Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, earlier today I attended the President's news conference with snowflake babies and their families at which the President announced his veto of H.R. 810. Snowflake babies were adopted as excess embryos. Excess embryos would be destroyed with taxpayers' dollars under H.R. 810 to produce pluripotent stem cells for science.

How can anyone look at these snowflake babies and hear their voices and say that it would be okay to kill them to provide materials for medical research?

President Bush transformed what could have been a day of tragedy into a day of triumph by vetoing H.R. 810 and by taking additional steps to support pluripotent stem cell research that does not destroy embryos.

To the proponents of H.R. 810, scientists, doctors and the public, pluripotent stem cells hold the most promise for understanding human diseases and treating devastating conditions. That is why pluripotent stem cells are coveted.

Yesterday, knowing that the President would veto H.R. 810, this body had the opportunity to approve a bill the President said he would sign to use taxpayer dollars to obtain pluripotent stem cells without destroying embryos. This opportunity is not lost to this Congress.

I urge everyone in this Chamber to sustain President Bush's veto and support bringing back for a vote the Bartlett-Santorum bill, S. 2754, which represents common ground into promising ways the Federal Government can support pluripotent stem cell research without sacrificing life for medicine.

Mr. Speaker, earlier today I participated in a news conference with about a dozen Snowflake babies who were adopted as embryos, along with five colleagues who are medical doctors. Very few media came to see these children and record their smiles, squirms, dancing, and other delightful antics. How can anyone look at them and say that it would have been okay to kill them to produce stem cell lines? I can state unequivocally that it is morally reprehensible and scientifically unnecessary to kill human embryos to provide raw fodder for scientific research.

For the vast majority of scientists and medial researchers, pluripotent stem cells hold the most promise for understanding human diseases and treating devastating conditions. That is why they are coveted.

To some, the manner in which these pluripotent stem cells would be obtained under the Castle-DeGette bill, by using taxpayers' dollars to kill a human embryo, is secondary to the hope for cures that they represent to sick patients.

To me and millions of other Americans, deliberately taking the lives of innocent human embryos is an unacceptable trade-off. A number of scientists have now proven what I have argued for the past 5 years. It is scientifically unnecessary to destroy human embryos to obtain pluripotent stem cells. Indeed, at least one procedure is almost immediately ready for human clinical application.

The Bartlett-Santorum bill represents common ground into promising ways the Federal Government can support pluripotent stem cell research without sacrificing life for medicine.

The Bartlett-Santorum bill will amend the Public Health Service Act to require NIH to conduct and support basic and applied research to develop techniques for the isolation, derivation, production, or testing of stem cells that have pluripotent or embryonic-like qualities. It was approved by the Senate earlier today by a unanimous recorded vote of 100-0.

``It's surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit.'' Ronald Reagan, 1989.

President Bush will sign the Bartlett-Santorum bill into law because it meets his ethical standards for promoting pluripotent stem cell research without the creation of human embryos for research purposes or discarding, destroying, or knowingly harming a human embryo or fetus. I am proud of President Bush's unwavering defense of the sanctity of life. I am grateful for his support and the support of my colleagues for ethical pluripotent stem cell research.

Mr. Speaker, we have appeared here on the floor several times to talk about a subject which is very important to a number of Americans, particularly those with some debilitating diseases that they believe might be cured with technology developed from embryonic stem cells.

I have had the privilege of having several Members of the House to work with me in developing the legislation that we are going to talk about tonight. And one of those Members is Congressman Tom Osborne from Nebraska, who is here with us this evening. And I would like to yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his support, for his leadership on this, and for his kind words.

I was fortunate in another life, before I came to the Congress, to have the privilege of working in this general area. I have a doctorate in human physiology, and I had the privilege of

teaching medical school for 5 years and doing biomedical research. And when I came to the Congress and learned of the interest in stem cells, with my background I saw some opportunities for applications here that may not have been apparent to others, and I have been pursuing this now for some 5 years with the White House and with the National Institutes of Health.

We are here tonight, Mr. Speaker, because it is our understanding that within a few days, probably next week and maybe early next week, the Senate is going to be voting on three bills, two of them relevant to this, the third somewhat tangential to it.

One of the bills they will be voting on is the bill that we passed here in the Congress here in the House some time ago. It is known as the Castle bill here generally, Castle-DeGette bill. This is the bill that the President says that if it gets to his desk, as Congressman Osborne indicated, he will veto it because this is a bill that would use surplus embryos from the fertility clinics, and they would be destroyed in the process of securing cells from them to produce these stem cell lines, although there is the anticipation, the hope, that a great deal of medical good might come from embryonic stem cell applications.

There is a concern of many in our society, which I share, that it is not morally acceptable to destroy one life in the hopes that you will help another life. So I had hoped that there would be an alternative to this, that we could look forward to enjoying the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell applications without having to kill embryos.

And that is what we are here to talk about this evening, because the second bill that the Senate will be voting on next week is a bill that is essentially identical to the one that we have been working on and developing now for these 5 years. The bill that we will vote on in the House, we hope, shortly after it is voted on in the Senate, will be a companion bill to the Senate bill and essentially the bill that we have been working on for these 5 years.

I would first like to take a look at a chart here which shows, in very gross form, the developmental sequence and the origin of what we call stem cells so that we can get a little appreciation of what a stem cell is so that we can understand the difference between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells and the potential that these hold.

Here we have a very abbreviated development process. It begins with what is called the zygote. The zygote is produced by the union of two sex cells, which technically are called gametes. And the zygote then goes to a number of cell divisions. And, boy, did they skip a lot here because we have just one cell and here we have several hundred cells; so it is divided again and again before you get to this point. And this is the point of the inner cell mass. And in that inner cell mass which will become the embryo, we have the first differentiation of these very primordial cells here into three distinct cell types: one is the ectoderm and another is the mesoderm and the third one is the endoderm.

There is a fourth cell type there, limited in number and location, and these are the germ cells. These will be the ova, produced in the female, and the sperm, produced in the male. What we have here depicted is the embryo implanted in the wall of the uterus. This is the uterus and this is the embryo and the so-called dissidua, the tissues that surround and support the embryo. Only this part of it here will become the baby. The rest of this will be the supporting tissues, the amnion and the corion, that support the baby.

In each of these germ layers, and we call these germ layers because they are three layers, three types of cells from which all of the tissues and organs of the body will develop, the ectoderm will produce our skin and our nervous system, and the mesoderm will produce the great bulk of our bodies. It will produce all of the muscle cells, our heart, the blood system, the smooth muscle cells of our gut and so forth. All of these will be produced from the so-called mesoderm. The endoderm, much limited in quantity in the body but not in importance, our lungs, much of our lungs, the lining of our intestines, and so forth are produced from the endoderm.

Every student in even a pretty elementary biology class will be familiar with one type of stem cell, and these are the stem cells that produce our blood cells because you can see those very readily in the adult. They are located in bone marrow, in the shafts of our ribs and so forth, and they produce our red blood cells, the little thrombocytes that produce the clotting of blood, and the polymorphonuclear leukocytes. These are the leukocytes with a funny shaped nucleus. And they are called stem cells because from a single cell type, this will differentiate into several types of blood cells, most of the blood cells. There are a couple of white blood cells that are produced in lymphatic tissue, but most of the blood cells are produced from these single stem cells.

Most of the other tissues here are also produced from stem cells because it is a single cell, the ectodermal cell, the differentiations of these several types of cells.

All of these types of cells are adult stem cells, and they have the limitation of already having differentiated. They already are differentiated so that under ordinary circumstances only certain tissues will ever be produced from them. If you can go into the body and take out an ectodermal stem cell, unless you are clever and make that cell believe that it is something that it is not, it will produce only tissues that relate to the ectoderm, cells of our nervous system and cells of our integument, or our skin.

Similarly for the mesodermal cells, if you can get a stem cell even before it is a stem cell for blood, back here you can get a stem cell from which all of these mesodermal tissues will develop, but you could never get ectodermal tissue from that nor could you get entodermal tissue from that; so you are somewhat limited as to the types of tissues that you might develop from an adult stem cell.

But if you could go back to the embryonic stem cell, and you may have to go back even before this stage of development, when the embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated, which means they haven't started to become a specific type of cell, you then could theoretically produce from those cells any and all of the tissues of the body. So there are a number of different diseases where the medical profession treating them and the loved ones of the families believe that there could be dramatic applications made from embryonic stem cells.

Every year I look forward to the juvenile diabetic people coming through my office. These are such heroic little kids that I see. Some of them so brittle that they have an insulin pump and they have to puncture their fingers or their earlobe a dozen times a day or more to keep track of their insulin because they are so fragile, so brittle, they can go from very low glucose to very high glucose with life- threatening changes.

Then the people come through the office who have friends and relatives who have Parkinson's disease, who have Alzheimer's disease, and any of the autoimmune diseases where the body's defenses have been confused so that the body is attacking its own tissues. And it is believed that in all of these different kinds of diseases that embryonic stem cell applications might produce dramatic effects.

I just returned from a family reunion. And my cousin's husband, who was a pathologist here in the Washington area, Washington Adventist Hospital in Shady Grove, for years, retired and went to Florida and very shortly came down with Parkinson's disease. I recognized him from his smile. Other than that, it would have been hard to recognize him because of the wasting of his body that has occurred with Parkinson's disease. And the mind, of course, is still very alert. It is just the mechanical part of the body that is deteriorating.

And Dr. Teske, Johnny Teske, we were talking about stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and he says, ``Time is of the essence.'' And I kind of choked up a little when he said that because here is a person who really understands this. He is a pathologist. He knows what he has got, and he knows what his future is going to be, and what he was telling me is that if I am going to benefit from this, you have got to do it quickly.

So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that we are able to move quickly on this in the

House. It is our understanding that the Senate will be moving quickly on it. I mentioned that several of our colleagues here have been working with us and helping on it. And one that I am very pleased has been helping us is someone who is really familiar with this subject because he is a physician who has delivered a lot of babies. He gets involved down the line from here after all of these tissues have been developed and we have that little baby at 9 months in the womb. And this is Dr. Gingrey from Georgia.

I am very pleased that he has joined us and would like to yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. Not only do these snowflake babies speak to us, the snowflake babies are the babies that were produced by the parents of the excess embryos, giving these embryos to a mother who could not have a baby. They were implanted in her womb, and we now have more than 100 of those. They were here, by the way, a year or so ago. A number of snowflake babies were here in the Congress and in the White House.

But I think there is something else that speaks to us, too, and that is that before you would harvest the cells from one of these embryos by destroying the embryo, you would want to know that it was a healthy embryo, and you would have it under the microscope and you are looking at it. You want to make sure it is a healthy embryo because you want to have stem cell lines that will be really healthy.

When you are looking at that embryo under there, it ought to occur to you that that could be the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven, and you are not now looking at 400,000 surplus embryos in the fertility clinics. You are looking at that one embryo under your microscope. That embryo ought to speak to you. It could be the next Albert Einstein. It could be the next Beethoven, and how could you kill the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven? Fortunately, as Dr. Gingrey said, there is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos.

The President was not unmindful of the potential for embryonic stem cell research, and he really wanted the medical community to benefit from embryonic stem cell research. So, quite immediately after he issued his executive order saying that they could use Federal money only for research on those stem cell lines that had already been established, those stem cell lines now are running out, as we knew they would, and a few weeks, months ago, there were 21, 22 or so left, maybe fewer than that left now. We started out with maybe 60.

Very shortly after the President issued his executive order, he set up a council on bioethics, and they issued a report. I have here a copy of that report, and they detailed and discussed at quite some length, it is very interesting reading, and I think even the layman could appreciate most of it. They discussed four different potential ways of getting embryonic stem cells as the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell without destroying or hurting an embryo.

The second one of those that they talked about, you will see a little asterisk there, and you go to the bottom of the page, and you will see the notation that Congressman Bartlett suggested this technique before the bioethics committee met. A little later, I will indicate to you how I came to have my first discussion with the President on this and how we now made that 5-year journey from then to now.

What I have here in this slide is a depiction of the reproductive tract of the female, and what we will be talking about is what goes on in a dish in the laboratory that I think is a whole lot easier to understand what is going on if we look at this process in this depiction of the mother's reproductive tract.

Here in the corner here we see the total reproductive tract which has the vagina and the cervix and the uterus and the two fallopian tubes, and each fallopian tube ending in a funnel-like structure called infundibulum, and there is the ovary and the blow-up here is only one- half of this reproductive tract. So there is a mirror image on the other half of it. This shows what happens in the fertilization and the early development of the embryo.

Once a month ordinarily, an ovum ripens and is released from the ovary, and if sperm had been deposited in the reproductive tract, they then travel up the reproductive tract. The egg is fertilized very quickly, very soon after it is released from the ovary.

Now, sometimes the egg is not picked up by the infundibulum, and it floats out into the body. Many of these sperm will make it clear through the reproductive tract and go out into the body where they will simply be absorbed later, but they may find the ovum out there and fertilize the ovum. Then the ovum will do what it does in the reproductive tract. It will divide again and again, and we will look at that in a moment.

At the appropriate time, it will find someplace to implant, and since it is out here in the body cavity, it will implant on one of the body tissues, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy, and that pregnancy will threaten the life of the mother. The baby cannot develop fully there, and the baby will die and the mother, too, if this is not interrupted.

At other times, as the egg, fertilized egg goes down the reproductive track here, it may implant along the tube here. And we call that a tubal pregnancy. And that tube is nowhere near big enough to accommodate a baby growing. So the baby will die, and the mother possibly too if we do not interrupt that pregnancy.

But most of the time, and nature is really quite a marvel, most of the time the egg is fertilized here high up in the fallopian tube and then it begins a several day journey. And here we have the days marked. Day 4, day 5 and day 6 and 7 and day 8 and 9. It is a bit more than a week after it is released from the ovum and fertilized, and day zero here begins the fertilization. It makes its way down the reproductive track.

No motility of its own, it is moved along by little cilia, little hair-like projections on the wall of the oviduct, which move in wavelike fashion and move the ovum down. As it moves down, it divides. First into two cells, then four cells, and then into 8 cells, and we will come back to that 8-cell stage, because that is an important one.

Then it goes on to divide further to a number of cells, and finally to the inner sell mass that we found on that first slide. And then it implants in the uterus.

And the mother's uterus produces some tissue and the little embryo produces some tissues, we call these the decidua. And they develop the placenta and the amnion. They are filled with fluids and support the baby and protect it during its development.

When eggs are taken from the laboratory, and all of this by the way can happen in the laboratory in a Petri dish, they simply take the egg from the mother, generally produced by hormone treatment that causes multiple ovulations, so that there are a number of eggs. There may be 6, 8, 10 eggs are produced by the mother. They will fertilize those in a dish in the laboratory, a Petri dish, in vitro, that means in glass.

This is in vivo, that means in life. The in vitro fertilization, they then will divide and the doctors watch them divide. And if they are going to harvest these for stem cells they generally wait to the inner cell mass stage down here and take them out. And the reason for that is that these cells do not like to be alone. And you have to be clever to get one of them to divide.

So they take them when they have lots of company after there is a number of cells in the inner cell mass. They take these cells and destroy the embryo in the process.

There is a technique used, first in laboratories in England, and then in this country, and I spent more than a half hour on the phone with two of the physicians in the one here in Virginia, where they go to the 8-cell stage, and this is all in a Petri dish in a laboratory now.

And they take a cell, and sometimes they get 2 cells from the 8-cell stage, and they do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that to make sure that the baby is not going to have some genetic deficiencies like Trisomy 21. You generally know it as Mongolism. And that is when just one of the chromosomes, there are three of them there. And if there are three of those chromosomes there, there are various degrees of Trisomy 21, but the baby then will be affected by that.

And you would like to have, most parents would like to have a normal baby. So they can do a preimplementation genetic diagnosis, and then they implant the remaining seven and sometimes six cells. And more than 2,000 times now, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby has been produced from that. I will have a slide a little later to show this.

But I would just like to note for now that that is no big surprise. In fact, the big surprise to me would be that the baby was not normal, because nature, for as long as we have had people here,

and happens in animals too, but nature has been doing exactly this, but they take not just one or two cells away, nature takes half the cells away. And from each half, nature grows a perfectly normal baby, and we call them identical twins.

So if nature can take half of the cells away and each half develops into a perfectly normal baby, it ought to be that you can take a cell or two away and the embryo would not even know it. If it does not know that half of the cells are gone, if it goes on and develops into a perfectly normal baby, each half does, why should it be affected at all if you take only one or two cells?

So the big surprise to me would have been if there was any effect of this on the baby. And it is that technique which had occurred to me earlier. But to kind of put this in perspective, I would like to look at the next slide. And this next slide, this next chart up depicts some of things that we have been talking about and some additional ones.

This is the fertilization process. We saw that in that former slide. But we did not see there the early development of the gametes or the sex cells. And they develop in the seminiferous tubules in the male, and in the ova of the female, those cells divide and divide again.

And most of these divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, that the chromosomes split so that the same number of chromosomes remain in the daughter cells. But in one of these processes there is a meiotic division called meiosis where the chromosomes do not divide, so that when the cells split, each daughter cell has only half as many chromosomes.

You see, that is necessary because the chromosomes are going to be joined from the female and from the male, and you now need to end up with the right number of chromosomes, not twice as many chromosomes. Because if that happened, the embryo would certainly die.

By the way, it is really interesting that in plants, when you have what is called polyploidy, that is what this is called when you have polyploidy, which is more than the diploid, which is the double, and there is a haploid number here, and there is a diploid number when the two haploids come together.

In plants it just makes them bigger and prettier, and the flowers brighter colored and so forth. That works well for plants, but for humans and all other animals, by the way it is fatal.

So this depicts the fertilization process and they combine to form the embryo, and then the embryo divides again and again. And we see there the same types of depictions that we saw previously.

The second little sequence here shows cloning. And Dolly the sheep was the first clone that the public knew about anyway that was produced. In cloning what happens is, that you take an egg cell, and you take the nucleus from the egg cell. You remove the nucleus, so now you have an egg cell with no nucleus there. And then you take a nucleus from a donor cell. This is a general somatic. By soma, that means body, somatic cell. You take the nucleus from that cell, and you put it inside the egg cell.

Now all of the genetic material is not in the nucleus. Most of the genetic material that determines who you are, whether you are male or female, tall or short, blond or brunette, going to be tall and thin or short and stout, most of that is in the nucleus. But in the cytoplasm here are a lot of control factors. Ribonucleic Acid, so called RNA and then messages are sent back and forth between the cytoplasm and the nucleus.

And so there are a lot of control factors here in the cytoplasm that when this nucleus from a skin cell or whatever is put inside this egg cell, it is controlled by these control factors in the cytoplasm under appropriate circumstances, so that it now behaves as if it were an embryonic cell. And that is because of the control factors here.

Of course, what the offspring is going to look like now is what the individual looked like from which the donor cell was taken. I was privileged to go to a little dairy in my district that is probably unique in all of the world. He happened to have the best Holstein cow in America, which probably means the best Holstein cow in the world, because we have some of the best cattle in the world.

Her name was Zena. And a cloning company wanted to work with him. And so he cloned two daughters of Zena. And then Zena broke her back and she had to be put down. But he had Zena's daughters. It was very interesting. The daughters did not look exactly like Zena. Why shouldn't they? And that is because of the black and white pigment, the general distribution, whether they are mostly white or mostly black is controlled by the genes.

But the actual pattern is kind of an accident of development. And so the two daughters had exactly the same genetic composition as their mother, looked somewhat different. They both had roughly the same amount of black and white, but it was distributed a little differently. And so you could see there the effects of the factors at work during the development of the embryo.

The third little sequence down here shows us parthogenesis. Parthogenesis is when an offspring develops just from the ova. That can only happen if this meiotic division does not occur, because the ovum has to, and it says that here, induce the egg to keep all of its chromosomes. This is kind of easy to do with salamanders and frogs and so forth. There is a lot of parthenogenic embryonic studies that are done with these, with these animals.

But now of course it is going to have exactly the same genetic makeup as the mother. I do not know if we ever have a documented case of this happening in humans. But you can certainly induce it in some of the lower animals.

The next chart now shows us the four processes, the potential sources of stem cells that were described here in the white paper produced by the President's Council on Bioethics, called alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Gingrey used the term pluripotent. I would like to note just for a moment what that means.

The embryo itself, when it is first fertilized, is totipotent, it can produce any and all cells, including the decidua. These are the cells that will produce the amnion and corion to support the embryo. By the time it gets to several divisions, even the eight-cell stage, it has now become only pluripotent. A single cell will not be able to produce all of the tissues of the body.

If it could produce everything, maybe produce all of the issues of the body, but not the decidua, if it could produce all of those, it would simply, as Dr. Gingrey mentioned, be another embryo and the ethical argument would start all over.

But it is my understanding, and I was pleased to learn this, because I did not know before I got involved in this, I do not think that we knew until very recently with research, when the embryo went from totipotent to pluripotent, but you do not want totipotent cells, you want only pluripotent cells; that is why the name of this article.

There are several different techniques, four of them, and three of them are shown here. The last one will be on the next slide. Altered nuclear transfer. This is an interesting one. You will see that it looks very much like the cloning.

But what they do before they put the donor cell is they turn out, turn off some of the genes in the donor cell. Generally they are the genes that would produce the decidua. So you do not end up with an embryo, you end up with a mass of dividing cells that have all of the cell types the embryo would have, but they are not organized as an embryo.

So the argument is made that since it is not an embryo, you can take the cells from it. And then you turn the gene back on, because in your stem cell line, you want to have a normal cell, so you turn the gene back on.

There is another variant of this, which is interesting and might have less ethical arguments. Because the ethical argument here might be that you are simply producing a deformed fetus. If a fetus is born deformed, you do not take it and kill it, so why should you kill this? You have intentionally deformed it.

Now the proponents of this will argue that it is really not a fetus because it has no chance of ever developing into a baby. But that argument kind of goes away if you use this technique.

Because what they do here is to enhance the cells that produce the embryonic stem cell growth so that it cannot produce the whole baby.

You haven't disrupted, changed the embryonic makeup; you simply enhanced the activity of some of the cells. So this altered nuclear transfer oocyte-assisted reprogramming is what it is called. And obviously we need a lot of animal experimentation, which is what the bill provides for.

This is the technique that I had suggested to the President. I met him at an event shortly after I went to NIH, and I talked to some of the doctors there. They had an open laboratory there and invited the staff out and Members out. I think I was probably the only Member that was there.

But they were talking about the potential of embryonic stem cell research. They didn't know what position the President was going to take; and of course you can't get inside their head, but my feeling was that they believed that the President was going to permit the use of surplus embryos and use Federal money for that. He, of course, did not do that.

But I asked them during this discussion, if in the development of identical twins you can take half the cells away and each half produces a perfectly normal baby, why shouldn't you be able to take one or two cells away to produce a stem cell line from, and then the rest of the embryo would produce a perfectly normal baby? And they said, yes, that ought to be possible.

And this is just depicted here. You have taken a cell away and you developed it into an embryonic stem cell line. That is easier said than done, because these cells don't like to be alone. And now two doctors say they have done it; Verlinksy and Lanza both say that they have successfully developed a stem cell line from a single cell. But both of them did it creatively by giving this cell some company, and after developing a sufficient number of like cells, they then could take the company cells away, and they had a pure embryonic stem cell line.

The last one here is a really interesting one, and that is the idea that you could take cells from an embryo which was clinically dead, like a person could be clinically dead but their organs are still good; that is how we do organ transplants. So maybe there is a time when an embryo is clinically dead, but the cells are still alive. It does not have the organizational capacity to produce an embryo, but yet the cells are still alive. There has been a lot of research on this, and, yes, that is a possibility.

The argument might be, gee, what kind of confidence could you have? You have got a good stem cell line from an embryo that was dead? But the counterargument would be, and one of our colleagues has a lung transplant here in the House and one of my very good friends here had a double lung transplant and lived with it for a long number of years, and both of those came from people who were clinically dead.

The next chart shows a really interesting one. And if this could be made to work, it is better than any of the others because you now would end up with embryonic stem cells that were a genetic match for the person that you were going to treat. And we won't take the time to go through these, but these are all techniques of trying to convince the donor cell, this is the donor, this is the guy with Parkinson's disease or the child with diabetes. You take the donor cell now and you use embryonic stem cell, the cytoplasm of the embryonic stem cell to confuse the donor cell nucleus so that it thinks it is an embryonic stem cell. And if you can do that, it is called de-differentiation, you have now taken the de-differentiated state, if you could do that, this would be the best of all worlds, because not only do you have a stem cell, you have a stem cell that is generically identical to the person you are going to treat so you don't have any rejection.

Now, we don't know if this is going to work or not, and what this bill does is to authorize the NIH to expend Federal funds to explore all of these techniques.

The next slide shows a phenomenon, and I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey to make a brief comment. We will be closing here in about 7 minutes, but this is what led me to believe that you could take cells from an early embryo without hurting it, because nature does this all the time. It is called identical twinning. Sometimes they divide at the two-cell stage and sometimes as late as the inner-cell mass stage. And my understanding is that you can tell when the division occurred by how they present. If they present at birth in a common amnion, the division probably occurred at the two-cell stage. If they present in the uterus with two different amnions, the division probably occurred at the inner-cell mass stage. And I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey, in his many deliveries, if he has had a chance to verify if this was true.

I thank the gentleman very much. I had forgotten that he had identical twins and is very familiar with this, not just as a physician but as a father.

I want to close with a note that a very fortuitous thing has happened, and let me put the next chart up that simply is a page from this White Paper that refers to this technique and that credits me with this proposal early in this process.

After I suggested this to the President, a very interesting thing had happened after that with a dialogue between Karl Rove and the White House, and they were, in effect, carrying out simultaneous monologues and thought they were dialoguing. And that very frequently happens, one of our big problems in this world, which is why, I guess, we have a State Department, because sometimes people think they are dialoguing and they really are carrying on simultaneous monologues.

But during this 5 years this technology has developed to the point that the British now are doing this preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And I am sure he won't mind if I mention his name. Richard Doerflinger made one of the greatest contributions to this dialogue of anybody when he suggested, ``Roscoe, the first thing that you need to do with that cell that you take from this eight-cell stage is to establish a repair kit for the baby.''

Now, we are kind of trying to do that with freezing cord blood. That is the reason you freeze cord blood, because later you may need it. That, by the way, is not embryonic stem cell; those are the adult stem cells. The baby's is an adult when it is born. As a matter of fact, the day you are born, you start to die. You are an adult when you are born. The embryonic is when you are first starting to develop; it is not an embryo, it is a fetus at that time. And the tissues are really in terms of the genetic development; they are adult tissues.

But if now the first thing that a parent does with that cell that is taken is to establish a repair kit and take a second cell, because the six cells that were implanted do just as well as the seven that were implanted, with the second cell, do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, if they wish. But the critical thing is that we would get the stem

cell lines now from the surplus cells, from the repair kit.

So now I think that all ethical arguments disappear, because the parents are making two decisions that we are not a part of; we don't even get involved. They make a decision to have in vitro fertilization; then they make the decision to establish a repair kit. And only after the repair kit is established do we ask for some surplus cells from the repair kit.

I am very pleased that there is this possibility, because I understand, and I have a number of prolife friends who have decided that since these surplus embryos are going to be thrown away anyhow that you may as well try to get some medical benefit from them. That may be, for some, a compelling argument. And if I didn't believe that there was an alternative to that, it might be a more compelling argument.

But since there is an alternative to that and we don't have to offend the sensibilities of a large number of people in the country, and I am one of them; I am a little different, I guess, because I am a scientist and understand these things a little from that perspective, too. But I am devoutly prolife.

And I am just so pleased, Mr. Speaker, that we will have the opportunity shortly in the House as they are doing in the Senate to vote on a bill that can go to the President's desk, where he can sign the bill and say, I am really happy that we have here a bill that gives all of the promise of embryonic stem cell research without destroying or even hurting embryos.

Mr. Chairman, today oil is above $70 a barrel. The world has either peaked or will very shortly peak in oil production. We will, of necessity, have to transition to renewables.

I am not going to vote for any drilling anywhere until we have a rational plan for transitioning to renewables. We have now run out of time and run out of energy. Additional drilling will buy us a little time to give us a little energy, but I will not vote for that until we have a rational plan.

Secondly, Mr. Chairman, we are now leaving our kids the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. In all conscience, can we also deny them the oil and the gas that they are going to need for their civilization?

There is a true moral element to this. I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids and two great grandchildren. I want to leave them a little oil, please. Vote ``no.''

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 42) to ensure that the right of an individual to display the flag of the United States on residential property not be abridged.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I have a constituent and a friend, Hugh Warner, who runs American Flag Service. He sells a lot of flags, one of the biggest flag salespersons in the country; and Hugh several years ago pointed out to me a problem that some of his buyers had. These were purchasers who were members of a homeowner's association or a condominium association who, when they flew their flag, were admonished by the association that they could not fly a flag on their condo or on their townhouse or home. So, as a result of those problems that Mr. Warner found several of his people had, as a result of some research that we did, we filed H.R. 42.

This is a very simple bill. We believe that it is a reasonable compromise between the rights of an association, homeowner's association, condominium association, to maintain the value of their properties and the rights of the individual to fly his country's flag.

We are not alone in being advised of this problem, because I have here in my hand newspaper reports from a number of newspapers that are reporting actions, there must be six or eight here, by States that were addressing this same problem; and they each one have passed bills that says that the homeowner's association may place reasonable limits on flying the flag, but they cannot prohibit the flying of the flag.

I will make these a part of the Record. We have here some letters from several organizations who are supporting this bill. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, AMVETS, the Military Officers Association of America, and the Gold Star Wives of America are all in support of this bill.

It is a very simple bill. It simply says that a homeowner or condominium owner cannot be prohibited from flying the flag of his country. It also says that the association may place reasonable limits on the time and the manner of displaying the flag.

We think that this is a commonsense accommodation of the rights of the associations to maintain the value of their properties and the rights of Americans to fly the flag.

Mr. Speaker, it is hard for me to understand how a flag outside my condo could depreciate the value of my condo. I would just think that Americans flying flags should increase the value of whatever it flies on.

Veterans of foreign Wars

of the United States,

Washington, DC, June 26, 2006.

Hon. Roscoe Bartlett,

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Congressman Bartlett: On behalf of the 2.4 million

members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States,

VFW, and our Auxiliaries, I wish to express our views on the

preservation and proper display of our national flag.

The VFW views our national banner as a living symbol. Flags

and flag education are a hallmark of our Citizenship

Education program. We promote frequent display of the flag,

especially on national holidays and days of remembrance. The

flag should only be flown during daylight hours, unless

illuminated. For a complete guide to the proper display of

our national colors, please view our Web site: www.vfw.org. In addition to proper national flag display guidelines

maintained on our Web site, we believe that any display of

the flag should keep with local traditions and norms. The

bearer of the flag should consider the impact to the

community and the flag. The flag should be the correct size

for the method of display, thus keeping it from becoming an

obstruction. The damage to the flag needs to be considered

such as displaying a flag on a highway, which exposes the

flag to stains and fabric rips.

Congressman Bartlett, I thank you for your addressing this

issue. Your recognition of America's current and future

veterans is very much appreciated by the Veterans of Foreign

Wars. If any member of my staff or I may be of assistance, do

not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Dennis Cullinan,

Director, National Legislative Service.

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

Mr. Speaker, there is a present and growing interest in our country in the potential for the materials created from stem cells to produce quite miraculous cures. Indeed, we have been working with adult stem cells for more than 30 years, and there are a large number of applications in medicine.

We have been working with embryonic stem cells for far less than that, but because of their primordial nature, the experts in the research field and the medical field believe that there ought to be more potential from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem cells.

But the way we now create embryonic stem cell lines presents ethical problems for a large number of American citizens, indeed, I believe, more than half of them, because all embryonic stem cells lines now are produced by destroying embryos. But because of the potentially vast potential for application of embryonic stem cells to medical cures, there is an increasing interest in the possibility of ethically creating embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic cell-like lines of tissues. And that is what we are going to spend a few moments talking about this evening.

I am joined on the floor this evening by Representative Osborne, who has a longstanding interest in this subject. And I would like to recognize him now and to commend him for his knowledge and interest in this subject. Congressman Osborne.

Thank you. I appreciate you mentioning that recent article on the application of stem cell therapy to these paralyzed mice and the quite miraculous response.

It is kind of ironic and teleologically difficult to explain, to understand why the nerve tissue outside the central nervous system can heal itself. If you cut your hand or your leg, and you lose feeling in your finger or your foot, by and by that feeling will return as the nerves grow. If you cut a nerve in the central nervous system, it doesn't regrow, which is why there are so many paralyzed people from spinal cord injuries and from diseases like multiple sclerosis and so forth.

Stem cell applications provide the hope that we might be able to grow nerve cells and implant them in these patients so that they could recover some activity. And this paper that Congressman Osborne referred to in mice gives us hope that that is a real possibility.

Mr. Speaker, I have here in this chart a very abbreviated sequence in the fertilization and the development of the embryo. It begins here with what is called a zygote. A zygote is made up of the two germ cells which have united up here before this one is shown. And then it goes through several developments, through the morula stage and the blastula stage. The blastula is shown here. And finally, the gastrula. And these are sequence. And you will see more of this in the next chart.

But when we get to the gastrula stage, we now have the production of what is called three germ layers. This cell that began up here as a single cell produced by the chromosomes that came from the ovum, the female sex cell, and the sperm, the male sex cell, have now divided again and again and again, and finally these cells begin a process which we call differentiation. They are now differentiating into what will ultimately become all the organ systems of the body.

In this early differentiation, we have what we call the three stem cell lines. We have the ectoderm, which is the external layer; the mesoderm, meaning middle; and we have the endoderm. These we refer to as the three germ layers. And then, of course, we have also the quite unique germ cells themselves. In the female that will, of course, be the ovum from the ovary. In the male it will be the sperm from the testicle.

Now, in each of these three basic germ cell lines, we have a stem cell, which in the ectoderm, it will differentiate into your skin, it will differentiate into your nervous system, the central nervous system, the spinal cord and all the nerves in your body. The mesoderm, the stem cells there will differentiate into the major part of your body. All the muscle, the cardiac muscle, the skeletal muscle, all of the bones, and all of the blood develops from the mesoderm.

The blood is particularly interesting because persisting even in the adult are stem cells for producing blood cells because we keep producing blood cells. They keep breaking down and are removed from the circulation by the liver and the kidney; so we keep producing new ones. So even in the adult, you can see these stem cells, which produce a great variety of blood cells. In the bone marrow, it produces the erythrocytes and the thrombocytes and what we call the polymorphonuclear leukocytes, which are part of the white cells. And then we have the entoderm. There is not much mass of entoderm in our body. That doesn't mean it is not important. The pancreas, the thyroid gland, and the lining of our intestinal system and the lungs and so forth all originate from entoderm.

It is very interesting that these cells retain their original inheritance kind of even in the adult. When you are 50, 60 years old, if you get a cancer and that cancer metastasizes, if it is a cancer on mesodermal tissue, it will metastasize only to other tissues that develop from mesoderm. That is really quite interesting that they have retained that much of their original characteristics, of their original selectivity.

The next chart shows in a little more detail the fertilization process and the development of the embryo. And I am spending a couple of minutes on this, Mr. Speaker, because I think it is important to understand what is being done in the scientific world and what the ethical problems are for those who believe that the embryo is a person in miniature with all of the genetic capabilities to produce a complete human person and therefore it ought not be destroyed.

This is a reproductive tract of the female here, and it shows the vagina and the uterus, and then it shows the two fallopian tubes. And the little square here indicates what is shown in this big chart here. It is just one half of the reproductive system. Here the uterus is split in half. There would be another

mirror image of this on the other side. And it shows here that the ovary, they mature roughly one a month in a female, once every 28 days. And then the ovum erupts from the ovary, and it is almost always, not always but almost always, picked up by a kind of a funnel end of the fallopian tube, which is called the infundibulum.

Once in a while it is not picked up and the ovum will go on out here in the body cavity, and the sperm, which are released, of course, down in the vagina. They go up into the uterus, and then they swim against the current, by the way, because there is some little cilia in here. This ovum has no motility on its own, and it slowly moves down the fallopian tube by cilia in the walls not shown here, which are beating and moving it down, and the sperm swim against that. And some of them will make it out the end of the fallopian tube clear out into body cavity, and if there is an ovum out there, they may fertilize it. And then the fertilized ovum will implant on some adjacent body tissue, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy. Of course, the body is not meant to develop a baby out there; so that needs to be interrupted by surgery or the mother may die.

But as the little diagram here shows, here are the sperm coming up and they fertilize the egg way up into the fallopian tube several days before it will implant down in the uterus. There is quite a miracle that happens here. There are millions of those sperm, and as soon as one of them makes it through the wall of the ovum to fertilize it, there is immediate chemical change in the wall of the ovum and no other sperm can get through because it would be absolutely disastrous if another sperm got through. That would produce when we call polyploidy, and that would result in the death of the embryo. Now, polyploidy reacts very differently in the plant world because that is how we make giant flowers and super fruits and vegetables and so forth.

We simply produce polyploidy, and that makes everything brighter and better and sweeter smelling. But in animals, humans and all other animals, this polyploidy would produce death.

So now the egg is fertilized, and we call it a zygote. So now here is the zygote. It begins its trek down the fallopian tube, and it takes several days. Here we have day 4 and day 5 and day 6 and 7, and you see it is going up around day 7, 8, or 9 before it finally implants in the wall of the uterus. But as it goes down the fallopian tube here, it divides to produce two cells.

Then it divides again to produce four cells and then eight cells, and we will come back to talk about this eight-cell stage because it has a special significance in one of the techniques that may be exploited to produce some ethically generated embryonic stem cell lines, and then it goes on to divide. Again, it goes through the morula stage and then it goes to the blastula stage and then the gastrula stage, and we saw that on the previous chart.

I would like to note that it is about here at the inner-cell mass stage, about at this stage, that the embryo is generally taken, not, of course, from the reproductive tract because all of this can also be done in a petri dish in the laboratory. You simply superovulate the mother and she may produce a dozen or so eggs, and you wash those eggs out, and then you put them in a petri dish and expose them to the sperm, and they fertilize.

And then they begin to develop, and they grow and develop into all of the different stages that we see here. And so in the petri dish when they have developed to the inner-cell mass stage, which, remember, is the stage where we saw that they were going to develop into the three germ lines, this is the stage at which they take the cells. They simply kill the embryo, and they take the cells from the embryo to produce an embryonic stem cell line.

Several years ago the President issued an executive order that said that we could not use Federal money if we were getting our stem cell lines from destroying these embryos but we could use Federal money in continuing with research on stem cell lines that were then in existence. The President said, and some may have indicated that that was the case, that there were probably 60 or so stem cell lines in existence then. If there were, they have now dwindled to about 20, more or less, stem cell lines, all of which are contaminated with mouse feeder cells.

I might spend just a moment to indicate what these feeder cells are. When we take these cells out of the inner-cell mass, these cells really do not like being alone or even nearly alone. They like company. And so they frequently put them in the company of other cells so that they can reproduce because, if separated, it is more difficult to get them to reproduce. So taking them from the fellowship they find in the embryo and putting them in a petri dish to tissue culture them, many of them will refuse to divide. But if you put them in the company of other cells, in this case the mouse feeder cells, then they divide. Well, this has now contaminated these present stem cell lines so that none of them can be used for therapy. It does not disqualify them for research; so some meaningful research is still going on.

There are four different potential approaches to producing embryonic stem cells without harming embryos or embryonic stem cell-like cells that could produce tissue cultures. And we have a bill, H.R. 5526. This is a companion bill to the Santorum-Specter bill in the Senate. Mr. Speaker, as you know, the politics of this is that we have a bill that has been in the Senate for quite a while known as the Castle bill, Mike Castle from Delaware.

What this bill does is to permit the use of Federal money to take some of those surplus embryos which are in our reproduction clinics. When a mother goes in to have in vitro fertilization, as I indicated, they will superovulate the mother with hormones. They get a number of eggs, they will fertilize them in a petri dish, and then they get a dozen, more or less, embryos. They then look at these embryos under a microscope, and they choose the best two or three and implant them in the mother's uterus because they do not all take. My daughter-in-law has just gone through a procedure, and at first, we thought that she had twins, and now it is just a single baby, for which we are very thankful.

The fertilized eggs which are left which have now become embryos are frequently refrozen. The parents pay to refreeze them to keep them, because something may happen to this baby and maybe they will want a second child or a third child, and they will stay frozen for quite a while; so they put them in the freezer. But by and by, they will decide that they do not want more children; so they will no longer pay for keeping the eggs frozen in which case, the fertilized eggs, they are simply discarded. And what the Castle bill says is that parents donate these embryos that are going to discarded anyhow to medical research and to the development of stem cell lines that, hopefully, will provide miraculous cures of many diseases that Congressman Osborne mentioned, for which we now hold out high hopes.

The problem that pro-life people have with this is if you are looking generically at 400,000 surplus embryos, and that is about what is out there, about 400,000, you may make the argument that if they are going to be discarded anyhow, why not get some medical good from them? But there are two problems that pro-life people have ethically with this. One is that before you decide to destroy the embryo, you are going to look at it under the microscope to make sure it is healthy because you are going to want to get cells from a healthy embryo.

So it is not 400,000 embryos that you are concerned with now. It is one embryo under the microscope. And when you are looking at that embryo under the microscope, it could be the next Albert Einstein, it could be the next Beethoven. And, again, we are not dealing with the 400,000 out there. We are dealing with the one under the microscope. That is the one for which we have responsibility, and how could you kill the next Einstein or Beethoven?

And another concern that the pro-life community has is that if we permit the destruction of these surplus embryos, who knows, but what we may be producing more surplus embryos so we will have more embryos to use for establishing stem cell lines? So there is a real need, Mr. Speaker, to develop techniques to ethically get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic stem cell-like lines that will have the potential of embryonic stem cells.

Just a moment to talk about how embryonic stem cells are different

from adult stem cells. Adult stem cells have already gone through a lot of differentiation. They are either of ectodermal, mesodermal, or entodermal origin. They are already destined to become nerve tissue or muscle or blood or the lining of the gut or something like that. And it is true that we can sometimes kind of reverse that differentiation, and we will talk about that in a few moments. And it is also true that even without doing that, you can make some applications to the development of tissues for that specific part of the body. But because of their primordial nature, because of their ability, we call it pluripotency. They can produce any tissue in the body. Totipotency means that they cannot only produce every tissue in the body, but they can produce every tissue that the embryo needs so that it can develop into a full baby. See, the embryo is not just an embryo because about half of the tissues of the early embryo end up with what we call trophoblast or the amnion and corion which attaches the baby to the mother's wall, protects the baby in an enclosed, warm fluid environment while it develops during its 9 months.

These ethical concerns have resulted in a lot of study by a lot of people to see if there is a way of doing it, where we can get the potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, which any one line can produce any and every tissue in the body theoretically.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not there yet, because these embryonic stem cells, much like an energetic teenager, just want to divide. They want to do things. They want to grow.

There are some who feel that their tendency to just grow and divide is going to be very hard to control and you are going to end up producing tumors and cancers and that sort of thing when you put them in the body. But there are a lot of knowledgeable, professional people out there who believe that we can control that, that there is incredible potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, so we are trying to get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic-like stem cell lines that avoid these ethical confrontations.

The next chart shows us three of the four that were looked at by a special commission that the President set up on bioethics. Several years ago they looked at the various possibilities out there and they looked at the pros and cons, and they have a little white paper on this subject which is worth the hour or so that it takes to read it because it goes through all of these techniques and it looks at the pros and the cons of these techniques.

First, we have here kind of a recapitulation of some things that we have been talking about. This shows the development of the gammies. They go through a process of division, and they divide again and again. Most of those divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, where the chromosomes split and the daughter cells have as many chromosomes as the original cell.

But once in that process there is a division which we call a meiotic division, called meiosis, and in that division the chromosomes split and half of them go to one cell and half to another cell, and that produces a gamete or a sex cell which has only half the requisite number of chromosomes, which we call the haploid number of chromosomes.

Of course, the design now is that these two cells will come together in a process which we call fertilization, when the sperm will fertilize the egg, and then we have the single cell embryo, and then it divides and here we have the 3-day and the 5- to 7-day embryo, which we saw in more detail in previous charts.

Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot these days about cloning. Dolly the Sheep was the first cloned mammal, and this little sequence here shows how they do cloning.

What they do in cloning is to take an egg cell, and this egg cell has a big cytoplasm, this is what is outside the nucleus, and it has the nucleus. The nucleus contains a lot of genetic material. It contains most of the genetic material that determines whether you are going to be a person or a frog, or whether you are going to be a male or a female.

But out in the cytoplasm are other proteins, protein-like substances, that have a lot of genetic capability too. What they do is pretty much control what goes on in the nucleus. So we have these RNA, ribonucleic acid out there, and these factors now control what goes on in the nucleus.

So if you take an egg and you take the nucleus out of the egg and then you take a donor cell, this is a somatic, which means body, take a cell from the body, and you now combine, you fuse these two cells, you take the cytoplasm from the egg nucleus from the donor cell, and you now have the nucleus from the donor cell in the environment of a cytoplasm from the egg and the factors in that cytoplasm now which control what happens inside the nucleus, with--everything is not detailed here. We kind of shocked this a little bit so the nucleus from the donor cell forgets it is the nucleus from a donor cell, so it now can be controlled by these control factors out in the cytoplasm.

This is now called cloning. So now we have an organism produced that looks nothing like the egg from which you took the nucleus. It now looks like the adult from which you took the somatic cell. So this is what cloning is.

By the way, we will have a chart a little later which shows this. Nature has been cloning for a very long time in a way, because every time we have a set of identical twins, one of them is a clone. I guess you could choose which one of the two you wanted to say was the clone. We will have a chart on that in a few minutes.

The next chart here shows three of the four techniques that are outlined in this report put out by the President's Bioethics Council.

Altered nuclear transfer. I showed the cloning one, because this is very much like cloning. As a matter of fact, the techniques you go through are the same laboratory techniques you go through with cloning.

But what you do here is to knock out a gene for normal development, and you do that before you put the nucleus in the sex cell from which you have removed the nucleus. So you now have deactivated a gene which is necessary for the complete development of the embryo. That gene happens to control the development of what we call decidua, which is the amnion and the chorian.

This cannot develop into a baby because it can't produce an amnion and a chorian, and so it is just a growth of tissues, all the kinds of tissues that are in a baby but not a baby, because you deactivated the gene necessary for the normal development.

What you do later, then, is turn that gene back on. It can never begin a baby. You turn that gene back on so the cells are normal cells, and then you can take cells from that to establish an embryonic stem cell line.

One can imagine, Mr. Speaker, the ethical objections which may be raised to this. But this is simply kind of a crippled child that you have produced here. We don't kill crippled children after they are out of the womb. Why should we kill crippled children produced in the laboratory?

Mr. Speaker, there is almost no technique against which some ethical objection could not be levied. In life, we are always making choices. When you look at the potential good from embryonic stem cell research, there is a level of risk that one is willing to take.

Every time I get in my car and drive down here to the Hill there is a risk involved. Not everybody who drives from Frederick down here makes it down. Every once in awhile there is a fatal accident on the way down here. But the value of what I am doing here I believe exceeds the risk that is involved in coming here, and so I come. It is that way with this nuclear transfer.

The second one of these is embryo biopsy, and I will come back to that in a little more detail later, because this is one I have been personally involved with for a number of years now. I spoke to the President about this before he came out with his executive order and have been working with people at NIH. So I will reserve more discussion of this until we come to a couple of charts a little later.

But let me just indicate that what one does here is to envision removing cells from an embryo without harming the embryo and then using the cell which you have removed to produce a tissue culture of embryonic stem cells. Then if you implant the cells remaining in a mother, they go on to produce

what appears to be a perfectly normal baby.

When I first suggested this several years ago, I did not know in the meantime there were going to be laboratories which were doing precisely this. It started in England, and now there are more than 2,000 babies born worldwide where a cell is taken, generally from the eight cell stage. Generally they get two cells, and they have taken that cell to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

This is to make sure the baby is not going to be mongoloid or have a genetic defect. If they find no defect from that single cell they have taken out, they implant the remaining cells in the mother, and more than 2,000 times now we have a perfectly normal baby, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born.

Mr. Speaker, I would be surprised if there was any effect. In a former life, I was privileged to get a doctorate in human physiology. I taught in medical school. I had a course in advanced embryology, and I knew that whenever we had identical twins, that half of the cells were taken away from the original embryo and each half became a perfectly normal baby.

So I argued and asked the researchers at NIH 4 or 5 years ago, was this a rational argument? I argued that if you could take half the cells away from the embryo and each half produced a perfectly normal baby, certainly you could take one or two cells away from the embryo and the embryo wouldn't even know it.

Now we have the potential for something which really is quite exciting, which we will come to a slide a little later and discuss that in more detail.

The last one here of these three, this altered nuclear transfer here and the embryo biopsy and cells from dead embryos, I have several slides in a few moments that we will go over cells from a dead embryo.

Many of these embryos are just not going to make it, which is why the clinician looks at them under the microscope before he implants them in the mother. They now have done a lot of observation and research to determine how early you can identify an embryo which is in effect dead. But like the person who is dead, you can still take organs from the person that are perfectly good for implanting in another person, and we do that all the time.

So it occurred to the researchers in this area that maybe when the embryo was dead, and by that we mean it did not have the ability to further divide, it was not going to become a baby and you could clearly identify that state, that maybe the cells in the embryo, at least some of them, were still quite normal and quite viable. So this whole procedure now presumes that we can identify dead embryos that are not going to make it, but they still have life, good cells in them.

So this procedure would be very analogous to taking organs from that young fellow who rides the motorcycle, my wife calls them ``donorcycles,'' and he has an accident and he is brain dead, but his tissues are still quite good, so they take the tissues from this dead person and implant them. We do that all the time. So there was a thought, and research, observations, seem to verify that indeed there is the possibility of doing that.

The next chart shows us a fourth technique, which is a very exciting one. If, in fact, we can do this, this holds enormous potential, because now we can avoid all of the rejection phenomena.

You see, if you develop a tissue from a embryonic stem cell line or an adult stem cell line and you now put that tissue in a person, it is foreign to them and it will be rejected. So we have a lot of medicines we give which makes them very susceptible to infections and so forth. We have medicines we give them now so they won't reject this tissue.

But in this reprogramming, you now could potentially take a cell from the patient and you could reprogram that cell. What they are doing here to reprogram is exploiting these very fascinating and powerful control factors which are out in the cytoplasm.

Here we have an embryonic cell and it has a cytoplasm, and you can crush the cell and you can now put the nucleus of the donor cell in, or infuse it with this stuff from the embryonic stem cell, and it will now control the nucleus and de-differentiate it and take it back to its primordial state so it now behaves as if it were a embryonic stem cell.

The only possible ethical criticism of this is that where do you get these sex cells to begin with? Well, if you get them by superovulation of the mother, there is some medical risk in superovulation. There is also the possibility, though, that we could dedifferentiate by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical, which would have the same effect on them as these control factors in the cytoplasm here; it is referred to as cell soup, and there are these little polypeptides in there that, like polypeptides that are in a ribonucleic acid which can control what happens in the nucleus. But you may also be able to affect what they do by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical which would kind of reprogram them.

And then the last thing here at the bottom simply looks at stem cells from mature organs. And the one that I mentioned, which is one frequently used, is from the bone marrow, because even in the adult, even today I still have stem cells in my bone marrow because my bone marrow is always making white blood cells and red blood cells and thrombocytes. They are the little cells that are responsible for the clotting of your blood.

Next, I have a chart, and I think there are several of these that look in more detail at Dr. Landry. And Dr. Landry is the one who first made the suggestion. He has proceeded with some vigor to explore the potential here for getting cells, good cells, from a clinically dead embryo. And, of course, the first thing you had to do was to develop a criteria for embryonic death. You need a dead embryo that still has good cells. And, again, let me use the analogy of the dead person from the auto accident who still has good organs. So this is a dead embryo who still has good cells. And it says here that we need a diagnostic test for embryonic death, because if one researcher is going to use cells from an embryo that he says was dead, there has to be some verifiable basis for declaring that the embryo was dead so other people would understand. So obviously it would be dead if he kills it, but it needs to be dead before he takes the cells from it.

Death is a question of medical fact, not law. We can't write a law that says what death is. And, indeed, clinical death now is not defined by law, it is defined by medical fact.

And these embryo do die, and they watch them. They are not dividing. They watch them for several days. They do not divide, and ultimately they just deteriorate, and they are gone. So the argument is that if you can identify when, in fact, they will never go on to develop an embryo, that at that point they are dead as far as any ability to produce a baby is concerned, and if you now do not wait for the several extra days to which deterioration would occur, the point of death, like the point of death from an auto accident where you can get good organs, at the point of death of the embryo, and when it will no longer develop into a baby, you now can take cells from which you can just have the stem cell lines.

The next chart shows a little more detail of this, and what it shows is that embryo 2 is dead. It shows that you can look at the embryo, and they look different, and it can be documented that, in fact, the embryos that are not going to go on to divide at a certain stage in their development look different. You can identify, you can say of a certainty this embryo will go on to divide, this embryo will not go on to divide. And so you can now make that determination. And when we have developed the techniques for this, and when we have determined that, in fact, we can develop stem cell lines from these, then we will have potentially a technique for getting embryonic stem cells without the destruction of an embryo because the embryo is already dead.

The next chart just is more detail of this. We can look at that quickly.

New criteria for embryonic death and natural history study of arrested embryos. They are arrested; that is, that the development stops at a certain stage. It won't continue beyond that. They observed 444 nonviable in vitro fertilized embryos; 142 were arrested at

the stage of an immature morula, about day 5, and we saw it in one of the previous charts. And they determined that these embryos were not going to divide because they just kept looking at them, and they ultimately deteriorated.

So if they, in fact, have good cells, and they have taken cells from these embryos, and then cells, in fact, are viable, and they can be cultured, and so with more research on this, this is a possibility for getting embryonic stem cell lines.

The next chart shows what happens in twinning. And it was this knowledge about I guess it was 5 years ago now when before the President gave his Executive Order, there was an open house at NIH, and staff and members were invited out to talk with the researchers at NIH about the potential for embryonic stem cell research. And there were a lot of staff members there; I think I was the only Member there. And I remember thinking as we were talking about embryonic stem cell research that this is what happened. And it doesn't always happen at this stage, by the way, but this shows the development of twins splitting at the inner cell mass stage. The inner cell mass splits; now the embryo splits in half, and now you have two babies. This also could occur at the two-cell stage. It splits in half at the two-cell stage. And you know roughly when it split by how the babies present. In this case, the babies present in two separate amnions. If it is split here at the two- cell stage, they present in a single amnion.

But what this told me was that obviously you could take cells from an embryo and not hurt the embryo, because in this case half the cells are taken from the embryo. This half went on to produce a baby, and this half went on to produce a baby. So if you could take half the cells from the embryo, and each half produced a normal baby, then why couldn't you take a cell or two from the embryo without hurting the embryo? And I asked the researchers at NIH shouldn't that be a possibility? And they told me, yes, that should be a possibility.

And I was in an event with the President and mentioned this conversation to him, and a couple of days later Karl Rove called and said that he had followed up on this at the President's request, and they couldn't do that. I said, ``Karl, either they didn't understand your question, or they are funning you, because these are the same people that can go inside of a cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in the cell. And they are telling you they can't take a cell or two out of these big embryos? Of course they can.'' And a female sex cell is big. That ovum is a giant cell compared to the somatic cells that they are taking a nucleus out of.

So he said, ``I will go ask them again.'' And so he went back and asked them again. He came back and said, ``Roscoe, they tell me they can't do that.'' So the President came down with his Executive Order which says that the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money to do research on are those that are now already in existence.

It was a couple of years after that when NIH researchers were sitting in my office that I learned what had happened. Mr. Speaker, this is illustrative of what happens so many times in our society. When we think we are carrying on a dialogue, we are really carrying on simultaneous monologues, and there was just a misunderstanding.

What they told him was that they weren't sure that they could develop a stem cell line from a single cell taken from an early embryo. And that was true. He interpreted it as saying that they couldn't take the cell from the early embryo. Well, what we wanted to do with our research was animal experimentation, which would determine whether or not you could develop a stem cell line from a single embryo. And, as luck would have it, Mr. Speaker, the medical community has kind of almost passed us by now, because in the 5 years since I first started exploring this with NIH and then the White House and then a number of meetings with NIH since then, as I mentioned, in England they have developed techniques for taking a cell from an early embryo, the H cell stage, in the laboratory, doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, making sure there was no genetic defect, and then implanting the remaining cells, the embryo, in the mother, and more than 2,000 times worldwide now we have what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born.

I keep saying what appears to be because we haven't watched these babies for 60, 80, 90 years, however long they will live, to make sure there is no defect. But I would be enormously surprised, and so would the professional community, enormously surprised, if there are any defects. Because if there were, then every twin ought to have a big defect because they represent only half the cells from the original embryo.

In our conversations with a number of people, we were talking with Richard Doerflinger, who represents the Council of Catholic Bishops. And I really want to credit him with making an incredible contribution to this dialogue, because what he said was, ``Roscoe, what you do with that first cell you take is not a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. What you do with that cell is to establish a repair kit.'' So that now any time during the life of this baby, 1 year, 10 years, 50 years, 80 years old, when they have a medical problem that could benefit from the development of tissues from embryonic stem cell line, it can be developed from their embryonic stem cell line because you have got this repair kit available for them.

What this did, Mr. Speaker, is to open up the possibility when we are using Federal funds of avoiding, I think, any ethical concern, because the parents will have already made two decisions: one, to do in vitro fertilization; and, secondly, to take a cell to establish a repair kit and maybe to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis if they want to take a second cell. And frequently they get two cells rather than one from this early embryo, and it doesn't matter if you take one or two, the other cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby.

So if this is a potential for the future, the stem cell lines could be achieved by simply asking the parents to donate a few cells from their repair kit. So now the decisions made to get to the repair kit have been decisions that parents make in what they think is the best interest of their child. They want to have one, they can't have one naturally, so they do in vitro fertilization, and they want to make sure that the child has the protection of a repair kit.

And, by the way, we kind of do that now when we freeze cord blood. Cord blood has nowhere near the potential of a cell taken from this early embryo, but it is that person, and for whatever you can get from it, at least there are going to be no rejection phenomena.

The next chart shows a bit of one of the pages of the white paper on the President's Council on Bioethics, and I have highlighted here. It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. Again, this was written now in about late 2001 or 2002, but since that time we have had two researchers, Verlinsky and Landry, both of whom claim that they have developed a stem cell line from a single cell. That was what NIH thought might be difficult to do, but there are now two researchers who say they have done that.

They say it may be some time that stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells, extracted from early embryos, and in ways that do no harm to the embryo. Well, they have more than 2,000 babies born by extracting these cells. But, again, if we simply use surplus cells from a repair kit, we have avoided, I think, any meaningful ethical objection.

But the initial success of the Verlinsky group's efforts, I mentioned Verlinsky and now Landry more recently, and note here an asterisk. And they say, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett as far back as 2001.'' And you can see it has been for 5 years since I have been pursuing this possibility.

The next chart and our last chart kind of is a summary, Mr. Speaker, of what we have been talking about. And what this does is to look at the classical development when you go to the eight-cell stage, and then it develops into a blastula, and you can now either implant that in the uterus, or you can kill it to get stem cell lines.

You can now either implant that in the uterus or you can kill it to get

stem cell lines. Ethically, that is not something that I am comfortable with. It is not something I think a majority of our people are comfortable with, or you can go through what we have just gone through, take a single cell from this blastom here and implant the remaining cells, let them develop, implant them and then develop a stem cell line from this single cell, then the altered nuclear transfer that we talked about.

This kind of summarizes the potential from those two techniques, and again, what we have done to make this ethical is altered nuclear transfer. We have shut off one of the genes in the cytoplasm so that the nucleus now cannot be induced to make all of the tissue necessary to produce a baby. It produces all of the tissues necessary for baby, but not the tissue necessary for growth of the baby in the womb, the amnion and the chorion.

The important thing, Mr. Speaker, is, and I want to be politically correct for just a moment here. It is not just that we want to do things that are politically popular. We certainly do not want to do things that are politically unpopular because we all like to get reelected and return here, but we want to do things which have medical meaning.

The Senate, I believe, very shortly is going to vote on the Castle bill. The President has said that he will veto that. Many people, and they come to our offices, these children with diabetes and so forth, people who have relatives who have Parkinson's disease or any one of the wasting diseases of the nervous system that might be treated with this, and they are incensed we are not doing something about this and using their money to develop what they think is enormous potential from these stem cell lines.

The President will veto because he is devoutly pro-life for which I respect him. He will veto the Castle bill. We need to have on the President's desk not just for political purposes, although I think that is important, but because of the enormous potential from embryonic stem cell lifelines, we need to have a bill on his desk that will permit the use, the ethical use, of Federal funds to produce these stem cell lines from which we might get enormous good.

The miracles of medicine have increased lifelines. I just passed my 80th birthday. I am wondering when I am going to enter mid-life. My grandfather would have never thought of entering mid-life after his 80th year, but we have really miracles of medicine today, and this provides miracles greater than we have seen.

Now we have enormous potential here, and I hope, Mr. Speaker, we have the political courage to do the right thing for the American people and get this bill, along with the Castle bill on the President's desk so that the President has a bill which promises the miracles, potential miracles of embryonic stem cell research ethically.

Mr. Speaker, we must encourage the development of new mine safety technologies and not hinder advances. Remember that when an accident occurs underground all power is shut off and our miners are working in the dark, perhaps unaware of what has taken place, and under stressful conditions.

Recent discussions about advancing mine safety technology have focused on a few distinct areas including self-contained self-rescuers, emergency shelters, two-way communications equipment, tracking devices, and lifelines.

Specifically, Mr. Speaker, I would like to address the references to self-contained self-rescuers in section 2 and section 6 of S. 2803. It is important to clarify that in no way should the requirements under section 2 discourage improving the design of self-contained self- rescuers.

A self-contained self-rescuer, SCSR, is a respiratory device used by miners for the purpose of escape during mine fires and explosions; it provides the wearer a closed-circuit supply of breathable air for a period of time that varies from model to model.

While the current MSHA regulations require that miners be provided with SCSRs that protect for a least 1 hour, some SCSRs on the market provide longer protection, approaching 2 hours, and research is under way to develop longer lasting SCSRs.

Mr. Speaker, in a 2001 study, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH, reported that out of 214 miners surveyed 38 percent had been notified to evacuate a mine because of fire or explosion during their career. Data provided by the U.S.

Mine Rescue Association indicates that the depletion of oxygen and the production of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide cause more fatalities than all other causes combined.

Access to and proper operation of SCSRs is a matter of life and death to

miners.

The Office of Mine Safety and Health is established by section 6 of S. 2803, the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act of 2006. The purpose of this office is to enhance the development of new mine safety technology and to expedite its commercial availability and implementations.

Mr. Speaker, section 2 of S. 2803 describes the components of an emergency response plan every coal mine must follow should an accident occur. Section 2(E)(iii)(II), refers to the hour of breathable air required by MSHA's new emergency temporary standard in addition to the hour already required by the mandatory SCSR standard. Beyond that, Mr. Speaker, the provision requires additional ``caches of self-rescuers providing in the aggregate not less than 2 hours per miner to be kept in escapeways from the deepest work area to the surface at a distance of no further than an average miner could walk in 30 minutes.''

Mr. Speaker, my concern is that in placing the SCSRs the average distance that a miner can walk in 30 minutes may unintentionally discourage technical advances. I am also worried that the provision in this act may unintentionally result in less safety should it result in encouraging miners in emergency situations to remove SCSRs before they are depleted and struggle to don new SCSRs in smoke-filled or other toxic atmospheres. It is not our intention to lock, either, the Secretary of Labor, miners, or their employers into a misguided one- size-fits-all solution. It is my intent that the Secretary would accommodate performance-based determinations of self-contained self- rescuer locations, and not discourage development and deployment of advanced self-contained self-rescuer technologies that provide greater amounts of breathable air than currently available devices, which would protect miners for longer and would require fewer changes from a depleted unit to a fresh unit in hazardous atmospheres.

Mr. Speaker, I would also encourage the Secretary to allow the use of appropriately constructed self-rescue transfer stations to be built in common locations between two parallel and adjacent escapeways. Providing a safe place to abandon old SCSRs and don new equipment during an evacuation will also improve the survivability of the miner.

Mr. Speaker, today I had a very pleasant visit with a very important person. Matt Simmons came by and we spent about an hour and a half talking. Now, who is Matt Simmons and why should we be interested in a discussion with Matt Simmons?

Matt Simmons is the President's personal energy adviser. He was the primary architect of his energy policy for his first campaign, continued with him through his second campaign. Matt Simmons is the president and CEO of one of the largest energy investment banks in the world, out of Houston, Texas, and he has written a book which I have here, ``Twilight in the Desert.''

I would like to read just a little bit from the dust cover of the book:

Saudi Arabia is the most important oil-producing nation in history. The secretive Saudi Government repeatedly assures the world that its oil fields are healthy beyond reproach, and that they can maintain and even increase output at will to meet the skyrocketing global demand. But what if they can't?

``Twilight in the Desert'' looks behind the curtain to reveal a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline.

In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his own three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations.

What he uncovers is a story about Saudi Arabia's troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability which differs sharply from the globally accepted Saudi version. It's a story that is provocative and disturbing, based on undeniable facts but until now never told in its entirety. ``Twilight in the Desert'' examines numerous aspects of Saudi Arabia and its looming oil crisis.

Mr. Speaker, we had a discussion, as I mentioned, that was about an hour and a half long. Matt Simmons shared

with me his concern that the world is reaching a very critical point in its history, a point at which the oil production of the world will reach a peak, after which it will inevitably decline.

This is a message that I first started talking about exactly 15 months from today. It was March 14 last year, and I have here the exact charts that we used in our discussion, and I would like to go through a few of those charts. These aren't all of them, but all of these charts are charts from that first discussion.

We started with this chart. Recent headlines. This is Washington Post, the third day of February 2005, just a few weeks before our March 14 first discussion of this subject, and the subject was Peak Oil.

You see that is pasted on because we were discussing what should we call this discussion. The Great Rollover was one possibility, and the Great Rollover refers to that time in which there will be a rollover from a consumer's market to a producer's market when you have reached the peak and roll over the top. We finally decided to call it Peak Oil, and that is how most everybody who is talking about this phenomenon refers to it now.

These are headlines, and they could be headlines from today's paper, or yesterday's, because the Dow went up a little today.

This reads, ``The Dow dropped 174 points, driven by economic damage from rising oil prices,'' and they were relatively low 15 months ago compared to what they are today, ``the plunging dollar,'' and the dollar is still plunging, ``and growing worries about consumer spending.'' It could be today's headlines.

``Recent oil price rise of 20 percent is continues to crunch the profits of struggling airlines and is believed to be a factor in disappointing retail sales.''

``Dollar slides against the euro and the yen,'' and it is still sliding.

``Consumer confidence slips in February.'' These were the headlines of the paper.

What are they talking about? They are talking about some statistics that resulted in 30 of our prominent citizens writing a letter to the President, saying Mr. President, the fact that the United States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserve and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. We have just got to do something about that.

We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We are one person out of 22 in the world, and that one person uses 25 percent of the world's energy and we import almost two-thirds of what we use.

Now we are really good at pumping oil. We have drilled about 530,000 wells in our country. There are on the order of magnitude, and I can't get the exact number, a thousand, more or less, in Saudi Arabia. We have 530,000, and I think there may be 3- or 400 in Iraq. Two percent of oil reserves are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. I think today we are still the world's third largest oil producer. We are far and away the world's largest oil consumer. How did we get here?

To find out how we got here we have to go back about six decades. The next chart shows us a prediction that was made by a scientist of the Shell Oil Company by the name of the M. King Hubbert. He worked for the Shell Oil Company. He observed a phenomenon in oil fields when they were pumped and finally exhausted, that appeared to be a characteristic of oil fields generally, and that was you reached a maximum after which the production dropped off and finally tailed off to near nothing.

He rationalized if he could know how many oil fields there were total in the United States and guess at how many more we would find, that he could then predict when the United States would peak in oil production. He made that prediction in 1956 and on the 8th day of March, just 50 years ago, this last March 8, he gave what would become a very famous speech in San Antonio, Texas to an oil conference and it was published as a paper. In that he predicted that the United States would reach its maximum oil production in 1970. In those days he was talking only about the lower 48.

Shell Oil Company asked him not to give that talk and publish that paper because it would embarrass him and them. He went ahead and did it; and, of course, we did peak in oil production in 1970 and so M. King Hubbert became an institution in his own time.

The smooth green curve here is his prediction. The more ragged green curve is the actual date and you see, right on schedule, it peaked in 1970, and then began falling off.

The red curve here is the former Soviet Union. They have more oil than we. They peaked a bit after us, and then the Soviet Union fell apart and their production capacity did not meet expectations so they are now having a second small peak.

Of the 48 major countries that produce oil, 33 of them have already reached their peak.

The next chart shows us where we have gotten the oil in our country. M. King Hubbert was predicting the production of oil in only the lower 48 and that would be this curve here that I am tracing, because he did not look at Alaska and did not include oil from that source.

Notice that we did peak in 1970 and then it starts downhill. And the very large discoveries in Prudhoe Bay and Dead Horse, Alaska just caused a little blip in the slide down the other side in Hubbert's peak. It did not reverse that. I have been to Dead Horse and Prudhoe Bay. I have seen the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which, for a number of years now, a full fourth of our oil production has flowed.

In spite of enormous production from Prudoe Bay, and in spite of a lot of production from the Gulf of Mexico, that is the yellow there. And you may remember, Mr. Speaker, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. They were so large that it would put any worries about oil far, far behind us. That is all the contribution they have made.

And by the way, we really are exploiting those fields because we have 4,000 oil wells out there in the Gulf of Mexico. We had reason to reflect on that last year when the hurricanes went through.

Now, these are the charts, Mr. Speaker, that I used. I had some additional ones too, but these are the charts that I used exactly 15 months ago today. It was the 14th of March. Two very significant things have happened since then. Two major reports paid for by the government have been published. One of those is the Hirsch report. It actually is dated February of 2005. That is just a month before I gave my first floor speech here on this subject. Neither I nor anyone else in the public knew that that research had been done and that report was available because it did not become available for several months after that. This is frequently called the Hirsch report. It is called Peaking of World Oil Production, Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. And in just a moment, I will show you a few quotes from that very important study. Then a little later than that, dated last September but not available publicly until just a few months ago, was another major study paid for by the Army, done by the Corps of Engineers, called Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations. M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. And the point I made 15 months ago, Mr. Speaker, was that if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and he was right on target, certainly, we are a microcosm of the world. And if he was right about the United States, shouldn't there have been some concern that he might be right about the world? And if in fact he was right about the world, shouldn't we have anticipated that and done something about it? We did not.

Let me show you, now, one of the quotes from the Hirsch report. That is from page 24. We cannot conceive of any affordable government sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules. What they are saying is that if the world has peaked in oil production, and they said that it certainly would peak. It wasn't if, it was when. And they weren't really certain when it would peak because you wouldn't know that it had peaked until you were a bit past the peak and looked back. And that is very true. And they looked at all of the things that the government might do to mitigate the consequences of a shortage of liquid fuels. This is not so much an energy crisis as it is a liquid fuels crisis.

And they said they could not conceive of any affordable government sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules.

The next chart has some very interesting and disturbing words in it. World oil production is going to peak, they said. It will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. They said that it is not if, it is when. It is going to peak.

Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. And I have highlighted it here. The world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent. We cannot look back in history and find any time when the world has faced a problem like this. This is a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this.

And as a consequence of that, the next chart says that the peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. Just a few years ago it was $10 a barrel. Now it is $70 a barrel and has been as high as $75 a barrel, will increase dramatically and without timely mitigation. The economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.

These, Mr. Speaker, are quite strong words, unprecedented risk management problem and economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.

The second report that I mentioned by the Corps of Engineers and the next chart has a quote from their study, reaches the same conclusion; that oil production will peak, that peak is either now present or imminent. And they say oil is the most important form of energy in the world today.

Just a moment's reflection on how important that source of energy is. 70 percent of all of the oil that we use in our country is used in transportation. There is no realistic alternative to liquid fuels for transportation.

Now, we can take oil and make other liquid fuels like ethanol, but for every gallon of ethanol that we burn, we have used at least \3/4\ of a gallon of liquid fuels, gasoline and diesel, oil to produce that energy.

Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today, and the energy density in oil is just incredible. One barrel of oil, 42 gallons, the energy in that represents the work output of 12 people working all year. So for just a little over $100, $3 a gallon, 42 gallons, a little over $100, you can buy the workout of 12 people working all year for you.

To get some idea that that is probably a realistic number, reflect on how far a gallon of gasoline or a gallon of diesel, by the way, still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you buy it in those little bottles that you drink from, how far that will carry your SUV or your car. You may get 10 miles from a heavy SUV, but try pulling that SUV those 10 miles and see how long it will take you. You can do that with a come-along and trees and guardrail beside the road, but it would take you quite some time to pull it the 10 miles.

I drive a Prius. It gets 52 miles per gallon. And how long would it take me to pull my Prius 52 miles?

Another indication, Mr. Speaker, of the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels is the energy density in electricity. You can work very hard in your yard all day long this weekend, and I will get more work out of an electric motor, more mechanical work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now, it may be kind of humbling to recognize that we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuels. But that incredible energy density and the really large supply of this energy source resulted in this statement by the Corps of Engineers. 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 a front line energy source for the industrial world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil is absolutely essential to our way of life.

The next chart notes some very prominent people. Colin Campbell, more than any other person, he probably inherited the mantle from M. King Hubbert, Jean LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett. Not a relative of mine, but if you go to the web and pull up Albert Bartlett you can get his speech that he has given more than 1,600 times. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I think you will agree with me it is the most interesting 1-hour lecture you will ever hear.

All of these people have estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. And then they quote some corporations that have reached a similar conclusion.

The next chart is another quote from this very important study by the Corps of Engineers. In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve, just as M. King Hubbert said 50 years ago. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak and then declines at a rapid pace, similar to its initial increase.

The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when. There are many estimates. Most of the authorities agree that it is either now or imminent. Very few push it off more than a decade into the future.

The next chart is really interesting. Now, this is dated just last September. The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per barrel range. Now it is $70 to $75, a little under $70 today. But it has been in the $70 to $75 range. And it is expected to stay in that range for several years. It is less than a year later and it is now $70 a barrel. They expected it to stay in the range of $45 to $57 a barrel for 7 years. So even the experts have underestimated the relationship between production and consumption.

Oil prices may go significantly higher. Indeed, they have gone up to $75 just a few weeks ago. And some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years.

Now, the next chart shows that not everybody agrees with this. And this is a very interesting chart. This is a chart from our Energy Information Agency, and we have had the two top officials of that agency in our office to talk about these subjects. And this is a chart which shows historically what production has been, and it shows what they think the future looks like.

Now, they use a very interesting and, one might say, bizarre use of statistics. In statistics there is a 95 percent probability; that is, you are 95 percent certain about what is going to happen in the future, and then there is a 50 percent probability, which is obviously less certainty about what is going to happen into the future. And then finally, a 5 percent probability. And boy, that is really uncertain. There is just a big, big envelope out there. Could be anything in a broad field.

Well, what they have done in this chart is really very interesting. They have taken the 95 percent probability, which is the yellow line here, and then they have taken the 50 percent probability, which is the green line. But they took the 50 percent probability only on the plus side of the 95 percent probability. You need to draw another green line that is just as far on the other side of the yellow line. Then they draw the blue line there, which is the 5 percent probability, but they should have drawn another one, which is just as far on this side of the yellow. In other words, the 5 percent probability says you are very uncertain about the future. There could be a whole lot more oil in the future, or there could be a whole lot less oil in the future. But they look at only the whole lot more oil in the future.

And then they make a very interesting designation. They say that the 50 percent probability is the mean. The 50 percent probability, Mr. Speaker, has nothing to do with the mean. And I wanted to make certain, and I did have a course in statistics many years ago. I wanted to make certain that I had not forgotten and was misinterpreting this, so we had experts from the Congressional Research Service come over and discuss this with them. And they said that they agreed that this was a very unusual, one might say bizarre, use of statistics.

Well, Mr. Speaker, you see what has happened since they made this prediction. Here they predicted these three different scenarios, the 95 percent probability, the 50 percent probability, which they said was the mean, the most probable. 95 percent probability is

far more probable than 50 percent probability.

But look what reality has been. Look what the red line, look what the actual data points have been. They have been following, as you would suspect they would, the 95 percent probability.

The next chart shows a somewhat expanded application of this use of statistics. A couple of Congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had the world's experts come in. And they just about all agreed fairly unanimously that we probably had about a thousand gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world, 940 to 1,030, something in that range. Now, we use gigabarrels because, surprisingly, a billion in our country is different than a billion in England. Apparently, a billion in England is a million million. One billion in our country is a thousand million. But everybody knows what a giga is; so we talk about gigabarrels. They now, using what they call the mean, and 50 percent probability, Mr. Speaker, is not the mean, but they say that if that is the mean, then they expect to find roughly another thousand gigabarrels of oil.

Mr. Speaker, even if that is true, this chart shows us a very interesting thing. The black curve here shows the actual production, and we are about at a peak here, and most of the experts believe that it will level off and then fall down, following a curve very much like the upslope here. They believe that there is another thousand gigabarrels of oil out there, roughly, that we are going to find. Eight hundred, roughly, gigabarrels of oil that we are going to find. If that is true, that pushes the peak only to 2016. That is only 10 years from now, Mr. Speaker, even if they are right. And the odds that they are right are very, very small. There is almost nobody else who agrees that this is a proper use of statistics. Even if they are true, it pushes the peak out only 10 years.

In the Hirsch Report, they said that if you did not plan for this peaking at least 20 years ahead that you were going to have rather serious economic consequences of that. Obviously, even if they are right, it is only 10 years ahead; so we do not have 20 years to plan.

This curve shows another very interesting thing, and that is what would happen if you really were very clever and worked very hard and had some breakthroughs so that you could pump the oil more quickly? And what they show there is that that might push the peak out to 2037, roughly another 20 years. But look at the consequences of that, Mr. Speaker. Notice the drop-off. It drops off almost like you have fallen off a cliff. You obviously cannot pump oil that you have not found. And if you pump it now, you cannot pump it later.

Let us read on the next chart what one of the world's experts on energy says about the assumptions that they make here. Now, that was a chart from the Energy Information Agency, but they get their basic data from USGS. And this is what Gene Laherrere says about that: ``The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery,'' to give you that, roughly, extra 800, 1,000 gigabarrels of oil, ``and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technology achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.''

We now are very good. We have computer modeling. We have 3-D seismic, and there is not much quarrel among the world's experts as to how much oil remains and where it will be. The people actually out there looking for oil do not have the wild disagreements that those who are back modeling with computers have who are using what I think is an unusual application of statistics.

The next chart shows us something that Albert Einstein would encourage you to reflect on. He was asked, after he discovered nuclear energy, ``Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great energy force in the world after nuclear energy?'' And his response was that the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound interest. And that is exponential growth, and these several curves here look at exponential growth. The lower straight line there is not exponential growth. It is 2 percent growth, and you extrapolate that out. In other words, it is like putting your money in the bank and it gets some interest, and every time you get some interest, you take the interest out. That is this growth.

This curve line that starts out at the same place is what happens if you leave your money in the bank and you are getting interest on interest. It gets ever steeper and steeper and steeper because the principal on which you are collecting interest grows and grows and grows.

This is a 4 percent curve. This is a 5 percent curve. And, Mr. Speaker, this is a 10 percent curve. It doubles in 7 years.

A good rule of thumb, by the way, is if you take the rate of growth and divide it into 70, that will give you the doubling time. So 2 percent growth into 70 gives you 35 years doubling time. This, by the way, is almost exactly the rate at which China and India are growing. And they are going to need oil, Mr. Speaker, for that growth.

The next chart is a simple schematic which presents us with several realities that we really need to reflect on. This is the 2 percent growth curve. Now, I can make that growth very steep by compressing the abscissa and expanding the ordinate here. But this is a 2 percent growth curve. That yellow area represents the difference between what you will have if we peak here and what you would like to have because this is demand. That is that 2 percent demand curve from the previous chart. And you see that you actually start to have a deficiency some time before peaking. By the way, that yellow area covers 35 years. We know that because this point is half as high as that point, and that is a 35-year period. It doubles in 35 years.

So most of the world's experts believe that we are at or near peaking. Now, this presents us with a couple of real challenges, Mr. Speaker. We now have no surplus energy to invest in alternatives. Every bit of the oil that we are producing is needed by the world's economies. As a matter of fact, they would like to have more. Because there is hardly enough oil to meet the demands, the price has gone from $10 a barrel just a few years ago to $70 a barrel now. So if we are going to have any energy to invest in alternatives, we are either going to have to find a lot more energy somewhere else, and the next chart will show how unlikely that is, or we are going to have to free up some energy by not using all the energy we are using now. In other words, an aggressive conservation program to push this peak down so that we have a little bit of energy here to invest in alternatives. By the way, that maybe is not a little bit.

Let me give you just one example of this investment. If you build a nuclear power plant, it may take you 10 years to permit and build it. Maybe we can shrink that, and I hope we can, to 5 years. That would be pretty quick, Mr. Speaker, to shrink that to 5 years. Our present nuclear power plants, you must operate them 20 years before you get back the energy that you have put into them. Lots of fossil fuel energy is used in making these nuclear power plants. What that means is that with today's permitting and with today's nuclear power plant efficiencies, it would be 30 years, if you started today, before you would get any net energy. Now, maybe we can do better and shrink the permitting and construction to 5 years, and maybe we can have more efficient nuclear power plants so that it only takes 15 years for payback. But even that, Mr. Speaker, 5 plus 15 is 20 years. What that means is if you started today to build nuclear power plants, it would be 20 years, best case, before you had net energy, and in the meantime you are going to have to get the energy to produce the nuclear power plants by depressing the present use of energy because we do not have any spare energy. There is no surplus energy if, in fact, we are at peak oil. That is what it means. That is peak. There is not going to be any more.

The next chart is a really interesting one and shows essentially the same things here. The bar graphs here show the discovery. And you notice that we made some pretty big discoveries way back in the 1940s, some really big ones in about 1950. And, boy, we really learned how to find oil in the 1960s and

the 1970s. But at about 1980 our discovery of oil became less than our use of oil. The heavy black line here represents the consumption of oil, how much oil we have used. So for all of these years up until we get to about 1980, we are always finding more oil than we use. We use this much of it under the curve, but all this above the curve is now surplus oil. It is reserve oil that we have to use in the future. We have been eating into that reserve since about 1980 because, you see here, we have found just this amount of oil, but we have consumed this amount of oil; so this shaded area in between them represents the amount of the reserves back here that we have used.

Now, you can within limits make the future look about any way you wish, within some very realistic limits. First of all, you have to decide how much more oil you are probably going to find. The world's experts believe that we have probably found about 95 percent of the oil that we are going to find. As a matter of fact, if I was extrapolating and smoothing this curve, I would come out at a lower curve than they would come out at. But that shaded area there, it is not going to be that smooth, obviously. It has never been smooth. It is up and down. But on average they believe that is the kind of oil that we are going to find in the future.

There is one thing that is an absolute certainty. The area under the consumption curve will not be greater than the area under the discovery curve. That is the quantity that you consumed. If you take the area under that curve, that is the total amount that you have consumed. It is like adding up a whole bunch of little bar graphs. That is what we have here is a bunch of bar graphs. And the area under the discovery curve represents the oil that has been discovered. It is obvious, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot pump what you have not discovered. So if you are going to make the future look much difference than this, you are going to have to make some different assumptions about how much oil you are going to find in the future.

Now, you can get the oil a little more quickly by using some aggressive techniques, enhance the oil recovery by injecting COG, pumping seawater in it. And, by the way, the Saudis are now pumping about almost two-thirds seawater, and they have always pumped some. They flood the periphery of the fields with seawater to push the oil into the center, and then they pump it out, and now they are getting about two-thirds seawater. But never mind. Oil is different from water and separates from water, usually lighter than water; although the heavy crude may not be lighter than water, as the name implies. But it is easily separated from water. So you now, Mr. Speaker, can kind of predict what you think the future will be by looking at this curve, remembering that you cannot pump what you have not found.

I would like to go back for just a moment to the previous chart I showed that shows a challenge that we have, and that is the challenge of the gap. The gap is the difference between what is available and what you would like to use. Now, people have been focusing on filling the gap. I would like to suggest, Mr. Speaker, that for a couple of reasons that ought not be our focus. First of all, I am not sure that we can fill the gap. And, secondly, since there is a finite amount of fossil fuels in the world, if we fill the gap now, there will be less to use later.

I am beginning, Mr. Speaker, to be more and more concerned about a moral element to this discussion. We now are passing on to our children and our grandchildren, not with my vote, but we are now passing on to our children and our grandchildren the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. We cannot run our government on current revenues. And we are now going to not only require our children and grandchildren to run their government on current revenues, they are going to have to pay back all of the money that we have borrowed from their generation. Now, Mr. Speaker, should we compound the problems that we are bequeathing to them by pumping now the oil and the gas that they would need to sustain their economy? There is only so much there, Mr. Speaker. If you pump it today, it will not be there tomorrow.

I am opposed to drilling in ANWR, not because of environmental concerns necessarily. I think they do a very good job. They build roads in the winter out of crushed ice. When spring comes, you cannot see where the road was. They have a very small footprint. But, Mr. Speaker, I am having a lot of trouble understanding how it is in our national security interest. If we have only 2 percent of the world's oil and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we use, I am having a lot of trouble understanding how it is in our long-term national security interest to pump that little bit of oil we have got as soon as we can. If we could pump ANWR tomorrow, what would we do the day after tomorrow? And the day after tomorrow is when our kids and our grandkids are going to be faced with the necessity of supporting the economy and paying back the enormous amounts of money that we have borrowed from their generation. So I am having a problem, Mr. Speaker, with trying to fill that gap.

The next chart shows us what the SAIC study, the Hirsch Report, suggested as a way to fill the gap.

But notice that if you start now, and zero is now, that you don't have hardly anything for at least 5 years. And then it slowly grows. They are going to fill it with enhanced oil recovery. If we pump it, our kids can't pump it. They are going to fill it with coal liquids. If we use the coal, our kids won't have the coal. They are going to fill it with heavy oil--oil is like the tar sands in Canada and the oil shales in our country--and gas to liquids. If we use those things, our kids aren't going to have those things.

You notice they don't have wind here. They don't have solar there. That is because these now, although they in the future will be enormously important, they provide minuscule contributions now. To ramp those up is going to take more time than they thought was available. And so you could get there quicker in filling the gap with exploiting these finite resources that when they are gone, they are gone.

The only one which is sustainable is efficient vehicles. The average car and light truck is in the fleet about 16 years, the average 18- wheeler for 28 years. And so if you start using more fuel-efficient cars, it takes a long time to turn over that fleet. You notice, they didn't see a thing for about 5 years nearly, and then slowly increasing the contribution that it made.

The next chart, Mr. Speaker, looks at what the options are that we have. Obviously we are going to get our energy from somewhere. As we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, the world will be looking for energy from other sources.

What will they be? Well, we have listed here, at least generically I think, all of the potential sources. We have some finite resources: the tar sands, the oil shales, coal, nuclear, two kinds of fission and fusion.

Just a word about the tar sands. Canada calls them oil sands. It is really tar. Its quality is little better than the asphalt parking lot out here which, by the way, if you put a blowtorch on it will flow. They now are mining that with shovels that have 100 tons in one shovel, dump it in a truck that hauls 400 tons and then they cook it, heat it up, to get the oil out.

You are told a lot of things, Mr. Speaker, and what we really need is an honest broker so that we can have facts that we agree on. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I am told that they are using more energy from stranded gas; stranded gas is gas where there is nobody nearby to use it and it is hard to ship so it is very cheap when it is stranded. They are using more energy from natural gas than they are getting out of the oil that they produce.

Dollarwise, it's a good bet. Eighteen dollars a barrel to produce it. They're getting $70. That is really a moneymaker. But in terms of energy-profit ratio, it obviously wouldn't be something that you would want to do indefinitely. The oil shales in our country are very difficult to exploit. Shell Oil Company has been there. It will be 2013, they tell us, before they will even decide whether it is economically feasible to get that oil. There is an incredible amount of oil there, more reserves there than all of the Middle East. But there is probably also more energy in

the tides than all the oil energy in the Middle East, but because it is so diffuse, it is difficult to get out and that is kind of the problem with these tar sands and oil shales. Ultimately we will get them out, but we are not going to get them out in large enough quantities quick enough to fill that gap.

Coal. Let's put the next one up, then I will come back to this. I just want to talk about coal for just a moment, because many people will tell you not to worry about the future because we have got 250 years of coal out there. That is true; 250 years at current use rates. But, Mr. Speaker, you remember those exponential curves we showed and what happens with exponential growth. Albert Einstein says it's the most powerful force in the universe. If you increase your use of coal only 2 percent, and I will submit that when oil starts running down, we are going to increase the use of coal far more than 2 percent to make up that difference. By the way, it is pretty easy to liquefy it with a Fischer-Tropsch technique. Hitler used it. We denied him access to oil, which is, by the way, one of the reasons that he went to a second front in Russia that lost him the war, because he was running out of coal. He needed Russian oil, so he went to that second front in Russia.

With a 2 percent growth, that 250 years now shrinks to about 85 years. But you can't fill the trunk of your car with coal, so if you are going to make a liquid of it or a gas of it, you are going to have to use some energy to do that. So now that shrinks to 50 years. So we have got 50 years of coal left, with only a 2 percent increase in growth if you are going to convert it to a gas or a liquid. By the way, with either a big economic penalty for cleaning it up or a big environmental penalty if you don't clean it up, because almost all the coal we have left in our country and in the world, for that matter, is pretty dirty coal with high sulfur. The good clean stuff we have pretty much used.

Now back to the first chart we were looking at, which goes through the other things that we might use. These are the finite resources. They are there. You need to husband them and use them wisely. We could go to nuclear lightwater reactors, the kind we have now. There is a big argument, by the way, as to whether we ought to go to more nuclear or not. Twenty percent of all of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy but 20 percent of our electricity is produced by nuclear. In France, that is about 85 percent produced by nuclear. You can either have the lightwater reactors, but there is a finite amount of fissionable uranium in the world, so by and by we will go to breeder reactors, of which we have none. And in transporting that stuff and enriching it, you produce some bomb-grade materials and so you have to be very careful with that. You buy some problems with it. But breeder reactors are what the name implies, breeder reactors, and they make more fuel than they may use.

Then there is fusion. Mr. Speaker, if we get there, we're home free. The analogy I use is if you think you're going to solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery, then we are probably going to solve our energy problems with fusion. I think the odds are about the same. That doesn't keep me from supporting that. We put about $250 million a year in it. I would vote more if there were more capability out there, because it is the only energy source for the future where we are really home free. So we need to explore it, but I wouldn't bet the ranch that we're going to get there.

Then we have the truly renewable resources. They now are pretty much in the noise level. Solar. Today, 1 percent. That is up. It is growing. It grew 60 percent last year.

Wind. I think that grew about 35 percent last year.

Geothermal. That is real geothermal, tapping down into the molten core of the Earth and getting water that is close enough to there that it is hot. There is not a chimney in Iceland, I think, because they have enough geothermal power.

Ocean energy. A lot of energy there. The tides, the waves, ocean thermal gradients. But it is very diffuse. Very hard to harness. We are trying. We need to do more there.

Agricultural resources. Soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass. In a couple of moments we will come back to talk a little more about those and what confidence you ought to have that they are going to make a really big contribution to our energy supply.

Waste energy is a really good one. That is burning trash instead of burying it out there. There are places doing that. We have a great facility up here in Montgomery County at Dickerson. They will be happy to show you that. It really is very current state of the art.

Hydrogen from renewables. Just a quick word about hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. We will always use more energy producing hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Else, we will have to suspend the second law of thermodynamics and if we can do that, we can suspend gravity, and then we have lots of opportunities. Always we will use more energy producing the hydrogen than we get out of it.

So why should we even bother? For two reasons. One is when you finally burn it, you get only water. That is really not a pollutant. The second reason is that if we are ever able to perfect economically supportable fuel cells, hydrogen is very convenient to use in a fuel cell.

I drove a fuel cell car the other day. We had an energy-efficient car showcase out in Frederick, Maryland. The major manufacturers came out there and brought their cars. I drove a fuel cell car. It cost a million dollars. The fuel cell will last a couple of hundred hours. We are working on fuel cells, but it will be a while before we get there. But if we get there, and I think we will, then they have at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine. That is why we look at hydrogen. It is not a savior. It will help.

The next chart looks at ethanol. This is an interesting chart. It shows on the top that you need about 1.23 million Btus of fossil fuel energy to get 1 million Btus in the tank of your car. Obviously it takes energy to drill a hole and pump it out and refine it and transport it and so forth.

This slide looks at energy from corn, from ethanol. This is about as good as we will ever get. Many people tell me this is wildly optimistic, but I think we can get there. What this says is that to get 1 million Btus of ethanol energy, you have got to put in .74, three- fourths as many Btus as you get out. What that means, Mr. Speaker, is that every gallon of ethanol that you burn in your car represents three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuel that it took to make the ethanol. So a gallon of ethanol doesn't offset a gallon of gasoline. If you make ethanol from corn, 13 percent of our corn crop will produce enough ethanol to displace 2 percent of our gasoline. But you have used a lot of fossil fuel energy producing, growing the corn.

This little chart at the bottom shows the energy input in producing a bushel of corn. The big purple slice here, 40-odd percent, is nitrogen fertilizer which today is made from natural gas. Mr. Speaker, I suspect there is almost nobody off the farm who knows that when they are eating broccoli that they are eating recycled natural gas, because that is where the nitrogen came from to grow the broccoli.

These are all the other energy inputs from oil. Planting it, harvesting, building the tractor, making the tires for the tractor.

If we were going to grow corn with the energy from corn, using that, 13 percent of the corn crop would replace 2 percent of our gasoline. We would have to double our corn crop and use all of it for ethanol if we were going to replace just 10 percent of our gasoline.

Mr. Speaker, this gives you something of the dimensions of the problem that we face. There is a lot of talk about ethanol. Brazil makes a lot of it from sugar cane. It is more efficient than corn. You use the whole stock rather than just the kernel and they don't use much fossil fuel energy. You see people down there planting it by hand, harvesting it by hand, and so forth. So they do not have anywhere near the fossil fuel energy input into their ethanol that we have.

By the way, we will never make ethanol from sugar cane in our country because sugar is so high. I don't know how expensive gasoline would have to be before we could afford to make ethanol from sugar, and that is what it is made from. It is made by fermenting sugar.

I have a really interesting analogy that helps us understand this chart. We are very much in our country like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents have died and they have a big inheritance and they have now established a lavish life-style, where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income; but their income is going to give out before they retire so they have obviously got to do something. They have got to make more or spend less. That is exactly where we are. Eighty-five percent of our energy, some people say 86, 85 percent of our energy comes from natural gas, petroleum, and coal and only 15 percent from other sources.

A bit more than half of that comes from nuclear. That could and maybe should grow. We need to talk about the pros. By the way, I have friends who were devoutly anti-nuclear. These were bright people.

But when they considered the alternative, which may be shivering in the dark, nuclear is beginning to look better. Seven percent of the total, and this is year 2000, we are a little better than that today, but only 1 percent of 7 percent, that is .07 percent. That is a trifling amount that came from solar. That has been growing.

Last year it was maybe 60, so now it is not up to .07 percent, but maybe it is 1 percent. But it is still a very small amount. Wood, that is the paper industry and timber industry wisely using a waste product that probably is not available to the rest of us and probably can't grow much to maintain our woodlands. Waste energy that ought to go and could go.

Wind again, 1 percent, that has grown some. That is 1 percent of 7 percent, by the way. It has to get seven times bigger, to be 1 percent of a whole thing. Congressional hydroelectric, that is not going to grow in our country. Micro-hydro might.

China is really exploding in their use of micro-hydro. That is using little streams where you probably don't have the environmental impact that you probably do in the large streams. That could grow in our country. We have not even begun to exploit that here.

Down here is agriculture, alcohol, fuel. That was about 20.07 percent. That is more now. That is growing, but still is very small compared to the total amount of energy used.

Then geothermal. The next chart shows something really challenging. The next chart shows the challenge we have of being more efficient. Most energy you get out of an incandescent bulb is heat. That is the blue here, the dark blue. The light is this little bit on top. Now to get the same amount of light from a fluorescent, you produce only this much heat. But look what happens when you go to a light emitting diode. This is the light that is the heat.

If you think, that is why if you buy an LED flashlight you will forget when you put the batteries in it, because they will last so long compared to the length of time they last, where with the conventional incandescent bulb, what, 90 percent of the energy goes to heat.

The next chart shows an interesting one. I wanted to show this, because many people say not to worry, the market will take care of it. There are many market worshippers out there who believe that the market is both omniscient and omnipotent.

This is a little example of what has happened in this market. This was the oil price by hike that didn't produce any commensurate increase in production of oil. It is because it just wasn't there.

The market will work if there are infinite resources. Mr. Speaker, there are not infinite resources here. The next chart shows that you can live on less and live well. The average Californian only uses about 65 percent of the energy of the rest of us. That is because of the many regulations they have out there with more demand, efficiency.

The next chart shows a very interesting one. This shows a satisfaction with life. This shows satisfaction with life relative to a GDP. Here we are. We have the highest GDP. But we don't have the highest satisfaction with life.

There are a dozen countries that have a much smaller GDP per capita, who are happier with life than we are. It is obvious that you can be happy using less energy than we use.

The next chart is one that just is stunning when you first see it. This is a history of the world. Only of 5,000 years recorded, this is the last 400. We entered industrial age, wood, coal, appropriately black, and then gas and oil.

Look what happened with gas and oil. It just explodes. It is standing on its end. By the way, the population followed that. Half a billion to a billion people here, nearly 7 billion people there.

Now, it will come down the other side as fast as it has gone up that side. What will we do? The age of oil will be about another 100, 150 years, and then we will be through the age of oil.

The next and last chart shows what we have got to do. We have got to buy time. We must depress our use of energy efficiency conservation so we have some energy to invest in alternatives and some time in which to do it. Then we must use it wisely. We need something equivalent of DARPA. ARPA-E is a suggestion, some organization that looks at that time energy we have got and the resources we have got. What is the best bet. Where could we use it to get the most good.

There will be a number of benefits in that. America could again become the industrial capital of the world. We could be exporting this technology. Whether we like it or not, we are a role model. We are one person out of 22. We use 25 percent of the world's energy. I genuinely believe that if Americans understood the problem they face today they would rise to the challenge.

I lived through World War II. Everybody was involved. I believe we are creative and innovative, and we can solve this problem. I think you could sleep really good when you went to bed tonight, recognizing you used less energy today than you were yesterday, and you were happier today than you were yesterday.

We need to face this challenge. We will face it. I think the earlier we face it, the better off we will be.

Mr. Speaker, in the last year, two major studies were done at the expense of our U.S. Government; one by the Department of Energy, the other by the U.S. Army; both indicating that we are at or will shortly be at peak oil with potentially devastating consequences for our country.

But drilling ANWR now is not an appropriate response to that. We have only about 2 percent of the world's reserves of the oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We import about two-thirds of what we use.

Mr. Speaker, with those statistics, I am having a lot of trouble understanding how it is in our national security interest to use up a little bit of oil as quickly as we can.

If we could drill ANWR tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, what would we do the day after tomorrow? Talking about tomorrow, we are saddling our children, our grandchildren, with an unconscionable debt. Will we add to that the insult of using up the little bit of liquid fossil fuels remaining? This is not the right thing to do at this time.

Mr. Speaker, recently our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, made a statement that I would like to read. In this statement she said: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word `warping diplomacy,' around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all- out rush for energy supply.''

Mr. Speaker, the 8th of this March was a really historic date, and it passed and really very few people knew how historic it was. It was 50 years since a report given in San Antonio, Texas, by a world-famous scientist. And I will talk about that a bit more in a few minutes.

The 15th of March of this year marked one year from the date that I first came to this floor to talk about the problem that Condoleezza Rice was talking about, about the energy problem; and since that time I have been to the floor several times to talk about that. Since then, there have been two major government studies on this same topic. One of them is known as the ``Hirsch Report,'' from Robert Hirsch, who was the principal investigator for SAIC, a very large prestigious scientific engineering organization.

This study was sponsored by the Department of Energy; and for several months after the report was available, it was kind of bottled up inside the agency and we were kind of asking the question, why wasn't it out on the street sooner because it really makes some very significant points.

A second study was done at the request of the Army by the Corps of Engineers. And I have those two reports here. Here is the ``Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management.'' The project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch. And here is that report, paid for by our Department of Energy and done by SAIC. That was dated February of 2005.

A few months later, in September of 2005, a report by the Corps of Engineers, and here is a copy of that report, which just got out to the street about 3 months ago, by the way. So for a number of months this was bottled up inside the Pentagon. Both of these reports say essentially the same thing, and I would like to spend a few minutes this afternoon talking about what these two reports say.

The first is a quote from the ``Energy Trends and Their Implications, U.S. Army Installations.'' And, Mr. Speaker, anywhere in this report that the Army is mentioned, you could put the United States in, or for that matter the world, and it would have the same meaning. But since they are a part of the Army and this was an Army study, they talk about the Army.

This first statement: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources,'' and fossil fuels are generally perceived of as being in the time scale that we are concerned about, nonrenewable. ``In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace similar 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 will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all of the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once a peak occurs, then historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease.''

And the next is a quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``World oil peaking is going to happen,'' saying the same thing as the Army Corps of Engineers. And, by the way, we have no reason to believe that there was any interchange between these two groups that were doing the study. ``World oil production is going to peak. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter.'' Exactly the same thing that the Army Corps of Engineers was saying. ``That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade, others contend it will be later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.''

``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. And then this astounding statement: ``The world has never faced a problem like this.'' There is no precedent. You cannot go back in history to find a problem like this. They say: ``The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, `` and most of the world experts believe we do not have a decade, in fact, we may be there, ``without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.''

The next chart shows that these same data inspired 30 prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, Jim Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney, and 27 other very prominent people, among them several retired four-star generals and admirals, to write a letter to the President. In effect what they said was, Mr. President, the fact that we have only about 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and we import about two-thirds of what we use, presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that.

As the chart shows here, we represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, about 1 person out of 22. And we are really good at pumping our oil. We have only 2 percent of the reserves, which from that 2 percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil, which means we are pumping our wells four times faster than the average.

Now, what are they talking about? As the next chart shows, this was all predicted quite awhile ago. To understand the history of this, to put it in context, we have to go back more than half a century to the 1940s and 1950s. A scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert was working for the Shell Oil Company, and he observed the pumping and the exhaustion of individual oil fields. The United States was pretty much first on the scene in any large way. At one time we were the world's largest producer of oil, and I believe the world's largest exporter of oil. And right when we were in our heyday in 1956, M. King Hubbert went to San Antonio, Texas, and gave that famous paper I referred to a few minutes ago, saying that in just 14 years, in about 1970, the United States would peak in oil production; we would reach a maximum.

Shell Oil Company did not believe that was going to happen and cautioned that he would make himself a fool and them a fool for hiring him if he went to give that paper and published it. And he went anyway. Then 14 years later, right on schedule, we peaked in oil production.

The smooth green curve here was the M. King Hubbert's curve. The more ragged green curve with the larger symbols is the actual production data. And you see that that peaked in 1970 and then fell off. Now, this is the lower 48. In just a moment, we will put another chart up here which shows what happens when you include the Alaskan oil finds.

This is the lower 48, and this is what has happened in the lower 48. The red curve there, by the way, is the former Soviet Union, and they kind of came unglued when the Soviet Union fell apart. You see that their production did not reach the potential. They are already on the downside, by the way. They have somewhat more oil than we. They peaked a little bit later. They had a second small peak, but then it is all downhill after that.

The next chart shows where our oil has come from in our country. And the rest of the U.S. and Texas, the dark blue and light blue, are what M. King Hubbert was talking about, and these are the actual data points from 1935 to now. We have added to this now the natural gas liquids and the Alaskan oil find, that big oil find in Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, Dead Horse. I have been there, at the very beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which about a fourth of our domestic production has been flowing. That is on the downside now, by the way, and it is becoming less and less. Notice that there was just a blip and the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak with that big Alaska oil find.

The thing on this chart, Mr. Speaker, which interests me is that little yellow there on the downside. Just a blip. A small blip. That is the famed Gulf of Mexico oil find. You may remember that. It wasn't all that many years ago we found that, and, boy, that was a lot of oil. There are now 4,000 oil wells out there in the Gulf of Mexico. And that was to save us. It just barely, barely is a ripple in our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

The next chart puts this in world perspective. We have been talking about the United States, and now this takes us to the world. The big bars here are the discovery of oil, and you will notice some of that was found way back in the 1940s, some big discoveries, then the 1950s, and, boy, the 1970s and the 1980s. But notice that since 1980, the finds of oil have been ever less and less, and that is in spite of really good techniques for finding oil.

We now have 3D seismic, we have computer modeling, and we have been very aggressive. You see, since about 1980, we have been finding less oil than we are using, because the consumption curve here is this solid black line. At about 1980, you see there the consumption of oil exceeded the oil that we were finding. So for that period between 1980 and now, the deficit between what we found and what we are using has been filled with reserves that we have. Worldwide, pretty big reserves.

Not much in our country because we have been pumping our oil for a long time, very aggressively.

This is an interesting chart, and anyone who works with these charts knows that the area under one of these curves represents the total amount available. So if you add up all of these little bars, we made a smooth curve through the discovery here. The area under that discovery curve would represent the total amount of oil that we have discovered. Similarly, the area under the consumption curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have consumed.

Now, what is very obvious is that you can't consume oil that you haven't found. So what does that mean? Now, you can have any projection for the future that you like. You can assume that we are going to do a lot of enhanced oil recovery, that we are going to find a little bit of oil, most experts believe there isn't that much left, the little bit of oil that remains and pump it very quickly.

But one thing is certain: you cannot pump what you haven't found. And so ultimately the area under the consumption curve cannot be greater than the area under the discovery curve.

Notice that they are suggesting in this little chart that peaking is going to be at about 2010. Some believe that it may have already occurred.

The next chart is an interesting one from the Energy Information Agency, and they use a very strange, in a way, bizarre application of statistics. We have the 95 percent probability in statistics which is the most probable, and something is significant if it is the 95 percent probability. It is highly significant at 97. You can go on down with the 50 percent probability or a 5 percent probability.

You can get a little sense of these probabilities when you look at the little chart they draw about a hurricane's path. You notice that for the next 24 hours it is a fairly narrow funnel, and then it gets wider and wider as they go out because of the increased uncertainty as you go out.

Well, here the Energy Information Agency has drawn the oil curve, and

you see that they peaked in 1970. We have been going downhill ever since. And back there, a little bit before 2000 I guess on this graph they made a projection of where we were going. Now, they are using these statistics you see at the bottom down there, the past, which is the red line, and then the 95 percent probability and the mean, which is the 50 percent.

The 50 percent probability is not the mean, Mr. Speaker. If you were going to draw this chart realistically, you would have to have another green line that came as far below the yellow line as that one is above it like here, and another blue line that is down here. They are using the 50 percent probability as if it were the mean and saying that is the most probable. Of course in statistics, 95 percent probability is obviously more probable than the 50 percent probability.

Well, this bizarre use of statistics results in something that the next chart will show. But just a moment on this one. Notice what has happened since they made this projection. Notice where the red line has been going. It has of course been following the 95 percent probability, although they believe that it should be following the 50 percent probability, or the green line. In other words, we should be finding more and more oil.

The next chart looks at that in another way. By the way, they say here the probability, they say 95 percent is low probability. That is the highest probability. I have no idea how you get this warped statistic; 95 percent is the highest probability. The 50 percent probability is not the mean, and the lowest probability is 5 percent.

Well, they mean that the lowest amount of oil you would find is a 95 percent probability. The highest amount is 5 percent. But the 5 percent could just as well be the other side of the 95 percent probability which would be really, really low.

Well, here is a graph that they have drawn, and this graph points out something very interesting, the peak for the 95 percent probability, which says that the world had totally about 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. By the way, we use ``giga'' rather than billion because in England a million million is a billion. In our country it is a thousand million, which is a billion. But giga means the same thing to everybody world around, so we use gigabarrels.

If we have in fact 2,000 gigabarrels total, we have used about a thousand of that, and about a thousand remains, which means that we are at this point here; and this should start sliding downhill after that. But they have imagined another thousand gigabarrels of oil to be found; and if that is true, notice that moves the peak out only to 2016.

We are using oil at such a horrendous rate in the world, that even if we found 50 percent more oil than we have ever found, that moves the peak out only that far. And then they show what happens if you go out to 2037. If you have enhanced oil recovery and so forth and get that much more, look what happens. Look at the way it drops there.

The next chart is an interesting one. It shows the same thing pretty much that we showed in that big oil chart that showed the discovery curve. And these are, this is the relationship of discovery to use. Notice, in about 1980 here, we started using more than we had discovered. So this curve says the same kind of thing that the previous one said, only this shows the relationship of discoveries to use.

The next chart is another statement from the ``Hirsch Report,'' and I want to spend a few minutes now on these two reports because they are really very meaningful reports. I will note, Mr. Speaker, that both of these reports have come out in the past year after we gave our first discussion here a year ago, the 14th of March.

This again is from the ``Hirsch Report.'' The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. And without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand side, but to have substantial impact they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.

Mr. Speaker, we probably do not have a decade. As a matter of fact, we may be here. Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars, and require many years of intense effort.

Mr. Speaker, the question I am asking is, If this is true, and if this report was paid for by the Department of Energy, why aren't the leaders in our country telling the American people this?

Now, if they didn't believe this report, just a few months later came the report from the Corps of Engineers that says essentially the same thing as we will see from some following charts. The next chart is another quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules.'' They are talking now about what will we do to make sure that there is enough oil available when we have reached peak production; what can we fill that gap with.

They are saying they can't conceive of any affordable government- sponsored crash program to make this happen, so as to incorporate higher energy efficiency technologies in the privately owned transportation sectors. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time consuming on the order of a decade or more. For some things like efficient automobiles, the average light trucks and cars out there, some 16 to 18 years in the fleet, the big 18-wheelers are out there 28 years. So if you are going to make any impact on efficiency in that market, you have to really wait awhile unless you think people are going to scrap their newly purchased SUV.

The next chart is from the Corps of Engineers study, and this is really an interesting chart. Remember the date of this was September `05. 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. Mr. Speaker, I don't think $70 a barrel is within the range of 45 to 57. And it has been less than a year.

So what this shows is that even the experts, these people who spend a long while studying this, when they look at the picture, they didn't anticipate the extent, the seriousness of this problem.

Oil prices may go significantly higher and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Mr. Speaker, if that is true, why aren't the leaders of our country telling the American people this?

Friends, we have got a problem ahead of us. It is not an insoluble problem; but the longer we wait, the tougher it is going to be to get through it. We really need to get started now. I don't here our leadership telling us that, Mr. Speaker. And in view of these two reports both saying essentially the same thing, I am wondering why.

Another chart from the Army Corps of Engineers study: oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. I think few would deny that. In addition to transportation, and we use 70 percent of our oil in transportation, it is the feed stock from a really large petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world. Just look around you at all the things made of plastic. Without oil, most of them wouldn't be here.

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 another chart from this same Corps of Engineers study, over and over, Mr. Speaker, they are saying the same thing: we face a big challenge.

Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, John LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett, no relative of mine, but you can pull up on the Web Albert Bartlett, do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and he gives the most interesting 1- hour lecture I have ever heard on energy and the exponential principle, have all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. This is 2006.

The corporate executive officers, CEOs at Eni SPA Italian oil companies and ARCO have also published estimates of a peak in 2005. So the problem may already be here.

The next chart shows a very interesting quote from one of the experts in

this area, and this really focuses on a chart that we had just a few minutes ago. Jean LaHerrere made an assessment of the USGS report that concludes, now, USGS says that we are going to find half again the oil that we have already found. We have found about 2,000 gigabarrels, used about 1,000 of that. They say we are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels. This is what Dr. LaHerrere says. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery that is over the present anemic discovery, a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented.

Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.

In other words, he is saying that we have been looking really hard with really good technique and we haven't found it for the last decade. There is just no justification to this euphemistic projection that we are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels of oil.

The next chart puts this in kind of a global and time perspective. The chart on the top shows the last 400 of 5,000 years of recorded history. And it shows the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with wood, and it did begin with wood. We were making steel with wood, with charcoal, denuded the hills of New England, carrying it to England to make steel. You can visit Little Catoctin Furnace up here in Frederick County, and we denuded the hills of Northern Frederick County to make charcoal for that little furnace there.

And then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here is quadrillion Btus. That is the amount of energy you produce. Not very much from wood down there. You see the brown.

It really got six or eight times bigger with coal. And look what happened when we found oil and gas. That is the red curve there which seems to go almost straight up. This is only about a 2 percent increase.

Albert Einstein said that the force of compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe which, after discovering nuclear energy he was asked, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great force in the universe? And he said that it was the power of compound interest, which is exponential growth, of course.

Notice what happened in the 1970s there, and the downturn. There really was a world recession. We used less oil, fortunately, because what was happening up until that time, Mr. Speaker, is really quite phenomenal. Every decade we were using as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that means is that when we used half of all the oil, only one decade of oil remained at current-use rates.

Of course that is not the rate at which oil will be used. We are now about 150 years into the age of oil; 5,000 years of recorded history. That curve is now coming down. It is peaking and will be coming down. And it will come down for about another 100, 150 years. So in 200, 300 years we will have been through the age of oil.

It is interesting, Mr. Speaker, to put this in this perspective: 5,000 years of recorded history, we found this incredible wealth under the ground. It really was incredible wealth. Just one barrel of this oil provides you the energy of 12 people working all year for you; 12 people working all year. You can buy that for a little more than $100, 42 gallons, a little more than $100 at the pump.

If you produce electricity with it, for less than 25 cents a day, an electric motor will do more work than a hardworking, athletic worker. Really incredible wealth.

What the world should have done when we discovered this, realizing that it could not be infinite, that there just had to be an end to it, that the world is not made of oil and even if it was made of oil, there would still be an end to it by and by, but it is not made of oil; we should have stopped and said, what can we do with this incredible wealth to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did. As this chart shows here, we just pigged out like kids who found the cookie jar, with no thought for tomorrow. We behaved as if oil was infinite, that it would be there absolutely forever. And, of course, that could not be true.

I started asking myself these questions maybe 40 years ago. I knew that oil and gas and coal could not be forever, and I asked myself what does that mean? Is it something that we need to worry about in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 1 million years? What does it mean? And a number of people have been asking themselves this question.

The next chart is interesting, and it kind of simplifies this curve. By the way, this is the same curve that we saw before, the red curve going up very steeply. All we have done here is to compress the scale on the ordinate and expand the scale on the abscissa so that now we have a more gradual curve. But it is still a 2 percent growth rate. That doubles in 35 years.

At the beginning of the little yellow there, which is the difference between what we would like to use, that is, the demand curve, and the supply curve, which is the blue-green curve, that is doubled at the end over there. So we know that took 35 years to get there because it doubles in 35 years. If we are there, and there should be a question mark after that because we are not dead certain, what this shows is that the shortage actually starts to occur a bit before the peak occurs, as you are breaking away from that nice, smooth curve. And, of course, there are going to be ups and downs, as we have seen in the price of oil. It is up $5 and down $4 and up another $5 and down $4, but ever up and up as we go through. We face some big challenges.

What most people want to do since we are, as the President says, hooked on oil, we would like to keep that habit. We do not want to kick that habit. We would like to keep that habit. So what most people are focusing on is how do we fill the gap? The gap is that yellow. The gap is the difference between what we have and what we would like to use. And as time goes on, that gets bigger and bigger.

I would like to make the argument, and we will come back to that in a few minutes, that we probably should not be trying to fill the gap, for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not think that we can fill the gap. And the second thing is that there will be a future and we do have kids and we do have grandkids, and to the extent that we are successful today in finding and pumping what oil remains, we are dooming them to an increased crisis where they are going to have less and less opportunity to live like we have lived because our incredibly lavish life-style is in large measure built on this really high-quality fossil fuel energy.

The next chart shows us what we will ultimately transition to, and there is no escaping this, oil is finite. There will be a peaking. It could be now; it could be in a few years. It is not if, it is when. And there are some finite resources that we can have that we can work with, but they are finite, although they are enormous in volume. For instance, the tar sands, the Canadians would rather call them oil sands because ``tar'' does not have a good sound to it. But it is tar. It is not much better quality than the asphalt out here in the roadway, which flows with the hot sun, as you may notice. The cars sit on it and it sinks down. Put a blowtorch on it and it will really flow. The oil shales in our west and coal are all finite resources.

The Canadians are aggressively pursuing the production of oil from their tar sands, or oil sands, as they like to call them. But I understand that they are using more energy from natural gas to cook that oil sand to get the oil out and more energy from natural gas than they are getting out of the oil. From a business perspective, that makes good sense because that gas up there is stranded. It is in Alberta, Canada. There are not very many people there. Gas is hard to transport, and stranded gas is very cheap. So they use a cheap gas to produce very expensive oil. It costs them about $18 a barrel, I understand, to produce it. And they are getting $70 a barrel. That is a really good dollar/profit ratio. The energy/profit ratio is less than one; so ultimately that is not sustainable, of course, using more energy in than you get out.

The oil shales in our west, there have been some very glowing articles in the papers. I talked to the investigator there. He attended a conference out in Denver, Colorado a few months ago that I was at. And Shell Oil Company,

it will be several years before they decide whether or not it is even feasible economically to get oil out of our oil shales. There is an enormous quantity there, nearly as much as the world has found, but not all recoverable. There are estimates that 800 billion barrels may be recoverable, but at what cost? What they do out there is to drill a series of holes around the periphery, and they freeze that so that the oil that they melt out in the middle will not contaminate the groundwater, and then they cook it with steam for about a year. And then after they have cooked it for about a year, heating it up, they drill a well there and they start pumping and cooking, and they do that for another year or two, and they can get meaningful amounts of oil. But the scalability of this and the economic feasibility of this are still unknown, so they are pursuing that.

I would caution, Mr. Speaker, not to be too euphoric about their prospects of getting energy out of these tar sands and oil shales. There is a lot of energy there. It will be difficult to get it out economically, particularly difficult to have a meaningful energy/profit ratio getting it out. But it is there and we have to do the best we can to get it out as efficiently as we can.

Then coal, you will hear we have 250 years of coal, and the next chart shows that is true. We do have 250 years of coal at current use rates, at no growth. But notice what happens when there is only 2 percent growth. Now, I think that as we have less oil, we are going to have to use coal more. Hitler ran his whole economy and his military on oil from coal. So did South Africa with the embargoes that we had there. With just 2 percent growth rate, this exponential growth has an incredible effect. This 2 percent, the 250 years shrinks to about 85 years. And for most of its uses, you cannot use coal. You are going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid. And if you take the energy to do that, you have now shrunk it down to about 50 years. And that is only 2 percent growth. I believe we will have to increase the use of coal more than 2 percent.

Now, back to this chart of the potential alternative sources:

Nuclear. Nuclear produces now about 8 percent of our total energy in this country and about 20 percent of our electricity. In France it produces about 80, 85 percent of their electricity. There are three kinds of nuclear power. Two kinds of nuclear fission: the lightwater reactor and breeder reactors. We use only lightwater reactors in this country. The only breeder reactors we ever used were in producing the fuel for our nuclear missiles. The world has a limited supply. It is hard to get good numbers on that, but the world has a limited supply of fissionable uranium, and then we will have to go to breeder reactors, which, as the name implies, produce more fuel than they use. But you also buy big problems with that, transporting it around and enriching it, and some of it is weapons grade; so you have to deal with those problems if you want to go to fission with a breeder reactor.

I have friends here in the Congress who were devoutly opposed to nuclear. They are bright people, and when they are considering the alternative, which may be shivering in the dark if we do not have enough electricity, now nuclear is not looking all that bad to them if the alternative is shivering in the dark. Nuclear could and maybe should grow. But in this country it is very difficult to site a plant and to build it. It may take 10 years, and I understand that the plant has to be operating maybe 20 years before you get back the amount of fossil fuel energy that went into producing the plant.

Again, Mr. Speaker, on many of these things we need good numbers. It is hard to have a rational discussion when there is so much disagreement in numbers, and we really do need to enlist an honor broker so that we can agree on numbers because it is very difficult to have a rational discussion when there are such wide differences of opinion as to how much is out there of this and that.

Nuclear fusion. If we can discover that, we are home free. That is what the sun does to produce all the energy we get from the sun. And we are just a tiny, tiny speck in that whole sphere around the sun and the incredible amount of energy that comes from the sun. We are home free if we get there, by the way. But I think the odds of getting there are about the same as the odds of your or my solving our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice, but I doubt, Mr. Speaker, that you are plotting your economic future on the assumption that you are going to win the lottery, and I do not think we ought to plot our energy future on the assumption that we are going to get fusion. I support all of the money, about $250 million a year or so. Of course, it goes into fusion. I hope we get there. But, frequently, my hopes and my expectations are not the same thing. In this case I would not bet the ranch that we are going to get fusion energy. If we do, we are home free, and we need to continue to invest all the money that that technology can reasonably absorb.

And now we come to the truly renewable resources. And ultimately, Mr. Speaker, after this age of oil, which will end, and when I say ``oil,'' I mean gas and coal too, which will end in about another 100, 150 years, we will be running our world on these energy sources: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy from tides or thermal gradients or waves. Agricultural resources, a lot of possibilities there: soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass, cellulosic ethanol. You hear a lot of these words.

Burning our waste to get energy, that is a really good idea, and we should do more of that. We need fewer landfills, and we would have a little more electricity if we did that.

The last one here that I want to spend just a moment on, it says hydrogen from renewables. Today we are not making hydrogen from renewables. We are making hydrogen from natural gas. That is going to peak and be running down about the same curve that oil is running down. One thing is true, Mr. Speaker: We will always use more energy producing hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Unless we are going to suspend the second law of thermal dynamics, that will be true.

Well, if it takes more energy to produce hydrogen, why are we even thinking about hydrogen? For two reasons: One is when you finally use it, burn it, you get only water. That is not a very polluting product. And the second reason we are really interested in hydrogen is that it is one of the better things to feed a fuel cell with if we ever get economically feasible fuel cells. A fuel cell will get more than twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. So even though you lose some energy when you go from electricity or coal or whatever to hydrogen, you will more than get it back in the increased efficiency of the fuel cell if we ever get to the fuel cell, if it is economically feasible. And you are certainly not polluting, you are producing only water.

The next chart is an interesting look at one aspect of the agriculture, and that is the amount of energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. On the chart we show two things: On the right is petroleum, and it shows that if you put in about 1\1/4\ million Btus, you will get out 1 million. On the left-hand side, it shows a picture for ethanol, that if you put in three-fourths of a million Btus, you get out 1 million. And some people will tell you that this is pretty optimistic. In fact, Pimentel says it is actually negative. You use more energy producing ethanol than you get out of it. But if this is true, what that means is that today the way we produce ethanol, for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you are burning the equivalent of three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuels, because that is the fossil fuel energy it took to produce ethanol.

The chart at the bottom shows why this is true, and it shows all of the total energy requirements of farm inputs.

This is BTUs per bushel of corn. The energy goes into producing a bushel of corn.

You notice that big, nearly half of it, that says nitrogen? Mr. Speaker, that is natural gas from which we make nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learned how to do that, all of our nitrogen fertilizer came from barnyard manures or guano. Guano is gone. If we wait another 10,000 or 20,000 years, there will be some more.

But most people don't know that nitrogen fertilizer today, essentially all of it comes from natural gas, almost none of it produced in our country. Natural gas is too expensive here. It is

made in other countries where gas is kind of stranded.

The next chart looks at where we are. I use an analogy here which I think is very apt. We are very much like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents 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.

They look at the inheritance, and it is not going to last until they retire. So what will they do? Obviously, they have got to do one or both of two things. They either have got to spend less or make more. I use those numbers, others may use 86-14. I use those numbers because that is exactly where we are with our energy use today. Eight-five percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural gas, and only 15 percent of it comes from some other source.

Now, a bit more than half of that comes from nuclear electric power. That is 8 percent of our total energy, about 20 percent of our electricity. The rest, 7 percent, is the true renewables. Mr. Speaker, those are the things which we ultimately will transition to.

Now this is a chart from 2000, and the solar and the wind and so forth would be bigger today. That is 1 percent in this chart of 7 percent. That is .07 percent. It is really in the noise level. We are four times bigger than that today at .28 percent. Big deal. It is a long, long way to go from .28 percent to go to something really meaningful as a contribution. But that is what we will be turning to increasingly in the future.

Notice that on this renewable sources there, the biggest one, 46 percent, is conventional hydroelectric. That will not increase in our country. We are pretty much tapped out on that. We might go to microhydro and use little microturbines in thousands of little streams across the country without affecting the environment as much as the big ones, by the way, and get about that much more energy.

But notice that solar and wind and agriculture down here, it is just alcohol fuel there; but it could be biomass, soy diesel, biodiesel and so forth, are very small amounts. Where we can get it, we ought to be getting more of geothermal. There is not much in this country. All of Iceland's energy comes from geothermal. I don't think there is a chimney in Iceland, because they don't need it. They get it all from geothermal sources.

Notice the waste to energy up there, which is 8 percent. That could grow. Instead of putting it in a landfill, there is a very nice plant up here in Montgomery County they will be happy to show you through. It is really a very handsome plant, and they are burning waste up there to produce electricity.

Just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. We must keep two realities in mind. The first is that we must feed the world. Tonight, about 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry, obviously not in this country. And we have to maintain our top soils. If you don't have top soils, you will not feed the world.

Now, if we would live lower on the food chain, if we ate the corn and the soybeans instead of the pig or the chicken or the cow that eat the corn and soybeans, we would have between 10 and 20 times as many calories to eat, because that is about the ratio. They say one pound of grain to three pounds of pig or chicken, but that is dry grain and wet pig and you can only eat about half of the pig. When you get down to the true ratio of dry to dry matter, it is about 10 to one for the steer. By the way, milk and eggs are very much more economically produced and really higher-quality proteins.

When it comes to things like cellulosic ethanol and biomass and so forth, be careful that we aren't using so much of that that we are mining our top soils of an essential element called humus. Humus is what gives tilts to the soil. It is why top soil is different than subsoil. It holds water; it holds the nutrients. If you take all of that out, you no longer have top soil.

We can get some energy from agriculture, but it will not fill the gap between what will be available and what we would like to use.

The next chart is a really interesting one. This shows on an interesting scale, this is how good you feel about your station in life on the ordinate here. Then the absyssa is how much energy you use. Notice where we are. We are way over there in the far right. We use more energy than any other society in the world.

You know, notice you can't feel very good about your station in life until you have used a meaningful amount of energy, but it is striking that this is all relative. China is up here. China feels really good about where they are. Notice how little energy the average man uses, so they are better off today than yesterday, so they feel good about it. They are improving. What I want to point out on this chart, you don't have to use the amount of energy we use to feel good about your position in life.

There are about a dozen countries over there that use less energy than we. Everybody above that line uses less energy than we and feels better about their station in life than we feel. We have lots of potential to use less energy and feel good.

The next chart shows a really interesting one on energy efficiency. There may not be this kind of opportunity everywhere, but on the left here is a usual incandescent bulb. If you are brooding chickens, you use a light bulb. It is not light you want; it is heat.

But notice that 90 percent of all the energy that comes out of that incandescent bulb, that is what is up here, I am looking up at them, Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the energy that comes out of that is heat.

Now, if you go to a fluorescent, you have these little screw in fluorescents now, and notice, by the way, the green here is the same amount of light every time. Notice that you use demonstrably less energy, four times less energy. A 13-watt little spiral bulb will give you as much light as a 60-watt bulb. These fluorescents are very efficient.

Now notice what happens with a light-emitting diode. Notice that the amount of heat produced in a light-emitting diode is only about one- tenth of the light you get. No wonder much of new technology is moving to diodes.

The next chart is an interesting one from our country, and this shows the energy used per capita electricity consumption in California and the U.S.A. Remember several years ago they had some blackouts and brownouts in California, and we were predicting massive rolling brownouts or blackouts the following year. It did not happen.

The reason it didn't happen is because the Californians, without anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their consumption of electricity by 11 percent. And notice, the average Californian uses about, what, about 65 percent of electricity as the average in the rest of our country. It would be hard to argue that Californians don't live as well as we.

The next chart is a very interesting picture. We don't want to go there, and unless we do something meaningful to address this coming energy crisis, we could do what the Easter Islanders did. They had a good thing going for them there. They fished the oceans and the fish was there for the taking.

To make their boats, they cut down the trees. And the trees weren't growing as fast as the boats they were making, and they cut down more and more trees, and ultimately they cut down the last tree. And when those boats rotted and they could no longer fish, their society started deteriorating. When they were finally discovered, they were down to eating rats and living in caves and eating each other. They had a civilization before that which could indulge in such things as these very large sculptures that you see here.

What they did was to mine a nonrecoverable resource, and they had no fallback. They had no alternative to fall back on.

The next chart shows kind of where we are and where we need to go. So far, Mr. Speaker, it may not be obvious that we have a really bright future ahead of us, but I think we do. We have some big challenges here. Challenges and opportunities are two faces of the same thing, and I would like to think of them as opportunities.

I think that what we need to address this problem is the equivalent of a program that embodies the total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. There were no automobiles

made in, what, '43, '44 and '45. There was gas rationing. I can't remember people grumbling about the gas rationing.

Everybody had a victory garden who could. They were encouraged to do that. It was the patriotic thing to do. We started daylight savings time so you could have some time after work in the evening to work on your victory garden.

Everybody saved their household grease. I am still not quite sure what they did with that, but we took it to a central repository.

The point is everybody was involved. It was the last time in our country that everybody has really been involved, and we need a program that involves everybody. We also need a program that kind of has the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, because there are some really big technology challenges here.

Thirdly, this program needs to have the kind of urgency that we had in the Manhattan Project, because time is really of the essence here. We don't have the luxury of a leisurely approach to solving this problem.

There will be an increasing deficit of oil in the world and in our country; but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I think the biggest deficit today is leadership, both here and in the world.

With so many experts, and these two studies, and again I go back to the two studies, here they are, paid for by our government, saying that we are at or nearly at peak oil and pointing to the dire consequences if you haven't prepared for that, I don't see our leaders in our country or in the world standing up and telling their citizens that we face this problem.

This chart shows what we need to do. The first thing we need to do is to buy some time. How do we buy time? Right now there is no surplus energy available to invest in alternatives, like building a nuclear power plant, like finding a really good way to make ethanol, to make a whole lot more solar panels, to make a whole lot more wind machines. By the way, wind machines are producing electricity at 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. That is very competitive.

If we can have a very aggressive conservation program that you can do quickly, we can free up some oil, which buys us some time so that we can invest in these alternatives.

Then we need to use this wisely. Somehow we need an entity which is making judgments as to what is the best uses of the limited resources of both time and energy that we will have.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, we need to invest three things to get these alternatives. We need money and we need energy and we need time. Of course, in this Congress, we never worry about money, we just borrow that from our kids and our grandkids without their approval. But we can't borrow time from them, and we can't borrow energy from them.

Thinking about our children and grandchildren, Mr. Speaker, I would just like to make an argument that there is a moral dimension to the challenge we face. To the extent that we are able to go out there and get these remaining resources to fill the gap, to continue life as we know it, we are going to be denying our children and our grandchildren access to these energy sources.

Right now, we are telling them although we cannot do it, we cannot even come close to running our government on current revenue, not only will they have to run their government on current revenues, they will have to pay back all the money we borrowed from their generation.

I am having a moral problem with going out there with the techniques that we have to get this gas and oil and coal, the little that remains, more quickly. We will certainly be denying our children the opportunity to do that.

Somehow we have to have an organization which makes decisions. We have only limited time. We have only limited energy. How will we invest it? What is the wisest way to invest it?

There are many benefits that can come from this. One of the benefits, Mr. Speaker, I can imagine Americans going to bed in the evening feeling really good about the contribution they have made that day to this problem. This shouldn't be viewed as a problem; this should be viewed as a challenge. Life is really easy in our country. Most people don't have to really stretch to do well.

I think that our people would marshal. We have the most creative, innovative society in the world; and if our people only knew that there was this problem, I think that all of our energy, our creativity, our innovation could be marshaled to address this.

We have no alternative but to be a role model. We use a fourth of all the world's energy. We are a role model. We need to be a good role model for this transition.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, with the realization that if every American is challenged to address this problem, that there is a way out, we will have a bright future. But the later we start, the more difficult that transformation will be. We should have started a decade ago. We can't turn back the hands of time, but we can from now on do what we should have been doing in the past.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 5122, a truly bipartisan bill that supports our troops.

As chairman of the Subcommittee on Projection Forces, I want to recognize the outstanding service rendered to our great Nation by our men and women in uniform around the globe here, meeting every challenge with true dedication and professionalism.

I also want to thank all Americans, especially the families of the deployed service members, for their unwavering support of our servicemen and women.

I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), ranking member of the Projection Forces Subcommittee, for his extraordinary partnership and support in completing this bill.

Thank you, sir, so very much. I express my sincere gratitude to all of my colleagues and staff on the subcommittee for their diligence, commitment and hard work. Further, I would like to recognize our chairman, Mr. Hunter, and ranking member, Mr. Skelton, for their continued exemplary leadership in bringing this year's National Defense Authorization Act to the floor with unwavering bipartisanship and clear focus to providing our military what it needs to accomplish its mission.

I am pleased to report that the National Defense Authorization Act that we consider today takes bold steps to ensure our Nation's continued ability to safeguard our national interests and, when necessary, project U.S. military power around the globe.

We have taken action to provide our troops with the capabilities they need to meet current and emerging threats. But we also have taken precautions to ensure that current capabilities are not permanently or prematurely retired to fund future replacement capabilities that are either undefined or unaffordable.

Some of the Projection Forces highlights in this bill include: a program to infuse our shipyards with leading-edge manufacturing technology and management systems to reduce shipbuilding costs and return our shipyards to global competitiveness; legislative provisions that will improve the Navy's ability to execute the 313-ship plan envisioned by the Chief of Naval Operations by setting cost limitations at Navy budget estimates for the LHA(R), CVN-21 and LPD-17 programs; force structure initiatives that set a minimum requirement for 48 attack submarines and 299 strategic airlift aircraft and limited retirements of KC-135E and B-52 aircraft; 400 million in advance procurement funds to begin construction of a second Virginia class submarine in fiscal year 2009; $300 million to procure three additional C-17 aircraft; and $200 million to accelerate the DDG-51 destroyer modernization program by 2 years.

While there is much more to do, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2007 is an important step in strengthening the Armed Forces of the United States. I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, when the unbridled expression of one right infringes on another, we appropriately limit that right, and that is what we do today.

On March 3 of this year, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder of Westminster, Maryland, was killed when his Humvee overturned on assignment in Iraq.

Before his deployment, Matthew explained that he volunteered for convoy escort security because, ``There was a position that needs to be filled, and I am a Marine.''

Outside the church where Matthew's family and friends gathered for his funeral, a group of six out-of-State protesters loudly chanted and carried signs, including, ``Thank God for Dead Soldiers.''

I stand today joined in spirit by members of the American Legion and the For Our Troops Club of Hereford High School in support of this bill that will honor America's fallen soldiers and respect the privacy of their families by protecting the dignity of their funerals.

Madam Speaker, I have here in my hands two pretty big reports that were paid for by our government and have for reasons that it is difficult for me to understand been pretty much ignored apparently by the organizations that paid for them.

The first of these is a big report paid for by the Department of Energy called The Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. This is generally known as the Hirsch Report, because the project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch from SAIC, a very prestigious scientific and engineering organization. This report is dated February, 2005.

For reasons that we are trying to find, this was bottled up, apparently, inside the Department of Energy, because it didn't become publicly available until several months after that.

The second report I have here is the report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This obviously is paid for by the Army. It is dated September of 2005, and it was just about 2 months ago that it finally got out of the Pentagon into the public. This one is called Energy Trends and Their Implications For U.S. Army Installations. I would submit that wherever they mention ``Army,'' you could substitute ``the United States'' and it would be completely appropriate.

What I would like to do for the first few minutes is to look at some of the comments and recommendations in these two reports; and I would like to keep asking the question, why have these two government agencies which paid for these reports done essentially nothing to promulgate this information across the country? Rather, it would seem that there was an intent to keep this information from the public, because the Hirsch Report was bottled up inside the Department of Energy for several months, and the Army Corps of Engineers report is dated September of 2005, and it says on the cover here, ``Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.'' But there was essentially no distribution of that until just about 2 months ago.

As you will see, Madam Speaker, if the content of these two reports is correct, if their observations and recommendations are correct, you would have expected these two government agencies to be using every vehicle at their disposal to get this information out to the public.

Let's look first at a few quotes from the Hirsch Report. The first here says, ``The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically,'' oil was almost $75 a barrel today, ``and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.

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

A little later we will talk more about this. I am not sure that this is exactly the way that I would have articulated our challenge. We will talk about that a little later.

``Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort.''

Now another quote from this Hirsch Report. ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules so as to incorporate higher energy efficiency technologies into the privately owned transportation sector. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time-consuming, of the order of a decade or more.''

If we are talking about transportation, Madam Speaker, that is indeed true. Because the average automobile and small truck is in the fleet about 17-18 years and the average 18-wheeler about 28 years. So any improvements that we ever make, we are making in energy efficiency in automobiles and trucks, is going to take quite some time to show any meaningful effect because of how long they are in the fleet.

Now a third quote from the Hirsch Report. Madam Speaker, I would like us to keep in our mind the question, if this is true and we have two reports, as you will see, that have reached essentially the same conclusion, we have no reason to believe there was any collusion between them. Indeed, their dates of publication are quite different, February to September. And if these observations and recommendations in these reports are in fact correct, then one might wonder why haven't these agencies been using every vehicle at their disposal to get this information out to the American public and to initiate programs to deal with these problems?

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

Then this, Madam Speaker, a very significant statement. ``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say, and then this statement. ``The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.''

Now I would like to read a few of the quotes and recommendations from the Corps of Engineers study just out about 2 months ago, although the date was September of last year.

``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil's many advantages provide 1-\1/3\ to 2\1/2\ times more economic value per million BTUs than coal. Currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum.''

Madam Speaker, that is a startling statement. If in fact the world is peaking in oil production and there is no viable substitute for petroleum, wouldn't you think that the agencies paying for these studies would have used every vehicle available to them to get this word out to the American public and to articulate a rational program for dealing with this emergency?

``Oil prices may go significantly higher,'' they say, ``and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years.'' Just under $75 today, $180 a barrel in a few years.

``In general, all non-renewable resources follow a natural supply curve: Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak and then declines at a rapid pace, similar 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 of the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline.'' Campbell and Deffeyes, several references here.

Let me digress for just a moment. One of these, Dr. Deffeyes, predicted that the peak did occur a couple of months ago, and he says he is no longer a prognosticator, he is now a historian, because the peak, he believes, is behind us.

``Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia has not been able to increase supply above its monthly production peak of April 2003.''

And I am reminded here of a recent book by Matt Simmons called Twilight in the Desert. He has done a very scholarly and exhaustive study of all of the open literature and believes that Saudi Arabia has peaked in oil production.

Iraq may also have significant excess capacity if it can be brought into production. Under Saddam Hussein, we got about 2\1/2\ million barrels a day from Iraq; now we are lucky to get 1\1/2\ million barrels a day.

Meanwhile, domestic oil production in both the lower 48 States and Alaska continues to decline. Many non-OPEC oil producers have also passed or are currently reaching their peaks of production. Indeed, Madam Speaker, of the 48 largest oil-producing countries in the world, 33 have already peaked.

And now their recommendations. And excuse me for reading, but to paraphrase this would not have quite the impact of reading exactly their words. The coming years will see significant increases in energy costs across the spectrum. Not only are energy costs an issue, but also reliability, availability, and security.

It is time to think strategically about energy and how the Army, and please substitute here the United States, should respond to the global and national energy picture. A path of enlightened self-interest is encouraged. The 21st century is not the 20th century.

Issues will play out differently and geopolitics will impact the energy posture of the Nation. Technology will change more rapidly and flexibility will be a crucial part of installation operations. This must also extend to the energy infrastructure and its operational concepts.

And then this very interesting statement: the days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy sources are quickly drawing to a close. When I read that, Madam Speaker, I was reminded of the short paragraph that Matt Savinar uses in introducing his discussion of peak oil.

He says: ``Dear reader. Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' I hope that he is overly pessimistic. We will see. Domestic natural gas production peaked in 1973. Now, note this statistic, Madam Speaker: the proved domestic reserve lifetime for natural gas at current consumption rates is about 8.4 years.

What this says is, if we can get all of our gas from our resources, it would last 8.4 years. Of course, we cannot get it out that fast. So we are importing gas. But that is all we have remaining is 8.4 years. This is the Corps of Engineers.

The proved world reserve lifetime for natural gas is about 40 years, but will follow a traditional rise to a peak, then a rapid decline. Domestic oil production peaked in 1970 and continues to decline. This is a really startling statistic. Proved domestic reserve lifetime for oil is about 3.4 years.

That means if we could pump oil as fast as we are using it, our 2 percent of the world's reserve would last us, at the rate at which we are using oil, 3.4 years.

World oil production is at or near its peak; and current world demand exceeds the supply, which is why oil is about $75 a barrel. Saudi Arabia is considered to be the bellwether nation for oil production and has not increased production since April of 2003. After peak production, supply no longer meets demand; prices and competition increase.

World proved reserves lifetime for oil is about 41 years, most of this at a declining availability. Our current throwaway nuclear cycle uses up the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years. We will see significant depletion of Earth's finite fossil resources in this century. We must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other sources.

This is dated September of last year, Madam Speaker. Have you seen anybody in authority in our country telling the American people this? We must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other energy sources.

Policy changes leap ahead of technology breakthroughs, cultural changes and significant investment is requisite for this new energy future. Time is essential to enact these changes. The process should begin now.

Indeed, if they had written this 20 years ago, they would use exactly that same language. Because we really should have started some 20 years ago.

Madam Speaker, what is all of this about? What are they talking about? To understand that, we need to go back about six decades and to the life of a very, now very famous oil geologist, Dr. M. King Hubbert, who worked for the Shell Oil Company.

In 1956, as a result of his studies, he published a paper that the 50th-year anniversary of that was March 8, in which he predicted that the United States would peak in oil production about 1970.

Now this was revolutionary. Because at that time I believe we were the largest producer of oil in the world, and probably the largest exporter of oil in the world. Shell Oil Company pleaded with him not to publish a paper, that we would make him and them look really silly.

He published the paper anyhow. And 14 years later when right on target we peaked, he became kind of a celebrity. What we have here, Madam Speaker, is his predicted curve, the smooth green curve. And then the more ragged curve, green curve with the largest symbols represents the actual data points.

And you see that right on schedule in 1970, oil production peaked. Now, this is the lower 48. He did not know about Alaska at that time, and in just a moment we will look at another chart which includes Alaska.

The red there, by the way, is the Soviet Union. More oil than we, peaked just a bit after us. They kind of fell apart when the Soviet Union fell apart, and they are now having a second small peak. But after that it will be continually downhill.

The next chart shows where we have been getting our oil from. Not just in the lower 48. And that is this blue curve and the dark blue one under it, Texas and the rest of the United States. But then you see the natural gas liquids and the Alaska oil, and the Gulf of Mexico oil.

And you see that in 1970 we peaked, and just a little blip in the downhill side of what is called Hubbert's peak here. I remember particularly, Madam Speaker, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries which were supposed to get us home free. That is the yellow on this chart. Notice the relatively trifling contribution that the Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries made, about 4,000 wells out there. We were reminded of that last fall with these hurricanes, when a number of them were damaged.

The next chart is from the Hirsch report, and that shows you what we do with this oil. It is really kind of interesting. The light blue here represents transportation. That is about 70 percent of all of the energy from the oil that we use is used in transportation. Then there is industrial and a little bit of electric power and a little bit commercially. But the major part of our oil is used in transportation.

That is a liquid fuel. And, you know, the challenge is to find something to replace that. The next chart is a really interesting one, and we could spend a long time on this chart, because it has so much information on it.

But I want to look at it just in gross form here. The bar graphs here represent the discovery of oil, and you see that way back in 1940 we were discovering some big fields of oil. And then a little later in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, we were discovering a lot of oil.

And our use of oil was very small then. The heavy black line here represents our use of oil, and notice that we were finding enormously more oil than we were using.

So there was every reason to believe that for the foreseeable future and beyond everything was going to be just fine, because we were finding enormous amounts of oil and we were not using very much oil. But then that all turned around about 1980.

Because at about that time, the discoveries of oil reached a maximum, and

then they trailed off. And you can see it here on the downslope here. And in spite of improved techniques, in spite of intense drilling, year by year, we have found on the average less and less oil.

For those who are familiar with curves like this, it is quite obvious that the area under this curve, if we were to draw a smooth line through this discovery curve, the area under that curve represents the total volume of oil which has been discovered.

And the area under the consumption curve represents the total amount of oil that we have consumed. Now, it is very obvious that you cannot consume oil that you have not discovered, and so to find out how much consumption we can have in the future, all one needs to do is to look at the area under this discovery curve, and then to project where you think the consumption curve is going.

Now, this chart has peaking occurring, what, in 5 years or so, about 2010. There are a number of people who believe that peaking has occurred about now or will occur very shortly.

The lightly shaded part of this graph, of course, is to the future; and, Madam Speaker, you can make that future within limits look about any way you want to make it look. For instance, if we use enhanced oil recovery, and we drill a lot more wells, the United States has drilled 530,000 wells. I believe there are about 400 wells in Saudi Arabia and maybe 300 in Iraq, both of which have enormously more reserves than we have.

But if you vigorously go after this oil, you might get it sooner. But if you get it sooner, there will be less later, unless you are really good at enhanced oil recovery and you are able to get significantly more out of the ground. The next chart kind of puts this in long-range perspective, and this is a really interesting chart.

Looking at the top chart here, we are looking back about 400 years through history; and we see that the quadrillion Btus, it is so near the zero line here that you probably cannot see the difference. And then we began the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. And we began that with wood, of course. We denuded the hills of New England, the mountains of New England, carrying charcoal to England to make steel. We have a little furnace up here in Frederick County, and we denuded the hills of northern Frederick County to provide charcoal for that little furnace there.

The Industrial Revolution was stuttering with wood when we found coal and were able to utilize that. And then look what happened, Madam Speaker, when we discovered gas and oil. It just took off. This is an exponential curve at about a 2 percent growth rate.

In a moment we will show this same curve with different units on the ordinate abscissa, and it will appear to be a much less dramatic curve there because it really spread out the abscissa here.

But I would like to note that the world population has reasonably followed this energy cycle. So that we went from about one-half a billion to about 1 billion people here. Steady state for quite a long time until we now have between 6 and 7 billion people.

And that dramatic increase in the world's population was largely due to the incredible quantity and quality of energy from oil and natural gas. I would like to reflect for just a moment on the quality of this energy, the energy density of these fossil fuels.

One barrel of oil, and you will now pay a bit more than $100 for the refined product at the pump, 42 gallons, will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you.

If you worked really hard in your yard this weekend for a full day, I will get more work, more mechanical work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. And that may be kind of humbling to recognize that we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of the energy available in these fossil fuels.

Madam Speaker, our children and certainly our grandchildren will look back at our generation and the generation of our parents, and I say that because my father lived almost half way through the age of oil, and they will wonder how we could have behaved the way we have behaved.

When we found this incredible resource, this wealth, we should have stopped and asked ourselves, what do we need to do so we can provide the most good for the most people for the longest time with this incredible wealth. It should have been obvious to everybody that this was not infinite. The earth is not made of oil. It is a finite resource.

We are now, as this chart shows in 5,000 years of recorded history, about 100, 150 years into the age of oil. In another 100, 150 years, we will be through the age of oil. What, then, when we have had to transition to the renewables?

Notice here, Madam Speaker, what happened in the 1970s. That was really quite dramatic. There was a worldwide recession, demand for oil fell, the price collapsed, and we reduced our energy consumption. It is now with China and India and the developing world demanding more and more oil increasing again at the same kind of a rate that it did up till 1970.

Madam Speaker, I would like to give one statistic that is just startling. Up until the Carter years, in every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that means is, had we continued on that course, and fortunately we did not as this chart shows, but had we continued on that course when we had used up half of the world's supply of oil, only one decade of oil would have remained. In 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil would be just a blip, about 300 years long is all, out of 5,000 years of recorded history.

The next chart shows the predictions of some of the experts about when peaking should occur, and this is from the Hirsch report, and this was about a year ago, and they could not have known that Dr. Deffeyes was going to conclude that the peaking has already occurred. He gave a specific date for that, and he rather humorously said he is no longer a prognosticator, he is a historian.

Well, all these people believe the peak is going to occur in the next 5 years; and then there are a few that believe it will occur about 5 years after that. Then there are Serum, Shell Oil Company, a few who believe it will be sometime in the future. Nobody, Madam Speaker, will contend that we will not have peaking. It is not if. It is when.

The next chart is a simple depiction. It shows the same curve, that really dramatic one you saw a couple of charts ago, when we had this dramatic increase in the production of energy, same curve. You can make it short and very high or spread out, depending upon the units you use in the ordinate and the abscissa.

This is a 2 percent exponential growth rate, and notice that starts out rather slow, but 2 percent, leave the interest in the bank, it grows and grows till it is now getting quite steep, even on this expanded abscissa scale.

As you saw from the previous chart, most of the experts believe that oil peaking is either now or very shortly in the future. If, as we have indicated here, we are at this point, then the peaking will indeed occur a couple of years or so hence.

But notice that the discrepancy between the oil we would like to use, the demand curve and the oil which is available to use, begins before the curve. It will not be as smooth as this. It will be ups and downs, and oil may again fall down to $50 a barrel. That will be nice. Do not count on it.

What we have produced here is what is called a gap. That is a difference between what is available to use and what we would like to use; and, as the next chart shows, the Hirsch Report focused on the problems of filling that gap. What they did is look at the consequences of filling the gap, dependent upon when you start to fill the gap, and if you wait until peaking has occurred, you see zero here, that is when it has occurred. Then there will be significant shortfall. You will be able to do some mitigation.

In a few minutes, we will talk more about that mitigation; and I wonder if, in fact, we should try to mitigate or whether we need to effect a steady state where we can live happily and productively at the current energy level and thus leave a little more for our kids and our grandkids and a little more for the next few years just ahead of us.

What it shows here is that if you are going to have no supply shortfall, that you need to begin the mitigation 20 years before peaking occurs. Now, from all of the experts' predictions that we saw, that is going to be manifestly impossible because almost nobody believes that peaking is two decades from now. So what one would conclude from this is that there are going to be consequences.

The next chart shows what we would be using to peak. We would be using enhanced oil recovery, coal liquids; and, by the way, South Africa and Hitler's Germany demonstrated you can indeed do that; heavy oil, that is the oil shales, tar sands and so forth, gas-to-liquids and then vehicle efficiency.

I mentioned previously how long these vehicles stay in the fleet. If you start here, there will be several years before you notice any effect, and then slowly over 50 years. That is a little less than the average lifetime of the average car and pickup in the fleet and about half the average lifetime of an 18-wheeler in the fleet.

Madam Speaker, I would like to wonder if, in fact, we ought to be trying to fill the peak, that is, to fill this gap till there is no shortfalls so that the world can continue to use all the oil that it would like to use. Notice that, except for vehicle efficiency, we are dealing here with finite resources. They are not forever, and the more we use now, the less we will have to use in the future.

Today, we are amassing the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. I would like not to include with that an enormous energy deficit that we are going to pass on to our kids and our grandkids. We are already burdening them with an enormous responsibility to not only run their government on current revenue but to pay back all of the money that we borrowed from their generations to run our government today. In good conscience, Madam Speaker, can we also borrow from their generations the fossil fuel energies which will be essential for establishing any reasonable quality of life in their generations?

I would submit that the challenge should not be to fill the gap. The challenge should rather be to establish an infrastructure and economy, lifestyles that can be interesting and productive and sustaining while we make the inevitable transition to renewables. These are all finite. You cannot fill that gap forever with these. As a matter of fact, for some of them, you cannot fill it very long.

The next chart shows us something about the consequences of excessive consumption. This is a really interesting chart. I would like to start here with this little insert where I think we are, and this is from our Energy Information Agency, and they get the data from the USGS. We talked to the Energy Information Agency, and they just use the information from USGS, and I think this is a rather meaningful misrepresentation of what the world will look like.

Madam Speaker, for any statisticians out there, it will be quite obvious that the 50 percent probability is not the mean. The most rightly thing to happen is the 95 percent probability. That is a high probability. It is the lesser, the lower amount of oil.

By the way, the 50 percent probability means that there could be a whole lot more oil. It also means there could be a whole lot less oil. You just do not know. What the Energy Information Agency does and the USGS is to assume that 50 percent probability is the mean. This is an unusual, and one might say bizarre, use of statistics, but using these statistics, you end up with almost twice the recoverable oil left in the world.

You see, they said that the ultimate recovery would be about 2 trillion barrels of oil with a 95 percent probability. We have already used about half of that, about 1 trillion barrels. So there is about 1 trillion left.

With the mean, which they say is expected, now that is not the expected value. The expected value is the 95 percent probability. That is the most probable. That is what it means. It is the most probable.

But with this assumption that that is the mean, which is a bizarre use of statistics, that pushes the peak out only from here at about 2000 to about 2016. So even if there is that much more oil there, and, by the way, only half of that yet to be pumped 2 trillion barrels have been found, you remember that earlier chart that showed the steep decline in discoveries, one must project something phenomenal in the future, that it will look just vastly different than the last few years. It would discover enormous basins of oil, and there is no expert out there that I know who believes that anything like that is going to happen. Notice that you push the peak out only about 10 years if you have that much more oil.

Now there is another interesting assumption that is made here, and that is if you can produce it with enhanced oil recovery and then you have a 10 percent decline, look what happens. You are really falling off a cliff.

The next chart kind of puts this in perspective; and it is these numbers, Madam Speaker, which prompted Boyden Gray and Frank Gafney and Jim Woolsey and 27 other prominent Americans, four-star admirals and generals, to write to the President some months ago, a number of months ago, saying, Madam Speaker, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, importing almost two-thirds of what we use, is an unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we have got to do something about that.

Even if you think that the only problem with oil is a national security risk, we ought to be about freeing ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. Even if there was no such thing as peaking, our behavior today needs to be vastly different than it is.

We are less than 5 percent of the world's population, about one person out of 22, and we use a fourth of the world's energy.

Madam Speaker, when we found all of that oil, and we more than others fit this characterization, rather than a responsible response to that discovery, which would ask the question how can we get the most good for the most people for the longest time, we acted like kids that found the cookie jar. We just pigged out, and here in the United States we are now using 25 percent of all the world's oil, and we represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population.

These top two numbers are significant. With only 2 percent of the oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. That means we are pumping our wells four times faster than the average in the world, which means that we are going to be increasingly dependent on foreign oil as we pump down our reserves.

The next chart kind of puts this in a global perspective. Because what this shows, and many people now recognize this, that for the last several years China has been scouring the world for oil. We have symbols here which show who has access to the major sources of oil in the world, and notice the symbol for China is all over this map. They have bought all of the increased capacity of the Canadian oil sands. They have major commitments from South American countries. They almost bought Unocal in our country. They have really major commitments from the Middle East.

Madam Speaker, not only this, but they recognize that we have the only blue water Navy, that is the Navy that sails the seven seas of the world and can control all of the access lanes. They see that we could, if we wish, cut off their source of oil.

So they are very aggressively building a blue water Navy.

Last year, we launched one submarine; they launched 14 submarines. Now theirs are not the quality of ours, certainly, but they are improving.

Well, what do we do? And the next chart kind of presents this challenge and this picture. Obviously, if what these two big reports say is true, that we are just about reached peaking, then we need to be about transitioning. In fact, we should have been about transitioning from fossil fuels to the renewables.

Madam Speaker, we knew of a certainty 26 years ago in 1980 we had already slid 10 years down the other side of Hubbard's Peak. Now, M.P. Hubbard was right about the United States. He predicted that the world would be peaking about now. Madam Speaker, he was right about the United States.

Would you not think that our leaders have wondered maybe, just maybe, he might be right about the world, and maybe we ought to be doing something about that? There has been a deafening silence on this subject for the last 26 years.

Any rational person, get a bright fifth grader and he will tell you what we need to be doing: We need to call upon all of our finite resources to help us through this transition period, and those finite resources are the tars and the oil shales and coal. And then there is nuclear as kind of a separate class, light water reactors, breeder reactors.

And note the quote from the Corps of Engineers study that the high- quality cheap, that is fissionable, uranium, will be exhausted in about 20 years, so we will need to move to breeder reactors which, as the name implies, makes more fuel than they use and so they are kind of self-sustaining. But, with that, you buy some problems of transportation and enriching and products that could be used by bad guys for making nuclear weapons.

I have a number of colleagues who have been stoutly opposed to nuclear, but when they are now rationally considering the alternative of shivering in the dark, nuclear is looking better and better.

Nuclear fusion, if we ever got there, Madam Speaker, we are home free. There is nothing else on this chart that gets us home free. Fusion does. I support happily the roughly $250 million a year that we put into this technology. But I think that counting on solving our energy future challenges with fusion is a bit like me or you, Madam Speaker, planning to solve our personal economic problems by winning the lottery, and I think the odds are probably somewhere near the same.

Once we have gone through these finite resources and have developed all the nuclear that we wish to develop, then we will ultimately, and the geology will assure it, because coal, gas and oil are not forever, we will transition to the renewables, and these are what they are, solar and wind and geothermal. That is true geothermal, where you are tapping into the molten core of the earth. There is not a chimney in all of Iceland because all of their energy is geothermal there, ocean energy, the tides and thermal gradients and so forth.

Agriculture resources, a lot of talk today about ethanol and methanol and soy diesel and biodiesel and biomass. Waste energy, a great idea. Instead of putting it in a landfill, burn it. There is lots of energy there. A very productive plant, state-of-the-art plant up in Montgomery County who would be happy, Madam Speaker, to have you come visit them there.

And then hydrogen from renewables. That is significant. Today, we are getting all of our hydrogen from natural gas. That is not renewable. That, by and by, will be gone, and then we will have to get hydrogen from renewables or from nuclear.

Just a word of caution. Hydrogen is not an energy source. We will always use more energy to produce hydrogen than we get out of it, or else we will have to suspend the second law of thermodynamics. And, Mr. Speaker, if we can do that, we can suspend the law of gravity and we are really home free, are we not?

Why even talk about hydrogen then? Well, because of the two characteristics of hydrogen. One is when you finally burn it, you get water that is not polluted. And if you have used a nonpolluting energy source to produce it like nuclear, for instance, or wind or solar, then you are totally nonpolluting.

The second advantage of hydrogen is that it is quite ideal for fuel cells if in fact we are ever able to make fuel cells that are economic. With the fuel cell, you get about twice the efficiency or at least twice the efficiency that you get out of reciprocating engine.

The next chart looks at coal. And some will tell you do not worry about energy because we have got an incredible supply of coal, they will tell you, in 500 years. That is not true. At current use rates, we do have 250 years of energy, of coal.

Albert Einstein said that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. If you increase its use only 2 percent, that 250 years shrinks to about 85 years. And, now, if you have to use some of the energy from the coal to convert to a gas or a liquid, and we will have to do that because we have limited uses for coal itself, then you reduce it to 50 years. That is meaningful. But it is a finite resource. It is not forever. It is dirty. You are either going to pay a big environmental penalty or an economic penalty for cleaning it up.

The next chart is an interesting one, and that looks at the opportunities and limitations from the agricultural world. On the top here, we have two little sequences which indicate the energy transformation from petroleum, and notice that you start out with maybe 5 equivalents of energy and end up with 4, so it is 5:4. And with corn to ethanol, you ought to do better, because you are getting some energy from the sun here. There are lots of challenges. It is or it can be energy positive. It certainly is in South America, where Brazil is converting sugar cane, which is a bit better than corn, to ethanol, and they are now freeing themselves from dependence on imported oil and soon all of their cars will be ethanol cars.

The bottom pie chart here is something I wanted to spend just a moment on because it is so startling. This shows you the energy input into producing a bushel of corn. Notice the purple area there, almost half of it, it says nitrogen, that is nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas. When natural gas is gone, that source of nitrogen fertilizer is gone.

Madam Speaker, before we learned how to do that, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manure and guano. The guano is gone. It took tens of thousands of years to produce it, we believe, and now it is harvested, and it is gone. That is the droppings from birds and bats on tropical islands and caves and so forth.

All those other segments of the pie here are other fossil fuel energy inputs into growing corn. I would just like to emphasize in very large measure the food we eat is just transformed gas and oil, and without gas and oil it would be very difficult to produce the amounts of food that we are producing today.

The next chart is a really interesting one. The little analogy that I use here 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. They look at the inheritance and how old they are and project a reasonable life span, and, gee, the grandparents' inheritance is going to give out long before we retire. So, obviously, Madam Speaker, they have got to do one or both of two things: Either they have got to make more money, or they have got to spend less money.

I use that 85/15, and others will use 86/14. The 85/15 shows what our energy dependence is now. About 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. That is like the inheritance from our grandparents: It will not last forever. And only about 15 percent of it comes from other sources. A bit more than half of it that comes from nuclear power, 8 percent of our total energy, 20 percent of our electricity.

As you drive home tonight, note that every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if it weren't for nuclear power.

Then we look at that 7 percent which is renewable energy, and the biggest chunk of that is conventional hydro that will not grow in our country. We may get some micro-hydro, but the big rivers have all been dammed and probably more than we should have dammed.

The next biggest chunk of that comes from wood, and that is the paper industry and the timber industry wisely burning a waste product that would otherwise end up in the landfill.

And then waste energy, that 8 percent. By the way, this 1 percent is 0.07 percent, because that is 1 percent of 7 percent from solar. That is a tiny, tiny amount of energy. But this was in 2000. That has been growing at 30 percent a year, so now it is about four times bigger. It is now 0.28 percent. Big deal, Madam Speaker. 0.28 percent? And that is about the same thing for wind, maybe a bit more from agriculture.

Those are the energy sources we are going to have to increasingly rely on in the future. So we have got a big challenge ahead of us.

The next chart depicts what we ought to be doing. The first thing we

need to do is to buy some time. You see, it takes three things to develop these renewables: It takes money, and it takes energy, and it takes time. Mr. Speaker, we will not worry about the money, although we should. Because when it comes to money we just borrow it from our kids and our grandkids by running up a big debt. So let us not worry about the money here.

But we cannot borrow time from our kids, and we cannot borrow energy from our kids. The only way to buy some time and free up some energy is with a pretty massive conservation program which frees up some energy.

Today, Madam Speaker, there is no surplus energy to invest in alternatives. All of it is needed by the economies of the world, or oil would not be roughly $75 a barrel.

Madam Speaker, what this chart denotes is a program that I think needs three qualities if we are going to make this transition in any acceptable way. First, we must have everybody involved, a total commitment like World War II. I lived through that. Everybody had a victory garden, everybody saved their household grease and took it to a central repository. It was the last war, the last time that everybody in our country was involved. We need a program, Madam Speaker, that has the total commitment of our population in World War II. It needs to have the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, because we are going to have to have a lot of technology breakthroughs and applications here if we are going to make it.

Thirdly, it needs to have the intensity of the Manhattan Project. Minus that, I think we are going to have a very rough ride. We should have begun 26 years ago.

Once we have freed up some time and freed up some energy, we need to use it wisely. And what has the biggest potential? What will have the biggest payoff? I think there are enormous benefits to this. I can see the American people going to bed every night thinking to themselves, gee, I really contributed today. I used less energy, I lived very comfortably, and I am really working on that new project which is going to help my kids and my grandkids to live as well as I live or maybe even better.

I think that we can be a role model for the world. I think that we can develop a lot of technology that we can export, but, Mr. Speaker, we will never get there unless we start.

I am wondering again, unless we close in the way we started, these two big studies paid for by our government noting the problems that we face in the future, why have not those parts of the government that paid for these reports claimed ownership? Why are they not using the resources available to them to make this information available to the American people? Why are they not coming to us with a program that says we have a big challenge, we have big opportunities, we really need to get going?

Madam Speaker, I think that we have a great bright future if we challenge the American people and marshal the resource. I think we have a very bumpy ride if we do not.

I look forward, Madam Speaker, to our leadership showing the way. I think Americans will follow. I think that we can be a role model to the world, and I think that we can get through this with less problems than many are depicting, but we won't get there unless we start.

Mr. Speaker, this is a historic event for me personally because it was just one year ago this date that I first came to this floor to talk about the subject of peak oil. As a matter of fact, that subject was so new that when we were preparing to give that first talk, we were debating should we talk about the great rollover or should we talk about peak oil.

The great rollover refers to that peak of the curve when it rolls over and you start down the other side of that consumption curve, which is the availability curve of oil. We finally decided that the proper designation to use was ``peak oil,'' and I guess that most other people who are talking about this subject have decided the same thing, because in this year, Mr. Speaker, just about everybody is talking about peak oil.

We looked at the statistics for last year and found that oil has increased about $10 a barrel, about 52 or 53 last year, 62 or 63 this year. Gasoline, I think, was about $2.05 last year. Now it is up and down a little, but $2.35, $2.45. Local stations where I live it is now $2.45.

A couple of very interesting things have happened in this last year. Oh, I have another document here, Mr. Speaker, which is about another very historic event; and it was 50 years ago, the 8th of this month, and I am sorry that I didn't know that date last year or I would have tried to do my first Special Order on peak oil on the 8th of March, because it was just 50 years ago on the 8th of March that M. King Hubbert gave his very famous talk at the spring meeting of the Southern District of the Division of Production of the American Petroleum Institute, Plaza Hotel, San Antonio, Texas. And this was a startling article. It is now very historic. This was in 1956.

In that speech, he predicted that the United States would peak in its oil consumption in about 1970. He did that with words. He did that with graphs, and he showed the graphs of the use of oil up to that time in 1956 and how much oil he thought that the United States would find and, therefore, when we would peak in oil production.

He was able to do this, Mr. Speaker, because he had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and he found that they all followed a very similar pattern. The oil production increased until it reached a maximum. That maximum production was, for most fields, about the halfway point of all the oil that you would get out of the field. And after reaching that maximum, no matter how vigorously you pumped that field, the production fell off steadily until at the end of the exhaustion of the field it reached a zero. And he theorized that if he knew how many individual fields there were in the United States, he could predict when the United States would peak in oil discovery.

This is a long paper with a lot of math in it. This wasn't just some intelligent guesses from looking at the data. He did a lot of mathematical analysis. Here is one of his graphs, for instance; and we have a larger one that we will show you in a minute. But this graph shows that he expected a peak about 1970. That was 14 years after he made this prediction.

So this tonight for me is a historic event because it is 1 year since I gave the first speech here on this subject. Since then I have given nine others. This will be the 10th since then and the 11th overall.

About the time I started this, 30 prominent members of our society, and let me put up a chart that shows that here for just a moment and then we will come back to two things that have happened in this year, which are really very interesting.

These numbers encouraged 30 prominent members of our society, including Boyden Gray and McFarland and Jim Woolsey and Frank Gaffney and 26 others, a number of retired four-star admirals and generals, to write a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil, and import about two-thirds of what we use, is a totally unacceptable national security risk; and, Mr. President, we have to do something about that.

I just want to show one chart here. Then I will introduce my colleague, and I will read a little paragraph from a recent report before doing that.

This is the curve that M. King Hubbert predicted in this article, reprinted here from 50 years ago, an article and a speech. The smooth green curve here was his prediction. The larger symbols, where the actual data points, and you see that right on target, we peaked in about 1970.

The red curve is the Soviet Union. They had a bit more oil than we. They peaked a little bit after us. Then they kind of fell apart when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they did not reach their potential. There will be a second little peak now, but they are nowhere near their former peak. They reached peak oil some time ago.

Mr. Speaker, in fact, I think 33 of the 45 countries in the world that produce oil have already passed their peak. Many others are at their peak or rapidly approaching it.

I want to read briefly from a new study, and this is one of the two really interesting things that have happened in the past year. One was a study by SAIC funded by the Department of Energy. I have some charts in a few moments that I will show, some of the comments that they made. There is another study that has just come out. Although this is not a brand-new study, the date on this study is September 2005. This is dated September 2005; but for some reason, it has not been released from the Pentagon.

This was done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and I am going to read from it a little later. Ordinarily, I don't read, but I haven't had time to make charts of this. I think this is so interesting and so startling, and it just came out. Yesterday, I think, may have been the first day; and for most people today, this was the first day they could get a hold of it.

Mr. Speaker, let me read you something, from that article and this will introduce my colleague, Wayne Gilchrest, who said he would be happy to come down and join me in this talk, if he could talk about global warming. I said, Wayne, that is exactly what the Corps of Engineers was talking about.

Let me read what they said here: ``Worldwide consumption of fossil fuels

and its coincident and environmental impact continues to grow.'' The Earth's endowment of natural resources are depleting at an alarming rate, exponentially faster than the biosphere's ability to replenish them.

Mr. Speaker, I would remind you that this is not an article from some environmental journal. This is from a report, which has kind of been kept under cover now since last September, just released. I think that it was inadvertently released, by the way. But now that it is out, you can get a copy of it. This was done by the Corps of Engineers. This is a U.S. Army publication. The Earth's endowment of natural resources are depleting at an alarming rate, exponentially faster than the biosphere's ability to replenish them. It took nature 100 million years to create the energy the world uses in 1 year. Fuel consumption affects the global climate with the production of greenhouse gases and localized production of acid rain, low-lying ozone, and smog.

Mr. Speaker, this is not from some environmental journal; this is from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Mining and production of fuels destroy the ecosystems and biodiversity. The loss of habitat is leading to localized extinction of species. This reduction of biodiversity results in greater vulnerability of the planet to ecological stresses.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to digress for just a moment to note how wise this observation is. There may be a species that you don't think has much environmental impact; but when you lose that, you have lost a gene pool that for one reason or another we may need to go back to in the future.

I just want to give one little example of this in agriculture. To produce hybrid corn, you have to have male and female. You have to take the tassels, that is the male part of the corn. You have to take the tassels off the top parts of the stalks whose ears you want fertilized by the male from the other corn.

For many years they hired college students to go through and break the tassels off, always a chore because some came out later and you could not have a tassel here or there which was going to fertilize the other ears, the female part of the silk.

They discovered what they call a Texas male-sterile cytoplasm. When they put this gene in the corn, the male was sterile. They didn't have to go through the field and pull off these tassels. There was a blight, I think it was, that struck all plants that had the Texas male-sterile cytoplasm. We couldn't produce any hybrid corn the way we ordinarily produce it.

If it weren't for Hawaii, where we could go to produce two generations of corn, you see, we had to go back to the old gene pool that we were no longer using. We went back to that older gene pool, and they went to Hawaii where you could produce two crops of corn in 1 year.

Over the winter season, they produced two crops of corn so that we would have enough seed so that we could do the planting in this country, but still the seed was somewhat scarce and considerably more expensive. This reduction of biodiversity, they said, results in greater vulnerability of the plants to ecologic stress. If the gene pool is not there, you cannot go to that gene pool for more diversity.

Waste from nuclear power generation plants is accumulating, and no viable means exist to safely and effectively dispose of them. Current energy policies and consumption practices are not sustainable. They clearly limit, boy, this is quite a statement, they clearly limit and potentially eliminate options for future generations. Mr. Speaker, just think for a moment what they are saying. They clearly limit and potentially eliminate options for future generations.

Mr. Gilchrest, a discussion of climate change and global warming is perfectly appropriate and anticipated by this report from the Corps of Engineers.

I would yield to you, sir.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield for just a moment, I would like to note that during the Christmas break, because I am a senior member of the Science Committee, I went down to Antarctica to our experiment station down there at the South Pole. That is about as far away as you can get from any factory that is burning fossil fuels. The CO2 you measure there is going to be probably lower than the CO2 any place else; and it will fairly represent the base for CO2 increase, and they will give you a chart there, they have now been following this, charting this for a number of years. They will give you a chart which shows exactly what you said, that the CO2 is rapidly increasing.

They have done corings of the ice pack there, and it goes back for tens of thousands of years. It is a desert down there with about 2 inches of precipitation a year, but it has been accumulating so long that the ice is almost 2 miles thick in the middle of the continent, up about 10,000 feet.

When we go back to those corings, they can find the CO2 level of the atmosphere, because ice is totally impervious to CO2, and it is trapped there. They can find the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and they can judge from the pollen and so forth what the temperature of the Earth must have been, because there was more growth.

They have found that every time in the past that there was an increase in temperature this was accompanied by an increase in carbon dioxide. You are exactly right. They have now been measuring this, I think, in the best place of the Earth to measure it. That is at the South Pole, which is as far as you can get away from any place where they are burning fossil fuels.

I thought this would be interesting. It would just emphasize what you have been saying that the CO2 is increasing in our atmosphere.

I yield back to you again, sir.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield again, you are talking about this exponential increase. It reminded me of a very interesting and startling statistic.

Up until the Carter years, every decade, the Earth used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That slowed down after the crash of the 1970s and so forth. Up until then, each decade, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that meant was that when you had used half of all the oil in the world, that just 10 years of oil would remain.

Now we are better than that today, because we have slowed down. I am going to read you some numbers in a few minutes from this report from the Corps of Engineers.

But you were talking about exponential increase, and this was a startling example of exponential increase, and fortunately, we are more efficient today and we have slowed down, or we would be in bigger trouble than we are. May the gentleman continue?

Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming down and joining us.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to come back again to this very historic document, this speech that was given by M. King Hubbert, just 50 years and a few days ago, and because this is so important, Mr. Speaker, I would like to place this in the Record at this point.

Mr. Speaker, I want to return to these numbers here, the 2 percent of world oil reserves, the 25 percent of the world's oil which we use, and the roughly two-thirds which we import. I want to look at a couple of other numbers here.

We produce 8 percent of the world's oil. And we do that from only 2 percent of the reserves. What that means is we are pumping our oil pretty quickly. In a couple of minutes, I am going to read you a statement from this report from the Corps of Engineers, it startled me when I read it, that talks about relationship here.

We represent a little less actually than 5 percent of the population of the world. And I want to read something else here from this report, from the Corps of Engineers. It is understood a subheading called ``Security.''

You will remember, Mr. Speaker, that it was security that these 30 people wrote to the President about, national security. ``In an age of terrorism, combustible and explosive fuels along with potential weapons-grade nuclear materials create security risks. The United States currently has 5 percent of the world's population, but uses 25 percent of the world's annual energy production.

``This disproportionate consumption of energy relative to global consumption causes loss of the world's good will.''

You need to think about what they are saying for a moment. A summer ago, I was in Europe on a trip visiting the major shipyards there. And at one of the events, one of the Europeans mentioned to me, you mean gas is still only $2 a gallon in your country, it was about $2.05, still $2 a gallon in your country?

His tone was somewhere between anger and disdain. And I thought of that comment when I read this statement. ``Causes loss of the world's good will and provided a context for potential military conflicts at the cost of lives, money, and political capital. A more equitable distribution of resources is in our best interest for a peaceful future.''

That is a very wise observation, I think, Mr. Speaker. What they are saying is that our disappropriate use of these resources, only 5 percent, actually less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person out of 22, using 25 percent of the world's energy has not gone unnoticed. And they note here that it causes a loss of the world's good will.

So in addition to providing for our national security, by freeing ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, it will increase the good will that the United States has in the world, is what they are saying here, and I think that is correct, Mr. Speaker.

There were two things that happened in this past year that confirmed my concerns. And by the way, I need to say this evening, Mr. Speaker, what I say every time I speak about this, and that is that I hope I am wrong. I hope that all of these experts, I hope that this study by the Corps of Engineers is wrong. I hope the Hirsch report is wrong, because if they are not wrong, and if I am not wrong, I think we are in for a very bumpy ride as we transition from the fossil fuels to the renewables.

Two things happened in this last year. One was this study that was done last September, dated then, but just came out now. You have to wonder a little, Mr. Speaker, why it was kind of kept under wraps for this long.

And the other thing that came out was a study funded by the Department of Energy done by the very prestigious SAIC organization. Dr. Robert Hirsch, was the principal investigator on this, and it is generally called the Hirsch report.

If you do a Google search, you can find the Hirsch report. Here are some comments from their report. The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and politically costs will be unprecedented.

Let me read now, while that is up there, a quote from this report by the Corps of Engineers. ``The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy resources are quickly drawing to a close.'' When I read that, Mr. Speaker, I was reminded of an introductory sentence in a report by Matt Savinar, that you can find if you do a Google search for peak oil, and then click on Matt Savinar.

And the first little sentence of his report says, ``Dear reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' My wife read that and said the guy is an idiot, I am not going to read any further, and I said, please reserve judgment and read on.

And she did. And by the time she finished reading it, she was genuinely frightened. If you will click on Matt Savinar, you will get about 11 pages. If you then click on page 2, you will then get another 33 pages. That is well worth doing. Because there he discusses all of the potential alternatives

and the pluses and minuses of these alternatives.

Matt Savinar, Mr. Speaker, may be audacious, but he is not an idiot. Domestic natural gas production, reading again from the Corps of Engineers study, and listen to these numbers. They are striking and frightening. Domestic natural gas production peaked in 1973. The proved domestic reserve lifetime for natural gas at current consumption rates is, what do you think? Is about 8.4 years.

Maybe that is why gas is $6, $7, it has been $12 and $14 for 1,000 cubic feet. The proved world reserve lifetime for natural gas is about 40 years, but will follow a traditional rise to a peak and then a rapid decline, like the curve that we saw a few minutes ago for oil.

Domestic, that is the United States oil production, peaked in 1970 and continues to decline. In spite of feverish drilling in the 1980s and in spite of Prudhoe Bay, it continues to decline.

Now this is a number, in this next sentence, which shocked me, but I saw it twice in their report, so I am guessing it is not a typo. Proved domestic reserve lifetime for oil is about 3.4 years.

Now that gets us back to that we have only 2 percent, we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We are really good at pumping oil. We have been so good at pumping oil, we have drilled, by the way, 530,000 oil wells in this country.

Saudi Arabia has roughly 400, Iraq has maybe 300. We are really good at pumping oil. The Corps of Engineers say that we have 3.4 years remaining. World oil production is at or near its peak. They believe we are either at peak oil or very near peak oil.

And current world demand exceeds the supply, and that is why oil is $62 a barrel today rather than the $10 a barrel it was a relatively few years ago. Saudi Arabia is considered the bellwether nation for oil production. And it has not increased production since April 2003.

A few months ago, the Saudi Arabia oil sheik was over in our country talking to the President. And you may have noticed from the news that he did not, I think the proper verb is could not, promise the President that the Saudis would increase oil production.

One of the current experts in this area is Matt Simmons, who runs one of the largest, if not the largest energy investment bank in the world, personal energy advisor to the President, I think in both of his campaigns. And Matt Simmons had gone to Saudi Arabia, gone to the library, gone through a great deal of material there, and he has written a book with the interesting title, Twilight in the Desert.

He believes, as the Corps of Engineers believes, that the Saudis have probably reached their maximum oil production. The great oil field, the granddaddy of all oil fields, Garwar, probably reached its peak production several years ago.

After peak production, supply no longer meets demand. Prices and competition increase. World proved reserve lifetime for oil is about 41 years.

Now, Mr. Speaker, this is not 41 years at current use rates and then you fall off a cliff. We are going to follow that traditional bell curve, the curve that the United States has been following. We are well down the other side of Hubbert's Peak now, we are going to follow that curve.

There will still be a lot of oil available 40 years from now, but in greatly reduced amounts, and probably by the end of the century, we will have gone through or very close to being through the age of oil.

Most of this they say, of the oil for this 41 years, is that declining availability. Our current throw-away nuclear cycle, and here is another number that surprised me, our current throw-away nuclear cycle will consume the world reserve of low cost uranium in about 20 years.

That, Mr. Speaker, is at current use rates. If we build more nuclear power plants, the use rate will go up and it will last less than that. That does not mean that we cannot have nuclear power 25 years from now, what it does mean is it is going to cost more, and we are probably going to have to go to breeder reactors. France and Japan are already doing that, so it is not like we would be plowing new ground.

Unless we dramatically change our consumption practices, the earth's finite resources of petroleum and natural gas will become depleted in this industry.

I think there may be a little at the end of the century, but it is going to be a very small amount compared to what we are now pumping.

We may, Mr. Speaker, long before that, decide that it is really not very bright to burn this gas and oil you remember which is the feed stock for a very important petrochemical industry.

We really live in a plastic world. And if you look around you and see how much of your automobile, how much of your office, how much equipment you buy is made from oil, it is just everywhere.

Coal supplies may last into the next century. If we can find that coal chart, I would like to look at that. Coal supplies may last into the next century depending on technology and consumption trends as it starts to replace oil and natural gas. This is a very correct statement. It may last into the next century, but only if you keep using at current use rates. It will last 250 years with current use rates. You see on the abscissa here, 250 years. But if you increase the use of oil just 2 percent, that is not much, if you increase the use just 2 percent, it reduces the supply to 85 years.

When Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the detonation of the nuclear bombs, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big energy discovery in the world? And he says, it is already discovered. The most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. That is exponential growth. Just 2 percent exponential growth doubles in 35 years. And that reduces the 250 years with no growth to only 85 years with 2 percent growth; and then when you recognize that much of the use that you will have to make of that energy cannot just be coal. We will have to do in our country, and the world will have to do, what Hitler was forced to do in World War II and that is to make oil and gas from coal; and the technology for doing both of those is readily apparent.

As a little boy, we did not have electricity in our house until I was near a teenager, and we used what was universally known then as coal oil lamps. And after other people were calling them kerosine lamps, we still called them coal oil lamps because the oil used in the original lamps, the oil that replaced whale oil, saved the whales, thank goodness, when we learned to get oil from coal, was called coal oil.

When you use enough energy to convert the coal into an oil or a gas so you can use it, now it is shrunk to just 50 years. So their statement that it may last depending upon use is a very correct statement.

They say we must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other energy sources. Policy changes, leap- ahead technology, breakthroughs, cultural changes, and significant investment are requisite for this new energy future.

Time is essential to enact these changes. The process should begin now. Just back for a moment to the Hirsch report. That is not what they said. What the Hirsch report said, and I do not have those charts with me, they said unless you start 20 years before peak oil, there are going to be meaningful economic consequences.

Here are some other quotes from the Hirsch report. World oil peaking is going to happen. The study by the Corps of Engineers says that, in other words, it is not ``if,'' it is ``when''; and they believe that it is now or very shortly in the future. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak.

A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. And now to that list has been added the Army Corps of Engineers. Others contend it will occur later, few in this category. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.

Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. This is a startling statement. The world has never faced a problem like this. Maybe that is why our government has not claimed ownership of either the Hirsch report or the study

by the Corps of Engineers. As a matter of fact, they have asked for a new study. The results of these are so startling, Mr. Speaker, and they indicate that we should have a number of years ago begun addressing this problem, and to make sure that we need to invest time, energy, and money and so forth that is going to be required if we are going to make this transition.

I understand the desire of the administration to make sure that this is real so that now they have commissioned another study by the National Petroleum Council. If they are looking at the same data these other two studies looked at, they should reach the same conclusion. It is not like the Department of Defense is not doing anything, because the Department of Defense Under Secretary for Acquisition Technology and Logistics and the Office of Force Transformations is sponsoring a new interagency monthly series of seminars entitled ``Energy, A Conversation About Our National Addiction.'' And they are borrowing the President's word from his speech when he said we are ``addicted'' to oil.

By the way, recovering from addiction to most things requires some trauma, and I think that there will be sufficient trauma here in breaking our addiction to oil. The Department of Defense is the single largest buyer of fuel in the United States, so I am really glad that they have initiated this series of seminars. The first speaker is Jim Woolsey, and I think the second month I will be the speaker at this series of discussions.

Back to comments, and again I apologize for reading, but I have not had a chance to make charts, and these are such significant comments because the Hirsch report said, and it has been out for several months now, and we have been saying this, Mr. Speaker, this is now the 11th time that I have come to the floor to talk about peak oil. A year ago I was kind of a lone voice. As I mentioned, we were debating should we call it ``peak oil'' or the ``great rollover.'' But since then, peak oil has found its place in the common jargon and many people are talking about it, and I am really pleased that these two major studies are saying the same thing that we thought the evidence was saying when we started doing these floor speeches a year ago.

Our best options for meeting future energy requirements are energy efficiency and renewable resources. Energy efficiency is the least expensive, most readily available and environmentally friendly way to stretch our current energy supplies. The oil you do not use is the cheapest oil you can buy. For efficiency and renewables, the intangible and hard to quantify benefits such as reduced pollution and increased security yield indisputable economic value.

They have a little subtitle in their report called ``Petroleum'' and they say: ``Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability,'' poke a hole in the ground and it came gushing out in many places, ``transportability,'' put it in a pipeline and move it hundreds of thousands of miles. Put it in a truck and carry it over the road. Put it in a tanker and carry it across the ocean.

``Transportability. Versatility.'' How many different ways do we use oil? To heat our homes, to cool our homes, to run our cars, to run our ships.

How many different way do we use it? The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil's many advantages provide 1.3 to about 2.5 times more economic value per Btu than coal. Currently, they say in the report there is no viable substitute for petroleum. Let me read that again.

This is the Corps of Engineers. Currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum, and petroleum has probably reached its maximum production. It will hold at about this level for about awhile, and then it will inevitably taper off. It will become smaller and smaller as we go through the years.

In summary, they say, the outlook for petroleum is not good. This especially applies to conventional oil which has been the lowest cost resource. Production peaks for non-OPEC conventional oil are at hand. Many nations have already passed their peak and are now producing at peak or below peak capacity.

The next chart shows where we have gotten our oil from in our country. Now, M. King Hubbert's prediction was for the lower 48. And the curve has followed exactly what he said for the lower 48. If we take out Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, you see that it peaked in 1970 and then fell off. Now we found a lot of oil in Prudhoe Bay at Dead Horse. There is a 4-foot pipeline there. I have been there at the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline, that has for a number of years been producing about a fourth of all of our domestic oil. But notice that that caused only a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

The next chart shows a stylized curve. By the way, you can make this curve as steep as you want by simply changing the dimensions on the ordinate and the abscissa. This is a 2 percent growth rate. We know that because in 35 years it doubles. And you see the little yellow there which represents the shortfall if we are at that point. I believe we are, I hope we are not, but I believe we are at that point. And this represents the shortfall that will occur over the next 35 years. Notice that the problem occurs before peaking, before you actually reach the peak. The demand curve has deviated from the supply curve.

Now, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to have any energy to invest in renewables, in alternatives, we are going to have to have a pretty massive program of conservation because today there is no surplus energy to invest. If there was any surplus energy, oil wouldn't be $62 a barrel.

The next chart looks back through history and that is a really interesting chart and the Corps of Engineers talked a little about this. This shows only 400 years of 5,000 years of recorded history, but it kind of puts in perspective where we are. The little brown hump on the bottom there is the Industrial Revolution that began with wood. We learned to make steel with wood. We denuded the mountains of New England. More forest today in New Hampshire than there was at the Revolutionary War. We denuded many of the hills, the mountains there to send charcoal to England to make coal.

Catocin Furnace just up the road here near Emmitsburg, near Thurmont in Emmitsburg, is a little furnace where they denuded the hills there in northern Maryland to make steel there. Then you see what happened to the Industrial Revolution when we found coal. But look what happened when we found gas and oil. That is the red curve. Going on this scale, and this is only 400 years of our 5,000 years of recorded history, on this scale going almost straight up, you notice there at the top of it what happened in the seventies. It really made a difference.

Remember I noted that up until the Carter years every decade we were using as much energy as we had used in all of previous history. That is on the steep part of this curve. We now have broken away from that, thanks to a lot of energy efficiency. Your air conditioner today may be two or three times as efficient as it was in the seventies. The similar thing for your refrigerator. We really are very much better today at efficiency than we were then. By the way, that is one of the things that we ought to be exporting from our country because much of the developing world is using oil energy very inefficiently.

For now, about 150 years we have been in what you call the age of oil, and another 100 to 150 years, the report by the Corps of Engineers says maybe less, we will be through the age of oil. What does that mean?

I started thinking about this subject probably 40 years ago. I guess it is the scientist in me. I knew that fossil fuels could not be forever, and I asked myself the question, what does that mean? Do we have 10 years remaining? Do we have 100 years remaining? Do we have 1,000 years remaining? I had no idea when I started looking into this what the dimensions of this problem were.

If you can think about this, Mr. Speaker, and where we are and where we come from, for 5,000 years of recorded history, the world's population was somewhere between a half billion and a billion people, and then we hit oil. And not only did the economy grow, represented here on the ordinate by quadrillion Btus, not only did we use ever increasing amounts of energy,

but boy, did our population spurt. If we had an ordinate on the other side with population curve on it, it would follow. It would pretty faithfully follow this increase in energy production.

Once we are through the age of oil, and we will one day be through the age of oil, and thinking about this, I often think about my father, who was a little boy in Kentucky. He remembered the first one-cylinder gasoline engine that came into Lincoln County, Kentucky. He died in 1985. He lived within a score of years, roughly halfway, through the age of oil.

What is the carrying capacity of the earth minus this incredible resource we have in gas and oil? I want to, for a moment, give you a couple of illustrations of how important this gas and oil has been to our life and our economy.

Just 1 barrel of oil, the refined product you can buy now, is just a little over $100. Forty-two gallons, a little over $100 at a pump will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you in manual labor, and you buy it for $100. To give some sense, if this is probably correct, reflect on how far a gallon of diesel or gasoline, and I was drinking a little bottle of water last evening and drove by a service station and noted the $2.45 gas, and I paid more for my bottle of water than for that in the grocery store. So gasoline is still cheaper than water.

But reflect on how far that little gallon of gas takes your car or your SUV and how long it would take you to pull it through. Now, I drive a Prius. I get about 50 miles per gallon, but it would take me a long time to pull my Prius 50 miles. I could get it there with a come- along and hooking to the guardrail or tree, but it would take me a long time.

Another little indication of the incredible quality of these fossil fuels is electricity. If I work really hard at manual labor all day long, I can get more mechanical work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. That may be humbling to recognize that I am worth in terms of manual labor less than 25 cents a day, as compared to the energy we can get from fossil fuels.

Future historians, after the age of oil, may very well wonder how we could have done this, how we could have found this incredible resource, one barrel of which provides you the work output of 12 people working for you all year long, incredible wealth, how we could have found this and not have stood back and asked ourselves the question, what are we going to do with this? How could we get the most good to the most people for the longest time out of this enormous wealth that we found under the ground? But that is not what we did. Like children that found the cookie jar, we just pigged out. I wonder what future generations will say about us.

Well, our time is running out, and there are so many other things I would like to talk about. Let us look at the chart that says where we go to now, and we will transition ultimately, Mr. Speaker, to renewables. Geology will demand it. We either do it because we are running out of readily available, high quality gas and oil, or we do it on our schedule which will be a kinder, gentler schedule.

These are the alternatives. We have some finite resources: the tar sands, the oil shales, the coal. We talked about coal. Nuclear, light water reactors, feeder reactors, fusion. If we ever get to fusion, we are home free; low odds, I think. These will only tide us over for a while. Then true renewables, which now represent, as the next chart shows us, tiny percentages of our total energy production.

We are very much like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents have died and they have got a big inheritance and they have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from their work. They look at the reserves and their inheritance and how much they are spending, and it is going to run out. So they have got to do one of two things. Either they have got to make some more money if they want to continue that lifestyle, or they are going to have to change that lifestyle. That is exactly where we are.

I use those numbers because 85 percent of our current energy use comes from coal, petroleum and natural gas, and these are not all renewables, by the way. They are alternatives. Nuclear is a bit more than half. Other people may have only 6 percent for the renewables. This chart uses seven. These renewables, seven are blown up, and you see that the biggest contributor there is conventional hydro. It is not going to grow in our world. Wood, that is, the paper industry and timber industry, wisely using a waste product, and then solar, winds, agricultural, geothermal, alcohol from fuel is part of agricultural, and energy from waste, that is a big one that should grow and could grow.

Mr. Speaker, if we are going to transition to these, and we will, I shouldn't say if. We are going to. We are going to transition, but if we are going to do that as painlessly as possible, we need today a very aggressive program. Time is running out. The Hirsch report says that. The study by the Corps of Engineers says that. Common sense says that. If we are at peak oil, where is the energy going to come from to invest in the alternative?

We need a program, I believe, Mr. Speaker, that has the dimensions of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan project. I think it can be very challenging. I think Americans will rise to the challenge. I think Americans will feel good about victory gardens, about getting cars that have high mileage, about two and three going together in a car. Life is so easy today that I think Americans would be challenged, that they would feel really good about making a contribution.

What we need, Mr. Speaker, is a national commitment to a program that has the commitment of putting a man on the moon and the urgency of the Manhattan project. If we do that, Mr. Speaker, I think we can have a relatively smooth transition and Americans feel good about their contribution.

Mr. Speaker, very shortly now the juvenile diabetes people will be coming through the Congress. They do this every year, I believe.

I look forward to this visit with really mixed emotions. These children come in with this disease that has and will change their lives. Many of them are so brittle that they have to have a pump embedded under their skin that pumps insulin, because the sugar may go violently up or down with potentially disastrous effects on the person. Many times a day they may have to get a droplet of blood to determine the sugar level.

They will appeal to us, as they have every year for the past 5 years, please vote for Federal funds for embryonic stem cell research because they believe, like the loved ones of many other types of patients, that there could truly be miracle cures from embryonic stem cells. They will tell us that there are several hundred thousand embryos out there that are frozen in fertility clinics.

I have a daughter-in-law who is going through that process now. They harvest eggs. They fertilize the eggs. First, they have to give a hormone treatment to the prospective mother so that there will be the production of more than just the one egg that is produced normally per month. They will harvest a number of eggs, 8, 10, 12 eggs. Then they will fertilize those eggs, and they will watch their growth in the laboratory, and they will choose two or three of what look like the strongest fertilized eggs, and then they will implant those in the prospective mother.

The remaining eggs are frozen. It costs money to keep them there. The family may pay for that process because these little embryos that are implanted may not take, and they may need to do it again, and frozen, they could last quite a while, and they may want to have another child. So they will pay to keep them frozen for a while; but by and by, time and changes in the family, they will see no further need to keep them frozen. When they cease doing that, then the laboratory must either dispose of the embryos or bear the expense of keeping them frozen.

So each year a number of these embryos are discarded, and there has been an appeal, which has been bought into by some of my very good friends in the Congress, that from a ethical perspective, why should we not get some medical use from these embryos that are going to be discarded anyhow.

That is a tough position to put pro-life people in, and the reason that most, but not all, pro-life advocates are opposed to this is because they view this as the beginning of a slippery slope. Today, you are permitting the use of surplus embryos that are going to be discarded anyhow; tomorrow, you might be producing embryos. They may be stronger, younger. You may be producing embryos just so you can discard them so you could use them for medical research.

I remembered the juvenile diabetes groups that come through, the children and their parents when, in 2000, I went to the National Institutes of Health when they had a briefing for Members of Congress and staff on embryonic stem cell research, the potentials and the challenge. There were a number of staff there. I think that I was the only Member of Congress who was there.

I went there from a somewhat unusual background, a different background than the average Member of Congress, because in a former life, I went to school and got a doctorate in human physiology. I got it not in a medical school but at an arts and sciences campus, and so we had to take a great variety of courses.

Things like limnology and ichthyology and cytology and protozoology and advanced genetics. And one of the courses I took was advanced embryology. And in that course I had an opportunity to study and learn something about the process which is so familiar to anybody who has studied biology in life, that is, the development of the embryo and how this process goes.

I recognized that occasionally in humans in the early embryo, sometimes at the two-cell stage and sometimes later, and you can tell by how the babies present whether they share an amnion or simply share the chorion; how they present at birth you can tell at roughly what time in the development of the embryo did it split. And each of those halves of the original embryo, either one cell if it was a two-cell stage, or multiple cells if it was further along in the development before it split, each half produces what appears to be a perfectly normal baby. We call them identical twins. And there are tens of thousands of them out there and a great deal of scientific interest is in these twins.

And a lot of research has been done, because when you are looking at two genetically identical people, you have an opportunity to make some studies and observations that you would have to use a great many more subjects to make using the usual genetic different subjects.

And so recognizing that you could take half of the cells away from the original embryo and each half produced a perfectly normal baby, I rationalized, gee, it ought to be possible to take a cell from the early embryo and it would not even know it. And that is because all the cells in the early embryo are what we call totipotent or at least pluripotent. Totipotent means they can produce another embryo if you take the cell out, and pluripotent means they can produce all of the cell types that make up the body. By the time they are pluripotent, they have lost the ability to coordinate all of the different kind of cells into an integrated individual, so they could not produce an embryo.

I asked the researchers at NIH, should it not be possible to take a cell from an early embryo without killing the embryo, probably without hurting the embryo, since in every set of identical twins half of the cells have been taken away from the embryo.

And by the way, Mr. Speaker, one of those is a clone. I guess you can decide which one of those identical twins you would identify as the clone, but clearly one of them is a clone, and both of them develop into what appears to be, by observations over hundreds of years and more recently many years of intensive physiological and medical observation, what appear to be perfectly normal human beings.

And so I asked the researcher at NIH, shouldn't it be possible to take a cell from an early embryo without killing the embryo, probably without hurting it? And they said, yes, they thought that should be possible. So a few days after that I happened to be at an event when the President was there, and I knew that he was laboring with a decision, a very difficult decision, of whether he was going to permit Federal dollars to be used in embryonic stem cell research when presently at that time the only source of embryonic stem cells resulted from the destruction of an embryo.

So I told the President about the meeting at NIH and about my discussion with the researchers there, and a few days later I got a call from Karl Rove. The President had remembered that conversation and turned the follow-up over to Karl Rove, and Mr. Rove told me that he had gone to NIH and had spoken with the investigators there, and they had told him that that was not possible. I said, Karl, either they are funning you or they misunderstood your question, because these are the same people that can go into an individual cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in that cell. And they are telling you they cannot take a cell or two out of a big embryo?

So he went back and asked them again and came back and called me a second time and said, Roscoe, they tell me that they cannot do that. I wondered at the time what had happened. And a couple of years later, when the researchers at NIH were in my office, they somewhat sheepishly admitted that they had permitted Mr. Rove to believe something that wasn't quite true. Because what they had told him

was that they weren't sure that they could produce a stem cell line from a single cell taken from an early embryo.

That is exactly what my bill had proposed to do, was to determine, with animals, whether in fact that was possible or not. They had not meant for him to believe that it was not possible to take a cell from an early embryo.

Now, I cannot get inside their head to tell you, Mr. Speaker, why they permitted Mr. Rove to go away with this misconception, I can only tell you that I think that if I were in their place, I would have judged that the President might very well make the decision that it was okay to use these discarded embryos. Because, after all, they were going to be discarded anyhow, and the potential for life-saving medical applications was so great that I think that they may have rationalized that the President was going to issue an executive order which would make possible the use of Federal funds in the study of embryonic stem cells taken from these surplus embryos. That, of course, is not what the President did.

I am happy to be joined this evening by Dr. Gingrey, and I wanted to engage him in a dialogue, because I think that the same kind of an emotional response that might have permitted the researchers at NIH to permit this discussion to result in a misconception by Mr. Rove, that an analogous emotional response on the part of many pro-life advocates makes it very difficult for them to even talk about the potential of any form of embryonic stem cell research because they are so conditioned that the only way in the past that we have been able to get embryonic stem cells was by destroying an embryo, and so they equate any discussion of embryonic stem cell research as requiring the destruction of an embryo.

The President has a bioethics council that published a white paper in which they talked about four different techniques, potentially bioethically acceptable that could produce embryonic stem cells without destroying an embryo. And I wonder what is the best approach, because we want to carry everybody along with us. I want no one to be offended that what we are proposing, what has been proposed as a matter of fact by the President's council on bioethics is a violation of our fundamental belief that life is sacred. Every life is sacred, and particularly the least of these, this totally defenseless embryo. Their life is sacred, and we must protect that.

So the research that I am proposing, that my colleague has been supporting, does exactly that. And I am wondering what is the best way to bring this community along with us so that they understand that there are potential techniques that could be used for producing embryonic stem cells that will not consist of destroying or even hurting the embryo. What do you think is the best way to approach this?

Dr. Gingrey, thank you very much.

There is another consequence of this understandable emotional reaction on the part of the pro-life community, and that is the statement that is made over and over again that we have, I think it is up to 70-some now, treatments or cures from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells; therefore, why would you want to bother looking at embryonic stem cells?

The reason we have 70-some treatments from adult stem cells is we have been working with them for about 3 decades and we have been working with embryonic stem cells for just a little over 6 years. A newborn baby cannot run a marathon, and there just has not been time for the medical community to develop the potential from embryonic stem cells.

I will be the first to tell you that this research may be very disappointing. I hope that it will not be, because these cells really want to divide, and like an obstreperous teenager, they may be very difficult to control. But the hope is that since embryonic stem cells can certainly make any and every tissue and, potentially, organ in the body, they ought to have the greatest potential.

And I wonder what we need to do so that the statement is not repeated that it is really silly to talk about embryonic stem cell research because we have 70-some treatments or cures from adult stem cells and none yet from embryonic stem cells. That is, of course, a true statement, but you need to put it in context. The reason for it is we have been working for more than 3 decades with adult stem cells and just a little over 6 years with embryonic stem cells. And I want our community to have credibility at the end of the day.

How do we meet this emotional challenge?

Thank you very much. I appreciate your mentioning the diabetes, particularly juvenile diabetes.

The deficiency, of course, is in the Islet of Langerhan cells, named after the German scientist who first saw them. They are like little islands scattered through the pancreas. I have no idea why they are in the pancreas. They have no relationship to the physiology of the pancreas; they just happen to be there, and they are not producing enough insulin. But replacing the insulin does not cure diabetes because the person who has diabetes will end up with eye problems, circulatory problems, toes that they lose, gangrene, and so forth.

And these children now are starting out with the absolute certainty that they are not going to have the quality of life of other children because just replacing the insulin does not cure diabetes. It controls many of the effects, but there will still be consequences to the diabetic.

And as you mentioned, there is the hope that with embryonic stem cells we could grow Islet of Langerhan tissues. And you would not have to put those back into the pancreas. You could, as a matter of fact, put them in the groin or under the arm or under the skin, anywhere. They just have to have access to circulation. They will produce the insulin. The circulation will pick up the insulin, and then it flows to the liver and the cells of the body where it does its miracle work.

But this is the reason that they are so enthusiastic about embryonic stem cell research, because of all of the diseases out there. And we spend more money on diabetes than any other disease in the country, and there is probably more debility and suffering from diabetes than any other disease in the country. And that is why they are so adamant in their desire that we permit Federal dollars to be spent, because with the power of NIH and the peer review, and they have created miracles in the past, they hope they can do another one.

I would like to just look for a moment at the physiology, and the chart, boy, this is really abbreviated. I will show you a little more expanded one in a moment.

But the two gametes come together and produce what is called a zygote, and this is the fertilized cell. It now has half the genes from the mother and half the genes from the father. And then that fertilized cell grows through several stages, and they have skipped the morula stage here and they go right to the blastula and then to the gastrula. And here you start the differentiation into the three germ layers.

Every tissue of our body develops from one of the three germ layers: the endoderm, that is what is inside; and the mesoderm, that is what is in the middle; and the ectoderm. Very interestingly, the parts of the adult body that develop from ectoderm is our skin and our nervous tissue. Most of this, by weight, develops from mesoderm. All the muscles, all the bones develop from mesoderm. And here you see at the bottom are derivatives of the ectoderm and the mesoderm and the endoderm, and then the unique cells, the germ cells, the sperm in the male and the egg in the female.

Now, adult stem cells, when you hear people talk about adult stem cells, what they are talking about is a cell down here, and one of the easiest ones to talk about are adult stem cells that have to do with making blood, and these stem cells found in the bone marrow primarily can produce a variety of cells. The polymorpho-nuclear leukocytes, the erythrocytes, the thrombocytes, all of those can be produced.

Now, you can take an adult stem cell and trick it into believing that it has not gone through all of this differentiation, that it is somewhere back here so that it can now make tissues other than just the ones that it was destined to make and the organ from which you took it. And these are the techniques that are used in adult stem cell research and treatment.

The next chart shows a little more detail in this development process, and this shows it in the reproductive tract of the female. Here is the ovary from which the egg is released. And the egg now starts a long journey down through the fallopian tube. It will be 7 to 10 days before it finally implants in the uterus. The sperm, of course, makes its way from the vagina up through the uterus and through the fallopian tube, and it fertilizes the egg. It shows it very correctly here. Fertilization occurs well up in the fallopian tube. A little later down and it cannot be fertilized.

And this shows the production of the zygote. It shows the first cleavage to produce a two-cell mass. At this point these two cells could separate to produce two embryos, two babies. We know them as identical twins. Or it can go on to split into four cells and eight cells, and I will come back to the eight cell in just a moment because that is the one medically that is of considerable interest.

Then it becomes a morula. You see it there, the compacted morula. And then you get the inner-cell mass, which you saw a pretty good picture of in the previous slide. And, of course, what we are talking about is what goes on in the laboratory now in a petri dish. You fertilize it there rather than in the reproductive tract, but the same sequence of development occurs. And they simply take the inner-cell mass out of the embryo and squash it and kill it and take the cells out to produce a stem cell line.

In the laboratory, in in vitro fertilization, they grow the embryos up to the eight-cell stage, and it is at that stage that they have the most luck in implanting them in the uterus of the female. Several years ago in England, a clinic there began taking a cell, and sometimes they got two, from the eight-cell stage, and they did a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on it because if you had the option of making sure that your baby was not going to have a genetic defect like trisomy 21, mongolism, for instance, you certainly would want to avoid that if you could.

They do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and if there is no genetic defect, they then take the remaining six or seven cells and implant them, and now worldwide I suspect there have been more than 2,000 babies born.

There is a clinic just outside Washington, in Virginia, and a year ago I spent more than a half hour talking

with two of the physicians there who have been doing this technique. So we now are producing babies with this technique, with the assurance that there will not be any genetic defects.

Another really good use of that cell that you take from that, and I have to credit Mr. Dorflinger with this, the spokesman for the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and he suggested that the most ethical reason for taking a cell from the early embryo, even more ethically defensible than doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, would be making a repair kit. That is sort of the goal when you freeze the cord blood, and we had a bill that everybody but one voted for that gave Federal dollars for freezing cord blood.

Those will not be embryonic stem cells. They will be adult stem cells, but at least they are closer to the genetic identity of that person than other cells would be. And more than 2,000 times worldwide now we have had a perfectly normal baby from that process.

So what I had proposed to the people has, in fact, been done. And what I envision at the end of the day in our bill, H.R. 3144, does not support experimentation in humans. It is only animal experimentations to verify that these procedures are, in fact, doable and efficacious and that the embryo is not harmed.

This technique and three other techniques are included in the white paper prepared by the President's council on bioethics, alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells.

Dr. Gingrey mentioned totipotent and pluripotent, and I would like to spend a moment talking about that. Totipotent means that the cell you take could produce another embryo. Pluripotent means that it could produce all the cells, tissues, organs of the body; but it does not have the capability to organize them into a person. Ethically, if you took a cell that was totipotent, you would simply be creating a new embryo, and so the argument starts all over again. So you need to take a cell from a stage where it is just pluripotent, not totipotent.

I am assured by the research community that no one has ever been successful in developing an embryo with a cell taken from the eighth stage. You see, these cells know, and I use that term advisedly, know that ultimately they are going to differentiate, and apparently that differentiation problem has started well before you see the three germ layers developing, because between the fourth stage and the eight-cell stage, they have lost their ability to be totipotent. They can now only be pluripotent. As Dr. Gingrey pointed out, it is very essential that ethically you take cells that could only be pluripotent.

I have two quick slides here that look at the development of twins. This is the two intercell masses. These are when the twins develop, the identical twins develop later, when it splits later. You can see that because they each have their own amnion. They share a chorion, of course, but they each have their own amnion.

Let me see the next one, which shows how you have what are called fraternal twins. Here you have two eggs produced by the mother, ordinarily only one, sometimes two, sometimes three, but ordinarily only one egg, unless you are giving some hormone treatment. Then those are now presented in separate chorions. They, of course, have their own amnion, which is the tissues around the baby which contains the fluid in which the baby floats, and the tissue around that is called the amnion.

There are four techniques in the white paper. I would like to look at the technique that I have been looking about. Number two in the white paper.

They credit me with suggesting that. There is a little footnote: ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001,'' and I think I actually talked to the President before that. They say it may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. We have two investigators, Landry and Verlinsky, who claim that they have done that.

You see, these cells love company, and they don't behave well if they are alone and they don't have company, so that is why there was the concern that maybe you could not develop an embryonic stem cell line from a single cell. But these two investigators have done it in a very clever way. They provide company for the cells, and then they separate the company, these are other types of cells, they separate the embryonic cells from the other cells that provided company for them to encourage them to continue the division process.

A second technique, as a matter of fact it was number one, mine was number two, the first technique that they talked about is a really interesting one. What this does is to propose the use of cells from an embryo much like we use organs from a cadaver. Everybody is familiar with that, and there are many people that have a will that say you can harvest their organs to benefit somebody if that would be useful.

When you create these embryos in the laboratory, not all of them are robust. A fair percentage of them never make it. They divide through a few stages for a few days and then just die. This proposal is if you determine that the embryo is moribund, and there is pretty good scientific evidence that you can do that with quite some certainty, kind of equivalent to determining a person is brain dead and therefore there is no chance that they can go on with life as we know it, and his proposal is that if you determine that the embryo is not going to make it, that it will die, but before it dies, you then take a cell or cells from the embryo to create an embryonic stem cell line. This is very equivalent to taking organs from a cadaver.

There may be some question as to whether you can get a really good strong cell from an embryo that is in a day or two going to be dead, but it is possible that you could do that. My bill actually asks for Federal dollars to explore all of these techniques with animal models.

I was talking to one of the researchers, Dr. Hurlbut, the other day. This is Dr. Landry's proposal. I noted that I would be enormously surprised if what we found in the great apes was not going to be what we found in humans, and he agreed that he too would be enormously surprised.

It may be somewhat humbling, but we share a vast majority of our organs with the great apes, the chimpanzees and orangutans and gorillas. You have to look to see genetic differences. They have the same number of chromosomes, and we share many, many, most, 90-odd percent of all the chromosomes. So it would be very unlikely that what we found in animals would not occur in humans.

We have a couple more charts that address this. There has been a lot of thought given to this, and I think that we have one; let's look at the one that actually shows the depiction, yes, that one. Let us look at that one.

That shows what happens in these cells, these embryos, in just a couple of days. They go from a perfectly normal looking embryo to a dead embryo, but there are clues that that is a certain result that the experts can see in these cells.

So this is a potentially viable, I believe ethically acceptable technique, very analogous to taking organs from a cadaver. This is simply taking cells from what would be the equivalent in an embryo of a cadaver, an embryo that will not live, that will die.

There is another technique, and I would like to submit two papers here for the Record, and these are papers describing another technique, a very interesting one. This is Dr. Hurlbut's contribution.

Researchers can take an oocyte, that is the egg from a mother, and they can take the nucleus out of that oocyte and place a nucleus from an ordinary cell, like a skin cell, inside the cell, and then with a little shock treatment you can trick the cell into believing that it was fertilized, and it will go on to develop into an individual. That is how we got Dolly the Sheep. It is called cloning.

Dr. Hurlbut's suggestion is, and this is called epigenetic nuclear transfer, that he alters that. The nucleus that you place in the cell has an induced genetic defect. They alter one of the genes so that the result cannot produce an embryo.

There are things that happen in some mothers where you have growths and they will have teeth and hair, but it certainly is not a baby. It is not coordinated. You can turn off this gene so

that what you have produced is not an embryo, could not be a baby.

It is very interesting that the way you turn that off is by RNA, ribonucleic acid, rather than deoxy ribonucleic acid, which is what is in the nucleus and what makes up the genes and chromosomes. The RNA is out in the cytoplasm, and I am not so sure that a clone is going to be that identical to the original because the RNA, the cytoplasmic RNA, is going to be different; and the cytoplasmic RNA has a big influence because it can turn on and turn off genes. This is the technique used for doing this.

This, I think, is from Nature Magazine, one of the premier scientific journals. It is the British equivalent to our Science Magazine. It is really multi-disciplinary and very discriminating in the articles that it prints.

The bottom sequence here shows what he would do. He is producing something that cannot be a baby because the gene that is responsible for the organization of these various types of cells into a coherent human being is turned off. By the way, whether he turns that off in the cymatic nucleus before he puts it in the cell so you avoid the argument that you are altering an embryo, because it is not an embryo, it is just a nucleus from a skin cell and he turns off the gene there, and then he takes the cell out of an oocyte and places this nucleus from the skin cell with the genetic alteration, places it in there. This is also a potentially viable technique.

All of these, by the way, you can argue that you may have some ethical problem with it. You may argue that you are intentionally creating a freak here just so you can harvest the cells from it. But since you are doing this before you place the nucleus in the oocyte, you are simply altering the nucleus in a skin cell, I think you can get by the ethical arguments.

Let us go back for a moment to the ethical arguments, because they are very important. I want to make sure that sensitivities of nobody in the pro-life community are violated.

The technique that I suggested to the President and the one that is described in our bill, we would not get the stem cells until several things had happened over which we have no control and no influence. The first thing is that a couple has decided that they are going to do in vitro fertilization. In addition, they have decided that they want to create a repair kit for their baby. They may or may not decide that they want to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

By the way, you can do both of those in the same cell. You simply culture the cell and you have now more than one, ultimately many, so you can take a cell for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. They will have made the decision they want a repair kit. All we are asking for is a few surplus cells, one will do, a few would be better, a few surplus cells from their repair kit.

What this would do is provide for that baby, then a child, then an adult, throughout its life the potential that if it had diabetes, you could develop other Langerhans cells from its repair kit that are genetically absolutely identical to the person so there would now be no threat of rejection. This would clearly, clearly be miracle medicine.

I think we have gotten by the ethical objections, because whether or not you believe that parents ought to use in vitro fertilization, these parents have decided to do that. Whether or not you believe they should take a cell to produce a repair kit, these parents have decided to do that. So they have already made those two decisions, both of which I think are ethical.

Parents really want a child when they will go to the extent of in vitro fertilization. As I mentioned, my daughter-in-law is going through that. And after the surgery for harvesting of the cells, she cannot even drive a car for quite a while. This is not a casual procedure.

So these are loving parents who want a child. And I think it would be very rational that they would want that child to have a repair kit if they could, and we are simply asking for a few surplus cells from the repair kit.

I should mention the fourth procedure that is in this white paper, and that is the dedifferentiation of the adult cells. This dedifferentiation is a play on differentiation, and what happens is that the single cell produced by the union of two gametes, called the zygote, this cell now differentiates. It produces tissues that are endoderm, from which the lining of your intestinal tract and lungs and the lining of your blood vessels will come, the mesoderm and so forth. So they have differentiated.

You can now potentially get the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell if you can simply take one of these adult cells and trick it into believing that it has not differentiated. What you will do is dedifferentiate it.

I do not know how consistently you can do that, but that is why we need to do the research. On occasion you can do that, and I do not know how consistently you can do it. I do not know how viable the tissues will be once you have done it, but that is the reason that you do research.

I would just like to again mention that our bill, 3144, does not provide any Federal funds for any work on humans. It is only animal experimentation. And it would provide Federal money for working on all of the techniques that the President's Council on Bioethics indicated might be ethically acceptable under the right circumstances.

Of course, one of the things that is very much involved in whether it is ethical or not is, does it do harm to the baby? And that is why the animal experimentation first. We want to make sure that in fact these techniques can occur. We want to make sure that there is no negative effect on the embryo.

There should not be, Mr. Speaker, unless you think that identical twins are somehow deficient, there should not be any medical effect, because we have, over hundreds of years, tens of thousands of identical twins, all of which appear to be perfectly normal human beings.

The potential for healing, medical applications in embryonic stem cells is just incredibly great, which is why the big interest in this. It is why the people at NIH would really like funding for this. It is why the groups that will come to see us, the juvenile diabetic groups that come to see us, will be advocating so strongly for research with embryonic stem cells, because this really could be a big, big breakthrough.

It could provide miracle cures that we can only dream of today. We need to make very sure that we are not crossing ethical bounds, that we are purely ethical.

Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned that none of my friends in the pro- life community be offended by any of this research, which is why the animal experimentation first, with a clear bioethical look at this.

I appreciate very much this opportunity to discuss this. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the articles I referenced earlier.

Production of Pluripotent Stem Cells by Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming

As described in the President's Council on Bioethics'

recent White Paper, altered nuclear transfer (ANT) is a broad

conceptual proposal for producing pluripotent stem cells

without creating and destroying embryos. In the description

set forth below, we outline a research program for a form of

ANT that should allow us to produce pluripotent stem cells

without creating or destroying human embryos and without

producing an entity that undergoes or mimics embryonic

development. The method of alteration here proposed (oocyte

assisted reprogramming) would immediately produce a cell with

positive characteristics and a type of organization that from

the beginning would be clearly and unambiguously distinct

from, and incompatible with, those of an embryo. Incapable of

being or becoming an embryo, the cell produced would itself

be a pluripotent cell that could be cultured to establish a

pluripotent stem cell line. Significantly, this cell would

not be totipotent, as a zygote is.

Our proposal is for initial research using only nonhuman

animal cells. If, but only if, such research establishes

beyond a reasonable doubt that oocyte assisted reprogramming

can reliably be used to produce pluripotent stem cells

without creating embryos, would we support research on human

cells.

With few exceptions all human cells contain a complete

human genome, i.e. the complete DNA sequence characteristic

of the human species. Specifically, one-celled human embryos,

pluripotent human embryonic stem (or ES) cells, multipotent

human adult stem cells, and differentiated (specialized)

adult human cells such as neurons all contain a complete

human genome. Thus, possession of a human genome is a

necessary but not sufficient condition for defining a

human embryo with its inherent dignity. Rather the nature of

each cell depends on its epigenetic state, i.e. which subset

of the approximately thirty thousand human genes is switched

on or off and, if on, at what level. For example, the gene

for albumin, a liver specific protein, is found both in human

embryos and in adult human liver cells called hepatocytes.

However, neither the messenger RNA (mRNA) for albumin nor the

protein itself is found in single-celled embryos because in

them the gene is silenced.

This fundamental observation has given rise to the concepts

of cell fate plasticity and epigenetic ``reprogramming.'' If

successful, reprogramming converts a cell from one kind to

another by changing its epigenetic state. The ability to

clone animals, such as Dolly the sheep, by transfer of a

specialized adult nucleus to an enucleated oocyte

demonstrates the power of epigenetic reprogramming: the

oocyte cytoplasm is sufficient to reprogram the somatic

nucleus to a totipotent state. Human cloning has been

proposed as a means of generating human embryos whose

pluripotent stem cells would be used in scientific and

medical research. Here, through a form of altered nuclear

transfer, we propose to utilize the power of epigenetic

reprogramming in combination with controlled alterations in

gene expression to directly produce pluripotent cells using

adult somatic nuclei, without generating and subsequently

destroying embryos.

How do pluripotent stem cells differ from totipotent

single-celled embryos? Several key transcription factors

essential for establishing and maintaining the pluripotent

behavior of ES cells have been identified. Importantly, some

of these are specifically expressed only in pluripotent

cells, such as embryonic stem cells or the cells found in the

inner-cell-mass (ICM) of the week-old embryo or blastocyst.

They are not expressed in oocytes or single-celled embryos.

Expression of these factors therefore positively defines and

distinguishes mere pluripotent cells from embryos. These

factors instruct a cell to have the identity of a pluripotent

cell. Currently, the best studied example is the homeodomain

transcription factor called nanog (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al.

2003*). Nanog is not present in oocytes or single-celled

embryos, but first becomes expressed weakly in the morula

and then highly in the ICM (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al. 2003;

Hatano, Tada et al. 2005). Deletion of nanog does not

prevent early cleavage stages of embryogenesis including

formation of the ICM but does prevent the formation of an

epiblast (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al. 2003). ES cells in which

nanog is blocked lose their pluripotency--which clearly

shows that nanog is a positive factor instructing cells to

be pluripotent, i.e. to behave like an ES cell.

Furthermore, ES cells which constitutively express nanog

can no longer be differentiated, i.e. are forced to remain

in their undifferentiated state (Mitsui, Tokuzawa et al.

2003).

We propose a procedure that combines epigenetic

reprogramming of a somatic nucleus with forced expression of

transcription factors characteristic of embryonic stem cells,

to produce a pluripotent stem cell. As a result of this

procedure, nanog and/or other, similar factors, would be

expressed at high levels in somatic cells prior to nuclear

transfer, to bias the somatic nucleus towards a pluripotent

stem cell state. Such altered nuclei would then be

epigenetically reprogrammed by transplantation into

enucleated oocytes. Alternatively or concomitantly, the mRNA

for these same factors could be introduced into the oocyte

prior to nuclear transfer. This procedure could ensure that

the epigenetic state of the resulting single cell would

immediately be different from that of an embryo and like that

of a pluripotent stem cell: the somatic-cell nucleus would be

formed into a pluripotent stem-cell nucleus and never pass

through an embryonic stage. Therefore, unlike some other

proposed methods of ANT, this method would achieve its

objective not by a gene deletion that precludes embryonic

organization in the cell produced, but rather by a positive

transformation that generates, ab initio, a cell with the

distinctive molecular characteristics and developmental

behavior of a pluripotent cell, not a totipotent embryo. This

should allow us to produce a pluripotent stem cell line with

controlled genetic characteristics.