Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, Pastor Appel's ministry extends beyond his congregation to embrace the entire Frederick community, as well as missions abroad. He is currently serving as the president of the Ministerial Association of Frederick County, Maryland. This organization is composed of all of the ministers in the county. It meets monthly to engage in fellowship, dialogue, and to promote interfaith cooperation and activities to meet the spiritual needs of Frederick County residents.

Pastor Appel is also an active supporter of the Adventist Church's Hope for Humanity projects in southern Africa in response to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic. Pastor Appel explained: ``Hope for Humanity is coming to this program saying, `Here are some challenges, here are some needs. We are a world church. We just can't stay focused congregationally. We've got to start thinking about our brothers and sisters around the world who need our help.' ''

Mr. Speaker, today's prayer continues a tradition that began when Benjamin Franklin spoke during a moment of crisis at the Constitutional Convention, and these are his words: ``In the days of our contest with Great Britain when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity to establish our Nation. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men.

``If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that a new Nation can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to any business.''

Mr. Speaker, I am really honored that my pastor, Pastor John Appel, senior pastor of the Frederick Seventh-day Adventist Church and currently serving as the president of the Ministerial Association of Frederick County, is here today to continue this precedent followed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, sometime ago, our Department of Energy commissioned a study with SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, to do a study on the peaking of world oil production, impacts mitigation, and risk management. This very prestigious scientific organization took some time to complete this study; and when they completed it, they made a recommendation to the Congress and to the Department of Energy. Part of what they said in their recommendation is included here:

``The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem.''

That is quite an adjective to use. No risk problem like this ever in the history of the world is what they are saying: ``. . . 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.''

Again, Mr. Speaker, they are pointing out, and they will use these words in a chart I will have a little later, that the world has never faced a problem like this.

``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.''

When will peaking occur? Do we have a decade? And they are saying if we do not have a decade, we're going to have problems. Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars, and require many years of intense effort.

Our next chart, which speaks to the same phenomenon, inspired 30 of our leaders, Boyden Gray, McFarland, James Woolsey, and about 27 others, many of them four-star retired admirals and generals, to write a letter to the President. In that letter they said, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world oil reserves, that we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use represents a totally unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we need to do something about that.

Two other numbers here are of significance. We represent a bit less actually than 5 percent of the world's population, about one person out of 22. And in spite of the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world oil reserves, we produce about 8 percent of the world's oil. We need to keep this in mind for some of the later charts we are going to show, because what this means is that we are pumping our little reserves, only 2 percent, four times faster than the rest of the world.

If we were pumping it as fast, with 2 percent of the reserves, we would be producing 2 percent of the production; but we are producing 8 percent. So if the world is going to run into trouble with decreasing amounts of oil, Mr. Speaker, we are going to get there first because we are pumping our oil more rapidly.

How did we get here? The next chart speaks to that, and we need to go back about six decades. There was a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, who worked for the Shell Oil Company; and he noted the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields. We would find an oil field, we would start pumping, and the oil field would reach a maximum production. And then after the maximum production, at about half of its total ultimate production, it would start falling off. No matter how hard they pumped, it would produce less and less oil, until finally the field petered out.

He rationalized that if he knew how many oil fields there were in the United States and roughly what their reserves were, and if he could predict how many new oil fields the United States would find, he could then add up all these little bell curves and he would get a big bell curve which would tell him when the United States was going to peak in oil production. So he did that in a paper in 1956, and he wrote in that paper that with this analysis he predicted that the United States would peak, and that was the lower 48 at that time, that the United States would peak in oil production and consumption of our own oil about 1970.

Right on schedule, and some authorities will say 1970 and some will say 1971, but as this chart shows, the smooth green curve here was his prediction peaking about 1970, and the more ragged large green symbols represent the actual production, which pretty much followed his curve. And it did peak, as you can see, at about 1970; and it has been downhill since then.

By 1980, we knew very well that we were downhill, and the early Reagan years provided a lot of incentives for drilling. There were a lot of oil wells drilled in our country. Notice the tiny increase from that. It simply brought us back to the curve that had been predicted by M. King Hubbert.

Now, the red curve here is the curve for the Soviet Union. They had more oil than we, and they peaked higher than we. And when the Soviet Union fell apart, you see that they broke away from the predicted decline. They are now going to have a second little peak here, and then it will be falling off. They will never get back to their earlier peak of oil production.

The next chart shows some detail about where our oil has come from through the years. And if you are looking only at the lower 48, you are going to be following this curve. And if you add to it the liquids that we are getting from gas, you will see that it still followed Hubbert's curve. It peaked in 1970 and then fall off.

But we found a lot of oil in Alaska. As a matter of fact, I have been there, Mr. Speaker, at mile zero, at Dead Horse, Prudhoe Bay. And through that pipeline has come for the last several years a fourth of all of our domestic production. But notice that in spite of that enormous find of oil in Prudhoe Bay, there was just a little blip on the downside of Hubbert's peak.

This yellow here on the chart is very interesting. That, you may remember, Mr. Speaker, was the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. I remember how that was hyped. That was going to save us. There was plenty of oil there.

That was all it did, Mr. Speaker. It hardly slowed us down. In terms of the total amount that we were producing,

you can hardly see any effect of the Gulf of Mexico oil discovery.

We were thinking about that discovery and those wells in the recent hurricane. There are 4,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico. By the way, Mr. Speaker, that is about 10 times as many wells as there are in all of Saudi Arabia. We have about 530,000 oil wells in our country, about 80 percent of all the oil wells drilled in all the world. Maybe that is why we are able to produce oil from our reserves relatively four times faster than the rest of the world.

The next chart looks back through history, and it shows two things. It shows two curves, one superimposed on the other. One of the curves is the discovery curve, and this shows when we found the big oil fields starting way back in the 1930s, and then a lot of them in the 1940s, and some big oil fields found in the 1950s. But notice that this follows kind of a curve like so, and it peaks at about 1970, and it has been falling off ever since that. In spite of very large profits from the oil companies, they are not finding much more oil.

I might note, Mr. Speaker, that the profits for the oil companies was inevitable. They do not set the price of oil. Chevron and BP and ExxonMobil, they do not set the price of oil. The price of oil is set by you and me and all the other roughly 7 billion people in the world who use oil.

We set the price by our demand relative to the supply. As supply has fallen off in the last several years, the price has gone up. Oil companies that were making money at $25 a barrel, how much more money do you think they will make when oil is $65 a barrel? We should not be carping about how much money they make; what we should be looking at is how responsibly they use the profits they make.

Some of those profits need to be invested in finding new oil fields, but the experts do not think there is much more to find.

Several Congresses ago I was chairman of the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. We had the world's experts in to talk about how much oil is out there that we can realistically pump. There was general agreement, quite surprising agreement, that it is roughly 1,000 gigabarrels. Giga is used because in Europe a billion is not our billion so if you say billion, not everybody will understand it. So giga means a billion, and it means the same thing around the world.

A thousand gigabarrels is about a trillion barrels of oil. That may sound like a lot, but it is about the amount of oil that we have pumped so far in all of history. If you divide the 84 billion barrels a day that we are using today into that trillion barrels of oil, it comes out to about 40 years. Most of the experts believe we have found about 95 percent of all of the oil we will find. We now have very sophisticated seismic techniques with 3-D computer modeling. This is what they believe will be found, this gray-shaded area over here. It is not going to follow that smooth curve, but on average that is how much they think we will find.

The solid black line here represents the amount of oil we have been using. Up until about 1980, we always found more oil than we were using. There was always a big reserve out there. Since 1980, we have found less and less oil, and we have been using more and more oil. We have been able to do that because we are now using up some of these reserves we found before.

All of the oil that we can use has to be all the oil that is there. If you have not found it, you cannot pump it. So you make your own judgment how much oil you think we are going to find in the future, then you add that to the reserves back here. That is going to be the area under this curve from now on.

By the way, this 40 years that I mentioned, that is not a plateau. You do not plateau out for 40 years and then fall off a cliff. It is going to follow that typical bell curve of every oil field. By the way, 33 of the top 45 oil-producing countries have now peaked. It is only a few that have not peaked.

What will this curve look like from here on? We can change the shape. If we use some of our good recovery enhancement techniques, we can pump oil a little faster, and we may pump a little more, so we may get a little more out of these fields than depicted here. This is not all of the oil in the fields because probably half of the oil there will not get pumped because it is so difficult to get, it is going to cost more energy to get the oil than you get out of the oil. So you get to the point of you stop getting the oil. As the old farmer said, at that point ``the juice ain't worth the squeezing,'' so we stop trying to get oil at that point.

The next chart shows a simple schematic that depicts the problem and where we are. Everybody may not agree this is where we are. Most of the people that have thought about peak oil think we are here or will shortly be here. This is a 2 percent growth curve. With 2 percent growth, that doubles in 35 years. This point is twice that point, and so this is a 35-year period from here to here.

Notice what this chart points out is that you start having a problem before peaking because the exponential use curve, the demand curve keeps going up like this, whereas when we reach peak oil, it will of necessity level off, and then no matter what we do, it will inexorably go downhill after that. It does for individual oil fields. It has for the United States.

By the way, the same M. King Hubbard that predicted we would peak in about 1970, he was right on. He predicted that the world would peak about now. If he was right about the United States, maybe he is right about the world, and maybe we should have been paying some attention to that.

I would submit that we have now, in common parlance, we have blown 25 years when we knew very well M. King Hubbard was right about the United States. If he was right about the United States, would not it have been prudent to recognize that maybe he just might be right about the world? If he is right about the world, the world is about to peak in oil production now, then we should have been doing something during these last 25 years so this would be a smoother transition.

The next chart shows us the alternatives. As the world peaks in oil production, we are going to have to, first of all, turn to some finite resources, and we are now doing that. I will chat for a moment about those. And those will not last forever. They are finite, as the word implies, except for nuclear, which is kind of different. The only nuclear that is finite is light water reactors that use fissionable uranium. If we go to breeder reactors, as the term implies, you make more fuel than you are using, and that could go on and on. You have to accept the problems you buy there with the enrichment and moving fuel around that could make bombs and so forth.

Of course, the one thing that gets us home free is nuclear fusion. If we could harness the kind of energy that the sun sends down to us every day, we are home free. But, Mr. Speaker, the odds of our doing that are a bit like you or me solving our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice, and by the way, I do not play the lottery, but I do not think that rational people count on solving their economic problems by winning the lottery, and neither do I think that we should count on solving our energy problems of the future by nuclear fusion. That does not mean I do not support it. I vote every year for all of the money, $250 million or so, that we put into that, because we have to try. If we do not successfully harness nuclear fusion, we have a really challenging road ahead.

Let us look at these finite resources and what kind of potential we can expect from them. There is a lot of suggestion today about the tar sands up in Alberta, Canada. There are enormous reserves there. The reserves there are at least as large of all of the oil reserves in all of the world. Then what we are worrying about? Well, because it is there does not necessarily mean that we can harness it in enough quantities or soon enough to really make a big contribution.

As an example, Mr. Speaker, every day the Moon goes around the Earth roughly in a day, and it lifts the oceans about 2 feet. That is an incredible amount of energy. I carry two gallon buckets of water and lift them up, that is a lot of energy. If we could harness the energy of the tides, we would be home free. There is an old adage that says energy to be effective must be

concentrated, and because those tides are spread out over all of the oceans of all of the world, it is difficult to harness them.

The tar sands are a little like that. There is an incredible amount of energy there, and the Canadians are working very hard at harnessing that. Let me see if I can remember the numbers. I think they have a shovel in Alberta, Canada, that lifts 100 tons at a time and dumps it into a truck that carries 400 tons, and I think those are the right numbers. It carries them to a place where they are cooked, because the oil in those tar sands is a bit better, but kind of like the oil in your asphalt road. If you put a blow torch on an asphalt road and mix it with some lighter fuels, it will flow. That is kind of like what we are doing with the tar sands. They are working very hard, and they are producing a million barrels a day. We will talk in just a moment about energy profit ratio. They are making a lot of dollars doing that because it costs them less than $30 a barrel to make it. The oil is now bringing $60-some a barrel, so the dollar-profit ratio is up there. They are using, I have heard, maybe more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. That makes good sense for them because they have natural gas there, and it is hard to ship, and it is relatively cheap, and the oil is easy to ship and in high demand at $60-some a barrel.

Mr. Speaker, by the end of the day, we really need to be thinking about energy profit ratio because that is what will be telling. They are now producing a million barrels a day, and if they work real hard, they will be producing 2 million barrels a day in 5 years. Big deal.

The world today is using 84 million barrels a day, and if they work really hard, 10 years from now they will be producing 3 times as much as today, 3 million barrels a day, but the world would like to be using another 40 million barrels a day. I do not think it will be there, but if you project our current demand for those 10 years, we would like to be using another 40 million barrels of oil, and they will be producing another 2 million barrels of oil, \1/20\ of the additional oil the world would like to use. Although there is a lot of energy there, and I am sure that we will find techniques to get it out that have some energy profit ratio so there will be energy there for a long time, but it is not going to be available anywhere near the quantities needed to meet the needs of contending with the crisis that will occur with peak oil.

Now, the oil shales in our country are very much the same thing. Recently you may have read of an experiment out in Colorado. I think it was Shell Oil Company that devised a new technique for getting the oil out of the oil shales, which is like the oil in the tar sands. It is very thick and will not flow.

What they did to avoid polluting the groundwater was drill a series of holes in a circle, and then they froze the ground because the oil will not move through frozen ground. Inside that frozen vessel, if you will, they cooked and cooked it for a year. They put steam down and cooked it for a year. After that year, they started sucking on the oil, and for another year they cooked and they sucked, and they got a pretty meaningful amount of oil out of that.

There is an awful lot of oil in the oil shales, maybe about as much as in the tar sands, but the scale, scaling up for this is incredibly difficult. I am not sure what the energy profit ratio is, because if you have to freeze the perimeter of that big vessel, if that is what you want to call it, and then you have to cook it for a couple of years, obviously you are putting a lot of energy in. They believe they got more energy out than they put in. But still, the energy profit ratio is not going to be enormous. Even if you can make that attractive, you still have the problem of scale. With the world using 84 billion barrels of oil a day, you have to have a lot of a million here, a million there before it adds up to what we are using.

Coal, you may hear people do not worry about energy, we have 500 years of coal. That is not true. At current use rates, we have about 250 years of coal. That is a long time, so why are we worrying? If we have 250 years of coal at current use rates, and obviously you can do with coal what we do with oil. Hitler did it. When we denied him access to oil, he made oil out of coal. When I was a little boy, the lamps that we call kerosene lamps today, we called them coal oil lamps because they were filled with oil, made from oil. So if you must use coal, if you have greater demand than we use today, that 250 years quickly shrinks. I have a chart a little later that shows that. But it quickly shrinks to about 85 years, and if you have to use some of the energy to convert the coal since you cannot have a trunkload of coal in your car, the energy to do that now shrinks that supply. There is only a 2 percent growth rate, and I think we will have to use it at much more than 2 percent growth rate, and it shrinks it to 50 years. So we have to husband that resource very wisely.

We have already chatted briefly about nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Today we produce 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. France produces 75 or 80. If you have some concerns about nuclear power, when you drive tonight note that every fifth business and every fifth house would be dark if were not for nuclear energy.

One-fifth, 20 percent, of all the electricity in our country comes from nuclear. Well, once these are gone, and they will be gone, except nuclear breeder reactors, as many of those as we want to have and maybe, maybe if we are lucky nuclear fusion. But we will transition, Mr. Speaker, whether we like it or not, as the world runs out of oil, we will transition to the renewables. What are they? They are solar and wind and geothermal. Geothermal is when we tap into the molten core of the Earth when we are close enough to that that you can get some heat from that. If you go to Iceland, there is not a chimney there because all of their energy comes from geothermal.

We are trying very hard, as I mentioned previously, to tap into ocean energy. It is not just the tides. It is the waves. It is the thermal gradients in the ocean, the cold water at the depths, the warmer water on top, kind of a thermal couple effect that you can get there.

Then there is lots and lots of talk about getting energy from agriculture. Soy diesel, bio diesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass. The President mentioned it in his State of the Union. He said we are hooked on oil and have got to wean ourselves from that, and technology will do it. And he talked about some exciting technology, about taking some biomass like soybean stubble and corn stalks and switch grass. What is switch grass? Switch grass is prairie grass, and a lot of it grows. Of the prairie that we did not plow up and let that return to switch grass, it is a big crop every year. And they are talking about harvesting that and using something like culling cellulosic ethanol. We bioengineered a little organism that can split cellulose into its requisite glucose molecules. It is made of sugar. Sure does not taste like sugar. See, because the human's molecules are so closely tied together that the enzymes in our body cannot split them. But these little bioengineered organisms can do that, so we break cellulose down to glucose, and then we ferment the glucose, and we get ethanol from it. And there is a lot of talk about that.

And biomass. Waste energy. Burning waste. There is a plant not far from here in Montgomery County, I would be proud to have it by my church. It looks like an office building. You do not even know it is an incinerator burning trash and producing electricity. They bring the trash in by truck or train in containers. You do not even see it until it is inside the building and then they dump it. Really interesting to watch it because that trash comes in with all sorts of things in it. They have a crane there that picks it up and drops it to see if there is something evil in it like a tank of propane. You would not want to put that in the fire. It might explode. And if they drop it and there is nothing evil-looking in it, they pick it up again and drop it over into the fire. It is really worth a trip there. And we now get a meaningful amount of energy, as a later chart will show from waste to energy.

Then hydrogen. Many people think that we do not have to worry about energy because we have got hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. Hydrogen is simply a way of transferring energy from one point

to another. It will always cost more energy to make hydrogen than you will get out of the hydrogen. I can say that with some confidence because just as sure as there will never be a perpetual motion machine, we will never suspend the second law of thermodynamics. And that says that when you transfer energy from one form to another, you will always loose some energy in that transfer. Why are we so enthusiastic about hydrogen if that is true? It is because hydrogen has some incredible capabilities. When you burn it, you get water. That is really not very polluting, is it? And further more, hydrogen is a great thing to put in a fuel cell. And a fuel cell gets twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. So I am not depreciating the value of looking at hydrogen. I am simply pointing out that hydrogen is little more than a battery which takes energy from one place to another place. As a matter of fact, in a recent hearing, we had three experts on hydrogen, and there are three ways that you could transport hydrogen. One is as a liquid. It must be really, really cold, several hundred degrees below zero to keep it as a liquid, which means you have to have a lot of insulation, and even then it is going to boil off, so you have got to use it faster than that boils off.

The other way to carry it is as a gas. Well, hydrogen is the lightest element we have. Those gas molecules are really trying to get apart from each other, so it takes a really high pressure vessel to contain hydrogen.

The third way to transport hydrogen is in solid state. You adhere the hydrogen either by some adhesion or by some chemical process. You carry it in a solid state. That is very much like the way we carry electrons in what we call a battery. Hydrogen is a proton plus an electron; and so, and I asked the question, is a hydrogen battery inherently going to be more efficient than an electron battery? Well, we really need to look at hydrogen, but it is not a salvation to our problems.

The next chart looks at the characteristics that we are going to want to find in whatever alternative we turn to, and here we have on the ordinate the energy profit ratio. I have talked about energy profit ratio. That is how much energy you put in compared to how much energy you get out. And our big oil fields here, you see, they are up at 60 to one. As a matter of fact, the charts were even higher. Some of those were more than 100 to one. By the way, there were none of those in our country. They exist only in the Middle East and most in the big Darwar oil field. The granddaddy of all oil fields is in Saudi Arabia.

And the energy profit ratio is 60. You put in one unit of energy, one BTU, and you get out 60 BTUs. The abscissa here is economic effectiveness in transport, that is, how handy is it to use. And we are talking primarily about transportation and liquid fuels, how handy is it to use. Well, oil of course is the handiest thing to use. It is way over here on the right. And it had an enormous energy profit ratio if it came from the giant oil fields. In 1970, when we peaked, our energy profit ratio was down here. Now it is harder and harder to get our oil, and so by 1985 the energy profit ratio had slid down to here. Notice where the energy profit ratio is for tar sands and ethanol and that sort of source: way down here, just about zero. In fact, some people think that the energy profit ratio for ethanol, the way that it is frequently made, is below zero here, that more energy goes into making ethanol from the fossil fuels that made the tractor and plows field and makes the fertilizer and so forth than you get out of the ethanol.

Well, here we have some of the other things: hydro, coal fired, nuclear, photovoltaics. They now are getting much better. They are moving up in energy profit ratio. Wind machines should be on here too, and they would be about in this same category. So whatever alternative energy source we use, to see how useful it is going to be, we need to put it on this chart: does it have a high energy profit ratio, and is it really convenient to use for transportation.

The next chart is one which really has the long look. I like this chart because it is kind of humbling. It kind of puts us and oil and our whole history into perspective. Here we have only about 400 years, a little less than 400 years out of 5,000 years of recorded history. But for the first 4,600 years not a whole lot happened. And so if you extended this back 4,600 years, it would look very much the same. Very little energy produced. Here you see it. Wood. And then we learned how to use it more effectively. The Industrial Revolution started here in the early 1800s. We denuded the hills of New England to send charcoal to England to make steel. There is a little historic place called Catoctin Furnace up in Frederick County, and we denuded our hills up there to make charcoal for Catoctin Furnace. And then we found coal.

Oh, the ordinate here is quadrillion BTUs, how much energy you are producing. And then we found coal. And boy, look what happened. Look what happened. We really took off. The coal was very limited in what it could do compared with gas and oil, and the red curve here is gas and oil. And look what happened. It just took off and was reaching for the sky. Notice here the worldwide recession after the Arab-induced oil price spike hikes, worldwide recession, and we did use less oil. So we can economize. We can be more efficient. We can use less.

I might point out, Mr. Speaker, that the world's population has pretty much followed this. Just this afternoon I was looking at a chart of world population. Half a billion, a billion people for way back as far as we can look in history. And then we start the Industrial Revolution, and the world's population took off and it mirrors this. From a half a million, half a billion to a billion people up to now nearly seven billion people.

If, in fact we are at peak oil, and almost nobody denies, the most optimistic estimate I have ever seen is that we will reach peak oil at about 2035 or 2036. You know, that is not forever in the future. Most authorities believe that we are either here or it is very imminent. But if we have reached peak oil, we are about halfway through the age of oil. That is incredible. Out of 5,000 years of recorded history, 150 years now we are into the age of oil. In another 150 years we will be through the age of oil. Our great grandchildren will live then. What will their world be like? We face a lot of really serious challenges.

Mr. Speaker, when I think back, and someone asked me the other day how long I have been thinking about this subject, and maybe it is because I am a scientist. I knew that the fossil fuels could not be forever and so maybe 30, 40 years ago, when I was teaching school and doing research, I started asking myself that question, what does that mean, not forever? Do we have another 10 years, a hundred years, a thousand years? Obviously, it is not going to last forever. But what does that mean? And so I have been following this for 30, 40 years now.

The next chart looks at something that I have spoken briefly about and that is coal. And some will tell you, and I have heard a lot of people who ought to know better say, do not worry, we have got 250 years of coal. That is true, at current use rates. But if you start increasing coal only 2 percent a year, you know, Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy, what is next? What is the most powerful force in the universe, Dr. Einstein? You know what his response was? The power of compound interest. That is exponential growth. Compound interest.

And if you grow only 2 percent a year, that 250 years now immediately shrinks to about, what, 85 years here? And obviously you cannot fill your trunk up with coal. You are going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid. And so when you have used some energy to convert it to a gas or a liquid, after conversion you have got about 50 years left. That is a long time. And it is a meaningful resource. But it is not forever. And by the way, there are one of two penalties you are going to pay for burning coal. Either you are going to pay a big environmental penalty if you do not clean it up. And every year we vote some billions of dollars for clean coal technology. And still we have too much CO2, too much pollution from coal.

And by the way, Mr. Speaker, the use of coal is not without its price. We have had, what, 16 miners killed in West Virginia in the last couple of weeks in producing coal.

When was the last time you heard that a worker in a nuclear power plant

was killed or injured? The answer is, never in this country. It just has not happened. I lived through the Three Mile Island disaster. I was not very far from it in Frederick, Maryland. There was a lot of hoopla about that. Very little actual effects of that. I have some friends who have been avidly antinuclear. When they are considering the alternative of shivering in the dark as we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak, they are wisely taking a new look at nuclear.

Our next chart is a very interesting one. We have talked about the potential from agriculture. Let me make two generalizations as a caution. We are barely able to feed the world. Tonight, 20 percent of the world or so will go to bed hungry. How much food can we convert to energy and still feed the world, particularly if we permit the world's population to increase as it is today?

The other caution is, how much biomass can we take from our land and still have topsoil? With all of our good techniques today, no till farming and so forth, every bushel of corn we grow in Iowa is accompanied by three bushels of topsoil that go down the Mississippi River.

Now, topsoil is topsoil, rather than subsoil simply because it has organic matter in it. And that organic matter, the humus comes from decaying organic material. And if you are taking all that organic material off to burn or to ferment or whatever you are going to do with it, I am not certain how long we can maintain the quality of our topsoil so that we can continue to produce the food and fiber that we need and that the world needs.

On the top here are shown two depictions. One is the amount of energy you get out of petroleum. Obviously, you do not get all the energy in your car. It takes energy to drill the wells, to pump it out, to transport it, to refine it, to haul it to the gas station and so forth.

So when we get out 1 million BTUs, there are probably, they estimate, it took 1.23 million BTUs input. So you do not get it all in your car. You would not expect to.

Now, what about the energy profit ratio here of ethanol? And here we are getting a lot of energy from the sun. What does that mean in terms of the final product? And I am told by some this is a pretty optimistic assessment here. But even if we reach this, you have put in .74 million BTUs. Almost three-fourths of the energy you get out of ethanol is represented by the energy that went into producing ethanol. There is an energy profit ratio, although some have disputed that. There is a doctor in the East here and one in the West, and they have done what they say is a very good analysis of all the energy, and it is hard to keep track of that, Mr. Speaker. It is not just the diesel fuel they use in the tractors. How much energy does it take to make the tractor? Every automobile tire has the equivalent of 6 gallons of oil in it. As you burn the tire, you get some sense that that is probably pretty close to the truth.

These two scientists believe that today in the way that some ethanol is made, it takes more energy from fossil fuels to make the ethanol that we get out of the ethanol. Even if that is true, there is a good byproduct remaining, all the fat and all the protein. Tofu is a protein, by the way. That is the protein from soybeans. We get a similar protein from corn. So we can use that as animal food or human food.

The bottom chart here shows some of the challenge of getting energy from corn. This is a pie chart which shows the total amount of energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. And notice, Mr. Speaker, that almost half of that total energy comes from nitrogen. That is because nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. Before we learned how to do that, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manure and what we call guano. Guano is the droppings of bats and birds for very long periods of time, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, and it accumulated on the tropical islands, and in the case of bats, we mined that to get guano. That is gone. If we wait another 10-, 20-, 30,000 years, there will be some more. But it takes a very long time to accumulate that.

This is all the other energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. Potash was mined using fossil fuels. Phosphate was mined using fossil fuels. The lime was quarried using fossil fuels. Here is the diesel fuel that ran the tractor and the combine, the gasoline that is used in some of the farm equipment, liquid gas, electricity, all of which is produced by fossil fuels, most of it by fossil fuels, some by nuclear, 20 percent by nuclear. The custom work, the diesel that went into doing the work, the energy, the fossil energy it took to build the tractor and so forth. And many of the chemicals we use in agriculture are made from oil. The water is pumped using energy. The hauling, the seed, fossil fuel energy goes into producing all of this.

Mr. Speaker, how will we feed the world once we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak?

The next chart, this is a really interesting one. I use an analogy here that helps me to understand this. I imagine a young couple that has just gotten married, and their grandparents died and left them a pretty big inheritance. So they have now established a life-style where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. And they look at the amount they are spending and at the size of the grandparents' inheritance and say, gee, this is not going to last until we retire. So obviously they have got to do one or both of two things: Either they have got to spend less money, or they have got to earn more money.

I use that 85-15. Others may use 86-14. The 85 or the 86 is the percentage of energy in our economy that we get from the fossil fuels, natural gas and petroleum and coal. Only 15 percent in this depiction do we get from nonfossil fuel sources. A bit more than half of that, nuclear energy, 8 percent, that is, 8 of 15, a bit more than half, comes from nuclear. That is 20 percent of electricity, but 8 percent of our total energy use heating buildings and manufacturing and so forth. Seven percent of it comes from renewables. Remember that previous chart? Ultimately we will transition to these renewables, with the exception of what we will get from nuclear. When we are through the age of oil, it will all be renewables.

What are they? Solar. This is a 2000 chart. We are better today. In 2000, solar represented 1 percent of 7 percent. That is .07 percent. It has been growing at 30 percent a year. That doubles in about 3 years. So now, big deal, it is .28 percent of our total energy.

Wood, 38 percent. Not the West Virginia hillbilly, but this is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using a waste product, what would otherwise be a waste product.

I mentioned waste before. That is 8 percent of our total renewable energy. We ought to be producing a lot more of that. Landfills are pretty silly when you think that you could be producing electricity with that rather than worrying about the methane that is produced there. They do harvest some of that, by the way, and use it.

Wind, another 1 percent. By the way, wind and solar are essentially the same energy source. The wind blows because of the differential heating of the sun; so they both go back to the sun. We can now produce electricity from wind at 2\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. That is really competitive. Why are we not producing more of it? Wind farms are growing. You may see them. Some people do not like the look of those. I think that the big wind machines are pretty handsome. That is about where solar is today, about .28 percent of our total energy.

How long will it take us to get to any meaningful percentage there? Because that is increasingly what we are going to have to rely on in the future.

Conventional hydro, almost half of all of our renewables comes from an energy source that is not going to grow in our country. We have dammed every river that should be dammed and probably a few that should not; so that is not likely to grow.

Now we are down here to agriculture, alcohol fuels and so forth. Again, almost in the noise level. And geothermal, where we are close enough to the molten core of the Earth, we really should tap into that. That is free. It is forever if you use it properly.

The next chart shows us something very interesting. Mr. Speaker, I would like to get some input from statisticians on this because everybody knows

the jargon of something which is statistically significant. There is a 95 percent probability, there is a 5 percent probability, and so forth. And here they have done something which I find very strange. If you are looking at the path that a hurricane is going to take, you notice it starts out very narrow. It could get pretty good for the next few hours, but when it gets out to hours and days, it gets broader and broader. Now, the hurricane maybe will go down the middle, but there is just as big a chance it will go to the left as there is that it will go to the right. And what these folk are doing and what they are using here is statistical jargon. They are saying a high 5 percent probability, low 95 percent, and the mean is what is in the middle. Now, that could just as well be a whole lot less as that much more. So the real peak is probably going to occur about right here.

This is where we are now. This is the 2000 chart. We are about right here. They are using this mean here. No one that I know of believes that the ultimate recovery, 1 billion barrels of oil, is 3 trillion. But even if you use the 3 trillion, that takes you only to this point. It pushes peak oil out only to 2016.

The next one is a really interesting one. If you assume that you are going to get it faster and move the peak out to 2037, look what happens after that. You fall off a cliff.

So we need to be careful about this enhanced oil recovery, because if there is only so much to pump, and you pump it sooner rather than later, later you are going to have less to pump.

Back to Robert Hirsch and the study done by SAIC. They say on Page 64, ``World oil peaking is going to happen.'' And down here he says that oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this without massive mitigation, more than a decade before the fact. And remember, Mr. Speaker, very few authorities believe that peak oil is more than a decade from now. So we are pretty much here.

The next chart points out something very interesting, and that is that this really is a worldwide problem. We are all in the same boat on this little planet Earth traveling through space. There is only so much oil. There are about 7 billion people, and clearly we would do better to engage the nations of the world in a competition to achieve sustainability instead of a consumption contest, which is now what we are doing: Who can use the most oil to grow their economy the fastest?

The next chart shows ideally what we need to be about.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, I think that if we do not have a national and indeed international program which kind of has the breadth of putting a man on the Moon and the intensity of the Manhattan Project, I think we are in for a pretty rough landing.

First of all, there is voluntarily conservation, and we can do that. We can conserve. California did. They had no rolling blackouts because they voluntarily reduced their electricity use by 11 percent in a single year. That is big. We start out with voluntary conservation, ride with two in the car, turn our thermostat down, put a sweater on. To organize voluntary conservation, working together to provide for the van pools and so forth, then the government can provide some monetary incentives, giving you the incentive to do the right thing. And then efficiency, of course. These were two words that were absent from the President's very good message on energy, conservation and efficiency.

I am a conservative. My wife says she thinks that there ought to be some relationship between conservation and conservatives. Does that make sense, Mr. Speaker?

The next chart we are going back again to the Hirsch report. That was such a great study. They said on page 24, ``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 private-owned transportation sector. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time- consuming of the order of a decade or so.''

For instance, if everyone was to drive a hybrid car, which gets two or three times the mileage of an ordinary car, it takes one or two decades to turn over the motor fleet; 28 years, I think, for the big trucks; much less than that for the vanity of cars and so forth.

The next chart, this is something that we are doing out in Frederick. We wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to be totally self- sufficient, so we have proposed, and we have funding to do it thanks to the generosity of the taxpayers, that we are going to build a welcome center coming down into Frederick that is totally energy self- sufficient. We will get all of our water from the rain. We will handle all of our waste without putting anything into the ground, with composting toilets and constructed wetlands and so forth. We will produce all of our energy with wind machines and solar panels and so forth. This should in the next couple of years be existing. If you go up 270 into Frederick and start down the hill where you look over the Frederick Valley and see the city there, on your right will be the Goodloe Byron Overlook. If you pull in there, you will be at this welcome center, which will have a lot of what we call benign technologies.

In the few minutes remaining, I would like to use the Apollo 13 as an example of the challenge that we have. You may remember the Apollo 13. They had an explosion in one of their oxygen tanks. They had two oxygen tanks. And that explosion caused the other oxygen tank to leak. So not only were they going to be short of oxygen for themselves if they were not careful, they were going to be short of energy because they were using that oxygen to combine with hydrogen in a fuel cell to produce energy.

What they had available to them was the module, the lunar lander. They turned around, as you may know. They had to evaluate what they had to work with, and that is all they had to work with, what was in that little spacecraft out there. What could they do with that? They had a big challenge of CO2 buildup and what they were going to do to manage that so that they could get back. They had a very narrow window.

There are a lot of analogies between the Apollo 13 and where we are today. They had a challenge not of their choosing. We did not choose to reach peak oil at this time, but they were faced with the inevitable decision of either making the right choices or not making it through, and we are faced with very much that same kind of a dilemma. We have some choices to make now, and the next chart points to the kinds of choices that we have and what I think we need to be doing.

I want to refer you to an earlier chart which, by the way, we had that bell curve and we had the consumption going up like so, and there is a gap there.

A lot of people are trying to fill the gap. Here is that chart. Put that in front of this one. We will talk about that in just a moment. A lot of people are talking about filling the gap so that we continue on this course and use ever more and more.

I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, it is not what our challenge should be. As a matter of fact, to get alternative energy sources, we are going to have to invest three things. Money, we will not worry about that. We will borrow that from our kids and our grandkids, I am sorry to say; but we cannot borrow time from them, and you cannot borrow energy from them. We have run out of time. We are using all the oil that is available. If there was more oil than we would like to use, it would not be a sixty-couple dollars a barrel, would it? So in order to have any energy to invest in the alternative, we have to reduce our demand for oil so we have something to invest.

Trying to fill the gap just puts off the inevitable. If, in fact, we are able to do that momentarily, since there is not going to be much more oil found out there, the experts believe all you are doing now is setting yourself up for a bigger fall later. The old adage, in a hole, stop digging, the corollary to that is you are climbing a hill and you are going to fall off the other side, the higher you climb, the further you fall. This is pretty much where we are with oil. Let us go back now about the choices before us now.

Like Apollo 13, we have got to develop those contingency plans. What will we do? We need to prepare proactively. We have almost run out of time to do that. We must reduce energy consumption to make some energy available. That will

buy some time. By the way, the cheapest oil is the oil you do not use. We have bought some time so we can make investments now in more efficiency, first of all, and then in these alternatives which we will increasingly turn to.

The ultimate goal is to achieve sustainable growth. By the way, Mr. Speaker, there is no such thing as sustainable growth, whether short term you may make it appear to be so; but ultimately there is no such thing as continued forever sustainable growth. We are going to have to learn to be happy with being satisfied with what we have got.

I think, Mr. Speaker, we have some really, really great times ahead of us. I can imagine nothing more than all Americans feeling really good about contributing to a solution to this problem.

What we really need is leadership that the American people understand that they really can contribute. We have enormous creativity and entrepreneurship. We need to harness that. The next big burst in economic efficiency and growth can be in developing these alternatives and more efficient ways of doing things.

The ultimate goal, and we will get to that goal, we will transition. When the age of oil is finished and there is no more oil that can be gotten without paying more for the oil than you get out of it, we will have been transitioned to the renewables. What will life be like then? What will life be like in that transition?

This is really a good-news story. The sooner we start to address this problem, the less traumatic will be the transition. I like to think, Mr. Speaker, that if we harness the creativity and the energy of the American people, there is nothing that will make sleep so refreshing other than just knowing you really contributed something that day.

Mr. Speaker, I think that we have a bright future ahead of us. Unless we recognize, we probably are approaching peak oil. I would encourage, Mr. Speaker, that you go do a Google search for peak oil, pull up the articles on peak oil or do Hubbert's peak, you will find essentially the same articles there. There is a lot of information out there.

The average person is so consumed with the necessities of life, the tyranny of the urgent that pushes the important off the table: you really need to change the diapers; you really do need to be responsible; you also need to be thinking about tomorrow. We think about our next election. The board of directors thinks about the next quarterly report. Who is looking 5 years from now, 10 years from now?

Mr. Speaker, I think we have a great future ahead of us. The American people will respond if properly challenged.

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend Chairman Hunter and Ranking Member Skelton for completing the impressive task of this conference report in such a short period of time. I also want to thank my subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Taylor, for his tireless efforts and dedication to the preparation of this report while simultaneously coordinating Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in Mississippi. The intense work involved in preparing the conference report has been accomplished only with the assistance of our able and hardworking staff and I really want to commend their efforts and the quality of the work they have so diligently done.

Mr. Speaker, this conference agreement provides the men and women in our Armed Forces the tools to effectively project our Nation's power and influence throughout the globe. Initiatives within this bill to build the Navy of the future, authorize advance procurement funding for the Navy's next generation platforms while continuing development and buildout of the Littoral Combat Ship and Virginia Class attack submarine fleet.

I am also pleased that this conference report takes steps to improve our U.S. shipbuilding industry to make it more efficient and commercially competitive in the future. Only by applying downward pressure on shipbuilding costs will we be able to afford a fleet of sufficient size to meet the national security needs and global commitments of tomorrow.

This agreement authorizes multiyear contract authority for additional C-17 aircraft if procurement is consistent with the results of the Quadrennial Defense Review. Furthermore, we encourage the Secretary of the Air Force to evaluate options for maintaining C-17 production capability until results of the C-5 modernization programs are available.

This conference agreement is an important milestone in making our country more secure. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 is critical in meeting the challenges and demands placed upon our Armed Services today, supplying a foundation on which to build well into the future. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines by voting for the Fiscal Year 2006 National Defense Authorization Act.

Madam Speaker, if our Founding Fathers could be resurrected and be with us here this evening, they would be astounded that we were discussing, debating this subject. Let me explain. Most of our Founding Fathers came here to escape one of two tyrannies, the tyranny of the crown and the tyranny of the church. In the Second Amendment, they address the tyranny of the crown. But that is a subject for another day. In England, the Episcopal Church was the official state church, and it could and did oppress other churches. On most of the countries of the continent, the Roman Church was the official state church, and it could and did oppress other churches, and our Founding Fathers wanted to make sure that this never could happen in their new country. And so in the First Amendment, they wrote the establishment clause which means exactly what it said, not the way it is frequently interpreted today. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, no established state religion, please, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Not only should there not be a state religion, there should be free exercise of every religion.

But they had no fear, Madam Speaker, of religion. The Continental Congress bought 20,000 copies of the Bible to distribute to their new citizens. And for the first 100 years of our country, our Congress each year voted funds to send missionaries to the American Indians. For 160 years of its existence, the Supreme Court, up until 1947 when they did an abrupt about face, 180 degrees from where they were before in every decision relative to this subject, our Supreme Court said that we were a Judeo-Christian nation, and they affirmed the right for expression of those beliefs. Indeed, 102, I believe, of the first 104 universities in our country were church schools, including Harvard. Harvard's handbook has an interesting note, that the Bible should be the constant companion of its students. And for the first hundred years of its existence, about half of all of the graduates of Harvard were ministers.

Madam Speaker, if our Founding Fathers could be resurrected and be with us this evening, they would unanimously support this commonsense resolution.

Madam Speaker, we should join them and unanimously support this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to thank Congressman Dingell for his many years of service to his country. Sometimes there is a young person who is very bright and well-achieved. And it is said of them that they are wise beyond their years. Congressman Dingell has served 50 years in the Congress. Before that, he served in World War II. Matter of fact, he is just about a year younger than I, so obviously he is not a really young person. I can truly say of Congressman Dingell that he, too, is wise beyond his years.

As a matter of fact, the subject I am going to talk about tonight is better

understood by Congressman Dingell, I think, than any other Member of the House. I remember a conversation with him some time ago, several months ago, when he noted that he did not believe that oil would ever be $50 a barrel again. I spoke with him tonight, and he said, you know, we probably had better hope that it is not ever $50 a barrel again because the only thing that could cause it to drop to that level would be the demand construction that would be precipitated by a world crisis. Thank you, Congressman Dingell, for your friendship, and I thank you for your contribution to your country.

The first chart is taken from a publication from a report that was funded by the Department of Energy. I want to make that clear. The principal investigator was Robert Hirsch. He works for SAIC, a very prestigious scientific organization.

``The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs 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.''

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

Mr. Speaker, what is he referring to? To put this in context, as the next slide shows us, we need to go back about six decades. Working for the Shell Oil Company was a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, and he watched the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields. He found that they all tended to follow a similar pattern. Oil came freely at first and then reached a peak production, and then, not surprisingly, the last oil from the field, as a matter of fact, roughly the last half of the oil from the field, was more difficult to get than the first half of the oil from the field.

So he judged that if he could add up all of the little fields in the country and the curve that would be produced by the exploitation and exhaustion of that, and these are called bell curves, they are typical curves of phenomena, that he then could predict when the United States would peak in oil production.

He made this prediction in 1956, and he said that the United States peak oil production would occur about 1970, certainly in the early 1970s. Right on target, the United States peaked in oil production in 1970 or 1971.

The smooth green curve here shows what he predicted. The somewhat more ragged curve with symbols shows the accurate data points. You see how closely this is for the lower 48 States. It shows how closely they followed his predicted curve.

The red curve is the similar curve for the Soviet Union. You notice that on the down side, they peaked some years ago, after us, but some years ago, and on the down side, when the Soviet Union fell apart, they lost a lot of production capacity. Now they are going to have a second small peak, but then on down. Russia is now a major producer of oil in the world, but they were in the past a larger producer of oil in the world.

The next chart shows the sources from which our oil production has come.

And notice that this peak, about 1970, and this curve differ from the previous one in that we have added here the oil from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. There was a tiny blip on the down slope. Without that oil, there was no blip at all. But in spite of that enormous find in Prudhoe Bay, about a fourth of our total production for a number of years, we still continued our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

I want to note the yellow there, that is the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico where there are now, I think, what, 4,000 oil wells. That was supposed to solve our problems with oil for quite some time. Notice the fairly trifling contribution it made. This was a big find. But we and the world use a lot of oil, and that kind of puts it in perspective.

The next chart shows two characteristics of the world. The previous one, the one just removed, we were looking at the United States, and in this one we look at the world. And there are really two curves here, and they are superimposed because that helps us to understand the situation a little better.

The bar graph here, the dark shows the discoveries of oil; and notice that we started discovering a lot of oil back in the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s; and after the 1980s, that is 25 years ago, we have had diminishing discoveries of oil. The heavy black line here shows the use of oil. For many, many years we were discovering far more oil than we used. But since about the early 1980s, every year we have used more oil than we found. And until today, and that is at this point, you can see that we are using several times as much oil as we find, maybe four barrels of oil used for every barrel of oil that we find.

Now, of course one can only extrapolate into the future. But if you make reasonable assumptions for what we will find, and that is this curve here, we could find more; we could also find less. But if you look back through the last 20 years, this is a fairly optimistic assumption of what we will find for the next 25 or 30 years.

And then, of course, you cannot pump oil that you have not found. And so the consumption curve, this curve, suggests that that will peak in about 5 years. But the consumption curve must have under it exactly the same area as is the area under the discovery curve, because obviously you cannot pump oil that you have not found.

We will come back to this chart a little later, and we will mention some of the critical relationships here a time or two as we address other points.

Now, there are a number of critics, and the next chart points to the statements that one critic has made. And we will come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, in the future to talk about other critics and the points that they have made, and we will carefully and respectfully address each of the points that they make.

This critic made four comments, four points. And what he said was, if we really understood this, you would not have any concern about peak oil because we are really not facing a problem, in his view.

I am only going to talk about the first one now, and then we will put this chart down here, and we will pull it up after we have talked about this one and then talk about the second, third, and fourth bullet here.

In the first bullet, he says: Simply put, known reserves can produce far more oil if more aggressively drilled, as in the United States.

That is true, and it is not true. As the next chart shows, this shows the relationship between drilling and pumping oil in this country. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan became President, we had already slid 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak; and we knew in this country, and the world knew, that M. King Hubbert had been correct, that the United States had peaked in its oil production.

Mr. Speaker, I wonder why there was not more recognition given to the fact that M. King Hubbert also predicted when the world would peak, which, considering events like a worldwide recession and the oil price spike hikes and so forth, would be about now. I wonder why more people were not concerned that maybe if M. King Hubbert were right about the United States, he might be right about the world. And if he was right about the world, then we really ought to be paying attention to that.

This curve shows the effect of the extra drilling that was encouraged by the tax policy of the early Reagan years. It showed that that had no effect on the amount of oil that we pump, because we went from positive, pumping more oil than we were consuming, to negative, pumping less oil than we were consuming, in spite of the fact that there was a very large spike here in increased drilling.

So depending upon the state of exhaustion of the oil fields, increased drilling may not produce any increased flow of oil. It certainly did not here. In spite of all this increased drilling, we produced relatively less and less oil. Now, it is true that if there is still a lot of oil left in the fields, you could exhaust it more quickly by drilling more wells.

I think that in this country, Mr. Speaker, we have drilled at least three-fourths of all of the oil wells that have been drilled in all of the world. And the critic was saying if we drilled relatively as many wells in Saudi Arabia as we have drilled in this country, that we could get that oil out more quickly. That may be true. But as we will discover a little later in this discussion, Mr. Speaker, that probably is not a good idea.

There is an old adage that says: If you're in a hole, stop digging. And I think a good corollary to that is, if you are climbing a hill and you know that you will fall off the other side, it is obvious that the higher you climb, the greater the fall will be.

So if there is only so much oil there, if we are able to get it out more quickly now by drilling more holes, then does it not stand to reason that there will be even less oil for the future, and the slope down the other side of Hubbert's Peak will be even sharper?

The next slide shows again a relationship between drilling and the amount of oil that you discover. The red curve here is a hyperbolic model. It approaches in ascentot. It will never quite reach the top because it will go up ever more slowly. And the yellow points here show the actual cumulative discovery of oil. And notice that it follows this very clear ascentotic curve.

What that points to, Mr. Speaker, is that there is probably not a lot more oil in the world that we are going to find. For the last number of years, we have had very good techniques: seismic, 3D modeling with computers. We are really very good now at characterizing the geologic formations in which oil is likely to be found, and we have drilled and exploited all of those that held much promise.

The next chart is another one taken from this very excellent report called the ``Hirsch Report,'' done by SAIC, and funded by our own Department of Energy. This shows the net difference between annual world oil reserves, reserve additions, and annual consumption. And this showed when we flipped over from every year finding more oil than we used to the point that for every year since, what, the early 1980s, as you can see from this chart, the world has found less and less oil than it has pumped.

I would like to now come back to the chart that I showed a few minutes ago because I think that this chart actually shows if you make this curve here a straight line, then that produces the curve that you have just seen. I would like to come back to this and point out that the history of discovery indicates that we probably are not going to have any more really large oil fields discovered. The last of the great oil fields were discovered in the 1980s. And in spite of intense drilling and vastly improved discovery techniques, just about on the average every year since then we have found less and less.

And I would like to point out again something which is very obvious, that you cannot pump oil that you have not found. Now, if you want to change the shape of this consumption curve, and you can change the shape of that curve, if you want to change the shape of that curve and have it ever go up and up, then you are obviously going to have to find a lot more oil.

Now, you can in the short term have it go up somewhat faster if you simply were to drill in Saudi Arabia relatively as many wells as we have drilled in this country. But what that will do, Mr. Speaker, is maybe to extend this curve a bit like this.

But you cannot pump more oil than you have found, so then it will fall off very sharply on the other side. I am not sure that is what our economy needs, and I am not sure that is what the world needs. So I am not certain, Mr. Speaker, that in the absence of finding more oil that it is in anybody's self-interest to find ways to exhaust the oil that we have found more quickly than we are doing it now.

Now, if you believe that just around the corner we are going to find enormous additional amounts of oil, then that might be a supportable philosophy. But I would suggest, looking at this history of our discovery of oil, that it would be very prudent to not use techniques for more rapidly exhausting the oil until you have found more oil, or we are simply going to be building a larger and larger economy in the world that is going to be even more and more difficult to support as we inevitably run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

I would like now to put back up the comments of this critic, and we want to look at the second bullet here. There is enough tar and natural gas in the world to fuel the globe for hundreds of years at current rates of consumption. And I should have underlined it there, the ``at current rates of consumption.'' There are two things I want to talk about on this.

The first is that there is a great deal of natural gas and other sources of hydrocarbons in the world. I am not sure that they are economically exploitable. And the second thing is at current-use rates. Let me finish this, and then I will put the next chart up. And that does not include even more massive amounts of coal that could be turned into gas and oil, and indeed it can be turned into gas and oil.

That is the way Hitler ran his country and his military in World War II, because we cut him off from oil and he made oil from coal. As a matter of fact, when I was a little boy, the lamps you now call kerosene lamps we called coal oil lamps. And that is because it was coal oil that first replaced whale oil before we learned how to refine crude oil and make kerosene. So we can do that.

The next chart points to what Albert Einstein said was the most powerful force in the universe. After we discovered nuclear power as a result of his theory of relativity and his contributions, he was asked, Dr. Einstein, we have now discovered this incredible power source, energy source. What will be next? And he said, you know, the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest.

Now, that is an exponential function. What we show here are several curves, and this lower curve here shows a 2 percent growth rate; and the straight line shows, if you extrapolate that out without compounding, that is you do not add this year's growth to the baseline for next year's growth, if you have money and interest and you take the interest every year and do not let it accumulate. But notice how much it grows if you let it accumulate. And this is only a 2 percent growth rate. There is a 4 percent growth rate. Notice how much more quickly it grows. By the way, a 2 percent growth rate doubles in 35 years.

This steepest curve here is a 10 percent growth rate. I would like to remind you that that is pretty much the curve that China is on, and India very close behind them. China, about 9.5 percent; 10 percent growth rate doubles in 7 years. It is four times bigger in 14 years, it is 8 times bigger in 21 years. That is exponential growth.

Mr. Speaker, if you will do a Google search for Dr. Albert Bartlett, not a relative of mine, but he gives the most interesting 1-hour lecture I have ever heard, and pull up his lecture on exponential growth and energy. He has some excellent analogies to help understand exponential growth.

I will give just one true story from an ancient kingdom where one of the citizens of the kingdom invented chess. The king was so impressed he called his citizen in and said, I will give you any reasonable request for the contribution you make for inventing chess.

The inventor said, I am a simple man with simple needs; Mr. King, if you will simply take my chess board and put one grain of wheat on the first square and double that and put two grains of wheat on the second square and double it and four on the third square and eight on the fourth until you have finally filled all of the squares of my chess board, that is all the reward I would ask. The king thought, silly man, I would have given him a great deal more. No problem.

But had the king understood the power of exponential growth, he would have had to place on that chess board more wheat than the world has harvested in the last 40 years. That is the power of compound growth.

We see that in the next chart that looks at one of these assumptions, and that is that we have a lot of coal. We do. We have 250 years of coal at current use. But if you have to use more of it, and we certainly will have to use more of it as we have less natural gas; today that topped $15 for a thousand cubic feet, the highest ever, and if you increase the use of coal only 2 percent a year and compound that, notice what

happens. It shrinks to about 85 years. That is the power of compound growth. And for much of its use, you will not be able to use coal, you will have to make it, as the critics suggested, into gas and oil, and that takes energy to do that, and so now it has shrunk down to about 50 years.

With just 2 percent growth, we will be really lucky if we can get by with increasing the use of coal only 2 percent, but that now lasts only 50 years. It is there. It is a very valuable resource, and we need to use it, but it is not a long-term solution to our problem.

The next chart shows something which is really very interesting. This shows the current consumption, and it is making an interesting assumption. I would like to pause for just a moment because, in another life, I had a course in statistics, and they give you some probabilities here. That is what statistics is all about, probabilities. They have the 95 percent probability and the 50 percent probability and the 5 percent probability. The 5 percent probability means only 1 time in 20 would you expect that to happen. The 95 percent probability is what is called statistically significant, and 97 percent probability is highly significant.

What they have done here is to take the mean and to assume that is the expected value. No, Mr. Speaker, that is not the expected value. The 50 percent probability means there is 50 percent probability it could be more. There is also 50 percent probability it could be less. What they have done, they say that is the mean. That is really, I think, a major distortion of statistics and reflects a misunderstanding of statistics because it could be just as well less than that as more than that.

But this red curve assumes that there will be 50 percent more. The total amount of oil most authorities believe that was recoverable, and we have recovered about half of it, was about 20,000 giga barrels. That is 2,000 billion barrels. This mean is 3,000. This is roughly the 2,000 here, and the 3,000 is here. Notice, even if you assume, which I think is a very rash assumption, that there will be 50 percent more oil than most of the world's experts believe, notice how little that pushes out the peaking. That is what exponential growth does.

Albert Bartlett uses another interesting explanation of exponential growth. He has a little colony of microbes that are growing in a liter flask and notices that they are doubling every minute. When they are only partially full, they say, we better be looking for more territory because we are soon going to fill up this liter vessel. They send out scouts and find not one or two or three more liters. Wow, three times as much as they now have. That should last them for a long time. Remember, they are doubling every minute.

If they fill their present liter flask at midnight, 1 minute after midnight they fill the second one because they double every minute, and in 2 minutes after midnight, they fill the third and the fourth.

That shows why if we find 50 percent more oil than most of the experts believe is there, that will only push out peak oil those relatively few years. If by some means you are able to extract oil more quickly, like drilling a whole lot more wells or using this enhanced recovery technique, you might push the peak out to 2037, but this curve acknowledges a reality that you cannot pump what is not there. And so now you fall off very quickly, and the area between these two curves is going to have to equal the area between these two curves.

So from a very real perspective, Mr. Speaker, if we are not going to find enormously more oil or gas or coal or large amounts of alternatives, it will not be in the long-term best interest of the world to exploit our present reserves more quickly.

The next chart shows the characteristics that any alternatives will have to be useful because the primary crisis that we face is not just an energy crisis; it is really a crisis of liquid fuels because that is where our economy and the world's economy will be first impacted.

This is an interesting chart, and it has an ordinate and an abscissa. The ordinate is energy-profit ratio. The energy-profit ratio is the amount of energy you have to put in to get out a certain amount of energy, and obviously, the best energy sources will be those where you put in just a little bit of energy, like drilling one well and getting out an awful lot of oil. And the energy profit ratios may be 60 or 80 or 100, and some even 200. That means you get out 200 times as much energy as put into drilling and developing the field.

Now on the abscissa here, we have economic effectiveness in transport. What that means is how convenient it is to use transport. The source that is the highest in both of these is the giant oil fields. None of those exist in this country. They are all in the Middle East and many in Saudi Arabia. But notice that they have a very high energy-profit ratio and also a very high economic effectiveness in transport.

Our oils were just as effective in transport, so they are way over here in the abscissa. But notice they are much more expensive to get than the Middle East oil. This is 1970, and now they are harder and harder to get, and so now we are down at this point where it is maybe five to one. We put in one unit of energy and get out five units of energy. Notice where the tar sands and ethanol are. They are really easy to use once you develop them, but you get very little more energy out of them than you put in them.

Over here we have hydro, coal-fired and nuclear, photo voltaics, and they have really improved, and direct use of coal. So any alternative that we are going to develop to replace our current oil for transportation needs to be put on this table, this chart, to see where it fits. It must have a very high energy-profit ratio, and it should have a very high economic effectiveness in transport quotient.

I will return now to the next of these points made by the critic. He says we have just produced the tip of the shale gas iceberg, and the likely resources in the U.S. are vast. What he is saying is, do not worry about energy; there is absolutely an enormous amount of energy in these shale gases. What they are, are gases trapped so tightly in shale that the only way to get them out is to drill a well and then to put sand and water in that well under a very high pressure, kind of an explosive pressure that fractures the rock and pushes the sand in between the levels of the shale so the gas can now come out. Yes, there is a lot of gas there, and you can get it out by doing that, but it is quite expensive. It is one well for every one relatively small area of the reservoir where this gas is trapped.

What I want to show now is a number of potential sources of energy. As we run down the other side of Hubbard's peak, we are going to have to turn to other sources of energy. Some of those are finite like the tar sands and the oil shales and the shale gas that he was talking about, and coal and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. I guess the nuclear thing ought to be put in a category kind of by itself because if you are talking about the light water reactors and fissile uranium, you are talking about a finite source. If you are talking about nuclear fusion, and I support all of the money that that technology can absorb, but I do not think that it is likely in any timely manner that we are going to have economically viable fusion to produce power. The general estimates are, in 30 to 50 years, that technology may have matured to where you will be using electricity produced by fusion. That is what happens in the sun and in the hydrogen bomb.

If we were to go to breeder reactors, they are pretty much sustainable, and they would not be finite, so nuclear is in a category by itself. We need to exploit all of these areas, but the energy-profit ratio is very low for those.

Let me give an example of an enormous amount of energy, and we really would have no energy problem if we just could harness that energy. It is called the tides. Every day, the moon lifts all of the oceans about 2 feet. I just pick up two 5-gallon buckets of water, and they are pretty heavy. Can you imagine the amount of energy it takes to lift the oceans 2 feet every day? The oceans are three-fourths of the earth's surface. If we just could capture that energy, we would be home free. But the problem is the energy-profit ratio is very low. There is a lot of energy there. It is very disbursed, very diffuse, very hard to harness, and we still try.

Ocean thermal gradients are another potential source. Here are some potentially enormous sources of energy.

Solar. If we paved our desserts with solar cells, we would have all of the energy we needed. That is a big if. It is about as big an if as getting all of this gas out of the gas shales.

Wind. If we put a wind machine every place the wind was blowing, we would produce incredible amounts of energy, but it is very diffuse, very expensive to build them, and it would take a long time to build enough of them to make any real difference.

Geothermal. If we just drilled down deep enough to tap into the molten core of the earth, there is essentially inexhaustible energy there. But again, the energy-profit ratio, except for a few places where the crust is thin, is very high, and so we are not doing that.

I would like just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. I am a big fan of energy from agriculture, but you must recognize its limitations.

We barely are able to feed the world. Now, you would not believe that by looking at many Americans, but tonight maybe a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry. And so if we are going to take what would otherwise be a food crop like corn or sugarcane and use it for energy, then we have to ask the question, How will we feed the world?

Another caution about energy from agriculture. A lot of the sources of energy are from what is called cellulose or agricultural waste like beet pulp and corn fodder and soybean stocks and switch grass. Now, all of these things are organic. All of them, in one way or another, by sheet composting or some other composting techniques, are returned to the soil to help make what we call top soil. And topsoil is different from subsoil because it has organic material in it that supports life, and it has a quality which we call tilth which is not there if you take the organic material away.

To rob our topsoils of organic material will be the exact equivalent of mining them. You may get away with it for a year or two or a few, Mr. Speaker; but in the long run, unless you husband our topsoils, we will not be able to continue to grow the food we need.

Now, there are potentials for getting energy from agriculture. But they are going to necessarily be limited by our need to feed the world and our need to maintain our top soil. I just heard the other day that for every bushel of corn that we produce in Iowa, three bushels of topsoil go down the Mississippi River. So in spite of no-till farming and the other advanced techniques we have, we still have a problem holding our topsoil.

Here is a great one: waste to energy. Up here in Montgomery County there is a facility that burns waste to produce electricity. I would be proud to have my church next to it or live next to it. You would think it is an office building from the front. The waste comes in in big containers on the back of trucks or trains, and you do not even see it. It is really quite an engineering marvel. We are producing some energy that way. We could produce more and probably should produce more.

The last bullet here: hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. Hydrogen is simply a convenient way, and sometimes not all that convenient way because of what it is, an explosive gas. But it is a way to move energy from one place to another. If you think of it in terms of a battery, then you get the notion of where hydrogen is going to fit into our economy. It is a good idea, because when you finally use the hydrogen, it produces, well, we say no pollutants. It produces a little bit of heat. And it produces water, but you know that is really no pollutants compared to what we get from the internal combustion energy in burning gasoline or diesel fuel.

And you can now use it, not in an internal combustion engine, but if we ever perfect them, we can use it in a fuel cell which gets at least twice the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. So you are now burning something, using something that produces, at the point of use, essentially no pollutants, and which produces about twice the net energy output that you can get by burning it in a combustion engine. So it is a good idea, but fraught with problems because if you are going to carry it as a gas, you have to really compress it, a big thick vessel, the lightest element we have, gas molecules just wanting to separate themselves and get out of there, so you have to have a big heavy vessel to contain it.

If you want to liquify it, it is very cold, a lot of insulation, again a big problem. And the experts believe that if it ever becomes a part of our economy, that it is going to be in a solid state form, in other words, a hydrogen battery. So if you will think of it as something maybe quite better than the electron battery that you have in your car, but very similar to that because it is simply something that takes energy from one place, a nuclear power plant for instance, producing electricity that is then used to split water and produce the hydrogen, taken to another place where you use it like using it in your car.

The next chart shows the details on one of these possible alternatives, and that is ethanol. And on the right, we show there the energy balance in getting gasoline from fuel oil. And it shows there that you must start out with 1.23 million BTUs of fossil energy to produce 1 million BTUs. That is quite reasonable. You have got to drill for the oil. You have got to transport it. You have got to refine it. You have got to haul it to the service station. You have got to pump it out. That all takes energy, and so you put in 1.23 units and you get out 1 unit of energy.

Now, when it comes to corn, to ethanol, which you get from corn here, you start with solar energy. So you would expect that there is going to be some contribution of solar energy. And this, by the way, I am told by some people, is quite optimistic because Dr. Pimental believes that the usual ways of producing ethanol use more energy than you get out of the ethanol because of all of the applications of fossil fuels to building the farm equipment, plowing the ground, putting the corn in, harvesting the corn, that if you account for all the fossil fuel inputs, he says with the usual techniques you use, you get less energy out of the ethanol than you put in growing the corn.

But I think we will do better than that, and we may get to this goal, and that is, you put in .74 units of energy, and you get out one. Well, that is not a really big energy-profit ratio. You would probably never drill an oil well if that is all you got out of it. That is a very low energy-profit ratio. But it is one of the things that we will need to turn to.

The bottom little pie chart here shows something that will stun most people. Notice the big purple, nearly half segment of that circle. That is the energy that goes into producing corn from natural gas producing the nitrogen fertilizer. Very few people know, Mr. Speaker, that essentially the only source today of nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas. When natural gas is gone, we are going to have to find another big energy source to produce nitrogen fertilizer.

By the way, before we learned how to do that, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer were the barn yard manures. We still have those today, but they do not go very far with the enormous agricultural lands we have, and guano. Guano were the droppings of bats and birds over thousands of years in the tropical islands on the cliffs and the bat caves, and there was a generation ago a major industry of mining guano. If we wait another 10,000 years, there will be some more guano.

If you look at this circle, you will see the contribution of oil and gas and natural gas to producing corn. It is hydrocarbon, very energy intensive. Almost literally, Mr. Speaker, the food you eat is gas and oil. If it were not for gas and oil, you would not be eating that food.

The next chart kind of puts this challenge in perspective, and the analogy I like to use here is that we, in our country, are very much like the young couple that had their grandparents die and left them a big inheritance. And so they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent comes from their earnings. And they look at the rate they are spending it and at the size of their grandparents' inheritance, and it is going to run out a long time before they retire.

So obviously this young couple is going to do one or both of two things:

either they are going to have to spend less money, or they are going to have to make more money. And I use that 85/15. Others will tell you it is 86/14, not quite as good as the 85/15, because this is exactly where we are in energy use in our country. Eighty-five percent of the energy we use comes from natural gas, today at the highest price ever, over $15, and oil and coal. And only 15 percent of it comes from other sources. A bit more than half of that 15 percent, 8 percent of it, comes from nuclear. It is 20 percent of our electricity, but only 8 percent of our total energy production.

As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, every fifth house and every fifth business would be dark if it were not for the electricity produced by nuclear power. And here we have blown up the 7 percent of renewable energy. Now, as we run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and as we exhaust, as we surely will, in time, the fossil fuels in our world, this is what we will have to deal with, nuclear and renewables. Look at what these renewables are. Conventional hydro. Nearly half of it. We have tapped out in our country. We might get some microhydro, but the big stuff we have dammed up all the rivers we should have and maybe a few that we should not have.

Second largest contributor: wood. That is the paper industry and the timber industry, wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product.

And then burning waste. I mentioned that in a former chart, and that is 8 percent now. That is 8 percent of 7 percent. That is not a lot, by the way. That could grow and should grow.

And then we get down to the things that we increasingly will have to rely on. Now, this is the 2000 chart, and things like solar and wind have been growing at 30 percent. Mr. Speaker, that doubles in about 2\1/2\ years. It is four times bigger in 5 years. So this is 5 years later. So let us say it is four times bigger. So instead of being .07 percent, that is what 1 percent of 7 percent is, is it not, .07 percent, instead of being .07 percent, it is .28 percent. Big deal. A little over one-fourth of 1 percent.

Now, eventually we will have to be getting a major proportion of our energy from such things as solar and wind and agricultural. Today they are trifling amounts. And it takes quite awhile to ramp these things up and a lot of investment. It takes investments of both time and energy and also money.

The next chart, I think, is one that puts in perspective what we are talking about better than perhaps any other chart. And I want to look at the top here. The bottom of it, by the way, we simply, for a short time period, explode the petroleum and natural gas. They are joined here, and it is a little better to see them together. But this shows the history of the world from 1600s on, and it shows the Industrial Revolution that began with wood and we were making steel when we were using charcoal from wood.

And then it shows what happened with coal and how much more energy on the ordinate here is quadrillion BTUs of energy. Notice what happened when we found oil and gas. It exploded. That is the result of exponential growth. That is 2 percent exponential growth.

Now, it is very steep because we have really compressed the abscissa here. And the previous charts, we will show another one that shows it in a big spread out curve like this. But that is spreading out only a few years. If you expanded this abscissa, that curve would look like that.

And by the way, the world's population has generally followed this. We started out with about a billion people, more or less here. And now we have 7 billion people.

Mr. Speaker, we are about 100 to 150 years into the age of oil. It is probable that we are halfway through the age of oil. I would submit that when we found that incredible wealth under the ground, that we collectively, our country and all the other countries in the world, should have stopped and said, gee, what will we do with this? Now, this was incredible wealth. Let me give you a couple of examples of what this meant. One barrel of oil, the refined product which you can buy for less, about a hundred dollars, will give you the work output of 12 people working all year for you. Imagine how far 1 gallon of gas or diesel fuel will carry your car and how long it would take you to pull your car or SUV or truck that far. You get some idea of the quality of energy, of the energy density in these fossil fuels.

If you worked really hard all day long at manual labor, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. That is the quality of this wealth that we found. What we should have done is say, gee, what will we do with this, so that mankind, for now and for the future, will benefit most from this incredible wealth that we found under the ground. We did not do that. What we did, we collectively, the whole world, what we did was to pile in and exploit this just as quickly and irresponsibly as the kids who found the cookie jar.

We really, Mr. Speaker, should have taken note--what will we do with this incredible wealth so that it will do the most good for the most people for the most time? In another 100, 150 years we will be through the age of oil, and 5,000 years of recorded history will be just a blip on this long screen. What will our world be like when we have run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, when we have exhausted the natural gas, when we have converted the coal to gas and oil and used that?

What will we feed our people, 7 billion people now?

The next chart shows some of these characteristics. This shows kind of the energy density quality. These are gigajoules per ton. A joule is a measure of energy. It is a scientific one that most people do not use in their usual discussions, but it shows here, we start with crude oil, and it gets better and better as we refine it. And then the things that we are going to have to replace it with, domestic refuge, brown coal, that will be gone. Straw, dung. We do not burn much dried dung in our country. In some parts of the world, they cook their meals and warm their houses with dried dung. Wood. Black coal, that will be gone. When we are through the age of oil, we will have used the coal. Ethanol, it does not look at all that bad here, does it? Way short of the energy density of these hydrocarbons from fossil fuels but better than most of these other things, many of which will be gone anyhow by that time. This speaks to the challenge that we have.

Let us put the critics chart back up again. And the fourth one here, By the time we are close to peaking out on all of the types of hydrocarbon molecules which can be refined into oil, a host of competing fuel technologies will have overtaken hydrocarbons altogether, using technologies that no one can anticipate today.

I hope he is right. I hope he is right. I also hope that everybody who has played the lottery today is going to win. Obviously, only one out of the millions who played it is going to win. And I think the odds of this happy scenario happening are roughly the same odds that you or I, and I do not play the lottery, but if I did, the odds of my winning the lottery. What could it possibly be?

I would submit that we need to be very careful how quickly we exhaust the resources we have until we are sure what these miracle replacements are going to be. Once they are out there and definable and achievable, then, yes, okay. But short of that, we really need to husband what we have so that we can make this transition as smooth as possible.

The next chart are some quotes that I would like to spend just a moment on because I think they are so significant. Again I would like to emphasize, this is a report that was funded by our Department of Energy, done by the very prestigious SAIC, Dr. Robert Hirsch, a real authority that headed this, and let me read what they said: World oil peaking is going to happen. No wishful thinking will avoid it. It is going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. It happened in our country. King Hubbert predicted it. Why will it not happen in the world? It will happen in the world. The only question is, when it will happen? Predicting the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand, elasticity, political influences. Peaking will happen

but the timing is uncertain. Most of the authorities believe that it will be within the next decade: Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. And then I emphasize here, The world, he says, has never faced a problem like this. And the first chart, it said, unprecedented challenges. Never have there been challenges 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, as we just looked at, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary, he says.

In our closing moments, I would like to just show some of the things that they were doing. What they have done is to simplify this bell curve to make it a little triangle because they want to use that to depict the solutions that they are suggesting are possible. On the bottom here is an interesting one, and what it shows is that oil price spike hikes have not made any difference in the amount of oil that is available.

This is the production of oil, and this is price spike hike. If making more profit because it sells for more would stimulate production, then one would have thought we would see a big production peak follow this. Notice we do not really see any big production peak following that.

Now, they have simplified this bell curve, and the next chart shows the reason why. This is just a little schematic, and they have a number of alternatives that they could use to fill the gap. The gap is going up like this, and then it is going to fall off, and we would like it to keep on going up so we could keep using more and more, and these are things we would fill the gap with.

The next chart shows what happens if we wait until it happens. Then we have a major, major economic problem because it takes quite a while to get these things going. If we anticipate it by 10 years, we have less of a problem but still a problem. To not have a meaningful problem, we must anticipate it by 20 years. Clearly, we have probably passed that point. By most people's reckoning, we have passed that point.

The next chart is a little schematic that I think shows it very well. This, again, is a 2-percent curve. This is a schematic curve, and what it shows is a 2-percent increase in the rate at which we are using it, which has been the rate at which we are producing it. That will slow as we reach peak oil. And notice that the gap starts to occur before we reach peak oil.

I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that what we do not want to do is to try to meet the challenge of filling that gap because, if we do, we only have a really sharp decline on the other side. What we really need to do is to depress our use with conservation efficiency so that we have something to invest in the alternatives that we must invest in. With oil at $60 a barrel, obviously there is not as much as we would like to have or it would be cheaper.

I would like to close by putting up again this chart which I think is so significant. This is kind of a global long-term look at the problem. This is where we are, about halfway through the age of oil. Now, we have been as a world and as a country, as a society, rather grossly irresponsible up to this time.

Mr. Speaker, whether we like it or not, oil will peak. We will start down the other side. We will shift to the alternatives. That will be a much less traumatic transition if we plan for it. And my urging tonight is that we need in our country to address this problem with the kind of an overall commitment we had when we fought World War II, and I lived through that, with the kind of a technical commitment we had to putting a man on the moon and the kind of urgency we had in the Manhattan Project. Mr. Speaker, I think that if we have a national, an international program that has those elements in it, that we probably can have a relatively smooth landing. Minus that, it could be a very rough landing not just for us but for all of the world.

Mr. Speaker, the great ingenuity of the American people cannot be harnessed, and I hope that we can challenge them so that we will meet this challenge and have a relatively smooth transition.

Mr. Speaker, I have in front of me a document called Peaking of World Oil Production, Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. As I look at the second page, it says this report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. That agency was the Department of Energy, and the organization that was funded to do this work was SAIC, a very prestigious, scientific organization.

Dr. Robert Hirsch was a project leader. He was supported by Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling in this very important work. It was submitted in February of 2005.

What I would like to do this evening is to go through the salient points of this so-called Hirsch report. Remember, it was funded by the Department of Energy, and it was performed by a very prestigious scientific organization, SAIC.

I have here a quote from page four of this report. This is so important, I have highlighted a couple of phrases, but I would like to read these couple of statements here, because they are so important. The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. What that means is that never in history has there been a risk management problem like this. It is unprecedented, they say.

As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically and without timely mitigation. The economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.

Mr. Speaker, what that means is that never in history has there been an occasion when economic, social and political costs will be this big. 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.

Dealing with world oil production, peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars. Now, around here, we talk a lot about billions of dollars, but seldom about trillions of dollars. This will cost trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort.

Mr. Speaker, what are they talking about? What is this oil peaking that they are talking about that is going to present unprecedented risk-management problems, and have economic, social and political costs, which will be unprecedented? What we need to do to put in this in context to understand it is to go back about 60 years, and our next chart helps us do that?

This begins with the work of a Shell oil scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert. M. King Hubbert worked during the 1940s and 1950s. He was observing the exploitation and the exhaustion of oil fields. He noticed that each oil field followed what we call a bell curve, goes up steeper and steeper, finally reaches a peek, and then down the other side.

He saw this in field after field. He rationalized if he could add up all the fields in the United States and guess as to how many more we were going to find, he could then estimate when the United States would peak in oil production. He made that estimate in 1956, and he said that the United States would peak in oil production about 1970.

As it turned out, he was right on target. You can see here from the graph, this peak in 1970. The smooth curve here is his prediction. The more ragged curve, or the actual data points, and you see that right on target, it peaked in 1970.

The red curve here is the curve for the Soviet Union, now Russia. They kind of fell apart with their dissolution, and they did not reach their potential, so there is going to be a second kind of a much lower short peak here. Russia has already peaked in their oil production.

Mr. Speaker, more than half of all of the oil-producing countries in the world, some 25, I believe, have already peaked. Their peak oil production is already behind them. The next chart shows a schematic that helps us understand this, perhaps a little better.

This represents a 2 percent exponential growth in oil. Now, all the oil that was produced was used. For the first part of the curve the production of oil and the use of oil are the same thing. Obviously, you are not going to produce oil that you do not use.

If you need more oil, and it can be produced, your price indicators will mean that more oil is going to be produced. So for this part of the curve, we have used the oil as fast as we produced it.

At some point in time, it will peak. It peaked for the United States in 1970. M. King Hubbert said it would peak for the world about now. Actually, he said a few years earlier, but he could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the world oil price hike spikes which sent the world into a recession, which reduced the demand for oil. That moved the peak a little forward. We believe, many observers believe, that we are peaking about now, or will shortly be peaking.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that the message that is in this document, peaking of world oil production, and the things that I am going to say, I hope they are wrong. Because if they are not wrong, we in United States and the world is in for a very rough ride. By the way, we can make this a very sharp peak or a very gradual one, by simply changing the scale on the abscissa and the ordinate. This represents a 2 percent increase in oil use.

It is 2 percent of what it was last year, so it keeps growing, it grows what we call exponentially. With a 2 percent growth, it doubles in 35 years. Since this point is half of that point on the ordinate scale, this represents 35 years.

So you see that some years before we actually reach peak, and we believe that we may be here at this point, but a few years before you reach peak, you actually are not producing as much as you would like to use. Just a very few years ago in 1998, I think, oil was under $10 a barrel, and now it was about $60 a barrel. So, clearly, there is not as much there as the world would like to use; and because there is not as much there, there is a higher demand for it, and so the price goes up.

We will be talking this evening about filling the gap. This is the gap we are talking about filling here. What are we going to do now that we have reached this point? There are two things we can do. One of them is simply reduce our

consumption of oil so that there is enough to go around, and the other is to try to find some other source of energy so we can fill this growing gap; and the further out we go, you will see the bigger the gap gets. We will be talking about that a little later.

The next chart is an interesting one that shows the relationship between the oil we found and the oil we used. This is the difference between the oil we found and the oil we used. You see this is about the year 1980. Up until about 1980, every year we found more oil than we used. So we were accumulating an excess. This much excess was accumulated. From about 1980 on, we did not find as much oil as we used; and so to have enough oil available, we had to now start pumping our reserves. And so since 1980 our reserves have been going down and down because we have never, I think, in any year since about 1980 found as much oil as we pumped.

The next chart shows these relationships in a somewhat different way that may be a little easier to understand. Here we have these bars and they represent, you see that was very similar to the previous chart, and this shows the actual discovery of oil. This does not subtract what we use from what we found because we have a second curve here, which is the use curve, and you will see this black curve here. That is the amount of oil that we have used.

Now, it is very obvious that you cannot pump oil that you have not found. So if you kind of round this curve out and you get a curve here that has an area under it, that is the amount of oil that we can use. The amount that we have used is under this curve here. And since about 1980 we have had to make up for what we did not find by borrowing from that which we had found. So you are going to have to borrow some of this and fill in this space here to get us to where we are now in 2005.

Where do we go from here? Well, where we go from here is going to be determined by how much of this oil that we found is still available and how much more oil we are going to find.

Now, the people who put this graph together guessed that the oil could keep going down because it has been going down for 20 years. See the slope down for about 20 years? They guessed it would keep on going down at that slope. So the amount of oil we can use in the future is going to be the difference between what we find, which they think is going to be less and less each year which I am sure it will be because it has been for the last two decades, and the amount of oil that we use, and that will be made up by the oil that is here.

So you can draw very many curves that do not have you falling off a cliff. And clearly the wells do not perform the way that you pump full bore and you get the last drop out and you do not get any the next day. It tapers off little by little as you come down what is called Hubbert's peak.

The next chart is from the Hirsch Report, and in this chart he has simplified Hubbert's peak. And for purposes of their presentation here, they have depicted Hubbert's peak as not being the bell curve that we looked at before, but as simply being a slope up and they slope down. And they will tell you in the report that they have simplified that because of the points that they want to make later.

The bottom of the chart here shows something very interesting. It shows our production of oil in our country peaking in 1970. After 1970, we have developed some really good techniques for improving the discovery of oil and the recovery of oil.

Mr. Speaker, really big increases in our technologies for both finding oil and for pumping it, enhanced recovery of oil, did not make any appreciable difference in the amount of oil that we were able to pump. This points to the fact that the geology really determines how much oil we are going to get in the enhanced recovery techniques, and the field exploration techniques do not make much difference.

Another thing that does not make much difference at all is price. We are falling down the slope here. Notice what happened to price. It went way up. That ought to have resulted, if you think the marketplace works, that ought to have resulted in a lot more oil production in our country. It did not.

You see, nothing really happened to the oil production when the price really spiked here. But what this graph does is to make the point that increased technologies and increased price will have little effect on the production of oil from a field that has already peaked and you are going down slope.

The next chart is an interesting one, and what this shows is kind of what was shown in the past one, perhaps in a more dramatic way. By 1980 we were already 10 years down the other side of what was called Hubbert's peak, and the Reagan administration noted that and they knew they needed to have more oil. Their solution to that was to incent our oil companies to go out and drill more, so they provided some tax incentives for that, and it really worked because this is the drill here you see. And it really spiked after 1980; they drilled a lot more wells.

But notice this relationship between the oil that you have found and the oil you are pumping; and in spite of all that drilling, we went negative. What that shows is if it is not there, you cannot drill it. No matter how many holes you drill, you will not get more oil if there is not more oil there to get.

The next chart is kind of a blow-up of the situation in our country since 1935 to roughly the present. This shows where we have gotten our oil from. It shows us peaking in 1970. Oil from Texas, the rest of the United States, the natural gas liquids, and then the big discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay. We were already slipping down Hubbert's peak. There was a little blip there as we slipped down Hubbert's peak. But notice this source where we are getting 25 percent of our oil really did not stop us from slipping down Hubbert's peak.

Notice the yellow there, Mr. Speaker. That is the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discovery. You may remember that. A number of years ago that was supposed to solve our problem. It was oil for the foreseeable future. That is all the contribution it made.

Now, we clearly have been using more oil since we peaked, and we have been getting it from overseas; and we now get nearly two-thirds of our oil from overseas because, Mr. Speaker, we have only about 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world. We use about 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two-thirds of what we use.

The next chart shows the estimate of a number of authorities on when peaking is going to occur. Here we have the dates, and this first block of dates are those between now and 2010. That is pretty soon. You see the individuals there. Several of those I know personally. Colin Campbell, I have talked with him on the phone from over in the British Isles. Matt Simmons is the personal energy adviser of the President, president and CEO of perhaps the largest energy investment bank in the world. Dr. Deffeyes is a professor at Princeton University who has written a book on this subject, ``The End of Oil,'' I think, ``The View From Hubbert's Peak'' is what he calls it. Then we have a few who think the peak is going to be between 2010 and 2015. And then there are three that say that it is going to be there at notice.

Mr. Speaker, there is no argument that there will be a peak except for the last one here, Lynch, who believes it will be a long plateau. He is not arguing that it will not peak, but he thinks it will not reach the top and fall off. It will be a long plateau.

I would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that the economists here tend to be those that think that peak will be sometime in the future. What economists do is simply predict the future from the past. They are very good at studying the past. And if, in fact, there are inexhaustible resources, it is very logical that you ought to be able to predict the future from the past. But if, in fact, there is a limited supply of oil, then you may not be able to predict the future from the past. But notice the big group of experts, and this is who they work for and what they are, and notice several of them are retired.

We find when a military person takes off their uniform, we sometimes get kind of different testimony from them than when they wear the uniform. These people do not have any company they are accountable to. They are retired. For people who are just retired, Mr. Speaker, you tend to get very honest testimony from them. So you know who they are and who they work for and they are very credible people and they are pretty much all saying that peaking is pretty soon.

The next chart shows how we use the oil that we get. The big blue on top here is transportation. That is where we use about 70 percent of it. The yellow is industrial. The purple down here is electric power, and then what we use in our homes, residential, and then commercial at the very bottom.

The important part of this is the transportation, important for two reasons. One is that it is the biggest chunk of it and, secondly, it is that use of oil that cannot be readily replaced by something else. In industry they can use energy from many other sources for much that they do; but for transportation, we are pretty much stuck with oil.

The next chart shows us some of the characteristics of the fuels that we use and this is talking about energy density, how many gigajoules you get per ton. Gigajoules is a technical term. It simply means BTUs or calories or heat or energy that you get from a given volume of this. We tend to think of it in gallons or barrels, 42 gallons in a barrel by the way.

Here you see that crude oil is here at 449, and then diesel automotive as you start to refine it you get higher and higher densities.

Now, as we run down Hubbert's peak and start running low on oil and still want to drive our cars and our planes and so forth, we will have to find a substitute. Notice that the substitutes here have very much less energy density. I would like to spend just a moment, Mr. Speaker, talking about energy density because it is really very important and presents a big challenge to us.

One barrel of oil, that is 42 gallons of oil, the refined product of which you can buy now for just a tenth of a penny under $2 at some stores now. So you can buy it for well less than $100. That will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you.

If you have some trouble getting your arms around that, Mr. Speaker, just imagine how far that gallon of gas or diesel fuel takes your pickup truck or your SUV or your car. By the way, that is still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you are buying it in the small bottles.

Now, you could pull your car or truck or SUV as far as that gallon of fuel takes you, how long would it take you to pull your truck there. Obviously, you cannot pull it, but you can use a come-along and guard rails and trees and so forth, and by and by you will get it there. But it would take you quite a while to take it the distance that that one gallon takes you.

Another little example of this energy density and the tremendous challenge we face of finding something that is equivalent to this: If you work all day real hard in your yard this weekend, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity.

That may be kind of humbling to recognize that in terms of fossil fuel energy we are worth less than 25 cents a day, but this incredible wealth that we found under the ground, how fast we have used it. How little concern we show for the future.

The next chart addresses the transportation challenge we have. Obviously, the oil will go further if we are using less of it, but what he says here is that we cannot conceive of any affordable, government- sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules for our cars and trucks. The average car is on the road I think 16 years. That is the median. That does not mean it is the average because the last one is 18 years, that is the middle one, and the average light truck, about the same distance, 16 or 17 years. The average big truck, heavy truck, is on the road for 28 years.

So if you want to buy a Prius or an Insight or one of these hybrid cars now, we ought to be doing that. I am not discouraging us doing that. That will make a very small dent in oil use because the things that were bought just this year are going to be on the road 16 or 17 years for cars and light trucks and 28 years median for heavy trucks. So it will take a long time.

If you want to dramatically reduce oil use, you have got to get these gas hogs off the road and get some fuel efficient things on the road. What they are saying is they cannot conceive of any affordable here, and that is the key word here. Obviously, we could bribe all the people in the country to take their SUVs to the junkyard and give them enough money to get a new hybrid. That would not be affordable. That is the key word here.

What he is pointing out here is it is going take a long time to make this change from our present gas guzzling SUVs, big cars and trucks and so forth and go to these hybrids.

The next chart shows us the contribution that enhanced oil recovery can make. We have some really good techniques today, and some people will tell you do not worry. We are really good at getting oil out of the ground now, so do not worry about this peak. What this shows is it does not affect the peak. Indeed, if you think about it, it should not affect the peak, because up until this peak, the oil comes out of the ground easily. You do not need the enhanced recovery techniques to get it out because it comes out very easily anyhow. When you really need them is on the down slope, and this shows you get a little more oil out on the down slope.

The next chart shows a depiction that the authors use, and this is really a simplification. They will tell you that this should be a growth curve here, an exponential curve, but they are making it a wedge because it helps them to make their points. And this is a schematic one for any substitute that you want to have.

It takes awhile before you get anything out of it. You have got to build the plant and plan, and then you start producing some of whatever this is. The next chart will show us the variety of things that it is, and the longer you have, the more and more of it you produce a day, present this thing as a wedge.

The next chart shows us an addition of some of wedges that you might use to have more liquid fuels available.

Enhanced oil recovery, we looked at that. That will produce something.

Coal liquids. When I was a little boy, in our lamps we used coal oil. By and by that was substituted by kerosene, and Hitler ran his military in World War II on oil made from coal because he did not have any oil and we were not going to let him get any. So he had to make it from coal. They had a lot of coal.

Heavy oil. Heavy oil is what determines why it is heavy. It will most likely sink in water some of it. All the rest of oil floats on water, and some of it is what is called sour. When you see that sour crude, light sweet crude is the most valuable. Sour crude has a lot of sulfur in it. You have to take that sulfur out. You are really polluting the air.

Then gas to liquids, and then he shows something about efficient vehicles. It takes a while before you get this in the fleet, and notice in 15 years the trifling contribution that efficient vehicles have made.

The next chart is a composite here that makes a salient point that they make in their paper, and here they look at three different scenarios of when you start to address the problem and the consequences of that.

The first of these, you start your crash program when you peak out. You say, gee, we cannot get as much oil out of the ground today as we got yesterday. That will not literally be true. It will be this month compared to last month because day-to-day is probably not going to make that big a difference.

If you wait until you see peak oil, what they are saying here is that run as fast as you can. With mitigation, you are still going to have a big shortfall.

By the way, I would like to refer back to their simplification of the bell curve. They simply use a slope up and a slope down, and what they are saying here, when you reach peak oil, you would really like to keep on going and use more and more. This really, of course, is an exponential curve going up, but they show here for simplicity a straight line and what they are trying to do is fill the gap. I am going to come back to that in a couple of minutes, but I am not sure we ought to be trying to fill the gap.

The second curve here represents what happens if you anticipate it by 10 years, and notice that most of the people in that former chart thought you were going to have peak oil a lot sooner than 10 years from now, but if you have 10 years and start the mitigation, you are still going to have a shortfall.

To have no economic consequences, they say they are going to have to start 20 years ahead.

Now, almost nobody believes that we have 20 years ahead. So obviously, if we are trying to fill that gap, there is going to be some shortfall because it is either upon us or will shortly be upon us.

I would like to talk for just a moment about whether or not we ought to try to fill that gap. For two reasons I think that maybe we ought to be considering that that is not really a good idea.

One is there is a pretty widespread belief that the warm weather we are having and the more frequent and intense hurricanes, the melting of the icecaps and the glaciers may be due to global warming that may have resulted from an increase in greenhouse gases which are produced by burning these fossil fuels. Now, if that is true and you believe that is going to have a negative effect on our environment, our climate and so forth, which will ultimately affect us economically, then I am wondering why you would want to have more of this by trying to fill that gap.

Let me give you another maybe even better reason that you should not be thinking about filling the gap.

There is an old saying that if you are in a hole, stop digging. Now, a corollary to that would be, in this case, that if you are climbing a cliff, a hill, where you will come to a precipice and by and by fall off and have to uncomfortably go down the other side, the higher you climb, the further you have to fall. That is very germane to this because the more oil that we use, the more energy that we use, the higher we will have climbed up that cliff and the steeper will be the descent down the other side.

The next chart, and you should notice, Mr. Speaker, the page where you can find these on each one. This is from page 64 of their report, and let me read this because this is really significant and I suspect that not too many people know this.

World oil peaking is going to happen. That is a certainty. I think that everybody understands that oil cannot be forever. There is not an inexhaustible supply of oil. It is not going to last to forever. What does that mean?

They think that it means that we will shortly peak in oil production. I would like to emphasize that peaking does not mean that we are going to run out of oil. We will not run out of oil for a long time, maybe 100 years, but what we will have run out of is readily available, high quality oil that can be produced at the rate we would like to use it. It is oil peaking. It is not running out of oil.

A hundred years from now there will be some oil, some gas, some coal, that we can find in ever-decreasing amounts at ever-increasing cost. It will not be very much in 100 years, but there will still be some.

``World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak.''

I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that one can find a lot of information on this if you simply do a Google search for peak oil. Now, you get essentially the same information if you do a Google search for Hubbert's peak but peak oil will do. That is maybe easier to remember. You will find a lot of articles there relative to this.

``A number of competent forecasters,'' and we looked at that chart a few minutes ago, ``project peaking within a decade; others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of'' a number of things, ``geological complexities.''

Let me pause just a moment to talk a little bit about the geology here and why you do not find oil everywhere.

We believe that a very long time ago there were warm seas, and at that time, the world was warm up in northern Alaska and Siberia because there were warm seas there. In every sea there was life there that grew like algae on your pond. At the end of the season, it sank to the bottom, and then dirt was washed off of the adjoining hills and through a very long time that built up large deposits at the bottom of these warm seas.

Then the tectonic plates of the earth separated. As you know, Mr. Speaker, there are tectonic plates that ride on the molten core of the Earth, and then the crust of the Earth is above those. These separated somewhat so that the bottom of these ancient warm seas were submerged, covered by a lot of rock and dirt. They were warm enough to the molten core of the Earth that it was just the right amount of heat. They were under enough pressure, and with time in this pressure cooker, this organic material was converted to oil and gas. Gas is the volatile part of this oil.

Now, you do not only need that, Mr. Speaker, you need something else before you really have oil deposits and gas deposits. You need a dome of rock over top of this like a big umbrella that keeps the volatiles, the gas, from going up and escaping because, you see, if they can escape, you do not end up with the nice, light sweet crude oil that we value so much. You end up with something like the tar sands in the oil shales. It is a little bit like the asphalt roads you drive on.

Now, if you cook that stuff, it will flow, and it is pretty much what these tar sands in oil shales are, something like that. So they were a very unique series of events that occurred that provide the oil and the gas for us, and it is no argument that you should not find it, probably are not going to find it everywhere in the world.

By the way, when I was a little boy we lived near a coal mining town, and we got what was called Run-of-mine coal. In those days there was not a big mechanical thing on a coal face digging it off. It was a miner with a pick and his shovel and his wheelbarrow. He may have had a little cart and a mule inside the mine to help him in some of the bigger mines.

But that would come out of the mine, and we would buy it just as it came out, called Run-of-mine, just the way you mined it, some big lumps on down to dust. Some of those big lumps were so big I could not put them in the furnace. So there was a sledge hammer, and we would have to break the lump to put it in the furnace. I remember breaking some of those lumps and they would fall open and there would be a fern leaf. I remember the thoughts that I had, gee, how long ago did that thing grow. It was very obvious where coal came from. You can see the vegetation inside the coal.

``Geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity,'' how much of it we are going to need, ``and political influences,'' are they really going to sell us the oil or not. ``Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.'' But the fact that it will peak is not uncertain. It will peak.

``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. Then I emphasize 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.''

The next chart takes us back about 400 years in history. It would be nice to have one that took us back 5,000 years in history because that is about the extent of recorded history, about 5,000 years. But we go back here to the very beginning, a little bit before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and we notice that the Industrial Revolution began with wood and it ramped up, and we denuded largely the mountains of New England to make charcoal to take to England to make steel, and then we found coal. And the ordinate here is quadrillion BTUs. That was the amount of energy we got. Boy, did we get a lot more energy from coal than we did from wood. It is more dense. It is easier to get and haul large quantities of it. But notice what happened when we came to gas and oil. There was essentially an explosion in the amount of energy that we could produce. Notice up there at the top, Mr. Speaker, the recession of the 1970s produced by the Arab oil embargo.

There is a stunning statistic. Up until the Carter years, every decade, the world used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Now what that means is that when we had used half of all the oil that was there, we would have only one decade of oil remaining. Now, that slowed down after the Arab oil embargo. We got a lot more efficient. The refrigerator we

have today probably uses a third of the electricity it did then; so we really slowed down in our use of oil, or this chart curve would have kept on going up.

There is another curve we might put on here, Mr. Speaker, and that is the world's population. And it might not be too surprising that the increase in population pretty much paralleled the increase in available energy. We started out with 1 billion, more or less, before the Industrial Revolution. Now we have almost 7 billion people.

Mr. Speaker, in terms of 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a brief blip. We have been in the age of oil about 150 years. It was about 150 years ago we first found oil in any quantities and started to use it. In another 150 years we will essentially be through the age of oil. What will our world look like when we have exhausted the fossil fuels? And they will be exhausted.

One of the writers in writing about this says that our great grandchildren, in looking at history and what we did with these fossil fuels, will say how could the monsters have done that. How could they have found this incredibly valuable resource buried in the ground, these riches buried in the ground, and used them wantonly with no regard that they might be finite, that they would one day run out. Matt Savinar, who wrote one of the articles that people will find when they do the Google search for peak oil, Matt Savinar begins his article by saying: ``Dear reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' I pulled it off the Web and gave it to my wife, and she read that first paragraph and said, The guy is crazy; I am not going to read any more.

I said, Please read on and reserve judgment.

She read on and was genuinely frightened when she had finished his article. Matt Savinar may be audacious, and I think that the future may not be so bleak as he presents it, but I will tell the Members, Mr. Speaker, if we do not do something meaningful in terms of trying to mitigate the damage, it could be, it could be as bad as Matt Savinar presents it. He may be audacious, but he is not an idiot; and I would suggest that Members read his article. It is very useful.

The next chart shows something really interesting that we have been talking about this evening. This is where we are now. We have been running up this side of Hubbert's peak. This, by the way, is worldwide. The question is now, When will the world do what the United States did in 1970? When will the world reach peak oil? I had a course in statistics when I was working for my doctorate in school maybe 55 or 60 years ago, and what they have done here, we have a probability of 95 percent. That is most likely what we will find. And then we have a 50 percent probability that it could be higher or it could be lower and then a 5 percent probability or it could be higher or it could be lower, and somehow they mysteriously take this as the expected value. It could be low just as well as high. That is not the expected value. The value that the statistician would tell us to expect is a 95 percent value. And, by the way, that is pretty much what the experts tell us.

A couple of Congresses ago, I was Chair of the Energy Subcommittee on the Science Committee, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of this problem. So we had a hearing and invited in the world's experts on oil reserves, and there was pretty unanimous agreement. I was surprised. It was somewhere like from 970 to 1,040, about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil that remained. Now, we have pumped about the same amount. We have pumped about 1,000 gigabarrels. That is 1,000 billion barrels. That is 1 trillion barrels, and that sounds like a lot.

But if we divide that 1,000 gigabarrels by the 84 million barrels that we use a day, 21 in our country alone, 63 in the rest of the world, 84 total, if we divide that 84 million barrels a day into the 1 trillion barrels that the experts told us are still out there, we come to about 40 years' remaining oil. Remember up until the Carter years, when we used half of it, which is about what we have used, we would have only 10 years remaining; so we have really slowed down, fortunately. We are using it much more efficiently now than we did then.

But they make two assumptions for this chart. One is that it peaks in 2016 and that there is 3,000 gigabarrels. That is not what the experts say. The experts say that there will be a total of about 2,000 gigabarrels, 1,000 already pumped, another 1,000 to be pumped. If that is true, then we would start downhill from this point.

But if we have another 1,000 gigabarrels, notice with this exponential curve how little that pushes peak oil out. Not very far. What is it? About 2017, 2016, something like that is all that it pushes out. Here it is: 2016. And if we now assume that there is more than that, it pushes it out further. But notice what happens. Notice what happens. Notice how quickly we fall.

I made the point before I am not sure we want to fill the gap because the analogy of if you are in a hole, stop digging is if you are climbing a hill and you are going to fall off a cliff on the other side, the lower the hill, the less you will fall. And they make exactly that point here in these predictions.

These are predictions of the Energy Information Agency. These are economists working for the Department of Energy. They are not oil experts. They are economists, and they do what economists do. They predict the future from the past. And they really study the past and know it, and they think that if they know the past well, they can predict the future. But what they do not take into account is that oil is finite and their predictions would be exactly right if market forces controlled and if oil were limitless, but oil is clearly not limitless.

In the last chart that I want to spend a few minutes on, where do we go from here? From where will we get our liquid fuels? From where will we get our energy as we run down the other side of Hubbert's peak? We have here some finite resources. By ``finite'' we mean they are not forever. Some of them are pretty big if we can get the energy out. Tar sands and oil shales. Some will tell us do not worry about the future of energy because there is 1\1/2\ trillion barrels of oil in the oil sands of Canada alone. That is true. But, Mr. Speaker, there is also an incredible amount of energy in the tides.

I pick up two 5-gallon buckets of water, and they are pretty heavy; and then I note that the Moon lifts the whole ocean about 2 feet. That is an incredible amount of energy. But because there is that incredible amount of energy out there does not mean that I can harness it and use it effectively. The same thing is pretty much true of these tar sands. Yes, there is potentially a lot of energy there, but how effectively, efficiently can we get it out?

The Canadians are now producing oil maybe even less than $30 a barrel. They are selling for $60. That is a good deal, and they are producing a lot of it. But when we look at the energy that it takes to get it out, there are better techniques than the one they are using; but the technique they are using, they use more energy from natural gas than they get out of oil so that the energy profit ratio is less than nothing. The oil is sought on the market and brings a good price. The gas is up there and they do not need it and it is hard to ship. So from a dollar-and-cents perspective, it may make sense to use that gas, even more energy and gas to produce the oil than they get out of the oil. But ultimately, of course, as we move to a more energy-efficient world, we will not be able to do that.

I was out at a conference in Denver, Colorado, just this past weekend; and the Shell Oil scientist that was doing some of the tests in the oil shales of Colorado emphasized that his work was just experimental, that he could not extrapolate from what he had now done to the future. And what they have done is kind of interesting, Mr. Speaker.

They have taken a small patch of Colorado desert out there, high desert, and they have drilled a lot of holes in a circle and frozen, put pipes down there, and they froze in the ground. What they have done is to make a vessel out of frozen ground because they do not want what they are doing inside that big vessel to contaminate groundwater outside, and then they cook the oil.

I hear from 2 years to 4 years, for some period of time, they cook the oil inside that vessel. They keep putting hot water down there, steam down there, and they cook the oil. By the

way, they heat that with natural gas, which is why it takes so much energy. And then they pump on that. When they have heated it up, it will flow so they can pump it out. But this is pretty small. It is hard to scale up from that. And they put in one unit of energy from heat and they get out 3\1/2\ units of energy. That looks like a pretty good energy profit ratio, but it does not account for all the energy that goes in there: drilling the holes and refrigeration and the energy it took to make the equipment that they use and refining it when they get it out and so forth.

So we are not yet sure how positive that is going to be. It may be that we will use the energy from four barrels of oil and have one net plus.

By the way, that would not be all that bad because that is about the ratio in producing ethanol. We have to put in about three-fourths as much energy into the ethanol as we get out of it, about 750,000 BTUs of energy to get 1 million units of energy in producing ethanol; and that is for efficient production. Many of our ethanol production facilities now are producing ethanol, Dr. Pimental believes, with a negative energy profit ratio: the more fossil fuel energy goes in to producing it than we get out of it.

Coal: we have about 250 years of coal remaining in our country. That is the current use rate. If we increase the use only 2 percent exponentially, that 250 years shrinks to 85 years. For many uses like our car, we cannot use coal. We are going to have to use gas or a liquid, and we are going to have to take some energy to make that conversion. Now it shrinks to 50 years. So we have got about 50 years of effective coal remaining at only a 2 percent increase. We may need to increase its use much more than 2 percent. It is there. We need to husband it and use it wisely.

Nuclear: we produce 8 percent of our electricity in this country from nuclear. That is 20 percent of our electricity.

That can and maybe should grow. But the kind of plants we use, the light water reactor plants, cannot be expanded indefinitely because there is a limited supply of fissionable uranium in the world. I get wildly divergent estimates, from 30 years to 200 years. That is at current-use rates. As soon as you start exponentially increasing the rate of use, whatever that time is, it shrinks very rapidly.

That means if we really wanted to go big-scale nuclear, we need to go to breeder reactors. With breeder reactors, you borrow a lot of problems, like transporting the fuel for enrichment. You have weapons- grade plutonium produced, and you may in the future be making a choice between buying these problems and shivering in the dark because in an energy-deficient world, that may be the choice that you come to.

Nuclear fusion. Oh, how I hope we get there because then we are home- free. But planning to solve our energy problems in this country of the world with fusion is a bit like you or me planning to solve our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. It would be nice if it happened; it probably will not, and I certainly would not count on it.

And then we come to the truly renewable sources. About half of those, a little more than half comes from nuclear up here as compared to what is down here. Solar, wind, they now represent about a quarter of a percent of our total energy. A bit more than that of electricity, but about a quarter of a percent of our total electricity.

Geothermal, that is tapping into the molten core of the earth. Where we can do that, we ought to do it because that will last a very long time.

I mentioned ocean energy. Lots of energy there. The tides, the waves, thermal gradients in the ocean. There is a lot of potential energy there, but there is an old axiom that says energy to be effective must be concentrated. It is so diffuse in the ocean. We have been trying for a very long time to capture some of that energy, and it is very, very difficult.

And then we come to agricultural resources. A lot of people have high hopes for what we can get from agriculture. We can get energy from agriculture in two different ways: One by producing fuels like ethanol and methanol by fermenting the product; and the other is by burning the product.

There are limits to both of these. We now are barely able to feed the world. Tonight a fair number of people will go to bed hungry. We could free up more of this energy if we would be content to eat the soybeans and corn rather than the pig and the cow and the chicken eating the corn and the soybeans.

To take biomass from the soil, that is what makes topsoil different from subsoil is organic material, biomass. I am sure we can get some energy from that. But we have to be careful how much to tend to get from that.

Waste energy, instead of putting it in the landfill, burn it. There is a really good plant here in Montgomery County very near. I would be proud to have that next to my church. I cannot even see that it is burning trash because trash comes in inside a big container. It is inside before it is emptied, and it looks like a nice brick office building.

The last thing is hydrogen from renewables. Hydrogen is not an energy source. You cannot mine it or suck it out of the air. The only way you get hydrogen is to use energy from some other source like natural gas. This is where we get most of it or like splitting water with electrolysis. You will always use more energy in getting the hydrogen than you get out of hydrogen, or else you are going to have to repeal the second law of thermodynamics, and that is not going to happen. It is still a good idea because hydrogen burns very cleanly. You get only water. You can burn it in a fuel cell where you have at least twice the efficiency of reciprocating engine, but it is not a solution to our energy problem. Think of it as an energy carrier which is exactly what your battery is.

If you think of this as being a hydrogen battery as opposed to an electron battery that you have in your car, you will get it right as far as hydrogen is concerned.

There is a lot of talk about a hydrogen future. That is not going to happen in the next decade or two or even three. It is going to take a very long time to ramp up, and we will always have to have some bigger energy source from which we make the hydrogen because it will always be made with an energy deficit because we are not going to repeal the second law of thermodynamics.

Mr. Speaker, I want to submit for the Record this report because it is not available anywhere else for the public to review.

Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management

(By Robert L. Hirsch, SAIC, Project Leader; Roger Bezdek, MISI; Robert

Wendling, MISI)

February 2005

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 2048.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support the Gingrey amendment.

Before Kelo, a Christian church, after spending 5 years acquiring property, had the city intercede when it learned there would be a church built on the property. The city initiated eminent domain to give the land to Costco. The church prevailed, but that was before Kelo.

In Justice O'Connor's Kelo dissent, she warned that in expanding the definition of ``public use,'' the majority had come close to embracing ``the absurd argument that any church might be replaced with a retail store.'' She continued to state that this ``is inherently harmful to society.''

Because of Kelo in general and in this situation in particular, the fifth amendment takings clause has been stretched beyond the bounds that the Framers intended. By expanding the fifth amendment's definition of ``public use,'' it could limit the scope of the ``free exercise'' of religion guaranteed in the first amendment.

Kelo shattered our private property rights. Today, by passing H.R. 4128, Congress will help pick up the pieces. Congress must act to prevent the demolition of our rights, our homes, our businesses and our houses of worship.

Mr. Speaker, I have here an article that appeared on the front page of USA Today. It is above the fold. It is the center article. It says: Debate Brews: Has Oil Production Peaked?

The undeniable facts that spawned this article were noted by a number of the leading persons in our country several months ago, Boyden Gray, McFarland, James Woolsey, and a large number of retired four-star admirals and generals when they noted the facts that are on our first chart here: That we have in our country only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil; we have 8 percent of the world's oil production. Just those two statistics together say something rather interesting. If we have only 2 percent of the oil reserves but are producing 8 percent of the world's oil, that means we are really good at pumping oil, does it not? That means that we are pumping down our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world.

We represent only 5 percent of the population, they noted, and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import about two-thirds of what we use. They wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the reserves and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we use is a very large national security risk. We really need to do something about that as a country.

Whether you believe, as this article points out, that oil has peaked--in just a moment, Mr. Speaker, we will note how this term came into existence--or whether you believe that we need to do something about energy because of this national security concern, what you are going to do is essentially the same thing, because what you need to do, if this is just a national security concern, is to free ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. That is exactly the thing you have to do. If you believe that we have reached peak oil, you have to free ourselves from the dependence on oil, most of which is foreign oil. In the former, if you just think it is a national security concern, we may muddle through that and come out okay. If you think that it is a peak oil issue, then there is no way of muddling through that, because unless you forcefully and intelligently approach that problem you are going to have some big problems.

The next chart shows us how this term originated, and we need to go back about six decades to the 1940s and the 1950s when a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert whose name is widely known. I was reading an article just today. Without ever telling the readers the derivation of the term they were talking about Hubbert's Peak. Well, in 1956, Hubbert as a result of his analysis for nearly two decades of the behavior of oil fields made the prediction that the United States would peak in oil production in about 1970. As it turned out, he was right on target, we did peak in 1970.

He made that prediction because, as he noted, the exploitation and exhaustion of an individual oil field followed a typical not surprising or unsurprising bell curve, that it went up and up as you pumped a field until you reached the peak, and then at that peak about half of the oil had been pumped, and then the last half was more difficult to get and so you came down the other side of that typical bell curve, and that has come in the literature to be known as Hubbert's Peak.

This smooth green line is his prediction for the United States. The rougher green line with the heavy symbols indicates the actual production of oil. What you see, it roughly followed his prediction. The red curve here is for Russia that had more oil than we. They peaked after us. But when the Soviet Union fell apart, you see that they did not reach their potential, and they are now experiencing a second smaller peak that does not show here but it is a peak about like so.

If we look at the next chart, we see where we got the oil from in our country. I am going to spend a couple of minutes just to say what peak oil is, and I have got several colleagues that are going to join us. This shows where we have gotten the oil from in our country, Texas and the rest of the United States and Alaska and natural gas liquids. Notice the small contribution that Prudhoe Bay made, a big source of oil. We were starting down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. Remember, he said we would peak in 1970, and right on target that is when we peaked, and the big Prudhoe Bay oil field was a little blip in our downward coast on Hubbert's Peak. I am sure you can all remember the fabled oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico which was going to save us for the future. That is this yellow here. That is all that amounted to. There are 4,000 oil wells out there, I think, and that is their contribution to oil in our country.

The next chart shows the world situation, and this is a too busy chart. It is like reading a textbook. There is really a whole lot of information there. They

spent a lot of time putting this together, and what I have done is to pull out one part of this. This little inset here will be our next chart, and this inset shows two curves. They are really very interesting curves. The bars here show the discovery of oil, and you notice that we were discovering oil way back in the early 1900s and a whole lot of it was discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. The black curve here indicates our consumption of oil. Notice, up until about the early 1980s the world was finding a lot more oil than it was consuming.

Up until this point, this is all history, and from this point on now is a guess as to where we will be going. Because these two curves have the same abscissa, the area under these two curves, and this is one curve, the production curve, and this is the consumption curve. The area under those two curves has to be the same. What that means is that the only oil that we can pump is the oil that we found, and what the authors have done is to make a guesstimate of the oil which is yet to be found, and this is their estimate of what we are yet to find. We may find more, a little, we may find less. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that most of the world's experts agree that we have probably found about 95 percent of the oil that we will find, of the recoverable oil that we will find.

I did a little play with these curves, and I noted that this part of the consumption curve will consume some of this discovery, and I noted that it took all of the discovery to about this point just to make up the difference between the rate at which we are using oil, which you can see is three or four times as high as the rate at which we are finding oil. So what we have got yet to consume is this oil which remains here, and the authors believe that it will follow that kind of a slope.

The next chart shows a simplistic bell curve. By the way, this bell curve can be very sharp. All you have to do is change the ordinate and abscissa, you can make it very short and sharp, or you can make it spread out. This is a 2 percent growth rate in the production and consumption, because up until this point the production of oil and the consumption of oil have been the same thing. There have been no real shortages until currently, and there have been no big surpluses that have been stored away somewhere except for our strategic reserve and some other countries that have some strategic reserve.

This shows that the problem will occur not at peak oil but sometime before peak oil, because you see that the demand curve will separate from the supply curve quite a while before you reach a peak. If this is a 2 percent growth rate, that means you double, that is exponential, you double in 35 years. So that yellow area on the abscissa is 35 years long. What this says is that you should start seeing some little perturbations a decade or so before you reach peak oil.

The next chart kind of puts this in context, and I think that it is good to look back through history to see how we got here. Here we have three little curves, one of which shows our economy, and this starts way back in the 1600s and goes up to the present. This shows the economy of the world with wood, the brown; black appropriately for coal; and then look what happens when we get to oil. It just does not show the quadrillion Btus that the world has produced, that also mirrors pretty much the population growth of the world. We started out back here with less than a billion people for hundreds of years, less than a billion people. When we finally had the energy available from fossil fuels, primarily oil, our population has shot up from about 1 billion people to now almost 7 billion people.

I want to show one more chart before I put one up that we can talk to with the Members that have joined me. This is an interesting one that kind of tells you where we are today. The analogy I use is that we as a country are very much like a young couple that has gotten an inheritance from their grandparents, a pretty good inheritance, and they have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from what they earn, and the grandparents' inheritance is not going to last until they retire at the rate they are spending it. So they have got to do one of two things. Either they have got to spend less money, or they have got to earn more money. I use those numbers, 85 and 15, and some other people may use 86 and 14, by the way, but that is pretty much where we are in our country in terms of energy use. 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels and only 15 percent comes from other sources, a bit more than half of that 15 percent comes from nuclear. That could and probably should grow. There are obviously some problems with using nuclear, but you will make a choice between borrowing those problems or not having energy in the future, I believe.

The 7 percent which is what we call renewables has been blown up here so that we can see what it consists of. Notice that the biggest part, nearly half of that renewable energy, is hydro. That is probably not going to grow in our country, we are breaching more dams than we are making now and so hydro has probably peaked out in our country.

The next biggest source is wood. That is not rural people burning wood to keep warm. That is the paper industry and the timber industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product and they are using it to produce energy. Then, waste. That is a really interesting one because that is pretty big, well, pretty big compared to other things in renewables but not very big compared to the total amount of energy that we use. That is municipal waste being burned. The county instead of a landfill ought to have a generating plant that is burning this waste. There is a very good one, by the way, up at Dickerson not very far from here that they would be happy to show you.

Now we get down to those renewables that are talked about as the sources of energy that we are going to have to increasingly turn to as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. They are solar, 1 percent. That is 1 percent of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. Wind, 1 percent of 7 percent, .07 percent, more than that of electricity, because this nuclear power which is 8 percent of total energy is 20 percent of electricity in our country. Then agriculture.

By the way, there are two ways we use geothermal. One is the true geothermal where you are tapping into the molten core of the Earth and getting heat there. There is not a chimney, I believe, in Iceland, because they get all of their energy that way. We are now using that term ``geothermal'' in another way where you wisely couple not to the air, which you are trying to heat in the wintertime and cool in the summertime to condition your house, but you are coupling your heat pump to the ground or ground water which stays a constant temperature. Fifty-six degrees seems pretty cool in the summertime and pretty warm in the wintertime, does it not, and that is ground water temperature here.

Then we get to agriculture, and what we can expect to get from agriculture. I know one of the Members who has joined us is going to talk about agriculture. Let me just call on the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) because he wants to talk about agriculture. Let me put the next chart up here, because what we are going to be speaking to now is the finite resources we have, the things we can turn to; but they are finite. They will not last forever, and then the renewable resources, and the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) is interested in one of those down here in the agricultural resources area.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for joining us this evening.

Ethanol is certainly one of the alternatives to which we can turn. But if there were some here on the other side, let me just indicate what they would probably say because, as a friend told me a number of years ago, the thinnest sheet of paper has two sides, and so let us look at what they would say on the other side.

I have here a chart which shows the energy input for producing a million Btus from gasoline and the energy input for producing a million Btus from ethanol. And to get a million Btus out of gasoline, we have to input 1.23 million, because you are not going to get it all. You have to transport it and refine it and you are going to lose something in the process. But for ethanol, we have the happy consequence of getting a lot of energy from the sun. So this chart says that for every million Btus you get from ethanol, it takes only .74 million Btus of fossil energy to produce it, and that is a good bet.

But, there are others, Dr. Pimentel, for instance, and his colleague from the West Coast. About 6 weeks ago I attended an all-day conference at the National Press Club, and their argument was that if you really look at all of the fossil fuel energy that goes into producing ethanol, you use more fossil fuel energy in producing ethanol than you get out of it. I hope they are wrong; but even if they are not wrong, the energy profit ratio is not going to be really large.

Let me look at this next chart for just a moment, and then I am going to come back to this one for a minute, because both of these relate to ethanol. This is an interesting chart. What it shows is energy profit ratios for several fuels. This is energy profit ratio.

Now, what the gentleman was looking at was dollar profit ratio. It is really profitable dollar-wise to produce ethanol today because it takes less money to produce it than you would pay for an equivalent gallon of gasoline. This is the energy profit ratio, and this is contrasted with a quality, economic effectiveness in transport, how feasible is it to use over a wide range of uses. Of course, the source that tops the list is the giant oil fields. We do not have any of those, by the way; they are all in the Middle East. But the energy profit ratio is very high: if you put in $1 you get out $60. And they are very economically useful, because you can make a whole lot of things out of it. You can make pharmaceuticals out of it, you can heat your house with it, you can run your car with it, you can make plastics out of it, do a whole lot of things with oil.

This shows the other compounds. Here is U.S. oil. We never were very good, and now we are getting on down further, tar sands and ethanol. Ethanol is way down here at the bottom because they say there is not a big energy profit ratio. But if it is even positive, it is really good, because when you use ethanol, it is relatively nonpolluting as compared to fossil fuels.

As the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) properly pointed out, there is no CO2 penalty for that, because every bit of CO2 you get out of it, next year's plant is going to absorb in growing it. We use oxygen, produce CO2, the plants, happy neighbors; they use our CO2 to produce oxygen which we then can breath. But you must be very careful with the energy profit ratio. The dollar profit ratio is one thing; and, today, that is about all economists look at. But energy profit ratio, at the end of the day, if we really have finite sources of these fossil fuels, is going to be important.

Let us go back now to the previous chart. I just want to take a quick look at the bottom of it because this shows something that most people have no idea about. This is the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn which you are using for your ethanol, and notice that nearly half of all of the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn comes from natural gas. And the other sources are the tractor that guides it, the seed, the phosphates, the diesel fuel, the gasoline, the electricity, natural gases and so forth.

But nearly half the energy comes from natural gas which produces nitrogen, and most people have no concept of that. Before we learned how to do that, the only nitrogen sources we had in the world were barnyard manures and guano, and it was a big industry a number of years ago. Guano, of course, is the droppings of bats and birds over tens of thousands of years that accumulated, and that is gone. If we wait a couple of hundred thousand more years, there will be some more. But ethanol is certainly something we ought to look at. It is one of a number of things on this list and it is down here in ethanol, and it is one of the things we can get out of agriculture. We will come back a little later in the hour to talk more about agriculture. Several other Members have joined us, and let me let them speak in terms of the time they appeared. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest).

Thank you very much. You mentioned prioritizing. And, you know, if we are going to avoid a really rough landing here, we need as a country, indeed as a world society, we need to have a mentality like the Manhattan Project or putting a man on the moon. This is a big, big challenge.

I just wanted to note your observation about we would reach peak oil. I come back to this chart for just a moment. This is only since 1630. We had a lot of recorded history about, what, 4,000 years before that of recorded history. Out of 5,000 years of recorded history we have been about 100 years in the Age of Oil, and we are probably about half way through the Age of Oil. There is a little argument whether it is 50 percent through, 40 percent through the Age of Oil. But we are roughly halfway through the Age of Oil. And during this Age of Oil, now we have permitted the world's population to grow to almost 7 billion people.

We will come down the other side. This will reach a peak. It will come down the other side. What will we do as we come down that other side? Now we can avoid catastrophic consequences of this, but we really must anticipate them to do that. Let me go back for just a quick moment to the analogy of the thinnest sheet of paper has two sides.

The argument for ethanol is great, and we need to go to ethanol. But I just want to dissuade people from believing that this is the solution to our problem. We are barely able to feed the world today. Tonight I understand maybe a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry.

We are just barely able to maintain the quality of our topsoils. Now taking corn does not degrade that, because we are taking the corn off anyhow. But ethanol will be a really meaningful contribution when we have drastically reduced our total need for energy, because to produce enough ethanol to make a dent in the amount of energy we use now is just going to take more corn than there is out there to do that.

Let me give you a real quick example of the energy density of these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil, the refined product of which will cost you a little over $100 will buy you the work output of 12 people working all year for you. We have some difficulty getting our arms around that. Imagine how far one gallon of gas or diesel fuel takes whatever you drive, from a big SUV that gets 8, 10 miles a gallon to I drive a Prius that gets 45 miles per gallon.

How long would it take me to pull my Prius 45 miles? How long would it take you to pull an SUV 8 or 10 miles? If you can do it with a come- along and chains and guardrail you can get it there. It would take you a long time.

Something, another analogy to help you understand how energy rich these fossil fuels are. If you work in your yard real hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. So in terms of fossil fuel energy, we are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of work output.

So that is the challenge we have. Now ethanol is nearly as good as gasoline. But as I showed on the chart before, it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel input to produce the ethanol.

You know all of these are solutions, but I tell you, none of them will work with the amount of energy that the world is presently using, particularly in the United States.

Now me turn now to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert). I know that he has had a long-time concern about energy and particular concerns that we ought to be getting more mileage from our motor vehicles.

The gentleman mentioned a collision course with catastrophe. I just wanted to make a quick quote from the article in the paper that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) was mentioning.

`` `The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s,' says Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton University professor emeritus of geosciences.''

He goes on to say that he made that prediction because ``the worst case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.'' That is better than war, famine, pestilence, and death.

It is interesting that the gentleman's ``collision course with catastrophe'' is mirrored by what he said.

I want to yield the remainder of my time to a colleague who has a fascinating Energy 101. We will only get partway through it today and we will give him a chance for a full explanation of this.

Mr. Speaker, this evening I wanted to spend the first few moments reflecting on the crisis in the gulf.

I have been privileged to observe nearly 8 decades of life and I will tell you that this is the only time that I can remember that I was looking at television, coming from our country that seemed really surreal to me. I had

to pinch myself to make sure that I was not dreaming, because how could it be that in our country, the United States of America, there were people sitting dead in wheelchairs by the sidewalk, there were people rolled up in sheets dead and others walking by them, there were corpses floating by in the water?

There were tens of thousands of people in buildings that they could not leave because water was around them and they had no food, no water, no bathroom facilities and no power.

The situation is better now and it is improving; and no one is happy with the response of either the local officials, the State officials or the Federal Government. But, Mr. Speaker, this is not the time to look at what went wrong.

Now is the time to make sure that these people are all rescued, who are not already out, to make sure that they all are comfortable in housing, to make sure that their needs are met, that their children are in school.

There will come a time that is not now, Mr. Speaker, when we will really take a hard look at what went wrong, not to place blame. Because I really believe, Mr. Speaker, that everyone at every level made what they thought was the right decision at the time they made it. Obviously, in hindsight, it was not the right decision and we need to make sure that we learn from this experience so that we do not repeat it when we have another crisis. And there will be another crisis, either a natural disaster or a terrorist-induced crisis.

Americans are really helping. When a tragedy occurred overseas we poured out ourselves to help in the tsunami and Americans are doing that now for other Americans. And we are learning that sometimes bureaucracy gets in the way because we have people who want to help and they are ready to help and they wait and they wait. What can we do? And they are ready with supplies. We are working very hard, Mr. Speaker, as we clear away these roadblocks in our bureaucracy because we know that what the Bible says is true, that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

We are now taking a lot of money from our people and from our children and our grandchildren because we will not be able to pay it back, money we need to help the survivors of this catastrophe. But we must not deny our citizens the satisfaction, the reward, the fulfillment that they get from helping themselves. And so we must continue to work to make sure that bureaucracy does not get in the way of people helping people because that really, in the end, is the best kind of help.

Just a little example about how much some of our agencies have done. This is the Coast Guard. They rescued over 23,000 survivors, assisted in the evacuation of another 10,000 from area hospitals. They have brought in over 2,600 servicemen and women, called up another 800 Reservists to undertake response operations. They moved over 75 aircraft, 22 cutters, those are ships, 110 small boats into the disaster area to execute search and rescue, environmental clean-up and to restore navigation to ports. That is very important because a lot of oil moves in there.

They dispersed tons of food, potable water and other supplies to survivors, surveyed and replaced dozens of aids to navigation required to reopen 62 percent of the local ports and waterways to deliver critically needed oil, gas and other natural resources.

They have begun the environmental remediation on gulf waterways by removing 60,000 gallons of oil, 665 floating containers of unknown liquid, 132 compressed cylinders and 10 petroleum tanks.

Mr. Speaker, as a result of this crisis, gas that was already high has skyrocketed higher, and now many people are talking about energy. We started talking about energy and a coming crisis on March 14. Katrina has just hastened and magnified the process that we began talking about then.

On March 4, just 10 days before we gave our first floor speech here on this subject, gas was $1.93. By August 29, just before the hurricane hit, it was $2.60. That is a pretty big increase, from March 4 to August 29 a 67 percent increase. In just 7 days from August 29 to September 5, the price of oil jumped from $2.60, this is an average nationwide, more some places, less some others, to $3.04 average. This is an increase of $1.22 in just 1 year.

But, Mr. Speaker, it could have been much worse. We have over 4,000 wells in the gulf; 953 of those are manned rigs and platforms. Only about 20 of those were cut. And, by the way, from those 4,000 wells we get about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, which is just a bit more than a fourth of all the oil that we pump. So we pump just a little over 6 million barrels of oil. But, Mr. Speaker, we use 21 million barrels of oil and the rest has to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else is all over the world, and much of it from countries that are relatively unstable, whereas, the President says, the people do not particularly like us.

I have here, Mr. Speaker, a little chart that shows the density of the oil rigs off the coast. And notice the little line here, the little symbols here. That shows where the hurricane came in. Lucky for us the hurricane came in where there was the least density of oil wells. Had it come in just a little west of that, it would have hit a very much higher density of oil wells, and the crisis might have been much worse than it is.

On September 7 there was an article by Reuters that said another storm would devastate U.S. energy, and it was quoting some analysts. And one of the analysts I know, because I have spoken with him several times and met him, was Matthew Simmons; by the way, he is the energy adviser for the President. He was an energy adviser in his first campaign and in his second campaign. He is the president and CEO of the largest energy investment bank in the world.

This is what Matt Simmons said in talking about our refineries and the infrastructure that moves the refined product to a great many users on the east coast. He says, ``We shoved it all into Texas and Louisiana. We put the heart of the industry in the middle of hurricane alley.''

Mr. Speaker, we may want to rethink where we have this infrastructure in light of its vulnerability to this kind of natural disaster.

I have here a news story from the 4th of March of this year, that was just 10 days before we gave our first floor speech here on this subject; and I am quoting from this. ``The average pump price then was $1.93,'' as I just said.

Trilby Lundberg--this is the Lundberg family, everybody has heard of the Lundberg Report that for many years now has been giving the price of gas and predicting what it will be in the future--she said, ``The chances of gasoline rises are very, very strong, if not immediately, then in coming weeks as we move into spring.'' It was $1.93 then, remember.

A government official who works for the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and I will not give you his name, Mr. Speaker, because he would be quite embarrassed, because this is what he said. He said, ``It takes about 8 weeks for crude prices to make it to the pumps,'' and he did not think the increase would be more than 10 cents. It was $1.93 so he did not think it would go up in the summer to more than $2.03. Mr. Speaker, it was $2.60 before the price was pumped up by the hurricane.

I guess it just goes to show, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot believe everything your government tells you.

The AAA reporting in that same story made this statement, Mr. Robert Sinclair from the AAA said, ``Probably the era of cheap oil as we have known it, where a barrel of crude oil was $29 or $30 is gone forever.''

Sadly, Mr. Speaker, I think that Mr. Sinclair was exactly right, and the chart that I have here shows that.

Now I have had to modify this chart. This shows inflation steadily rising and it shows the price of oil which has been up and down. And we notice what I had to do over there at the end, because a few weeks ago when I used this chart, we had not gone over $55 a barrel for oil and so I put that down as the 2005 figure. But just a few days ago during intraday trading, the price of oil went up to $71.85, almost off the chart.

When I come back again, Mr. Speaker, and I will, to talk about this subject, because I think it is so important that we need to emphasize it over and over again so that we have enough interest and enough knowledge so that we do the things that we really must do to avoid a really big problem with this in the future. So I suspect, Mr.

Speaker, that when I come back to talk again that this might very well be off the chart, and we will try to add something to the corner of the chart to show you how high it has gone.

On the next chart are some numbers that are widely known. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. As I said just a few moments ago, about two-thirds of that is imported.

By the way, we have gone from bad to worse. In the Arab oil embargo in 1973 we imported 34 percent, about one-third of the oil we use. We did not learn a whole lot from that, did we, Mr. Speaker, because now we are importing two-thirds of the oil that we use. So we are even more vulnerable, and look what happened then with the Arab oil embargo.

We represent only 5 percent, as a matter of fact less than 5 percent, of the world's population, one person out of 22, and we use a fourth of all of the oil which is used in the world. The other figure here is a really interesting one, and that shows that we pump 8 percent of the world's oil. If we have only 2 percent of the reserves, and from that 2 percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the oil, that means we are pretty good at pumping oil, and we are. It also means that we have a whole lot of oil wells probably, and we do. More than half of all the oil wells drilled in the world, Mr. Speaker, are drilled in this country. So we do not have much oil, and we are using it up really quickly. When there is an end to oil, we will come there before the rest of the world because we use so much, we have so little, and we are pumping the so little we use so fast.

The next chart shows a consequence of this, and by the way, those numbers inspired about 30 of the leading citizens in our country, McFarland, Jim Woolsey, Frank Gaffney and about 30 names total, retired generals and admirals and leading people in our country wrote a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the oil and use 25 percent of the oil and import two-thirds of what we use is a national security risk, which is unacceptable. We have to do something to wean ourselves from foreign oil.

The chart that I have here, Mr. Speaker, points out one of the problems that we face, and that is, that we are not only a country that needs a lot of oil. China now is the second largest importer in the world. Last year, they increased their importation 25 percent. I saw the number. They increased their oil use by 14.7 percent. I am not sure how we get so precise, but this chart of the world here shows where they are. They are now scouring the world to make sure that they have oil, and they are entering into contracts and buying assets.

You may remember, Mr. Speaker, they bid on Unocal in our country, almost got it, bid more than Chevron. Fortunately, they withdrew their bid. By the way the price of oil is not set by who owns it. It is set by how much of it there is in the world compared to demand in the world. It would have not been nice for China to own oil right in our country, but it really would not have affected the price of oil at all.

Notice, they are in Colombia. They are in Venezuela. They are in Brazil. They are really in the Middle East. In the big far eastern Russian oil reserves in the Sakhalin Islands, they are now building a pipeline. Originally, we thought it would go to a port where the oil would then go to Japan. Russia has just recently said that at least a large part of that is going to be diverted on down to a pipeline that goes to China. So we now have a world in which China and India and all of the developing countries, many of them in northern Africa, particularly in the Orient, are now demanding more and more oil.

To put this in context, Mr. Speaker, and to kind of see how we got here, we need to go back 60 years. Our next chart takes us back there 60 years and just a word about the origin of this chart.

Working for the Shell Oil Company in the 1940s and 1950s was a scientist known as M. King Hubbert. He watched the pumping and the exhaustion of oil fields and he noticed that for almost all of those fields that they followed a bell curve. Now, most people are familiar with a bell curve. There are some people very short, some very tall, but most of us are somewhere in the middle. So there is a bell by weight, and most things out there in the nature, their distribution follows a bell curve. What he found was that we pumped oil faster and faster until finally we reached a peak, and at that peak, he noticed that about half of the oil that was in the field had been found, and no matter how hard they sucked and pumped, the production of oil from that field fell down the other side. It is perfectly reasonable that the last part of the oil is more difficult to get than the first part of the oil.

So what M. King Hubbert did was to say, gee, if I knew how many oil fields there were in the United States, and I knew how many more we were likely to find, and if I added up all these little bell curves, I could get a big bell curve which would tell me when the United States was going to peak in oil production. He did this study and he made that prediction in 1956. Everybody thought that he was going to be really wrong and really be embarrassed, and Shell Oil Company said, please, do not do that.

He published the paper anyhow, and right on target, in 1970, we reached our peak oil production. M. King Hubbert went from being something of an embarrassment to being an icon because he was right on the money. He predicted 14 years ahead when we would peak in oil production in this country.

Using those same analytical techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in oil production about 2000. That did not happen because he could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the oil price spike hikes and the worldwide recession that occurred as a result of these oil price spike hikes.

Many experts believe that we in the world are peaking about now. If not now, soon. The next chart shows where we have gotten our oil from in the United States, and it shows the production curve and the fact that right on target in 1970 we peaked in oil production, and it has been downhill since.

This shows where we get the oil from, a whole bunch from Texas, the rest of the United States, natural gas, liquids. Notice Alaska there. This is Prudhoe Bay, from which we get a fourth of our oil, and Mr. Speaker, that produced only a little blip in sliding down Hubbert's Peak, and notice the yellow there. I am sure you can remember the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. This was going to solve the problem. There would be oil for a very long time. That is all the contribution. That yellow there is the total contribution from the Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries.

Mr. Speaker, I am having some trouble understanding why we ought to drill ANWR. Let me tell you why. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. I am having trouble understanding how it is in our national security interests to use up that little bit of oil we have as quickly as we can. If we could pump that oil tomorrow, and we cannot, but figuratively, if we could pump that oil tomorrow, what would we do the day after tomorrow? And there would be a day after tomorrow.

ANWR will be, most people believe, not more than half of what Prudhoe Bay was, and you see that it did little or nothing to stop our slide down Hubbert's Peak. So I would like to reserve ANWR. We are really going to need oil in the future. It and gas are the feedstock for an enormous petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world, and in the future, when we look back at what we have done, we will be embarrassed that we burned, just to get energy, so much oil, and particularly gas, because they are such an important feedstock for our petrochemical industry that we see all around us.

We live really in a plastic world. It builds our tractors and makes the insecticides, makes the herbicides. It makes the plastics. It is anything and everything in our society.

The next chart shows something very interesting. In spite of increasing techniques, in spite of computers, in spite of 3D seismic, the peak oil discoveries were about 40 years ago. Now, this is blocked off by 5-year increments, and there was a big one here at about 1980, but generally speaking the discovery of oil has been down, down, down. And the experts do not believe that there is

more than about maybe 5 percent of the known reserves that are yet to be discovered.

We have drilled a lot of holes. We have done a lot of exploration. We are really good at finding oil. And most of the experts do not believe we should count on much more than maybe about 5 percent of our current reserves as unknown, yet-to-be-discovered reserves.

The next chart shows something very interesting, and that shows that you cannot drill your way out of this problem. This shows the production of oil in the United States; and in 1980, when the Reagan administration came in, we were already 10 years down Hubbert's Peak. We had slid over the top and were starting down the other side of this bell curve called Hubbert's Peak. We were importing oil, and Reagan was concerned that we needed more oil. And so he did what you do in a market society like we have, he gave incentives for drilling. If we just give them some incentives, some tax advantages, some profit motive for drilling, they will go out and drill.

This yellow line represents the number of wildcat wells that were drilled. And, boy, was he successful. He got them to drill a whole lot more wells. But notice what happens down here. They produced less and less oil. They soon tired of drilling those extra wells when they were not finding any oil; and so, notice that the number of wells they drilled slipped down and down because they were finding less and less oil and we were going more and more negative.

The next chart shows something which Albert Einstein said was the most powerful force in the universe. When we had discovered atomic energy and the nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein was asked, Gee, Dr. Einstein, what will we do next? What will be the next big increment in energy? What will we fight the next war with and so forth? He said, The most powerful force in the universe was the force of compound interest; that is exponential growth.

And so here we show some exponential growth curves. The bottom straight line here is a 2 percent growth in the first year, and then just extrapolating out there from that. If you have money in the bank and it is getting 2 percent interest, and every year you take out the 2 percent and just keep it and do not let it in there to create any more interest, that is the rate at which it will grow. But if you leave the interest in and it is compounded, then you see what happens. You have what is called an exponential curve. This is 2 percent and 4 percent and 5 percent.

And this one on the left here is a really interesting one, Mr. Speaker. That one that goes almost straight up, that is the rate at which China is growing, almost 10 percent a year. With a 10 percent growth rate, you double in 7 years, 7.2 years to be precise, but roughly 7 years. You are four times bigger in 14 years and you are eight times bigger in 21 years. Now, I do not think China will necessarily continue with a 10 percent growth rate for 25 years, but if they do, their economy will be eight times bigger than it is today.

The next chart shows this same 2 percent growth. And, by the way, you can make that bell curve very sharp, very high and very sharp. You can simply change the numbers on the abscissa and the ordinate here. But this is the same 2 percent we saw in the previous one, and this has been about the rate that the consumption of oil has grown in the world, about 2 percent a year. That is the 2 percent curve here.

Now, obviously, up until this time the rate of reduction has equaled the rate of use because we have used all the oil that was produced and we have had all the oil we needed to use. But there will come a time, if in fact there is a phenomenon known as peak oil, when you peak, and there was for our country.

I want to remind you, Mr. Speaker, that there are a couple of unassailable facts. The first one is that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We did peak in 1970. He predicted that we would peak in 2000. Now, why should not M. King Hubbert be right about the world if he was right about the United States? And we now have oil at, what, roughly $65 a barrel, that has recently spiked up to over $71 a barrel.

But notice, Mr. Speaker, from this chart that the problem does not wait until peak. And, by the way, this 2 percent growth curve doubles in 35 years. So from this point to the end here, all the shaded area, that spans 35 years, because the upper point here is twice this one. That would mean that you start to have problems, if you could see them that precisely, 17\1/2\ years before peak. So we do not necessarily have to reach the peak before there is a discrepancy between what you would like to use, India and China and us.

We think, Mr. Speaker, if our economy is not growing at least 2 percent a year, the sky is going to fall, so we need to grow. China is certainly growing. India is growing. All of the Orient is growing and all demanding more oil. And if we stay with only a 2 percent increase-- China last year increased 14.7 percent, India increased. If we stay with only a 2 percent increase, we are going to be really lucky. And, Mr. Speaker, we will not even be able to use all of the energy that is available here if, in fact, we are going to make a reasonably smooth transition to alternatives.

Mr. Speaker, we will transition to alternatives, because the age of oil will not last forever. And as oil runs down, we must move to alternatives. We will either move to alternatives because there is not any more oil available in the quantity we would like, and by the way we are not running out of oil; there will be oil for another 100 years. What we are running out of is readily available, high-quality oil produced in the quantities that we need to meet our current economic demands.

Now, we really are going to have to reduce our consumption here so that we will have some energy to invest in the alternatives, because you are not going to make the transition without investing three things: Money. Mr. Speaker, we do not worry much about money. We just borrow it, without permission, from our kids and grandkids. But we cannot borrow time and we cannot borrow energy. So we are going to need to have time and need to have energy. So what we are going to need to do is to conserve, so that we reduce our energy demands so that we have something to invest.

The next chart shows us, Mr. Speaker, that we really can do that. This shows through the years from 1960 to 2000 the energy use per capita, per person, in the United States. Now, on this chart, Mr. Speaker, we see something very interesting. We, and by ``we,'' me and everybody else in the United States and California, started out at the same place, about 4,000 kilowatt hours per person. We have been using more and more energy as we have lived better and better from 1960 until now. We have more labor-saving things that are using fossil fuels to help us. But notice what has happened. Because of their emphasis on environment and efficiency in California, the average Californian uses only about 65 percent as much energy as the rest of America. This shows, Mr. Speaker, that we can conserve. We can be more efficient. We can reduce our consumption of energy.

The next chart shows what we have available to us to transition from fossil fuels, oil, gas, and coal to renewables. We have some finite resources. These are things which we have that are not the typical petroleum product that we can rely on to give us some energy. Tar sands and oil shales and coal and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Just a word about these.

I would first like to make an observation about energy density, because this is a quality of energy that is very important in our society. Fossil fuels have enormous energy density. For instance, Mr. Speaker, one barrel of oil, the refined product of which is 42 gallons of gasoline, you can buy at the pump for just a little over $100 now. That will give you, Mr. Speaker, the work output of 12 people working all year for you and it costs you just a little over $100.

Now, to give you some sense that that is probably correct, I would like you to reflect for a moment, Mr. Speaker, on the car you drive and how many miles per gallon you get. That gallon of gas is still, at $3- something, cheaper than small bottles of water in the grocery store, by the way. But reflect on how far that gallon of gas will take you in your car and then you think about how long it would take you to pull your car that far.

So you will get some notion that this energy density is probably correct, that a barrel of oil, 42 gallons of gas, the refined product will give you the work output of 12 people working all year for you, and it costs you just a little over $100.

Mr. Speaker, another way of looking at this is to go out this weekend and work very hard in your yard, manual labor, digging a ditch, cutting grass, whatever you want to do. I will use an electric motor and less than 25 cents worth of electricity, and I will get more mechanical work done than you will working all day long real hard. That is kind of humbling, is it not, Mr. Speaker, to recognize that in terms of the energy in fossil fuel, you and I are worth less than 25 cents a day.

But this is really the problem we have had, because these fossil fuels are so good, they are so available, the energy density is so high that we have just come really to rely on them. So when we are looking for alternatives, if we are going to continue the lifestyle anything like the lifestyle we have now, we are going to have to find substitutes that have something like the quality of energy this our fossil fuels. That is not going to be easy, Mr. Speaker.

Here are the finite resources that we have. There are some big oil sands, they call them oil sands up in Canada, and they are now producing oil from the oil sands at about $30 a barrel. Oil is selling at $65 a barrel, and that is a good deal, so Canadians are producing a lot of oil up there from the oil sands. From a dollars and cents perspective, that makes a lot of sense. They are doing that and selling it.

But there is another profit ratio that we have to think here, and that is energy profit ratio. That is energy in and energy out. I am told that at this time they are using more energy from natural gas.

You see, this tar and the tar sands is so stiff that it will not flow at normal temperatures. So they drill two wells together, then they go horizontal, and in the upper well they put hot water, steam, and that softens the oil. Then it goes down through the rock and sand and then they pick it up in the lower well that is drilled under that. They can now drill down perpendicularly and go horizontally, as they have been able to do for a number of years.

I am told they are using more energy from natural gas than they will get out of the oil they produce. For them that is still maybe a good idea, because the natural gas is up there and it is cheap for them and hard to transport. Because it is a gas and there is not very much of it, the density is very low. They are converting gas energy into oil energy, and although they get less energy out of the oil, you can put it in a pipe or ship and you can easily move it and you are getting $65 a barrel for the oil, so they are doing it.

But this points out, Mr. Speaker, that we should not be too sanguine about all of the potential energy in the tar sands and oil shales, because it may take, even if we get really good, and they are now talking about putting a nuclear power plant up there to heat the water, to soften the oil to get it out of the ground, if we are really good at getting this out, it is not going to be very energy positive. We are going to have to be good to make it energy positive at all.

Then coal, in a couple of moments I will show you a chart on coal, we have 250 years at current use rates, but that shrinks when you have to use it in higher quantities, and we will have to use it in higher quantities.

Nuclear fission, that is the conventional nuclear power plants, now we get 14 percent of our total energy, 20 percent of our electricity, from nuclear. As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, note that every fifth house and every fifth building would be dark if we did not have nuclear energy.

We probably in this transition period need to have a lot more of that, and we need to think through what we do with the waste from that and how we handle that. But either you are going to end up using far less energy than you are using now, or you are going to get energy from sources you are not now getting it from, and nuclear is a very attractive source to get energy from because you have such enormous energy output from a single plant.

But that is not a final solution with the kind of power plants we have now, because they use fissionable uranium, and that is in limited supply in the world and that will not last forever. Maybe, I get different numbers, I get numbers between 30 years and 200 years, depending on who you are talking to. We desperately need an honest broker, like maybe the National Academy of Sciences, to help us agree on a number so we have something to work with.

But in any event, when fissionable uranium is gone, and that is at current use rates, by the way, we have 30 to 200 years. If you ramp up the use rates, it goes more quickly. Then we have to go to breeder reactors, with which we have little experience and which produce by- products that have to be stored away, even more critical by-products, end products, than from the fissionable uranium, that have to be stored away for maybe a quarter of a million years, and that kind of boggles the mind to think of storing something away for that long.

The last one here is nuclear fusion. I support all the money that technology can absorb. I think the chances of getting to nuclear fusion in our lifetime are about the same as my chances of winning the lottery and solving my personal economic problems. If I think the lottery is a good bet, I am going to think that nuclear fusion is a good bet. But I would not bet the ranch that we are going to get to nuclear fusion.

If we get there, Mr. Speaker, we are home free, because there is essentially a inexhaustible amount of energy there. We ought to support all of those skilled people that have expertise in this area to see if it is possible to get there. But it is certainly something we should not bank on. It will be really nice if it happens, but we better have an alternative course of action, because it is unlikely to happen.

Once we have gone through these finite resources, then we come to the alternatives. I would like to look at the next chart and leave this one up, because I want to come back to it.

This now shows where we are. This is our total energy use in the little circle here, and three-fourths of that, the natural gas, the petroleum and the coal, if you add those up, they add up to 85, it should be 85 percent.

The other sources of energy are then 15 percent total. A bit more than half of that comes from nuclear power and so-called renewables. Here the chart has blown that up so we can see it. The biggest part of that comes from hydroelectric, and that is not likely to grow in our country, because we have dammed up about every river we should and maybe a few we should not and we are breaching more dams than we are creating now. So that is probably not going to grow.

The next biggest source of renewables is wood. This is not the rural person burning it for heating their home. This is a big timber industry and paper industry wisely burning what would otherwise be a waste product to get energy.

Then waste. This one can grow, the waste, and it should grow. It is really kind of dumb to bury our waste rather than burning it to get energy from it. Landfills create problems. When you burn it many of those problems, when you control it the pollutants disappear and you get energy from it.

But what this points out is that the sources that we are going to have increasingly turn to as we run down Hubbard's peak are things like solar, which is now one percent of 7, which is one out of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. Wind, these are just now really minuscule, but they are the resources that we have got to invest in, because they are going to have to be big sources of energy for us in the future.

Here, alcohol. A couple of weeks ago I spent a full day, Mr. Speaker, at the National Press Club here on a conference on ethanol. There is a big controversy out there about whether or not we can produce ethanol and get more energy out of the ethanol than we put into producing it, mowing the land, building the tractor, putting the tires on the tractor, fertilizing and so forth. There are a couple of really good scientists who believe they have looked at all of the energy inputs and they think that you have an energy deficit when you go from corn to ethanol, that you put more energy into producing it than you get out of it. Others think it is maybe energy positive.

But the point I am making is if it is energy positive, it is not going to be

very energy positive, and it may be a nice convenient way to end up. You cannot put cornstalks in your car and go, but you could have a little critter that breaks down the cellulose there into glucose and then ferment that and get alcohol and put that in your car and go. I am not saying it is not a good idea, but I am saying we are not going to get enormous amounts of energy from it.

It may be energy positive; but if energy positive, not very energy positive.

Here is geothermal, and, by the way, that is not the geothermal of the guy who is selling the heat pump and telling us he is going to put in a heat thermal system. And what he is doing is very wisely connecting us either to groundwater or the ground so that we are not trying to heat the summer air to cool our house or cool the winter air to warm our house. It is what we do with the heat pump that interfaces with air, and they call that geothermal. And I agree they ought to put that in quotes because the real geothermal is where we are doing what Iceland does and tap into the molten core of our Earth where we are close enough where we can drill down and get the benefit of that heat.

If one goes to Iceland, I have never seen a chimney there. I have been there several times. They do not need chimneys because they have a lot of geothermal there. This points out the importance of these now very miniscule contributions to our energy. We are very much, Mr. Speaker, like a young couple that has just gotten married and we have really lucked out. We have got a big inheritance from our grandparents. We really lucked out. We found a lot of fossil fuels.

So now we have established a life-style where 85 percent of all the money we spend is our grandparents' inheritance and only 15 of percent of it comes from our income. But our grandparents' inheritance is not going to last until we retire and certainly not until we die. So we are going to do, Mr. Speaker, one of two things. Either we are going to have to spend less money, or we are going to make more money; and that is exactly where we are in energy. Eighty-five percent of what we use is fossil fuels. Fifteen percent of it is what we have earned in a sense because it comes from nuclear power, and if we go to breeder reactors, that could be a perpetual source of power, and it comes from these renewables.

And we are going to have to transition as we run down Hubbert's Peak. We are going to have to transition from this 85 percent inheritance of our grandparents to the 15 percent, and would it not be nice if we could make it more than 15 percent? But the probability is that we are going to have to have life-styles in the future which require less energy.

And let us go back to our previous chart. If we look at the potential for energy sources from all of these solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy, can one imagine, Mr. Speaker, how much energy it takes to lift the ocean 2 feet, the tides? But the problem with that is it is so diffuse, it is very hard to harness. But people are trying. Wave energy, thermal gradients in the ocean, there are lots of possibilities of energy from the ocean; but it is very diffuse. It is very difficult to get it concentrated so we can use it.

Then all the agricultural sources. Mr. Speaker, I am not so sanguine about energy from agricultural as I once was as I recognize that we are barely able to feed the world. Tonight, a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry. When I recognize that we are barely able to maintain the productivity of our soils with no till farming that helps us keep our top soils.

Before that we were losing the battle, and our top soils in the center of our country were ending up in the Mississippi Delta, from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. They were ending up in the Chesapeake Bay. Now we are doing better; but I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, how much biomass we can take from our agricultural land and still have enough organic material, good tilth, which is what we call that quality of soil. So we can get some energy from agriculture, but it is going to be limited. It is not going to be enormous amounts of energy we get there. But we need to get energy from every place we can get it because we have an enormous challenge to come up with enough energy to replace the fossil fuels as we run down Hubbert's Peak.

Waste energy, we mentioned that. It was on the previous chart. We really need to do more of that. That is a really good idea.

Just a word about hydrogen from renewables. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. It will always take more energy to produce hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Otherwise, we are going to have to suspend the laws of thermodynamics, and they are not going to be suspended. But still it is a good idea to use hydrogen because we can get hydrogen from some things like coal, like electricity from a nuclear power plant; and we cannot put a nuclear reactor in the trunk of our car. We cannot put coal in the trunk of our car. We did that in the coal car behind the engine, but we do not do it in our cars and we will not.

So what we are doing really is converting one kind of undesirable energy to a very desirable form of energy in hydrogen that burns and we get only water from it. And in addition to that, Mr. Speaker, we can now use it in a fuel cell. It is very adaptable to a fuel cell where we will get about twice the efficiency that we do from a reciprocating engine. But please think of hydrogen as the equivalent of a battery. It takes energy from one place and stores it in a very convenient form so we can use it someplace else.

Several weeks ago we had a hearing here, and we had experts here on hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. And they all agreed that of the three ways that we could store hydrogen, only one of them was really feasible if we were ever going to move to a true hydrogen economy. Three ways of storing hydrogen. One is to compress it. It is the lightest element in the universe. It is always trying to get out of wherever we put it. And it takes big, thick pressure vessels because it is so light to store very much of it. So that is a big problem. They say that we can never really have a really functional hydrogen economy if we have to compress it.

Another way of storing is to liquefy it. Then it is really cold, and it takes a lot of energy to compress it and cool it, compress it and cool it until it finally becomes a liquid, and then we have to store it in a really insulated vessel; and when we park our car, it is just going off.

And they say that the third way of storing it is the only way that is really going to make a hydrogen economy feasible, and that is solid state storage. Storing the hydrogen in a reversible chemical reaction. Mr. Speaker, that is exactly what we do with the electron battery, which is the conventional battery we have. We take electrons and we put them in a chemical form that is reversible so we can charge the battery and then discharge the battery to get power from it.

So when we have a hydrogen economy, which will really be effective and doable, these experts say we are going to have to find a battery, a way of storing hydrogen in a solid form to make it really doable. So just think of it as another kind of battery.

The next chart is really a very interesting one, and it points out to us something that we should have realized, and this covers about 400 years. It goes from 1630 to the present. And on the ordinant it shows the energy that our societies have produced; and over here, of course, is time. And the brown here is wood, and it shows that when we really learned how to use wood in the Stanley Steamer and our charcoal for smelting iron and so forth, we started an industrial revolution. It was stuttering, and then we found coal, and, boy, it really jumped. But then the use of coal really dropped off when we found oil because oil had qualities that exceeded coal. It was so much easier to use. The energy density was higher. And look what happened to our production of energy.

And, by the way, the increase in population pretty much followed the increase in the production of energy. It made it possible now to live so much easier. We could have more children. We could support the children. And notice up at the top up there that little dip. That is the Arab oil embargo and the worldwide recession. And what that did, Mr. Speaker, was to delay the onset of peak oil.

The next chart shows us some characteristics of the alternatives that we are going to have to replace these fossil

fuels. On the ordinant here, we have energy profit ratio. I talked a little bit ago about energy profit. This is how much energy we get out from what energy we put in. And if we go subzero, we may as well not do it if we are putting in more energy in than we get out unless what we are getting out has some qualities that are better than the qualities we are putting in.

And we are down here now with hydrogen. Hydrogen is down here. It is below zero. We are putting more energy in than we are getting out. But never mind, because hydrogen has real economic effectiveness in transport. We can put it in a vessel, and we can run our car with it.

Now, what you want, of course, is an alternative that has the highest energy profit ratio and has the highest economic effectiveness in transport, and what meets that are the giant oil fields. We do not have any of those in our country. Most of U.S. oil is way down here. It is really good in terms of economic effectiveness, but it takes a whole lot more energy to get it out than it takes over in Saudi Arabia, and the big, giant oil fields are up here, and there never were any of those in our country, they are in the Middle East. You can see here coal. You get a meaningful amount of energy out of coal but, boy, it is not very good in economic effectiveness. You have to convert it into something else. Photovoltaics in 1995, they were way down here, and now we have moved them up to here. Hydro and coal-fired and nuclear are down here, and this tells you the qualities of the replacements that we are going to need to find for fossil fuels if we are going to be able to maintain anything like the economic activity and the lifestyle that we now have.

The next chart is an interesting one. It shows us coal, and people will tell us, do not worry about energy, we have 250 years of coal left in our country. That is not forever, by the way, but that is a very long time. That is true. At current use rates, we have 250 years of coal. But, if we are going to use more coal, we are going to have an increased use of coal, and if we use coal only with a 2 percent growth per year, and, Mr. Speaker, we are going to have to use a much greater growth rate than that to make up for the slide down Hubbard's Peak in oil, but only 2 percent growth per year, compounded, it now shrinks to 85 years. And, since you cannot use coal for a lot of things like running your car, you have to convert to a gas or liquid; well, you have now made that conversion, you are now down to only about 50 years. The coal is there, it is dirty, it produces a lot of pollutants. You either put up with the pollutants or you pay a lot of energy and money, and we will not worry about money, we should worry about energy, to clean up the coal.

The next chart is an interesting one. The top shows you the subject that I spent a full day down here at the National Press Club a couple of weeks ago on, and that is ethanol. On the right here it shows the energy you get from oil. You put in 1 million BTUs and you get out 1.23 million BTUs. I am sorry. With an input of 1.3 million, you get out 1 million BTUs. Obviously, you are going to have to use some of the energy and the oil to transport it and to refine it and to deliver it and so forth.

Now, the chart on the left here was given to me by our Department of Energy. I am told by the experts that this is wildly optimistic, but this is at least this group's view of what we can get out of it. The Energy Conference had these two experts who said that you need to put in more energy than you will get out. And even this optimistic assessment says that to get a million BTUs out, you need to put in three-fourths that amount. Now, of course, the extra energy comes from the sun, which, by the way, is where the oil came from too, because the oil and gas all come from things that grew a very long time ago with sun.

On the bottom here is a really interesting chart. In this little pie- shaped thing here, it shows all of the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. And notice that nearly half the energy, Mr. Speaker, that goes into producing a bushel of corn comes from nitrogen. And that nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, so that is natural gas energy there. And notice almost every other slice of this pie, we are talking about fossil fuel energy to grow the seed to haul, to supply the water, many of the chemicals come from oil, custom work, putting oil in the combine, natural gas that is liquefied or used as natural gas for drying your crop, electricity that is used for a lot of things; gasoline itself, diesel, the lime and the phosphate and the pot ash are all mined using fossil fuels, so essentially, for every piece of this pie, fossil fuels are used.

Now, what do we need to do? This next chart, which is our last chart, shows us the challenge. And, Mr. Speaker, what we need is a focus that is equivalent, if you are old enough to remember the Manhattan Project, it is equivalent to the Manhattan Project, or putting a man on the moon. That was a real challenge. And I think we need to challenge the American people in a very similar way. We have to do something about our dependence on foreign oil. If you do not think there is going to be such a thing as peak oil, and I think we are probably here. I hope not. I hope I am wrong, I hope these world experts are wrong. But if we are right, then we face a very bumpy ride. But even if you do not believe that as a problem, you have to believe that getting two-thirds of our oil from overseas is a big national security risk. By the way, we need to do exactly the same thing to reduce the national security risk that we need to do to transition. We need to buy time, conservation, and efficiency. We need to use that very wisely. If you do the wrong thing, you may end up making the problem even worse.

I would encourage my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to look into Jevons Paradox. Very interesting paradox. For some problems, the harder you work, the worse the problem gets. There will be real benefits to doing this. We will have technologies we can sell to the world, not just we, but the world, so we need to make this transition. We will create a lot of new jobs. It will be challenging to our people.

Whether we like it or not, Mr. Speaker, we are going to be a role model. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We are a role model. We are going to be a role model. We need to step up to that.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to challenge our government and our people to step up to this challenge. There are those who believe that we cannot do this. One writer begins his article by saying, dear reader, civilization as we know it will end soon. His name is Mat Savinar, you will find him with a google search of ``peak oil.'' Please read the article. You will be genuinely frightened, having finished the article.

I am not as pessimistic as Mat Savinar. I think that the American people, because we have met every other challenge, I think we can meet this challenge. But, Mr. Speaker, we are not likely to meet the challenge if we do not know there is a problem. So I am very appreciative for this opportunity to speak about this problem, and we will be back again, because this problem is not going to go away, and we need to talk more and more about the solutions and the problem.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 8, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I was in my office last evening about 11 p.m., as was all the rest of the House of Representatives, waiting for a resolution of some of the concerns on the transportation bill so that we could vote on it, when we were looking at the ``Drudge Report'' on our screen and we saw there a headline that I could hardly believe, that Senator Frist had reversed his position on embryonic stem cells and was now advocating the passage of the Senate version of H.R. 810.

I thought it would be appropriate today, with stem cells, embryonic stem cells being so much in the news, if we could spend a few minutes looking at what stem cells are and what this is all about, what was Senator Frist talking about and what is the issue here.

I have here on the easel a chart that shows the development, not all of the stages, but it shows the development of the human embryo. It starts with the zygote. The zygote is the fertilized egg. It now has chromosomes, genes from the sperm and genes from the egg, having what we call the diploid number of chromosomes. And that develops through several stages, we will see a little later in another chart, but it goes through the blastacyst stage here and then it goes down to the gastrula stage. And by the time you get to the gastrula stage, the embryo that began as a single cell here just a few days before has now developed into a large number of cells.

What is shown here is the embryo and the part of the wall of the uterus to which it is attached. By this stage in its development, the embryo has already now developed four very specific stem cells that will go on to produce a variety of tissues and organs in the body, all of the tissues and the organs in the body, and we see those down here at the bottom.

Some of them develop into ectoderm. This is the external layer. The ectoderm becomes primarily two things in the developing baby and in the adult. It becomes the skin and the nervous system and some of the pigment cells. Most of what we are in terms of mass is all developed from the middle layer, or the mesoderm, and from that develops all of your skeletal muscle, all of your skeleton, all of your bones, all of your heart muscle, the red blood cells, the smooth muscle in your intestines and stomach and so forth.

Then a third stem cell here ultimately develops into the entoderm. And here we see that this is the lining of the lung, the thyroid gland, and pancreatic cells, nowhere near the mass that is produced by the mesoderm, but very important tissues nevertheless.

Then there are some very unique cells. They are different in the male and the female. They are the germ cells. In the male they produce the sperm and in the female they produce the egg. Some of these stem cells persist even into the adult. In the bone marrow of every adult are stem cells which will produce erythrocytes, your red blood cells, which produce some of your white blood cells. The polymorphonuclear leukocytes will produce those cells that help in clotting, the thrombocytes.

And there are stem cells in other adult tissues. And there has been a lot of research for more than three decades now on using these stem cells to see if we cannot cure or help patients with a number of different diseases. And there have been a number of good applications of adult stem cells. They have produced betterment in a number of individuals, in some cases what looks like actual cures.

But these adult stem cells are limited in their capability because they are already what we call differentiated. They have already split, and a number of the genes have been turned off, and they now are destined to produce only a certain kinds of cells. What the researcher tries to do at times is to take these adult stem cells and put them in an environment that convinces them that they are not really an adult stem cell, but that they have gone now back to a more primordial state, that they are back to an embryonic stem cell.

Here in the blastula we see embryonic stem cells. Of course, the ultimate embryonic stem cell is the zygote: one cell, which will divide again and again and again, and then differentiate, and then finally produce all of the cells of the body. But here in the blastula stage we have the cells already differentiated into two different categories: those cells which are going to produce the embryo, and they are shown here in this inner cell mass; and then those cells which will produce the dissidua. And the dissidua is the cells around this which will become amnion and corion parts of the placenta. In the stage just before this are the cells that can produce the full embryo.

I would like now to look at our next chart here because this shows the development of the embryo, and it has all of the stages there. It starts with the zygote. Here we have the fertilized egg, or the zygote. Of course, this all begins with an ovary. This is only half of the reproductive system of the female. An ovary which every month routinely during the childbearing years will produce an ovum. Here it shows the follicle rupturing and the ovum coming out. Here is the oocyte. And then here are the sperm, and the sperm of course make their way all up through the uterus and the fallopian tube, clear up here to the end of the fallopian tube.

And by the way, they actually sometimes get out into the abdominal cavity. Sometimes this egg is not picked up by this little funnel- shaped end, and you see part of the funnel here, called the infundibulum. Sometimes that cell does not get out there, and it does not get picked up by the fallopian tube and carried down with the beating of a number of cilia and it goes out into the body cavity. And the sperm may actually get out there too, and it can be fertilized there. We call that an ectopic pregnancy. And of course the baby cannot develop there and it is going to die, and it is going to cause a lot of problems for the mother. So this ectopic pregnancy has to be terminated because it will cause the death of the mother if it continues.

After the fertilization, the egg begins its journey, taking several days, maybe as many as 8, 9, 10 days before it finally reaches the end of the journey and is implanted in the wall of the uterus. It divides first two cells, then four cells, and then eight cells. And I would like to pause for just a moment at that eight-cell stage. Imagine now that we are not in the reproductive tract of the female, but we are in a petri dish in the laboratory, because that is what in vitro fertilization means. In vitro means in glass. And they are now taking the egg from the mother and sperm from the father and they have combined these two and produced this fertilized egg, the zygote. It now divides and divides until they come to the eight-cell stage.

At this stage, more than a thousand times worldwide, in one clinic in England more than 600 times, they have taken in the laboratory under the microscope a cell, and sometimes they get two from that eight-cell stage, and they have done what they call a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They look at the genes, and you can do that, we now know what they ought to look like, and they can determine if there is any genetic defect.

One of those genetic defects is what we call trisomy 21, mongolism. If there is an extra chromosome at the 21st chromosome, you get what we call trisomy 21, or mongolism. If there is no genetic defect in the cell that they analyze, which would be like all the other cells because they began as a single cell here, then they implant what is remaining, that is the six or seven cells that is remaining, and now more than a thousand times worldwide we have had what looks like a perfectly normal baby born from this process.

This technique, which has been widely used in England, is now used in this country; and just outside Washington, here in Virginia, is a clinic that is doing this. They have done it more than 300 times now. Several weeks ago, I talked for perhaps a half-hour with two of their doctors about the procedure.

Let us now take a look at how they get embryonic stem cell lines. They take an embryo in the laboratory which had been produced by the fertilization of an egg, and they let it develop, not to the eight-cell stage, they go just a little beyond that. They go to the inner cell mass, and then they destroy the embryo. And there are now a lot of cells, not just eight; and they take a number of the cells from the inner cell mass, which I indicated previously had all of the genetic potential to produce the body of the baby, but none of the genetic potential to produce the dissidua. And so here we see right at the bottom of this chart we see the dissidua developing there, the little fingers like that are growing into the lining of the uterus.

Well, what this debate is all about, Mr. Speaker, is about the morality, really, the ethics of taking this little embryo, which is a baby in miniature, because, you see, if it goes on just a couple of days later and implants in the uterus, it will become a baby, although it is now in the petri dish in the laboratory, but it can be implanted in the uterus, to take this embryo and to destroy it and take the cells from the inner cell mass to produce a stem cell line. Up to this time that has been the only technique that has been available for developing these stem cell lines.

The President had a very difficult decision to make 4 years ago when there was an interest in using Federal monies to fund further embryonic stem cell research. Maybe we ought to pause for a moment, Mr. Speaker, to look at why we are so much interested in stem cell research. Because these stem cells, as the earlier chart showed, can produce all of the tissues in the body, there is the hope, the promise, and in fact even the realization with some of the work we have done with adult stem cells that we can use these stem cells to replace tissues which have been damaged by disease or some other trauma in the body. We can replace those so as to restore health.

Now, we have a lot of applications from adult stem cells and, as we stand here today, essentially no applications from embryonic stem cells. And why should we have this big debate, Mr. Speaker, about embryonic stem cells when almost all of the applications to medicine have been from adult stem cells? You see, we have been working with adult stem cells for more than three decades, so we have had a lot of opportunity in the medical community to make applications there, but we have been working with embryonic stem cells for only about 6 years, and there just has not been the opportunity to make the medical applications from embryonic stem cells that we have been able to make from adult stem cells.

But because of what embryonic stem cells are, because embryonic stem cells still have all of the capability to produce any and every tissue in the body, doctors and researchers believe intuitively from what they know of embryology that there ought ultimately to be more and better applications from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem cells. We do

not know. It may be that these embryonic stem cells are going to be like unruly teenagers, very difficult to control. You see, their destiny in life is to divide and divide and divide.

We want them to do that, but we want to be able to control how they divide and what they produce, because if it is a liver the patient needs, you need to convince the cells that is what they ought to be producing, and when they have done enough, they need to quit. They may be very difficult to control. They may keep on dividing, and when you put them in the body, they may form tumors.

Because of what embryonic stem cells do, the medical community and indeed millions of Americans with relatives with devastating diseases believe there are important applications from embryonic stem cells to medicines. We need to provide that opportunity without harming the embryo.

To this date the only way we have gotten these embryonic stem cell lines started is by taking some of the cells from the inner cell mass, which destroys the embryo. In 2001, the President was faced with a very difficult decision. He needed to determine whether Federal funds could be used in embryonic stem cell research when the only way to get embryos at that time was to destroy the embryo.

When the President was making that difficult decision, the scientists at NIH had an open house for Members of Congress and staff to come to NIH and learn about embryonic stem cell research and the potential. I went there, Mr. Speaker, and listened to their presentations. Because in a former life I was privileged to be able to get a Ph.D., a doctor's degree in human physiology, because I taught medical school, because I had a course in advanced embryology, I knew a little bit about what they were talking about.

As I sat there listening to the researchers at NIH explaining what they were doing and the dreams and the hopes that they had for the applications of embryonic stem cell research, and when I thought about the dilemma that the President was in in trying to decide whether it was okay to destroy these embryos to get a stem cell line that may come up with some miraculous cures, I thought back to my studies and to a course that I had in advanced embryology. And really you do not need to have had that course to understand this, but it occurred to me nature had been doing for a very long time what we needed to do, and that is to take cells from the early embryo without hurting the embryo. Nature had been doing that by producing identical twins. In identical twins, half of the cells are taken away from the embryo, and each half goes on to produce a perfectly normal baby. And one of those identical twins is a clone. Think about that and decide how that relates to the dialogue that we are having on cloning.

Well, there are two different times during the development of the embryo, maybe more, but at least two different times that it can split to produce identical twins. One is at the two-cell stage. Instead of just dividing to make four cells, it splits, so there are now two one- cell embryos, and each one goes on to divide and produce a baby. Or it can wait until the inner cell mass stage, and in some embryos there are two inner cell masses, and that can now split to form identical twins.

Sometimes this is not perfect, and they do not split totally, and we have what we call Siamese twins. This is the origin when the split has occurred probably at the inner cell mass stage, and it is not complete, and they remain close enough that some parts of the body grow together.

We know that the embryo is capable of splitting at these two different stages because of the way the babies present themselves at birth. If they are both within the same amniotic sac, they probably split at the two-cell stage. If each have their own amniotic sac, they probably split later.

It occurred to me since nature many times takes half of the cells away from the early embryo and they go on to produce two perfectly normal babies, we ought to be able to take a cell or two from an early embryo without hurting the early embryo. And I asked the scientists at NIH, should we not be able to do it? They said we ought to be able to do it, although we have not done it.

A little after that I was at an event when the President was there, and I mentioned this possibility to the President. He asked Karl Rove to follow up on it, and a few days later I got a call from Karl Rove saying he had talked to the NIH; the NIH told him what I was proposing was not doable.

I said Karl, either they did not understand your question, or there is some confusion, because these are the same people that can take a single cell and take the nucleus out of that cell and put another in it. Of course they can do this. He went back and asked them again, and he came back and said he got the same answer, that they could not do this, and so the President came down with his executive order.

A couple of years after that, not very many months ago, the people from NIH were sitting in my office, and I asked them how could this have happened. What apparently happened as so often happens, there was a miscom- munication. What they told Karl Rove was they were not sure they could produce an embryonic stem cell line from an embryo that early because they had never done it, not that it was not doable. He interpreted this as saying they could not take the cell, and, therefore, the research could not be done.

I would like to spend just a moment looking at some of the reasons why people are so concerned and why this was such an important decision on the part of the President, and why Senator Frist's decision last night has stirred up so much controversy. It is because there are a very large number of diseases that have the potential of being cured ultimately with the application of embryonic stem cell research.

Let me give us one example, and that is diabetes. Kids come in my office with this hockey puck-like thing under their skin, which is an insulin pump. They have to prick their skin to get a glucose level so they can set the pump, and they are very brittle. It has to be pumped in regularly. This is the most expensive disease in our country, and it is potentially totally curable with stem cell applications. All we need to do is produce some islets of Langerhans cells because these are the cells that just happen to be embedded in the pancreas. There is no reason why they need to be in the pancreas. They have nothing to do with the function of the pancreas, because the pancreas is a big digestive gland at the beginning of the small intestine that produces enzymes that digest fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Embedded in the tissue of the gland are what looked like these little islands to Dr. Langerhans, and so we call them the islets of Langerhans. They produce insulin.

Now, insulin does not cure diabetes, as any family who has diabetes in the family knows; it simply delays the course of the disease. There may ultimately be some problems with the eyes and circulation. You lose some toes, they have to be amputated. If we could create islets of Langerhans cells, which could be under the skin anywhere in the body, anywhere that the blood can get to them so the circulation can pick up the hormone that is produced, this should cure the disease.

And there are many others, particularly the autoimmune diseases, and there are 63 autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where the body gets confused what is really body. There is something very interesting that happens with early embryos. Obviously we need to know what is us so foreign things can be rejected. When you get inside your body, there are no bacteria in there. That is a pristine world. We have a big army of white cells in there that make sure that it is pristine. The white cells are told by what we call T-cells as to what is you and what is not you, so they attack what is not you. Sometimes, and in more people than we would like to have it occur in, sometimes the body gets confused as to what is really you.

I have a little problem, rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease. The body starts attacking itself; and there are 63 of them, and potentially all of them could be addressed with embryonic stem cell research.

Alzheimer's disease, a very tragic disease. Central nerve injury, an injury to the spinal cord, those cells do not grow back. There is a potential you could put new cells in the spinal cord, and people in a wheelchair could walk

again. There is that potential, and that is why embryonic stem cell research is of such great interest, because of the enormous potential that they ought to have because they are so totally undifferentiated because they can produce any and every cell in the body.

I have been working with the White House, with the National Institutes of Health, with the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and with the prolife community in developing a bill, H.R. 3144, which would permit research on not just the procedure that I recommended more than 4 years ago now, but several other procedures that are outlined in a little book here called Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, A White Paper, produced by the President's Council on Bioethics, and they talk about four different kinds of research, four different ways of procuring embryonic stem cells that might be ethically acceptable to the prolife community.

The first of these is pluripotent. By pluripotent, they mean cells that have the capability of producing all of the tissues of the embryo, but not the decidua. That is a totipotent cell. Pluripotent stem cells are derived from embryos that are essentially moribund, dead; the equivalent, if you will, of an adult that is brain dead.

It is perfectly ethical, most people believe, to take organs, that is how we get organs for transplant from adults that are brain dead, so if you now have an embryo which is obviously not going to develop, but it still is alive enough that you might take cells from it to produce a stem cell line, if you really knew that it was dead and could never produce a baby, then ethically it would appear to many people to be okay to take cells from that to establish a stem cell line. You might have a little concern that an embryo that had sat there a day or two and never divided because there was something wrong with it, that the cell you took from it to produce a stem cell line might not produce just the high-quality stem cell line that you might like for research, but at least it is worth exploring, and it gets by the ethical arguments.

The second one of their proposals, and I would like to look at the next chart now as we do that. Let me just look at this chart for a moment here with you. This comes from a white paper on the President's Council on Bioethics. Let me look at the highlighted portion: ``It may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single cells extracted from early embryos.'' That is the procedure that I was talking about that occurred to me when I was out at NIH talking to the investigators there. ``And in ways that do no harm to the embryo, thus biopsied. But the initial success of the Verlinsky's Group's efforts at least raises the future possibility''--Verlinsky is a Russian scientist working in this country who says that he has done what NIH said they were not sure they could do, and that is to produce an embryonic stem cell line from one cell taken from an early embryo--``at least raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres.'' A mere is a cell, and it is taken from the blastula so it is a cell taken from the blastula. A blastomere. ``Removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them.''

And then the asterisk there. If you look down at the bottom of the page, it says, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001.'' What they are referring to is the recommendation that I made to the President that he relayed on to Karl Rove. This is recognized in this fairly recently published white paper, Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, a white paper by the President's Council on Bioethics. This is one of four different procedures. The first, you remember, was taking cells from an embryo that is essentially moribund, it is going to die, and like the person who is brain dead, why not get some benefit from it. We do that with organ transplants all the time.

The third one is very interesting, and that is to produce pluripotent stem cells derived from biological artifacts. There are two artifacts that they are looking at to do this. One of those goes back to this little embryo in the petri dish that we talked about. What they want to do is go in that early embryo and turn off some of the genes. We know how to do this. To turn off some of the genes so that it can never produce a baby, but could go on dividing and produce a mass of cells. They call this an artifact. If it is not going to be a baby, it is just this mass of cells growing, maybe it is okay to take cells from it to produce an embryonic stem cell line.

But some people might have a little concern, Mr. Speaker, that you have gone in early and messed up what could have become a perfectly normal baby, you have turned off some of the genes so it cannot, so now you have created kind of a freak that you can take some cells from, and since it is not going to be a baby, it is okay to take the cells from that. But at least it is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without destroying what at that moment is perfectly normal stem cells.

There is another possibility, and that is parthenogenesis. That is the development without the union of sex cells. The fourth technique is an interesting one and that we are trying to do all the time. That is to take what is called the pluripotent stem cells via somatic cell dedifferentiation. A somatic cell simply means a body cell. The soma is the body. Take a body cell from anywhere in the body, skin, muscle, lungs, anywhere, and dedifferentiate it, try to produce this cell in an environment that it is confused as to what it is, that it kind of thinks and behaves like it is an embryonic stem cell. If we can do this, that is great, because ethically there should not be any problem doing this. But this has not been done. There are big technical challenges to doing this.

Now, this white paper gives a very good discussion of the proposal that we made; that is, of getting cells via blastomere extraction, sometimes called biopsy. You are going in and just taking out a cell or two. They even talk about producing the repair kit, which would be really advantageous to the baby through all of its life now. If it needed a new liver, new islet of Langerhans cells, if it needed new spinal cord cells, hopefully in the future we would be able to produce those from this repair kit.

But when they get back for some strange reason, Mr. Speaker, it almost looks to me like two different groups wrote the body of this text where they talk about this technique and where they make the recommendations, because in the recommendations they say the second proposal, blastomere extraction from living embryos, we find this proposal to be ethically unacceptable in humans. Owing to the reasons given in the ethical analysis, we should not impose risks on living embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells for research.

I agree. That is not the reason the stem cells are taken from this baby. As a matter of fact, if the cells are taken with no thought that they are stem cells, the cells will be taken by the parents to produce a repair kit or to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis for the baby, and I think that most Americans do not have an ethical problem, Mr. Speaker, with in vitro fertilization. I think that most Americans do not have an ethical problem with deciding that your baby is not going to have a genetic defect. I do not think that hardly any Americans could ever have a problem with establishing a repair kit for your baby.

What is envisioned is that at the end of the day, the parents would have made at least two ethical decisions, what I consider ethical and I think what most people consider ethical; that is, to have their own baby, the only way they can do it is in vitro, and to establish a repair kit for their baby, and then all that needs to be done to get another stem cell line is to ask them, Couldn't we have some surplus cells from the repair kit that you have established.

There is a big discussion going on in our country now, Mr. Speaker, about embryonic stem cells. They voted how many billions of dollars in California to pursue embryonic stem cell research because a big percent of our population believes that there could be a major medical application there which would provide miraculous cures for many of our diseases. And then we have a large number of people, the prolife community, that have a big problem with taking these embryos, any one of which

could become a baby, we have more than 100 of them, is what we call the snowflake babies that have been adopted, implanted in the receptive womb of a mother, and they become a baby; to take this human life, and it is a life, and it is human, and destroy it so that you can produce a stem cell line.

Most of this debate ignores the fact simply because the debaters do not know that it is possible, Mr. Speaker, to get embryonic stem cell lines without harming embryos.

I would like to go back again to the second chart I showed, which is the path of the reproductive tract of a female, so that we can look at this again together so that we understand clearly what we are talking about here. We will imagine now that this is happening in the laboratory and it is in a petri dish, in glass. In vitro is what we call it. Because the parents could not have a baby any other way, they decided to have in vitro fertilization, and they decided they would like to at least do one thing, and that is to establish a repair kit for their baby. They might also want to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis.

So now the physician in the clinic will wait until the cells divide and produce several embryos. By the way, they do not all produce really good-looking embryos, and so what they do is to fertilize more than one egg, and they then watch the development of these embryos, and they will take the best of them and generally more than one of them.

One of my colleagues, Congressman Rohrabacher from California, his wife had three beautiful babies from in vitro fertilization. I do not know how many the doctor implanted, but at least three of those that he implanted grew, and she had triplets. I saw a recent picture of them in their little life vests out in the surf in California.

There is a potential ethical argument in doing this even if we let the parents make the decision they are going to do the in vitro fertilization, if the parents make the decision that they are going to establish a repair kit, and then all we ask for is a few cells from that repair kit. You see, if the cell is taken from the eight-cell stage, then you could make the argument that maybe the cell you took could become another embryo. So then you start all over again with the ethical argument. You now have another embryo. And so you now ethically should not destroy that embryo with the hope that you are going to have some applications to health care for somebody else.

There is, Mr. Speaker, one way to avoid this, and it is one of the things that our research, H.R. 3144, would pursue, and that is waiting a little later to take this cell. I am not sure for all the reasons that they take the cell at the eight-cell stage, but that is the convention. If you waited to take that cell from the inner cell mass stage, which is a little later, a few days later, then the differentiation has already occurred to the point that the cells in the inner cell mass which can produce the whole baby, but they cannot produce a baby by implantation because they have lost the ability to produce decidua. So you have now removed that possible ethical argument, although those who wrote the white paper on the Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells do not believe that you could do this. But if there is any possibility that you could do that, then for those whose sensitivities would be offended by this, if we could demonstrate that you could take it from the inner cell mass stage, now you have bypassed even that.

Our bill, H.R. 3144, is a bill that looks for the moment only at animal experimentation, because we believe that before you go to humans, you ought to know that what you are doing is going to work and that it has worked. The best way to do that is to go to animals and ultimately to what we call nonhuman primates; that is, the big apes which genetically, by the way, are remarkably close to humans. It may be embarrassing, Mr. Speaker, to look at the genetic complement of one of the great apes and look at our genetic complement. There is not all that much difference in us. Once we have demonstrated it there, then we could have more certainty that it is going to work in humans.

What we do not need, Mr. Speaker, is for millions of Americans to feel that their last best hope for a cure for their relative had been removed when the President vetoes H.R. 810 and its Senate complement, which he has said he would do, which I hope he does. I think it is the ethical thing to do.

What we need, Mr. Speaker, is to have this bill on the President's desk so that those millions of people out there who believe that there is potentially a lot of applications in health care from embryonic stem cells will know that the Federal Government believes with them that this is possible; that we are going to support responsible, ethical research, using cells taken from early embryos that certainly do not kill the embryo, do not harm the embryo. As a matter of fact, if, Mr. Speaker, we get those cells, the surplus cells from the repair kit, then the parents have made two decisions which I think, and I believe most Americans will believe, are ethical, one, to have their own baby, the only way to do it is in vitro; secondly, to establish a repair kit so that at any time during its life, their child is going to have the potential for new tissues, new organs, new cells that is going to be them, so there will be no rejection.

Mr. Speaker, what we saw last night I hope results in a very positive eventuality. I hope that by the time H.R. 810 and its Senate complement gets to the President's desk, that also on his desk is H.R. 3144, so that the President can say, today I proudly sign a bill which provides for research which has the potential of producing embryonic stem cells for all the miraculous applications to health care that citizens all across the country believe. Because in State after State now they are voting in referenda to provide, sometimes in the legislature, sometimes just a vote of all the people, to provide very large amounts of money statewide because the Federal Government is not doing it, and they believe there is a big potential there.

I hope that in the not-too-distant future, Mr. Speaker, that we will be using Federal funds to support responsible, ethical embryonic stem cell research, and H.R. 3144 will do it.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 225, 109th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, if you go to your computer this evening and do a Google search for peak oil, you will find there a large assortment of articles and comments. Like every issue, you will find a few people who are on the extreme, but there will be a lot of mainstream observations there.

One of the articles that you will find there was written by Matt Savinar. Matt Savinar is not a technical person. He is a lawyer, a good one, and he does what lawyers do. He goes to the sources and builds his case.

I remember in another life I was involved in morphing some of my knowledge of human physiology into the practical world, and I was awarded 20 patents. For every one of those I had a lawyer. I knew that he knew absolutely nothing about the subject that he was helping me on before he came to work with me. By the way, Mr. Speaker, the 20 patents I had, 19 were military patents so these were military lawyers. I was really impressed with how quickly they caught on and knew what was going on and were able to contribute.

I think that Matt Savinar has done that, and I wanted to begin this discussion this evening with a quote from Matt Savinar because it kind of grabs your attention and makes you either want to put down his article with the statement that gee, this guy cannot be for real, or you want to finish it to see the basis for his statement because he begins his article by saying, ``Dear Reader, Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.''

When my wife read that she had the first reaction that I mentioned, Gee, this guy is a nut. I am not going to read any further.

I said, Please read on and reserve judgment until you have finished reading his thesis.

She read on and at the end was genuinely frightened by what she read. I do not believe Matt Savinar has to be correct, but he could be correct. I am going to spend a few minutes this evening talking about the subject that caused Matt Savinar to make his prediction: ``Dear Reader, Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.''

I have on the first chart here a trend that I think everybody in America is familiar with. This shows the inflation rate, and we have done a pretty good job since 1995 in the last 10 years of taming inflation. It has gone up only slightly. But the zigzag magenta here is the price of fuel, of gasoline. This is a month or so old because you see it stops at $55 a barrel, and fuel oil from which we get gasoline is now up to around $60 a barrel. It has fallen off just a little now. It was over $60.

This is a trend that we are all familiar with and you see in the last 4 years from 2001 to 2005, if you draw a best fit line through those points, it would be a pretty steep slope. This gave rise to a letter that was written by about 30 prominent people in our country, McFarland, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, and a number of retired admirals and generals.

The next chart shows the subject of their letter to the President. They noted that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, and that is a generally agreed upon figure. You will not find much contention with that statement. Some will say closer to 3 percent. They point out that we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we are importing about two-thirds of what we use. That is up from about one- third that we imported as of the Arab oil embargo.

The other points here are significant ones, I think. This 25 percent of the oil used in the world is less than 5 percent of the world's population. If we divide the 280 million people in our country into the world's population, just short of 7 billion, we get about 22. So we are one person out of 22 in the world, and we use a fourth of all the world's energy.

These first two bullets here are really interesting ones. We have really only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but from that we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We are pretty good at pumping oil. What this says is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the average well in the world. We do a good job of pumping oil.

Their letter to the President pointed out that this was an unacceptable national security risk. And the President himself, Mr. Speaker, has noted that much of this two thirds of imported oil that we get comes from countries, in his words, that do not even like us very much. They are unstable, unpredictable. And these 30 prominent Americans wrote to the President, saying: Mr. President, we think this is an unacceptable national security risk and our country needs to mount an aggressive program to free us from our dependence on foreign oil.

The next chart shows us how we got here. And we have to go back several decades, like 6 decades, to see where this story started, and it started with a Shell Oil Company geologist, a scientist, who was studying the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields. And he noticed that for each typical oil field that production increased until it reached a peak, and, then after holding that peak for a little while, it started down the other side, and it is perfectly reasonable that the last oil that they get out of the well is probably going to be harder to get than the first oil that they get out of the well; so it should come more slowly. His name was M. King Hubbert, and he theorized that if he knew the totality of the oil fields in the United States and that they all behaved the way that several fields that he had studied behaved that he ought to then be able to predict when the United States would peak in oil production. And so he did that. He added up all of the fields that he knew of in the country. He made a reasonable estimate of how many more fields the country was likely to discover because this discovery trend followed a similar curve. That was a lot earlier on, and we generally are discovering the oil something like 30 or 40 years before we are using oil. And he then created a curve, a bell-shaped curve, which we call bell shaped because it rises to this peak and then falls off. That is a very typical curve that is familiar to scientists and statisticians. And he theorized that if he added up all the little bell curves in the country, he would get a big bell curve for the country. And he predicted in 1956, from his studies in the 1940s and 1950s, that the United States would peak in oil production about 1970. As it turned out, it was precisely 1970 that we peaked in oil production.

When he came up with that prediction, his employers told him, Please do not publish that; people will think you are silly. He published it anyhow, and when he finally was proven to be a prophet who had predicted correctly, he became something of an institution in his own time.

The smooth green curve here is the curve that he predicted, and he made this prediction in 1956. We were up that curve, and he predicted it would peak about 1970 and then fall off. And the more ragged, heavier green symbols, those are the actual production. And we now are well down on that curve. This is called Hubbert's Peak. And, Mr. Speaker, if one is doing this Google search, they can do one for Hubbert's Peak too, and they will find a lot of articles there, pretty much many of the same articles that one will find when they do a search for ``peak oil.''

The red curve here is the curve for the Soviet Union, now Russia. They had more oil; so their peak was higher than ours. And we see that the reality of their production fell off very dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So they are going to have a little secondary peak here to compensate for the fact that they were very inefficient in pumping oil during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The little blue here that we cannot see very well represents what happened with the oil discovery in Alaska, in Prudhoe Bay.

The next chart is a graphic one that shows us where we have gotten our oil from and where we are getting our oil from. The red on top is natural gas liquids, and we see that as oil runs down, we are depending more and more on this source. Notice the enormous contribution that Texas made here, that one State, but they are really winding down now, as we can see. It peaked in 1970, and notice that the big Alaska oil find produced just a little bump in the down slope of Hubbert's Peak. Except for a very short period of time, there was never any increase in oil production as a result of that. It plateaued briefly and then went on down.

The yellow is an interesting one. I am sure the Members can remember, Mr. Speaker, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries that were going to save the world, there was so much oil there. That is the only contribution from the Gulf of Mexico deep water oil discoveries. It helped a little, but it certainly did not stop the downward slope of our production.

We are now talking about drilling in ANWR. And for a couple of reasons, Mr. Speaker, I am opposed to drilling in ANWR. One of them is that if we were to drill in ANWR, there would be the perception that we have solved the oil problem. Nobody believes, almost nobody believes, that there is as much oil in ANWR as there was in Prudhoe Bay. And notice, Mr. Speaker, the relatively small contribution that the oil in Prudhoe Bay made. ANWR would make much less. So I am opposed to drilling because I think it would give us a false sense of security and we would not then have the incentives to do what I think we must do if we are going to avoid the consequences that Matt Savinar talked about: ``Dear Reader, civilization, as we know it, is coming to an end soon.''

The other reason that I am opposed to drilling in ANWR goes back to our second chart, which showed that we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. If we have only 2 percent of the known reserves and are using 25 percent of the world's oil, help me understand, Mr. Speaker, why it is in our national security interests to pump that little bit of oil as quickly as we can. Would it not be nice to husband that? This may be a rainy day, but I suspect that there will be a rainier day when we need it more than we need the oil today.

The next chart is a chart that Albert Einstein would really have appreciated. He was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the nuclear weapons went off, an enormous release of energy from a very small amount of mass, and he was asked what would be the next great energy source in the world? And his answer was that the greatest force in the universe was the force of compound interest. And that is, in effect, what we have in these exponential growth curves here. When it is compounded, that is referred to by mathematicians as ``exponential growth.'' That is, if we grew 5 percent last year and we leave the 5 percent in this year, then we do not start out with 100 units; we start out with 105 units. So 5 percent of 105 is obviously bigger than 5 percent of the 100 from the previous year. So each year, now, we are going to have a greater incremental increase. And the straight line on the bottom here shows what we get if we extrapolate from a 2 percent growth the first year and just assume it is going to follow that straight line. But that is not exponential growth. If we now are taking out the interest, if we are taking out the interest and the principal is going to grow, that is the curve, I guess, we would get. But if we have exponential growth, that is the next curve here, and it shows what happens. This doubles in 35 years, just 2 percent exponential growth. I am using the 2 percent figure because that has been about the rate of growth of the consumption of oil over the past several years. If we double that and go to a 4 percent growth rate, that doubles now in 17\1/2\ years and it quadruples in 35 years.

The curve over here on the extreme left is one I want to spend just a moment talking about because it is a really interesting one. That is a 10 percent growth rate. That is about the rate at which China's economy is growing. With a 10 percent growth rate, it doubles in 7.2 years. That is rounded off to 7. That means it is four times bigger in 14 years. That means it is eight times bigger in 21 years. If China's economy is going to be eight times bigger in 21 years than it is now, that is really going to challenge our GDP, is it not?

The next chart shows the consequence of this enormous exponential growth rate in China. China's use of fossil fuels, they used to be an exporter. The last several years they have become an importer of oil. As a matter of fact, they now are the second largest importer in the world, just behind the United States. They just displaced last year, I think, Japan as the second largest importer of oil. And this map shows some symbols that indicate where China has gone to secure the rights to future oil and gas production. And they are all over the world. They are in Canada. They have locked up most of the future increased production from the oil sands in Canada. They are all over South America. They are in Colombia and in Venezuela and in Brazil and in Argentina. And notice, Mr. Speaker, that not all of these countries in South America, as a matter of fact, the one with the largest reserves there, Venezuela, is not particularly friendly to the United States. They have locked up oil in the Caribbean and in Africa and all over the Middle East. We see the symbols here for the oil production rights that they bought up in the Middle East.

The Members may have noticed, Mr. Speaker, that in the last few days there have been some reports of the decision of the Russians, announced by Mr. Putin himself, that they are going to favor China with their Sakhalin oil production rather than Japan. And Japan, which needs to import essentially all of its energy, is really concerned about the decision that Russia has made from the Sakhalin Island region here. That is called the Far Eastern Russian oil, and it is very difficult to get that to the countries in the West, and they are now moving it by train, and they are building a large pipeline, and China is going to be the primary beneficiary of this.

There have been several reports recently about the fact that China is making an aggressive bid to buy Unocal, which I think is the ninth largest oil company in the world. They are not particularly interested in the oil that they own in this country, but Unocal has rights to oil in a number of other places in the world, much of it closer to China than we are. They have offered about $2 billion more than Chevron has offered, and there have been some really interesting articles.

I have here a Washington Post article from the 13th. The government's current push, that is the government of China, to secure oil fields is driven by worries that there may one day be too little oil to meet worldwide demand and that foreign powers and particularly the United States will choke China.

Now, it is interesting, Mr. Speaker, to note that when M. King Hubbert was making his predictions about the United States, after he made that prediction, he looked at the world and he made a prediction about the world and that was that if you added up all of the fields in the world and made some reasonable estimates about how much more oil the world would find, that the world should peak out in oil production, which is why we are calling this peak oil, should peak in oil production about the turn of the millennium.

That did not quite happen, because he could not have known about the Arab oil embargo or the oil price spike hikes or the worldwide recession that resulted from that. That reduced the demand for oil and the use of oil, and so we are now reaching, in the view of many experts in the area, we are probably reaching peak oil now.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, there may be some disagreement as to when we

will reach peak oil, but there is no disagreement that oil is a finite resource. I know of no one who believes that the elves or God or whoever is filling the oil wells as we are pumping them out. If he is doing that, we are failing somehow in the United States, because our oil wells are being pumped down. Here we are now just pumping barely more than half of what we did at our peak.

It is very interesting that, although we have 5,000 years of recorded history, we have been in the age of oil just a little over 100 years, and we are now probably about halfway through pumping all of the reserves of oil in the world.

A couple of Congresses ago, I was Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy on the Committee on Science, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had a hearing with the world's experts in as to how much oil was out there, how much had been pumped and how much was out there.

A gross estimate of how much oil is still out there, which happens to be the same number as the oil that has been pumped, because there is general agreement that we probably have pumped about half of all the oil out there, there is about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world.

Nobody in the industry, by the way, expects that we are going to find any more giant deposits of oil. We are now very good at prospecting for oil. We use 3-D seismic with a lot of computer analysis. As you may note, Mr. Speaker, with the plethora of cash that the oil companies now have, they are doing very little prospecting.

I just read the other day that for the last several years, they have spent more money prospecting than they will ever get from the oil they found, even at $60 a barrel. So the oil companies know that this is not a good financial investment, to spend a lot of money looking for what are, in most people's views, very small oil fields remaining out there yet to be discovered.

Well, this is what the Chinese government is concerned about. There may one day be too little oil to meet worldwide demand and that foreign powers, in particular the United States, will choke China. They are very concerned about the Straits of Malacca through which a lot of their oil passes.

Mr. Speaker, we ought to really be concerned about where our oil comes from, because there are some choke points, that if one of those choke points was cut off, our economy would suffer grievous damages from that. The Straits of Hormuz are one of these. Just mining those straits by terrorists or sinking a single supertanker in there would probably shutdown oil through the Straits of Hormuz for a number of months, and 40 percent of all the world's oil moves through the Straits of Hormuz. Of course, it would not be the United States that was affected by that, it would be all of the great industrial powers.

I have here a copy of Fortune Magazine, July 25, that is the most recent one. There is a big article here ``Why China Scares Big Oil.'' The Chinese company that is looking to buy UNOCAL is called CNOOC. This is their offshore oil company. We have a new word coined for them, I saw it the other day, called CNOOCered, that China is now buying or looking to buy this billing oil field and lock up reserves of oil that both we and they need.

The next chart that I want to show, Mr. Speaker, is a schematic one, but I think it shows very well the challenge that we face. I mentioned that the production of oil had been increasing at about 2 percent a year. This curb that we show here is a 2 percent exponential growth rate, and then it falls off after it reaches a peak down the other side.

Now, of course, by choosing different scales for the abscissa and the ordinate, you can make this a very spread out curve, as we have shown here, or you can make it a very sharp curve, if you make the scale bigger and the scale on the bottom smaller. But it is still a 2 percent growth rate, and notice it keeps going up and up.

The curve on top here is the rate at which we have been using oil. Of course, up until this point in history, we have used all the oil that has been produced, and there has been enough to fuel everybody's economy, so the oil we used matched the oil we produced.

By if in fact we are reaching peak oil, as many of the experts in the field suspect, then there will be a leveling out of the supply of oil, but the demand for oil, unless everybody is interested in conservation and efficiency, the demand for oil should keep going up.

Now, there is a suggestion by many experts that we are probably at this point. Maybe we haven't peaked yet, although one of the major experts in this area, a professor at Cornell University, says that the peak is going to occur on Thanksgiving day of this year.

It is going to occur a little before or after that. Even if it is 10 years after that, Mr. Speaker, it is not going to make a lot of difference. Because let us look at the scale here.

We mentioned before that if you have a growth rate, exponential growth rate of 2 percent, that doubles in 35 years. This point on the graph is half as high as this point on the graph. So that period of time, time is on the abscissa here, that period of time is 35 years, and you see that about 17\1/2\ years before you reach peak, the curve starts to level out and you are having a discrepancy between the amount of oil that you would like to use, that is demand, and the amount of oil that is available to use.

Well, if in fact we are at that point, then this explains the $60 a barrel oil. There is some evidence that the high price at the gas pump is reducing demand a little. I do not see any less SUVs and pickup trucks on the road with one person on it, but there is a waiting line for buying any of the hybrids.

Mr. Speaker, I have been driving a hybrid now since 2000. We have 90,000 miles on it. It has performed very well. We get an honest 45 miles per gallon. We bought the first one in Maryland and the first one in Congress. Now to buy a hybrid, whether it is an SUV or just a sedan hybrid, there are, for many of them, pretty long waiting periods.

If in fact this is where we are worldwide now, in order to avoid the kind of a consequence that Matt Savinar referenced when he started his article by saying ``Dear reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon,'' if we are going to avoid that kind of a consequence, we have got to do two things right now, Mr. Speaker.

The first thing that we have to do is to use even less oil than is under this blue curve, because we cannot use all the oil in our present economy or there will be none left to make the big investments that we are going to have to make in the alternatives as we transition from the age of oil to the alternatives. We are going to have to reduce our demand even below this point so that we have something to invest.

I might point out, Mr. Speaker, that we, the world and the United States, have blown 25 years. We knew very well in 1980 we were already 10 years down Hubbert's peak. The United States was producing meaningfully less oil than we were 10 years before. We had peaked 10 years ago. Ronald Reagan knew that when he came to office. He knew the problem, but he certainly did not have the right to suggestion to the problem. His presumption was that there was essentially for at least present purposes an infinite amount of oil out there and all we needed to do was give the American producer the incentive to explore more, give them a better profit motive, and he would go out and drill more. And we did that.

I have a chart, I did not bring this evening, but it shows the frequency of drilling. We drilled a whole lot more wells, but it did not help because we did not find much more oil because we pretty much found all the oil there was to find in the United States by that time.

But we are going to have to, worldwide, reduce the amount of energy that we are using so that we have some to invest. We should have started these investments at least 25 years ago when we knew that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. If he was right about the United States, Mr. Speaker, why should he not be right about the world? There should have been a very good reason that we just ignored what he said and relegated him to the lunatic fringe and kept on using oil as if there was no end to oil.

So we now have blown 25 years. I have used an analogy in talking about this, it is a plane that is flying across the Atlantic. They notice when they are well out there that they do not have enough fuel to get to the other side. As a matter of fact, they do not

have enough fuel to turn around and come home. They have passed the point of no return.

For perhaps 30 years now I have been telling audiences that we will pass the point of no return. We will come to that point where there is not enough readily available, high quality oil in the world to both sustain our present economies and make the investments we are going to have to make in the alternatives if we are going to transition.

What would you do if you were in a plane crossing the Atlantic and you have passed the point of no return? Well, you would jettison all the luggage, and then you would make some assessments, am I going to make it to the other side. I cannot make it to the other side.

What would you then do? Ask half the passengers to jump overboard so you can make it to the other side?

We are now in a situation, Mr. Speaker, where if we, and I mean the world, but since we in the United States use 25 percent of the world's energy, whether we like it or not, we have a leadership position and we have got to take a leadership role in this. What should we do?

Well, the first thing to do is an enormous effort at conservation so we reduce our demand, so that we have something to invest. We need to make big investments of money, let us not worry about money, because we just borrow that from our kids and grandkids without their permission. But there are two things we have to make investments of. One of those is time, and the other is energy.

Mr. Speaker, we are running very short on both time and energy to make the investments that we need to make.

The next chart shows the alternatives that we face. There are some finite resources out there. There are the tar sands up in Canada, the oil shales in our Midwest, coal, and we will come to that in a few minutes. Some people say do not worry about energy, we have a world supply of coal out there to last 500 years. That is not true. At current use rates it will last 250 years. We will come to that in a few minutes.

Nuclear fission. We get 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, every fifth house and every fifth business would be dark if we did not have nuclear power. We have never had a death, we have never had a serious accidents. I live very near Three Mile Island. There was nothing serious that happened then. It was blown up in the press. We got through that with proper design. It was all contained. There was really no big problem.

I want to spend a little time, a few moments talking about each of these.

I am going to Canada, I have been invited up by the Canadians to see what they call their oil sands, others call them tar, because it is really very tarry. The way this oil and gas is produced we believe was that a very long time ago when the Earth was much warmer because it was subtropical and tropical climate up in Prudhoe Bay and ANWR, there were lakes, fresh water lakes, everywhere, with lots of life growing in it, and at the end of the season the life would die and fall to the bottom. Then there would be rains which would carry sediment in from the shores and it would cover this organic material, it was decaying on the bottom there, and this happened year after year. And then upheavals of the big plates that the crust of the Earth floats on, and these could be buried under large rock domes. And when you have a rock dome, like a lid over it, that will trap the volatiles that come off the oil, that is where we get gas.

But when you have the oil very close to the surface, and in our Western United States and in Canada, there was never these big upheavals that submerged it way down so it was covered by rock and so forth.

So the volatiles have all gone out of this, and instead of being oil and some gas trapped with it or above it, all the volatiles are gone now, so it is real sticky, tarry stuff. Out in California, these tar pits out there have some ancient animals that were trapped in those and we can find a lot of fossils there. But it takes a lot of energy to get this oil out of the ground. It will not flow. They need to do one of 2 things. Drill 2 wells side-by-side, eventually make them horizontal, pump steam into the upper well that softens the oil, and it now flows down and is picked up by the lower well and you can pump it out. Or, you can simply mine it and put it in a vessel and heat it up, and that is maybe more economical as far as heat is concerned but, of course, you have to spend all the energy mining it.

Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether this is a net energy winner or loser. I know they are producing oil up there at $30 a barrel. That sounds great when it is selling for $60 a barrel. But I also hear that more energy from gas is going in to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. Now, there could be better ways of doing it.

But the point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is that there are many people who tell us, do not worry about energy, because when the conventional oil is gone, we have this nonconventional oil, and there is more oil in the tar sands and in the oil shales than there is in all of the Middle East. That may or may not be true. But even if it is true, Mr. Speaker, and it takes more energy to get the oil out than you get out of the oil, then in terms of energy balance, unless the oil is a higher quality than the energy you are putting in, why would you want to do it, if you are putting more energy in than you get out of it. Now, hopefully, we will have processes that will be energy positive. But at least a number, several experts now believe that the processes we are using are energy deficient. It is a negative energy balance.

By the way, we seldom talk about energy balance when we are talking about exploiting these energy resources. We are always talking about profit and profitability. Now, if the gas is there and the gas is cheap, what does it matter if you are using more gas energy than you get out of the oil you get, because the gas is there and it is hard to transport. When you get the oil, it is easier to transport; put it in a pipe and it is a liquid and move it to gas, you have to liquefy it under very cold temperatures and high pressure, or move it as a gas and you cannot move much mass through a pipe when you are moving it as a gas. So I just caution that there may or may not be a lot of finite resources there that are usable. With coal, we have a chart in a few minutes that will show us something about coal. We really do need to look at fission and fusion. Fusion, of course, if we get that, we are home free. But hoping to solve our national, international energy problems by counting on fusion is a little bit, Mr. Speaker, like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial problems by winning the lottery. It would be real nice if it happened, and I think the odds are probably roughly the same. I support all the money that this technology can use, because if we get there, we are home free, but boy, I surely would not bet the ranch that we are going to get there, at least in time to avoid the crunch that may be coming.

Well, we really do need to look at nuclear fission. There are 2 kinds of fission. We use only one in this country, that is the light water reactor. There is not an infinite supply of fission or uranium in the world. If everybody cranked up their nuclear fission, we would fairly shortly run out of uranium. At current use rates, it will last a very long time. But as we run down on these conventional fossil fuels, we are going to be turning to some of these other sources. We saw from the previous chart, exponential growth rates are just incredible.

If you run out of fission uranium, you still can have efficient electricity from nuclear, but now it is breeder reactors. As the name implies, they produce more fuel than they use, but they also produce a lot of potential problems with enrichment and transporting and bomb grade material that might be more readily available to terrorists and so forth. So these are all issues we need to look at.

But once we have gone through these, and these are all finites, except for the fusion and breeder reactors, and they come with uncertainties and big problems; then we come to the real renewables: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy. My goodness, the moon lifts the whole ocean about 2 feet. Mr. Speaker, take a bucket of water and lift it 2 feet, enormous amount of energy in lifting the ocean 2 feet. But we have great difficulty in harnessing that energy because it is so dispersed. There is an old axiom that

says energy power to be effective must be concentrated. And unless you are a fiord in Scandinavia where the tides are 60 feet high because they are funneled in, we have great difficulty in capturing ocean energy.

But there is other kinds of ocean energy. There is the thermal gradients between the deep cold water and the more shallow warm water. There are some entrepreneurs out there that are working, and it will not help us, by the way, to get meaningful energy from that, unless you live in Key West, because this is only going to be effective probably down in that part of the world, that much above and that much below the equator.

Then there are the agricultural resources, soy diesel, biodiesel, methanol, ethanol, biomass. I was very enthusiastic about these, and today I saw, I guess it was a couple of days ago, an article which distressed me a little. A group of scientists out in California at Stanford and at Berkeley published an article saying that it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you will get out of the gallon of ethanol. Now, others say that they use antiquated data and that really is not true, that you might get a little net energy out of producing ethanol anyway; after you produce the ethanol, there is still something left in the corn. All the fat is there and all the protein is there, and you can eat that or feed the chickens and pigs and then eat the chickens and pigs.

But the point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is that if we are going to solve this problem, we at least have to focus on what the facts are. We cannot start to have a rational discussion about how to solve the problem until we agree on the facts. There is no agreement that, as a matter of fact, you can actually get energy out of the tar sands and the oil shales. Some people believe that will always be negative. Some people believe that the ethanol is negative. It may be positive. I am going to show a chart in a few minutes from our Department of Energy that shows that it is slightly positive. I am told that is wildly optimistic, and this article that just appears says that it is, in fact, negative.

Another caution on energy from these agricultural products. We are barely able to maintain the quality of our soils by leaving all of the agricultural waste on the soil. If you take that organic material off to make energy from it, you are removing humus from the soil, we call that tilth, and if you remove enough of that humus, you have removed much of the ability of the soil to produce crops.

Until we learn to do no-till farming, we are losing the battle of maintaining our topsoil. It was increasingly ending up in the center of our country in the Mississippi Delta and, in the east here, into our lakes and streams and so forth. So although there are some opportunities from agriculture for energy, I would caution, Mr. Speaker, that in terms of the enormous amounts of energy that we need to get, this is going to contribute, it is going to contribute only marginally.

Let me give my colleagues a couple of little illustrations of the energy density in fossil fuels. The energy density in one barrel of oil, the refined product, 42 gallons, of which you can buy at the pump today for about, what, $100, 42 gallons of gas at the present rate, about $100; that energy is the energy that would be produced by 12 people, Mr. Speaker, working full-time for you for one year. That is the energy density in these fossil fuels. They have been such cheap slaves. We have become addicted to this energy. Just like the cocaine addict, we are addicted to this cheap energy.

Let me give another example, Mr. Speaker. If you go out this weekend and you work really hard in your yard all day, I will get more physical work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. So in terms of fossil fuels, Mr. Speaker, you are worth less than 25 cents a day in energy output. Now, that is the challenge that we have. What are we going to come up with that has anything like the quantity and the energy density of these fossil fuels?

Just one word about waste of energy. We really need to be doing that. There is a great facility up in Dickerson, Maryland, I am proud to have it next to my church, and they burn trash and you would never know it, it looks like an office building. You ought to go up and see it. They are burning trash. We do not need to fill the gullies, or more than gullies, because the landfills become more than a fill, it becomes a mountain. We really need to be getting what energy we can from that.

Just a word about hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. There is no place you can go to get hydrogen. The only way to get hydrogen is to make it, using more energy to make it than you will ever get out of the hydrogen. Well, we say gee, why all this fuss about the hydrogen economy? The reason, Mr. Speaker, is that hydrogen is a really nice fuel once you have it. It burns very cleanly. Water is the by-product. And you can use it in a fuel cell which has at least twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine.

Please think of hydrogen as a really neat battery. It takes energy from one place, like a nuclear power plant that produces electricity, I cannot put that electricity in my truck, I can put it in batteries, but the batteries do not have much energy density. You fill up your car with batteries and they will take you 50 miles. That is all you can get from it. But I can put the hydrogen in there and it has a lot of energy. So please think of it as a battery, as a convenient way of hauling energy from one place to another.

It is no solution for our energy crisis. It is a nice way to take energy from something nasty and dirty like coal and put it in a form that is really convenient and clean to use in another place.

The next chart shows us how we got here, Mr. Speaker, and this is a really interesting chart. This goes back to the history of the world, and this relates just to the United States, that it mirrors what happened in the rest of the world. The brown one on the bottom here is energy from wood and, by the way, we still get a fair amount of energy from wood. But primarily, in those industries that use a lot of wood like the timber industry and the paper industry, and they have by- products which they burn and they get energy from that; but notice that leveled out, and then we discovered coal. The industrial revolution stuttered a little, you can see it here, with coal, and then we found oil and gas. Look what happened. Over on the ordinate here is the quadrillions of BTUs. Look at the energy density, the quantity of energy that we got from gas and oil.

Now, if we are going to look at something to replace these conventional sources of energy, the next chart shows us the qualities that these replacements have to have. We are looking for two things. One, we are looking for something which is really neat and easy to use. That is on the bottom here. Economic effectiveness in transport, something really neat and easy to use. And on the ordinate here, we are looking at something that you do not pay too much for, and this is called the energy profit ratio. The giant oil fields are about 60 to 1. We do not have any of those. They are in Saudi Arabia. The giant oil fields are about 60 to 1. You put in $1, as an example, and you get out $60. Well, we do not have any of those.

Here is our 1970 oil fields in the United States, still really neat in terms of its effectiveness and quality, but energy profit ratio, much lower. Here we are in 1985. I do not know where we are; we are down now near zero in 2005. And we look at some of the other photovoltaics. Here they are in 2005, here they are in 1995, getting better. They will never move this way, because they are just stuck on the roof of your house or out in the field or something, but they can move up here as they get more and more efficient, and they are getting more efficient. We do not show wind generators here. They are pretty good. We can now produce electricity at about 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Here is coal. It is no good at all in terms of effectiveness for transport; big and dirty and bulky, but the profit, energy profit ratio is up about here. That will come down, by the way. It is coming down, because coal is getting harder and harder to get.

The next chart shows us a number of things that we might get energy from, and it shows, this is energy density is really what it shows.

And natural gas you see is very high here. Become aviation fuel and naptha

and petrol. This is automotive gasoline and diesel and crude oil and ethanol. Notice ethanol is way down, compared to the gas and oil and things like that. Then it is downhill from there.

Coke and black coal and wood and dung. Many people heat their homes with dung in other parts of the world. Baled straw, brown coal, a very poor quality coal and domestic refuse. There is something in domestic refuse. You may as well use it.

The next chart shows us something really interesting. I could have shown one for the world, which would have shown the average person in Europe using half the energy that the average American uses. And you would be hard pressed to argue that they do not live as well as we live.

This is a really interesting one. It shows energy used for the United States as a whole and for California. And notice that the people in California, and we have a lot of Members from California, and they are not going to tell you they are living less well than we do. But they are getting by on about two-thirds of the energy of the average in the rest of the country. This is because of many of the regulations that they have in California.

I put this up, Mr. Speaker, to show that life can be good with less energy. You do not have to live poorly because you are using less energy. The Europeans, I see as many smiles on their faces as I see on faces in this country. And the average Californian seems to me to be as well off and as happy as the average American.

The next chart is a really interesting one and it gets to one of the things that I was talking about previously, that is the top part of the chart here. And this shows the energy you get when you start with crude oil. And it takes 1.23 BTUs to get 1 million PTUs of gasoline. Obviously you have got to use some energy to pump it and haul it and refine it and take it to the service station and so forth. And it is about what, 1/5 of the total you take to do that.

This is what the Department of Energy says is the energy balance for ethanol. I have been using this because they gave it to me. And I had an expert the other day tell me that is wildly optimistic and it is maybe not even half that good. But even with this, what I am told is a very optimistic projection, you have .74 million BTUs to get 1 million. Now of course you have got a lot of energy from the sun. That is why you get more than you are putting in.

But others, I mentioned the article previously where they say that it is really a net energy loss. And again, Mr. Speaker, we cannot really have an effective discussion on this until we can agree on the facts at a very minimum. And I think we in the Congress, we in the Federal Government, have a responsibility. At a very minimum we need to agree on the facts before we can start talking about solutions.

The bottom here is a really interesting one. It shocked me, and I am a farmer. This is the energy input in producing a bushel of corn. And notice the big, almost 50 percent of it here says nitrogen. Almost half the energy in producing a bushel of corn comes from nitrogen. And that is because we are producing nitrogen from natural gas. Before that the only source was barnyard manures and guano. That is gone. We mined the guano. If we wait 10,000 years we will have some more.

All these others are energy largely from fossil fuels. Mine the potash. Mine the lime. This is diesel fuel, gasoline, liquid gas, electricity, natural gas, cost of work was a lot of oil.

A lot of the chemicals we use in agriculture come from oil. You are almost literally eating oil, Mr. Speaker, when you eat that food on your plates because of the energy that went into producing it.

The next chart shows coal and, you know, do not worry, we have got this big supply of coal. At current use rates it will last about 250 years. That is true. But if you have to start ramping up the use because you are running short of other fuels, at a 2 percent growth rate you are down to about what, 85 years?

But I cannot put a trunkful of coal in my car and go down the road and have to convert it to gas or oil. And once I do that and the energy to do that, now I am down to about 50 years. So we do not have a surfeit of coal out there. We must be very careful how we husband these finite resources to make the transition.

The last chart I want to show is a really interesting one. And I want to use a little analogy here that I think helps us understand where we are and the challenge we have. This shows our total energy and where it comes from, 23 percent from coal, 8 percent from nuclear power, electrical, 30 percent from petroleum, 24 percent from natural gas. If you add up these three big ones, natural gas, petroleum and coal, you get 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels.

We are a little bit like the couple that has just gotten married and they have gotten a big inheritance from their grandparents, and they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of what they spend comes from their grandparents inheritance, and only 15 percent of it comes from their income.

Now the grandparents inheritance will not last forever. And so they are going to have to transition from the present lifestyle they have, where 85 percent comes from their grandparents inheritance and only 15 percent is interest income.

Our income is nuclear power, 8 percent, and then renewable energy, 7 percent. And we have blown up the renewable energy here to show where that comes from. Solar. And that is going to have to be a big source of future energy when we have run out of these fossil fuels.

I want to make the point that we are not running out of oil. Half of what was ever there is still there, Mr. Speaker. There will be a lot of oil for a long time, but not at the quantities that we are used to using it, with ever diminishing quantities, with an ever greater demand in the world for oil.

This 1 percent solar, that is 1 percent of seven. That is .07 percent of our current energy comes from solar. Mr. Speaker, it is a long way from .07 percent to the quantities of energy we are going to have to get from somewhere else when we are running down Hubbert's peak and running out of these fossil fuels.

Here is wood. We probably cannot increase that much unless we stop building houses because we are barely able to maintain our forests now. We are using a lot of wood energy, but that, as I mentioned earlier, is in the timber industry, the wood industry and in the paper industry they are burning waste product. 8 percent of 7 percent comes from waste, 1 percent from wind. Wind has got to be a big sorts of energy. .07 percent of our current supply comes from wind. Conventional hydroelectric. That is a big part. What is it, more than half of all the renewables.

Mr. Speaker, we are tapped out on that. There are no more rivers we can dam. As a matter of fact, they are now breaching some of the dams so that the fish can move up to spawn. So we are not going to grow anything here. We probably cannot grow much in wood. We ought to use more waste. We can really do something more there. But we are going to have to count on solar and on wind.

Alcohol. That may or may not be a positive. We mentioned that previously. That is still a very small amount, .07 percent.

Geothermal. There are some opportunities in the West to get energy from the deep molten core of our earth. We need to be exploiting those.

If you go to Iceland Mr. Speaker, there is not a single chimney in the whole country because they do not need to burn anything because they have geothermal energy.

Mr. Speaker, the challenge that we have now is to reduce the amount of energy we are using so that there is a surplus of the available energy to make investments in the alternatives that we are going to have to turn to as we run down Hubbert's peak.

I think that our country, Mr. Speaker, needs something like a melding of the Manhattan Project, the urgency of the Manhattan Project and the commitment that we had in putting a man on the moon. Short of that, Matt Savinar could be correct when he said, ``Dear Reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.''

I would encourage you, Mr. Speaker, to pull up his article and read it. It is really very sobering.

One of the great attributes of being in America is that we are entrepreneurs. We do very poorly at avoiding crises. We do very well at responding to a crisis. We now are approaching

a crisis. I think the Federal Government and the Congress needs to take the lead in challenging our people, our entrepreneurs, our creative spirit, to address this problem. There may be solutions that I have not dreamed of here. But I think if you look through all the potential sources of energy in the world, there are not many that we have missed here.

This is a big challenge. There is nothing like a challenge like this to sharpen the intellect and give you a feeling of really doing something worthwhile.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to see this not as a problem but as a challenge. And if every American addresses that appropriately, I think we will weather the storm.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 55 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 20, 2005, at 10 a.m.