Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, this is the 22nd time, I believe, that I have come here to the well of the House to talk about a subject which I think will be the overarching concern of our world for the next decades and several decades beyond that. That subject is energy and specifically the energy that we get from oil.

As an illustration of the problems we face, I have here a map of the world as it would be drawn if each country was sized relative to the amount of oil reserves that it had. So this is the world according to oil. And you see here Saudi Arabia, and it would swallow up the United States. How many times would it swallow us up, a dozen, 15 times?

Notice the incredible wealth of oil in the Middle East. Venezuela looms, what, two, three times the size of the United States as far as reserves of oil are concerned. The little United Arab Emirates, you can hardly find them on a map. They are kind of a little pinpoint on a usual map, and there they are six, eight times larger than the United States with their reserves of oil. The famed reserves of Russia up there. Notice that the United Arab Emirates have more oil than Russia has. And Saudi Arabia, of course, and Iraq. And little Kuwait, a little province that Saddam Hussein thought ought to belong to Iraq when he invaded it more than a decade ago, has many times as much oil as the United States and more oil than Russia has.

Remember this map when we put the next map of the world up here because this is an interesting map. And this is a map with the continents, the countries drawn relative to their actual size. And you will notice here the little symbols that represent several things, and one of them is oil that China has bought around the world. And this is Unocal, which they almost bought in our country. Everywhere you see this little symbol, the Chinese have bought rights to oil. They are scouring the world for oil.

And the next chart shows a statement by Condoleezza Rice, who recognized this. And this is a pretty interesting statement made by our Secretary of State: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.''

Thank you. I am pleased that you recognize that.

``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 wharping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the wharping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' And, of course, China has been preeminent in this.

Several days ago I came upon an article. I have no idea why it took so long to come to light. It really is not an article. It really is the script of a speech that was given by Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine. And he gave this speech, it will be 50 years this coming May 14, 1957. He gave this speech to a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota. And we will recognize, celebrate the 50th anniversary of that here in a relatively few months. That speech, by the way, was just 14 months and 6 days after a really famous speech that was given by M. King Hubbert in San Antonio, Texas, to a group of oil people in which he made a prediction that we will be talking about this evening, and that is that the United States would reach its maximum oil production just 14 years after that in 1970.

And right on target, that is exactly what happened. And no matter what we have done since then, we have pumped less oil than before until now we are pumping about half the oil that we pumped in 1970. He predicted that the world would be peaking about now, and that is the subject that brings us here tonight. I have a few excerpts here from this speech that he gave:

``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever smaller number of countries. Ultimately the nation which controls the largest energy resource will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.''

He said this 50 years ago: ``If we act wisely and in time,'' he says 50 years ago, ``to conserve what we have and prepare well for the necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.'' We have done nothing in the last 50 years except try to find more and more gas and oil and coal and use more and more of what we have found.

Another quote from this very interesting speech: ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion . . .''

Now, he missed it a little because we are at nearly 7 billion now.

`` . . . with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent . . . ''

Way more than 90 percent taking place during the last 5 percent of that period.

`` . . . in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.'' And it occurred well before that because we are now at nearly 7 billion people.

The next chart shows what he says in chart 4. If you were to plot population on this chart, it would pretty much follow the curve here for the increased use of gas and oil. This is only about 400 years of the 8,000 years that he spoke of, of recorded history. So you can move this way, way back a great long distance here to see the whole history of the world. In the long history of the world, 8,000 years of recorded history, the Age of Oil will last but about 300 years. We are about 150 years into the Age of Oil from when we started to where we are now. And if M. King Hubbert was correct, and he was correct about the United States, but if he is correct about the world, for the next 150 years there will be less and less oil pumped at higher and higher prices until finally, roughly 150 years from now, there will be little or no more gas, oil, and coal which is economically recoverable.

This is an astounding picture, and future generations looking back at this Age of Oil may very well ask themselves how could they have done that, this incredible wealth?

In a few minutes I am going to read a fascinating history, a very brief history of the world and energy that Hyman Rickover gave to those lucky physicians that night nearly 50 years. They will ask themselves how could they have done that when they found this incredible wealth under the ground? Couldn't they have understood that it couldn't last forever? Wouldn't they have asked themselves what can we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? But instead of that, we simply have used that energy as rapidly as we could with little or no thought for the future.

Another quote from this very interesting talk: ``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.'' And he recognized 50 years ago that there would be a Fossil Fuel Age. ``We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.''

Less than a month ago I came back from China. Nine of us went there, nine Members of Congress. We went there primarily to talk about energy. We met with a number of relatively high officials in the Chinese Government. I was surprised in our discussions first with the energy people and then with others that they began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago anticipated that there would be a world without fossil fuels when we had gone through the Age of Oil.

The next chart is another quote from this very interesting speech: ``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuels reserves. They were created by solar energy.'' He says: ``500 million years ago it took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. The longer they last, the more time that we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''

What a speech. Fifty years ago when the United States was king of oil, the biggest consumer in the world, biggest producer in the world, and he recognized, as I think any rational person would recognize, that gas and oil and coal cannot be forever. It is finite. It one day will be gone. The only question is when, which is what we are here to talk about.

And this is a great quote here: ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.'' I will suggest that this is precisely what our offspring will accuse us of doing.

You know, there are only a few places that we believe there are any meaningful amounts of oil left. One of those is in ANWR and the other is in offshore drilling. The vast majority of experts in the world believe that we have probably found 95 percent of all the oil we will ever find. And notice that the new finds of oil are way out there, difficult to get, expensive to get. That big find in the Gulf of Mexico under 7,000 feet of water, roughly 50,000 feet of rock and dirt under that. I am told, and I don't know whether this is true or not, you can hear a lot of things, that when oil is $211 a barrel, they will be able to develop that because it will cost that much to get that oil out.

What I would like to do now is to take a look at some of the thoughts in this speech given by Hyman Rickover. I wish I had been a physician 50 years ago. I would have been 30 years old at that time sitting in that audience. He predated me by about 10 years in thinking about this problem. It was probably 40 years, and maybe because I am a scientist that I started asking myself the question: you know, Roscoe, oil and gas and coal are finite. They are not an inexhaustible supply. At some point in time, we will have to be concerned about those supplies. Is that 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I had no idea, when I first asked myself this question, how long that time would be, but I knew that a time had to come when we would be asking ourselves the question isn't it time that we should start thinking about this.

Just a few excerpts from this really interesting speech: ``Each American has at his disposal each year energy equivalent to that obtainable from eight tons of coal.'' Then coal was the primary energy source, a primary energy source, much less important now. Eight tons of coal, that is a lot of energy.

``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus enormous fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which makes each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves.''

And notice these numbers, and these were 50 years ago. You decide how much this has changed today. ``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or one twentieth horsepower.''

Now, you can do more than that in working, but you can't do it 24 hours a day, and this is a 24/7 figure.

``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'', he says, and this is 50 years ago, ``and despite wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by'', 150 now, ``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.'' And well they will when we look back on this.

``Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.'' He thought it would grow to 4 billion by this time. It is nearly 7 billion.

Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations. And I found this part of his speech just captivating, fascinating. ``Possessant of surplus energy is of course a requisite for any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must exhaust all of his strength, mental and physical, to obtain the bare necessities of life.

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

``There is no need to belabor this point. What lifted man, one of the weaker animals'', an interesting observation. We are really weak in muscle power. A chimpanzee the size of a man has four or five times the strength of a man. A dog has enormously better smell than you, the eagle infinitely better eyesight than you. Man is indeed one of the weaker animals.

``What lifted man, one of the weaker animals above the animal world was that he could devise with his brain ways to increase the energy at his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely on the energy of his own body he can sustain only the most meager existence.

``Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from the discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy resources, he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization, he needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor of the pendent members of large patriarchal families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty.

There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this type of energy, less today thankfully than there were 50 years ago. ``Slave labor was necessary for the city states and the empires of antiquity. They frequently had slave populations larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were lacking.

``This may well have been the single most important reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times. A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization, and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.''

I would like to pause for just a moment to reflect on that. If all of the energy available to the United States was the energy from the United States, we would now be living on half of the energy that we had available in 1970. If you believe that the United States is a microcosm of the world, and if you believe that M. King Hubbert's analyses, which were so right on for the United States, are probably pretty good for the world, then the world now or very shortly will reach its maximum oil production.

After that, no matter what we do, there will be less and less oil available. And finally over the next 150 years, if the second half of the age of oil is as long as the first half, and M. King Hubbert found a bell curve in the exploitation and exhaustion of each of these oil fields, then we will have available to us less and less fossil fuel energy.

Now, unless we can contrive to replace that fossil fuel energy by alternative energy sources, we will have available to us year by year less energy than we had the year before.

And I was fascinated by Hyman Rickover's discussion of how energy contributed to the development of civilizations. And then he notes here, ``That a

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

Will we be able to avoid that? Will we be able to create enough energy sources, other than fossil fuels, that we can replace the energy that will not be available from fossil fuels as we exhaust, slowly exhaust their supplies in the world?

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

It is a sobering thought to recognize that life on this planet is largely dependent on about the upper, on average, 8 inches of our soil. That is the top soils which grow our crops. And then he notes something that few people want to talk about, I am glad he had the courage to mention, that another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure of population on available land.

No matter how clever we are at developing other energy sources, if population continues to grow, and I will say that I am a 100 percent pro-life person. I think there are ways to control population without killing the preborn. And so when I read this, do not think that I am advocating that we need abortion to control population.

``A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally, even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man, who is 2\1/2\ times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agriculture machines increase productivity for man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation.

``It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia--'' now this is less true today with a booming economy in China and a good economy in India, but this was true in that day. ``It is a sobering thought that the impoverished peoples of Asia who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger completely satisfied,'' 20 percent of the world will go to bed tonight hungry, ``were once far more civilized and lived much better than the people of the west.''

And not so very long ago either. It was a story brought back by Marco Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes to the riches of the East and induced the adventurous sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels searching for direct routes to the fabulous Orient, which, of course, brought Columbus to our shores.

The wealth of the Indies is a phrase still used. But whatever wealth may be there is certainly not evident in the lives of the people today. Now, the last 50 years have seen meaningful industrialization in that part of the world, which just has consumed increasing amounts of energy.

Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has become again the primary source of energy. That was true then, it is still true in rural areas in these countries.

Since other energy convertors have become too expensive, this might be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more primitive stage of civilization, with all that implies for human dignity and happiness.

Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow creeping along a cobblestone street, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java, the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads.

Anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone realizes the degradations of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded.

Let me skip now to a little later in this very interesting talk. I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests on the technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels.

True 50 years ago, truer today. And then this statement. Now, underline this. Use red ink. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer is, in the long run, none. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations, which is why the Hirsch report says that man has never faced, the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history.

In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more effervescent than metals. Metals too are nonrenewable resources, threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap. And there is nothing that man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy, he says, 500 millions years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.

I might pause here to note that those who belief in a literal flood believe that all of this occurred with the upheavals that occurred during the flood and the time since then. But most people believe that it took a very, very long time. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect.

The longer they last, and I am repeating one of the charts I had. But you know we need to hear this again because this is so significant. The longer they last the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources, and to adjust our economy to the vast changes that we can expect from such a shift.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. And I am going to repeat this again. This needs to be heard again too. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly. Now have we been using this energy capital sparingly? Anything but. In order to pass onto his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.

I am afraid that that is exactly what our children and our children's children will say of us when they recognize how little attention we paid to the warnings that we have been given for a very long time. This is Hyman Rickover 5 years ago, and just a year before that, M. King Hubbert and his prediction.

Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics, far- seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor which must enter into all planning for the future, responsible governments who realize that the wellbeing of their citizens and the political power of their countries depend on an adequate energy supply, all of these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. Gee, I wish that were true.

If they began, then they stopped. Because I notice hardly anybody today is concerned about this problem. In this country especially, many studies have been made in the past few years. 50 years ago, seeking to discover accurate information on fossil fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs.

Now he may have been referring to the studies that were made by M. King Hubbert just the year before when he predicted that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970.

The chart that I have here kind of indicates to us the dimensions of the problem that Hyman Rickover was talking about and the problem we face.

The little analogy I use for this is that we are very much like a young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance. And they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend

comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. And they look at how old they are and how large the inheritance is and they recognize, gee, it is not going to last till we retire, so, obviously, we have got to do something. Either we have got to spend less or we have got to make more.

I use that analogy because that is precisely where we are. Today, 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural gas, and just 15 percent of it from other sources. Now, you may lump all of those as renewables, but they are not quite because a bit over half of that, 8 percent of the 15, comes from nuclear power. In this country, that is 8 percent of our energy, but it is 20 percent of our electricity, so as you drive home tonight, imagine that every fifth home and every fifth business and every fifth street light was dark. That is what our country would be without nuclear power.

Now, we have had not a single death, no meaningful accidents. By the way, 3-Mile Island, and I lived within the drift zone of that, that worked. The containment facility worked. Too bad we had the accident, but good that we had prepared for it.

A lot of people are concerned about nuclear energy. But they really don't reflect on how many people die from coal, all the black lung disease. I remember a number of years ago when I worked for NIH and had a contract to look at respiratory support devices, and one of the places I went to was West Virginia, where they had a lot of black lung disease. And I talked to the physicians there that were dealing with these patients, and each year thousands died from black lung disease. It wasn't so much, and this is not really related to energy, but the real problem there was silicosis. But the lungs were black from the coal, and so it was called black lung disease, but it was really rock dust primarily which was the offender there.

How many miners are killed when the mine caves in or when it explodes? How many people are killed at the railroad crossing when the coal train goes by? We just seem to accept that as a part of the cost of having coal to use.

There have been no injuries, I remind the listeners, from our use of nuclear. We have had no Chernobyls, aren't going to have any because we have designed them much better, so this could and probably should grow.

Then we come to the true renewables. And there we see them, solar, and I am a big supporter of solar. I have a second home beyond the grid and we have only solar power. We are shortly putting up a wind machine because very frequently when the sun is not shining, the wind is blowing and so they complement each other very nicely.

But notice how tiny they were. This was 2000. Now we are better today because they have been growing very rapidly. So they are several times bigger today. But that was 1 percent of 7 percent, .07 percent. Suppose it is four times bigger today, .28 percent. Big deal. We have a long, long way to go.

Notice the contribution of wood. That is the timber industry and paper industry wisely using that waste product.

Conventional hydro. We have pretty much peaked out on that. There is maybe as much as we could get from unconventional hydro, microhydro, small streams where it wouldn't have the environmental effect that big dams have.

The waste to energy here, that is 8 percent of the 7 percent. That could certainly grow. It is probably a whole lot better to burn it than it is to put it in the land fill.

But note that this is really kind of recycling fossil fuel energy because, in an energy deficient world, there would be no enormous piles of municipal waste. They are all produced with energy; and as we have less and less energy, we will be able to live with less and less waste. So that will be a diminishing source of energy in an energy deficient world.

I want to take just a moment here to talk about ethanol. There are a couple of bills, and I will have it up here in a few moments, that look at developing ethanol. The price of corn, from which most ethanol is made in this country, was $2.11 a bushel in September. It was $4.08 a bushel in December. And that was because of the pressure of the demand for corn for producing ethanol.

Now, I didn't read it in this speech, but Hyman Rickover cautioned that if you are going to get energy from agriculture, please note that you will be competing with two things for that energy. One, you will be competing with food.

We eat some corn meal. Most of the corn goes to our animals, and our dairy farmers are really hurting now, because milk has not gone up much and their feed has gone up enormously because of the pressures put on corn by ethanol.

Every gallon of ethanol that we burn represents at least three- quarters of a gallon of fossil fuel to produce it. Almost half the energy in producing corn comes from the natural gas that produces the nitrogen fertilizer.

If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, which is the only fair way to look at corn as an energy source, otherwise you are simply recycling fossil fuels and growing the corn and making ethanol from it.

If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, and if you wanted to replace just 10 percent of our current gasoline consumption, I checked these figures with CRS, I think they are correct, you would have to double our corn crop and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 percent of our gasoline.

What is very likely to happen now that corn has doubled in price is that farmers, recognizing that, gee, if I planted more corn I would make more money, they are going to take land out of agricultural preserve where it has been reserved by putting it in a bank, and it is land that probably shouldn't have been farmed anyhow, which is why they took it out, and the government helps pay them for that, which I am supportive of, by the way, because it helps preserve that land.

If they take that out and plant it to corn, corn is one of the worst crops for erosion. It is one of the heaviest feeders that we have, demanding more fertilizer than almost anything else. The insult to our environment by the erosion and so forth of this land as the result of more corn cropping, may off-balance, offset the benefit we get from the small decreased production of carbon dioxide, which is the primary reason most people are thinking about ethanol today, because of global warming and greenhouse gases.

And if you are simply releasing the carbon dioxide that the plant picked up, you have not increased the amount of carbon dioxide up there, because the plant took it out of the air. You are burning it and putting it back into the air. So it is a balance.

Hyman Rickover also cautioned, be careful about your expectations for energy from biomass. And today you will hear a lot of hype about energy from cellulosic ethanol. And this is a fascinating pursuit. Cellulose is made up of a lot of glucose molecules, simple sugar, half of the sucrose which is your table sugar. But they are so tightly bound together that there are no enzymes in our body which will separate them. In fact, the cow and the goat don't have any either. But they harbor in their gut some little critters that do have enzymes that do that. And so this is a great example of symbiosis. They both benefit from that relationship. These little microbes split the cellulose into the glucose molecules, and then they are absorbed by the host animals.

Hyman Rickover cautioned, be careful how much of this biomass you think you can take from the soil because it is biomass, organic material, which makes top soil different from subsoil.

There were three men from the Department of Agriculture in my office several months ago talking excitedly about the potential for cellulosic ethanol. And I asked them if our top soils were increasing in quantity and quality. And the answer is obviously, no.

We are really good today compared to how we were 20, 30 years ago. But I am told that for every bushel of corn you grow in Iowa, three bushels of Iowa top soil go down the Mississippi River, which is why we have such a big delta down in Louisiana.

Well, these little microbes that exist in the gut of these animals we have now learned to bioengineer so we can do this in the laboratory. So we can now turn newspaper into alcohol and run your car on newspaper. That is doable. But be careful how much energy

you expect to get from that because for a few years you may mine the top soil, but soon you will decrease the product activity of the top soil. So there is a limit to that.

So what do we do? The next chart, we buy time. How do you do that?

I mentioned that I have been to China, came back 3 or so weeks ago. And they begin all of their discussions by talking about post-oil. And they have a 5-point plan. And it is not just the energy people. It is every member of government we talked to talked about this 5-point plan. So they recognize that energy is a real challenge for them.

The 5-point plan begins with conservation. You see, today there is no surplus oil. There is no surplus energy to invest in developing alternatives. If there was any surplus oil, it wouldn't be $55 a barrel.

So we have run out of time. We have run out of energy, but we can buy some time and free up some energy if we have an aggressive program in conservation. This is where they began their 5-point program: conservation.

Two and three were produce as much of your own energy as you can, and diversity will help. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And the fourth one, a really good one, especially for them, be kind to the environment. They were apologetic. They are not kind to the environment, but they have 1.3 billion people who are clamoring for the kind of life style we have and want to go climb up that economic ladder and they aren't using energy very efficiently, and we need to help them.

The fifth point, a really interesting one, international cooperation. They recognize that this isn't a U.S. problem or a Chinese problem. This is a global problem because oil moves on a global marketplace. It doesn't really matter who owns the oil. The person who has the highest bid gets the oil. It sells to the people who have the money to buy it. And when it is in short supply, there is more demand for it, so the price goes up.

Once we have bought some time and freed up some energy, then we need to use it wisely. I think one of the things that we need is an ARPA-E. Many people know what DARPA is. It is an agency in our Defense Department that looks at far-out, really interesting things. They developed the Net, for one thing. And they invest in things that industry couldn't invest in because there is no imminent payoff, not even certain there will be any long-term payoff. You are running down a lot of dead roads. But, boy, when you hit it, you hit it big. And DARPA has been very creative. And we need something like that in the energy world because there are some things that may be big, big producers tomorrow, which may not be attractive to investors today.

I am a big fan of the marketplace, but the marketplace is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and there is a role for government here. And I am one of the biggest small government people in Washington. But, you know, we ought to get the government out of things that are not productive and put them into things where they are productive.

And looking ahead and wisely deciding what some reasonable risk is and investing the taxpayer money has paid big dividends in DARPA, and I think it would in ARPA-E. Big benefits to this. We are now an incredible importer. I think this year the trade deficit we were $800 billion or something like that. We could again become a major exporter. The world is going to be clamoring for these renewable technologies, and we could be a leader in this.

Whether we like it or not, we are a role model. We are one person out of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's energy. So we are a witness, we are a role model whether we like it or not.

There are a couple of bills that I wanted to mention. This is our bill, and I am proud of this bill because if we can't do this, we are in for a really rough ride. This is a bill that encourages our farms to become energy independent. Not just energy independent, because if that is all they did, then the people who live in the cities would be in a world of hurt when we run out of fossil fuels.

But the farmer must be able not only to produce enough energy to run his farm, but have some leftover energy, and I think this challenges him to produce as much leftover energy as he uses on his farm. And there are some rewards for farmers who can do this. There are a lot of creative ways we can do this, and we hope that these awards will challenge people to be as creative and innovative as Americans have always been, and I am looking forward to some very exciting developments here.

The next chart has some data on it that I referred to previously. There is nothing like seeing it in a pretty colored chart. We can look at the top part of the chart. And petroleum, of course, if you start out with 1 million Btus, you won't have 1 million Btus to burn because you have got to pump it and refine it and transport it and put it in your car and so forth. So to get 1 million, you must start out 1.23 million.

Here we look at ethanol, and there is a big advantage here because you get solar energy. These, I am told, are very optimistic figures. Dr. Pimental believes that if you look at all the energy input into producing corn, that more energy goes into producing corn than you get out of corn. I hope that is not true. Most people believe that it is energy positive.

You know, even if it were just balanced, once you have taken the ethanol out, you have left some really good feed. Tragically, many of the ethanol plants today carry that to the landfill. What a shame, almost a crime, because all the fat is left, all the corn oil is left, and all the protein is left. All we have taken out is the carbohydrate.

What this says is, as I have mentioned previously, for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you are burning at least three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuels. That is a fossil fuel input. Now, this down here depicts the fossil fuel input. I mentioned that almost half of it, this big purple area here, comes from the natural gas that produced the nitrogen fertilizer.

Before we learn how to do that, by the way, the only nitrogen fertilizer--as a little kid I remember that pretty much the only nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manures and guano. And you took the manure out of your barnyard, you spread it out on your fields, and the fertilizer attachment on your tractor was about three times as big as the seed, the corn bin. You put very little fertilizer on it. But now we have learned to make enormous--we mine the phosphate rock and the potash and we make nitrogen fertilizer as incredibly energy intensive, as you can see. All of these are other fossil fuel energy inputs, making the tractor, fueling the tractor, putting the tires on the tractor, harvesting the grain, hauling it to market, drying it, the chemicals that go into killing the bugs and so forth on it.

An incredible amount of energy goes into producing a bushel of corn. And if you were going to grow corn with energy from corn--I gave you the statistics a little bit earlier--I believe that you would have to double your corn and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 percent of our gasoline.

That is an illustration of the huge challenge that we face. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day in this country, 70 percent of it in transportation. Each barrel of oil, as Hyman Rickover so graphically described, represents an enormous amount of human energy. One barrel of oil represents the work of 12 people working all year. For less than $10 you can hire a guy who is going to work all year for you. These are part of those 33 faithful household servants that Hyman Rickover said our energy use provided to the average family.

The next chart shows another energy bill, the DRIVE bill. This was dropped just very recently. We love acronyms down here, and this is a bill that has to do with transportation fuels, Dependable Reduction through Innovation and Vehicles and Energy Act, H.R. 670. I didn't sign on to any energy bills last year. There were some pretty good bills, but somewhat, not just somewhat, enormously exaggerated claims were made for them; and I did not want to give credibility to unrealistic expectations from these bills.

The next chart here quotes several people: Petroleum expert Colin Campbell. By the way, he kind of inherited the mantle from M. King Hubbert. He is kind of the godfather today of all of these scientists. Jean Laherrare, Ryan

Fleeley, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Albert Bartlett, no relative of mine. But if you put Albert Bartlett, do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and Energy, and you will put out the most fascinating 1-hour lecture I have ever listened to. He has given it more than 1,600 times. I will tell you, there will be no thriller on television that will be as interesting as Albert Bartlett's 1-hour lecture on energy. You will be captivated by it. They have all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur at around 2005. This is now 2007.

By the way, the world oil production has been roughly 84 million, 85 million barrels a day for the last several years. That may or may not mean we have reached peak, but at least there has been a plateau. And if it weren't for a fact that there has been a 40 percent reduction of gasoline use in many South American countries, for instance, because it has just gotten too expensive, the price of oil would be far greater than roughly $55 a barrel today.

This has been what they call demand destruction. If you can destroy demand, you can reduce the price. And when it got too expensive to use, they just quit using it, so the price of oil has dropped because there is less pressure.

The next chart shows a number of experts and what they have predicted, and here are some of them there, Campbell and Goldstein and Deffeyes, Skrebowski, Simmons. Matt Simmons is an investment banker, a personal energy adviser to the President. They all believe that it is going to occur very shortly. The previous list had it in roughly 2005, these in the next decade and these further down. Now, CERA is one here that says it is going to be after 2020.

I want to show you the next chart here, and this is a CERA chart; and CERA believes that we will find maybe several times as much more energy as all the energy that now is known, all the oil that we now know is out there. They think we will find two or three times that much more oil.

Now, if we find only 5 percent more oil, then this will be when it peaks. If we find as much more oil as all that exist out there, this will be when it peaks. It still is not forever, it still is about 2040. And if we now are able to get enormous amounts of oil from these unconventional sources, the Canadian tar sands; and don't call it oil, please, it is tar, and the oil sands out in our west, and I don't know that we will ever achieve this, by the way. The Canadians are getting 1 million barrels a day, just a little over 1 percent of production, using incredible amounts of energy, incredible amounts of water, producing a big lake that they call tailing water; it is really toxic water, and they know that what they are doing is not sustainable because they don't have enough natural gas to produce the energy.

They are thinking about putting in a power plant. The vein, I understand, dips under an overlay so they will have to develop in situ, and they don't know how to do that. Enormous reserves, more than all the oil in the world potentially, are out in our West. Shell Oil Company had a little experiment out there. They said it would be 2013, I think, before they said they could even make a decision as to whether it was economically feasible to get that. So this is a huge ``if'' here.

The next chart is an interesting one. One of the world's experts in this, Jean Laherrare, made an assessment of the USGS report. What I was looking at was not a USGS report, but they were basing their prognosis on USGS data, so this comment is appropriate to that chart as well. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition through which no evidence is presented.

Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technical achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate efforts to find the largest remaining prospect. We have computer modeling in 3-D seismic and enormously improved techniques for finding oil, and still every year we find on the average less oil than we found the year before.

This is a very heartening chart. As we face an energy-deficient world, I often think of this chart and the promise that it gives us. On the abscissa here we have energy consumption per capita here, and on the ordinate we have perception of how good life is. Now, it is not perfect for anybody, but there are a whole bunch of people who think that it is about 85 to 95 percent as good as paradise can be.

And notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy. Little Switzerland is close behind us. But what this chart tells me is that you can use far less energy and be pretty happy with where you are. These many people, by the way, use less energy than we and are happier with their lives than we are, everybody above this imaginary line.

And notice that if you have very little energy, it is tough to feel good about life. As soon as you reach 25 percent, as much as we use, then you can feel pretty good, 80 percent compared to 90 percent, not much improvement for an incredibly large increase in energy. So this gives us hope.

Europe uses per capita about half as much energy as we use, and if you have traveled to Europe, nobody who has traveled to Europe believes that they live less well or are less content with their life than we are.

The next chart shows an interesting, and this is one of many, many, opportunities for efficiency, but this is such a dramatic one. This is the efficiency of getting light. And this is the old incandescent bulb, a red hot hairpin hung up in a bottle is the way one old farmer described it. And this is the amount of heat you produce, which is why you use it as a brooder for fish and to keep them warm, and baby chickens, and this is the light you get, 90 percent heat, 10 percent light.

This is fluorescence, which is why you have the little screw in fluorescence. A great Time magazine article that showed that each one of those bulbs saved a quarter of a ton of coal. And here is the light- emitting diode. I have a light-emitting diode flashlight; I have forgotten when I put the batteries in. They just last and last.

I have a couple of charts here, and we have only a few minutes remaining, and I just want to show a couple of them to refer you to very big studies paid for by our government, ignored by our government. One is the Corps of Engineers, and this is the Corps of Engineers study, and the other is the big Hirsch Report. You can find all of those on the Web. In fact, you can go to our Web site and either find these or find the link to it.

In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace, remember, to its initial increase.

The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years.

This was paid for by the Army, essentially ignored by everybody.

The next one, a bigger study, paid for by our Department of Energy, SAIC, a big, prestigious organization: We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate the normal replacement schedules to fill the gap created by a decline in oil production.

I won't use any more of these charts because the others, I have a dozen or so more, simply say the same thing, that one way or the other, in different words, we are either at or shortly will be at peak oil with potentially devastating consequences.

There is hope with leadership. We are an enormously creative society. I think that we can meet the challenge, but it is going to require a program I believe that has a total commitment of World War II, I lived through that, that has the technology challenge of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We can do that. It needs the help of every American, and leadership; our children and grandchildren are counting on it.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 45 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 31, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thought that there was only one speech given in the last century that would become very famous in the few years just ahead of us, and that was the speech given on the 8th day of March in San Antonio, Texas, by M. King Hubbert in 1956, but I just discovered a few days ago a speech which I think may become just about as famous.

This was a speech that was given by the father of the nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover, and he gave this speech in May 1957. So soon we will reach the 50th anniversary of this very famous speech by the father of the nuclear submarine.

I just wanted to start by reading a couple of things from this speech that he gave. He gave the speech, by the way, to a group of physicians at a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 14, 1957.

The title of the speech had nothing to do with medicine. The title of the

speech is ``Energy Resources and Our Future.'' He says early on in the speech that, ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves.'' Now, this was 50 years ago and can you imagine what has happened since then?

``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously,'' that is, 24/7. Of course, you need to sleep and eat and so forth, and so when you are working, you are working at more than 35 watts, but 35 watts continuously, which is one-twentieth of horsepower.

``Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men.'' So all of those things that we enjoy in our life, the automobile, the refrigerator, the microwave, all of these represent the equivalent of 244 men in place of just the one that can turn these things out with the aid of this fossil fuel energy.

Then he goes on to say, ``While at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road,'' probably more than that for an SUV, ``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,'' he says, ``the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by,'' that was the 100 years up to 1957, it is now 150 years, ``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.''

Others have commented on this incredible energy density in these fossil fuels by noting that just one barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 12 men working all year. If you look at the cost of that at the pump, that is roughly $10 a year. For $10 a year, you can have a servant work for you all year long. You may have some trouble getting your mind around that, but imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel, still cheaper, by the way, than water in the grocery store, how far that takes your SUV or your car or your truck and how long it would take you to pull your SUV or truck or car the distance that that gallon of diesel fuel or gasoline takes it. I drive a Prius. We get about 50 miles per gallon. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles?

Let me give another little example to help you understand the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels and how much they have improved our life and how totally dependent we are on them.

If a big man goes outside and is working really hard all day long doing physical work, I can get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. That may be humbling to recognize that in terms of fossil fuel energy, our muscle power is worth less than 25 cents a day, but understanding that helps us to understand how totally dependent we have come to be on these fossil fuels.

A little later in his speech, Hyman Rickover said, ``I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels?'' And then this answer, 50 years ago, when we were king of oil, biggest producers, biggest consumers in the world, I think biggest exporters in the world, ``The answer is,'' he says, ``in the long run, none.''

There is no assurance that we can have these fossil fuels for the long term. ``The earth is finite,'' he says. ``Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation,'' when we got our energy from the soil. ``We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are nonrenewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy,'' he says, ``500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.''

Another quote from his talk. ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion.'' Actually, he missed it a little. It is now 7 billion, as you will see in a moment, ``with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.'' As a matter of fact, it required less than that, because today we have about nearly 7 billion people in the world rather than just 4 billion.

Another quote from his talk. ``High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power . . . Ultimately,'' he says, ``the Nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.''

Have we done that? In no way have we done that.

Another quote from his talk. ``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age . . . We might even, if we wanted, give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption,'' this was 50 years ago, ``by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.''

I just came back about 3 weeks ago from a trip to China. Nine Members of Congress went. We met with a number of the top officials in China, and I was pleased and surprised. We went to talk about energy primarily, and they began every discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago understood that one day we would be talking about post-oil. The Chinese now are talking about post-oil. By the way, they do not mean that there is not going to be anymore oil in the world. Nobody is telling you that.

What they mean by post-oil is that it will be post the peak production of oil, where we can no longer produce additional oil so we are going to have to make do with what we have. As a matter of fact, each year after that there would be less and less oil available for us to use.

The next chart. There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves, and this is part of the quote I just made. They were created by solar energy a very long time ago and took eons to grow into their present volume. In the face of the basic factor, fossil fuel reserves are finite. The exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. The longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift. This is 50 years ago.

He is saying the same thing that our President said last night in the State of the Union message, that we should get busy with preparing for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

Then I really love this quote. I am a father of 10, a grandfather of 15 and a great-grandfather of two. ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance.''

Do you think, Mr. Speaker, that we have been using fossil fuel energy sparingly? I doubt that you would find very much concurrence for this anywhere in this country, and certainly worldwide. When you look from other places to this country and see this one person out of 22 using 25 percent of all of the world's energy, you will have nobody over there saying we have used our energy sparingly. ``A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fair.''

I have characterized our relationship with energy as the equivalent of the

pig who found the feed room door open and just went in and pigged out. That is what we have been doing. When our children and our grandchildren and great grandchildren look back in a world with diminishing fossil fuel availability, and, by the way, saddled with a huge debt that we are passing on to them, they may well ask themselves the question, how could they have done it?

When we found this incredible wealth under the ground, that provides the equivalent of 33 servants, 100,000 people pushing your train, 244 people pushing your automobile down the road, when we found this incredible fuel fossil fuel energy under the ground, why didn't somebody stop and ask the question, what should we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did.

What we did was to extract this oil from the ground as quickly as possible; to use it as prolifically as possible; to develop a lifestyle ever more and more dependent on fossil fuel; to develop an agriculture where one person out of 50 feeds the rest and much of the world; where the man sits on top of a 150 horsepower tractor and uses fertilizers produced from natural gas to grow his crops.

The next chart here is a really interesting one. Suppose the size of the countries in the world was determined by how much oil they have. This is the world according to oil. If you look at our military might, if you look at our economic might, we are really big. But when you look at the oil we have, here we are, itty-bitty United States. Notice Alaska is pretty big here, a fair amount of oil up there.

But look at Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait. Little Kuwait. Look at a map and see how little Kuwait is. But look at the oil they have. This is what the world would like look like if the countries were sized relative to the amount of oil they have.

Look at Russia there. People talk about the huge reserves in Russia. It is dwarfed by Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and even little Kuwait has more oil than Russia. Look at Venezuela down here. It is probably twice the size of the United States in terms of what they have in oil. Look at some of the African countries here. Nigeria, what, way bigger than the United States. Libya, bigger than the United States in terms of the amount of oil that they have.

The next chart, this was predicted by that second famous speech that I mentioned that was given in the last century, and that is the talk given by M. King Hubbard on the 8th day of March, 1956, to a group of petroleum engineers in San Antonio, Texas, and a lot of other oilmen there. This was the time, you remember, when the United States was the biggest oil producer in the world, the biggest consumer of oil in the world, and I think maybe the biggest exporter of oil in the world.

What M. King Hubbard told hose assembled people was that in just about 14 years, the United States would reach its maximum oil production and then, no matter what we did, the oil production would drop off after that.

How did he know that that was going to happen? He had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and each one of them followed what we call a bell curve. That is a curve that goes ever up and up and reaches a peak and comes down the other side. You get a bell curve if you weigh people and see how much they weigh. There will be a few very light people, a few very heavy people. Most of them are in the middle. How tall people are, how many mice are in a litter of mice and so forth, most of the things in a natural world follow a bell curve. He predicted that we would follow a bell curve.

When he noticed each one of these little fields, he saw when they reached a peak, they had pumped about half of all the oil they would ever pump. So he theorized if he knew how many little fields we had, little bell curves, and how many more we were likely to find, and if you added all those up, you could predict when we would reach the peak. So he did that, and he said that was going to be about 1970.

And the Shell Oil Company, for whom he worked, said, please don't do that and embarrass us. You make a fool of yourself and embarrass yourself. He gave the talk and for a while he was kind of a humorous person. But then he became an icon in his own time, because right on schedule in 1970, we peaked in oil production.

Now, this curve that I have here is one that is taken from the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and I use this especially because you may hear from these people, they are called CERA, and they are predicting that there is lots more oil out there, we are going to find a whole lot more oil, not to worry. They use this to make the point that M. King Hubbard really didn't know what he was talking about and he really was wrong.

They are saying that because the total U.S. production, and this, by the way, is with Prudo Bay and the Gulf of Mexico in, if you put only the lower 48 in, which is what M. King Hubbard was predicting, this was the actual on the green, and his prediction was the yellow here, and they said, gee, he was off. That doesn't look like it is very far off to me.

Let's look at another chart which shows the same data. This shows two peaks here. The smooth green symbols here are the prediction of M. King Hubbard. The more ragged ones are the actual data points.

You see right on schedule we peaked in 1970. We have been going down ever since. The red one is the former Soviet Union, FSU, and they kind of fell apart and didn't reach their potential. They are having a second little peak now and are going down.

Do you remember from that chart of the world according to oil, they were maybe twice the United States? They aren't using anywhere near as much oil as we are, so now they are a major exporter. But they don't have all that much oil. As you can see here, the area under this curve represents how much oil they have, the area under this curve represents how much oil we have, and you can see the general relationships there.

The next chart shows where our oil has come from. M. King Hubbard predicted only Texas and the rest of the United States, and that was his prediction and that was the actual data points. Then we found oil in Alaska and we learned to make oil from gas, non-gas liquids, natural gas liquids.

This is the oil that we found in the Gulf of Mexico. You remember those fabled discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico? I remember them. We were home free. They were going to solve our oil problem for the foreseeable future. You can hardly see their contributions as we slid down the other side of Hubbard's peak.

The next chart shows another depiction of peak oil, and this is one again from Energy Information Area, the EIA, quoted in the Hirsch Report. Let me spend a moment on what the Hirsch Report is.

Our government has paid for two big studies of the fossil fuel energy situation. One of those was financed by the Department of Energy, done by SAIC, a very prestigious, large scientific organization, and Dr. Hirsch was the principal investigator there, so it is frequently referred to as the Hirsch Report. He here is reporting this information that came from our Energy Information Agency, which is a part of our Department of Energy.

Here they are using some very interesting statistical terms, but they aren't true statistical term. I have had the EIA people come in and talk with them at the office about this, because I had some trouble understanding it.

A couple of Congresses ago, I was the Chair of the Energy Subcommittee on Science and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had experts come in from around the world to tell us how much oil they thought remained in the world and how much more oil they thought we would find.

I was quite surprised at the relative unanimity. They all were pretty close to 1,000 gigabarrels, maybe 970 to 1,040. Now, I use gigabarrels instead of million barrels and that is because the British billion is not our billion. The British billion is a million million. Our billion is a thousand million. But everybody understands a giga. So when you hear ``giga'' used, you know that is an international term. A thousand gigabarrels, which is 1 trillion barrels of oil, that is what remains.

You remember at the peak of that curve, M. King Hubbard said about half of the oil would be used, so that means we have used about 1,000 gigabarrels, and here they have the total of 2,248 gigabarrels. So about half of that has

been used and about half of that remains.

Now, they are using some very interesting techniques here, and they did some simulations, and I have no idea what the inputs were into the simulations, but they have convinced themselves that there is a high probability that we will find twice as much more oil as all the oil that now exists out there unpumped. So they said gee, halfway between what they say is the low probability and the high probability is the mean, which is the expected yield. So they believe we are going to get, this is a total of 3,000, so we are going to get another 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. That is this red curve here.

What they show is that even if that is true, Mr. Speaker, even if that is true, and I think the odds that that is true are very small, but even if that is true, that pushes the peak out only to 2016.

What the dotted curve here shows is what you might be able to do with enhanced oil recovery, pump live steam down there and a bunch of solvents and push water in there, and maybe you can get it quicker. But if you get it quicker look what happens to the other side. Just a demonstration that you can't pump what is not there, and the total volume you will pump is the area under this curve. If you get it sooner, you won't have it later. Notice how quickly that curve drops down.

If they don't find the additional enormous quantities of oil that they believe they will find, then we are about here and the peak will occur at about 2005 or so, which is where M. King Hubbard said that the peak would occur. By the way, he predicted it in 1969, a year before the United States peak. He was confident enough of his analytical techniques that he predicted the world would be peaking about now.

The next chart is another chart from CERA, and it depicts some of the same information on that chart a little differently.

This is the curve, the peaking curve, if there is a roughly 2 trillion, 2000 gigabarrels. You will notice slightly different figures between these, because there is not unanimity on how much is there, but it is roughly 1.9 to 2.2. This is in the same ballpark. If that is the case, then peaking according to them is going to occur fairly soon according to them.

But if you find another 1 trillion barrels of oil, that pushes peaking out only to what, 2035, something like that. That is not all that far off. And the probability we are going to find that oil is very, very small, as we will see in a few moments.

Now he has piled on top of that, CERA has piled on top of that, an enormous amount of oil that they think we are going to get from unconventional oil sources. This is like the Canadian tar sands and like our oil shales out in the West.

We may or may not get enormous quantities of oil from that. There are potentially huge quantities there. There is more potential oil in the tar sands of Canada than all of the known reserves in the world. That big map we saw, there is more potential oil there.

But there is also an incredible amount of potential energy in the tides, but we have not been very successful in harnessing that energy from the tides. Canada is now getting about 1 million barrels of oil with a shovel that lifts 100 tons and dumps it into a truck that hauls 400 tons. They then haul it and cook it with enormous amounts of energy from natural gas, which is stranded. By ``stranded'' we mean there are not very many people there to use it.

Since it is expensive to ship, why, it is cheaper there, and so they are producing that oil at about 18 to 25 dollars a barrel. I understand they are getting 55, today, dollars a barrel for it. That is a pretty good dollar profit ratio. But they know this is not sustainable for several reasons. One is they are using water faster than they can supply it. The energy from the gas will run out. They are thinking of building a nuclear power plant, and they have a huge, relatively huge, lake there of tailing water they call it. It is really very toxic water, so there are huge environmental impacts of it. And furthermore, this vein of the tar sands will shortly duck under an overlay so that they will no longer be able to deadlift it or surface mine it, whatever you want to call it. They will now have to develop it in situ, and they have not even experimented with how they are going to do that.

The next chart has a little simple schematic. And by the way, you can make this peak look very hard and sharp or spread it out by the scale you use on the abscissa and the ordinate. Here we have spread it out because we have an expanded scale on the abscissa and a restricted one on the ordinate here. But that yellow area represents the additional oil we would like to have, because growth is exponential at about 2 percent. And if we reach the peak, I think we are about here. We are now having some problems with meeting the demand, which is why oil is going from 50 to 60 to 78 at the highest a few months ago.

And by the way, they showed undulating plateau in that last big chart I showed, and I agree with them. May I put that chart up for just another moment? That is a very interesting one. I want to focus on this. They are saying that there is no such thing as peak oil. And this is what they show. Tell me that is not a peak. This is from their publication. And it is an article where they are kind of pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil, and they are showing peak oil. For every potential level of oil that they think will be there, they are showing a peak. They are just showing it, and I agree with them that it is going to be undulating plateau. It is not going to be a smooth thing. The curve just under it shows it very smooth because we have simplified it. And what it shows is, and, by the way, the 2 percent growth, it doubles in 35 years. This point is doubled this point, so that is a 35- year period there. So you see it takes a while to get through that peak.

The next chart is one that if you had only one chart to look at and talk about relative to oil, this would be the chart. And you could spend a very long time looking at this chart and talking about it. The big bars here show the discoveries. And you notice that there was a rash of discoveries way back in the 1940s, 16 years before M. King Hubbert made his prediction. By the way, he made that prediction here in 1956, about here. Wow. Look how much more we discovered after that. And he was able to predict how much more we would discover and correctly predict when we would reach peak oil production.

The solid line here shows the consumption. And obviously up until about 1980 we were always finding more than we were consuming. Now, remember, underneath this curve represents all that we have used. So we have used this much of what we found. But this much of what we found was left over that we could use in the future. So ever since 1980, now, we have been finding less and less oil and using more and more oil. Notice a little stuttering here in the 1970s. The Arab oil embargo. The oil price spike hikes, the big push for efficiency in our country. Your air conditioner now uses about half the energy that it used in 1970.

Well, what will the future look like? The folks who put this chart together believe that peaking will occur at about 2010. Who knows? We really won't know until after it has peaked and you look back and see the data. It could be peaking now. It could be 5 years from now, it could be 10 years from now. But both of these are very, very short term in terms of what we need to do to address this.

What will the future look like? They have predicted that future oil discoveries will follow, and of course they won't be smooth like that, but on the average they will follow the curve like that. And you can't pump what you haven't found. And if you were to put a smooth curve over this discovery curve, and you have an area under that which will equal the amount which will be the total amount of oil you have found, that is adding up all these little bars here, and the area under that discovery curve cannot be different than the area ultimately under the consumption curve. So you can make this curve go, within limits, any way you want, within reason. You can use vigorous enhanced oil recovery techniques and get it out quicker, and you can maybe delay the peak a little bit. But you can't pump what is not there. And so it ultimately is going to fall off much, much faster. This is a very interesting chart. We could spend a lot of

time looking at this. But what you cannot do is pump oil that you have not found.

Now, what CERA is predicting is that you are going to find as much more oil as all of the reserves that now exist. The reserves that exist, and I calculated this, I think that this area pretty much fills in this. So the reserve that exists is this. They think we are going to find that much more oil? What do you think when you look at this chart? Do you think it is reasonable that they are going to find that much more oil?

Mr. Speaker, this is a chart which kind of smooths out those big different bar graphs that we saw before. Now, as early finds in the 19, here, they have a little spike here and a big spike here. You can smooth that whole thing out, of course. But this is roughly a graph drawn through the bar graphs on that previous chart. And now we are down here at this point in time. And the Energy Information Agency, using those three numbers that we used before, the 95 percent, which they say is low, the 50 percent, which they say is the mean, and the 5 percent, which they say is high, and they think that because the 50 percentile is halfway between the 95 and the 5, that that is the most likely thing. Well, anybody in statistics knows that if it is 95 percent more probable, it is more probable than 50 percent probable. That is pretty simple to understand, I think.

Well, the red dots here indicate what the actual data have been. Now, their projection was that this discovery line would follow the green. Clearly it has been following what you would expect it to follow, the 95 percent probability.

The next chart is an interesting one, and Hyman Rickover referred to this. He referred to 8,000 years of recorded history. And he, at that time, noted that they were about 100 years into the age of oil. Today we are about 150 years into the age of oil. And ultimately, out of 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a blip in the history of man. It will occupy maybe 300 years from when we first found it and started to really exploit it until it becomes so difficult to get and so expensive that we won't be getting much of it again.

This is a little chart that shows the development of the industrial revolution. It started with wood. Brown, here. The hills of New England were denuded carrying charcoal to England to make steel there. Come up to Frederick County where I live, and we have a little historic site up there, Catoctin Furnace. We denuded the hills up there where Camp David is now to make charcoal to make steel at Catoctin Furnace.

Then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here, it is a quadrillion Btus, how much energy we were producing. Look how much more energy we were able to produce with coal. The coal locomotive. Lots more energy in coal than there is in wood, so we could do a lot more things with.

The industrial revolution was kind of stuttering when we discovered gas and oil, and then look what happened. And if you could superimpose on this a chart of the population growth in the world, it would look just about like this. Remember Hyman Rickover said that it was going to grow from that half billion back here to 4 billion? It really grew to almost 7 billion, which is where we are today. So that population curve with appropriate dimensions would just about follow exactly the energy use curve. This is an incredible amount of energy we are using that obviously could not continue.

A really interesting statistic. Up until the Carter years, every decade, the world used as much oil as it had used in all of previous history. That is this curve. Now, in the 1970s you see what happened. We really had a shock, and we stopped and took some sense of where we were. And we drove smaller cars, and we developed more efficient refrigerators and air conditioners, and we reduced energy. We had a big recession, a big worldwide recession as a result of that. So energy use went down.

But now look. It is climbing back up again. Three hundred years, the age of oil, it will be but a blip in the history of man.

Again, I ask, what will future people think when they look back at this and say, why didn't we stop when we found this incredible wealth under the ground to ask what could we do with this to get the most good for the most people for the longer time? That is obviously the question that almost nobody asked. What we asked was, how can we use more and more of this to improve more and more our quality of life, as if it were forever. Obviously, as Hyman Rickover said 50 years ago, it can't be forever.

The next chart is a really interesting one. As I mentioned, we are 1 person out of 22, and we use a fourth of the world's energy. Energy use is on the abscissa here, and how good you feel about life is on the ordinate. And notice that we are way out there. We feel pretty good about life, but not as good as many others. We are just here. There are all of those who feel better about life. And we clearly are using the most energy. Only little Switzerland comes close to us in using energy.

Interesting chart here. If you could draw a line through this, you would see that with little energy it is really tough to feel good about life. But when you come up here to what, a fifth of the amount of energy we use, a lot of people, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, China, they feel about as good about life as we do. If you look at the countries in Europe here, you will find that many of those use about half the energy we use, and they feel just as good about life as we feel.

What this points out is that it is possible to live a quality life using much less energy than we use, and all you have to do is to look at these countries that use very much less energy than we do and feel just about as good, and some of them better. All of these above my arm here feel better about life than we feel about life. And they are using less energy than we are using.

Well, what now? Well, obviously, we must transition. Geology will assure it, as anticipated by Hyman Rickover in that very fascinating speech to the physicians 50 years ago. We will transition ultimately as we go through the age of oil from the fossil fuels to renewables. We have available to us some finite sources, and I mentioned the tar sands, and we have about as large a potential supply of energy in our West called the oil shales, a little bit different. They aren't really oil. You put a solvent in, they won't flow out. But if you cook them, they will turn to oil, and you can then refine it. And there is potentially a huge amount of energy there. But can we get it?

The Shell Oil Company has gone there doing some experimentation. And a year or so ago I was a speaker out in Denver, Colorado, at the American chapter of the Peak Oil Association. And the investigator for the Shell Oil Company that conducted this little experiment was there and reported on it. And what he said in his report there was very different than the stories you read in the papers. The stories in the papers said, you know, don't worry about energy. We have this huge potential amount there, and we have found a way to get it. That is not what he said.

Let me tell you what they did. What they did was, and I am not sure of the reasoning because I hear two reasons for it. One was that there was an aquifer there they didn't want to contaminate. And the other had something to do with the mechanics of sequestering the oil. But they drilled a series of holes around the periphery, and then they froze the ground, and they froze it for a year so that now they had, in effect, a frozen vessel.

The second argument was that they did that to contain the heat. That is a little hard for me to understand how a frozen vessel contains heat, but that is the argument that I was given. Then at the end of the year they went in and drilled a second set of holes, and then they pumped heat down there, and they cooked it for a year. And then they drilled a third set of holes, and then when they got to the bottom of those holes, they turned it sideways, which they can do now, and drilled it horizontally. So the oil that was loosened by cooking it in the second set of wells they drilled now flowed down through the shale and was picked up by those horizontal channels from the third set of wells they drilled. And they pumped for several years a really meaningful amount of oil from that. So there is potentially a lot of oil there.

But what the investigator told us was that it would be, I think he said, something like 2013 before they could even decide whether it was economically feasible to develop those fields.

So there is huge potential there. There are also huge challenges there. But it is energy. We will develop some of it. But it is finite. It will not last forever either. And there is going to be enormous cost in developing it, both economic cost and environmental costs.

Now, you can trade the environmental cost for economic cost. If you do not mind polluting the environment you can develop it for less money. At the moment, most of us believe we should not be polluting our environment so we spend the money necessary that we do not, although they are not really doing that in Alberta, Canada. They are using up precious water, and they have a relatively huge lake of tailing water as they call it, which is really pretty toxic stuff.

Coal. We and China have a lot of coal. China was suffocating themselves with coal smoke. They closed down some of their coal-fired power plants. People will tell you that we have 500 years of coal. That is just not true. It is true that we have 250 years of coal at current use rates. We will put the next chart up in front of this one.

Be very careful when people tell you we have so much of something at current use rates. When Albert Einstein was asked what the next big force in the universe was going to be after nuclear energy, which had such a dramatic increase over any kind of energy we had before that, his answer was, compound interest, he said was the most powerful force in the universe.

And there is a really interesting talk given, he is not my relative, I wish he were so I had some of his genes, but Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado has given a talk on energy I think some 1,600 times. Just do Albert Bartlett and energy and you will pull it up. It was the most fascinating 1-hour talk I ever listened to, and I am sure you will agree.

But he says that the biggest failure of our industrialized society is our inability to understand the exponential function. You see this coal that will last us 250 years at current use rates if we increase its use only 2 percent, and we will have to do better than that. By the way, coal has been in the past a big source of gas and oil.

Hitler ran his whole country and his whole military on it. And when we were limiting the opportunities for trade in South Africa, they were making gas and oil from coal. When I was a little boy, it was coal oil. And I thought it was all one word, coal oil that replaced whale oil in the lamps. I kept calling it coal oil a long time after they were getting it from kerosene rather than coal.

But if you increase it just 2 percent, that shrinks its usable duration to about 85 years. But obviously for many of our uses you cannot use coal, you have got to use it as a gas or liquid. If you use some of the energy from the coal to make it into a gas or liquid you have now shrunk it to 50 years.

But the reality is that it does not matter who owns the resource today, it is all traded in a global marketplace. And the guy who has the dollars buys the oil or the gas. And so whether we like it or not, there is no alternative that we are going to share our oil with the world. Because, you see if we use oil from our coal, that just frees up some oil from pumping it out of the ground that somebody else can use.

So the effect is as if we were sharing our oil with the world so that 50 years from now, we use a fourth, you remember the rest of the world uses the other three-fourths, that means that now shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. So that marvelous 200 years of coal at no growth for us now shrinks to 50 years when we increase its growth to only 2 percent, and use some of it, the energy, to convert it to gas and oil. And then we realize that we are going to have to share this, no alternative, unless we have a big enough Navy to say, it is ours and we can keep you from coming and getting it. We are going to have to share it with the world so now it lasts 12\1/2\ years.

Let's go back to this chart. Going just for a few moments about nuclear. If you were in France, you would get about 80, 85 percent of all of your electricity from nuclear. We get in our country 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear, that is a lot. When you go home tonight look out your window, and every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if it were not for nuclear energy.

We have never had an accident. We have never had a fatality. Three Mile Island, it behaved just as it was supposed to behave. I lived within the radiation zone of that. And we contained that. That was not a disaster. It was just a demonstration that we were building them right, because when we had the meltdown at Three Mile Island we contained that. There was little effect from it.

There are three different ways you can get nuclear energy. One is the way we get it from lightwater reactors. That uses fissionable uranium. There is a finite supply of fissionable uranium in the world.

And I get wildly divergent estimates of how long it will last, 15 years, 100 years. Again, this is at that current use rate. So you have to ask the person, what rate of use are you assuming when you make this projection? This reminds me, by the way, that we need an honest broker to help us agree on the facts.

It is hard to have a rational discussion when you cannot agree on the facts. And I think the right candidate to do this is the National Academy of Sciences. Enormously respected, very competent. And I have talked with them, and they would be interested in doing this. We just need to fund them so they can do it.

We need to have a rational discussion of this. And we cannot have that when there is big differences of opinion as to what the facts are.

Well, ultimately one day sooner or later, there will not be enough fissionable uranium to go to lightwater reactors. So then we are going to have to go to the second type of fission reactors, that is the breeder reactor. France already uses those. The only ones we had we used for making weapons. We now do not do that anymore. They have problems.

The big advantage, of course, is they are what the name implies, they are breeder reactors, they make more fuel that they use. The problems are that they have a byproduct that we must store away for a quarter of a million years. I cannot even imagine that. A quarter of a million years.

I think there is a challenge here. Anything that is so hot that has no much energy in it that I cannot get near it for a quarter of a million years, don't you think ought to have enough energy there that we can do something meaningful with it?

Now we have been profligate in our use of energy, all energy including nuclear energy. And we use only a tiny fraction of the nuclear energy in the isotope when we say it is no longer good for our reactors, so we put some more in. But I think there is a big challenge there. I think there is a potential source of energy from these byproducts. If it is so hot, such high radiation that I cannot get near it for a quarter of a million years, it ought to have some usable energy in it. We have very creative, innovative people. I think that we can find that if we realize that we need to.

The third type of nuclear energy is the type that is represented in the sun and every other star out there in the Milky Way. The sun is a nuclear reactor. And it is fusion reaction, it is like our hydrogen bomb. By the way, it will one day run down too. But that will be in millions of years in the future, so in our context we do not need to think about that.

We have been spending money on fusion, about $250 million a year. We are always about 30 years away from a solution. I gladly would vote for the money that we spend there. I think that we have got to do that. If we can conquer the enormous engineering challenges then we are home free. That is the only energy source out there that can take the place of fossil fuels. But I think the odds of doing that are about the same as the odds of winning the lottery. And if you are satisfied that you are going to meet your financial obligations by playing the lottery, then you are probably satisfied that we are going to meet our energy needs with nuclear fusion. Please do not bet the ranch on it.

Well, once we have gone through these finite sources and we have done what we can with nuclear, I have friends that have been devoutly antinuclear, but they are very bright people. And when they are looking at a very probable alternative, that is, shivering in the dark, not enough energy to

keep warm, not enough energy to run the lights, nuclear does not look all that bad to many people who before were not enthusiastic about it when the alternative might be shivering in the dark.

Well, then we have renewable resources. And as Dr. Rickover said, by and by, we will have transitioned to these renewable resources. There will come a day when the fossil fuels are so scarce, so hard to get, so expensive, that we are getting little or none of them. And we will have, by that time, have transitioned, like it or not, we will have transitioned to these renewables. What are they? There is the sun. As I look at what the sun does, I am not surprised that the ancients worshiped the sun.

Almost all of the energy that we have been talking about here came from the sun. It was the sun that permitted the organic materials to grow in those subtropical seas that existed. The Earth, a long time ago, was much warmer than the Earth today. They were up there in the North Shore of Alaska, and in the North Sea off England producing these organic materials that settled to the bottom, infiltrated by runoff from the adjacent hills, probably. This is all theory. As good an explanation as I have heard as to how it got there. Tectonic moved. It opened up. It sank down. Near enough, proper pressure, proper heat, enough time, and by and by it becomes gas and oil, with a dome over so the gas cannot escape.

Then you have a good field. You get gas from it. You get oil from it. And if you drill into the oil and seal off the gas, the gas pressure above is putting pressure on the oil, so you have a gusher, it just pushes it up the pipe. So you see that this is the way it was formed. We have an explanation for what we find when we drill out there.

So all of the gas and oil came from the sun. When I was a little boy, we had a coal furnace. And we had run a mined coal from dust to big lumps, and some lumps so big that you could not put them in the furnace. And there was a sledgehammer by the wall, and we would break the lumps so we could get them in the furnace.

I remember as a little kid the feelings that I had, and I still get a chill when I think of this. I would break open the lump of that coal and there would be a fern leaf. You did not have to tell me where the coal came from. I knew where the coal came from. It came from ancient vegetation that grew and fell over and was covered up and ultimately became coal. We can see this process in the making in England, of the bogs there, it is not coal yet but you can take it out and burn it.

Wind. The wind blows because the sun shines. It is differential heating of the Earth that makes the wind blow.

Here is one that is not due to the sun. This is geothermal. True geothermal, not tying your heat pump to groundwater or earth, which makes a whole lot more sense than trying to coal the winter air and heat the summer air, which is what your radiational air conditioner and heat system, heat pump does.

But this is tapping into the heat from the molten core of the Earth. You go to Iceland, there is not a single chimney because they have a lot of geothermal, that is where they get their energy.

Ocean energy. Except for the tides, all of ocean energy is really a second-hand sun energy. It is the sun which differentially heats the waters. It is the sun which produces ultimately the Gulf Stream and the Japanese current, which carries so much warmth to northern Europe. Look at England on a globe. You will see that England is about mid-Canada, that is certainly not their climate, that is because of what the sun does in heating that water and setting up this conveyor belt.

The tides, of course, are produced by the Moon. There a lot of potential energy there. And then a very popular potential source of energy today, the President talked about it last night in his State of the Union, energy sources from agriculture.

Hyman Rickover in his speech here talked about that. And he said that ultimately, if you are getting energy from agriculture, you are going to be competing with one of two things, either you compete with food, and today corn is over $4 a barrel, it is ordinarily about $2 a barrel so that our dairy farmers and chicken farmers and hog farmers are now having a hard time making ends meet, because corn has about doubled in price, and that is because using corn for ethanol is competing with corn for food.

If we all became vegetarians, by the way, we would all have a whole lot more corn to use for energy. Soy diesel, biodiesel, these are all attractive sources. The second potential source of energy from agriculture was biomass. And the President talked a lot about that last night.

But Hyman Rickover very astutely noted that today's crops grow because last year's crops died and are fertilizing them. He noted that you will need to return the biomass to the soils if you are going to keep productivity going.

Now, we can get some energy from ethanol, and we can get some energy from biomass by burning it or fermenting it, but there are limits as to how much we can get there. And the incredible amount of energy that we use from fossil fuels presents a huge challenge to try to find enough disparate sources of energy to add up to equal the energy that we get there.

Waste energy, that is an interesting one, and we ought to be doing more of that. It is a very good idea. But remember, that big pile of waste that you see at the city dump is the result of profligate use of energy. In an energy-deficient world, we are not going to have those huge piles of waste. That is really secondhand use of fossil fuels because that is how the waste got there.

Hydrogen. Hydrogen is not an energy source. We must make hydrogen. The second law of thermal dynamics says you will always get less energy out of hydrogen than it took to make it. So why are we talking about hydrogen? For two reasons. One, when you burn it, it is really clean. You get water.

Secondly, if we ever get an economically feasible fuel cell, hydrogen is a great candidate for the fuel cell. But minus a good fuel cell, there will not be a viable hydrogen economy because you will always get less energy out of hydrogen than it took to make it. If you are simply burning the hydrogen, you could have gotten more energy by burning the gas from which you got the electricity which you used to split the water to get hydrogen.

So that is why there is such a focus on fuel cells, because it opens up the promise of a really clean fuel with at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine.

The next chart, and I would like to talk about this one in terms of a young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance, and they have now established a life-style. Hyman Rickover described that life-style with 33 servants, or the equivalent. They have established a life-style where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent comes from their income. It is not going to last long enough for them to retire. They have to do something. They have to spend less money or make more money.

That is exactly where we are energywise. Eighty-five percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, natural gas. Only 15 percent comes from other sources, and a bit more than half of that comes from nuclear. That could grow, and probably should grow. And that leaves 7 percent, and this is in 2000. We are a little better today than we were in 2000, but the challenges are huge. Even with 30 percent growth, when you are going from 0.07 percent, in 2000 that is the contribution that solar made to our energy supply. It is minuscule. And the noise level.

We are doing much better today, and it is growing rapidly, but it is still a tiny fraction of the energy we use.

Notice wood here, more than a third of all of the renewables. That is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using a by-product.

Waste to energy we talked about.

Wind is just another way to use sun energy.

Conventional hydro, we have maxed out on that. We can maybe get some microhydro. We have about maxed out on that.

The next chart, briefly, what do we need to do. We need a program, if we

are going to have a relatively smooth ride, and we have waited too long to address this problem, but we need a program that has the total commitment of World War II, that has the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, and has the urgency of the Manhattan Project.

We need a vigorous conservation time to buy time, free up some energy, buy some time, use it wisely, invest it in those things that will do the most good for the most people. We could become a major exporter. We have a very innovative society. We have a farm bill that is challenging our farmers. And if a farm can't be energy independent, we have big problems because that is where a lot of energy could be produced.

This is challenging our farm people to develop a farm where they produce twice as much energy as they use so there is some for the city person.

Mr. Speaker, www.bartlett.house.gov will get you access to all of this material.

Mr. Speaker, I submit into the Congressional Record the entire speech ``Energy Resources and Our Future,'' by Admiral Hyman Rickover, Chief, Naval Reactors Branch, Division of Reactor Development, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Ships for Nuclear Propulsion, Navy Department, prepared for delivery at a Banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association, St. Paul, Minnesota on May 14, 1957.

Energy Resources and Our Future

I am honored to be here tonight, though it is no easy

thing, I assure you, for a layman to face up to an audience

of physicians. A single one of you, sitting behind his desk,

can be quite formidable.

My speech has no medical connotations. This may be a relief

to you after the solid professional fare you have been

absorbing. I should like to discuss a matter which will, I

hope, be of interest to you as responsible citizens: the

significance of energy resources in the shaping of our

future.

We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil

Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the

world's energy; water power accounts for only 1%; and the

labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6%. This is a

startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850--only a

century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world's

energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal,

oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel

Age has been burned up in the last 55 years.

These fuels have been known to man for more than 3,000

years. In parts of China, coal was used for domestic heating

and cooking, and natural gas for lighting as early as 1000

B.C. The Babylonians burned asphalt a thousand years earlier.

But these early uses were sporadic and of no economic

significance. Fossil fuels did not become a major source of

energy until machines running on coal, gas, or oil were

invented. Wood, for example, was the most important fuel

until 1880 when it was replaced by coal; coal, in turn, has

only recently been surpassed by oil in this country.

Once in full swing, fossil fuel consumption has accelerated

at phenomenal rates. All the fossil fuels used before 1900

would not last five years at today's rates of consumption.

Nowhere are these rates higher and growing faster than in

the United States. Our country, with only 6% of the world's

population, uses one third of the world's total energy input;

this proportion would be even greater except that we use

energy more efficiently than other countries. Each American

has at his disposal, each year, energy equivalent to that

obtainable from eight tons of coal. This is six times the

world's per capita energy consumption. Though not quite so

spectacular, corresponding figures for other highly

industrialized countries also show above average consumption

figures. The United Kingdom, for example, uses more than

three times as much energy as the world average.

With high energy consumption goes a high standard of

living. Thus the enormous fossil 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 one-twentieth 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 hundred years just gone by

may well seem like a Golden Age.

Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon

our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs

of our growing population. Before I go into this question,

let me review briefly the role of energy resources in the

rise and fall of civilizations.

Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for

any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the

energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength--

mental and physical--to obtain the bare necessities of life.

Surplus energy provides the material foundation for

civilized living--a comfortable and tasteful home instead of

a bare shelter; attractive clothing instead of mere covering

to keep warm; appetizing food instead of anything that

suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom from toil

without which there can be no art, music, literature, or

learning. There is no need to belabor the point. What lifted

man--one of the weaker mammals--above the animal world was

that he could devise, with his brain, ways to increase the

energy at his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to

cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely solely on

the energy of his own body, he can sustain only the most

meager existence.

Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from

his discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With

these energy resources he was able to build a pastoral

culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization he

needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor

of dependent members of large patriarchal families, augmented

by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There

are some backward communities which to this day depend on

this type of energy.

Slave labor was necessary for the city-states and the

empires of antiquity; they frequently had slave populations

larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were

abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership,

incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were

lacking; this may well have been the single most important

reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times.

A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in

the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to

a more primitive way of life. For example, exhaustion of wood

fuel is believed to have been the primary reason for the fall

of the Mayan Civilization on this continent and of the

decline of once flourishing civilizations in Asia. India and

China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East.

Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a

further disastrous effect: lacking plant cover, soil washed

away, and with soil erosion the nutritional base was reduced

as well.

Another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure

of population on available land. A point is reached where the

land can no longer support both the people and their domestic

animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally even the

versatile water buffalo is displaced by man who is two and

one half times as efficient an energy converter as are draft

animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic

animals and agricultural machines increase productivity per

man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by

intensive manual cultivation.

It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of

Asia, who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger

completely satisfied, were once far more civilized and lived

much better than the people of the West. And not so very long

ago, either. It was the stories brought back by Marco Polo of

the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's

eyes to the riches of the East, and induced adventurous

sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels

searching for a direct route to the fabulous Orient. The

``wealth of the Indies'' is a phrase still used, but whatever

wealth may be there it certainly is not evident in the life

of the people today.

Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of

her growing populations and sank into such poverty that in

many places man has become again the primary source of

energy, since other energy converters have become too

expensive. This must be obvious to the most casual observer.

What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more

primitive stage of civilization with all that it implies for

human dignity and happiness.

Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker

strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a

cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an

endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market

in Java--the slender women bent under mountainous loads

heaped on their heads--anyone who has seen statistics

translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of

man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy

source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human

beings are so degraded.

Where slavery represented a major source of energy, its

abolition had the immediate effect of reducing energy

consumption. Thus when this time-honored institution came

under moral censure by Christianity, civilization declined

until other sources of energy could be found. Slavery is

incompatible with Christian belief in the worth of the

humblest individual as a child of God. As Christianity spread

through the Roman Empire and masters freed their slaves--in

obedience to the teaching of the Church--the energy base of

Roman civilization crumbled. This, some historians believe,

may have been a major factor in the decline of Rome and the

temporary reversion to a more primitive way of life during

the Dark Ages. Slavery gradually disappeared throughout the

Western world, except in its milder form of serfdom. That it

was revived a thousand years later merely shows man's ability

to stifle his conscience--

at least for a while--when his economic needs are great.

Eventually, even the needs of overseas plantation economies

did not suffice to keep alive a practice so deeply repugnant

to Western man's deepest convictions.

It may well be that it was unwillingness to depend on slave

labor for their energy needs which turned the minds of

medieval Europeans to search for alternate sources of energy,

thus sparking the Power Revolution of the Middle Ages which,

in turn, paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the

19th Century. When slavery disappeared in the West

engineering advanced. Men began to harness the power of

nature by utilizing water and wind as energy sources. The

sailing ship, in particular, which replaced the slave-driven

galley of antiquity, was vastly improved by medieval

shipbuilders and became the first machine enabling man to

control large amounts of inanimate energy.

The next important high-energy converter used by Europeans

was gunpowder--an energy source far superior to the muscular

strength of the strongest bowman or lancer. With ships

that could navigate the high seas and arms that could

outfire any hand weapon, Europe was now powerful enough to

preempt for herself the vast empty areas of the Western

Hemisphere into which she poured her surplus populations

to build new nations of European stock. With these ships

and arms she also gained political control over populous

areas in Africa and Asia from which she drew the raw

materials needed to speed her industrialization, thus

complementing her naval and military dominance with

economic and commercial supremacy.

When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-

energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter.

The Europeans not only achieved standards of living vastly

higher than those of the rest of the world, but they did this

while their population was growing at rates far surpassing

those of other peoples. In fact, they doubled their share of

total world population in the short span of three centuries.

From one sixth in 1650, the people of European stock

increased to almost one third of total world population by

1950.

Meanwhile much of the rest of the world did not even keep

energy sources in balance with population growth. Per capita

energy consumption actually diminished in large areas. It is

this difference in energy consumption which has resulted in

an ever-widening gap between the one-third minority who live

in high-energy countries and the two-thirds majority who live

in low-energy areas.

These so-called underdeveloped countries are now finding it

far more difficult to catch up with the fortunate minority

than it was for Europe to initiate transition from low-energy

to high-energy consumption. For one thing, their ratio of

land to people is much less favorable; for another, they have

no outlet for surplus populations to ease the transition

since all the empty spaces have already been taken over by

people of European stock.

Almost all of today's low-energy countries have a

population density so great that it perpetuates dependence on

intensive manual agriculture which alone can yield barely

enough food for their people. They do not have enough

acreage, per capita, to justify using domestic animals or

farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil

management, and better hand tools could bring some

improvement. A very large part of their working population

must nevertheless remain on the land, and this limits the

amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these

countries must choose between using this small energy surplus

to raise their very low standard of living or postpone

present rewards for the sake of future gain by investing the

surplus in new industries. The choice is difficult because

there is no guarantee that today's denial may not prove to

have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity with

which public health measures have reduced mortality rates,

resulting in population growth as high or even higher than

that of the high-energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice;

it accounts for much of their anti-Western feeling and may

well portend a prolonged period of world instability.

How closely energy consumption is related to standards of

living may be illustrated by the example of India. Despite

intelligent and sustained efforts made since independence,

India's per capita income is still only 20 cents daily; her

infant mortality is four times ours; and the life expectance

of her people is less than one half that of the

industrialized countries of the West. These are ultimate

consequences of India's very low energy consumption: one-

fourteenth of world average; one-eightieth of ours.

Ominous, too, is the fact that while world food production

increased 9% in the six years from 1945-51, world population

increased by 12%. Not only is world population increasing

faster than world food production, but unfortunately,

increases in food production tend to occur in the already

well-fed, high-energy countries rather than in the

undernourished, low-energy countries where food is most

lacking.

I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the

significance of energy resources for our own future. Our

civilization rests upon a technological base which requires

enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we

then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied

by fossil fuels: The answer is--in the long run--none.

The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In

this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier

civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply

by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned

is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals.

Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with

ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from

scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do

to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created

by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow

to their present volume.

In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are

finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is

important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more

time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or

substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the

vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and

responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to

pass on to his children as much as possible of his

inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander

it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring

will fare.

Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy

statistics; far-seeing industrialists who know that energy is

the principal factor which must enter into all planning for

the future; responsible governments who realize that the

well-being of their citizens and the political power of their

countries depend on adequate energy supplies--all these have

begun to be concerned about energy resources. In this

country, especially, many studies have been made in the last

few years, seeking to discover accurate information on

fossil-fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs.

Statistics involving the human factor are, of course, never

exact. The size of usable reserves depends on the ability of

engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and

use. It also depends on discovery of new methods to obtain

energy from inferior resources at costs which can be borne

without unduly depressing the standard of living.

Estimates of future needs, in turn, rely heavily on

population figures which must always allow for a large

element of uncertainty, particularly as man reaches a

point where he is more and more able to control his own

way of life.

Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an

astonishing degree. In part this is because the results

differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded or if in

calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is

not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not

enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required

to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly

approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals

will force us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most

cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal.

But the most significant distinction between optimistic and

pessimistic fuel reserve statistics is that the optimists

generally speak of the immediate future--the next twenty-five

years or so--while the pessimists think in terms of a century

from now. A century or even two is a short span in the

history of a great people. It seems sensible to me to take a

long view, even if this involves facing unpleasant facts.

For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best

estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over

twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time

between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of

living and population growth rates are taken into account.

Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There

will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so

difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to

economically intolerable heights, so that it would then

become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to

lower standards of living drastically.

For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever growing

numbers of machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped

gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, tractors,

ships, planes, and homes without giving a thought to the

future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra has been raised

only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised

estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was

found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can

be expected in the future, especially in industrialized

countries where extensive mapping of resources has been done.

Yet the popularizers of scientific news would have us believe

that there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last

thousands of years, and that before they run out science will

have produced miracles. Our past history and security have

given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will

never really happen--that everything turns out right in the

end. But, prudent men will reject these tranquilizers and

prefer to face the facts so that they can plan intelligently

for the needs of their posterity.

Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we

cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of

living will of a certainty continue through the next century

and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to

rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted,

and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy

from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel

synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel

certain that when economically recoverable fossil

fuels are gone science will have learned how to maintain a

high standard of living on renewable energy sources?

I believe it would be wise to assume that the principal

renewable fuel sources which we can expect to tap before

fossil reserves run out will supply only 7 to 15% of future

energy needs. The five most important of these renewable

sources are wood fuel, farm wastes, wind, water power, and

solar heat.

Wood fuel and farm wastes are dubious as substitutes

because of growing food requirements to be anticipated. Land

is more likely to be used for food production than for tree

crops; farm wastes may be more urgently needed to fertilize

the soil than to fuel machines.

Wind and water power can furnish only a very small

percentage of our energy needs. Moreover, as with solar

energy, expensive structures would be required, making use of

land and metals which will also be in short supply. Nor would

anything we know today justify putting too much reliance on

solar energy though it will probably prove feasible for home

heating in favorable localities and for cooking in hot

countries which lack wood, such as India.

More promising is the outlook for nuclear fuels. These are

not, properly speaking, renewable energy sources, at least

not in the present state of technology, but their capacity to

``breed'' and the very high energy output from small

quantities of fissionable material, as well as the fact that

such materials are relatively abundant, do seem to put

nuclear fuels into a separate category from exhaustible

fossil fuels. The disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear

power plants is, however, a problem which must be solved

before there can be any widespread use of nuclear power.

Another limit in the use of nuclear power is that we do not

know today how to employ it otherwise than in large units to

produce electricity or to supply heating. Because of its

inherent characteristics, nuclear fuel cannot be used

directly in small machines, such as cars, trucks, or

tractors. It is doubtful that it could in the foreseeable

future furnish economical fuel for civilian airplanes or

ships, except very large ones. Rather than nuclear

locomotives, it might prove advantageous to move trains by

electricity produced in nuclear central stations. We are only

at the beginning of nuclear technology, so it is difficult to

predict what we may expect.

Transportation--the lifeblood of all technically advanced

civilizations--seems to be assured, once we have borne the

initial high cost of electrifying railroads and replacing

buses with streetcars or interurban electric trains. But,

unless science can perform the miracle of synthesizing

automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown or

unless trolley wires power electric automobiles on all

streets and highways, it will be wise to face up to the

possibility of the ultimate disappearance of automobiles,

trucks, buses, and tractors. Before all the oil is gone and

hydrogenation of coal for synthetic liquid fuels has come

to an end, the cost of automotive fuel may have risen to a

point where private cars will be too expensive to run and

public transportation again becomes a profitable business.

Today the automobile is the most uneconomical user of

energy. Its efficiency is 5 percent compared with 23 percent

for the Diesel-electric railway. It is the most ravenous

devourer of fossil fuels, accounting for over half of the

total oil consumption in this country. And the oil we use in

the United States in one year took nature about 14 million

years to create. Curiously, the automobile, which is the

greatest single cause of the rapid exhaustion of oil

reserves, may eventually be the first fuel consumer to

suffer. Reduction in automotive use would necessitate an

extraordinarily costly reorganization of the pattern of

living in industrialized nations, particularly in the United

States. It would seem prudent to bear this in mind in future

planning of cities and industrial locations.

Our present known reserves of fissionable materials are

many times as large as our net economically recoverable

reserves of coal. A point will be reached before this century

is over when fossil fuel costs will have risen high enough to

make nuclear fuels economically competitive. Before that time

comes we shall have to make great efforts to raise our entire

body of engineering and scientific knowledge to a higher

plateau. We must also induce many more young Americans to

become metallurgical and nuclear engineers. Else we shall not

have the knowledge or the people to build and run the nuclear

power plants which ultimately may have to furnish the major

part of our energy needs. If we start to plan now, we may be

able to achieve the requisite level of scientific and

engineering knowledge before our fossil fuel reserves give

out, but the margin of safety is not large. This is also

based on the assumption that atomic war can be avoided and

that population growth will not exceed that now calculated by

demographic experts.

War, of course, cancels all man's expectations. Even

growing world tension just short of war could have far-

reaching effects. In this country it might, on the one hand,

lead to greater conservation of domestic fuels, to increased

oil imports, and to an acceleration in scientific research

which might turn up unexpected new energy sources. On the

other hand, the resulting armaments race would deplete metal

reserves more rapidly, hastening the day when inferior metals

must be utilized with consequent greater expenditure of

energy. Underdeveloped nations with fossil fuel deposits

might be coerced into withholding them from the free world or

may themselves decide to retain them for their own future

use. The effect on Europe, which depends on coal and oil

imports, would be disastrous and we would have to share our

own supplies or lose our allies.

Barring atomic war or unexpected changes in the population

curve, we can count on an increase in world population from

two and one half billion today to four billion in the year

2000; six to eight billion by 2050. The United States is

expected to quadruple its population during the 20th

Century--from 75 million in 1900 to 300 million in 2000--and

to reach at least 375 million in 2050. This would almost

exactly equal India's present population which she supports

on just a little under half of our land area.

It is an awesome thing to contemplate a graph of world

population growth from prehistoric times--tens of thousands

of years ago--to the day after tomorrow--let us say the year

2000 AD. If we visualize the population curve as a road which

starts at sea level and rises in proportion as world

population increases, we should see it stretching endlessly,

almost level, for 99 percent of the time that man has

inhabited the earth. In 6000 B.C., when recorded history

begins, the road is running at a height of about 70 feet

above sea level, which corresponds to a population of 10

million. Seven thousand years later--in 1000 AD.--the road

has reached an elevation of 1,600 feet; the gradation now

becomes steeper, and 600 years later the road is 2,900 feet

high. During the short span of the next 400 years--from 1600

to 2000--it suddenly turns sharply upward at an almost

perpendicular inclination and goes straight up to an

elevation of 29,000 feet--the height of Mt. Everest, the

world's tallest mountain.

In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the

year 2000 AD. world population will have grown from 10

million to 4 billion, with 90 percent of that growth taking

place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years.

It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to

accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for

the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50

years. Calculations give us the astonishing estimate that one

out of every 20 human beings born into this world is alive

today.

The rapidity of population growth has not given us enough

time to readjust our thinking. Not much more than a century

ago our country--the very spot on which I now stand was a

wilderness in which a pioneer could find complete freedom

from men and from government. If things became too crowded--

if he saw his neighbor's chimney smoke--he could, and often

did, pack up and move west. We began life in 1776 as a nation

of less than four million people--spread over a vast

continent--with seemingly inexhaustible riches of nature all

about. We conserved what was scarce--human labor--and

squandered what seemed abundant--natural resources--and we

are still doing the same today.

Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic

in the American character has now been buried under cities,

factories and suburban developments where each picture window

looks out on nothing more inspiring than the neighbor's back

yard with the smoke of his fire in the wire basket clearly

visible.

Life in crowded communities cannot be the same as life on

the frontier. We are no longer free, as was the pioneer--to

work for our own immediate needs regardless of the future. We

are no longer as independent of men and of government as were

Americans two or three generations ago. An ever larger share

of what we earn must go to solve problems caused by crowded

living--bigger governments; bigger city, state, and federal

budgets to pay for more public services. Merely to supply us

with enough water and to carry away our waste products

becomes more difficult and expansive daily. More laws and law

enforcement agencies are needed to regulate human relations

in urban industrial communities and on crowded highways than

in the America of Thomas Jefferson.

Certainly no one likes taxes, but we must become reconciled

to larger taxes in the larger America of tomorrow.

I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about

our responsibilities to our descendents--those who will ring

out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as

parents and as citizens, is to give America's youngsters the

best possible education. We need the best teachers and enough

of them to prepare our young people for a future immeasurably

more complex than the present, and calling for ever larger

numbers of competent and highly trained men and women. This

means that we must not delay building more schools, colleges,

and playgrounds. It means that we must reconcile ourselves to

continuing higher taxes to build up and maintain at decent

salaries a greatly enlarged corps of much better trained

teachers, even at the cost of denying ourselves such

momentary pleasures as buying a bigger new car, or a TV set,

or household gadget. We should find--I believe--that these

small self-denials would be far more than offset by the

benefits they would buy for tomorrow's America. We might

even--if we wanted--give a break to these youngsters by

cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so

as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments

which eventually must be made in a world without fossil

fuels.

One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-

energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of

political power.

The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an

ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation

which controls the largest energy resources will become

dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy

resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we

have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall

insure this dominant position for our own country.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 41, 110th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, I rise as a proud conservative and Republican, as well as a cosponsor, to urge support of H.R. 6.

Oil and natural gas are not forever. When we burn them, they are gone. The U.S. has only 2 percent of known oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we are using. We pump our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world.

I just returned from a trip to China. China is preparing for a post- oil world.

There are three reasons to pursue renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. One is climate change. A second reason is preparing for peak oil. A third reason is for national security risk of our dependence on foreign oil.

As predicted by M. King Hubbert, and ratified by a recent SAIC report, the world either has or will shortly reach peak oil. As a cofounder and cochairman of the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, I can assure you that halfway through the age of oil, there is an urgent need for the U.S. to pursue conservation efficiency and alternative renewable sources of domestic energy.

We have a moral obligation to leave younger generations some oil. I urge support of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, last evening we were here just about this time talking about this same subject, the subject we have been talking about for the last hour. We had been discussing the phenomenon known as peak oil. That is the term given to a prediction that a geologist made, M. King Hubbert, working for the Shell Oil Company in 1956. He gave a speech in San Antonio, Texas, which I believe within a decade will be recognized as the most significant, most important speech given in the last century.

What he predicted was that the United States, which at that time was king of oil, we were producing more oil than any other country. We were using more oil than any other country, and we were exporting more oil than any other country. M. King Hubbert had the audacity in San Antonio, Texas, in 1956 to predict that in just a bit less than a decade-and-a-half, by about 1970, he said that the United States would reach its maximum oil production, and after that, inevitably, no matter what we did, oil production would tail off.

That prediction came true. Surprisingly, in 1970, some may say 1971, we peaked in oil production. In 1969, using this same analysis technique, he predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. So last night we had come in our discussion to the point that we were looking at the potential for the alternatives that we and the world would need to turn to as we slide down the other side of what is referred to as Hubbert's peak. We noted that there were some finite resources, some nuclear resources and then the true renewables.

There are three justifications one might use for moving to alternatives. One is peak oil, and we will transition from fossil fuels to alternatives. Oil, gas and coal obviously will not last forever, and as the earth at some point runs down the other side of what we call Hubbert's peak and there is not enough oil, gas and coal to meet our

energy needs in the world, we will transition to alternatives. The only question is whether we do that on a time scale that we control so that it is a pretty easy ride, or whether we do it as dictated by geology, where it may be a very difficult ride.

Two other reasons for moving to alternatives. One is our dependence on foreign oil. Today, we have only about 2 percent of the known reserves of the oil in our country. We use about one-fourth of all the oil in the world, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. Obviously, if M. King Hubbert was right about the world, and there is every reason to believe he will be right about the world, we will need to transition to alternatives.

From a national security perspective, we ought to have been doing this a long while ago. A couple of years ago, 30 prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, wrote a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, and they used the statistics I just used, the fact that the United States has only 2 percent of the known reserves and uses 25 percent of the world's oil and imports almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we really need to do something about that. So even if you think that there is a whole lot of oil and gas out there, you still may be very incentivized to look for alternatives if you are concerned about our national security.

There is another reason to look for alternatives, and that is, if you believe that we have global warming, and I think there is an increasing body of evidence that suggests that that is probably true, and that we are probably contributing to that, although in the past the earth has been very much warmer, this is in a very distant past. Ordinarily, the past that we are talking about is from the last ice age, which is like some 10,000 years back. It is now the warmest we have ever been since that last ice age, but sometime way in the past the earth has been very much warmer because there were apparently subtropical seas in what is now the north slope of Alaska and the North Sea because we are finding oil and gas there.

The general belief is that this oil and gas was produced by organic material that grew in these subtropical seas, that every season it matured and fell to the bottom and was covered and mixed with sediment that was washed off of the adjacent hills, and then that built up for a very long time. Finally, with moving, the tectonic plates was submersed down with enough pressure and enough heat from the molten core of the earth and enough time that this finally was processed into gas and oil, and then if there was a rock dome over it which would hold the gas, now you have a very fertile place in which to drill. It took a very long time to grow all of that organic material and to turn it into gas and oil.

We are now in a relatively few years releasing all of the carbon dioxide that was sequestered in this organic material over quite a long time, until we are driving up the CO2 of the world, which in the last century or so is nearly twice now what it was a century or so ago. This is what we call a greenhouse gas.

You can get some idea as to the greenhouse effect. If tomorrow is a sunny day and a cold day, and if your car is parked outside with the sun shining on the windshield, you may find quite a warm car when you go out there. That is because of what we call the greenhouse effect. The light that comes in from the sun, call it white light, it comes in over a long spectrum of wave lengths, and it goes through the glass of your car. Then it warms up the material of your car and it reradiates only in the infrared. Well, the glass of your car is pretty much opaque to the infrared. It keeps the heat inside. It reflects it back, and that is why your car gets so warm.

The greenhouse gases out there, you may remember being in an airplane, you are 44,000 feet, and the pilot tells you it is 70 degrees below zero, when down just below you may be flying over south Florida where it is very warm, and this is because of the greenhouse effect. The energy coming in from the sun heats up things in the earth, and when that heat is reflected back out, emanated back out, it is reflected by what we call the greenhouse gases and CO2 as one of those.

So there is increasing evidence that we have global warming, and there may be a need to move to the alternatives because many of these alternatives, although they will produce CO2 when you burn them like ethanol, that CO2 was taken out of the atmosphere by the corn plant when it grew. So you are not contributing any more CO2 to the atmosphere if you are using a product that just last year or so took the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Now, what you would want to do in these last 2 cases is a little different in moving to alternatives. We have a essentially run out of time and run out of energy to invest in alternatives. We absolutely knew by 1980 that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We had peaked in 1970. We have done nothing in the ensuing years. If M. King Hubbert is right about the world, we have no excess energy to invest or oil would not be $50, $60 barrel, which means we have essentially run out of time and have no energy to invest.

Now, we could buy some time and free up some energy with a very aggressive conservation program.

Now, if your concern is foreign oil, then you could also get some additional energy from such things as tar sands and oil shales and coal. But if your concern is global warming, this will be a very bad place to get energy to invest in the alternatives that we will ultimately have to transition to because it take a lot of energy to get energy out of tar sands, and that energy is fossil fuel energy and that releases CO2 into the atmosphere.

So you are making a bad situation worse if your concern is global warming and you think CO2 is the cause of that and you want to transition to renewables, and you are going to get the energy to transition to renewables from tar sands and oil shales and particularly in coal somewhat. You will simply be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But let's look at these, because if the other two incentives are your incentives, then these are good bets.

If you are simply concerned that we have got to transition to renewables, then you will use whatever energy is available, and there is potentially enormous amounts of energy available in these tar sands and oil shales. And if you are concerned about dependence on foreign oil, then this is a good place to begin.

The tar sands. Some may call them oil sands; they are tar, thank you. It doesn't flow; it is really very much like tar. It is, I guess, a bit better than the asphalt parking lot out here, but not much better. If you put a blow torch on the parking lot, that will flow, too, which is pretty much what we have to do with the tar sands. They exist in Canada around Alberta, Canada. There is an incredible amount of potential energy there. There is more energy in these tar sands than in all the known reserves of oil in the world.

But why aren't we resting easy, then, that we have got an easy transition, a big source of energy? Because this energy is not all that easy to get out of the tar sands. The Canadians are now getting about a million barrels of oil a day. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is a lot. It is a little less than 5 percent of what we use in our country and just a bit more than 1 percent of the 84 million, 85 million barrels a day that the world uses; but they are using an incredible amount of energy to get this.

They are mining this, if you will. They have a shovel there that lifts 100 tons at a time, they dump it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and then they take it and they cook it, and they are cooking it at the present with natural gas. They have what is called stranded natural gas there. There are not very many people in Alberta, Canada, that use it and gas is very difficult to move long distances; and so they are using this gas to produce oil from the tar sands.

I am told, and you can be told a lot of things that aren't true, but I am told that they may be using more energy from the natural gas than they are getting out of the oil that they produce. But from an economy perspective, that is okay, because the gas is very cheap and the oil is very expensive. And I understand it costs them $18 to $25 a barrel to produce the oil; and if it is selling for $50, $60 a barrel, obviously there

is a big profit there. But this natural gas will not last forever.

And where will the next energy come from? They are talking about building a nuclear power plant there so they will have additional energy for cooking this oil.

And they have another problem. The vein I understand, if you think of this as a vein, it now ducks under a big overlay of rock and soil, so that they will not be able to continue to develop this by mining it which is what they are doing now. They will have to develop it in situ, and I don't know that they have any economically feasible way of developing it in situ.

So although there is an incredibly large amount of potential energy available there, it will take a lot of energy to get it out, so what you really need to be thinking about is the net energy or the energy- profit ratio that you get out of this.

Who knows what new technologies we may come up with, what the engineers may be able to do, but one should not be too sanguine that this will be a savior, that we will get enormous amounts of energy from this, because of the difficulty of getting the oil out.

The oil shales. The name might better be called tar shales, but we refer to oil shales, and they are found in our western United States, in Utah and Colorado and so forth. And, again, there is absolutely an incredible potential amount of oil that could be extracted from these oil shales, or tar shales. Probably more than all of the known reserves of oil in the world, if we could get it all out. There have been a couple of attempts to do that. The most recent one was by the Shell Oil Company, and there was some glowing reports in the papers about what they did there. But there are aquifers associated with this shale that they need to protect, and so what they do to develop this is to go in and drill a bunch of holes around the perimeter and then freeze it.

So they in effect have a frozen vessel, and the oil will not move through that frozen vessel. And then they drill wells in the middle of it and they cook it, and they cook it for a year. And then they drill a third set of wells, and then when they get to the bottom, they go horizontally. They are very good at doing that now. So the oil that they cooked, loosened up by the second set of wells they drilled, now flows down through the shale, into the well that they drilled that finally went horizontal, and then they pump it out of those wells, and then they pump it for several years and they get a really meaningful amount of oil out.

A couple of years ago I was out in Denver, Colorado, speaking to a peak oil conference there, and the engineer, the scientist who did this little experiment cautioned that it would be several years before Shell Oil Company decided whether it was even economically feasible to get any oil out of the oil shales using that technique. Now, there may be other techniques, but at present to my knowledge nobody has any big exploitation

of the oil shales. The one that got the most publicity was this experiment by the Shell Oil Company, and they have indicated it would be several years before they can determine whether $60 a barrel is even feasible to get that oil.

The next one here is coal, and we will put another chart up in front of this one, because we hear a lot about coal. And you may hear it said that we have 250 years, 500 years of coal. We don't have 500 years, but we do have 250 years of coal at current use rates. Be very careful when people are telling you how much we have of some resource. If it is at current use rates, you have to factor in how long it will last you if you have an increased use rate.

After the development of atomic energy, and the world was amazed by that, Dr. Albert Einstein was asked: What will be the next great energy source in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the world was the power of compound interest.

And when you look at exponential growth, if you increase the use of coal just 2 percent, and I submit that we will have to dig into coal much more than just 2 percent increase per year over what we now use, but if it is only 2 percent, that 250 years immediately shrinks to about 85 years; and then you can't fill your trunk with coal and go down the roads. You have to convert it to a gas or liquid. And, by the way, we have been doing this for decades. Hitler ran his whole military and his whole country on oil from coal. When I was a little kid, the lamps that you now call a kerosene lamp we called coal oil lamp because it was coal oil that replaced whale oil in the lamps, and long after we were using kerosene I still called it coal oil.

But if you use some of the energy from the coal to convert the rest of the coal into a gas or a liquid, now you are down to 50 years with just 2 percent growth rate. And there is something else to look at. Because oil is fungible and moves on a world market, and it really doesn't matter in today's world who owns the oil, the guy who bids the highest gets the oil. It all moves on a global marketplace. And since we use one-fourth of the world's oil, our 50-year supply at only 2 percent growth rate will last the world just one-fourth of 50, or 12\1/ 2\ years.

So the coal is there. It is the most readily developed, unconventional fossil fuel energy source, and we need to husband it. But it is dirty. You will pay an environmental penalty if you use it without cleaning it up, or you will pay a big economic penalty if you clean it up.

Let's go back to the original chart we were looking at. And the previous speakers talked about nuclear, and indeed today we produce about 20 percent of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy from nuclear. We could and maybe should do more. There is no energy source that is without its drawbacks. When you burn any fossil fuel, you release CO2 into the atmosphere and that produces greenhouse effects, which might very well produce global warming. There are potential drawbacks to nuclear, but so are there drawbacks to not having enough energy for your civilization.

There are three ways in which we can get energy from nuclear materials. One of them is the lightwater reactor, which is the only kind of reactor that we have in our country that uses fissionable uranium, and there is not an inexhaustible amount of fissionable uranium in the world.

And one of the big problems in this whole dialogue is agreement on what the facts are. When I ask how much fissionable uranium remains in the world, and I guess you have to say at current use rates, I get numbers that range from 15 years to 100 years. We desperately need an honest broker to help us agree as to what the facts are so that we can have a meaningful dialogue.

I have thought a lot about this, and perhaps the National Academy of Sciences, which is highly respected and very knowledgeable, would be this honest broker. Because when we sit at the table discussing where we are and where we need to go, you can't have a rational discussion without agreeing on the facts. But nobody disagrees that there is an inexhaustible supply of fissionable uranium. So obviously at some point in a few years, or a few more years with building more nuclear power plants, and China wants to build a lot more nuclear power plants, we will run out of fissionable uranium.

And then we will have to move to the second type of energy released with nuclear fission, and that is the breeder reactor. The only breeder reactors we ever had were those that were used for producing nuclear weapons. France produces about 80 percent, 85 percent of its electricity from nuclears, and they have some breeder reactors. The breeder reactor does what its name implies, it breeds fuel, so you now will have essentially a replaceable and therefore inexhaustible amount of fuel.

But there are problems that go with the breeder reactor. It has waste products that you have to somehow store away for maybe one-quarter of a million years. Now, we have only 5,000 years of recorded history. It is hard for us to imagine one-quarter of a million years. Something that is so hot that I have to store it away somewhere for one-quarter of a million years I think ought to have enough energy in it that we ought to be able to do something productive with that energy. As a matter of fact, the usual nuclear power plant gets only a tiny percentage of all the potential energy out of the nucleus.

So I would like to challenge our engineers to look at a way to make something good out of what is now a big problem when you have breeder reactors, and that is a byproduct that you

need to store away for very long time periods.

The second type of nuclear energy release is what is called fusion. And we have a great fusion reactor; it is called our Sun, which is a mediocre star over near one end of the Milky Way. By the way, if you go someplace where the air is not so polluted and you look up at night, you can see across the sky that great Milky Way. It looks like you have taken a brush across the sky. There are just billions and billions of stars out there.

All of the stars are the equivalent of our sun, by the way. Nuclear fusion, power plants, if you will, and we are kind of a mediocre one near one end of the Milky Way.

We invest about $250 million a year in nuclear fusion. I happily support that. I wish there was a technology out there to and a technologist to use more money. I would happily vote for that. But if you think that we are going to solve our energy problems with nuclear fusion, you probably have some confidence you are going to solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery. The gamble is about the same.

I think there are huge, huge engineering challenges with nuclear fusion. We have been working for many years, and we are always about 20-30 years away from a solution. We have been 20-30 years away from a solution for the last 20-30 years. We may get there. But it is not the kind of thing that you would want to bet the ranch on. By the way, we are home free if we get that. That would be an inexhaustible source of energy, essentially pollution free except for thermal pollution.

I would like to talk about thermal pollution in our power plants. We have had the luxury in this rich country we live in to put our nuclear power plants away from where we live, and the heat energy that comes out of them, we dissipate. If you drive, you see the big cooling towers for the nuclear power plants. What we are doing is we are evaporating drinking water to cool these power plants.

Almost everywhere else in the world, whether it is nuclear or coal, no matter what it is, unless it is hydro, then it is where the water is, but every other power plant is pretty much in the city right where people live, and they use the heat from that for what they call district heating. They pipe it to homes and businesses, and they use it in the wintertime to heat. In the summertime, you can use the heat to cool by the ammonia refrigeration, ammonia cycle refrigeration system, which used to be very popular in this country. But now you have to buy one from Argentina if you want one, for some reason. They have no moving parts and last a very long time. You can get cooling out of heat. So you can both heat and air conditioning with the excess heat from these power plants if you simply sited them nearer where people live.

Once you have used these finite resources, and they are finite, except for the nuclear that we have discussed. The others are finite. They will not last forever, then we will have only the true renewables left. They are such things as solar and wind and geothermal. This is true geothermal.

You may have people talk to you about geothermal and they are talking about connecting your heat pump to the earth or a well. What you are doing with your heat pump in the summertime, your air conditioner is really trying to heat up the outside air, that is how it cools the inside. And in the wintertime, your heat pump is keeping you warm by trying to cool down the outside air.

If you are working against groundwater, and here it is about 56 degrees, groundwater looks very cool in the summertime, and it looks very warm in the wintertime. I remember as a little boy we had a springhouse on our farm, and that is where our food was kept cool. I used to wonder how does that happen.

In the summertime I went into the springhouse and it was so cool. And in the wintertime, it felt so warm. Of course it was essentially the same temperature. But in contrast with the hot summer air it felt cool, and in contrast with the cold winter air it felt warm.

True geothermal is where we are connected to the heat from the molten core of the Earth. If you have been to Iceland, there is not a chimney in all of Iceland because they have geothermal and they get all of their heat sources from that.

Several places in our country we can tap that, and wherever we can we should. It is not really inexhaustible. The molten core of the Earth will not be there forever, but it will be there for millions and millions of years, so from our perspective that is an inexhaustible source of heat so we include it under renewables.

Then we have a number of sources of energy from the oceans. There is huge potential from the oceans. The tides, and by the way, the tides are one of the few energy sources that are not either the direct or indirect result of the sun. All of the fossil fuels that we are burning, gas and oil, and all of these tar, sands and oil shale were all produced by organic material that grew because the sun was shining a very long time ago.

I knew that when I was a little boy for coal because we lived on a farm in western Pennsylvania, and there was a coal mine on our farm. There had been a cave-in and they simply took the mules and the people out an air shaft that had a walkout slope, and so there was still some coal left. There was not enough to open the mine, but we partnered with a miner from the local town but he opened the mine and they drug coal with a pick and a shovel and a wheelbarrow. So we had what was called run-a-mine coal. We had a coal furnace, as did everybody in western Pennsylvania. Some of the lumps were too big to get in the furnace. Leaning against the cellar wall was a sledge hammer. If the lump was too big, you would break it. I remember breaking those lumps of coal and they would break open and there would be the imprint of a fern leaf. I still get a chill when I think about that.

Here I am looking at something that grew who knew how many eons ago. So I knew very well where coal came from, it came from vegetation that had fallen and was overlaid with Earth.

You can see coal in the process of production, by the way, in the bogs of England. It is not yet coal but it is on the way to coal. And if you take it out, it will burn.

The sun produces most of the energy that you can get from the oceans. It produces thermal gradients. It produces the waves. How does it do that, by producing wind. The wind is the result of the differential heating of the Earth, and that therefore is sun driven.

There is one big potential source of energy in the ocean that is not sun generated, and that is the tides. They are generated by the gravitational pull of the Moon, which lifts the whole ocean 2 to 3 feet.

Can you imagine the incredible amount of energy it takes to lift three-fourths of the earth's surface 2 or 3 feet a day. We have tried to get meaningful energy from the tides without a whole lot of success, and it is simply because they are so disperse. There is an old axiom, energy or power to be effective must be concentrated, and the tides are anything but concentrated. They are spread over huge, huge expanses.

We get some meaningful energy from the tides in the fjords where because of funneling effects you may have a 60-foot tide. You let it come in and then you wall it off and let it flow out through a generator when the tide goes out.

There is another potential source of energy from the oceans, it is not really oceans but you find most of it there, and that is gas hydrites. There is more potential energy in the gas hydrites I understand than in all of the fossil fuels in all of the Earth, but we have been singularly unsuccessful in trying to collect those little nodules of gas hydrites and get the energy from them because they are dispersed largely on the ocean bottom over enormous expanses of the ocean. Well, these are all challenges. And one day when energy becomes less and less available from fossil fuels and more and more expensive, some of these other sources will be more exploitable.

And then the agricultural resource, and let me put the next chart up here.

I would like to start on the left-hand side of this because it really shows us where we are and the challenges we face. We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a pretty big inheritance, and so they have established a life-style, pretty lavish life-style where 85

percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent, some people will say 14, 15 percent comes from their income. They look at how old they are and how much they are spending, gee, it is going to run out before they die, before they retire, as a matter of fact. So they obviously have to do one of two things, or both: They have to make more money or spend less money. That is pretty much where we are with energy.

Three-fourths of all of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels: Petroleum, natural gas, and coal.

Only 15 percent of it comes from something other than fossil fuels. Eight percent comes from nuclear power, and that is 8 percent of our total energy. Nuclear power represents 20 percent of our electricity. If you don't like nuclear power, imagine when you go home tonight that every fifth business and every fifth home doesn't have any electricity because that's what the picture would be if we didn't have nuclear power. So 8 percent. And this is data from 2000. It is a little different because we have been trying to do something since then.

Seven percent of the energy represents the true renewables, like solar and wood and waste and wind, conventional hydro. Agriculture, here we have alcohol fuel and then the geothermal that we talked about where you are truly tapping into the heat from the molten core of the Earth.

These numbers would have to be a little bigger now, but they would have to be a lot bigger to be relevant because in 2000, solar was 0.07 percent. That is trifling. It has been growing at 30 percent a year so it is several times larger than it was in 2000. But still, it is minuscule compared to the 21 million barrels of oil that we use per day.

And 38 percent of this comes from wood and that's largely the paper and timber industry burning waste product.

Then a very interesting one, waste to energy. A lot of people look at the incredible amount of waste we have and say if we could just burn that waste, we could get a lot of energy from that. That's true.

As you go up into Montgomery County, they have a very nice one, I would be proud to have it beside my church. You don't even know it is a waste to energy power plant. It is a nice looking building and the train or the truck comes in and the waste is all in containers and you don't even see it.

But let me remind you that almost all of this waste is the result of profligate use of fossil fuel energy. What you are really doing when you burn that waste to produce electricity is you are kind of burning secondhand fossil fuels because that's what was used to produce this waste. In an energy deficient world, there will be far, far less waste because waste is a by-product of large energy use, and in an energy- deficient world we would be using nowhere near as much energy.

Wind. Wind is really growing. Our previous hour talked about wind. The wind machines today are huge. You may see the blades for them go down the highway. They may be 60 feet long, as big as an airplane wing. They are huge, and produce megawatts of electricity. They are producing them at about 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour.

By the way, because we did not have the proper incentives in our country, we have now forfeited the manufacture of this product. Almost all I understand of the new big what I think are handsome wind machines are made overseas. Most are made in Denmark.

The cheapest electricity costs several times the 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour, so wind machines are now really competitive with other ways of producing electricity.

There are a lot of siting problems, a lot of nimby kinds of reactions. That is, not in my backyard. My wife says these are really bananas, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, she says is the attitude of many of these people.

You know, pretty is as pretty does, and if your alternative is shivering in the dark in an energy deficient fossil fuel world, that may be what we are coming to, and wind machines may start to look a whole lot better. I know some people who live along the coast would mind wind machines if they couldn't see them, so they are trying to site them out in the ocean beyond the horizon so they won't see the wind machines.

Conventional hydroelectric. You see, that is the biggest sector of these renewables. We have about maxed out on that. We have dammed every river we should have dammed and maybe some we shouldn't. The migratory path of fishes, and I saw a big article the other day about eels, we are now building some ladders so that eels, which are snake-like fish, can get back to their spawning grounds, but there is a huge potential, I understand, maybe as big as that, from something called microhydro. And that is using the water flow and drop in small streams. And there you can use it without the big impacts on the environment that you have when you dam up a big river.

By the way, if you have dammed that river up for water for a downstream city, that will become less and less effective as it gradually fills in with silt, and it will. And by and by, who knows how many years later, there will be little water there because it will be mostly filled with silt that came down from further up in the watershed.

If you are just interested in electricity, it still, when it comes over the dam, falls the same distance. So that silting in won't really effect how much electricity you can produce, but it will affect how much you can vary the height of the reservoir so as to always maintain some reserve for producing the electricity.

I would like to spend a few moments talking about energy from agriculture. There is an awful lot of hype about energy from agriculture. I read the other day, and I don't know why it took us so long to find this, but in 1957, 50 years ago this year, Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine, gave a talk to a group of physicians. It is an incredible speech. He was so prophetic. He understood that gas and oil were not forever. That, I think, is obvious.

Maybe it is because I am a scientist, but probably 40 years ago I started asking myself the question, you know, since gas and oil obviously are finite, they are not infinite, they will not last forever, at what point do we need to start being concerned about what is left? Is it a year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I didn't know when I first started asking this question. But I knew that at some point in time the world would have to start thinking about, gee, what do we do when gas and oil and coal are gone? Because one day gas and oil and coal will be gone.

So there is a lot of hype about energy from agriculture. But Hyman Rickover, very, very astutely observed that as our population increased, the ground would be more used for producing food than it would be something you burned or fermented. And he also noted, talking about biomass, that biomass might be more valuable returning it to the soil so that you still had soil rather than taking it off to either burn or ferment.

We will get some energy from agriculture, but every bit of corn you use to make ethanol is corn that is not used as a food. We are well fed in this country, many of us more than well fed, but tonight, about 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry. But as our population continues to increase, there will be less and less opportunity to use agriculture products for energy rather than food.

By the way, there is one way we could free up a lot of agricultural products for energy. If you will eat the corn and the soybeans rather than the pig and the cow that ate the corn and the soybeans, then you could free up a lot of corn for ethanol and soybeans for biodiesel. The animal breeder may brag he has a pig or a chicken that is so efficient that three pounds of corn will make one pound of pig. That is true. But that is three pounds of dry corn and one pound of wet pig; maybe 90 percent dry matter in the corn and for sure 70 percent water in the pig. And you can't eat his bones.

And so on a dry matter to dry matter basis, it takes at least 10 pounds of dry matter in corn to make one pound of dry matter in the pig or the chicken, and probably 20 in the steer. You get very much more efficient conversion of these grains and beans into good food if you use milk.

A cow will today produce 20,000 pounds of milk in a year with a ton of dry matter. She doesn't weigh a ton, but you have a ton of dry matter in her

milk for the year, which has very high food value. There is no protein that is as good as milk protein. We determine the quality of protein by feeding young rats. It may not be complimentary that the animal has dietary requirements nearer us than any other, rats, but they do. And they are also omnivorous. And we determine how good their protein is by how fast young rats grow.

If you assign a value of 100 to milk protein, eggs come in at about 96, and the meats on down. And that shouldn't surprise you. God or nature, or whoever you think did it, obviously designed milk to grow young animals. A 100-pound sheep will put a pound each on twin lambs just from her milk. Enormously efficient. And eggs are very efficiently produced compared to producing the chicken that you eat.

So we can free up a lot of these food crops for energy if we will simply eat the food crops rather than processing them through animals.

The next chart shows one of the challenges in producing ethanol. Indeed, there are some scientists who believe that we use more energy in producing ethanol, more fossil fuel energy in producing ethanol than we get out of it. I hope they are wrong. I believe that it can be possible. But even after you have made the ethanol, you still have all of the protein and all of the fat left in the corn, and that is pretty good feed.

Just an observation about what we eat and give to our animals. If you go to the Orient, the main protein source there for people is what is called tofu, and that is soybean protein. In this country, we take the soybean and we express the oil, which is the least valuable nutritionally, and we use the oil and we feed what is left of it to our pigs and chickens. No wonder that they are healthier than many of us.

Here is a little comparison of the energy inputs in producing ethanol and in producing gasoline. Obviously, you expend some energy. You don't get all the energy from the oil in your gas tank. You expend some of that in drilling it, in pumping it, transporting it, refining it and hauling it to the service station, and so forth. So you use 1.23 million Btu's to get 1 million Btu's.

Well, what is the story with corn? Now, you have a lot of free energy with corn. You have the solar energy, the photosynthesis that makes the corn grow. And this is about as good as it is going to get. To get 1 million Btu's of energy out of corn, you are going to have to spend about three-fourths of a million Btus in growing the corn, harvesting it, processing the ethanol, and so forth.

Down at the bottom here is a very interesting pie chart, and it shows something that very few people know, and that is that almost half the energy that goes into producing corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer, which is now made from natural gas. So this is a fossil fuel input. This is all fossil fuel input, by the way.

You just go around this little pie here and you are talking about mining the potash, and mining the phosphate, and mining the lime that makes the soil sweeter so that the nutrients can be absorbed. The diesel fuel in the tractor, the gasoline, the liquid propane gas, the electricity you use is produced by fossil fuels. The natural gas you use for drying your crops, for instance, the custom work, the guy you hire to come.

And then all of the chemicals, something that we rarely, rarely reflect on. Gas and oil are huge feedstocks for a very important petrochemical industry. Most of our insecticides, most of our herbicides and so forth are made from gas and oil. And this is the contribution they make to growing corn. It is really, really quite large there, isn't it?

I have been told that 13 percent of our corn crop would displace 2 percent of our gasoline. But the only fair way to look at the contribution ethanol can make is to grow corn with energy from corn, and you can do that. But if you grow corn with energy from corn, to get a bushel of corn to use here, you have to use three bushels of corn. Remember, the 750,000 Btu inputs to get a million? You need three bushels going in to get one out, which means that it is one to four. You only get a fourth of it out, which means that you are going to have to use 52 percent of your corn crop to displace just 2 percent of our gasoline.

So when you are hearing the euphemistic projections of how much of our gasoline we are going to displace with ethanol, just remember these numbers.

Now, some people are even more enthusiastic about what is called cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose and lignin, particularly cellulose, we can't digest. It is made up of a whole long string of glucose molecules, which is a simple sugar; half of what we call sucrose, which is a double sugar disaccharide. But they are so tightly bound together, we don't have any enzymes in our gut which will release them. And neither does any other animal, by the way.

So, gee, you might say, how do cows, sheep, goats, horses, and guinea pigs make do eating grass and hay? They make do because they have in their gut what are called comincils, animals or little critters that live in there, some of them multi-cellular, some single cells, that have chemicals, enzymes that can split the cellulose into the requisite glucose molecules and then the host simply absorbs those.

We are now able to bioengineer some little organisms that can do that. So now, when you look at the huge piles of beet pulp, look at the corn fields with all the corn fodder out there, people are saying, gee, look how much energy we could get from this agricultural waste. You can get it by burning it, or you can use it by making cellulosic ethanol from it. But, you know, topsoil is topsoil because it has organic material. It gives it tilth. Why does it have to be there? Because without the organic material, the soils can't hold the nutrients and they can't hold the water necessary for growing things. You can't grow plants in stone dust and you can't grow plants in sand. So you have to have organic material there. For a few years, we might be able to mine the organic material and still grow some crops, but there will be diminishing returns. I don't know steady state how much we can take.

Some people are euphemistic about how much we are going to get from sawgrass, prairie grass. They see it growing in huge amounts. But I suspect this year's prairie grass is growing because last year's prairie grass died and is fertilizing it. Now, we certainly can get something from this biomass, from agricultural waste and from growing trees and so forth, but it will not be enormous.

Let me give you some idea of what the challenge is. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day. Each barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. Hyman Rickover used data which showed the average family in 1957 used fossil fuel energy resulting in the equivalent of having 33, he said, full-time servants.

If you have some trouble getting your mind around this one barrel of oil and 12 people working all year, and by the way, that is costing you less than $10 per person per year, think how far a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel, I appreciate the chart from the previous hour which showed how cheap oil was. It costs considerable less than water in the grocery store, by the way. But think how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel carries your car and how long it would take you to pull the car there. And that gives you some idea of the challenge we face.

Another little example: if you are a strong man and work hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. Now, that may be humbling to recognize that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel energy, but that is the reality.

There are two publications. We have only a few moments remaining. I want to go quickly through some slides here. We have two major studies, one of them is a Corps of Engineers study and these first few slides will be from their study. The second one is the big SAIC study, commonly known as the Hirsch Report. I just want to read quickly some of the things they said. These are paid for by our government. They are out there. You may be asking the question, Gee, why aren't people talking about this and why aren't we doing something about it? Good question.

This is from the Corps of Engineers: the current price of oil is in the 45 to 57 per barrel range and is expected to stay in that range for several years. When they wrote this, by the way, it was about 65. Oil prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted

prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years.

Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. And then this quote: In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve, getting more and more till you reach a peak and then falling down the other side. And they are concurring, a careful estimate of all the estimates lead to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease.

And the last one from this source: Petroleum experts indicate that peaking is either present or imminent; will occur around 2005.

And now some charts from the Hirsch Report. This is very widely publicized. They concluded that we would have unprecedented risk management problems as we face the problem of transitioning from declining quantities of gas and oil and moving to alternatives. The economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. And then they state, We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules. They said we should have started 20 years before peaking. If it is here, we are 20 years too late, aren't we?

And then this quote: The world has never faced a problem like this. There is a third report out there and that is by the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and they believe that peaking will occur sometime in the future. And they present this little chart. This shows Hubbert's peak here, by the way, and because the actual data points didn't exactly follow his prediction, they are saying that you can't rely on his analysis. The little peak here, by the way, and the next chart will show us, that is from the Alaska oil find. Just a blip and the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

And then in the couple of minutes remaining to us, the last slide we will have a chance to look at here. And this shows several predictions, depending upon whether you think the world will find enormously more oil than we now have found. And I will tell you that most of the experts that I have talked to believe we have found 95 percent of all the oil we will ever find. That is this curve. If you think we are going to double the amount of oil that we have now found, then that is this curve. And the one on top here, and by the way, they say that they don't believe in peaking, but they present this curve which shows peaking. This is unconventional oil.

Make up your own mind how much of that we are going to get, remembering the discussion we had earlier of the difficulty of getting this oil.

Mr. Speaker, we in the world face a huge challenge. I just returned from China. They are talking about post oil. They get it. I wish we did.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, January 19, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we vote here in the House on an energy bill. And I thought it might be appropriate to spend a bit of time this evening looking at where we and the world are relative to energy. I have here a chart with some numbers on it that inspired 30 of our prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, among them retired four star admirals and generals, to write to the President a letter which said, ``Mr. President, we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. We consume 25 percent of the world's oil, almost two-thirds of which we import. And that presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that to free ourselves from the necessity of buying foreign oil.''

The President recognizes that this is a problem. In his recent State of the Union message he said that we are hooked on oil.

There are a couple of other interesting numbers here. We represent actually a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We represent about one person in 22 in the world. And with only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the rest of the world. We have been pumping less oil each year now for several years, and with this high pumping rate that decline will accelerate.

How did we get here? To find how we got here, you have really got to go back about 6 decades. I didn't know last year on the 14th day of March, when I gave the first speech here on the floor about peak oil, that I was just 6 days beyond the 50th anniversary of what I think will come to be seen as the most important speech given in the last century. This was a speech given by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil company geologist, to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas. At that time, if you look back in your history books, you will see that we were the largest producer of oil in the world. We were the largest consumer of oil in the world, and we were the largest exporter of oil in the world.

And M. King Hubbert shocked his audience by telling them that in just about a decade and a half, roughly 1970, the United States would peak in oil production. And no matter what we did after that, our production of oil would decline.

I have here a curve which shows his prediction. His prediction is the small green symbols here, and the actual data points are the larger green symbols. And you see they reasonably followed his predicted curve. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office, we were already well down the other side of Hubbert's peak, and we knew very well that M. King Hubbert had been right about the United States.

Now, in 1969, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would follow the United States in peaking in oil production about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world?

It has now been 27 years since we knew, in 1980. We are already 10 years down the other side of what is called Hubbert's peak. And we knew that he

was right about the United States and he had predicted that 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 shouldn't we have been doing something about anticipating this world peaking oil production?

The red symbols there, by the way, are a similar curve for the former Soviet Union, now today, Russia. And you see that when they fell apart they did not meet their expectation, so they are now having a second little peak, but they will follow the general downward trend.

How was M. King Hubbert able to predict this? We had already been producing oil for quite a while in 1956, and M. King Hubbert had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of some individual oil fields, and he found that they always followed what we call a bell curve. Small production at first, and then increasing and finally reaching a maximum, and then falling off the other side.

This bell curve is very familiar. If you weigh people, some will be very light and some will be very heavy, but most of them are somewhere in the middle and they follow a bell curve. If you measure the heights of people, they will follow a similar curve, or the number of mice in a mouse's litter. There are just a great many things that follow this kind of a curve.

So he noted two things, one, that most of the fields tended to be exploited and exhausted in a bell curve, and when they had reached a maximum, for the average field, half of the oil had been pumped. And so he rationalized that if he knew how many fields the United States had, and how many more we would discover, if he added up all the little bell curves he would have one big bell curve which would indicate when the United States would peak in oil production.

He did that. His math may be difficult to follow, but his reasoning is pretty simple. He did that, and he predicted it would be 1970. And right on schedule, we peaked in 1970.

I have been joined on the floor by my good friend, also from Maryland, Wayne Gilchrest. And before I yield to him, I would just like to introduce what he is going to talk about by quoting here from the International Energy Agency. This is a recent press release. And what they say here, ``The energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive. But it also shows how new government policies can create an alternative energy future which is clean, clever and competitive.''

They go on to say that ``energy demand increases by 53 percent between now and 2030.'' Well, it may. The demand may increase by 53 percent, but the use will not increase by 53 percent because, as you will see when we develop the subject this evening, the oil almost certainly will not be there to meet this demand.

Over 70 percent of this increase comes from developing countries led by China and India. World oil demand reaches 116 million barrels per day in 2030, up from 84 million barrels today in 2005 and 2006 and 2007. That number really hasn't changed. We have been on a plateau for the last 3 years of about 84, 85 million barrels of oil per day.

By the way, we use about 21 million barrels a day, about exactly one- fourth of that. Most of the increase in oil supply is met by a small number of major OPEC producers. Non-OPEC conventional crude oil output peaks, they say, by the middle of the next decade. Most observers believe that that has now peaked and, as a matter of fact, the world is about to peak. These trends would accentuate consuming nations' vulnerabilities to a severe supply disruption and resulting price shocks. They would also amplify the magnitude of global climate change.

Mr. Gilchrest, I am pleased to yield to you. They introduce the subject that I know you are very much concerned about, and that is what our increased use of fossil fuels is doing to our climate and how it is affecting global climate change and global warming.

I think that would be very instructive for our audience. Please do.

What the gentleman has been talking about is more than valid reason for pursuing the development of alternatives, if no other. Why would we want to increase CO2 more? Why would we want to threaten more the quality of life in this world?

The Congressman and I have been to Antarctica twice; one of those trips we went together. Down in Antarctica, 90 percent of all the fresh water in the world is locked up in the ice there. It is nearly 2 miles high, and 70 percent of all the world's ice is locked up in Antarctica. Now that hasn't really started to melt yet, although it has threatened. I am told that calculations indicate that if the polarized caps in the Greenland ice shelf, if they were all to melt, the ocean levels would rise 200 feet.

Now, if you look around the world you will note that a big percent of the world's population lives within 200 feet of sea level. This would be a monstrous, monstrous change.

There are three very good reasons for pursuing alternatives, which is what the bill tomorrow is going to be talking about. One of those is certainly a climate change, because what we are doing now is releasing CO2 that was bound up in these plants and organisms that grew aeons ago, and it took many, many years to tie up the CO2. Now we are releasing it very quickly as we burn these fossil fuels.

A second reason, of course, is I just don't think that the oil is going to be there, which is what we are talking about tonight as ``peak oil.''

The third really good reason for doing it is the reason the President advanced, and that is, it really is a big national security risk to be so dependent on foreign oil.

What I have here on this chart is another depiction of Hubbert's peak, and this is by the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, commonly referred to as CERA, and they are trying to indicate that one should not have confidence in the predictions of Hubbert because his curve didn't exactly actually follow his prediction.

Well, by golly, it is pretty close to actually following his prediction. Here is the U.S. actual production in red. You will see there is a little second peak here, and the next chart will show that is because of Prudhoe Bay. We found a lot of oil there, but that was not in M. King Hubbert's prediction. He hadn't imagined that we would be going to the North Slope of Alaska to drill.

So the little yellow ones here are his prediction. Notice that the actual Lower 48 has followed very closely, very closely, his prediction. We are now down to, even with Prudhoe Bay, we are now down to about half, about 5 million barrels a day. That is the red one over there, as compared to roughly 10 million barrels a day at our peak.

The next chart shows better where their oil comes from. Hubbert's prediction covered the Lower 48, and that is this gray area here. Now we need to add to that gas liquids. The big find in Alaska here, and that is what causes this little blip here in the downward slope. I remember a number of years ago, these fabulous discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, which is supposed

to solve our problem for the foreseeable future, that is the yellow there. Notice it hardly makes a shadow on the downward slope of Hubbert's peak.

The next chart is really a chart that we could spend a long while talking about because it has a great deal of information on it. The bars there represent the discoveries, and you notice that we were discovering oil way back in the 1930s, big discoveries in the 1940s, and then lots of discoveries which peaked about 1970, and since then it has been going down, down, down.

The solid black line here indicates the amount of oil that we have been using. Notice that for a long while we were accumulating big reserves of oil; everything about this solid black curve is reserves that we have in store that we can use later.

But then in about 1980 there, you can see these two curves cross. I say two curves, because obviously you could draw a smooth curve through the peaks here, and these two curves crossed about 1980. Ever since 1980 we have been burning more oil than we found. Today we burn two or three barrels of oil for every barrel of oil that we find. So for this period, between 1980 to the present, we have been using up some of the reserves that we have back here, but still a lot of those reserves remain.

Now, what will the future look like? Well, there is a big difference of opinion in what the future will look like. The persons that put this chart together believe that by about 2010, about 3 years or so, the world will peak in oil consumption. Some believe that it has already peaked, others believe it may peak a little after 2010, and then it will go down.

Now, they have made some guesses as to how much oil we are going to find. I am not sure I would have drawn that curve exactly that high, because a smooth curve might bring you down about here. I think they have been very generous in the amount of oil that is yet to be discovered.

By the way, the world's experts on oil believe that we have, most of them, we have probably found about 95 percent of all the oil that we will ever find. You notice that when we find oil now, we find it in very difficult places to get to. The last big find was in the Gulf of Mexico, through 7,000 feet of water, and then about 30,000 feet of rock and dirt until you get down to the oil. We aren't now developing that field, and I am told, you can be told a lot of things that aren't true and I don't know the veracity of this, but I am told we will be developing that field when oil reaches $211 a barrel, because that is what it will cost to get the oil out of that field.

I just want to spend a moment looking at this before we go to the next one. If you draw a smooth curve through these bars, the area under that curve represents the total amount of oil that we have found, and the area under the consumption curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have consumed.

Now, it is very obvious that you can't consume oil that you haven't found, and you can make the future, within reason, look anyway you like. But what you can't do is pump oil that you haven't found. Unless you believe that we are going to find a whole lot more oil than indicated by their projection, then you have some choices as to what that downslope is going to look like.

You can be very aggressive and use enhanced recovery techniques, you can pump steam down there, you can pump CO2 down there, you can flood it with sea water as the Saudis do to get their oil out. You get it more quickly. But if you get it more quickly, you have less to get later on.

So we have choices facing us as to what that downslope will look like. But, remember, you can't pump oil you haven't found, and the area under the consumption curve cannot be larger than the area under the discovery curve. They have to be the same area ultimately, the same volume.

Here is a prediction by our Energy Information Agency, and it is a very interesting one, and they use some unusual statistical approaches. But this is a curve through the discovery peaks. Let me put the other one up just quickly so you can see the similarities here.

Notice the big peak here in the late 1940s and 1950s and another peak here. They have kind of smoothed that out here. You can see this is the early peak here and then the later peak and then down, down, down.

We get to the point we are at now, and they make some very unusual predictions. The yellow line there, they say, is the 95 percent probability, and the green line is the 50 percent probability, and the blue line is the 5 percent probability. And they say that the 50 percent probability is the average, the mean, and, of course, probabilities and means don't mean the same thing, so therefore, that is what our production is more likely to be.

Surprisingly, this curve that has been going down for a number of years they thought was going to turn around and go up. But notice for the roughly 5 to 10 years after they drew this first curve, notice the red symbols there. They have been following what you would expect they would follow, and that is the 95 percent probability. Ninety-five percent probably is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable, and that is what it has been following.

Here is another chart from CERA, and it shows something very interesting. First, I want to look at the left here. This is the low, they say, is the 95 percent probability. Now, the 95 percent probability is the most probable, so it is not the low, it is the most likely.

Then they say the high probability is almost 4,000 gigabarrels. The mean is right in the middle. Most of the experts in the world believe that we have found about a little over 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. I use the term ``giga,'' because a billion in England is a million million, and in our country a billion is a thousand million. So everybody understands giga. A giga is a thousand million. We have consumed about half of that and about 1,000 gigabarrels, maybe a little bit more, but roughly a thousand gigabarrels remains.

Several Congresses ago I was privileged to share the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to get some idea of the dimensions of the problem we face, so we had the world's experts come in for a hearing. And I was surprised at the unanimity. It was like from 970 to 1,040 gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world, not a big spread.

Now, what they are showing here is that if in fact we find as much more oil as all the oil that now remains discovered, if we find as much more as all the oil that remains discovered, we will still peak at 2016, 9 years from now, if we find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists, that we know exists in the world. If you don't find that, then we peaked about now and it is going to start down this way.

Another thing they have shown here is if you aggressively develop these fields and pump life steam down there or put CO2 down there or pump sea water down there, you can get it more quickly. But then look what happens. It falls off more quickly too.

Again, the area under this curve has to be the same thing as the area under this curve. You can't pump more because you are pumping it faster. Now, with enhanced oil discovery, you might get a little more, because you might get some oil that you wouldn't have gotten with conventional techniques.

Here is another more recent chart from the Oil Information Agency. They have been pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil. They said it was going to be an undulating plateau. I agree, it is going to be an undulating plateau. So they show here with what I think are wildly optimistic estimates of how much oil we are going to find, they believe that we are going to find twice as much more oil as all the oil we now know exists. That just isn't very probable.

But even if we find that much oil, they have a peak. Notice it. They say it is an undulating plateau. I agree. With the world's economies and demands and warmer temperatures, which is why oil is down a bit now, because we have warmer temperatures in our country, I agree it is going to be undulating plateau. They are pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil, and they show in this curve peak oil. They show it I think a good many years beyond when it will actually occur.

This little curve down here is closer what I think is reality. They have 1.92 trillion, and it is just a bit over 2 trillion, I think, so maybe it would extend

a little beyond this. But notice they are showing this peak about now, aren't they? So if we don't find this enormous amount of additional oil, it will be peaking about now. What they are saying is if we have only 2.93 trillion, we will be peaking at this point.

I have a quote here from one of the world's experts on oil, Dr. Laherrere, and this is what he says, and I think that it is kind of difficult to argue with his logic. Jean Laherrere made an assessment of the USGS report.

Now, it is the USGS report that provides the data that permits CERA to make their prognostications. He concludes that the USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, 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. Today we have 3-D modeling and seismic use, and so we know pretty much what the world's geology looks like.

I might take just a moment to talk a little bit about this geology, because it is very important in understanding how much more oil we are likely to find.

How did the gas and oil get there? Well, nobody was there when it got there, so we really don't know, but one of the best guess its is that a very long time ago the Earth was very much warmer than it is now. As a matter of fact, there were subtropical seas at the North Shore of Alaska. In the North Sea, there were subtropical seas. And every cycle the vegetation grew, and then when it matured or if there was a fall, and it may have been warm enough there was no true fall, but still there was a cycle of life, and it grew and sank to the bottom as algae does now in the ponds and so forth. And then waters washed erosive materials off the surrounding hills and it mixed with the organic material. This continued for an a large number of years until there was a lot of mixture of organic material and inorganic material there.

Then the tectonic plates of the world moved, and we know that happened, and it opened up and sank and went down to a depth where the temperature was appropriate, closer to the molten core of the Earth, and where the pressure was appropriate, and then cooked there under this pressure for who knows how long, and this organic material, mostly plants, maybe a few small animals, gradually became what we know as oil.

Now, the oil is made up of molecules of varying lengths. Some are very short and they are in fact gasses, if you let them escape from the oil. Some of them are very long, and that makes the waxes and so forth that we find in oil.

Now, if there happened to be a rock dome over top of this deposit way down there that is now being cooked and pressurized for a long while, if there is a rock dome over that, the gas that escapes will be trapped under that rock dome. So when you come along and drill a well through that, and you get down to the oil, the oil is going to be under pressure because of that gas above it. So you have what you call a gusher. The gas pressure above pushes the oil down and up the drill pipe and it continues to gush until that gas pressure has been relieved.

Now, this may not be the way that oil and gas were formed, but there isn't any better guess as to how it was formed. And if that is in fact the way it was formed, then we can make some guesses as to how much more oil and gas we are likely to find, because we have done a pretty good job of matching the geology of the Earth.

What you need to find is some of this organic material buried deeply for a long while with a rock dome over it so it captures the gas. By the way, if it doesn't capture that gas, you end up with something like the tar pits of California, and you end up with the tar sands, they call them oil sands, they are tar sands, thank you. They flow about as readily as the blacktop driveway out here, unless you heat them up, which is what they do, and combine them with some shorter chain molecules so that when they cool they will still flow.

The loss of these gasses has produced what we call our oil shales in the west. By the way, there are huge, huge deposits of these tar sands and oil shales.

As a matter of fact, the deposits of each of those represents way more than all the fossil fuels that we now know exist in the world, and the Canadians are making some heroic efforts because their big fields are up in Alberta, Canada, and they have a shovel up there that lifts 100 tons and they dump it into a truck that carries 400 tons and then they carry it and cook it. When it is cooked, why, the oil flows and then they mix it, as I said, with something with shorter molecules, a solvent, so when it cools it will flow and they move it out through pipes. With this heroic effort, they are getting about 1 million barrels a day. That sounds like a lot, 1 million barrels a day, but we use 21 million barrels a day. That is about 5 percent of what we use, and just a bit over 1 percent of what the world uses, because the world uses about 84-85 million barrels a day.

And what they are doing is not sustainable, because they are cooking this with natural gas that is what we call stranded. By ``stranded'' we mean there are not very many people there to use it, and natural gas is hard to transport unless you liquefy it and are near a port, so it is cheap. So I understand they may be using more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. But from a dollar and cents perspective, it makes sense, because the gas is really cheap and they are producing that oily understand for $12 to $25 a barrel, again, you get various estimates of this, and they are getting $50 to $60 barrel for it. So dollars and cents-wise, that makes good sense.

From an energy profit ratio, it does not make any sense at all. Natural gas is a high quality feed stock for an enormous petrochemical industry.

One of the things that we use it for, by the way, is making nitrogen fertilizer, and without our ability to make nitrogen fertilizer, we could not begin to feed the world. It is not just the plant breeder, and he has done marvelous with developing new plants. It is all of the fossil fuel energy we use in agriculture, and a great deal of that is used in making nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas.

I have next a little schematic here, and this kind of smoothes out these curves. By the way, the world has been increasing its use of oil about 2 percent. That does not sound like much, does it, 2 percent? But 2 percent exponential growth doubles in about 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years, and it is eight times bigger in 140 years.

Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the detonation of the nuclear bomb, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great energy force in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. Exponential growth.

I have a namesake, no relative. I wish I had some of his genes. He is really very brilliant. Dr. Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, he gives the most interesting 1-hour lecture I have ever heard on the failure of our industrialized society to understand exponential growth. Just do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and energy, and it will come up and you will be fascinated with this 1-hour lecture.

Here we show this little schematic curve. It is a 1 percent growth rate. Remember, that doubles in 35-years. This point is twice as high as this point, and that represents 35 years. Notice that the shortage occurs before we reach the peak.

The shape of the bell curve and the exponential growth curve indicate that you are going to have shortfalls in supply, price is going to go up before you might reach the peak, and maybe, just maybe, we are in this time right here. A lot of the evidence indicates that is true.

The next chart is one that really gives you some pause when you look at it. Let us just look at the upper one because the bottom one is an expansion of the upper one, separating the gas from the oil here in the red curve. But this shows only what 400 years, a little less than 400 years of more than 5,000 years of recorded history. The use of energy in our world was so small back in 1750 that that brown there which is

wood is just about the baseline, is it not?

The industrial revolution started with wood. The hills of England were denuded to make charcoal to make steel. Catoctin Furnace, a little historic site up in Frederick County, they denuded the Catoctin Mountains where Camp David now is, thankfully the trees grew back, they denuded that making charcoal for that furnace.

The industrial revolution really took off when they discovered coal, and it was stuttering when they finally discovered gas and oil. Then look what happened.

The hockey stick, that is the hockey stick that Congressman Gilchrest was talking about, look what it did. It just goes straight up. Notice here what happened in 1970. There was a real oil price shock there, and the world used somewhat less oil. We are now very efficient in the way we use oil in this country. Air conditioners probably are twice as efficient at least as the ones you used in 1970. If it were not for our increased efficiency we would be in even more trouble with energy today.

But what I want to point out is that we are about 100, 150 years into the age of oil. That is this. If Hubbert was right, and he was exactly right about the United States, why should he not be right about the world, this is going to be a bell curve. By the way, you can make this thing look steeper or shallower depending upon the dimensions and the ordinates, the absinthe ordinate and abscissa. Here, of course, we have 400 years on the abscissa so it is very compressed so it makes the curve look higher, but that is exactly the same kind of curve we have here. We just spread out the abscissa here so that we spread it out. If you really push these two things, that is going to peak up high in the middle.

Out of 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will represent about 200 to 300 years, remaining about 100, 150 years. What will our world look like post age of oil?

The next chart shows us something that is alarming a number of people, and this is a little drawing of the world. It has a number of symbols on it, and one of those symbols shows where China is securing rights to buy oil, and they are all over the world. This symbol here was Unocal. They almost bought Unocal, one of our oil companies. They are buying oil all over the world. They are scouring the world for oil.

I just came back from a trip to China, and we went there to talk about energy by the way. I was pleasantly surprised when they began their discussion of energy by saying post-oil. They get it. I wish we did. They talk about post-oil. They recognize that they are big polluters. As a matter of fact, I have a reference here that says by 2010, just 3 years from now, they will be a bigger CO2 producer than we are, in just 3 years. Their economy is growing, the last 2 quarters, at more than 10 percent a year. That doubles in 7 years. It is four times bigger in 14 years. It is eight times bigger in 21 years, 1.3 billion people. I saw essentially no bicycles on the street and traffic jams like we have at rush hour here in Washington.

Well, the fact that they are scouring the world for oil indicates their understanding that this is going to be a resource in short supply for the future. We can spend a long time talking about China and what they are doing. They are aggressively building a blue water navy.

A blue water navy is different than the brown water navy, brown from the silt that comes out the rivers near shore, little navies that protect you from somebody coming from afar. They are rapidly developing a blue water navy. Last year, for instance, we launched one submarine. They launched 14. Now, their submarines are not ours but 14 submarines is 14 submarines.

I have here a very interesting statement from our Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.'' I am thankful you recognize that. ``I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way the politics of energy is I will use the word `warping' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something now about the warping now of diplomatic efforts by the all-out rush for energy supply.''

It would be nice if everybody in the administration understood that and we were doing something meaningful about it.

So what do we do? Well, I think that any rational person would understand that you need to get busy developing some alternatives if you are going to run out of these fossil fuels. By the way, these fossil fuel are just incredible. The energy in these fossil fuels is just unreal.

I have an article, really not an article. It was a speech given by Hyman Rickover in 1957, 50 years ago this year, and I want to read something that he says here which is really interesting. He understood 50 years ago, ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously,'' little more than you are working, but you have got to sleep, ``or one-twentieth 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 hundred years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.''

And it has gotten even more golden in these last 50 years, has it not?

Hyman Rickover understood very well our dependence on fossil fuels. One barrel of oil controls the energy of 12 men working all year for you. If you figure out what that costs, it is less than $10 to purchase the equivalent work of a person all year long.

Now, if you have some trouble getting your minds around that, imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel carries your car. And by the way, it is considerably cheaper, a little over $2 a gallon, than water in the grocery store.

Now, how long would it take you to pull your SUV or your car or push it as far as that little gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel take it? I own a Prius. We get under normal road driving conditions 51 miles a gallon. It would take me a long time to pull my Prius 51 miles.

Another indication of the incredible energy benefit from fossil fuels, if you work really hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. It may be humbling to recognize in terms of fossil fuel that we are worth less than 25 cents a day, but that is the reality, and that is why we live so well.

As Hyman Rickover understood 50 years ago, if that was true what he said 50 years ago, it is true in spades today, is it not, because we have even more helpers to make our life quality higher as a result of our use of energy.

Well, what do we do if we are going to run short of fossil fuels? Obviously, we have no surplus oil to invest in the development of renewables. If we did, oil would not be $50, $60 a barrel, but we can free up some oil and buy some time with a very aggressive conservation program.

Matt Simmons, who has written a really good book on Saudi Arabia called ``Twilight in the Desert,'' and he makes the case that Saudi Arabia has probably peaked in oil production. They will not tell you that, but you notice they cannot make good on any promise to increase oil production so he may very well be right. Then after having freed up this energy and bought some time, we must use it very wisely. We would get a lot of benefits from that.

Life is just so easy in this country that we are bored. We are watching awful movies. We are doing drugs because we are bored. There is no exhilaration like facing a big challenge and besting that challenge. There is nothing that puts flavor in pie so much as work, and I can imagine Americans, when they understand the problem we face, going to bed at night saying, gee, today, I used less energy than I did yesterday and I lived just fine, and tomorrow I am going to do better.

But we need leadership that is not here yet so that we will do that. By the way, big benefits. We could once again become a major exporter. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. Properly challenged, we will figure ways to get this alternative energy. We could again be a major exporter. Today, we are a big, big importer, as you know, $800 billion trade deficit this year.

We are a role model whether we like it or not. When you use 25 percent of the world's energy, you are a role model. Not a very good one today. We profligately use energy, way more energy than the average person in the world. It really is possible to be much more efficient.

This is a fascinating chart, such a simple one, but what it shows is the heat that you get out of an incandescent bulb and the light you get out of it. Ninety percent of it is heat which is why I use an electric bulb for brooding little chickens. I am not so much interested in the light as I am the heat from it. Now fluorescents are much better, and I saw there was a Time magazine cover page that had a pile of coal there. I think it was on the cover page, and they have one of these screw-in fluorescent bulbs beside it. Five hundred pounds of coal, that is the amount of coal you save in the life of that one fluorescent bulb, that is here.

But notice what you get out of light omitting diodes. I have a little light omitting diode flashlight that I carry. I put two little batteries in it, and I have forgotten when I put them in.

It just lasts so long. We have the same amount of light out of each one of these, but notice the enormous amount of heat you are getting out of the incandescent bulb and the tiny amount of heat that you are getting out of the light emitting diode.

There are lots of opportunities in our society to live well and comfortably using a lot less energy. I don't have the chart here, but the average Californian uses only about 65 percent as much electricity as the rest of America, and it would be hard to argue that Californians don't live well.

This next chart is a really interesting one, and what it shows here on the abscissa is the amount of energy that we are using per person and what it shows on the ordinate here is how good you feel about life. You couldn't feel any better than 100 percent, and notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy in the whole world and we feel pretty good about it; but notice how many countries that use less energy than we feel even better than their quality of life. Let's go way back here to Colombia. They use a fifth as much energy as we; they feel almost as good about their quality of life as we feel.

If you drew a curve through this, you need some minimum energy to feel good about life, but once you go up that steep part of the curve, the minimum energy is pretty flat. We can move way back here on the curve and feel just as good as we do now about life. You don't have to use the amount of energy that we use to feel as good about life as we do.

The average European, the countries are scattered through there, but the average European uses half the energy we use and, by the way, pays more than twice as much per gallon of gasoline and they have been doing that for a very long time.

We are shortly going to run out of our 60 minutes this evening and we will need to come back to finish this, but obviously we have got some finite resources here that we can use. When we come back, we are going to talk about the resources available to us to meet the challenge of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. And, by the way, we will transition either on a time scale that we have chosen or on a time scale chosen by geology.

As we run down the other side of Hubbard's Peak and the world has less and less supply of fossil fuels, we will transition. It can be a bumpy ride, or it can be a really bumpy ride. But Americans are up to it. We need leadership and knowledge. And we will be back again to talk about the finite resources available to us and all those fascinating opportunities in renewables.

Mr. Speaker, in a former life, I received a doctorate in human physiology, I taught medical school, and I had a course in advanced embryology. With this background, my heart just bleeds when these diabetic kids come through my office every year, because I know there are options which have not been discussed on this floor; and I have two charts here which point that out.

The assumption is being made by many people that you need to kill embryos to get embryonic stem cells. That just isn't true, and these slides point that out. Let me go quickly to the slide that is really important here.

These are several different ways of getting embryonic-like stem cells, and I want to go to the embryonic biopsy. This was a procedure that I had suggested to the President before he came out with his executive order. The medical community has now run past us with this, Mr. Speaker. What I suggested was you ought to be able to take a cell from an early embryo without harming an embryo, because I knew that God or nature, whoever you think does it, does that every day. When identical twins are produced, half the cells are taken away, and each half produces a perfectly normal baby.

What the medical community is now doing is what is called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They take a cell from an early embryo and they do a genetic diagnosis on it. If there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells. It may be six or seven cells. Sometimes they get an extra cell. And more than 2,000 times now we have had perfectly normal babies born.

There are hundreds of clinics in this country doing that. The procedure started in England. All that we need is that second cell that they inadvertently get when they do the biopsy for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Two professionals have now developed stem cell lines, Verlinski and Lanz have developed stem cell lines from single embryonic cells.

Mr. Speaker, we can have embryonic stem cell research without killing embryos. I think that is the real message.

Every professional I know believes there ought to be more potential medical applications from embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Many of my colleagues are opposing embryonic stem cell research needlessly because they believe you have to kill embryos to get embryonic stem cells. You don't have to kill embryos. The medical community is doing this every day by the thousands in preimplantation genetic diagnosis with in vitro fertilization.

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend Chairman Hunter and Ranking Member Skelton for their exemplary leadership in bringing this conference report.

I also want to thank my subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Taylor, for his tireless efforts and dedication in the preparation of this important legislation. I am grateful for our strong and cooperative relationship.

In addition, I would like to recognize my fellow colleagues on the subcommittee for their diligence and commitment to a job well done.

The intense work involved in preparing this conference report before us has been accomplished with the assistance of our professional and hard-working staff, and I commend their efforts and the quality of the final product. Staff, thank you very much.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this conference report. It strikes an appropriate balance between modernizing and maintaining our existing weapon systems, while investing in replacement capabilities for our future force.

In this bill, we move forward with the development of our future fleet by funding the lead replacement amphibious assault ship and the dual lead DDG-1000 destroyers, while also providing advance procurement funds for the next generation aircraft carrier. The bill also continues to build-out our fleet of Virginia class attack submarines, San Antonio class amphibious ships and Littoral Combat Ships. This conference report also contains funds for continuing the refueling and complex overhaul of the USS Carl Vinson and provides funds for the modernization of the Arleigh Burke destroyer and the Air Force's fleet of strategic airlift and bomber aircraft.

We have taken action to provide our future force with the capabilities they need to meet future threats. We have also taken steps to ensure that the current capabilities are not retired prematurely. This conference report mandates the Department of Defense maintain a minimum strategic airlift force structure of 299 aircraft and allows limited retirements of KC-135E aerial refueling aircraft and B-2 bombers.

One point of concern deals with the submarine force for the future. It is destined to go back to 40 submarines. It is the strong sense of this subcommittee that it ought to go no lower than 48 submarines.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting our sailors, our airmen, our soldiers and marines by voting ``yes'' for the fiscal year 2006 National Defense Authorization Act.

Mr. Speaker, there have been in the last couple of years two major government-sponsored studies on energy. One was a big SAIC report, commonly called the Hirsch Report. The other was a more recent report by the Corps of Engineers, and both of them reached essentially the same conclusion.

The world has either peaked in oil production, conventional oil production, or it will shortly peak in oil production with potentially devastating consequences. The Hirsch report said that the world has never faced a problem like this, that mitigation consequences will be unprecedented.

Today I got across my desk a flyer from a group here on the Hill that said that we ought to be cautious about this suspension vote because some new programs were suggested here. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that some new programs are suggested here because the reality is the Hirsch report said if you didn't anticipate the peaking of oil, in 20 years there were going to be economic consequences.

We knew 25 years ago that this was a reality. By 1980, 1981, we absolutely knew that M. King Huppert was right. The United States had peaked in 1970. We are well down that slope now. He predicted the world would be peaking about now.

I hope, Mr. Speaker, that there are a lot of new programs in here because we don't have 10 years. We don't have 20 years. I think we have essentially run out of time. We have run out of energy.

And don't be lulled into complacency by this find of oil in the gulf. Instead of our responding, saying here is some energy and we can invest in alternatives, what we have said is, I don't need to buy that hybrid now; I can now buy an SUV. We have exactly the wrong response to this.

Please, this is a great bill. I hope there are new programs in it. My only complaint with the bill is it doesn't have enough new programs in it.

Thank you very much for a great bill. Everybody should vote ``yes'' on this.

Mr. Speaker, we have 2 percent of the nonreserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We import almost two-thirds of what we use. Ten years from now when we look back, our regret is going to be that there wasn't ten times as much money in this bill for these programs.

This is desperately needed. The market is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It will not solve this problem. If this government does not solve it, it won't be solved because the private sector cannot do it. We need real leadership in this area, and that is a major responsibility of government.

And again I say mark it down. Ten years from now you will look back and say why wasn't there ten times as much money in that bill because we really needed it?

This falls far short of what we ought to be doing, but at least it is something. Please vote for it.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of order.

Mr. Speaker, a few days ago we paused to recognize Constitution Day. I thought it would be appropriate this evening if we spent a few moments looking at the Constitution.

But in order to really understand the milieu in which the Constitution was created, I think we need to go back 11 years before the Constitution was ratified to the Declaration of Independence. In there we read these words: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

Mr. Speaker, we mouth those words today, and then we move on to the next clause, and they mean so little to us compared to what they meant to our Founding Fathers. You see, most of our Founding Fathers came from countries in the British Isles and in Europe that were ruled by a king or an emperor who claimed, and incredibly was granted, divine rights. What that says is that the rights came from God to the king or the emperor, and he would give what rights he wished to the people.

And we made a stark departure from that. Fourscore and 7 years later, Abraham Lincoln was to note that this new experiment might not work. He said in his Gettysburg Address that: We are now engaged in a great war testing whether this Nation or any Nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

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.

It took 11 years for the promise of the Declaration of Independence to be fulfilled in the Constitution that was ratified in 1787. The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before our Founding Fathers wondered if it really was clear that they meant to have a very limited Federal Government with essentially all of the rights belonging to the people.

And so they wrote 12 amendments; 10 of them made it through that process of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the State legislatures, and we know them as the Bill of Rights. I think we all too seldom review these Bill of Rights.

The first eight deal with pretty specific rights that the people have, like the right to worship as they please, and to speak freely, in the first amendment; the right to keep and bear arms, much misunderstood in the second amendment. And then third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eight all deal with specific rights of the people. And then the ninth amendment, seldom referred to, but they wanted to make sure that having enumerated certain rights as belonging to the people, that the reader of the Constitution and these amendments understood that essentially all of the rights belonged to the people.

Notice what they said in the ninth amendment. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. In other words, just because we did not mention a right in the Constitution or these amendments as belonging to the people, that is where essentially all of the rights belong. So do not disparage these rights to people. They do belong to the people.

And then the most violated amendment in the Constitution, the 10th amendment. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

What this really says in plain everyday English, without the old English and the legalese, is if you cannot find it Article I, section 8, you cannot do it.

Now, we are doing a great many things in this Congress that neither I nor anyone else can find a sound basis for in the Constitution, and this is pretty widely recognized. As evidence of that, I have, and I think this was a joke from Jay Leno, that is one of the places that it was heard. ``They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we are not using it any more.''

Mr. Speaker, this general recognition on the part of the citizenry that we are now largely ignoring the Constitution ought to cause us to rethink what we are doing.

I am not saying that the things that we are doing are not things that we ought to be doing. What I am saying is we ought not be ignoring the Constitution. This, I believe, starts us down a very slippery slope. If I can argue it is okay to do these things, like philanthropy, and, by the way, do a Google search for Davy Crockett and farmer, and you will get a great discussion of philanthropy, health care and education, I am not arguing that these are not things that the Federal Government might ought to be doing. I am simply arguing that if we are going to do them, we need to have amended the Constitution, because I am very concerned that if we can ignore the Constitution now, that we can ignore it in the future for some very important civil liberty that we have.

Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned that the general malaise on our part in referring to the specifics of the Constitution will serve us no good purpose in the future, and I think that we need to look at every law that we pass to make sure there is a firm basis in the Constitution.

This is a wonderful document. We have one person in 22. We have a fourth of all the good things in the world. I think it is because of the milieu that was established by this Constitution, the civil rights. No other constitution, no other bill of rights provides such civil liberties. To remain who we are, I think that we need to stick by our Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the efforts of one of my constituents, Mr. Leo McHale, of Walkersville, Maryland, to honor the heroes of 9/11.

With community support, Mr. McHale created Maryland's first private memorial to remember and honor the heroes who responded to the terrorist attacks and those who perished on September 11, 2001. It was dedicated on May 10, 2003.

I personally would like to thank Mr. McHale and the Walkersville residents whose joint efforts and hard work are responsible for the completion of this commemorative project. In spite of the terrible losses on that cataclysmic day, it is important to recognize the astounding community efforts and cooperative response that symbolize the character, pride and unity of the American people.

With 9/11's 5th anniversary approaching, it is essential that the American people continue to remember the events that occurred when America was attacked on September 11, 2001. Through the efforts of Mr. Leo McHale--and so many others--we continue to keep the memory alive by honoring the heroes who responded and the men, women and children whose lives were mercilessly and cruelly taken on 9/11.

Mr. Speaker, among many priorities that the country and the Congress face, our national security is probably preeminent today in the minds of many people and in the Congress and in our administration. And today I would like to talk about one aspect of national security that will probably be unknown to a great many Americans, and to those few who know about and have studied it, this will remind them of the potential for this threat to our country, indeed, to our whole society.

Our first glimpse of the possibility of this threat occurred in 1961. It was in the Pacific and we were then doing a series of nuclear tests, and this was our first and last high altitude test. It was over Johnston Island, and the weapon was detonated above the atmosphere the first time that we had done that. No one knew what was going to happen as a result of that test, and the consequences were unexpected and really quite striking.

Hawaii was about 800 miles away. If you think back to 1961, we did not have all of the electronics that we have today. We were more in an electrical infrastructure then than we were in an electronic infrastructure, and the electrical infrastructures are very much more robust than an electronic infrastructure because you are dealing with big structures and heavy wires and so forth. Even so, the effects of this detonation above the atmosphere resulted in the shutdown of electrical circuits. There were many disruptions in electrical and certainly in electronic equipment such as existed those days in Hawaii 800 miles away. The Soviets were also doing testing simultaneously with ours and they had more experience with this phenomenon. We now have a name for this phenomenon. We call it electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.

And here I have a chart which shows very schematically what is happening. We detonate the weapon above the atmosphere, and there is an immediate distribution of gamma rays that travel at the speed of light that will strike every object within line of sight. And when these gamma rays reach our atmosphere, they produce what is called Compton electrons, all of this essentially at the speed of light, and these Compton electrons then become a force which is very much like a nuclear storm magnified many, many times. And if you think, Mr. Speaker, of the disruptions that a robust solar storm can produce to our communications here, you can get some idea as to the potential impact of an EMP. It is sometimes called high altitude or HEMP.

We since have learned a great deal more about that than we knew then, but the feature that we learned then was that wide areas are affected. You can have very high field strengths, and here it says 50 kilovolts per meter. We have since learned, as reported by the Russian generals, and I will come to that report in a few moments, that the Soviets purportedly designed and built electromagnetic weapons that would produce 200 kilovolts per meter; so that is four times larger than the number which is given here in this chart. This was May of 1986. That was 20-some years after the explosion, but a long time before these Russian generals were interviewed. There is a very broad frequency band running from very, very short wavelengths to very long wavelengths. The pulse lasts more than 2 minutes, but it comes on with such abruptness that our surge protectors for your computer and other devices are useless because the pulse is through the surge protector before it sees it. So there is now nothing out there the equivalent of EMP.

The next chart shows on the right that just about everything is affected by EMP. It has a missile which is taking off there. We are not even sure that we can launch through a robust EMP laydown. What I am told is that we tested our missiles and we found some deficiencies and we corrected that and we have done that several times, and the last time we corrected the deficiencies, we intentionally did not test again, hoping that we had fixed all the deficiencies. But knowing that if we tested and found deficiencies that that intelligence would probably get out to our enemies and they would know that we were vulnerable, and rather than run that risk, we believe that we had corrected all the deficiencies; so we have not tested, and, hopefully, a potential enemy will also believe that we have corrected all the deficiencies. But that is not a certainty. We do not yet know for certain that we could launch our ballistic missiles through an EMP laydown. It shows effects on automobiles.

By the way, if you have a car or truck that has a coil and a distributor, you are probably immune to EMP. But all modern cars, as you know when you take your car for service, has a lot of computers. Indeed, a computer is required for servicing your car. So all of the new vehicles are vulnerable to EMP. Airplanes, only a few of our military airplanes are EMP hardened. All of the other planes are vulnerable to EMP effects.

Here on the left it shows the coverage with the height of blast 60 miles and how large an area. That is line of sight, with the simple geometry of the Earth and the height. If you are 200 miles up, you cover a bigger area. And if you are 300 miles high up with the center of that in Iowa, Nebraska, about in that area, it covers our whole country; or the margins of our country in south Florida, northwest Washington State, and Maine, all are covered with a blast of about 300 miles high above Nebraska or Iowa.

The next chart is a little more detailed presentation of the blast area. And it shows that it is not simple concentric rings because of the dynamics of the detonation of a nuclear weapon. You have a distribution of intensities; but generally speaking, out at the margins of the country with 480 kilometers, about 300 miles, with a detonation of that blast, you see from the purple here that you have got about 50 percent of maximum at the margins of our country.

The level to which we tested is classified, but if the Russian generals are correct that they developed weapons at 200 kilovolts per meter, that would mean 100 kilovolts per meter at the margins of our country. And there is concern that even when we test and harden that we may not have hardened it to an adequate level.

The next chart answers an important question that I am sure a lot of people ask at about this point, and that is if there is such enormous vulnerability to EMP, why would you be talking about that and giving our potential adversaries a heads up that we are vulnerable? To help understand that, most Americans may not know about it, but every one of our potential enemies knows about it. I have here just one little chart which, as you can see, is not in English. It is in Russian, as a matter of fact. And although I cannot read Russian, I certainly can look at the sketches here. And what we see is EMP.

Here is a weapon detonated above the atmosphere. And here you see the effect of that. This is the EMP pulse here lasting a long time. By the way, the fact that the wavelengths in that pulse go from extremely short to extremely long mean that they can couple with almost everything.

I am told that the smallest electronic parts on the warehouse shelf will couple with some of the shortest waves. And long, long lines like railroad tracks will couple with the longest waves. As a matter of fact, they will even couple with wires that are buried several feet underground.

Without technical knowledge, what we are talking about almost seems like Buck Rogers and science fiction. A blast of a single weapon up to 300 miles in the sky, and by the way, if it were in the daytime and you were looking away from it, you would not even know it happened. If you were looking at it, obviously, you would see it because it was very bright, and it was line of sight.

You are not hurt by it. It has no effect on our bodies. But if you have an electronic watch, that will stop. If you get in your car, that probably will not run. The phones will not work. There will be no power grid. There are literally tens of thousands of what are called SCADA, which are little control devices in our power grid. And they all contain chips, micro-electronics. And many of them were manufactured by organizations that do not even exist now because they have been in the field for a long time.

And all of those are gone. Signals traveling through fiber will get there. But if you have anything other than optical switching, if you have electronic switching, the switches will be gone. And so even if you are using fiber, you still cannot transmit your data if you are using other-than-optical switching.

So this chart demonstrates very clearly that our enemies know about EMP, because this is from a Russian publication, and it shows the effects of EMP. This is the power grid. They show the transformers going out.

By the way, if our big transformers go out, there are no replacements on the shelf. The biggest ones are not even manufactured in this country. We will need to go to Europe or Scandinavia, and you place your order, and in a year to 18 months, they will have the transformer for you.

I was concerned about EMP, and I called a friend of mine, Tom Clancy, who I knew had an EMP scenario in one of his books. And he lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I knew him. So I called Tom and asked him for some information on EMP.

He said, if you have read my book, you know as much about EMP as I know, but let me refer you to, in his opinion, the smartest man hired by the U.S. Government. And he gave me the name of a Dr. Lowell Wood who worked for Lawrence Livermore Lab, one of our big nuclear labs out in California.

Well, this was back, oh, probably 12, 13 years ago, a while ago. And cell phones were not all that popular. You may remember that we were using pagers. If you wanted to communicate with someone, why you paged them. And that went up to a satellite and back down to their pager. And they got the little message, please call so and so. I did that with Lowell Wood. I thought he was in California. And he happened to be in Washington. And of course the same satellite that would have brought the signal down to California brought it down to Washington. Within an hour, he was sitting with me in my office.

Dr. Lowell Wood was indeed a font of knowledge on electromagnetic pulse. I was concerned that, because of cost considerations, that our military was waiving EMP hardening on essentially all of its new weapons systems and that that made us vulnerable to an EMP attack.

And so I got in legislation the establishment of an EMP commission. And the EMP commission was set up and functioned for 2 years. Normally our commissions work for a year. But because of the details of this legislation, they were able to work for 2 years. They brought forth a big report. This is the executive summary of that report. And this was issued in 2004.

This is the Executive Summary of the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse EMP Attack.

And here are a number of PowerPoint presentations that they prepared, because they were going around the country briefing a large number of organizations, Federal and State and private, on the results of their study.

The next chart shows the commissioners. Here you will see Dr. Johnnie Foster is the developer of almost all of our new atomic weapons. Dr. Bill Graham, who was the chair of this, was Rumsfeld's co-chair when they did that very important study on the emerging ballistic missile threat that came out a few years ago.

It is interesting. I spent a couple of days in Moscow with Bill Graham and Rumsfeld when we were briefing members of the Russian Duma so that they would understand that our withdrawal from this treaty that prohibited us from protecting ourselves against intercontinental ballistic missiles had nothing to do with Russia because we cannot imagine that we could produce a robust enough protection system to protect us against the literally thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles that Russia has. But there are some new players on the scene out there, like China and North Korea and Iran and who knows who may get in line.

And we could, we felt, with the development of a system, the successful test just a few days ago, be able to take out a few weapons from a country like this.

Another very important member of this commission was Dr. Joan Woodward, who is the deputy director of the Sandia Labs out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was out visiting my son there who works at the labs. And he brought me home some material from the lab that led me to believe that they might have some knowledge that would be helpful in this EMP study.

So I asked for a briefing. I had not looked at the list and remembered specifically who was on this list of commissioners. And I came in for a 5-hour classified briefing on the commission's work. And Dr. Joan Woodward had at her disposal all of the resources of the Sandia Labs. So they did a really magnificent job of studying the threat, not just to our military but to our national infrastructure.

The next chart shows something which alarmed them. This is from their commission report. We have redacted here the names of the Russian generals. But they interviewed two Russian generals who told them that Russia had designed and built a super EMP nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. That is an enormously high pulse.

Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea. Now, I am not saying this. I am taking this from the report of the EMP commission. Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the near future. Now, this is the assessment of the EMP commission.

The next chart just builds on the point that I made that most of our citizens may not know anything about EMP, because it is really a Buck Rogers Star Wars kind of a phenomena. It almost seems like science fiction.

The fact is that, although few of our people know about EMP, all of our potential enemies know about EMP.

And I just wanted to make that very clear, because I do not want anybody to have the notion that we are somehow informing a potential enemy of something that he does not know about.

This first quote here is a very interesting one. This is not exactly the quote as I remember, but it is a pretty

good paraphrase, because I was there. It was May 2nd of 1999. And I was sitting in a hotel in Vienna, Austria, with ten other Members of our Congress and three members of the Russian Duma.

I can tell you exactly when we were there. We were there when the three prisoners, hostages, whatever you want to call them were released by Yugoslavia. You may remember that event. They were released to Jesse Jackson as you may remember.

For 2 days we sat in that hotel room hammering out a framework for an agreement. Five days later, that was voted by the G-8. Russia joined the G-7, because the only country that the Bosnians had enough respect for to be controlled by them was Russia. And when the G-7 joined with Russia, they used the framework agreement that we had developed. And that ended the hostilities there as you may remember.

Well, one of the three Russians there was Vladimir Lukin. He was the ambassador here at the end of Bush 1, the beginning of the Clinton administration. At the time we were there, he was the chair of their equivalent of our International Relations Committee in the Russian Duma.

He is a fairly short fellow with even shorter arms. And he was extremely angry. And he sat there for 2 days with his arms folded across his chest looking at the ceiling. And then he made this statement, and what he said was, as I remember it, ``if we really wanted to hurt you with no threat of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM and we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country and shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.''

That was Vladimir Lukin. Another Russian who was there, who was I think the third ranking Communist, and yes, there is still a big Communist Party in Russia, who was the third ranking Communist, Alexander Shurbanov. And he smiled and he said, ``if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares, like I think at least 7,000 spares.''

You see, the reason for no fear of retaliation was that if it was launched from the ocean, we would never know where it came from. Well, that was his comment.

Now, all of this is from the EMP commission. None of those are my statements. Chinese military writings describe EMP as the key to victory and describe scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in a conflict over Taiwan.

Again, a survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by the commission found widespread knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility, including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.

This next bullet is kind of repeated in the next chart, so I will skip to this one. Iran has tested launching a Scud missile from a surface vessel, a launch mode that could support a national or transnational terrorist EMP attack against the United States.

It should be noted that you do not have to be very technically adroit or very competent to launch an EMP weapon, because if you miss by 100 miles that is just about as good as a direct hit because there is a large area that this covers.

A Scud missile can launch about 180 miles high. That will not blanket the whole United States, but a Scud missile launched from a ship off our coast could shut down all of New England and much of the mid- Atlantic area with an EMP blast. Now, if you thought recovery from Katrina was difficult, imagine an area many times that large with no remaining infrastructure in terms of communications or power. That is the problem we would have. If it blankets our Nation, of course, we have an essentially irresolvable problem.

The next chart continues with what our potential adversaries know about EMP, and again, all of this is from the EMP commission report. If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways, and this is an interesting one from Iranian Journal in 1998, even before the present wild man who is there, if the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. 150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. It is probably more than that now, and if the enemy forces succeeded in infiltrating the information network, which an EMP would do if it shuts us down, then the whole organization would collapse, the American soldiers could not function, nor would they be able to fire a single shot. Now, I am not sure that is totally true, because I think our guns are pretty much immune to the EMP, but it is largely true.

We have now about 35,000 people in South Korea. We believe that with the technology we have that we are a match for the million-man North Korean Army, but if the North Koreans were to launch an EMP weapon, just fire straight up, if you will, and detonate a weapon above the atmosphere, our soldiers would, in effect, be no taller in terms of combat capability than the North Korean soldiers who probably are pretty EMP immune because they do not have very sophisticated equipment.

Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse. This is the Iranian Journal. Terrorists have attempted to acquire nonnuclear radio frequency weapons. This is a statement from the EMP Commission.

So you see that essentially all of our presently believed potential enemies are writing about EMP. It is not that they do not know about it, and my concern is that most Americans do not know about it, which is why we are talking about it.

Why would they be interested in EMP? Again, this is from the commission. States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for EMP test offers the greatest utility. We talk about asymmetric warfare. An EMP weapon is the ultimate asymmetric weapon. One little country with a Scud launcher and a crude nuclear weapon and a transsteamer from which they could launch it, and by the way, we cannot see with our satellites through the thinnest canvas. If the Scud launcher is on the deck and covered by a canvas, we could not distinguish it from baled hay or crates of bananas.

In fact, there is one interesting story on an EMP attack in our country, and this may be kind of a look at the future. It has our country attacked from the sea, and after the weapon is launched, the ship is sunk. So now even if you find the ships there are no fingerprints. The ship is gone.

Well, these are the reasons they may use it. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against U.S. military forces in a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland. There is no way that a nuclear weapon could be used to produce so much damage to our country as with an electromagnetic pulse detection by detonating it at high altitude.

If it took out all of Los Angeles or New York City, you would not have done anywhere near as much damage to our country as simply detonating it above the atmosphere and for using an EMP pulse which would shut down all of our communications and all of our power grids.

Mr. Speaker, think about a world, and it would not be quite this but nearly this, a world in which the only person you can talk to is the person next to you unless you happen to be a ham operator with a vacuum tube set, and then you could talk to another operator who had a vacuum tube set. By the way, the vacuum tubes are a million times less susceptible to EMPs than the microelectronics that we use now. And in this world, the only way pretty much you can go anywhere is to walk unless you happen to have a friend who has a car that has a coil and distributor, and that car probably will work.

The second bullet here is a very interesting one, for two reasons. The country that does this believes they are relatively immune to a massive retaliation with our nuclear weapons. Even if we knew who did it, are we justified in incinerating their grandmothers and their babies because they took out our computers? That is in effect, Mr. Speaker, all they would have done is take out our microelectronics. The consequences of that, of course, are devastating, but the second reason is that we probably would not know who did it.

I cannot imagine, except for Russia, any country that would launch a nuclear weapon from their soil. Our satellites are really good. We would certainly detect it. We would know where it came from, and we would retaliate. If they attack us, it is going to be from the sea. They cover three-fourths of the Earth's surface. They are very difficult to monitor. The north Atlantic shipping lanes are crowded with ships. It is essentially impossible to keep track of specific ships in that shipping lane.

EMP could, compared to a nuclear attack on the cities, kill many more Americans in the long run from indirect effects of collapsed infrastructure, power, communications, transportation, food and water.

I was given a prepublication copy of a novel which I hope comes out because I think Americans need to know what the potential is, and it was the story of a community in the hills of North Carolina after an EMP attack. It goes through the first year; and to give some emphasis to this statement, it could kill many more Americans. This is a novel, but they did a lot of research. They had reason to believe, I think, it was probably pretty close to the truth.

If you go to a country that has no communications and no power and will not have any communications or power and essentially no transportation because all of our transportation now except for these old cars and trucks are dependent on microelectronics, the story they told was that at the end of the first year 80 percent of the people in this North Carolina community were dead, most of them from lack of food.

The average city has 3 days' supply of food. If the trucks do not keep coming in over the superhighway, and by the way the serving of food on your plate tonight, the average serving traveled 1,500 miles to get there, to give you some idea of how vulnerable we are to transportation losses.

They were lucky, because the authors concluded in their book that probably 90 percent of our population would be dead by the end of the year, and in New York City with its millions of people, the novel at the end of the year had them with 25,000 people still alive.

These are unimaginable consequences. The effects could be just overwhelmingly devastating, and a little later I will give you some quotes from some very prominent Americans who understand, and you may be surprised of the source of these quotes when you see them.

Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military strengths and societal survival, challenge the integrity of allied regional coalitions, and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to the high-tech West than to rogue states. Most of these rogue states have little microelectronics. If we retaliate with EMP laydown, they would be a little discomfited compared to the effect on us.

The next chart is an interesting one and far too complex to go through in the few moments we have to look at it here. But they spent a lot of time looking at our national infrastructure and the interdependency of the various aspects of our infrastructure.

Their study and conclusions reminded me of the counsel of a very prominent American. This was a number of years ago, Harrison Scott Brown, from CalTech, a geophysicist who I think held a number of seminars called ``The Next Hundred Years,'' and in those seminars, he looked at where the world might be and the various scenarios for the next hundred years.

One of the scenarios way back in the 1960s and 1950s that had been looked at was a nuclear war. He cautioned that recovery from a nuclear war would be very difficult, and what he said then is true in spades today. He noted that our very complex infrastructure was developed through an evolutionary process, through the exploitation of high- quality, readily-available raw materials, iron ore in the Midwest, which was so good that you could almost literally have a backyard smelter. There is still one of those little smelters, by the way, not working of course, just a tourist site now up near Thurmont, Maryland, not very many miles from here.

He cautioned that since our infrastructure was built with these high- quality, readily-available materials like coal that was exposed by erosion of the soil from the coal, oil that was very shallow and very abundant in Pennsylvania, that if our infrastructure collapsed, that we probably could not reestablish it without heavy industry, and heavy industry would have collapsed.

I thought just in the last day or two how appropriate his concerns were when I thought of this recent big, and it is big but it is not going to save the day, oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. How could you ever drill through 7,000 feet of water and I think about 30,000 feet of soil without the products of heavy industry? You could not, of course, and what this chart shows is that all of our infrastructure, like a house of cards, is interrelated. Any one is pulled out and the rest collapse. Of course, the one essential to everything is power. When that is gone, all is gone. Nothing works.

They spent a great deal of time, and you can get a copy of this report, and you can read the concerns that they have.

One of the few high altitude nuclear detonations, to confuse the EMP, one 300 miles will cover the whole country. Unprecedented cascading failure of our electronics-dependent infrastructure could result. I think, Mr. Speaker, we probably ought to change that verb. It would result.

Power energy transport, telecom and financial systems are particularly vulnerable and interdependent. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause large scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the national life. Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these infrastructures without adequate protection, and today, we have essentially none, Mr. Speaker. Without adequate protection, recovery could be prolonged months to years.

Mr. Speaker, you cannot hold your breath for months or years. Now, all of this is from the EMP Commission set up by Public Law 106-398, title XIV. These are not my words. These are the words of the people from the EMP Commission.

The next chart, again directly from the commission, says that EMP is one of a small number of threats that may, and, boy, are they capable of understatement. These are scientists primarily, and scientists are not preachers or politicians. They are given to understatement. EMP is one of a small number of threats that may hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. That is the way of saying, Mr. Speaker, that EMP could end our civil society. When they say ``hold at risk the continued existence,'' that means discontinue the society, disrupt our military forces and disrupt our ability to project military power.

Far too many of our weapons systems are not hardened. At a series of hearings over the last several years, I have frequently asked, after a robust EMP laydown, how much of our war fighting capability remains? And the short answer is, usually not much.

Now, that is about to change, because I now understand that a memo is circulating in the Pentagon asking all of our departments there to make an assessment of their EMP vulnerabilities. Hopefully, that will result in a program to correct this deficiency.

The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than in the Cold War. Then there was one. Today, who knows how many there are. Any country that has a crude nuclear weapon that they might make or buy, a Scud launcher and a transsteamer they can put it on is capable; not of blanketing our whole country, but taking out the whole northeast and Mid-Atlantic area would be devastating. This would be orders of magnitude greater than Katrina, and we still really haven't recovered from that one.

Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP strategic attack option. I read earlier a number of quotes from the commission, from journals in these foreign countries noting that they really know about it, the threat not adequately addressed in U.S. national and homeland security programs. I said, Mr. Speaker, they were capable of gross understatement. We are paying essentially no attention to it.

You know, my house is probably not going to burn down, but I wouldn't sleep well tonight, I wouldn't sleep tonight if I knew that I didn't have fire

insurance on my home. I would want to call the agent and get a binder. Now, what are the odds that my house is going to burn tonight? Very small. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that in the reality of today's world, there is a bigger probability that there will be an EMP laydown than that any one house or building will burn. Now, if you are uncomfortable being unprotected by fire insurance, you really ought to be uncomfortable being unprotected from EMP.

The next chart shows the conclusions of the EMP Commission. The EMP threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. As a matter of fact, there is almost no other single event that you can name, except the impact of a large meteor from space perhaps, that you could note that would have the devastating effects of an EMP laydown. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels. And they have a large number of pages and a lot of recommendations.

We just recently extended the life of the EMP Commission for 18 months after their first meeting, and their first meeting was just a few weeks ago. So the EMP Commission, unlike most commissions doing this kind of work, they produce a paper, and then the report just collects dusts, and they go away. But this one is not going away, and I hope we can keep it in existence for a long time.

The EMP Commission needs to be there watching our response to make sure that we are doing the right thing. They now have an extension of life of about 18 months. They are a few weeks into that, so they are going around educating people, sectors of government, private sector and so forth.

By taking action, this EMP threat could be reduced. It could be reduced to manageable levels. If you are building a device, and EMP hardened, it may increase the cost of the device only 5 or 10 percent, maybe even less. If you wait until after the device is built, it may cost you as much to harden the device as it did to build it. If you are building in the hardening, it is not all that expensive or not all that difficult.

The strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, and that is telling other people you do this, you are going to pay for it; preparation, protection and recovery. We need to be looking at all of these.

A fascinating study is, what would you do if this happened? What resources do you have available? How would you mobilize those resources? What would you do to provide the most good for the most people with the resources you have available? These are fascinating studies, and essentially nobody is looking at them.

Critical military capabilities must be survivable; and they are not today, I hope we are moving to address that; and endurable to underwrite U.S. strategy.

The next chart shows a continuation of their conclusions, and this reflects that, in the 2006 Defense Authorization, we extended it for 18 months.

Terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of an attack.

Vulnerability invites attack. I really am a pacifist. I don't like war. That is why I am a big, big supporter of our military, because I really subscribe to the philosophy that the most certain path to peace is to prepare for war. If you are really prepared for war, you are probably not going to have a war. We are not prepared for this kind of an eventuality, and our very unpreparedness invites this kind of an asymmetric attack.

The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical infrastructure. And what do we do to protect it? And what do we do to recover? And it notes here that the power grid is a particularly vulnerable and essential one. Without power, you have essentially nothing. Everything goes down without power.

The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan to help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur. What do you do as a family to prepare? What do you do as a community to prepare? What do you do when it happens? Citizens need to become as self-sufficient as possible.

I am not telling you this; I am reading this from the report. If you are not as self-sufficient as possible, then you become a liability. You are no longer an asset to your country. You become a liability. So it should be the goal of every American to be as self-sufficient as possible, because then you become an asset and not a liability.

The next quote is a really interesting one, and I mentioned some really prominent Americans are concerned about this, and so this is from the Washington Post, ``One Way We Could Lose the War on Terror'' by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl from Arizona. ``Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, which I chair,'' he says, ``held a hearing on a major threat to the United States not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea. An electromagnetic pulse, an EMP attack, is one of only a few ways America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorists or otherwise. Few, if any, people would die right away, but the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Few could conceive of a possibility that terrorists could bring American society to its knees by knocking out our power supply from several miles in the atmosphere, but this time, we've been warned, and we better be prepared to respond.''

Thank you, Senator Kyl. Thank you for your recognition that this is a problem. Thank you for your counsel that we ought to be doing something about it. But, you know, I still don't see us doing much about it.

Another article that appeared in the public, ``The Impact of EMP is Asymmetric.'' This is by Major Franz Gayl. ``The impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries. The less developed societies of North Korea, Iran and other potential EMP attack perpetrators are less electromagnetically dependent and less specialized and are more capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern conveniences.''

If you don't have modern conveniences, you are not going to miss modern conveniences.

``Conversely, the United States would be subject to widespread paralysis and doubtful recovery,'' he says. That really is true, doubtful recovery, ``following a surprise EMP attack. Therefore, terrorists and their coincidentally allied state sponsors may determine that, given just a few nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, the subjection of the United States to a potentially nonattributable,'' from the sea, from above, ``nonattributable EMP attack is more desirable than the destruction of selected cities.'' I would think so.

``Delayed mass lethality is assured over time through the cascade of EMPs indirect effects that would bring our highly specialized and urbanized society to a disorderly halt.'' That is a very euphemistic way, Mr. Speaker, of saying that most of us would die.

The next chart shows the capability, which we exercised and have now mothballed, where we could put a whole airplane and zap the airplane. Now, this is not quite a realistic simulation of an EMP attack, but it is the best we could do, because there are no long line effects here. You just can't simulate miles of wire and railroad tracks. But we used to have these facilities, and we have now mothballed them. We used to test our airplanes. And some of our most important airplanes are hardened. Indeed, those which are hardened are, obviously, classified. But it is not that we would not have an ability to respond. We would. But to whom? Who did it? And what would be our response?

Mr. Speaker, we have spent several minutes now talking about a threat which I suspect few listeners had any idea existed. I hope that quoting this report and high profile people like Jon Kyl has convinced the listener that this is not just science fiction, that this is a real possibility indeed.

If there is going to be a conflict, Mr. Speaker, with these powers, I think it is more than a possibility, I think it is a probability that any of these small adversaries that have a nuclear weapon could devastate us more with an EMP laydown than with any other use of that weapon. And the reason I am here in this time that we are talking about national security, Mr. Speaker, is because I believe that, although there are more urgent concerns about national security, like an open border through which 11, 12, 20, who knows how many million illegal immigrants could come,

there could just as well have been that many terrorists. By the way, there is an old adage that talks about the tyranny of the urgent.

Iraq and what we are doing there is really urgent. Every day it is on the President's plate. The border and the outrage of American citizens that we haven't been able to close that border is really urgent. And it is just a truism for families, for businesses, for countries, the tyranny of the urgent. The urgent always sweeps the important off the table. And one of the really important things that we need to be about is preparing for the eventuality of an EMP laydown.

My last chart is a kind of a colorful one. This is a satellite photograph of the Ural Mountains, and it is labeled the Yamantau region in Russia. And this facility is ordinarily spoken of as Yamantau Mountain because it is in a mountain, and you can see from the figure down in the lower right there, it is about 600 miles almost due east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains.

Beginning with Brezhnev, in about 1980, the Soviets, and now the Russians, have a closed city there. In our liaison with the Russian Duma, we have become fairly friendly with a number of those Duma members, our counterparts there, and we asked them about closed cities. And they say, oh, yes, we have closed cities. When you draw a map of the region, the city is not even on the map. It is closed. People don't go there unless they are needed to work there, and they do not leave there unless they are no longer needed there.

Mezhgorye is the closed city. It happens to be in two little pockets in the mountains, because one valley wasn't big enough to house it, but there were at one time 60,000 people that we could estimate from our satellite living there. That would be about 20,000 workers that were working on Yamantau Mountain.

Yamantau Mountain is the largest nuclear secure facility in the world. We have had two defectors from that Yamantau Mountain. They each have told us what they know.

What we know from what they told us is that it is enormously large, as large as inside our beltway; it has train tracks running in two directions, so they intend to move a lot of material; and it has enormous rooms carved out of soft rock beneath hard rock. It is an ideal geologic formation for producing this kind of a facility.

The number of people at Mezhgorye, since they are finished digging, has now shrunk to about 15,000, as our satellites indicate, which means there are about 5,000 working at Yamantau Mountain.

What are they doing there? By the way, this is so secret in Russia that the cost of this, which has to be enormous, does not show in the financial lines of any of the ministries. It is the equivalent of our black programs, for those of you who are familiar with black programs.

To give you some idea how important this is to the Russians, continuing work on Yamantau Mountain is more important than paying their military officers, because they have continued work there when they couldn't pay their military officers. It is more important to them than the $200 million for the service module on the International Space Station. That was embarrassing to them when they couldn't fund that and we had to fund the service module, which was their responsibility, on the International Space Station.

Now, there is no conceivable use of Yamantau Mountain except during or after a nuclear war. This kind of gives you a little opportunity to get into the heads of the Russian leaders. From their writings and from their actions, it is quite justified to draw the conclusion that they believe that nuclear war is inevitable and winnable.

Now, I have no idea, and I have had a number of classified briefings, I have no idea what they plan to do in Yamantau Mountain. But one thing is certain, it has no use except during or after a nuclear war.

I wanted to end with this, Mr. Speaker, to bring the message that nuclear war is not unthinkable and therefore it will not happen, because apparently the Russians do not believe that it is unthinkable.

By the way, they span 11 time zones. Their enormous country goes almost halfway around the world. They have less than half the people that we have and a geography that size, I think only six cities of more than 1 million people. And if wealth is determined by natural resources and raw materials, Russia is the wealthiest country on the globe. They have everything their heart could desire, except a rational government, their heart could desire for a robust economic system. They could close the door and with their resources live happily ever after.

Almost nobody else can do that. We cannot do that. We import about two-thirds of our oil, we have no diamonds, nickel, chromium, tungsten. You would not have these lights in the ceiling without importing things.

So I just wanted to end, Mr. Speaker, with this chart which shows that our potential enemies believe that there could be a nuclear war and they are preparing for it by spending money on Yamantau Mountain, scarce money.

They were doing this, by the way, when money was scarce. It is not scarce now. They are awash in cash because oil is $65, $70, $75 a barrel. But they were spending money on this before they were flush with money.

So my hope is, and I believe we should have time, that the American people in our society and in our military can plan, adapt, design, build, so that we will be immune.

We are much more likely to have this attack if we are vulnerable to the attack, and at the moment we are explicitly vulnerable. We don't need to be that way. The creativity and ingenuity of the American people can make us essentially immune to this, Mr. Speaker, and we need to be about it.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend.

Madam Speaker, in the last year and a half I have come here to the well of the House a number of times to talk about subjects ranging from embryonic stem cells and the challenge of deriving these cells ethically so that we might hopefully enjoy the great potential medical benefits. I have come here to talk about electromagnetic pulse, a very interesting consequence of the detonation of a nuclear weapon above the atmosphere that produces a surge which is very much like a lightning strike everywhere all at once or an enormously enhanced solar storm. And I have come here I think maybe as many as 18 times in the last year and a half to talk about a problem which we as a country and we as a world face, and that is the peaking of oil. We are shortly, I believe, if we haven't already, going to reach the maximum production rate of oil in the world, and then the world will need to deal with how we substitute renewables.

But tonight I come to the floor to talk about something that could very easily become a victim, a casualty of the tyranny of the urgent. All of us are familiar with this phenomenon in our personal lives, in our professional lives; it is true for our country that very frequently the urgent pushes the important off the table. Things you have got to deal with today frequently push things off until tomorrow that you might wait until tomorrow to address.

I want to spend a few moments this evening talking about something that concerns me. We have 10 children in our family, I have 15 grandchildren and two great grandchildren, and I am concerned that I leave them a country as good and great as I found when I was born into this country in 1926.

The story that I want to spend a few moments on tonight begins with a quote from Benjamin Franklin. There are several versions of this. I have one here from the Dictionary of Quotations, requested from the Congressional Research Service. It says, ``On leaving Independence Hall at the end of the constitutional convention in 1787, Franklin was asked, `Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' '' Of course, they were very used to a monarchy because that is what they lived under as a colony of England.

According to Dr. James McHenry, a Maryland delegate, he replied, ``A republic, if you can keep it.''

Another version of this has the question asked by a woman who asked him as he came out of the constitutional convention, ``Mr. Franklin, what have

you given us?'' And his reply, ``A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.'' And that is what I want to talk about tonight, a republic, and if you can keep it.

So often when I hear people talk about this great country that we live in, they refer to it as a democracy. A speaker can do this after the opening exercises which very frequently may include a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. And you come to that part of the Pledge which says ``and the republic for which it stands.'' And having just recited that, perhaps without thinking about what it means, the person will get up and talk about this great democracy that we live in and will talk about our commitment in keeping the world safe for democracy.

What is the difference between a democracy and a republic? And why, in our pledge of allegiance to the flag, does it say a republic? And why did Benjamin Franklin emphasize, ``A republic, Madam, if you can keep it''?

An example of a democracy, and I was interested to find that this was a quote from Benjamin Franklin, too. A good example of a democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner. You see, in a pure democracy, the will of the majority controls; and that there are two wolves and one lamb and they cast votes on what they are going to have for dinner, it very well might be lamb.

I kind of hesitate to use the next example of a democracy because I really don't want to be misunderstood, Madam Speaker. But if you will just think about it, I think you will realize that a lynch mob is an example of a democracy, because clearly in a lynch mob the will of the majority is being expressed.

Are you not glad you live in a republic? What is the difference? A democracy is majority rule. What happens is what the majority wishes. In a pure democracy, there are no elected leaders. The people simply vote, and that is what happens. The laws represent the current opinion of the majority of the people.

In a republic, we have the rule of law. One example in our history that helps me understand this is an experience with Harry Truman. Take charge, Harry. You remember the characterization. The steel mills were striking and the economy was already in trouble. In those days, it mattered that the steel mills were striking. Today, much of our steel is made overseas, and it might not matter so much. Then it mattered.

Harry Truman wanted to prevent a worsening of the economy as a result of the strike of the steel mills. So he issued an executive order, and what he did was to nationalize the steel mills. What that meant was that the people who now worked for the steel mills were government employees because he had nationalized them, and as such, they could not strike. I remember that was a very popular action.

But the Supreme Court met in emergency session, and in effect what they said, by the way, I think this is just one of two times that the Courts have overridden an executive order of the President, and what the Supreme Court said was in effect was, Mr. President, no matter how popular that is, you cannot do it because it violates the Constitution.

You see, in a republic, we have the rule of law; and the law in this Republic in which we are privileged to live is fundamentally the Constitution. I have here a small copy of the Constitution. It is not a very big document; but, oh, what an important document it is.

I hear us talking about wanting a democracy in Iraq, and I keep asking myself the question, Is that really what we want in Iraq, a democracy? You see, we have three groups there, the Shiia, the Sunni and the Kurds, and the largest of these far and away are the Shiia. They were oppressed for many years under Saddam Hussein by the Sunni, and if we had a pure democracy there, surely the will of the majority would be to oppress the Sunni and maybe the Kurds as they have been oppressed for these number of years under Saddam Hussein.

I think what we really want in Iraq is a republic. We want the rule of law, which says that you cannot discriminate against any people, any ethnic group, that you cannot oppress any ethnic group.

I thought that what we wanted to do in Iraq represented a pretty steep hill to climb. There is no nation around Iraq that has anything like the government that we would like them to have. They are bordered by countries which are dictatorships. We call them royal families, but they are dictatorships. They have got lots of money, and so they can be benevolent dictators, but nevertheless, they are really dictatorships. Then they have countries that have kings, Jordan and Syria.

The only country that comes even close to the kind of government we would like them to have is Turkey, but they have a very interesting situation in Turkey. The most respected institution in Turkey is the military, and three times in the last several years the military has thrown out the government and told them to try again, that they are not doing very well.

I have a quote here from Benjamin Franklin that I thought was very interesting and relevant to Iraq. It says only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, and you see the attacks in Iraq, as a nation becomes more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

I went to the Web to see what it had to say about democracies versus republics, and I found this little discussion: in constitutional theory and in historical analyses, especially when considering the Founding Fathers of the United States, the word ``democracy'' refers solely to direct democracy. By that, they mean where the people directly determine what the laws will be, whilst a representative democracy where representatives of the people govern in accordance with a Constitution is referred to as a republic.

Using the term ``democracy'' to refer solely to direct democracy retains some popularity in United States conservative and libertarian circles. The original framers of the United States Constitution were notably cognizant of what they perceive as danger of majority rule and oppressing freedom of the individual.

For example, James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10 advocates a constitutional republic over a democracy precisely to protect the individual from the majority. However, at the same time, the framers carefully created democratic institutions and major open-society reforms within the United States Constitution and the United States Bill of Rights. They kept what they believed were the best elements of democracy but mitigated by a Constitution, with protections for individual liberty, balance of power and a layered Federal structure forming what we now call a constitutional republic.

A couple of interesting observations about some of the limitations of a democracy. I have one here from Benjamin Franklin; and whether he knew it or not, he was paraphrasing Socrates because I think the earliest quote came from Socrates. Benjamin Franklin said when people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. I think he really meant democracy, because if it is truly a republic, then you cannot vote yourself money. Then you could not do it. Socrates wisely observed that a democracy is doomed when its citizens can vote themselves moneys from the public Treasury.

This concerns me. When more than half of the American people benefit from big government, I think that will be a tipping point; and if you think our deficits are big now, just watch what they could be when we pass that tipping point.

The second part of his statement, if you can keep it, what were his concerns? We cannot get inside Benjamin Franklin's head to know what he was referring to, but we can only kind of surmise by putting this quote in context.

In his day, 11 years after the Declaration of Independence, and by the way it took us 11 years to write our Constitution, so let us have a little patience in Iraq, please. Eleven years after writing the Declaration of Independence, the United States of America, this new fledgling country was far away from any other major power. It had just about a decade before defeated the most important power of that day, the superpower, the colonial superpower of that day, England; and so I doubt that

Benjamin Franklin was concerned about the loss of this Republic from without. We were isolated by these oceans. We had just defeated a major world power, and so I doubt that Benjamin Franklin was concerned about a threat from without.

Today, I have little concern for a threat from without. This one person out of 22 in the world has about exactly half of all the military in all the world. We spend about as much money on the military as all the rest of the world put together, and I do not regret this because I tell you, if we do not get that right, if we do not have a military adequate to protect ourselves, nothing else that we do will matter much, will it?

I think that Benjamin Franklin was more concerned about a threat to this republic from within.

Just 50-odd years after this, at the beginning of our country, a young Frenchman by the name of Alex de Tocqueville spent several years visiting our country. Already this new country was the envy of the world, and Alex de Tocqueville wrote a thesis on his observation of America. His two-part book, entitled Democracy in America, is still hailed as the most penetrating analysis of the relationship of character to democracy ever written. And this is how he summed up his experience.

``In the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manors, but shapes the intelligence of the people. Christianity there reins without obstacle by universal consequence. The consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle in a moral world is fixed and in force.'' And then this great quote from Alex de Tocqueville. ``I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her great harbors, her fertile fields, and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her universal public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her Democratic Congress and in 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. America,'' he said, ``is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.''

Have you ever asked yourself the question, Madam Speaker, of why we are so fortunate? This one person out of 22 in the world has a fourth of all the good things in the world. How did we get here? We are no longer the hardest working people in the world. That was a characteristic that helped make us great. We no longer have the most respect for technical education in the world. The Chinese this year will graduate more English speaking engineers than we graduate, and a big percent of our graduating engineers will be Chinese students. We no longer have the best work ethic in the world. We no longer have the most respect for the nuclear family. Why are we so fortunate?

I think, Mr. Speaker, for two reasons, and I want to spend just a couple of moments talking about these, because I think that if we aren't careful, we could be at risk of losing what our forefathers bequeathed us and Benjamin Franklin's concern ``if you can keep it'' may be realized.

I think one of the reasons that we are such a fortunate people is because our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table when they deliberated and wrote the Constitution. I think that they believed that God guided them in what they did.

You wouldn't believe from our history books today, which have been bled dry of any reference to our Christian heritage, that our early Congress purchased 20,000 copies of the bible to distribute to its new citizens. You wouldn't believe that for 100 years this Congress voted money for missionaries to the American Indians.

President Adams made an interesting observation, which I will just paraphrase. He said that our Constitution was written for a religious people; that it would serve the purposes of no other. He was the President of the American Bible Society, as was his son, John Quincy Adams, who noted in his later years that of those two presidencies, the Presidency of the United States and the Presidency of the American Bible Society, that he valued more the Presidency of the American Bible Society.

I don't know if you noted, Mr. Speaker, but in the Declaration of Independence, God is mentioned four or five times, depending upon how you relate these statements. That is of considerable interest to me, because we are now considering whether or not the Supreme Court would look at if it is okay to say ``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Let me read these references in our Declaration of Independence to God.

It says, ``the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them.'' And then in the next paragraph, it says, ``we hold these truths,'' and all of us, Mr. Speaker, know these words. We repeat them so often. ``We hold these truths to be self- evident; that all men are created equal.'' Now, if you are created, there is a God somewhere, isn't there? That ``all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.''

Mr. Speaker, never state or assume that the rights that you have come from your government. These rights come from God, and it is the responsibility of your government to make sure that they are not taken away from you.

And then I look further through the Declaration of Independence, and there is this one phrase here that when you read this, you just have to smile. You wonder what was in the minds of our Founding Fathers. I have no idea what King George had done that required them to write this complaint, but, you know, it is prophetic. I think there is no better way to describe our regulatory agencies. And they used such poetic language then. What they said was, ``he has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.'' I smiled when I read that, and I thought what better definition could we have of our regulatory agencies.

And then near the end of the Declaration of Independence, in the last paragraph, ``we therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world.'' That has to be God, doesn't it? And then in the last sentence of this last paragraph, it says, ``and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.'' Another reference to God.

So five times in the Declaration of Independence our Founding Fathers referenced God. He was important in their life. They wanted him to be important in their country.

And I don't know if you knew it, Mr. Speaker, or not, because we seldom sing that far, but I have here the Star-Spangled Banner, written by Francis Scott Key. I pass his grave several times a week. It is in Frederick, Maryland. Let me read the third stanza of this. We seldom sing that, and I doubt that one American in fifty could recite it for you.

``And where is that band who so vauntingly swore that the havoc of war and the battle's confusion, a home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave: And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph doth wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.''

And then this last verse: ``O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand between their loved home and the war's desolation; blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: In God is our trust! And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.''

I wonder, Mr. Speaker, if our courts might somehow declare the Star- Spangled Banner and the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because they mention God?

Now I have a wonderful quote here from Benjamin Franklin. The time was June 28, 1787. Benjamin Franklin was 81 years old, Governor of Pennsylvania, and probably the most honored member of the Constitutional Convention. The convention was deadlocked over

several key issues of State and Federal rights when Franklin rose and reminded them of the Continental Congress in 1776 that shaped the Declaration of Independence.

By the way, one of the issues that divided them and almost prevented us from having a Constitution was the concern that they somehow draft a Constitution that would assure that the large States could not trample on the rights of the smaller States. And this is what he said:

``In the days of our contest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle,'' and it was the struggle for independence, ``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 that we no longer need His assistance?''

And then this part of the quote which I really love:

``I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men.

``If a sparrow cannot fall 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 build it.''

And then a request that set a precedent that we honor to this day. This very day in this Congress we follow the tradition that Benjamin Franklin started with this request:

``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.''

Mr. Speaker, I often reflect on the fact that the only place in our great country that you cannot pray is in our schools. And I wonder what our Founding Fathers would say about that. So I think that one of the reasons that we are such a blessed country, a blessed people, is because our Founding Fathers believed that God sat with them at the table, that He guided their efforts, and I think we put at risk this privileged position that we have in the world if we deny that heritage. And I am concerned as the Ten Commandments come down from the courthouse walls and the nativity scenes disappear from the public square and the Supreme Court is going to take a look at whether it is okay to say ``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.

A second reason that I think that we are a great, free country is because of the enormous respect that our Constitution shows for the civil liberties of our people. The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before our Founding Fathers were concerned that it might not be clear that their intent was to have a very limited central government; that essentially most of the rights, most of the power should stay with the people. And so they wrote the first 10 amendments, which we know as the Bill of Rights. They started as 12 in that process of two-thirds vote of the House and two-thirds vote of the Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the State legislatures; and 10 of those 12 made it through, and we know them as the Bill of Rights.

And, Mr. Speaker, as you go down through those Bill of Rights, you will see that time after time it talks about the rights of the people.

And, by the way, that first amendment, so simple the establishment clause of the first amendment that it really is quite a marvel how it is misinterpreted. You see, our Founding Fathers came here to escape two tyrannies. One was the tyranny of the Church and the other was the tyranny of the Crown. In England there was a state church. It was the Episcopal Church. And in most of the countries on the continent of Europe, there was a state church. It was the Roman Church. And those churches were empowered by the state, and they could, and did, oppress other religions.

I have such great respect for our Founding Fathers because when they came here, they did a perfectly human thing. In Old Virginia Roman Catholics could not vote. But when it came time to write these first amendments to the Constitution, they finally had figured it out that that was not what they came here for. They came here to establish a country that provided freedom to worship as you chose. So they wrote a very simple establishment clause, and it meant just what it says: ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.'' Please do not establish a religion. And, furthermore, do not prohibit the free exercise thereof, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That is all it means.

Mr. Speaker, our Founding Fathers would be astounded if they could be resurrected and see that we had interpreted this very clear language as requiring freedom from religion. You see, they meant it to assure freedom of religion, and there is a big difference.

I mentioned that they came here to escape two tyrannies. The second was the tyranny of the Crown. And I know my liberal friends do not like to reflect on it and they really abbreviate the second amendment, which, they say, reads the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That is in the second amendment, but that is not the second amendment.

The second amendment, you see, deals with their concerns that never ever would a small oligarchy in the seat of government be able to take over and oppress the people. So this is what they said: ``A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''

I asked them, Mr. Speaker, what do you think that means? You know, they do not want to think what that means, so they change the subject. But in most of these first 10 amendments there is explicitly stated or implicitly stated the rights of the people: the right of the people peaceably to assemble; the right of the people to keep and bear arms. And over and over it is talking about the right of the people.

Notice, Mr. Speaker, that this does not say ``citizen.'' I am not always pleased with the decisions of our courts, but I really believe that this Republic we live in is so essential to who we are and our favored status in the world that words do matter. And when the Court says that illegal aliens are people, they are protected by the Constitution, Mr. Speaker, maybe we need to amend the Constitution to say when you read ``people'' in the Constitution, please read that as ``citizen.'' But that is not what it said. And I am very concerned that we do not rationalize away the clear wording of the Constitution. I think the enormous respect that we have for the rights of the individual, for the civil liberties of individuals, has established a milieu, a climate, in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish.

I think that is one of the reasons that we are such a privileged people. And I think, Mr. Speaker, that if we permit any erosion of these rights given to us by God and guaranteed to us by our Constitution, that we put at risk the favored status that we have in the world.

I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, that it may already be happening. I think that Benjamin Franklin may have had a concern when he said if you can keep it, that we might just ignore the Constitution. And I think with all of the best intentions that we are walking that path. We are doing that today.

I want to talk about three things that we spend a lot of time on here and we spend a lot of money on in our country. I am not saying, Mr. Speaker, that we shouldn't be doing these things. What I am saying is that if we want to do them, we need to amend the Constitution, because I don't think there is any basis in the Constitution for our involvement in these three things.

First, let me note how we rationalize that it is okay to do these three things. First let me mention what they are, because that will relate to the rationalization.

The first of these is philanthropy. I have a very interesting quote from Davy Crockett on philanthropy. A second of them is health care. A third one is education.

How do we rationalize that it is okay for us to be involved in this? Well, they go to the preamble to the Constitution. They read ``We the People of the

United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare.''

There it is. They say ``welfare,'' so we now can be involved in philanthropy because it is there in the preamble to the Constitution.

I would note, Mr. Speaker, if they read on and came to Article I, Section 8, which defines the responsibilities of the Congress, that they would note that it says there ``provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.''

They are talking about the corporate welfare, not welfare as we use it today instead of philanthropy.

The second justification they use is the commerce clause, ``to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states and with the Indian Tribes.'' So they rationalize that if it crosses a State line, we can have control.

Now, I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if that was the intent of the Founding Fathers, they never, ever, would have written the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. The Tenth Amendment, by the way, is the most violated amendment in the Constitution. The Ninth Amendment, this was written in old English and kind of legalese. ``The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.''

What does that say in everyday English? What it says is that just because the Constitution doesn't identify a right as belonging to the people, unless it specifically is given to government, it belongs to the people.

Then the Tenth Amendment, this is a really interesting amendment. ``The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.''

In common, everyday English, what this says is if you can't find it in Article 8, the Federal Government can't do it, because Section 8 of this Article enumerates the powers of the Congress. I will read those in just a moment.

I had a very interesting experience here in this very spot probably 12, 13 years ago when I first came to the Congress. I was given 3\1/2\ minutes of debate time. That is a long time, as those many viewers who watch C-SPAN recognize. We were voting on something that I thought was unconstitutional.

So I took my Constitution and I turned to Article I, Section 8. That is just the words between my two thumbs here, by the way, it is less than 2 pages in this small document, and I went through it summarizing each of the articles there. The Congress has power to lay and collect tax. Boy, we know how to do that. To borrow money. We are doing that big time. To regulate commerce, to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. It goes on.

Then I finished my debate and I turned to walk up that center aisle, and the recording clerk, who is recording everything we say here tonight and was then, came walking up the aisle after me and tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, ``What was that you were reading from?'' They take down what we read, but they like to have a written copy if they can.

I thought that that was very interesting. The recording clerk, who sits here day after day listening to Members of Congress, heard the Constitution so infrequently that when it was read, the recording clerk didn't know it was the Constitution.

When asked that question, I said, ``Oh, it is the Constitution.'' And the clerk said, ``Can I see it?'' And so I had it open like this. ``Can I copy it?'' They took it and copied it on the copy machine. I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that this reflects a trend that we somehow need to deal with.

What have we come to? Much of what we do here, as I said before, I don't find any basis in the Constitution for. I am not saying we shouldn't do it. All I am saying, Mr. Speaker, is I have a big concern that when we simply ignore or rationalize the Constitution so that we can do something that is not specifically permitted by the Constitution, I wonder tomorrow how we might be rationalizing away these great civil liberties, these great rights given to us by God and protected by our Constitution.

Health care. By the way, we don't really have a very good health care system in our country. We have a really good sick care system. If you think about it, you really don't get involved in that system until you are sick. Maybe, Mr. Speaker, if we had a better health care system, we would be spending less money on our sick care system.

Also education. In a moment I am going to read this in the Constitution. It is very short. I want you to stop me, Mr. Speaker, when I come to that part in Article I, Section 8, that says it is okay for us to be involved in health care, that it is okay for us to be involved in education, that it is okay for us to be involved in philanthropy.

By the way, I have never met anybody who had a good, warm feeling on April 15 because so much of their tax money goes to philanthropy. I think that is a great tragedy. The Bible says it is more blessed to give than to receive, and yet I find no one who has a good, warm feeling on April 15 because so much of the tax money that is taken from them is used in philanthropy. What a shame, that the government has usurped the role of philanthropist and our people are denied that experience.

I had a really interesting experience in our church. Our kids don't go out trick-or-treating, so they went out before Halloween and left bags at the homes and said, ``We will come back on Halloween. If you put some food in there, we will make up some food baskets for Thanksgiving.'' So they did that, and with the ladies in the church, they made up food baskets.

Then they called the welfare people and said, ``We need some needy families that we can take these food baskets to.'' The welfare people were indignant. ``What do you mean, needy families? Families that need food? What do you think we are here for?'' And I thought, what a tragedy that government unconstitutionally, I believe, has usurped the role of philanthropist.

The Government unconstitutionally, I believe, has usurped the role of philanthropists. I have here a very interesting experience from Davy Crockett, who was a Congressman. And if you will do a web search for just Davy Crockett and farmer, it will come up. Because it is a very interesting story.

I was one day in the lobby of the House of Representatives when a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. It seemed to be that everybody favored it. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose.

Everybody expected, of course, that he was going to make a speech in support of the bill. And this is what he said: ``Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased and as much sympathy for the suffering to the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House. But we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into argument to prove that Congress has no power under the Constitution to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every Member upon this floor knows it.

We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but as Members of Congress, we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

Now, how did Davy Crockett get to that position? This is a very interesting story. You will find it fascinating reading. We do not have time this evening to go into it. But Davy Crockett, before this, was out campaigning. Before that campaign ride on his horse there was a fire that they could see from the steps of the Capitol in Georgetown. And they went there and several wooden buildings in those days were burning.

Davy Crockett and other Members of Congress worked very hard to put out the fire. And when the fire was finally out, there were a number of people who were homeless. And among them were women and children. And, of course, their heart went out to these women and children.

So the next morning in the Congress here, the primary item of business was

doing something about those poor people who were victims of the fire. And so they voted $20,000 for these victims of the fire. And that done, they went onto other business and Davy Crockett forgot about it.

Then about a year later, he was out campaigning. And it was mostly rural then. And he was on his horse. There was a farmer with his team who was plowing. So Davy Crockett times his horse so that he gets to the farmer just as he comes to the end of the row.

He speaks to the farmer. And the farmer is very cold. And finally he tells him, he says, ``Yeah, I know who you are, you are Davy Crockett. I voted for you last time you ran, but I cannot vote for you again.''

And then he made a very interesting statement. He said, ``I suppose you are out electioneering now. But you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again.''

Davy Crockett said, ``this was a sockdolager'', I don't know what a sockdolager is, but that is what he said. And this is what the man said: ``You gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have no capacity to understand the Constitution or that you are wanting the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me.''

Well, Davy Crockett was finally convinced that he had not understood the Constitution. He asked the man, gee, I really would like to apologize. I would like to explain to the people that I am now a new man, I understand the Constitution.

He said, if you will get a few people together and have a barbecue, I will pay for it. He said, well, we won't need you to pay for it. But if you come a week from this coming Saturday, we will have a barbecue. And Davy Crockett came and there were 1,000 people there that he spoke to and apologized for his vote in the Congress.

Now, I want to read from the Constitution. And I want you to stop me, it will not take very long to read. I want you to stop me, Madam Speaker, when I come to that part that says that it is okay for us to be involved in education, in philanthropy, and in health care.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imports and excises, to pay the debts, to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States; to regulate commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States; to establish Post Offices and post roads; to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; to constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court; to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the laws of Nations.

I will not read the rest of this, because I tell you all of the rest of the Constitution deals with just two things, and read it to affirm that this is correct.

All of this part deals with the Congress and its responsibility for the military. We declare war. This is not the King's army. We declare war. Raise and support armies and so forth.

Then the last couple of paragraphs here deal with the District of Columbia, and then to make all of the laws necessary to enforce the above. Now, where, Madam Speaker, was there any reference to our right to be involved in these three things? I am not saying that we should not be doing these things, I am simply saying that if we are going to do them, I am very concerned that we should not do them by ignoring the Constitution.

If they are good and proper things to do, we should have amended the Constitution. We have done it 27 times. I do not mind doing it again. But I really mind ignoring the Constitution. Because let me tell you why, we are engaged now in a war. I have no idea when the war will end.

Civil liberties are always a casualty of war. Abraham Lincoln, my favorite President, suspended habeas corpus. And during World War II, we interred the Japanese Americans. My friend, Norm Minetta, with whom I served in this House, Secretary of Transportation, several years younger than I. He says, ``Roscoe, I remember holding my parents hand as they led us into that concentration camp in Idaho.''

That war is over. And we are now a bit embarrassed that we did that. The civil war is over. And we got back habeas corpus. But I am concerned that we not permit this war to result in an erosion of our civil liberties. I do not know when the war will end.

I have a great quote here. It is probably not from Julius Caesar, because it did not appear in print, as far as we know, until what, 01. It probably was not passed down by word of mouth until that time. But this ascribed to Julius Caesar.

I think it so reflects this inherent reaction of people to a war situation. ``Beware of the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword, it both emboldens the blood just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch, and the blood boils with hate, and the mind is closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry, rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done, and I am Julius Caesar.''

That is probably not Julius Caesar. But it does, I think, reflect a common tendency on the part of people.

Benjamin Franklin, I do not know if he was the first to say it, ``if you will up your freedom to get security, at the end of the day you will neither have freedom nor security, or you will deserve neither freedom nor security.''

We are now at war. When will this war end? I want to make very sure that I bequeath to my kids and my grandkids more than an ever increasing debt, more than an energy deficient world. I want this great free country to be bequeathed to them just as I got it from my fathers.

This was a great new experiment. We weren't certain it was going to succeed. I am reading here from the Gettysburg Address, and Abraham Lincoln recognized this as an experiment which might not succeed. I don't know if you have thought about that in this Gettysburg Address.

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.

Not so in England and Europe, was the divine right of kings.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this Nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

And then he ended that Gettysburg Address with almost a prayer, that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

This has been a great experiment. We are the most blessed people on the planet. It has been said by a number of people that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

What will our children inherit? Unfortunately, we are going to bequeath to them an enormous debt, the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. We are going to bequeath to them a world with deficient energy to run a society as we run ours. Will we also bequeath to them a Constitution gutted by apathy where the civil liberties of our people are at risk?

Mr. Speaker, the world needs the United States and for the United States to be the great free powerful country that it is. I believe that we need to be very vigilant in protecting these great civil liberties given to us by our Creator and guaranteed to us by our Constitution.