of the world looks like, and we will find gas and oil in only very unique geological formations. Maybe a little later this evening we will have a little chance to talk about those so you have some expectation of what we might find in the future.

Here we are now, and this is about 2007, and we have been using more oil ever since about 1980 than we have been finding. Of course, we have had lots of reserve, and we have been eating up that reserve now, until we have taken some of this to fill in this space.

Now you look to the future, and what does the future look like? We have some options of what the future looks like. One of the options we do not have, though, is pumping oil we have not found. So unless you think we are going to find more oil than this chart indicates, and of course it will not be a smooth, down curve like that. It will be up and down but generally it will be down most people recognize. Well, we can use all sorts of enhanced oil recovery techniques and pump it sooner, and you may get a little more from those enhanced recovery techniques, but you cannot pump what you have not found.

So this shows you very graphically. If you had only one graph to look at to help you understand what we are facing in terms of peak oil, this would be the graph. So you understand now why this second group is really concerned about our use of fossil fuels, particularly oil, because it is very probable that the world is going to reach its maximum production of oil, maybe has already, but if not now, very soon, and the demand for oil, which has been going up at a roughly 2 percent per year growth is going to continue. So it is going to be an ever increasing difference between the available oil and the demand for oil.

Of course, when that happens, of course when demand exceeds supply, price goes up, and we have seen oil prices go up relatively few years ago from $10 a barrel to $60 a barrel now. It was just a few months ago $78 a barrel. Kind of fear factor in that way, it went away, and it dropped very quickly $18 a barrel. But very volatile market, up and down $1 or more a day. Another fear factor, it could jump another $18.

The next chart I have here is one that shows the concerns that this third group has, and that is those who are concerned about climate change. I have something I want to read here. This chart comes from this document by the way, ``Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change.'' It says here, ``The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.

``Climate change is global in its causes and consequences, and international collective action will be critical in driving an effective, efficient and equitable response on the scale required.''

This international cooperation reminds me of a visit we just made. I came back just about a month ago from China. Nine of us, nine Members of Congress went over and the primary reason of the trip was to talk to them about energy. I was surprised and pleased when they began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Gee, I says, they get it. Somehow a civilization that was a golden civilization when my Fore Fathers were barbarians running around Europe has a longer view of things than we seem to have. We have trouble seeing beyond the next quarterly report in our industry. We have real trouble here seeing beyond the next election. But they are looking post-oil they say. They recognize that there will be a post-oil period.

A thousand years of recorded history, we have been in the age of oil about 100, 150 years. If it is half gone and if it follows a bell curve, as it did in our country and it probably will in the world, you have probably got another 100, 150 years of oil, with ever increasing costs and ever decreasing amounts as we get the oil, which is harder and harder to get.

Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics. It is the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen. The benefits of strong, early action on climate change outweigh the costs they say.

So this is a little chart that shows where these gases come from. Just a moment of explanation as to why the use of oil and so forth produces climate change.

When you go out into your car this evening, if you go out, if it is parked outside and the sun is shining in, and if you go out before dark, your car will be very much warmer inside than it is outside, and we call that the greenhouse effect. What happens is the light from the sun comes in in a very broad wavelength spectrum from very long waves to very short waves, and they go easily through your car, most of them through the car window, and then that sun heats up the material inside your car, and that reradiates in the infrared. Well, the glass is relatively impervious to infrared so it simply reflects it back, and that is called the greenhouse effect, and your car then gets warmer and warmer. You see it especially on a summer day when it may be 80 outside and 120 inside your car which is why you should not leave your children and animals inside the car when you leave it.

Well, there are gases in the atmosphere that essentially do the same thing as the glass in your automobile. You may remember riding in the airplane and you are very comfortable sitting in there at 38, 40,000 feet and the pilot tells you it is minus 40 degrees centigrade outside. That is really cold. The reason you could be so warm down here and you are so cold up here is the reflection of all this heat which is radiated back from the earth, long infrared rays, and they are reflected back. One of the things that reflects them back are gases up in the atmosphere. There a number of those gases, methane, and carbon dioxide is one of the major ones.

Of course, carbon dioxide, absolutely essential for plant life, and they are so efficient. Our oxygen is about 21 percent. We can do with maybe half of that. If you are at 18,000 feet, that is all you have got because of the atmospheric pressure there. But these plants make due on .04 percent. Do you not wish you could be as efficient as these plants? You could get by on the top of Mt. Everest very easily. You would not need to pressurize the cockpit in the aircraft you are riding in.

What stunned me in this report was when I read that our earth now is only 5 degrees centigrade, that is 9 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than it was in the last ice age. Wow, what a huge change in climate, a relatively small change in temperature makes, just 9 degrees cooler Fahrenheit, and we had glaciers that came down to southeast Ohio. They came down that far, scooping up the dirt and from it you can see where it melted and left the mounds of gravel and dirt there where they came down that far.

Well, I am very pleased to be joined by one of the Nation's leading voices and authorities on climate change, my colleague, also from the great State of Maryland, Congressman Gilchrest.

I want to thank my colleague very much for joining us here. Congressman Gilchrest mentioned market forces. They are, indeed, very powerful. They have served us very well in this country. They have provided for us the highest quality of life of any place in the world. But market forces are limited. They cannot do what they cannot do.

As I noted somewhat humorously, there are even some things that God cannot do. God can't make a square circle, for instance. The market forces are very powerful. As long as there are unlimited forces, market forces will work. I remember mentioning to one of our very high government officials the problem of limited oil supply in the future. The response was, gee, I guess the market will take care of that.

I guess when oil gets more expensive, we will use less of it, and then we will find alternatives. That is true. When oil prices get higher, we will use less of it, and we will look for alternatives.

But when you look at the potential for exploiting these alternatives, you see that a large amount of time and energy must be invested in these alternatives before they yield any meaningful amount of replacement for the fossil fuels, which are so abundant and so energy rich.

Let me give you just one little example of some of the unintended consequences of trying to do this. This is a big push to make ethanol from corn in our country. We have noted that the Brazilians are making ethanol from sugar cane, and they now don't have to import any oil. We would like to emulate them and make enough ethanol from corn that we will not have to import oil. That, by the way, is the impossible dream. That will not happen.

With the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are now making, and there aren't very many E-85 pumps or blends of ethanol in gasoline in this part of the country, there are in the Midwest, but with the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are making, the demand for corn raised the price of corn from $2.11 a bushel in September to $4.08 in December. That is causing a huge problem for our people that raise animals.

We are having a meeting in a few days with a number of our dairy people from Maryland. Unless milk goes up to more, I think it is about $14 per 100, now it needs to be at least $18 before they can break even.

With this kind of a price for food for their animals, they will go bankrupt. So the relatively small demand for corn to make the relatively small amount of ethanol that we are making now has essentially doubled the price of corn.

What this does is to reflect the enormous amount of energy that is in these fossil fuels. There they are really energy dense. This chart shows something about what has happened to our world as a result of the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels.

Hyman Rickover, and let me get a copy of his paper, it was not really a paper, it was a talk that he gave to a group of physicians 50 years ago. The anniversary of that will be May 14 of this year, and that was at a banquet of the annual scientific assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association. This talk had nothing to do with medicine. He apologized for that at the beginning of his talk. But he thought that the physicians might enjoy some diversion.

He was talking about the enormous fossil energy in these fuels. Hyman Rickover, of course, is the father of our nuclear submarine. I had no idea that he had given this talk. It just appeared in the Energy Bulletin December 2 of last year, 2006. So it has only been out in the general public for these couple of months.

I noted this the other night that we need to hear this again, because this is just so revealing as to what this energy has done for us. With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Does the enormous fossil fuel energy in this country which we control feed machines which makes each of us a master of an army of mechanical slaves? Now at that time we didn't import any, so he could say we controlled it. Now we import almost two-thirds of what we use.

Another writer has indicated the incredible amount of energy in fossil fuels in oil. Let me give you the analogies he uses, and then I will read the ones that Hyman Rickover gave in that speech 50 years ago. One barrel of oil produces the energy equivalent of 12 men working all year for you.

If you figure the price that you could hire a man, the equivalent a man to work for you, by buying $10 of fossil fuel, of oil, it will work a full year for you. Now let me read what Hyman Rickover said 50 years ago and more so today. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, \1/20\ of a horse power. That is 24/7. You can do a little better than that when you are working, but you have to eat, sleep, so forth.

Machines, therefore, furnish every American and industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men. Wow. How many man-months of work without any energy from fossil fuels would it have taken to build your automobile?

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, he says, controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men. Each jet pilot of 700,000 men.

You know, thinking of that jet pilot in that plane up there just the other day, and I look at those contrails and sometimes they are the only cloud-like things in the sky, it finally occurred to me the dynamics of this CO2 thing that Congressman Gilchrest was talking about, carbon; and that is what is in these fuels, is largely carbon and hydrogen.

Carbon has a molecular weight of 12, and hydrogen has a molecular weight of 1. It is the lightest element in the universe. When you burn this carbon, it combines with oxygen, one molecule of carbon with two molecules of oxygen. Oxygen weighs 16. So what that says is, Congressman Gilchrest, that if you weigh the gasoline that goes in your car, you produce three times that weight in carbon dioxide. That is incredible.

Now, all of that carbon dioxide was taken out of the atmosphere a very long time ago. I didn't know, as a little boy, where oil came from; but I did know where coal came from, because we had a coal furnace in our house, and I would have to break those big lumps of coal. We bought it just as it came out of the mine.

When I would break a lump of coal open, there would be a fern leaf. Nobody had to tell me where coal came from. I knew very well where it came from. It came from plants that grew a

very long time ago, they fell over under pressure and in time and they became coal.

So we were releasing incredible amounts of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, which will change the acidity of the ocean. Fortunately carbon dioxide is very soluble in water. But it still changes the pH of the water because it forms a very weak acid, carbonic acid, when it gets in the water.

Truly, the humblest American, Admiral Rickover says, enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and live better than most ancient kings. In retrospect and despite wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by, that was 1950, that is right here, the 100 years just gone by, may well seem like a Golden Age.

And what this chart shows here is the history of the world, energy wise, for only about 400 years out of that 8,000 years that Admiral Rickover talks about. And the industrial revolution began with wood, the brown curve here, and it did not produce very many quadrillion BtUs of energy, and then coal, and boy did the economy grow with coal and trains and so forth. But then look what happened. It exploded when we found gas and oil. And that is because gas and oil are so easy to change into compounds that we can readily get energy from.

And they are much more adaptable and flexible than coal. Although you can get gas and oil from coal. Hitler had to do that when we cut off his oil supplies, and under embargoes South Africa had to do that. We may be turning to that again shortly.

As I mentioned, Madam Speaker, there are three groups that really have common cause in talking about the use of these fossil fuels. One is that very large and growing group of people, including our Secretary of State, who are concerned that our growing dependence on foreign oil is a very serious national security risk.

Well, what do we do? We obviously need to use less of it. The President says we are hooked on it, we need to use less of it. And we can use less of it two ways. One. We can simply conserve and be more efficient. And we have done some of that. We can do a great deal more of that.

The second thing that we can do is to get energy from alternatives. As this chart shows, and as Dr. Rickover mentioned, there will come a time when the world will be getting less and less energy from fossil fuels, and finally at some point in history down the road, we will be getting essentially no energy from fossil fuels, because obviously they are not infinite in their supply and they will not last forever.

In 8,000 years of recorded history, the Age of Oil will represent but a blip in terms of energy production, a pretty big blip. But we are probably about halfway through the age of oil. In another 100, 150 years if M. King Hubbert is correct and we are now at the peak, and it will be tailing off and going down the other side of what is commonly called Hubbert's Peak, oil will be ever more difficult to get and ever more costly.

In another 100, 150 years we will have transition to renewables, we will be steady-state, having used up the coal we have, having gotten all of the energy we can from these unconventional oil sources, like the tar sands of Canada and the oil shales of the United States.

The next chart looks at what obviously we need to be about. And that is addressing this problem. Now, whether you believe that we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels because it is a national security problem, whether you believe we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels because it is causing climate change, or whether you believe we need to reduce the use of fossil fuels because they are just not going to be there in the quantities that we are using today in the future, you still must do the same things.

Well, the first thing that you need to do is to buy some time. We now, knowing that we should have known at least by 1980 that we were going to be here today, because we were already 10 years down the other side of our Hubbert's Peak in this country, and M. King Hubbert had already predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

For these last 27 years, we should have been addressing this problem and investing energy and time in alternatives. Unfortunately, we in large measure have not done that. And so today we are faced with a problem. We have no excess oil, no excess oil energy to invest in alternatives. If there were any excess it would not be $55, $60 a barrel. And we have essentially run out of time.

Now, we can buy some time and free up some oil with an aggressive program in conservation. And you really can do that. Europe is using half the energy that we use. It would be hard to argue that they do not live as comfortably as we do. The average Californian uses 65 percent of the electricity that we use. And there are 50 some of those in our Congress. I doubt that any would agree that they live less well than we do, and they still use a lot less energy than we use.

What we need to do then is use it wisely. What will we do with this energy that we freed up and the time that we have bought by this aggressive conservation program? We have to invest that wisely in alternatives.

Now whichever of these camps that you come from, whether it is the climate change camp, or the camp that is concerned that we are too dependent on foreign oils, that is going to be a big national security risk, or whether you believe that we need to move from fossil fuels to alternatives simply because there are going to be less and less, and more and more expensive fossil fuels in the future, you still want to do essentially the same thing.

Enormous benefits can accrue from this. Congressman Gilchrest mentioned the enormous creativity and entrepreneurship of our people. We put a man on the moon in less than a decade. When you realize where we started from, that was a really big feat. We can do this. We were challenged to do that.

Today, the average American does not know that oil is probably limited in its future supply. They probably are unaware, today is an interesting day to talk about the potential for global warming, because it is the coldest day that we have had this winter. But I understand it is 20 degree above normal in Alaska and 20 degrees above normal today in Russia.

I just wanted to make a comment about some of the potentially unexpected consequences of this climate change. If you look at a globe, you will see that England is way up there, about mid Canada. And I had to stop for a refueling flight in Ireland. That really is the Emerald Isle, it is so green. And that has a climate like, what, South Carolina. How can you have a climate like South Carolina at a latitude of central Canada?

The reason for that is a huge conveyor belt that carries heat from the tropics to the British Isles and Europe. And that huge conveyor belt is called the Gulf Stream. And the Gulf Stream picks up heat in the Gulf area near the equator, and it then carries that like a giant conveyor belt up to the British Isles and Europe.

They have a very moderate climate compared to what they would have in the absence of the Gulf Stream. Now, water is not piling up up there around Europe and England, so it is obvious that if it flows up there and carries that heat up there, it has got to come back.

It comes back by going down. And why does it go down? We will talk about that in just a moment. Then it comes back flowing in just a large as volume and just as fast, it comes back to the lower part of this big conveyor belt. Again in the tropics, picking up more heat, and continues this transfer of heat to the British Isles and England.

Well, a very interesting thing is happening to this conveyor belt. The waters as they flow north, they are warm. And the sun shines on them, and water evaporates. And when the water evaporates, it leaves the salt there. And that makes the water more salty and heavier. And of course that is what produces the rains that then drops in our mountains and produces the indirect solar energy from the waterfalls that we use the turbines in to produce electricity.

Well, two things are happening. A major one is the fact that the polar ice cap is melting. And a lot of that fresh water, water without saline in it, very light compared to this heavy water, it is in addition to the general global warming of the oceans, it is the effect of this polar ice cap melting. And

strangely the melting of the polar ice cap may so dilute the waters in the Gulf Stream that they do not become dense enough to drop down to continue this conveyor belt on back down to the tropics.

The Gulf Stream could stop. If the Gulf Stream slows down appreciably, or if it stopped, the climate in the British Isles and in Europe would be very, very different than it is today.

Now, if we were in Siberia talking about global warming and so forth, we may have a very different view of it. It might be hard to convince me that a little global warming might not be good if I lived in Siberia. But noting that just this 9-degree Fahrenheit, 5 degrees Centigrade change from the Ice Age has produced the incredible climate changes that we see from that time to this, you see the potential for really devastating climate changes as a result of very modest changes in temperature. Congressman Gilchrest.

Madam Speaker, Congressman Gilchrest and I have both been twice to Antarctica. One of those trips we made together. We are on the Science Committee. We have a large experiment station down there right at the pole. When you go to Antarctica, that is a continent that nobody owns. I think Argentina claims they own it, and Russia claims they own it, but nobody honors those statements. It is an international area.

It has got ice piled nearly 2 miles high. So high and so heavy that it has actually pushed the continent down a little bit under it. 90 percent of all the world's ice is in Antarctica, and 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. You take our Great Lakes and all of the relatively thin ice at the North Pole and Greenland, that is relatively thin compared to nearly 2 miles in Antarctica.

So we have 90 percent of the ice down there and 70 percent of the fresh water. And Congressman Gilchrest mentioned that the oceans would rise maybe 3 feet with the melting of the glacial cap in Greenland and so forth and in the Arctic. If all of the ice melted, that would take a very long time, that is not going to happen tomorrow because there is a whole lot of it there.

But if all of the ice melted in Antarctica, I am told that the oceans would rise 200 feet.

Now, that would really, really change our world because I don't know what percent of our population lives within 200 feet altitude of the ocean. I suspect it is more than 50 percent, if you look around the world of the people that live at less than 200 feet altitude.

Now, there is an interesting ocean current that goes around Antarctica, talking about ocean currents and their affect on climates, that is the circumpolar current. And what it does is it keeps the, like our gulf stream, it will either let the cold air down if it is further south or keep it from coming down if it is further north. This circumpolar stream around the Pole keeps the northern, down there, of course, it is northern waters that are warm, it keeps the northern waters from coming down into Antarctica. And if something happened that stopped that circumpolar stream, the Antarctica polar ice cap might melt much more quickly than we anticipate that it might melt.

As an indication of how much these ocean currents affect climate, about 5 years ago, I guess it was, an iceberg broke off down in Antarctica, which was the size of Delaware. And in spite of the circumpolar current, some northern warm waters do get through it and down there to temper the climate a little, and that usually melts the sea ice enough so that they could get a boat in that is full of diesel file to McMurdo, which is where the main station is. You fly from there to the Pole. And because that big iceberg the size of Delaware blocked the flow of this water that year, and that was 4 years ago, it was so cold there that the sea ice didn't melt, and the closest they could get, with the help, by the way, of a Russian ice-breaker, the closest they could get was 3 miles out, so they laid a hose 3 miles across the ice to fill their tanks at McMurdo.

By the way, Congressman, one of the things that amazed me there, when I was down there the sun was shining all day long and the wind blew incessantly. I didn't see any solar panels down there, and I didn't see any wind machines down there. In the summer down there, in their summer, our winter, they could clearly make all of their energy from the wind and from solar. It just reflects the President's wise observation that we are hooked on oil. We are so hooked on oil that we are really quite irrational in our use of it. You had a comment?

They have a very interesting rookery down there; we enjoyed seeing it. Both times I was down we went out to the rookery to see the penguins. The big Emperor penguins, they didn't like us; they waddled off. And they scoot along on their bellies when they are moving fast, by the way, rather than marching.

I am very pleased to have been joined by Congressman Gilchrest. And again I want to emphasize that we have three groups that have a common cause: those that are concerned about oil and national security, those that are concerned about the excessive use of fossil fuels and the climate change that may very well result from that, and those of us, and I am with all of those groups actually, but I am particularly concerned about the fact that we may muddle through the national security thing and somehow God may save us from the global warming, but nothing is going to save us if there really is a limited supply of oil.

So, I am very pleased to be joined by my colleague, and I join all of those in these three camps. We really do have common cause. Please join and help us do the right thing.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 5 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, there is a question that often comes to my mind. I wonder to how many Americans this comes to their mind.

We are a great superpower, the undisputed economic and military superpower of this world. Have you ever asked yourself why? What is so special about us that we have this privileged position in the world?

We no longer have the most oil in the world or gold or silver or diamonds. We no longer have the best work ethic in the world. We no longer have the most respect for technical education. We no longer have the most respect for the nuclear family. Nearly half of our children are born out of wedlock. What makes us so special?

I have asked myself that question a lot of times, and I think there are two reasons. There may be others, but I have noted for myself two reasons I think. One of those is the enormous respect that this country, that this government, has for our civil liberties. There is no other Constitution, there is no other government, that has this great respect for civil liberties.

The Constitution written in 1787 was hardly dry before our Founding Fathers wondered if it was clear that most of the rights, most of the power, should belong to the people, and so they wrote what we call the Bill of Rights, those first 10 amendments which delineated very clearly that most of the rights belonged to the people.

Civil liberties are always a casualty of war. Abraham Lincoln, my favorite President, violated our civil liberties in the civil war. In World War II, we interred the Japanese Americans. I served here with Norm Mineta, former Secretary of Transportation. Japanese Americans. He told me, ``Roscoe, as a little boy, I remember holding my parents' hands when they ushered us into that concentration camp in Idaho.''

Those wars were ended and we got back the habeas corpus that was denied during the civil war, and the Japanese Americans were released from those interment camps.

We are now engaged in a great war, a war like no other that we have ever fought. I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, that in our zeal to catch terrorists that we may threaten the civil liberties that I think are largely responsible for making us this great, free Nation.

I think these civil liberties have established a climate and milieu in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish, and I think we put at risk who we are in our superior position in the world if we put at risk these civil liberties. We need to be very careful, and actions like the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretaps, detention without either charging or giving counsel to the accused, we must be very careful, Mr. Speaker, that we do not put at risk those things that have made us such a great Nation. But this is a subject for another day.

A second reason, which is the subject for today that I believe that we are such a great, free Nation, undisputed superpower in the world, I believe that our Founding Fathers understood that God sat with them at the table when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I have here in the front of the little Constitution that I carry a statement from Alexander Hamilton one year before they wrote the Declaration of Independence, and I think that it kind of epitomizes the belief that most of our Founding Fathers had.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hands of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Is there any better evidence that our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table when they wrote these great documents?

I would like to read something from the Declaration of Independence, that first document, in 1776. ``We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.''

Five times in the Declaration of Independence God is mentioned. Do you think, Mr. Speaker, that our courts may declare the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it mentions God?

As I mentioned earlier, the Constitution, which was the fulfillment of the promise made in the Declaration of Independence, written, by the way, 11 years later in 1787, this Constitution sought to assure the permanence of these God-given rights noted in the Declaration of Independence to the citizens of this new country. They did that by delineating a very limited Federal Government. If the Federal Government is limited, obviously the powers, the rights that it does not have belong to the people, but the ink was hardly dry on this document before they wondered was it really clear, would people really understand from this Constitution.

It is certainly implicit there in the fact that our Federal Government is given very few powers. You would need never believe they meant that today, Mr. Speaker, by the size of our Federal Government. We really need to take a look at that because we are doing a lot of things that I think that if our Founding Fathers were resurrected would be quite surprised that we thought their Constitution permitted the Federal Government to do.

They were concerned that maybe it was not clear that these precious rights given to us by God were to be secured to the people and not to the government, and so they started 10 amendments through the process of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the State legislatures, and 10 of them made it through, and we know them as the Bill of Rights.

The rights of the people are so frequently mentioned in these Bill of Rights, which is why we call them the Bill of Rights. The first amendment, the right of the people peaceably to assemble. The second amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The third amendment does not mention rights, but it certainly delineates the right of the people not to have the military quartered in their houses except in time of war. The fourth amendment begins with the words the right of the people.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to note that this does not say the rights of the citizens. It says the rights of the people, and our Founding Fathers did differentiate in this great Constitution between people and citizens because when they are delineating the requirements for the presidency or other offices they note the requirement for citizenship.

The fifth amendment, which delineates a lot of rights, begins with the delineation of a right which is frequently denied to us by our governments, both local, State and Federal. I think it is the most violated part of our Constitution. The last part of the fifth amendment, a lot of rights in there, the right of the people not to have to testify against themselves, the right of the people not to have to stand trial twice for the same offense, but this last right, little noted, violated every day by all levels of government, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

We need to take a serious look at that. If we can start denying one right of the people in this great Constitution, arguing that times have changed, are not all of these rights at risk?

The sixth amendment, enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial; the seventh amendment, the right by trial; and then the eighth amendment, the people have the right not to have excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishment.

The ninth amendment, the lost amendment, the amendment that almost nobody reads, the amendment that I think very few people understand, it is a very simple one. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This is written in old English and legalese. What does it mean? What it means is that just because a right is not given to the people specifically in the Constitution, don't disparage that right to the people, to whom that right belongs.

Fundamentally, all rights belong to the people. They choose, they choose to give certain power, certain rights to their government.

Because when there are a lot of people who need government, the government must have some rights. Our Founding Fathers wanted our government to have little power and few rights.

The tenth amendment, the power is not delegated. They might just as well have said, rights not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by the States or reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

If you were writing this in everyday English, and not using legalese, you would say, if you cannot find it in article 1, section 8, the Federal Government cannot do it.

There is a whole lot of what we do that I can't find in article 1, section 8. I would submit that we have amended our Constitution 27 times. If we think it is outdated, we ought to be doing something that this Constitution prohibits us from doing, then, sir, we need to amend the Constitution. We don't need to ignore it.

Essential to our understanding of our origins is an understanding of what our government really is. I am afraid, sir, that too few understand this.

When Benjamin Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention in 1797, as the story goes, he was asked by a woman who was sitting there, Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? This quote is in the front of many copies of the Constitution. His answer was, a republic, madam, if you can keep it, a republic.

But I thought we have a democracy. I don't know if we cite that Pledge of Allegiance just from rote and never think about what it says. But you remember those words in there, the republic for which it stands, not the democracy, but the republic for which it stands. What is the difference between a republic and a democracy and why did Benjamin Franklin make a point of telling this lady, a republic, madam, if you can keep it?

Let me give you a couple of examples of a democracy that will help you understand why he didn't say that they had given us a democracy. An example of a democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner. You may smile a little because you know that if two wolves and a lamb are voting on what you are going to have for dinner, it is not going to be clover.

Another sample, and this is a very sad example, but if you think about it, this is really an apt example of a democracy, and that is a lynch mob. Because, clearly, in a lynch mob the will of the majority is being expressed, and that is what people say democracy is, that the majority rules.

So what is a republic? There is an incident in our history that helps me understand the difference between a republic and a democracy, and this happened during the Truman administration. The steel mills were going on strike, our economy was already in trouble, and it was going to be in bigger trouble if that strike occurred. Then we did some manufacturing, and we made some steel, and it mattered. Today, it probably wouldn't matter, because so little manufacturing in steel is made here, but it mattered then.

Harry Truman in his take-charge style issued an executive order, one of only two, by the way, that the Supreme Court has set aside. What he said in that executive order was that he nationalized the steel mills that made the steel mill workers civil servants, employees of the government. As employees to the government, they couldn't strike.

That was a very popular action that had very high approval from the American people. In a democracy, that

would have been just fine. But the Supreme Court met in an emergency session and, in effect, what they said, Mr. President, no matter how popular that is, you cannot do it because it violates the Constitution.

You see, the fundamental difference between a democracy and a republic is a rule of law. In a democracy, what the majority wants prevails. In a republic, it is a rule of law that prevails. Now, we can change that law. We have changed it 27 times. But it takes a very deliberative process, two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and then three-fourths of the State legislature. This is a long-time process. It gives a lot of time for reflection.

The last time we tried to amend the Constitution it didn't quite make it, the Equal Rights Amendment, you remember. Nobody denies that women should have equal rights with men. But what that amendment says, that you couldn't differentiate between men and women. If you had a draft, you would have to draft women.

We can change this Constitution, but it takes a very deliberative process and a super majority vote.

Then the last half of that statement, if you can keep it, I wonder what was in Benjamin Franklin's head, in his mind. Was he concerned about threats from outside our country? We were a long ocean away with sailing ships from any potential enemy. I doubt that his concern was a threat from without. I think that he was more concerned about a threat from within, a republic, madam, if you can keep it.

This needs a longer discussion, but that, too, is a discussion for another day. To really understand who we are, we need to go back to our origins and how our Founding Fathers came here. Most of them in our early days came from the British Isles and the European continent, and they came here to escape two tyrannies. One was the tyranny of the crown, and the other was the tyranny of the church.

Most of them came from countries where there was a king or an emperor who incredibly, from our perspective, claimed and was granted divine rights. What that says was the rights came from God to the king or the emperor, and he would give what rights he wished to his people. That is incomprehensible to us that for hundreds of years people could have lived under that kind of government.

Well, those who chose not to live that way came to this country. When they wrote the Bill of Rights, their concern about the tyranny of the crown gave rise to the second amendment.

Now, you may ask people what the second amendment is, and almost all of them will tell you that it says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That is about half of the second amendment.

Let me read the first part that puts that second part in perspective. A well-regulated militia, that is every citizen with a gun, that is the militia, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. I asked some of my friends, who wants to limit the right to keep and bear arms? What do you think that means?

Remember, they came here to escape the tyranny of the crown. If we have a citizenry who have the right to keep and bear arms, never, ever could a small oligarchy at the seat of government take over and oppress the people.

The second tyranny that they came here to escape was the tyranny of the church. In England, it was the Episcopal church. On the continent, it was the Roman church. In England, it was a state church, supported by the state, empowered by the state. On the continent, the Roman Catholic Church was the state church for many states, supported by the state and powered by the state, and these religions could and did oppress other religions.

Our Founding Fathers were so repulsed by this that when they came here in old Virginia they would not let Roman Catholics vote. But, to their great credit, when it came time to write these precious 10 amendments, they recognized that is not really what they came here to do. So they wrote the establishment clause of the first amendment, and it is very clear. I have no idea why people have trouble understanding it.

It says, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Don't make any law establishing a state religion.

Then they went on to say, and let everybody worship as they please, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That is a really misunderstood establishment clause.

Early history books will present a very different picture of our origins than that which really existed. If you go back to a history book of 50 years ago, it will be unrecognizable as compared to the history book of today. The history books of today have been bled dry of any reference to our Christian heritage.

I would like to pause here for just a moment to note that I am going to quote from a lot of our Founding Fathers, and they are going to use the word ``Christian.'' That was the lexicon of the day. If they were here today, they would be saying Judeo-Christian. Every time I read the word ``Christian,'' please translate that Judeo-Christian, because that is the context in which they used that word.

Current history books, and indeed our culture, contains three great lies. The first of these lies is that our Founding Fathers were atheist and deist. Now an atheist is someone who does not believe in God. Deist, God, atheist, the alpha primitive, don't believe in God. A deist is someone who believes there is a God. They believe he created the world, but don't bother trying to talk to him or pray to him, because when he created the world he also put in place several laws, and your destiny will be determined by how you relate yourself to your laws. Although they believed in a supreme being, they didn't believe he was a personal God or made any difference whether you tried to talk to him or not, and he certainly was not going to talk to you.

The second great lie is that our Founding Fathers did not want to establish a Christian Nation.

The third great lie is that they established a wall of separation between the church and the state.

Our national freedom was not free. It was enormously costly. Five of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were captured and executed by the British, nine of them died on the battlefield of the Revolutionary War, and another dozen lost their homes and their possessions and their fortunes to British occupation. Our birth as a Nation was not cheap for these men. What beliefs and convictions motivated them to do what they did?

Of these three great lies, that is the wall of separation, it is very easy to dispense with a third of those because the words ``separation,'' ``church,'' and ``State'' never exist in relationship to each other in either our Constitution or the amendments.

But they do occur in one constitution. Interestingly, that is the constitution of the old Soviet empire, the constitution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Article 124 says: ``In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the USSR is separated from the state and the schools from the church.''

Now, many people would like to interpret the establishment clause of our first amendment as if it was written in these words that are found only in the constitution of the old Soviet Union.

To refute the first two lies, that is, that our Founding Fathers were athiests and deists and that they did not mean to establish a Christian nation, I want to do four things. First of all, I want to let the Founding Fathers speak for themselves. I am going to cite only a few quotes from the many, many that you could find. Then we are going to take a look at what the courts said and you will be astounded at what our courts said in our early years. And then we will take a look at what the Congress did. The institution permits me to speak here in the well of the Congress. And then we will take a look at our schools.

Patrick Henry was the firebrand of the Revolution. Every school child knows his words: ``Give me liberty or give me death.'' But I will wager, Mr. Speaker, that you will not find in any current textbooks the circumstances in which he uttered these words: They were in a church in Richmond, Virginia, St. John's Church in Richmond Virginia March 23, 1775, and this is what he said: ``An appeal to arms and the God of Hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone.

There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle, sir, is not to the strong. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.''

Did your children ever bring home to you this full quote from Patrick Henry?

Was Patrick Henry a Christian? The following year, 1776, he wrote this: ``It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this great Nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians,'' or in today's vernacular, Judeo Christians, ``not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, peoples of other faiths have been afforded'' . . . ``freedom of worship here.''

Benjamin Franklin was said to be a deist; that is, he believed there was a God who created the Earth but then he just let the Earth and its inhabitants determine their destiny by how they related themselves to laws that he had established. Let me read to you something that Benjamin Franklin said. This was in 1787. We had a deadlocked convention.

It wasn't certain that after 11 years, we were going to be able to write a Constitution that would protect all of the rights, big States and little States and people, that we wanted to protect. And this is what he said: ``In the days of our conquest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity to establish our Nation. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Do we imagine we no longer need his assistance?''

And then I love this quote: ``I have lived, sir, a long time.'' I believe he was 81 years old, the oldest member of the Constitutional Convention, revered Governor of Pennsylvania. ``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. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, it is probable that a new nation cannot rise without his aid. We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that built it. 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 proceed to any business.''

That, Mr. Speaker, established a precedent that we honored this morning when we opened this day and this Congress with prayer. We have a chaplain; so does the Senate. There is a chaplain of every religious persuasion, or many, including Muslims, who serve our military. As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, the only place today we cannot offer a prayer is in our schools. I have often asked myself the rationality of this.

Thomas Jefferson was also said to be a deist. Let me read what he says and see if you believe he was a deist: ``I am a real Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our creator and, I hope, to the pure doctrine of Jesus also.''

On slavery Jefferson wrote: ``Almighty God has created men's minds free. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.''

George Washington, the founder our country, a deeply religious person. We think of him often as commander of the Army. This is his quote: ``It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible.'' Boy, are we trying to do that? ``Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, our religion and morality are the indispensable supporters. Let us with caution indulge the supposition,'' that is, the idea, ``that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect our national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.''

And in his prayer book, George Washington wrote this: ``Oh, eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words, and work. Wash away my sins in the emaculate blood of the lamb and purge my heart by the Holy Spirit. Daily, frame me more and more in the likeness of they son, Jesus Christ, that living in thy fear, and dying in thy favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind and let the world be filled with the knowledge of thee and thy son, Jesus Christ.''

John Adams, our second President and President of the American Bible Society, this is what he said: ``We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion.'' Mr. Speaker, I wonder if maybe this can be a factor in our problems in Iraq. ``Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.'' This by the second President of the United States.

John Jay, our first Supreme Court Justice, said ``Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian Nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.'' This from John Jay, the first Supreme Court Justice.

John Quincy Adams, also, like his father, President of the American Bible Society. As a matter of fact, I think it was he who said that he valued the presidency of the American Bible Society more than he valued the presidency of the United States. This is what he said: ``The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. From the day of the Declaration, the day'' the Founding Fathers ``were bound by the Laws of God, which they all acknowledged as their rules of conduct.''

And later Calvin Coolidge, ``Silent Cal.'' An interesting story is told of him. He was a man of few words. It was hard to get him to talk. He was sitting at dinner with a lady who said, ``I have a wager that I will get you to say three words tonight.'' And the only words he uttered that whole evening were ``You lose.''

Calvin Coolidge said this: ``America seeks no empires built on blood and forces. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.'' He later wrote: ``The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teaching would cease to be practically universal in our country.''

President Coolidge, they have ceased to be practically universal in our country. What now?

I think, Mr. Speaker, you see from these quotes from just a few of our Founding Fathers, and there are dozens of others I could have brought, that certainly our Founding Fathers were deeply religious people. They were not deists and athiests.

Now let us move to the Supreme Court. Some of these quotes will shock you. The People versus Ruggles. He had publicly slandered the Bible, and somehow this came to the Supreme Court in 1811. ``You have attacked the Bible.'' This is what the Supreme Court said: ``You have attacked the Bible. In attacking the Bible, you have attacked Jesus Christ. In attacking Jesus Christ, you have attacked the roots of our Nation.''

Did they intend this to be a Godless Nation?

``Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity manifests itself in the dissolving of our civil government. This was the Supreme Court. And then the same Court a little later, in 1885, in Vida versus Gerrard, they were using the Bible in teaching one of our schools, and somehow that got to the Supreme Court. And this is what they said: ``Why not use the Bible, especially the New Testament? It should be read and taught as the divine revelation in the schools. Where can the purist principles of morality be learned so clearly and so perfectly as from the New Testament?'' Can you imagine anything like that coming from our Court today?

And then in 1892, and this was in a suit involving the Church of the Holy Spirit in which they contended Christianity was not the faith of the people,

and this is what the Supreme Court said in 1892: ``Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the redeemer of mankind. It is impossible to demand that they should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent, our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. No purpose of action against our religion can be imputed to any legislation, State or national, because this is a religious people.'' This is the Supreme Court. ``This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to this present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.'' And then they go on to cite 87 different legal precedents to affirm that America was formed as a Christian Nation by believing Christians.

And then in 1947, our Court did an about face, 180 degrees, repudiating everything they have they had done for 160 years. And you will see no Supreme Court reference today going back beyond 1947 because if you went back beyond that, every one would be consistent with the quotes that I have read here.

We are having trouble understanding that what our Founding Fathers meant in this great establishment clause in the first amendment was to ensure that there would be freedom of religion. We are ever more interpreting this as requiring freedom from religion. Our Founding Fathers would be astounded if they could be resurrected and see how we have interpreted their Constitution.

In the early 1850s, Humanism and Darwinism was sweeping our country. And there was the assertion that America was not a Christian Nation. After a year's study, now we are turning to the Congress. After a year's study, this is what the Senate Judiciary Committee said in its final report in March 27, 1854.

``The First Amendment clause speaks against an establishment of religion. The founding fathers intended by this amendment to prohibit an establishment of religion, such as the Church of England presented or anything like it. But they had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us an illreligious people.'' And I love the language that our founding fathers used, so poetic.

``They did not intend to spread over the public authorities and the whole public action of the Nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistic apathy. Had the people during the revolution had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that revolution would have been strangled in its cradle.''

At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, not just any one sect or denomination. The object was not to substitute Judaism, or Islam or infidelity, but to prevent rivalry among the Christian denominations to the exclusion of others. Christianity must be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure rests.

``Laws will not have permanence or power without the sanction of religious sentiment, without the firm belief that there is power above us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices.'' This is what our Congress said.

The Continental Congress bought 20,000 copies of the Bible to distribute to its new citizens. And for the first 100 years of our country, every year our Congress voted monies to send missionaries to the American Indians.

Continuing the Senate Judiciary Committee's 1854 reading. ``In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity. By its general principles, the Christian faith is the great conserving element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of our free institutions.''

That was the religion of our founding fathers, or the Republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendents. Well, there is little question, little question how the Congress felt, and the courts.

Let us turn now to our schools. Oh, by the way. The same Congress in 1854 passed this resolution. Can you imagine this today? ``The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in our schools.''

The New England Primer used for 200 years. This is how they taught the alphabet. A. A wise son makes a glad father but a foolish son is heaviness to his mother.

B. Better is little with the fear of the Lord than abundance apart from him. C. Come unto Christ, all you who are weary and heavily laden. D. Do not do the abominable thing, which I hate, sayeth the Lord. E. Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God. Clearly religion was important in our early schools.

The McGuffey Reader, used for a hundred years. A few years ago they brought it back with the hope that if kids used that, they could read, because what they were doing today they were not learning to read.

This is what McGuffey said. ``The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our notions of the character of God, on the great moral Governor of universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions. From no source has the author drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred Scriptures. For all of those extracts from the Bible, I make no apology.''

Of the first 108 universities in our country, 106 were distinctly religious. Harvard University, the first university. This was in their student handbook. Let me read it. ``Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.''

For more than 100 years, more than 50 percent of all Harvard's graduates were pastors. We now have exposed these three great lies from our founding fathers, from our courts, from our Congress, from our schools. Our founding fathers have all spoken. Clearly we were founded by religious people intending to be a religious Nation.

What have we reaped in the way we have changed? America 100 years ago had the highest literacy rate of any nation. Today we spend more on education than any nation in the world. And yet since 1987 we have graduated more than one million high school students who could not even read their diploma.

We have spent more money than any other Nation in the industrialized world to educate our children, and yet SAT scores fell for 24 straight years before finally leveling off at the bottom, where they still are compared with others in the world in the 1990s.

In a 1960 survey 53 percent of America's teenagers had never kissed. 57 percent said they had never necked, that is kissing and hugging, and 92 percent of teenagers in America said they were virgins in 1960.

Before that, more than a decade before that, I was getting my doctorate at the University of Maryland. The girls dorm was right down the hill from Moral Hall where I did my work. The Dean of Women would not let the girls go barefoot because she said that bare feet were too sexy.

There are far too many coed dorms and coed rooms in the University of Maryland today. By 1990, just 30 years later, 75 percent of American high school students are sexually active, by 18. In the next 5 years, we spent $4 billion to educate them on how to be immoral, to trumpeting the solutions of safe sex, and it worked.

One in five teenagers in America today lose their virginity before their 13th birthday. 19 percent of America's teenagers say they have had more than four sexual partners before graduation. The result: Every day 2,700 students get pregnant, 1,100 get abortions, 1,200 give birth. Every day another 900 contract a sexually transmitted disease, many incurable.

AIDS infections among high school students climbed 700 percent between 1990 and 1995. We have 3.3 million problem drinkers in our high school campuses, over half a million alcoholics, and in any given weekend in America, 30 percent of the student population may spend some time drunk.

A few years ago a young woman in a high school in Oklahoma wrote this poem as a new school prayer. ``Now I sit me down in school where praying is against the rule, for this great Nation under God finds mention of him very odd.

``The Scripture now the class recites, it violates the Bill of Rights. And any

time my head I bow, becomes a Federal matter now. Our hair can be purple, orange or green, that is no offense, it is a freedom scene. The law is specific, the law is precise, only prayers spoken out loud are a serious vice.

``For praying in a public hall might offend someone with no faith at all, in silence alone we must meditate, God's name is prohibited by the State. We are allowed to cuss and dress like freaks, and pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks, they have outlawed guns but first the Bible.

``To quote the Good Book makes me liable. We can elect a pregnant senior queen, and the unwed daddy our senior king. It is inappropriate to teach right from wrong, we are taught that such judgments do not belong.

``We can get our condoms and birth control, study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles, but the Ten Commandments are not allowed. No word of God must reach this crowd. It is scary here I must confess, when chaos reins the school is a mess.

``So Lord this silent plea I make, should I be shot my soul please take.''

Our Nation which used to lead the world in every arena now leads the world in these areas. Number one in violent crime. We are number one in divorce. We are number one in teenage pregnancies. We are number one in volunteer abortions. We are number one in illegal drug abuse. And we are number one in the industrialized world for illiteracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a great, young Frenchman, toured our country for 5 years. He wrote a great two-volume treatise on democracy, which is still a classic. And this is what he said. ``In the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but shapes the intelligence of the people. Christianity, therefore reigns without obstacle, by universal consequence. The consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle in a moral world is fixed and enforced.''

And this great quote. ``I sought for the key to the greatness of and genius of America in her great harbors, her fertile fields and boundless forests, in her rich minds and vast world commerce, in her universal public school system and institutions of learning.

``I sought for it in her Democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution. But not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.''

He said, ``America is great, because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.''

In 1963, Abraham Lincoln declared a National Day of Humiliation. And this is what he said. ``We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers and wealth and power, as no other Nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched us.

``And we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self- sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace.

``Too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us then to humble us ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.''

Abraham Lincoln understood that this was a new experiment that might not succeed. In the Gettysburg Address he says this. ``Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth in this continent a new Nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.''

That may sound very strange to us, and this should be unusual. But remember, they came from countries that had a king or an Emperor. ``We are now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that Nation or any Nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.''

We have forgotten from whence we came. Actually this generation has not forgotten, it never knew. I think, Mr. Speaker, that this great free country, the undisputed economic and military super power of the world is at risk if we have forgotten from whence we came.

Abraham Lincoln said this to our Nation, and I will close with this. We need to hear it again. ``For all those who have died in all of our wars, it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great tasks remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause to which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vein, that this Nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.''

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 41, 110th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.