Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, there have been a number of articles in the recent press relative to stem cell research, with particular reference to embryonic stem cell research. I thought it might be well in starting this little discussion to take a look at what we mean by stem cells.

I have here a chart which shows in very abbreviated form the development of an early embryo. It starts out with the zygote, which is the fertilized egg; and then it skips a couple of stages of development, and it goes through the blastocyst, and then it goes to the gastrula. By the time the embryo gets to the gastrula stage, the cells have already differentiated to the place that we have three different kinds of somatic stem cells. This is the ectoderm, and the mesoderm, and the endoderm, and then those very specialized cells, which in the female will be the germ cells in the ovary, the ova, and in the male will be the millions and millions of sperm that are in the gonads of the male.

If we look back, Madam Speaker, at these stem cells that are present here in the gastrula, where we have these three, as we call germ layers, we see the ectoderm can further differentiate into skin and nervous system and some of the pigment cells in our body; and then the mesoderm, the middle layer, that differentiates into what is most of us by mass and weight, cardiac muscle, our big skeletal muscles, the bone, the smooth muscle, all of our blood, and the blood is an organ, it happens to be a liquid organ that is dispersed through the body; and then the endoderm. This is much more limited in volume and in variety, but still very important. The pancreatic cells, the thyroid cells, the lining of the gut, the lining of the lung and so forth.

It might be worth just a moment, Madam Speaker, to take a look at our next chart, which kind of puts this in context. We started out with the zygote, which is the fertilized egg here, and we ended up with the inner cell mass with these three germ layers. What we show here are all the stages that were omitted in that first chart. This is one-half, as the little diagram here in the upper left shows, of the reproductive tract of a female. It shows the ovary on one side and the fallopian tube, with the funnel-like opening here called the infundibulum. Then it shows the fallopian tube on down to the uterus itself.

What it shows, Madam Speaker, is that fertilization takes place well up in the fallopian tube, and that begins day one. And then as the egg slowly moves down the tube, it splits first into two cells, then four cells, and then eight cells, and then the larger variety of cells, and finally where you have the inner cell mass and then to the gastrula.

There are two kinds of stem cells, adult stem cells, and those are derivatives of the cells that we showed in the previous chart. For instance, in the humans we have adult stem cells in our bone marrow. These are cells which are differentiated to the point that they will produce a limited variety of cells, but still undifferentiated to an extent because these stem cells in the bone marrow can produce red blood cells and polymorphonuclear leukocytes, part of the white blood cells, and the thrombocytes, those are the cells, the platelets as we call them, that are associated with clotting. And there are a number of adult stem cells similar to that that still retain some of the capability for producing more than just one kind of cell.

We have been working with adult stem cells medically now for more than 3 decades, and there have been a number of medical applications, treatment of humans that have been made with adult stem cells. But just because they are what they are, Madam Speaker, a great number of people believe that there should be more potential from the embryonic stem cells simply because they can produce any and all of the tissues of the body.

Since we have been working with embryonic stem cells for now just a little over 6 years, we have not had the opportunities for medical applications we have had in adult stem cells, but this does not dim the hopes of the scientific community and the medical community that ultimately there may be more and better applications of embryonic stem cells to treatment of diseases than adult stem cells, simply because of what they are, puripotent cells retaining the ability to produce any and all of the tissues of the body.

It is possible, Madam Speaker, that this characteristic, which makes them so potentially attractive and exciting, may be uncontrollable. They may be so bent on dividing that we cannot control their division. They may end up producing tumors and cancer-like growths in the organism in which you put them.

But if that can be controlled, the medical community and the researchers associated with it believe there is potential for enormous applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell research. We have now had 58 applications of adult stem cells in helping to treat some of the diseases.

What are the diseases that could be treated with stem cells? Ordinarily, one thinks that the greatest potential for the use of stem cells would result from use in diseases from tissue deficiency rather than diseases that result from some organism, although if there is an infection in the body and a tissue is damaged, there is the hope that it might be replaced with stem cell application. There are a number of diseases that the scientific community and the general public believe might be amenable to treatment with stem cells, particularly embryonic stem cells.

Diabetes is one of those. This is the most costly disease in our country. It costs more to treat the diabetics in our country than any other single disease. I have these come through my office. Particularly heartrending are the little children that come there, 5 and 6 years old some of them, such brittle juvenile diabetics that they have an implanted pump and they have to prick their finger or some part of their body a number of times a day to monitor the glucose level so that just the right amount of insulin can be injected to control this.

This insulin is produced by cells called island of Langerhan cells. Dr. Langerhan was the German scientist that described them. And they look like little eyelets because they are simply distributed through the tissue of the pancreas. The pancreas is a very large gland at the very beginning of the small intestine that secretes all of the different kinds of digestive enzymes so that fats, carbohydrates, and proteins all are digested using the enzymes secreted by the pancreas.

I have no idea why nature placed the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. They could be placed anywhere. With these stem cell applications if we could create islet tissue, they could be placed in the person. It could be placed in the groin, under their arm, under the skin, anywhere. It does not have to be in the pancreas. This islet tissue could then make insulin which would cure diabetes. When you give insulin to the diabetic, it delays progression of the disease, but it does not cure it. A person with juvenile diabetes faces the prospect that they probably will have a shortened life, problems with their vision as the vascular bed in the back of the eye breaks down, and they may

have problems with circulation in their extremities, particularly in the feet where there is some difficulty getting blood back uphill to the heart.

As many people in this country know through relatives and friends, this results frequently in sores that do not heal and results in gangrene, so the toes or a foot may need to be taken off. Diabetes is one of the diseases that is very attractive as a potential for use of stem cells, because if we could just produce islet tissue, we could cure diabetes, the most expensive disease that we have.

Another disease is multiple sclerosis, and if impaired cells could be replaced through stem cell therapy, then the person could walk again.

Lou Gehrig's disease, I remember my grandmother was tripping and falling, and they did not know why. It took them quite awhile back, this was a number of years ago, to determine she had Lou Gehrig's disease. I remember as a teenager going to her bedside. She was maintained in the home. She slowly deteriorated, losing first one muscle function and then another. Finally, at the end, the only muscle function she had remaining was the ability to blink her eyes. It was once for yes and two for no, as I remember. She could not swallow and had indicated she did not want to be force fed and ultimately she died from starvation with this disease.

Well, anybody who has a friend or a relative that has gone through that kind of experience has to be enthusiastic about the potential for stem cell therapy. This was a number of years ago, but if it were tomorrow or the day after tomorrow figuratively, maybe there could be stem cell therapy for my grandmother, and she would not have to have died at the relatively young age she died at.

Alzheimer's disease is another one. President Reagan died from Alzheimer's disease. Victims do not even recognize their favorite loved ones, have no memory and may wander outside and wander off.

There is a whole category of autoimmune diseases. I have a paper which lists 63 of the autoimmune diseases. By that, I mean a disease where the body gets confused as to what is the body and what is not the body.

When we are developing as embryos in our mother's womb, there are certain cells in our circulatory system called T-cells located in the lymphatic tissue, and the T-cells are imprinted with who we are because once we get out of the mother's womb, we are going to be in a hostile environment, exposed to bacteria and viruses, and so it is important that the body knows what it is so the defense mechanisms in the body can be marshaled to eject the intruder.

These T-cells identify what is you and what is not you, and they alert some of the specialized cells in our white blood cell system so they are attracted to the site, and they eject, they may consume, they eject the intruder.

There are 63 distinct autoimmune diseases. For some reason, the body gets confused and the autoimmune system gets confused and starts attacking your joints, for instance. We know that disease as arthritis.

I remember my first real introduction to this big list of autoimmune diseases was a secretary I had, a very vibrant young lady whose life was really, really changed because she had lupus. There are many Americans who have family or friends who have lupus, and lupus was one of the first autoimmune diseases that was discovered.

There is a controversy going on over the potential for embryonic stem cell medical applications and adult stem cell medical applications. We have been working for more than 3 decades with adult stem cells, and our very able medical scientific community has been able to develop a number of applications that can cure or at least lessen the severity of disease using adult stem cells.

Since we have been working with embryonic stem cells for only a brief period of time, we do not have any direct applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell therapy, but that does not dim the enthusiasm of the medical community because they believe that the potential there ought to be greater.

But the real problem here is that up until this time the only way that we can get embryonic stem cells is to destroy the embryo. The scientists go into the inner cell mass stage. That is this stage here, day five. Of course, what we are doing now in the laboratory is not done in the uterus. All of this is done in a petri dish. The in vitro is in glass. In vivo means life. The embryo is destroyed at the inner cell mass stage, and cells are taken to produce a stem cell line.

About 4 years ago, this produced a real dilemma for the President who, like all of us, has family and friends who have one or more of these diseases that could be potentially ameliorated or cured by embryonic stem cell application. Yet the President knew the only way we were presently getting embryonic stem cell lines was by destroying embryos. He, as I am, is a strong pro-life advocate and the President had a problem with taking one life because that embryo produced in the laboratory in surplus and in vitro fertilization had the potential when implanted in a receptive mother to become a baby and the President's problem was that he had a moral problem with taking one life with the hope of helping another.

While the President was wrestling with this problem and what to do about it, there was a briefing at the National Institutes of Health for Members of the Congress and for their staff. I went out there to that briefing.

As the next chart shows, when we were talking about the potential for embryonic stem cell lines, I remembered my training of more than 50 years ago when I got my doctorate at the University of Maryland and had a course in advanced embryology and then went on to teach medical school for 4 years and postgraduate medicine doing basic research at the National Institutes of Health. I remembered what everybody knows, because they had the course in advanced embryology it was in my mind, that whenever we have identical twins what has really happened is that half of the cells have been taken from the early embryo. The half that is taken becomes a perfectly normal baby, and the half that is left becomes a perfectly normal baby.

Madam Speaker, one is a clone. When one thinks about cloning, remember that Mother Nature or God, to whomever you want to subscribe it, has been cloning for a very long time. Now these early embryos can split either at the two-cell stage or at the inner cell mass stage or anywhere in between, presumably.

We know at least at those two extremes because we can tell by how they present at birth when they split. If they share an amnion, they split at the two cell stage. If they have separate amnions, they probably split at the inner cell mass stage.

So knowing that half of the cells could be taken away from an early embryo without harming the embryo, unless you think identical twins are somehow deficient, and I have talked with a number of identical twins, and I have not talked with any of them who thought they were less a person or deficient because half of the cells were taken away to produce the other identical twin.

It occurred to me that you ought to be able to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo to develop a stem cell line from that early embryo. I mentioned this to the researchers at NIH, and they said, yes, that is theoretically possible to do that.

Just after that, I was at an event and the President was there and when I went through the line, I mentioned my visit at NIH and the response that they had given to my question. A few days later, I had a call from Carl Rove and the President had turned the pursuit of this suggestion over to Carl Rove. Carl told me that he talked to the people at NIH, and they tell me what you have suggested is not possible.

Carl, I said either they are funning you or they misunderstand you, because these are the same people that can take a single cell and take the nucleus out of that cell and put another nucleus in it. That is what they did with Dolly the sheep and the large number of clones that have been produced since then.

I said, of course, if they can take the nucleus out of a cell and put another nucleus in it, they can certainly take a cell or two out of what is a relatively big embryo. So he went back and asked them again and then called back and said they are still telling me they cannot do that. So a few days later, the President came out with his executive order.

Madam Speaker, you may remember this was kind of a decision like Solomon might have made. Obviously, from the potential efficacy of embryonic stem cell research and medical applications, it is very desirable that we do that.

On the other hand, if the only way to get embryonic stem cells is by destroying an embryo, then you are left with the quandary of, is it really acceptable to destroy one life with the hope that you are going to help another?

So the President came to a decision that I think represented great wisdom. He recognized that a number of embryos had already been killed, destroyed to establish stem cell lines, and since you cannot turn back the hands of time to change that, these embryos were gone, the stem cell lines were there, and so the President, recognizing the potential for embryonic stem cell research, and being concerned that you should not take one life with the hope of helping another, wisely I think, said we could spend Federal dollars on any exploration we chose with the existing stem cells lines, and he thought there were about 60. There have never been 60, but he was told there were something like 60 stem cell lines, and Federal dollars could be used for research on those lines, but no Federal dollars could be used for developing or destroying any additional embryos for stem cell lines.

This was about 4 years ago, and as we knew, the scientific community knew, as I knew because of my background, these stem cell lines would eventually run out. Stem cell lines, like people, age. For reasons that we may not understand, they do not last forever. Those stem cell lines, Madam Speaker, are running out. We now have, I think the accepted figure is 22 stem cell lines left, and all of these are contaminated with mouse feeder cells. This is the result of a technique which is used to facilitate the replication of these cells in the tissue culture, and they are now all contaminated with mouse feeder cells so that although they are perfectly good for research and a lot of research is being done, they are not good for medical application because you would not want to put the cells contaminated with mouse feeder cells in a human.

So what now? One of the potential solutions to this problem is included in H.R. 810, the Castle-DeGette bill; and the argument made in this bill is that there are about 400,000 surplus embryos out there from in vitro fertilization. You see, to make sure that the doctor is going to have a good embryo or two or three to implant in a mother, because they do not all take, he will produce more embryos than he will probably need. Then he will look at them under the microscope and pick the strongest looking of those embryos and may put two or three or so in the mother.

One of our Members, the Rohrabachers, are now the proud parents of triplets from in vitro fertilization. All of them grew and so they are now the proud parents of these very happy and healthy little babies. Since there are 400,000 surplus embryos out there that are frozen, the argument is, and this is the argument of the bill, that since these embryos, at least many of these embryos, realistically most of these embryos will ultimately be discarded, they will not stay frozen for 49 years there, they will not last forever, and by and by they will be discarded, and so the argument is, why should medicine not benefit from cells, from embryos that are going to be discarded anyhow? That to many people is a compelling argument. It was a compelling argument to a majority of people in the House, and now they are considering this bill in the Senate.

But to those in the pro-life community, there is another way of looking at these embryos. I am at the microscope and there is an embryo under the microscope there. That embryo could become a snowflake baby. More than 100 times parents who do not have an ovum, cannot get pregnant any other way, have adopted these surplus embryos and we have more than 100 of what we call snowflake babies. The embryo that I am looking at under the microscope might be adopted and that could be any one of the 400,000 embryos, and it might be the next Albert Einstein. How could I destroy an embryo that might be adopted and might be the next Albert Einstein? So this is the argument on the other side, which is why the great debate over H.R. 810.

As a result of a series of discussions with the White House and with a number of the interested groups, we have developed a bill which is called H.R. 3144, the Respect for Life Pluripotent Stem Cell Act of 2005.

Madam Speaker, I will make this short bill a part of the Record.

Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has joined us. I would like to yield to him before I go through the history of how we got to this bill and the people we talked to

and exactly what is in the bill. I thank the gentleman for joining us.

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I want to thank my colleague very much for his comments. He is very generous. I did not come to the Congress, and that was 13 years ago, until I was 66 years old; and I am very fortunate to have some prior life experiences that have permitted me to understand some opportunities here in the Congress that might not have been so obvious to others who did not have this background.

After the President came down with his executive order, I continued to meet with the folks at NIH, and I subsequently learned, by the way, I need to come back to that problem with Karl Rove and his discussion with the NIH people, and this was a typical example of failed communications. And so often we think that we are carrying on a dialogue and we are really carrying on simultaneous monologues.

However it happened, what the NIH people were telling Karl Rove was that they were not sure that they could make a stem cell line from an embryo that early. That is true. That is why in our bill we advocate animal model research rather than beginning with humans. But there is no reason we should not be able to do that.

Now, as a matter of fact, a Russian scientist working in this country, Verlinsky, says he has, in fact, done that. I have met a number of times with people from NIH. On July 20 of last year, for instance, we had an extended meeting in my office with representatives from NIH, with representatives from Health and Human Services, and with representatives from the White House.

And then, Madam Speaker, a very interesting thing happened while we were having this series of meetings with the NIH and HHS and the White House and with the outside groups. There appeared in the literature a paper, a very interesting paper, on preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And what these medical people were doing, and this was in England, the first paper came from a clinic in England, what they were doing was going into the eight-cell stage and taking a cell or two out to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis to see if the baby would have a genetic defect. And if there was no genetic defect, they implanted the remaining seven cells, sometimes six cells. And more than 600 times that went on to produce a perfectly normal baby. That is now being done in this country just outside Washington, in Virginia. A few weeks ago I spent probably a half hour or more on the phone with two of the medical scientists there who were involved in this research.

There is one potential ethical problem here, although the President's Council on Bioethics thinks it is not a problem. I would like to avoid, Madam Speaker, even the possibility of a problem. And that problem is that the cell that we take from that embryo might, under the right circumstances, become an embryo itself. The members of the President's, and I have the white paper here I am going to refer to in just a moment, Council on Bioethics think that that is not feasible. But, Madam Speaker, if we were to wait just a little later to take the cell to the inner cell mass, and I probably ought to put that chart of the uterus back up here so that I can point to what I am referring to here, in the laboratory they are going at the eight-cell stage and taking a cell or two out and doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis.

If there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells, and more than 1,000 times worldwide now, they have had a normal baby born. The argument is that that cell they take out under the right circumstances is pluripotent, totipotent at that stage probably, and could produce another embryo. To avoid that, if we just wait until the inner cell mass stage, which is the stage from which the embryonic stem cell lines are now developed when they destroy the embryo, there is no reason they cannot go into this inner cell mass and through the trophoblast and they could take out several cells then because there are a lot of cells there.

By that time we already have some differentiation. The cells in the inner cell mass are going to produce the baby. The three germ layers that we talked about at the very beginning and the cells in the trophoblast are going to produce the decidua. The decidua is the amnion and chorion, the tissues that support the baby, and we can see those starting to develop down here in day 8 and 9 when the embryo has attached itself to the wall of the uterus and the uterus grows and produces some tissues and there is a growth of this decidua here and we have the placenta, these big opposing vascular bags through which food and oxygen and CO2 and hormones and so forth are exchanged between the baby and the mother.

By the way, Madam Speaker, this is a pretty hazardous journey; and we do not know the exact percentage, but maybe less than half of all of the ova here that get fertilized actually implant in the uterus. As a matter of fact, one of the techniques for preventing conception is an IUD. They simply place a foreign object here in the uterus, and the uterus reacts to the presence of that foreign by not permitting the fertilized egg, the embryo, to implant there.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman very much for that contribution.

While we are carrying on these discussions with the White House and NIH and HHS and with the outside groups, the President's Council on Bioethics submits a white paper; and in this white paper they go over four potential techniques that might produce pluripotent stem cells, which is another way of saying the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, without destroying or harming an embryo. And what our bill does, Madam Speaker, is simply ask NIH to please explore these potentials, first of all, in animal models; and the bill gives them $15 million to begin this exploration.

I just wanted to spend just a moment talking about the four things that are in here because it may be of interest to a number of people. The first is called pluripotent stem cells derived from organismically dead embryos. Well, this says that all these embryos I had mentioned earlier, all these embryos will not live. And when an embryo is moribund, it is not going to divide anymore, then it is the equivalent of a brain dead person and there should be no problem taking cells from it like they would take organs from a brain dead person.

One might have a little question about the vitality of the cell they take from that embryo, but at least ethically if the embryo is dead or moribund, the equivalent of a brain dead person, they could take an embryo from it. The second procedure, and the next chart shows a little clip from that, is one in which, down at the bottom here, it says ``a similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett.'' This was my recommendation in 2001. And this simply says they go into an early embryo, as I have mentioned, and take out a cell without hurting the embryo because mother nature or God, whoever people think makes identical twins, has been doing this for a very long time.

Our bill simply asks the NIH to do this in animal models to make sure that it is safe and efficacious.

A third technique is called pluripotent stem cells derived from biological artifacts. This is an interesting one. And what the proposal there is that they take an ovum and they take the nucleus out of the ovum and then they take an altered nucleus out of a somatic cell.

You alter the nucleus so that you have turned off some of the genes, and then you put that nucleus inside the egg. Now, why would you do that? Because in the cytoplasm of the egg outside the nucleus of the egg, there are some factors which turn on and turn off genes and kind of control what happens inside the nucleus. So now they have turned off some genes so this thing will divide; that will never be a baby because they have kind of messed up the genetics. Well, if they can never be a baby, then maybe ethically you can take stem cells from it, and this is something that really needs to be explored.

These several techniques are all open for investigation. Oh, the fourth one of these is pluripotent stem cells by differentiation. I mentioned the differentiation of cells. That is when they decide that they are going to be just this or that, and all the cells they produce after that are just that kind of cell. Now, sometimes, you can take a cell and kind of put it in an environment where you have confused it, you have shocked it, you have done something to it, so it forgets what it was supposed to be, and it starts making cells, tissues that it would not ordinarily make in that stage of differentiation. So what our bill does is to permit the research, particularly on two of these, the nucleus transfer and the taking of cells from the early blastomere.

Our bill has received input from the White House, from the Conference of Catholic Bishops, from Right the Life communities, so there is a broad spectrum of individuals and organizations out there that are supportive of what we are doing.

In the few moments left, Madam Speaker, I would like to note that there have been a plethora of articles very recently about this, and I would like to submit these for the Record. They are not very long, and I will insert them into the Record. Here is National Geographic, July 2005. Stem cells, a big article, very good article on stem cells there. Here is a letter of May of this year from Dr. Battey who is the chief spokesman for stem cell research at the National Institutes of Health who is quite supportive of our bill and what we propose to do, and here is a very interesting op-ed piece written by Richard Doerflinger who represents the Catholic Bishops.

By the way, I need to give credit where credit is due. It was Richard Doerflinger who made the great suggestion that the first thing you do with that cell you take from the early embryo is to create a repair kit so that all during the life of that person, they will have frozen the ability to produce a new liver if they need it, islets of Langerhans, spinal cord cells, whatever they need. There is a great op-ed piece by Richard Doerflinger who explains his support for our bill. He says, Representative Bartlett and his colleagues are helping to demonstrate what has always been true: science and ethics were meant to be allies, not enemies, and this is certainly true.

Tuesday, July 12, Associated Press, Lawmakers Wary of Backup Stem Cell Bill. For those who would like to see just the Castle-DeGette bill passed, our bill, and the President, by the way, says that if that other bill gets to his desk, he will veto it. For those of us who believe that we really ought to research stem cells, we really look forward to a bill which the President can support.

Stem Cell Legislation is At Risk, July 9, Washington Post. GOP Probes Nondestructive Cell Research, Washington AP, June 29. And then just today, in Congressional Quarterly, Congress Considers Numerous Stem Cell Bills. It mentions our bill in the House, and that Bill Frist is expected to draft a related bill in the Senate.

I am very pleased, Madam Speaker, that my background has permitted me to understand some of the potential here, my experience with my grandmother, with these little diabetic kids, my profound pro-life commitment. I am very pleased that I was able to propose a potential solution that I think meets the morals and the demands of both sides of this issue.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the following articles:

Department of Health

and Human Services,

Bethesda, Maryland, May 23, 2005.

Hon. Roscoe G. Bartlett,

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Bartlett: I am pleased that Drs. Allen Spiegel and

Story Landis were able to meet with you, Mr. Otis and Mr.

Aitken during your visit to the National Institutes of Health

(NIH) last month to discuss ways to derive human embryonic

stem cells (hESCs). Drs. Spiegel and Landis were serving as

Acting Co-Chairs of the NIH Stem Cell Task Force during my

leave of absence from this position. Earlier this month, I

returned to chair the Task Force. NIH shares your enthusiasm

on the therapeutic potentials of hESC research and thank you

for your continued support of this field.

Drs. Spiegel and Landis briefed me about your April 26th

meeting. I am also aware that you have had previous meetings

with NIH officials, including myself, Lana Skirboll and

Richard Tasca, on this topic. You propose the possibility of

using a cell (or two) removed from the 8-cell stage human

embryo undergoing preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to:

(1) create a ``personal repair kit'' made up of cells removed

from the embryo and stored for future use; and (2) for

deriving human embryonic stem cell lines.

You suggested that creating hESC lines in this manner would

avoid ethical questions surrounding the fate of a human

embryo. Live births resulting from embryos which undergo PGD

and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that this

procedure does not harm the embryo, however, there are some

reports that a percentage of embryos do not survive this

procedure. In addition, long-term studies would be needed to

determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later-

developing injury to children

born following PGD. Also, it is not known if the single cell

removed from the 8-cell stage human embryo has the capacity

to become an embryo if cultured in the appropriate

environment.

NIH is not aware of any published scientific data that has

confirmed the establishment of hESC lines from a single cell

removed from an 8-cell stage embryo. We are aware of the

published research of Dr. Yury Verlinsky in the Reproductive

Genetics Institute in Chicago that showed that a hESC line

can be derived by culturing a human morula-staged embryo

(Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2004 Vo. 9, No. 6, 623-629,

Verlinsky, Strelchenko, et al). It is also worth noting,

however, that in these experiments, the entire morula was

plated and used to derive the hESC lines. The human morula is

generally composed of 10-30 cells and is the stage that

immediately precedes the formation of the blastocyst.

At the April 26th meeting, NIH agreed that such experiments

might be pursued in animals, including non-human primates.

That is, animal experiments could be conducted to determine

whether it is possible to derive hESCs from a single cell of

the 8-cell or morula stage embryo. To date, to the best of

our knowledge no such derivations have been successful. NIH

also does not know whether these experiments have been tried

and failed in animals and/or humans and, therefore, have not

been reported in the literature. NIH agreed to explore

whether there have been any attempts to use single cells from

the 8-cell or morula stage of an animal embryo to start

embryonic stem cell lines by consulting with scientists that

are currently conducting embryo research. From these

discussions, these scientists believe it is worth attempting

experiments using a single cell from an early stage embryo or

cells from a morula of a non-human primate to establish an

embryonic stem cell line.

Of note, a recent 2003 paper from Canada shows that when

single human blastomeres are cultured from early cleavage

stage embryos, before the morula stage, that there is an

increased incidence of chromosomal abnormalities. Even with

hESCs derived from the inner cell mass of the human

blastocyst, the odds of starting a hESC line from a single

cell are long, perhaps one in 20 tries. Thus, the odds of

being able to start with a single cell from an 8-celled or

morula staged embryo are equally challenging. This would make

it difficult to accomplish the goal of establishing ``repair

kits'' and hESC lines from any single PGD embryo. (Fertil

Steril, 2003 June, 79(6):1304-11, Bielanska, et al). It is

possible, however, that improvements in technologies for

deriving and culturing hESCs may improve these odds.

NIH concludes that the possibility of establishing a stem

cell line from an 8-cell or morula stage embryo can only be

determined with additional research. NIH would welcome

receiving an investigator-initiated grant application on this

topic using animal embryos. The Human Embryo Research Ban

would preclude the use of funds appropriated under the Labor/

HHS Appropriations Act for pursuing this research with human

embryos. As with all grant applications, the proposal must be

deemed meritorious for funding by peer review and then will

be awarded research funds if sufficient funds are available.

It also bears keeping in mind that it may take years to

determine the answer.

At the April 26th meeting, you had mentioned that twins can

develop when the inner cell mass splits in the blastocyst and

forms two embryos enclosed in a common trophoblast. You asked

if cells from the inner cell mass could be safely removed

without harming the embryo. In animal studies, it has been

shown that the blastocyst can be pierced to remove cells of

the inner cell mass and the embryo appears to retain its

original form but it is not known whether the embryo will

result in the birth of a healthy baby. Since this experiment

in human embryos at either the morula or the blastocyst stage

would require evaluations of not only normal birth but also

unknown long term risks to the person even into adulthood, it

would have to be considered a very high risk and ethically

questionable endeavor. Because of the risk of harm, this

research would also be ineligible for Federal funding.

You had also asked NIH about the latest stage in

development that an embryo can be artificially implanted into

the womb. We know that infertility clinics transfer embryos

at the blastocyst stage (approximately Day 5 in human embryo

development) as well as at earlier stages.

Finally, I am providing an additional resource that was

discussed at the April meeting. I have enclosed a copy of a

recently released white paper developed by the President's

Council on Bioethics (PCB) on Alternative Sources of Human

Pluripotent Stem Cells. In this white paper, the PCB raised

many ethical, scientific and practical concerns about

alternate sources for deriving human pluripotent stem cells

without harming the embryo. Your proposal is specifically

discussed in this report.

I hope this information is helpful.

Sincerely,

James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D.,

Chairman, NIH Stem Cell Task Force and Director, National

Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Mr. Speaker, what I want to spend a few moments talking about this evening is something that will be new to most Americans. They will not have heard about this subject. Indeed, nobody knew about this until 1962; that is, no one in this country knew about it.

There was an experiment over Johnston Island out in the Pacific Ocean that was called Operation Starfish. It was part of a series of nuclear tests that were called the Fishbowl Series. This was a unique one. The others had all been at ground level or some little distance above the ground. This one was an extra-atmospheric, a detonation above the atmosphere.

Nobody knew what was going to happen. It was the first time we had detonated a nuclear weapon in a test series above the atmosphere, and there were a number of ships and airplanes and radar, theater-like, that were tracking the missile that launched this nuclear bomb and noted its explosion. The explosion occurred about 400 kilometers

above Johnston Island. That is well above the atmosphere.

Now, the Soviets have had very extensive experience with this kind of testing. This was our first and, indeed, our only experience with this. So our knowledge about this phenomenon comes from this single test, what we have learned from the Soviets and now the Russians and the number of simulations that we have done since that time.

There were no diagnostics to test the effects on Hawaii, which was about 800 miles away, because nobody expected there to be any effect there. Many of the instruments we were using for testing around Johnston Island were pegged; that is, they did not have enough capacity to register the effects that were produced by this extra-atmospheric explosion.

What happened in Hawaii may be open to some controversy, but there were some lights that went out. This was largely electrical. In those days it was not all of the electronics that we have today. A number of lights went out, and in the last couple of years, some of the evidence of what happened to that equipment was shown to a commission that I will talk about in a little bit that was set up in 2001 to investigate this phenomenon, and they submitted their report in 2004.

This phenomenon that we observed there that exceeded the capacity of the instruments at the test site, that went all the way, 800 miles away, to Hawaii, have been called electromagnetic pulse, EMP. We have learned since then that every extra-atmospheric explosion produces an EMP. You can develop a nuclear weapon, as we designed but as I understand never built and the Soviets both designed and have built, enhanced EMP weapons that limit the explosion but increased the electromagnetic effects.

What are the implications of EMP and why are we talking about it tonight? EMP could be probably the most asymmetric weapon that any adversary could use against us. By asymmetric, we mean a weapon that has a relatively small impact in terms of its local effect but could have an enormous impact on our military or our society because of its effect.

There are a number of asymmetric weapons. Terrorism is an asymmetric weapon. It does not cost them much money or take very big explosives, but it has a big effect on us. 9/11, of course, was a major asymmetric attack on us because those few people in those four airplanes have cost us billions and billions of dollars and totally changed our society. This is an example of an asymmetric attack.

Most Americans will not know about electromagnetic pulse and what it could do to our military, to our society, but I will guarantee my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that all of our potential enemies know everything about EMP. In a little bit, I will show you some quotes from countries that could be our enemy that will indicate that they know all about EMP.

In 1999, I was sitting in a hotel room in Vienna, Austria. We were there near the end of the Kosovo conflict. There were eleven Members of Congress there, several staff members, three members of the Russian Duma and a personal representative, Slobodan Milosevic. We developed a framework agreement for ending the Kosovo conflict that was adopted 8 days later by the G-8.

One of the Russians who was there was a very senior Russian. His name is Vladimir Lukin. He was the ambassador to this country at the end of Bush I and the beginning of Clinton. At that time he was chair of their equivalent of our Committee on International Relations, a very senior and very respected Russian. He is a little short fellow with short arms and stocky build.

He sat in that hotel room in Vienna for 2 days with his arms folded across his chest, looking at the ceiling. He was very angry. He said at one point, You spit on us; now why should we help you?

What he meant by that was that the United States, the Clinton administration at that time, had indicated to the Russians that they really were not needed to help resolve this conflict, that we were big boys and we would handle this on our own. It soon became obvious to the Clinton administration that the only country in the world that had the real confidence of the Serbs was Russia, and they were added to the G-7 to make the G-8, which 5 days after we came back resolved the Kosovo conflict with the framework agreement that we had developed there.

The statement that Vladimir Lukin made was a startling statement. The chairman of our delegation was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) who had been to Russia thirty-some times and he speaks some Russian and understands more. When Vladimir Lukin was speaking, he turned to me and said, Did you hear what he said? Yes, I heard what he said, but of course, I did not understand it; I just heard Russian words.

When it was translated, this was what he said, and by the way, he did not need a translator. Vladimir Lukin speaks very good English, but when you are talking with these folks, they frequently will speak in their native tongue so it has to be translated and then translated back to them when we speak so that gives them twice as long to formulate their answer. So if you do not know both languages, you are at somewhat of a disadvantage in dialoguing with them because they have twice as long to formulate an answer.

This was what surprised the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), and this is what he said: If we really wanted to hurt you, with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM. That's a submarine-launched ballistic missile. We would launch an SLBM. We would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and we would shut down your power grid for 6 months or so.

Now, he made the observation that without fear of retaliation, because you would not know for certain where it came from, particularly today. Factor in the Cold War with only two superpowers, we absolutely would have known where it came from, but today, how would you know? There are many countries out there who can get a tramp steamer and a Scud launcher and a crude nuclear weapon and that is all it would take to produce an EMP attack because a Scud launcher goes about 180 miles apogee, and that is plenty high. It would not cover all of the United States, of course.

The third ranking Communist was there, a handsome, tall, blond fellow by the name of Alexander Shurbanov, and he smiled and said, if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares. I think at that time it was something like 7,000 spares that they had.

This was a very startling remark, and what it said was that the detonation of a single, large, appropriately designed nuclear weapon above our country could shut down our power grid and shut down our communications, he said, for 6 months or so. If that were true, and there is increasing evidence, as I will indicate, from the report that this commission gave us that it is true, that would mean that you would be in a world, Mr. Speaker, where the only person you could talk to was the person next to you unless you happened to have a vacuum tube handset, then you could talk because they are about a million times less susceptible to EMP than our current microelectronic systems, and the only way you could go anywhere was to walk.

Several years ago, we had a field hearing at Johns Hopkins University applied physics lab, and a Dr. Lowell Wood was there. I met Dr. Lowell Wood through Tom Clancy who lives on the eastern shore of Maryland and I know him. He has come to do several political events for me. I knew that he had done a book where EMP was a part of the scenario, and I knew he did very good research and he could tell me something about EMP. This was several years ago.

I called Tom Clancy and I asked him, and he said, gee, if you read my book you know all about EMP that I know, but he said let me refer you to the smartest man hired by the U.S. government. He referred me to a Dr. Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. We got his pager number. In those days it was pagers rather than cell phones that are so ubiquitous today, and I paged him, believing that he was in California. The pager signal went up to a satellite and back down, and he was in Washington, and within an hour, he was sitting in my office.

Dr. Lowell Wood at this field hearing out at the applied physics lab out in

Howard County made the observation that an EMP lay down would be the equivalent of a giant continental time machine that would move us back a century in technology. What this would mean, of course, is that we would have no more capability for moving around, for communicating to each other, for plowing our fields, for moving our equipment and our food around than we had 100 years ago.

I said that, Dr. Wood, the population we have today, 285 million people and its distribution, largely in large cities and suburbia, could not be supported by the technology of a century ago. His unemotional response was, Yes, I know.

The population will shrink until it can be supported by the technology. The point I am trying to make is this could be a devastating asymmetric weapon. It may not be known to most Americans. I suspect not one in 100 have heard of nuclear electromagnetic pulse, but I can assure Members that all of our potential enemies know a great deal about EMP.

The first chart shows the effects of a single nuclear weapon. This one is detonated in the northwest corner of Iowa, and it blankets all of the United States.

The colors here indicate the intensity of the pulse you get from that. The purple as you can see from the scale is 50 percent. So what this says is whatever the intensity was at ground zero, and we are several hundred miles above that, but the intensity at that level which is the red here in the center, will be half that out at the margins of our country.

This little smile here and the distortion here is due to the magnetic field of the Earth that bends the electrons that I will describe in just a moment.

What is this electromagnetic pulse? It is produced from strong gamma rays from the nuclear explosion which produce electrons that move at the speed of light. They move now to everything within line of sight. If you are about 3 or 400 miles high over the center of the country, Iowa or Nebraska, that will blanket all of the United States.

If the voltage is high enough, it will disrupt or fry these microelectronics.

Mr. Speaker, if you want to work on the inside of your computer, you need to be very careful that the static electricity that you produce just by rubbing your clothes together will not damage it. You need to put a little wrist band on and ground yourself. At factories where most of these computers are made, and it is almost all women that I have seen there, this is one area where women do it better than men, and they are grounded to the floor. They have a metal anklet on, and they are grounded to the floor because static from just their movement could damage these very sensitive, very tiny microelectronics.

A little later I will show a chart that says the interview with some Russian generals have indicated that they have weapons that can produce 200 kilovolts per meter. They told us, and I cannot tell Members the exact voltage to which we have harkened, but I can say that the Russian generals told us they believe that this signal was several times higher than the voltage to which we had hardened. And even out at the periphery with 50 percent degradation, it was higher than we had hardened. By ``hardening'' I mean we have put some buffers in there that would intercept this pulse, like the surge protectors that we have for our computers which we have for lightning which will do no good for EMP because this pulse has such a rapid rise time measured in nanoseconds.

This pulse will be through the surge protector before the protector sees it. If you are 200 kilovolts at ground zero, it is 100 out at the periphery, and that is probably enough to weld, to fry all of our microelectronics, which is why Vladimir Lukin said they would detonate a nuclear weapon high above our country, shut down our power grid and our communications for 6 months or so.

From chart 2, I want to give some quotes from potential enemies to indicate that I am not letting the genie out of the bottle this evening. They know all about it. Not one in 50 Americans may know about EMP, but I want to assure Members our potential enemies know all about

Mr. Speaker, the subject that I want to spend a few moments talking about this afternoon really began for our country in 1962. We were still testing nuclear weapons then, and for the first time the United States tested a weapon above the atmosphere. This weapon was detonated over Johnston Island in the Pacific. This was a part of a series of tests called the Fishbowl Series, and this was Operation Starfish in 1962. We had no prior experience with the detonation of a weapon above the atmosphere. We prepared for this test with airplanes and ships using radar and theodelites and instrumentation to measure the effects on the ground from a blast that was some 400 kilometers in altitude.

In conversations just today with Dr. Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, I learned more of the details of the results of that test. They had not anticipated the magnitude of the effects at the ground under the blast; so many of their instruments simply pegged and they were not able to get a clear indication of the effects. I might note that the Soviets had extensive testing experience with EMP over their own territory. They had a much larger territory than we and some of it quite remote; so they were able to instrument more extensively and had a lot more experience than we have had. This was our first and only experience with a superatmospheric detonation of a nuclear weapon.

The effects over Hawaii, which was about 800 miles away, included several totally unexpected things; so there was no instrumentation on Hawaii to record the effects.

So all they can divine from the effects is what happened. Some street lights went out, and analysis after the fact indicated that these were the street lights that were oriented so that there was a very long line effect. In other words, the wires feeding the street lights constituted a very long antenna which received the signals from the detonation in space such that there was arcing and some of the street lights went out. This was investigated, and some of the failures were retained and were shown to a commission that I will talk about in a few minutes, Mr. Speaker, that spent 2 years studying these effects and the risk to our military and to our country.

There were other effects in communications and so forth. As I said, none of this was expected; so there was no instrumentation. We have since tried to determine the effects of what is called electromagnetic pulse produced by a nuclear detonation. We have done that with laboratory devices, some of them quite large that could expose a whole airplane, but none of them obviously large enough to include miles and miles of long-line effect.

The EMP pulse at that distance was estimated to be about five kilovolts per meter. We will have occasion in a little bit to talk about that in light of present capabilities. Because there was intense activity above the atmosphere, the Van Allen belts were pumped up; so there were a number of low Earth orbit satellites that decayed very rapidly as they passed through the Van Allen belts.

Mr. Speaker, I want to kind of put what we are going to say in context. So I want to indicate here some of the seriousness of EMP and its implications. In 1999, I sat in a hotel room in Vienna, Austria. I was there with 10 other Members of Congress and several staff members. We had there three members of the Russian Duma and a representative of Slobodan Milosevic. This was just prior to the resolution of the Kosovo conflict. We developed with them a framework agreement that was adopted about 5 days later by the G-8, which the Members may remember ended the Kosovo conflict.

One of the members of the Russian Duma was Vladimir Lukin, who was well known to this country because he was the ambassador here at the end of Bush I and the beginning of the Clinton administration. At that time he was a very senior member of the Russian Duma. He was very angry and sat for 2 days in that hotel room with his arms crossed looking at the ceiling. We had not early asked the Russians for help and they felt offended about that, and the statement he made expressing that sentiment was that ``you spit on us. Now why should we help you?'' And then he made a statement that stunned us. The leader of that delegation was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), who speaks and understands some Russian. And when Vladimir Lukin was speaking, he turned to me and he said, ``Did you hear what he said?''

Of course I heard what he said, but I did not understand it because I do not understand Russian.

But then it was translated, and this is what he said: ``If we really wanted to hurt you with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM,'' which if it was launched in a submarine at sea, we really would not know for certain where it came from. ``We would launch an SLBM, we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and we would shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.''

The third-ranking communist was there in the country. His name is Alexander Shurbanov, and he smiled and said, ``And if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares.'' I think the number of those spares now is something like 6,000 weapons.

This likely consequence of a high-altitude nuclear burst was corroborated by Dr. Lowell Wood, who in a field hearing at the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory, made the observation that a burst like this above our atmosphere creating this electromagnetic pulse would be like a giant continental time machine turning us back to the technology of 100 years ago. It is very obvious that the population of today in its distribution could not be supported by the technology of 100 years ago. And I asked Dr. Wood, I said, ``Dr. Wood, clearly the technology of 100 years ago could not support our present population in its distribution,'' and his unemotional response was, ``Yes, I know. The population will shrink until it can be supported by the technology.''

Just a word, Mr. Speaker, about what this EMP is. It is very much like a really giant solar storm. All of us are familiar with solar storms and with the disruption to our communication systems. And this is like a really giant solar storm. It is kind of like really intense static electricity everywhere all at once, all over the whole country. It

is sort of like a lightning strike that is not just isolated to one spot. Different than a lightning strike in terms of the intensities and so forth and the spectrum, but it would be everywhere all at once over a very large area.

I have here in front of me the report, and I will have occasion to refer to that again a little later, the report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. This is the executive summary. The report itself is very thick and there is a big classified addendum to the big report. And I just want to turn to one page here, and this is page 4, and it says: ``What is significant about an EMP attack is that one or a few high-altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMP effects that can potentially disrupt or damage electronic and electrical systems over much of the United States virtually simultaneously at a time determined by an adversary.''

I talked a little bit about what EMP is. It produces a large number of Compton electrons above our atmosphere which are trapped by the magnetic fields around the Earth. They move at the speed of light. The prompt effects are such that if the voltage is high enough, all electronic equipment within line of sight is damaged or destroyed. These are called prompt effects. And, of course, satellites are very soft because it costs about $10,000 a pound to launch a satellite; so they do not launch a lot of hardening on the satellite if they do not need to.

So all of the satellites within line of sight would be taken out by prompt effects. It would not go so high, by the way, as the satellites that are 22,500 miles above the Earth. And it would pump up the Van Allen belts so that satellites that were not in line of sight would die very quickly and one could not reconstitute the satellite network by launching new ones because they also would die quickly.

Let me show a chart here that shows the effects of this bomb exploding over the United States, and this shows a single weapon. This shows a single weapon detonated at the northwest corner of Iowa, and it shows it at about 600 kilometers high, and this would blanket all of the United States. And the concentric circles here, not true circles because there is a little distortion of the electrical fields by the magnetic waves around the Earth, but these represent the intensity of the field that is produced by this. At the center we can see it is 100 percent. But even out at the margins of our country, it is down to 50 percent.

Now, a little later I will show a statement from some Russian generals that were reviewed by the people who put together this report, and they said that the Russians had developed weapons that produced 200 kilovolts per meter. Remember, the effects in Hawaii were judged to be the result of five kilovolts per meter. So this is a force about 200 times higher. The Russian generals said that they believed that to be several times higher than the hardening that we had provided for our military platforms that they could resist EMP.

Others know about EMP. I did not want anybody to believe that we were letting the genie out of the bottle and others did not know about that. I mentioned earlier the statement by Vladimir Lukin, the Russian member of their Duma, and this is the statement that I referred to here, and that was in May 2, 1999: ``Chinese military writings described EMP as the key to victory and described scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in the conflict over Taiwan.'' So it is not like our potential enemies do not know that this exists. The Soviets had very wide experience with this, and there is a lot of information in the public domain relative to this.

``A survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by the commission,'' that is the commission that wrote this report, ``found widespread knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea.

Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons. These are little weapons that produce an EMP- like effect, but over a very much more restricted area, and also electromagnetic pulse produced from nuclear weapons.

By the way, an enemy no more sophisticated than Saddam Hussein would need no more than a tramp steamer, a Scud missile and a crude nuclear weapon like is probably available in North Korea or might be bought or stolen from some Russian source. That would not shut down the whole United States, because the Scud missile could not carry it high enough, but it would certainly shut down the whole Northeast.

By the way, this is not like the Northeast blackout that we had a couple of years ago. This would produce damage that you would not recover from simply by turning a switch. It would probably destroy large transformers. These very large transformers are made to order, and if you need one, they will build you one, not in this country, we do not build the big ones anymore, they will build you one over in Europe or Scandinavia, and it will take maybe a year-and-a-half to 2 years to get it. So it is not like you are going to recover from this tomorrow.

Iran has tested launching of a Scud missile from a surface vessel, a launch mode that could support a national or transnational EMP attack against the United States.

We have a second chart which shows more of the evidence that potential enemies out there know that this is a potential weapon.

``If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. 150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. If the enemy forces succeed in infiltrating the information network of the U.S. Army, then the whole organization would collapse, the American soldiers could not find food to eat, nor would they be able to fire a single shot.''

I kind of think they would be able to find food to eat. This is from an Iranian journal, so you know they know about this and they are thinking about this.

``Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons, magnetic pulse.'' I referred to that earlier.

Iran has conducted tests with its Shahab-3 missile that have been described as failures by the Western media because the missiles did not complete their ballistic trajectories, but were deliberately exploded at high altitude. This, of course, would be exactly what you would want to do if you were going to use an EMP weapon.

Today we are very much concerned, Mr. Speaker, about asymmetric weapons. We are a big, powerful country. Nobody can contend with us shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face. So all of our potential adversaries are looking for what we refer to as asymmetric weapons. That is a weapon that overcomes our superior capabilities. There is no asymmetric weapon that has anywhere near the potential of EMP.

Iran described these tests as successful. We said they were a failure because they blew up in flight. They described them as successful. Of course, they would be, if Iran's intent was practicing for an EMP attack.

Iran's Shahab-3 is a medium-range mobile missile that could be driven on to a freighter and transported to a point near the United States for an EMP attack. I might state that an early use of EMP is a common occurrence in Russia and Chinese war games.

I just would like to spend a moment or two talking about kind of the history of how we got here and why the big concern about EMP and the risk that it poses to us. I mentioned Operation Starfish in 1962.

Then we really had a scary event which we did not know about for quite some time that happened in 1995 when there was a Norwegian weather rocket that was set off. The Norwegians had told the Russians that they were going to fire this weapon, but that did not get to the proper level. When the weapon was fired, it was interpreted by the Russians as a potential first strike of the United States against them and they had alerted their nuclear missile response. They came very close to launching that, and we did not know about that until some time after.

In 1997 I had a very interesting experience. I am on the Committee on Armed Services. This was during the Clinton administration, and he had set up a Commission on Critical Infrastructure. General Marsh, retired, was

chairing that Commission on Critical Infrastructure. This was infrastructure that was so critical that if an enemy could take it out, we would be very much disadvantaged by it. I asked him about EMP, had they looked at that?

His answer was, yes, they looked at it.

Well?

He said, well, we did not think there was a high probability that would happen, so we did not continue to look at it anymore.

I told him, gee, with that attitude, if you have not already, I am sure when you go home tonight you are going to cancel the fire insurance on your home.

What one needs when there is the potential for a very high-impact, low-probability event, is what we call insurance. I think that every American citizen has the right to ask their government, have you made the proper insurance investment to protect me, to protect my country, in the event, which we hope is not a high probability, in the event that there is an EMP attack against our country?

Your home burning, by the way, is not a high probability event. You may have a $300,000 home and it may cost you $300 for fire insurance for the year. So you can do the simple arithmetic that tells you the insurance company does not expect very many homes to burn that year.

Then the next event in this little timeline was my trip to Vienna, Austria, when I met there in that hotel room with Members of the Russian Duma. In 2001 we had some tests at Aberdeen with a device that was made using only the equipment that a terrorist might buy from Radio Shack or a place like that to see if you could put together a directed energy weapon, a weapon, by the way, that if sophisticated enough one might drive down Wall Street and take out all the computers in the financial market. It would not go further than that, but if it did that, that would, of course, be an enormous blow.

In 2001, the Commission was set up and then in 2004, last year, we have the report of the Commission.

I just would like to show you a chart now of the commissioners. We will not have time to talk about the capabilities of all of these commissioners, but I will assure you that these are all giants in their area. They were appointed from among the foremost scientists, experts and military officers in the United States to achieve a mix of talent on scientific aspects of EMP, nuclear weapon design, military implications of EMP and the effects of EMP on civilian and military infrastructures.

Dr. William Graham, the Commission chairman, was science advisor to President Reagan. He ran NASA and was one of the first scientists to study the EMP phenomenon when it was first discovered by its United States in 1962.

Commissioner John Foster, Johnny Foster, who designed most of the nuclear weapons in the inventory the United States today, was a director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and for decades has been a close adviser to the Department of Defense on nuclear matters.

Dr. Lowell Wood is a member of the director's staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he inherited the scientific mantel of Dr. Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb.

I had a very interesting personal experience related to Dr. Lowell Wood. When I became interested a number of years ago in EMP and the potential implications, I knew that Tom Clancy, who lives in Maryland and he has come to do several events for me, I knew that he had a novel in which EMP was one of the sequences in his novel. I know that Tom Clancy does very good research. So I called to ask him about EMP and its implications.

He said that if I had read his book, I probably knew as much about EMP as he knew, but he was going to refer me to what he said was in his view was the smartest person hired by the U.S. Government, and that was Dr. Lowell Wood. So Dr. Lowell Wood comes with great recommendations.

Commissioner Richard Lawson was a USAF general, served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the U.S.-European Command.

Dr. Joan Woodard, I had a very interesting experience with Dr. Woodard. I was visiting my son and daughter and children out in Albuquerque, he works at the Sandia Labs, and he brought home a little note talking about a seminar they were having which was exploring some issues that I thought would be relevant to the work that the Commission was doing. I did not know at that time that she was a member of the Commission.

So I asked for a briefing, and I spent 5 hours in a classified briefing at Sandia Labs. And it was not just Dr. Joan Woodard, it was a large number of people at the labs there that were focusing primarily on the national infrastructure consequences of this.

What I would like to do now is go through some of the statements and recommendations of the report. The next chart shows the threat and the nature and magnitude of EMP threats within the next 15 years.

On the right you see the coverage that is produced by weapons detonated at various altitudes. I mentioned 600 kilometers. Actually 500 kilometers pretty much covers the margins of our country and, of course, the lower the altitude you detonate it, the less area that it covers, but the higher will be the intensity of the pulse that is produced.

This is a direct quote from the EMP Commission report: ``EMP is one of a small number of threats that may hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society.''

Now, that is couched in the careful kind of scientific terms, but what that really means is that a really robust EMP laydown, which, as Vladimir Lukin in that hotel room in Vienna, Austria said, would shut down our power grid and communications for 6 months or so. And if one weapon would not do it, as Alexander Shaponov said, four absolutely would do it, particularly with the power of the weapons that the Russian generals say that they have developed.

What this would do is to produce a society in which the only person you could talk to was the person next to you, unless you happened to be a ham operator with a vacuum tube set, which, by the way, is 1 million times less susceptible to EMP than your present equipment that the hams use. And the only way you could get anywhere was to walk, because, you see, if the pulse is intense enough, it turns off all the computers in your car. There will be no electricity, so even if the car ran, you could not get gas.

By the way, if you have a car that still has a coil and distributor, you are probably okay, because those are pretty robust structures compared to today's cars with so much microelectronics in them.

It would disrupt our military forces and our ability to project military power. For the last decade, Mr. Speaker, we have been waiving hardening on essentially all of our military platforms because it costs maybe as little as 1 percent, maybe like 5 percent more to harden. It can be done. That is the good news story. If you do not harden, you can get 5 percent more weapons systems. And since we have had so little money during those years, the Pentagon opted to run this risk. With terrorists about, I think that is probably a risk we do not want to continue to run.

The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than during the Cold War. We may look back with some fondness on the Cold War. We then had only one potential adversary. We knew him quite well.

Now we have who knows how many potential adversaries, and they come from very different cultures than we, and we have a great deal of difficulty in understanding them and communicating with them.

Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP's strategic attack option. I started, Mr. Speaker, with talking about the fact that I was not letting the genie out of the bottle. Ninety-nine percent of Americans may not know very much about EMP, but I will assure you, Mr. Speaker, that 100 percent of our potential enemies know all about EMP. I think that the American people need to know about EMP because they need to demand that their government do the prudent thing so that we will be less and less susceptible, less and less at risk to an EMP attack year by year. The threat is not adequately addressed in U.S. national

and homeland security programs. Not only is it not adequately addressed; it is usually ignored, not even mentioned, and it certainly needs to be considered.

I might note that Senator John Kyl, with whom I served in the House on the Committee on Armed Services, wrote just a couple of weeks ago a very nice editorial in the Washington Post, and we will have his quote a little later, on EMP effects and how we need to be about preparing ourselves for that.

Terrorists could steal, purchase, or be provided a nuclear weapon and perform an EMP attack against the United States simply by launching a primitive Scud missile off a freighter near our shores. We do not need to be thinking about missiles coming over the Pole. There are thousands of ships out there, particularly in the North Atlantic shipping lanes, and any one of them could have a Scud missile on board. If you put a canvas over it, we cannot see through the thinnest canvas. We would not know whether it was bailed hay or bananas or a Scud launcher. You cannot see through any cover on ship. The Commission on the Emerging Ballistic Missile Threat chaired by Secretary Rumsfeld before he was Secretary, and Dr. Bill Graham, the chairman of this commission was his vice-chair, found that ships had been modified so that they had missile-launching tubes in ordinary freighters. You can read that in their report.

Scud missiles can be purchased on the world market today for less than $100,000. Al Qaeda is estimated to own about 80 freighters, so all they need, Mr. Speaker, is $100,000, which I am sure they can get, for the missile and a crude nuclear weapon.

Certain types of low-yield nuclear weapons can generate potentially catastrophic EMP effects. These certain types of weapons are weapons that have been designed for enhanced EMP effects. They may have little explosive effect, but very high EMP effects over wide geographic areas, and designs for various such weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter of a century. We are certain that the Chinese have them. Of course the Russians have them; they developed probably better or at least as good designs as we developed. We designed them, by the way, but never built them. The Russians we understand have both designed and built them, and we now believe those designs to be pretty widespread out around the world.

The next chart shows the comments from the Russian generals, and to protect the Russian generals we have redacted their names. But the commission met with Russian generals, and they claim that Russia has designed a super-EMP nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. And the Russian generals told our commission people that they believe that to be several times higher than the level two, which we had hardened our weapons systems; even those that are hardened and, as I mentioned, Mr. Speaker, most of our weapons systems now procured are not hardened.

Russian, Chinese, and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the near future. Now, this is not what the commission said; this is what the commission reported the Russian generals to have said.

The next chart shows additional comments from the EMP Commission report. States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for EMP attack offers the greatest utility. Mr. Speaker, there is no way that a country could use a nuclear weapon against the United States that would be as devastating as using it to produce an EMP lay- down. I had not noted, but I should note, Mr. Speaker, that there is no effect on you or me from this weapon. We are quite immune to that. We will not be damaged by that. Buildings will not be damaged by that. It will affect only electric and electronic equipment.

EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck. Now, this is from their report; I am not saying this. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against U.S. military forces in a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland. EMP may be less provocative of U.S. massive retaliation compared to a nuclear attack on a U.S. city that inflicts many prompt calories.

Just a couple of words about this. As Vladimir Lukin said, if it were launched from the ocean, we would not know who launched it. So against whom would we retaliate? Even if we knew who launched it, Mr. Speaker, if all they have done is to disable our computers, do we respond in kind, or do you incinerate their grandmothers and their babies? This would be a really tough call. Responding in kind might do very little good. There is no other country in the world that has anything like our sophistication in electronic equipment, and no other country in the world is so dependent as we are on our national infrastructure. So this is a real problem and a big incentive to use this weapon without fear of retaliation, as Vladimir Lukin says, with no fear of retaliation.

EMP could, compared to a nuclear attack on the city, kill many more Americans in the long run from indirect effects of collapsed infrastructures of power, communications, transportation, food, and water. Can you imagine our country, Mr. Speaker, with 285 million people, no electricity, and there will be no electricity, no transportation, no communication? The only way you can go anywhere is to walk, and the only person you can talk to is the person next to you. What would we do? How many of our people might not survive the transition from that situation to where you had established a sort of infrastructure that could support civil society as we know it today.

Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military strength and societal survival, challenge the integrity of allied regional coalitions, and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to the high-tech West than to rogue states. This makes the point that I was making that because we are the most sophisticated, we are the most vulnerable.

Technically and operationally, EMP attacks can compensate for deficiencies in missile accuracy, fusing range, reentry, velocity design, target location, intelligence, and missile defense penetration. We are really superior in all of these areas, and none of our enemies out there, except for Russia and China, and we would not expect an attack like this from either of them, but there is nobody else out there who really can be very good shots with their missiles.

But what the EMP Commission report is pointing out is, they do not need to be. Anywhere over the northeastern United States will shut down all of the northeastern United States, and anywhere near the middle of our country, you can miss it by 100 miles and it really will not matter. Anything near the middle of our country detonated high enough with the right kind of weapon will blanket the whole country with an EMP force that could knock out all of our electronic equipment.

The next chart shows some other comments in the EMP report. One or a few high-altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMP simultaneously over wide geographical areas. As the chart we showed earlier, the whole country can be blanketed with one about 600 kilometers high.

The thing they were really concerned about, because we have a very sophisticated infrastructure with lots of interdependencies, they were really concerned about the cascading failure, unprecedented cascading failure of our electronics-based infrastructures, which could result in power, energy, transport, telecom, and financial systems and are particularly vulnerable and interdependent. And if one of them comes down, if you bring down the power grid, Mr. Speaker, you have brought down all of these other parts of our national infrastructure. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause large-scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the Nation's life.

Now, these are not my words; these are taken from the EMP Commission report. This commission was set up as a part of public law, and that is noted here on this chart. Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these infrastructures. Without adequate protection, recovery could be prolonged months to years for recovery. And here on the right is a little depiction showing some, and there are more than that, showing some of the interrelationships. For instance, electric power is not shown as important for water or for banking and finance, and

for government services; and of course it is. So if you do not have electric power, for instance, you do not have any of these other things.

There was a number of years ago a scientist by the name of Harrison Scott Brown. I think that he worked at CalTech, and he offered a series of seminars called the ``Next 100 Years.'' This was during the Cold War. And one of the questions that it was appropriate to ask during the Cold War was, What would you do after the nuclear attack? You may remember, Mr. Speaker, your parents talking about the backyard shelters that were built during the 1960s. Sometime after that I went to work for IBM and they were still talking about the fact that IBM had loaned its employees money interest-free to build a backyard shelter. There was a real concern that there could be a bolt out of the blue and that we could have a nuclear attack. We had a big civil defense organization with lots of shelters. They were stocked, and you were given pamphlets and you were told where to go.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that today, with the potential for terrorist attack, we need to turn back a few pages and learn from our experience during the Cold War when we recognized that the more prepared an individual and a family was to be self-sufficient during that attack, the stronger we would be as a whole; and I think that we could profit, at least have a more intense focus on civil defense in our homeland security efforts.

Harrison Scott Brown was concerned about what you would do after you came out of the fallout shelter and how you would reconstitute your society to reestablish the kind of an infrastructure that you had before the attack. His concern was that in the United States, and this was a number of years ago, his concern would be even greater were he alive today, his concern then was that we had developed such a sophisticated, interrelated infrastructure, that if it came down like a house of cards, that it might be very difficult, maybe, he thought, and I will explain in a moment why, maybe impossible to reestablish that infrastructure. Because, he noted, that this infrastructure was built up gradually from very simple to very complex, when there was available to us a rich resource of raw materials, high-quality iron ore. That is all gone. Our best ores now, I think, are \1/2\ of 1 percent taconite ores.

When oil essentially oozed out of the ground, when the water washed the dirt away, you could see coal exposed in some of the hills of Pennsylvania. The oil now is deep and hard to get or offshore or in the Arctic. All the good coal has been burned. Now, to get oil and to get coal, we have to have the infrastructure. You have to have diesel fuel shipped to you. You have to have large excavators.

His concern was that if our infrastructure collapsed as a result of a nuclear attack, today we are talking about an EMP attack, which does not blow up buildings, but it shuts down the infrastructure because it would destroy, disrupt all of the electronic equipment if the pulse was high enough; and a determined, sophisticated enemy could make sure that it was high enough.

So he was concerned that maybe it would not be possible now without that high-quality, readily available resource of raw materials that might be very difficult without massive help from other parts of the world that we could reconstitute our society.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that we need to be looking at that threat to our country today. I am sure it is no less a threat now than it was when Harrison Scott Brown was holding those seminars.

In 2004, the EMP Commission met with very senior Russian officers, and we showed that on the sign. They warned that the knowledge and technology to develop what they called super EMP weapons had been transferred to North Korea and that North Korea could probably develop these weapons in the near future, within a few years.

The Russian officers said that the threat that would be posed to global security by a North Korean armed with super EMP weapons was, in their view, and I am sure, Mr. Speaker, in your view and mine, unacceptable.

You know, why use EMP, as we noted in a previous chart? A terrorist or rogue state might be so inaccurate that they could not even use a nuclear weapon to take out New York City. They might hit the countryside somewhere near. But it would not really matter with that low accuracy if they were doing an EMP laydown. Because anywhere over New England would be quite good enough, and there is no way that they could do as much damage to our country by a ground burst, even if it hit the city, than if they could do a high altitude burst, which produced EMP and took down, if it was intense enough, all of our infrastructure.

EMP has such a wide area of effect that if the weapon is large enough or several are used, covering potentially an entire continent, that even a highly inaccurate missile could not miss its target in an EMP effect. EMP attack involves exoatmospheric detonation, meaning that attack, this is really interesting, Mr. Speaker, this attack would occur before the weapon ever reentered the atmosphere. So even if we were really good at taking out weapons before they hit us, it really would not matter, because this is detonated before it starts to reenter. So any weapon that would take out a missile on its final descent would be useless, because it has already detonated and the damage is done at altitude.

Increased dependence on advanced electronic systems results in the potential for an increased EMP vulnerability. And what this does is to make that attack more attractive to our assailants. The fact that we are ever more sophisticated and therefore ever more vulnerable makes it ever more attractive to our adversaries, because this really becomes the ultimate asymmetric weapon.

EMP threatens the ability of the United States and western nations to project influence and military power, because a third-world country with a crude missile and a crude nuclear weapon could, in effect, hold us hostage. This is why it is so important that we stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

EMP can cause catastrophic damage to the Nation by destroying the electric power infrastructure, causing cascading failures in the infrastructure for everything: telecommunications, energy, transportation, finance, food, and water.

I live on a farm. I cannot even get a drink of water without electricity, because the pump in my well that supplies my water has to have electricity. So we are all really dependent on this infrastructure.

Degradation, and this is really minimized, degradation of the infrastructures could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to support its population, and then millions could die. That is true.

In the final analysis, Mr. Speaker, the EMP Commission report is really a good news story. So far what we have been talking about does not really sound like good news, does it? It sounds like the worst of all news that you could get. But there really is good news here, and the good news is that we do not have to be this vulnerable. It is really not all that expensive to protect our systems against EMP. You just have to do it.

But we have a problem, and that is the cheapest way to do it is when you are making them, if you design it in. Then it may cost as little as 1 percent more. For really sophisticated electronic stuff, probably not more than 10 percent more. But if you are trying to add it after it is built, then it can cost you as much as the device itself, which means that we need to start, you can only do what you can do, and we need to start in our national infrastructure by deciding what is most essential to protect and then expeditiously protecting that as fast as we can.

Every new water system we put in, every new sewage system we put in, every new power line we run, every new distribution system we put in needs to be hardened. It is not all that expensive to do. You just need to do it.

Now we have hardened in the military our command and control. We are pretty sure that we can talk to each other after an EMP laydown. But that does not give me much solace, Mr. Speaker, because that is the equivalent of me having my brain and spinal cord work, but my arms and my hands will not work. I am not sure just having the capability of my brain communicating

with my spinal cord does me much good if my arms and my legs will not respond to those signals.

The EMP Commission has proposed a 5-year plan that, if implemented, would protect the United States from the catastrophic consequences of EMP attack and make recovery possible at surprisingly modest cost.

I would like now to turn to a statement that was made by Dr. John Kyl. I mentioned his name earlier. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, which I chair, his words in his op-ed piece, held a hearing on a major threat to the United States not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea.

An EMP attack is one of only a few ways that America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorists or otherwise. Few if any people would die right away, but the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Few can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring American society to its knees by knocking out our power supply from several miles in the atmosphere. But this time we have been warned, and we better be prepared to respond. We really do need to respond.

Here is another statement from Major Franz Gayl.

The impact that EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries, now these are all in the public domain. I want to be very careful, Mr. Speaker, that I do not leave the impression that I am letting the genie out of the bottle. Ninety-nine percent of Americans may not know about EMP, but I will guarantee you 100 percent of our adversaries know about EMP. And we need to know about EMP, because to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and we need to do something about that.

The impact that EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries, the less developed societies in North Korea, Iran and other potential EMP attack perpetrators are less electronically dependent and less specialized, while more capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern conveniences.

I do not know that outside of Pyongyang that many people in North Korea would even know if electricity went out. I am not sure they depend much on electricity.

Conversely, the United States would be subject to widespread paralysis and doubtful recovery following a surprise EMP attack. Therefore, terrorists and their coincidentally allied state sponsors may determine that, given just a few nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, that subjecting the United States to a potentially non- attributable EMP attack, we would not even know where it came from if it came from the oceans, is more desirable than the destruction of selected cities. Delayed mass lethality is assured over time through the cascade of EMPs' indirect effects that would bring our highly specialized and urbanized society to a disorderly halt.

The vulnerability of the United States to EMP attack serves as the latest revelation that societal protections associated with our national security can no longer be assured by traditional nuclear deterrence and battlefield preparations on their own.

Let me put up now a conclusion chart. The EMP threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels, but we should have started yesterday, Mr. Speaker. We just must start today.

U.S. strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, preparation, protection and recovery. We need to be studying all four of these. Critical military capabilities must be survivable and endurable to underwrite U.S. strategy. If they can bring down our military, that really puts us at risk.

The 2006 Defense Authorization Bill contains a provision extending the EMP Commission to ensure that their recommendations will be implemented. We need to have them around to make sure that we are following through on their recommendations. Terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of attack. It needs to be hardened.

When you have a weak underbelly, you are inviting attack there. They are going to attack at the weakest link, and our infrastructure complexity is certainly our weakest link. The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical infrastructures. What do we need to protect first?

Then we need to have a plan for what would we do if we had the EMP attack tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the next year, 5 years from now. How far along would we be in protecting ourselves? But we need to have a plan for what we would do in the event that that happens.

The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan, I really want to emphasize this, Mr. Speaker, to help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur. Each of us as individuals, each of us as families, each of us as a church group, each of us as a community, needs to have plans for what we would do in the event of an EMP attack. We need to know what we need to do to prepare so that we are not going to be a liability on the system. Our strength as a Nation is going to be greatly increased if each of us as a family, a church group, a community, is prepared so that we will be less susceptible to the loss of these infrastructure supports.

Mr. Speaker, this is really a good news story. We know about this problem. It has not happened yet. We have a great study with great detailed recommendations of what we need to be doing. The good news is that if we do these things we will have reduced our vulnerability and we will have now taken from the enemy an enormous strategic capability that they now have because we are such a sophisticated society, depend so much on our infrastructure, and if they can bring down an infrastructure they can bring us down.

We have a mighty Army. It will not be much good if the folks back home do not have anything to eat.

Mr. Speaker, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I am sure Americans will respond to this challenge. And challenges are really exhilarating. You feel really good at night if you have met a challenge and you have had some successes in meeting that challenge.

Mr. Speaker, I think we have a bright future ahead, and it is going to be even brighter if we respond appropriately to the warnings that are here.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to give my Special Order at this time.

Mr. Speaker, several times during the past few weeks, I have stood on this floor to talk about peak oil. The chart I have here symbolically shows what we are talking about. The blue curve here represents the amount of oil that the world produces and uses. Of course, over a period of time, the world will use as much oil as it has been producing and that has been going on now for 100 years. Currently, the increase in use rate of oil is about 2 percent. That is what this curve represents. Knowing that, we can put some time on the abscissa of this curve because a 2 percent compound growth will double in 35 years. This use curve, which goes up from here to here, has doubled in that amount of time, so that is a 35-year period.

What this chart shows is that at some point in time, and the only argument is when, the world will peak in its oil production. But before the world peaks in oil production, it is noted from this curve that the demand will be exceeding for several years, it is like a decade, if this is the curve which is followed, the demand will be exceeding supply.

What this has given rise to, of course, is a look for oil around the world. The second largest importer of oil in the world, which is China, has been scouring the world for oil. This chart shows the places where China has secured leases for oil. It is in Canada, it is in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, negotiating in Russia, in Africa and all over the Middle East, of course; and we have a symbol here showing that they were negotiating for an oil company in our country, Unocal.

When I spoke on the floor the last time about this, I noted that Chevron had bought this oil company, had bought Unocal; but now just in the June 6 issue, this year, just this week, Time magazine, there is an article called ``The Great Grab.'' It says: ``In quest of oil, China is on a collision course with U.S. firms and U.S. policy. Chevron, one of the world's oil giants, announced in early April that it was buying Unocal, a smaller rival, for about $17 billion. The Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, CNOOC, may make a counteroffer for Unocal, the world's ninth largest oil company. If it does, it would mark the first major takeover fight between a U.S. company and a Chinese competitor.''

Think about it, Mr. Speaker. The Chinese have now secured rights for oil north of us in Canada, to our neighbors to the south, and now they are about to buy a major oil company, the ninth largest oil company in the world, right on our soil. Competitors are worried, the article says, that China is so eager to do deals that it will warp the market. Western oil majors are concerned that they won't be able to compete, according to Gary Ross, CEO of Petroleum Industry Research Associates, because the Chinese companies, most still state-owned, are willing to accept a lower rate of return. To acquire Unocal, CNOOC would have to offer more than the $17 billion that Chevron said they would pay for it, plus the $500 million breakup fee that Chevron booby-trapped to its Unocal bid.

This is not the only place in the world that China is doing the great oil grab. It says: ``But Beijing is completing a long-term $70 billion oil and gas deal with the Iranian regime.'' I would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that this crisis is not just noted now, because almost a year ago, Jane Bryant Quinn, in an article in Newsweek, it was August 16, 2004, called ``Gas Guzzlers' Shock Therapy,'' had this to say:

My fellow Americans, drop the fantasy that we'll return to

cheap gasoline, that was a year ago, it was a lot cheaper,

and pump it for as long as our withered hands can steer an

SUV. As the prophet saith, the end is nigh. Demand for oil is

running high. In fact, we're gobbling up the stuff. But world

production grew by only 0.6 percent a year for the past 5

years. At some point, supplies will shrink, not grow.

Mr. Speaker, this is really quite alarming, that in our country the second largest importer of oil in the world is now buying a major company.

Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago on this floor there was a very prolonged and serious debate on stem cells. Now that we have had time for emotions to subside, I thought it might be productive to spend a little while this evening talking about the subject of stem cells and why there is so much interest in it across the country.

A few months ago there was so much interest in this subject in California, for instance, that the voters voted favorably for a resolution that would make $3 billion from California taxpayers available to do research on embryonic stem cells.

What are stem cells? We have a chart here which kind of shows this.

There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem cells and there are embryonic stem cells.

I guess the ultimate stem cell is the fertilized ovum, which is referred to here as a zygote, because from that cell develops all the cells of the body. That single cell, produced from the union of the egg and the sperm, divides and divides again and again until finally it is a blastocyst; and then it goes to the gastrula stage, and at that stage the three germ layers begin to sort out the cells that are already differentiating, is the technical term that is used for that.

Every cell in our body, of course, has all of the same gene complement. And by mechanisms that are not clearly understood, during the embryonic process genes get turned on and get turned off, and the cells that are destined to produce your skin, for instance, the genes that are producing all the other tissues of the body are turned off, and only those genes necessary for producing the skin are still active.

Here we have the three germ layers: The ectoderm, which is the outer layer, and from that will develop your skin and your nervous system.

Then we have the mesoderm, that will be the middle layer, meso meaning middle, and from that will develop most of the weight of your body, all of your skeletal muscle, your cardiac muscle, much of the kidney, the blood cells, the smooth muscle in your intestines and stomach and so forth.

Then from the innermost layer of this inner cell mass as it is called here, the mass of cells that differentiates into these three germ layers, the endoderm, the internal layer, produces not very much of the mass of your body, the pancreatic cell and the thyroid gland and the line of the things like your lung and intestines and so forth are produced from the endoderm.

Then, of course, there are the unique germ cells produced, the sperm in the male and the egg or the ova in the female.

The reason for the intense interest in these stem cells is because of the perceived potential for affecting the course of many diseases and hopefully curing many of our diseases.

We have fundamentally two kinds of problems with our health. One is from tissue deficiencies when the tissue no longer does the kind of thing that it was destined to do and this embryonic development is wearing out or diseased. Then we have diseases from pathogens. These are organisms that can be outside that invade us.

Primarily, the hope is that stem cells will be useful in treating diseases of tissue deficiency. Although if the pathogens have destroyed a tissue and then the body has marshaled its resources with the help of the doctors with the antibiotics and so forth so that the pathogen is destroyed, then there is some hope that through the use of stem cells that you might be able to repair or replace the tissue damaged by the pathogen.

There are a lot of examples of diseases that might be amenable to cure or at least assistance through these stem cells. One is diabetes, which is a deficiency of insulin. Insulin is produced by some little cells that look like islands under the microscope because they are very dissimilar to the cells that they find themselves in. These cells are distributed through the tissue of the pancreas.

The pancreas is a big gland that produces a lot of enzymes. When the food leaves the stomach and goes into the small intestine, the pancreas produces enzymes for the digestion of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. So it is a very important digestive gland.

There is no real reason why these little islands of tissues, called the islets of Langerhans, named for the person who first described them, need to be in the pancreas, but that is where they are. They could, in fact, be any part of your body and do the same thing, which is secreting insulin.

We use insulin to treat persons with diabetes, but everyone knows, particularly the family of those and the patients who have diabetes, that insulin does not cure the disease. It simply prolongs life, but, ultimately, even with insulin, many of the people who have diabetes will end up having peripheral vascular problems with maybe amputation of toes or limbs, usually the lower limb, have problems in the eyes with the peripheral vascular there in the eyes and have vision problems.

Diabetes is the most expensive disease that we have. It costs more to

maintain and treat the people with diabetes than any other disease. There is the hope that if we could generate islets of Langerhans cells from these stem cells that you could eradicate diabetes, that you could implant these cells in the body, and it could be in any tissue. It could be in muscle tissue or under the skin. You could implant these islets of Langerhans cells there that produce insulin and whatever else these cells do that is not done simply by replacing the insulin which is lost. We might be able to eradicate diabetes, which, of course, would be an enormous contribution.

This is one of the most heart-wrenching things that the congressmen see, is when these little kids come to your office, they have to prick their finger maybe a dozen times a day, and they need insulin so frequently that they have an embedded little pump under their skin, about the size of a hockey puck. They may have to wake up during the night and prick their finger so that they can set the pump so it produces the right amount of insulin.

This is just one of many diseases that authorities in medicine and the general public believes might be helped with stem cell research: multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease.

That is one that I am personally very familiar with. My grandmother died from that disease. This was a long time ago, and it took quite a long time to diagnose that disease. She was falling. For quite a while they did not know why, and finally they diagnosed it as Lou Gehrig's disease, as was the common name for it then. I remember watching my grandmother deteriorate until the only motion that she had left, that she could communicate with us, was blinking her eyes: once for yes and two for no. Then she slowly died when she could no longer eat or drink. She did not want to be force fed.

We did not have any dream then of stem cells and what they might do for that disease, but I can understand the hope that families have who have a loved one who has a disease like this and the hope that they have that there may be a medical advance and a miracle cure for the disease.

Alzheimer's disease, my mother had Alzheimer's disease. How nice it would have been to have turned back the clock in her mind so that she was the mother that I spent the first 60 years with.

Then, of course, there is a very large category of autoimmune diseases. I have a list here of 63 autoimmune diseases. That is an interesting type of disease. When we are developing in our mother's womb very early and our heart is beating and we have a circulatory system and we have white cells, there is a particular kind of white cell called the T cells. Very early in our embryonic development those T cells are imprinted with who we are, and that is very necessary because they have to understand who we are, who you are, who I am, so that if some foreign invader comes in there or virus or bacterium or something, they recognize that as being foreign so that they can reject it.

For reasons that we do not understand, occasionally our autoimmune mechanisms get confused, and they see some of us as not being us, as being foreign, and so they attack it. We call those autoimmune diseases, and there are a lot of those autoimmune diseases: Addison's disease, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, autoimmune hepatitis. It goes on for 63 of these diseases.

Multiple sclerosis is one of those, by the way. Lupus was one of the first of these diseases that was identified as an autoimmune disease. There is a hope that stem cells could be useful in treating all of these diseases.

Then, of course, there are the injuries of central nervous tissue. We have two kinds of nervous tissue in our body, the central nervous tissue that is in our brain and spinal cord and then the peripheral nerves. That is the nerves that run to and from the brain and spinal cord. For reasons that is difficult to understand, they have two very different responses to injury.

Peripheral nerves regrow very easily. There is a classic phenomenon known as Wallerian degeneration and then regeneration of the nerve. If you cut a nerve well up in your leg that goes to your toe, it may be a long while before you get feeling back to your toe, almost always, unless a lot of scar tissue develops where the nerve was cut.

But for some reason that we do not yet understand central nervous tissue has no power to regenerate. Of course, what we are trying to do medically is to find out why central nervous tissue is different than peripheral nervous tissue, but absent finding out why so that you can turn that around there is the hope that with these stem cells we could grow nerve tissue that could then be placed in the body, injected in the body to help repair.

So there are a lot of diseases out there that medical specialists and the public generally believe could be cured or at least the course of the disease quite favorably changed with the use of stem cell technology.

There are, of course, two kinds of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Most of the work that we have done so far is with adult stem cells because we have been working with them for over three decades. We have been working with embryonic stem cells just a little over 6 years, and so the techniques for using adult stem cells are far better developed.

So there are more medical applications from adult stem cells than there are from embryonic stem cells, but we have not had enough time working with embryonic stem cells to determine whether or not they have the increased potential that most people believe they should have. The medical specialists believe this. The general public understands this.

If you are dealing with a cell that is not differentiated, that is, that it has not developed far enough along so that genes are turned off, a lot of leads are turned off, it could then develop into anything and everything with proper manipulation in the laboratory. So that if you are using embryonic stem cells there is the hope that they should have a wider application than adult stem cells.

There is another interesting characteristic of embryonic stem cells, and I do not know how important it will be. Only research will determine that.

At least 50 years ago, embryologists had determined that you could take a mother white mouse and a mother black mouse, each of which was pregnant and they have multiple babies in their uterus, and you could go into the uterus of the black mouse and take a little patch of skin out of the black mice, you could sew it into the skin of one of the white mice. When the white mouse is born, it has a little patch of black skin. Quite amazingly, it is not rejected.

Everybody knows when you transplant an organ from one person to another, there is a big rejection reaction to that. So we have a lot of anti-rejection drugs that we give. The person who gets that organ transplant must take those anti-rejection drugs. As soon as they stop taking them, the T-cells recognize this thing as foreign and start to attack it. Its use in the body is destroyed.

I do not know whether this little mouse experiment, whether the miracle of no rejection is a donor phenomenon or host phenomenon; but when you take skin from one embryo to another, there is no rejection. So using embryo stem cells, they might be less rejected. That would be good news.

I would like to spend just a couple of moments reflecting on some of the elements of a debate here in this Chamber. These debates are a bit like a battle. They are a battle; you are fighting for your position. Like all battles, emotions rise and sometimes things are exaggerated a little by one side or another. Now that emotions have subsided and we are dealing with other issues, I thought it might be instructive to look at some of the arguments made on both sides.

The argument on the pro-life side was that life is sacred, that these little embryos are human life, and the President has a position which I very strongly support, that it is just morally wrong to take one life hoping you can help another life. There has got to be another way to do it.

The bill we were debating said we should take some of those 400,000 surplus embryos that were produced in the in vitro fertilization clinics that were going to be discarded anyhow, we should take those embryos and use them to produce embryonic stem cell lines. For the last 4 years we have been dealing with what started out as maybe 60 cell lines, which has now

dwindled down to 22, all of them contaminated with mouse feeder cells so they are only good for research. They would not be good for medical use so there is a need for additional embryo stem cell lines. These are the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money exploring. The private sector can destroy all of the embryos they wish; there is no prohibition. You just cannot use Federal money so there are only 22 cell lines we can use Federal money to explore.

The argument on the pro-life side, and I subscribe to that argument, that for any one embryo, there is no certainty that embryo is going to be destroyed, that it is going to be abandoned. The argument on the other side is there are 400,000 of them. Of course they are, you cannot keep them frozen forever, and by and by they will be discarded. But not all of them, because we now have, I understand, over 100 babies who have been born from adoption of these snowflake embryos.

We have surplus embryos because when you go for in vitro fertilization, under hormone stimulation the mother produces more than one ovum; and they are put in a petri dish and exposed to sperm and fertilized. Then the doctor watches their growth, and the doctor chooses generally several because they do not all adhere to the uterus and grow to become babies, and so he wants to be sure there will be at least a baby. So he implants several in the uterus, and there are several left over that are then frozen in the event none of those take or the mother wants to have a baby later.

I remember when I was running a farm several years ago, I was breeding cattle to a bull that had been dead for 8 years. I do not know how long the sperm and the ovum or these embryos will survive frozen, but they will survive for quite a long time.

The argument on the pro-life side is that for any one of those embryos, it could be adopted; and that is true. If you have a reverence for life, as I do, you need to find another way to pursue embryonic stem cell research without destroying embryos, and we have a bill that does just that. We have talked to experts from NIH and others around the country, and in a few moments I will be talking about that bill.

One of the arguments made by the pro-life people is we have had 58 medical applications from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells, and that is true. But as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story is maybe the reason it is true because we have spent 3 decades working with adult stem cells and only about 6 years working with embryonic stem cells, and you will not know if they have the same potential until you have an equivalent amount of time to work with them.

The arguments on the other side were that these cells are going to be thrown away anyhow and why not get some use from them. I have just reiterated my argument, which is the argument of the pro-life community, which is for any one of those embryos, they could be adopted. In fact, some of these snowflake babies came to the White House during this debate, so they can be adopted.

There was another bill that we voted on that night and that was the umbilical cord blood bill which many mothers are now having frozen because there are some stem cell-like cells there that might be useful. But the argument is although they might be useful, they would not be as useful as the embryonic stem cells themselves.

``As a physician-scientist,'' and this is a direct quote from Curt Civin, co-director, Division of Immunology and Hematopoiesis Sydney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the centers at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, and we are fortunate in our State to have one of the best universities and one of the best medical schools in the world, that is Johns Hopkins, he says, ``As a physician- scientist who has done research involving umbilical blood cord stem cells for over 20 years, I am frequently surprised by the thought from nonscientists that cord blood stem cells may provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for research. This is simply wrong,'' he says.

By the way, all of the 58 diseases that have had applications from adult stem cells, all of them are represented by organizations that support embryonic stem cell research because the general belief is there ought to be more potential from embryonic stem cells than from adult stem cells.

Just a little history why I am standing here this evening and how I got involved in this. I did not come to this Congress until, and this was 13 years ago, until I was 66 years old, and so I had a former life. In that former life, I was a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in human physiology. I taught medical school and postgraduate medicine and spent a number of years doing research at medical schools and at the National Institutes of Health.

Several years ago, in 2001, I believe it was, there was a little like symposium at the National Institutes of Health where staff and members went out. I went out with a fairly large number of staff members where the experts from NIH were briefing the staff and members who were there on stem cell research. This was just before the President came down with his executive order on stem cells, and this was kind of an educational activity on the part of NIH. There were several researchers there; and as we can see in the next chart, I suggested it ought to be possible to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo and that was because of my knowledge of what happens in twinning.

Now, the first chart here shows the usual type of twinning. That is where you have two zygotes. That is the mother sloughed two ovum, not just one, and both were fertilized and both came down and were implanted in the uterus and they grew two fetuses, and they are called womb mates because they share the womb.

Well, we also can have twins, and the next chart shows identical twins and what happens with identical twins.

This can occur apparently in at least two different stages in the development of the embryo. Here we have the zygote, which is the union of the egg and the sperm, and that then divides to two cells; and they have left out a lot of stages here because there is a lot of stages between the two cell and the inner mass cell stage.

These embryos can split at the two-cell stage or later on when they grow two inner cell masses. You can tell at what time they split by how they present themselves. If they are presented in two placenta, they split early and they go their separate ways. If they split later, they are generally presented at birth in a single placenta so the doctor knows the approximate time they split.

I recognized what was really happening here was in a sense you were taking half of the cells away from the original embryo, and both halves went on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So it seemed perfectly logical to me that you ought to be able to take a cell or two from an early embryo without hurting the embryo. There has been a lot of research since that.

By the way, the experts at NIH said, yes, that should be feasible. I mentioned this to the President at an event where we had just a few moments to talk about it, and he turned the pursuit of this over to Karl Rove who went to NIH and asked them about my suggestion that you might be able to take cells from an early embryo, and he came back and called me and said they tell me they cannot do that.

I said either they did not understand the 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 one in it. That is what you do in cloning. If you can do that in a single cell, obviously you have the capability of taking a single cell out of a fairly large mass of cells.

So he went back a second time and asked them and they told him the same thing, and so the President came down a few days later with his executive order that all the stem cell lines we have produced by destroying embryos; and since he was opposed to taking one life with the hope that you might help another life, he could not support the destruction of any additional embryos, but that Federal money could be used in pursuing research and medical applications using what he was told was roughly 60 lines of stem cells that were in existence at that time.

Several years later in my office, just this year, as a matter of fact, talking

with the people from NIH, they explained how this misunderstanding occurred. It is awfully easy to have misunderstandings when your backgrounds are very different, which is one of the problems we have in dialogues, of course. You can think that you are carrying on a dialogue when you are really carrying on simultaneous monologues, which was apparently sort of what happened in this discussion between Karl Rove and NIH. Because what they had really told him was that they did not know if they could make a stem cell line from such an early embryo, and that is true, and that is why I wanted animal experimentation to determine whether you could do that or not.

Our next chart shows some of this progression, and it shows what we are talking about and what we were talking about there. This is half of the reproductive life of a mother. It shows an ovary, and there is one on each side, of course. Then it shows a funnel-like thing that sweeps over the ovum, it is called the infundibulum, and then the fallopian tube and down to the uterus. This shows just half of the tract. There is a mirror image of this over on the other side.

By the way, there is an interesting thing that sometimes happens. These sperm are very energetic. They are released, of course, in the vagina of the mother, and they then make their way up into the uterus, through the cervix into the uterus, and then they swim all the way up the fallopian tube, and they can swim out through the end of the fallopian tube out into the body cavity. Sometimes the egg is not picked up by the cilia in the fallopian tube, and it also floats out into the body cavity, and the egg can be fertilized there. We call this an ectopic pregnancy and, of course, the baby cannot grow there, so that has to be removed.

The ovum starts down the fallopian tube and very high up in the fallopian tube, it is fertilized. Then it divides into two cells and four cells and eight cells. It is at the eight-cell stage in the laboratory. This same process of fertilization and growth occurs in the petri dish in the laboratory, and it is at the eight-cell stage in the laboratory that they ordinarily implant the embryos. This goes on, of course, to produce the inner cell mass that we saw in the earlier chart there which then differentiates into the germ layers. It is at these later stages that it actually implants in the mother's uterus.

The convention is ordinarily that implantation is done at the eight- cell stage. So my suggestion was that you could take a cell from the eight-cell stage, and it would not harm the embryo. As a matter of fact, if the embryo splits at this stage or at the two-cell stage or down here at the inner cell mass stage of the two inner cell masses, both groups of cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So, obviously, there was the potential that you could take a cell from an early embryo without harming the embryo.

I have been carrying on this dialogue with the pro-life community and with the scientists at NIH now for these 4 years. During one of these discussions, the representative of the Catholic bishops, Mr. Dorflinger, made a suggestion. There are some things that you see in life that are just so obvious that you say, gee, why didn't I think of that. His contribution was just that kind of thing. He said, in addition to taking a cell out of that inner cell mass, and, by the way, this is now done more than a thousand times around the world. We do not know how many more than a thousand times. But in the laboratory they want to know that this embryo they are going to implant in the mother does not have any genetic defects so that they are going to have a healthy baby. So they take a cell out of the eight-cell stage and they do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on it and then they implant those remaining cells in the mother and more than a thousand times they have had a normal baby born.

Mr. Dorflinger's suggestion was, and in addition to doing that preimplantation genetic diagnosis that you also establish a repair kit. That is kind of what you hope you are doing when you freeze umbilical cord blood. You hope that there are some stem-cell-like cells in there, that if there are future medical problems and stem cell research development has gone on to the point that you can make some meaningful applications that you could then be using tissues that would not be rejected like the tissues from an embryonic stem cell from another person.

But clearly if the repair kit was established from a cell taken from an early embryo, it would be exactly the genetic composition of the child, of the person, of the adult as they grew, and so any defect could then be very effectively treated with tissues that would not be rejected.

The President has a group of people, the President's Council on Bioethics, and because of the enormous expected potential from stem cell research, they have been looking at alternatives for embryonic stem cell research that might be ethically acceptable and they have just fairly recently issued a report, Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells. It is called a white paper. In the body of that white paper they describe four different techniques.

The next chart shows a little paragraph from that, and I have highlighted a part of it.

It says it may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single cells extracted from early embryos 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 that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres. A blastomere is simply a cell from the blastula. It merely means a cell removed from the early human embryos without apparently harming them.

Then there is a little asterisk. If you go to the bottom of the page you see, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001.'' This is the proposal that I made to the President that was pursued by Karl Rove with the misunderstandings that we talked about a few minutes ago.

In the body of their paper, they talk about four different approaches. One of the approaches is to use embryos that obviously are not going to live because they are really bad and they are going to die. You could take cells from them like taking an organ from a person who is brain dead. I would have a little concern, Mr. Speaker, about how good a stem cell I was getting from an embryo that was dead.

Another suggestion is to manipulate the genes of the cells so that if they develop they will never produce a baby. It would be kind of a freak, I guess, and since it is not going to be a baby, then you could take cells from that. Again, I would have a little concern, was I really getting a normal cell when I was taking it from something that was genetically engineered so that it was not going to grow to be a baby?

In the text of their white paper, they do a very good job of talking about developing the repair kit and the fact that the cells could probably be taken without hurting the embryo. They look at all of the pluses and minuses of this.

But then it looks like almost, Mr. Speaker, that somebody else wrote the recommendations, because let me read from the recommendations here. The recommendations 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 risk on living embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells for research.

I agree. That is not what they talked about in the text of their white paper. There they talked about preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This clearly has to be for the benefit of the baby. The mother does not want to have a baby that is going to have a less than optimum opportunity for a good life with a genetic defect, and she has the opportunity to determine that and so she does it. And then they also talk about developing the repair kit.

So what we were proposing is that there would be cells made available, surplus cells from the repair kit, only after the parents had made three decisions which were in the interest of their baby. The first decision was to do in vitro fertilization. I know that there are those who do not believe that we ought to be doing in vitro fertilization. They kind of think that is like playing God. But there is an old axiom that I really subscribe to, Mr. Speaker, and that is that man's extremity is God's

opportunity and God is not going to do for us what we can do for ourselves. And these parents have made the decision they want a baby and in vitro fertilization is the only way they are going to get one, so they have made the decision.

Then they have made the decision they really want a healthy baby, so they are going to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And, by the way, they refreeze the embryo that was defective. It could be adopted. There are some families and, God bless them, that are really fulfilled by taking into their home handicapped babies, babies with defects, that they are going to be with them for a lifetime and these people feel fulfilled in taking these children into their homes, children who have HIV, crack cocaine babies and so forth and so these embryos could be adopted.

By the way, this is not genetic engineering. There have been some suggestions that this is an unacceptable technique. Just looking at what kind of genes are there, Mr. Speaker, that is not genetic engineering. That is not a very believable argument against this.

Then the parents have made a third choice, and that is to establish a repair kit for their baby. And only after the parents have made those three what I think are ethical choices, they want to have their own baby, they do not want their baby to have a genetic defect and they want their baby to have a repair kit and only after they have made those three decisions, then we would ask for some surplus cells from the repair kit to establish a new stem cell line.

There are two things that I want to refer to here. One is a letter from Dr. Battey, who is the spokesperson at NIH for stem cell research. He wrote me on May 23, fairly recently, a three-page letter in which he says, live births resulting from embryos which undergo preimplantation genetic diagnosis and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that this procedure does not harm the embryo. At least for a thousand times we have had a normal baby. They are not adults yet, and so the clock has to run for a while before we determine whether there is any defect.

I would be very surprised, Mr. Speaker, if there is a defect. Because you can take half the cells away from an early embryo to produce identical twins, and both halves produce what looks like perfectly normal people. So I would be surprised if there is any long-term effects from this.

Also, it is not known if the single cell removed from the eight-cell stage human embryo has the capacity to become an embryo if cultured in the appropriate environment.

Then I would like to turn, Mr. Speaker, to the Science section, Monday, June 6, just yesterday, Stem Cell Advances May Make Moral Issue Moot. A Dr. Lanza, and our office has spoken to Dr. Lanza, he is publishing a paper imminently. Some of the details could not be in this article because he was holding those for his paper.

In one approach pioneered by Robert Lanza and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, researchers plucked single cells from eight-cell embryos, embryos so young they do not have stem cells yet. Stem cells are ordinarily derived from inner cell mass. I do not understand saying that these are not the conventional stem cells but they certainly, I think, have the capacity to produce stem cells.

Fertility doctors have known for years that early embryos seem unfazed by the removal of any one of their eight virtually identical cells called blastomeres. In fact, it is common today to remove a single representative blastomere from a laboratory conceived embryo and test that cell for diseased genes before deciding whether to transfer that embryo into a woman's womb.

If this technique were applied to humans, and I skipped a couple of paragraphs where he talks about work with animals, if this technique were applied to humans, then a single cell taken from an eight-cell fertility clinic embryo could give rise to a self-replicating line of embryonic stem cells without compromising the donor embryo's odds of someday growing into a baby.

So the thing that Dr. Battey said had not yet been, and he was correct because this paper is yet to be published, I think it may be published today or tomorrow, but he has now in mice, and if it is doable in mice it is probably doable in higher animals, including humans, that they have developed stem cell lines from a single cell taken from an early blastomere.

I would just like to spend a few moments now talking about the bill which we have filed. It has a number of cosponsors, and I am very pleased that several doctors in the House have signed on to our bill.

Our bill really has nothing to do with working on humans because we think that we ought to do some animal experimentation before we start working with humans. So what our bill does is simply to make some moneys available for a several-year study, and we ought to go up to nonhuman primates. These are animals like chimpanzees and the great apes. To make sure that what has been done in mice and what has been done more than 1,000 times in these clinics, and what has been done, of course, is taking cells from an early embryo without apparently hurting the embryo, that we could develop these cells into a stem cell line. That has now been done, as was noted in the paper yesterday. This is the science section of The Washington Post. So the potential is there to do this. And all that our research does is to ask for animal experimentation so that we can check and double-check and make really sure that this is a safe procedure for humans.

I would like to put up the last chart that we are going to refer to now. This is a little bit like one that we looked at previously. This shows again half of the reproductive tract of the female; and, of course, what we are talking about are procedures that are done in the laboratory. But they are mimicking what happens in the body. By the way, when the little baby girl is born, she has in her ovary all of the ova that will ever be there, and they mature generally during her reproductive life, which may span 30, 40 years. They generally mature from one side or the other one a month. But they are all in there. And this shows the development of these ovum. And finally they grow and there is like a little blister on the side of the ovary, and then it breaks and the ovum is free.

In the laboratory, of course, these have been washed out of the reproductive tract of the female, and they are now put in petri dishes and exposed to sperm. In the body, the sperm is deposited in the vagina, makes its way through the cervix, up through the uterus, and swims clear up through the Fallopian tube. In a laboratory, of course, they simply with a pipette put the sperm in the petri dish with the ovum. And there will be many sperm. There are millions of sperm. And really quite a miraculous and very rapid transformation takes place. As soon as one sperm enters the egg, the egg then sets up a defense so that no more sperm can enter because if another sperm were able to make its way in and they had three sets of chromosomes instead of two, that would be fatal.

By the way, in flowers that is not fatal. That is called polyploidi, and that is how we get bigger flowers and better smell and so forth. But plants react very differently to extra hormones than humans do. Tisomy-21 produces mongoloid babies. That is just having one extra of one chromosome. So we do not react well to extra chromosomes; and so the ovum, after one sperm has entered, it sets up this defense so that no more sperm can enter.

The same thing happens in the laboratory. And then it divides, and the doctor watches that division. And down at eight-cell stage, they take a cell out and do preimplantation genetic diagnosis; and as recent research has demonstrated, the paper that is going to be published very shortly by Dr. Lanza, they have done this in mice, but if it is possible there, it ought to be possible in higher animals, and our research would determine that. They have produced stem cell lines from a single cell taken. What this means is, Mr. Speaker, that we now have been able to produce, we will be able to produce, embryonic stem cell lines without harming an embryo.

I have heard people say that they are just unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell research. I hope that is not what they mean. I hope what they are

mean is that they are unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell research if it means killing an embryo. I am unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell research if it means taking one life with the hope that we will be able to help another life. But with these recent advances in medicine and research in the laboratory, there is the real hope that we can take cells from an early embryo to benefit the embryo.

And I would like to say again the reasons that the parents are taking cells from this early embryo, the fundamental reason they are taking the cell is to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And the President's Council on Bioethics mentions the possibility of creating a repair kit, which certainly would benefit the baby. So the parent has now done three things which they think is ethical. I think that they are ethical, and there ought to be surplus cells from the repair kit, and it is those surplus cells that would be made available for additional stem cell lines.

But I want to reiterate again that the bill which we have just looks at animal experimentation. Although human research, human developments, human applications have gone beyond some of the exploration that we have done with animals, we still think that it is prudent to work with animals where we can determine with more cases and more intense experimental observation to make sure that there are no untoward effects of doing this.

I hope that this research can bring the two sides together. We had a couple of weeks ago a very heated debate. The emotions on both sides were rather obvious: those who wanted to take some of these more than 400,000 frozen embryos that they said were going to be discarded anyhow to get some good from them, and they were so convinced of this in California that they voted for $3 billion to proceed with this. The argument on the other side, which position I take, is that morally I have big problems with taking one life, and this little embryo could become under the right circumstances a baby. More than 100 times it has. From these frozen 400,000, there are about 100 or so, we call Snowflake babies, because this is a program to offer these embryos for adoption, and more than 100 times they have been adopted, and the President had some of those babies at the White House a couple of weeks ago when we were having that debate, and they came to the Hill also when we were having that debate here on the floor.

With the ability to take cells from an early embryo not to establish a stem cell line, that is not why the parents took it. They took the cell to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They then would like to establish a repair kit. We know they would like to do that because they are more and more freezing umbilical cord blood, which, as the one doctor I read from said, is a poor second choice to an embryonic stem cell line, but it is better than nothing. So we know that parents would like to do that. And it is only after that if the animal experimentation supported by our bill shows that this is efficacious and will not harm the baby, only after that would stem cell lines be derived from surplus cells from repair kits that the parents had decided to establish for the benefit of their baby.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that this ought to remove all of the ethical objections. But there is just one more, and I just want to spend a moment talking about that, and this is a good chart to talk about it from. Since these cells at the eight-cell stage are quite undifferentiated, which means they have not really decided what they are going to be, it is possible that they might take that one cell and establish another embryo. The President's Council on Bioethics thinks that is very unlikely. But what I would like to see them pursue is the development of stem cell lines and the preimplantation genetic diagnosis from the inner cell mass stage.

Now, that is the stage at which embryonic stem cells are ordinarily taken from when the embryo is destroyed. That is before the embryo is implanted in the normal process. Here is the inner cell mass, and here is where it is implanted a couple of days later, 2 or 3 days later, in the uterus.

Ordinarily, and I am not sure why they use the eight cell stage in the clinical laboratories, but I would like to see cells taken from the inner cell mass. There is no ethical question involved there because these cells in the inner cell mass cannot produce a baby because they have already lost their ability to produce decidua. The decidua is the amnion and chorion which is commonly known as the placenta, and they have lost the ability to do that, so they cannot produce a baby, but they can produce all of the tissues of a person, because these are what produce, back to our first chart that shows the inner cell mass differentiating into these three germ layers.

So the last possible ethical objection to deriving stem cells from pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and the development of a repair kit would be gone if we could take the cell from the inner cell mass, because the inner cell mass, those cells could not possibly produce a baby, because they are sufficiently differentiated that they cannot produce the decidium.

I have used this term ``differentiation'' a number of times, and what we try to do with adult stem cells, because they are already differentiated, we try to de-differentiate them. We try to confuse them with ques, with chemicals, with exposing them to other cells and the products from other cells so that they can kind of forget their development and they now go back to a prior less-differentiated state where they could produce more variety of cells. But you avoid those problems with the embryonic stem cell, because it has the capability to produce any and every cell in the body.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that with these recent medical advances, with the knowledge that we have, that it is perfectly feasible to ethically develop embryonic stem cell lines from embryos which should have, in the view of many of the experts, and clearly in the view of most Americans if you poll them, should have more potential than adult stem cells. Only research will tell that, and only time will tell whether or not that is true.

But with the hope that these large numbers of diseases so devastating to our people could be affected or maybe cured with embryonic stem cells, we really must pursue this, and now we have the opportunity to do that without offending those who have a problem with taking one life so that we might help another life.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that we now are on the cusp of advances that will bring these two sides together. We have enough things to be concerned about and to discuss in our country, we do not need to be discussing this, and I think the two sides with these present advances can come together. I hope that we will have an early vote on our bill and it will reach the President's desk so that he has a bill that he can sign that will promote embryonic stem cell research.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 13 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, June 8, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, we want to spend some moments this evening talking about a subject which is a very high priority for a lot of Americans, including a number of us here in the Congress, and that has to do with embryonic stem cell research. I want to start out by telling you what the essence of a bill that we have dropped is. We filed this bill a couple of days ago. And then I will come back to this later on, to a more detailed discussion of it.

What I have here, Mr. Speaker, is a little depiction of what happens in the human body. This shows one-half of the reproductive tract of a female. This would be replicated, mirror image, on the other side, because here we are seeing only one ovary and one Fallopian tube and one-half of the uterus; and what this depicts, Mr. Speaker, is the sequence of events in the fertilization and the growth and the ultimate implantation of the embryo, this whole trip, not an unhazardous trip for the embryo, because not all of them make that trip successfully.

In fact, probably about as many as two-thirds of those that are fertilized here never are implanted down in the uterus. But this is a sequence of events which takes 10 days, perhaps, to make the trip down to finally be implanted in the uterus.

Fertilization, as is noted here, occurs very far up in the Fallopian tube, and then there is a single cell called a zygote, and that splits to form two cells. They split to form four cells and eight cells. And we are going to come back and talk about those eight cells because that is the focus of a lot of attention in today's world, particularly in infertility clinics where they are doing in vitro fertilization.

Let us imagine now that that sequence of events is not occurring in the uterus and the fallopian tube of the mother, but it is occurring in a petri dish in the laboratory. For some reason, the mother cannot become pregnant, and so they, with the use of hormones, take eggs, generally more than one, from the mother, and they take sperm, of which there are millions, from the male, and they expose these eggs to sperm, and they are fertilized. And so the doctor has a number, generally several, of these fertilized embryos. And he looks under a microscope and determines the embryos which look the strongest, and then he implants them in the mother.

Because not every embryo takes when it is implanted in the mother, he

will usually implant more than one. One of my good friends here in the Congress, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), his wife had three babies because all of the embryos that were implanted took. And so now they are the very happy parents of triplets that were born.

Well, at this eight-cell stage, in clinics, it started in England a couple of years ago; it has now spread to this country. At the eight- cell stage, the doctors are able, with a very fine pipette, to remove a cell or two from that embryo, and they then do a genetic diagnosis on that cell. It is called a preimplantation genetic diagnosis because they are doing it before they implant the embryo in the uterus. The parents want to make sure that their baby is not going to have a genetic defect. If there is no genetic defect, they put the egg, minus a cell or two, in the uterus. And more than 600 times in the clinic in England, and well more than 1,000 times worldwide, we have had a perfectly normal baby born.

Now, the hope is that ultimately, but that is not what our bill is. I will come to that in a moment. The hope is, ultimately you could take that cell and do two other things with it, that cell or two that you have removed. One of the other things that you would do with it is to establish a repair kit for your baby.

We are now attempting to sort of do that when we are freezing umbilical cord blood, Mr. Speaker, and I know you have heard of that, with the hope that the stem cells, they are not really a true embryonic stem cell because they are already differentiated somewhat, that is, they have already decided ultimately what they are going to be, at least to some measure, that the baby can get, or the adult later on can get, some help from that.

We hope that we will be able to develop a repair kit from the cell that is taken. If that is true, then you could take some of the cells from the repair kit to produce a new stem cell line.

And as you know, Mr. Speaker, we are now down to 22 stem cell lines of humans that we can use Federal money working with. They are all contaminated with mouse ``feeder'' cells, and so there is a need in the medical research community for additional stem cell lines.

There is, Mr. Speaker, the hint of a moral ethical problem here, and that is that maybe the cell that I take out of this eight-cell-stage embryo could, under proper circumstances, become another embryo and, therefore, another baby. There is some cause to reflect on that, Mr. Speaker, because nature, on occasion, at some point between the two- cell stage and the inner cell mass, which is clear down here, will split the embryo and then end up with two embryos, and obviously, half of the cells went to each embryo and those half cells, each one, develops into a perfectly normal identical twin.

But if we could take the cell for preimplantation genetic diagnosis, if we could take that cell from the inner cell mass, then it is already differentiated, so that it cannot produce decidua.

Now the decidua, Mr. Speaker, is the amnion, chorion. These are elements of the placenta. And already the cells that are the inner cell mass, which will become the baby, have lost the ability to produce the decidua, so there would be no concern that the cells you took could produce another embryo and, if implanted, another baby.

Our bill looks only at animal experimentation because we need to determine several things. First of all, we need to determine, can you, in fact, from these single cells? By the way, one of the additional advantages of the inner cell mass is that there are a lot of cells there. So you could potentially take much more than one cell, which would give you an enhanced capability of producing a stem cell line and a repair kit, because these cells do not like being alone. And what we want to do is have animal experimentation on nonhuman primates, which are the great apes, which are 99.99 percent genetically identical to humans. That may reflect something on who you think you are, but the truth is that the gene differences between the great apes and humans is very, very small.

If, in fact, we can do these things with cells taken from embryos and cells taken from nonhuman primates, then we will have increased confidence that it will be safe in humans, that we can, in fact, develop the repair kit and the stem cell line that we would like to develop.

Let me take just a moment, and then I am going to recognize my friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey). Let me take just a moment to talk about what stem cells are.

There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem cells and there are embryonic stem cells. Here we show the growth of the embryo, and as you notice, there are fewer stages here than that previous chart we had, because they have skipped the morula and they go to the blastula, and then they skip the gastrula, well, here is the gastrula, and then they go on to the three derm layers.

These cells start differentiating. They first differentiate into the inner cell mass and the tissues which will become the decidua, and then the inner cell mass differentiates into three types of cells, the ectoderm and the mesoderm and the endoderm. And at the bottom here it shows the kinds of tissues that will develop from those.

From ectoderm will develop your skin and your nervous system, the brain and spinal cord and all the nerves that run to and fro in the body.

From the mesoderm, that is in the middle. From the mesoderm the middle layer will develop most of what you are, all of your muscle, all of your bone, all of your heart and so forth, the smooth muscle of your gut.

And then we have small but important contributions of the endoderm. And this is some of the glands in the body and the lining of the digestive system and the lining of the lungs and so forth.

Now, adult stem cells, and a good example of those is a stem cell that produces red blood cells here, that cell produces more than that. It is in the bone marrow and it produces red blood cells. It produces the thrombocytes for clotting. It produces the polymorphonuclear leukocytes, that is some of the white cells.

Now, maybe you can take that stem cell, which is not totally differentiated, and you can put it in an environment where it will be confused as to what it really is, so that it might be able to produce for you something else. And that is what we do, at least partially, with adult stem cells.

The embryonic stem cell is a cell taken from the embryo no later than the blastocyst, which has the inner cell mass, because only then will it be purely embryonic.

In the morula, the eight-cell stage we talked about, it is totally undifferentiated. Conceivably, it might produce an embryo. The President's Commission on Bioethics does not think so, but conceivably, it might. But if you take that cell or cells from the inner cell mass, it certainly will not, because it is already differentiated to the point that these cells in the inner cell mass will become the baby, and these cells in the trophoblast will become the decidua, the amnion and chorion, the placenta.

Mr. Speaker, now I would like to yield to my good friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much. I am honored he has come, and I really appreciate your articulate description of the situation we are in in the country where I think that a vast majority of Americans believe that there is considerable potential from embryonic stem cell research. And yet we have this big divide in our country where a lot of our citizens in this country and a lot of our Members here in the Congress have real problems taking a life, the life of one of these early embryos.

By the way, this has in it the blueprint for a completely unique individual. There are now 6\1/2\ billion people in the world and no two alike. And so each of these embryos created in the laboratory has in it a completely unique genetic blueprint. It is not that we know which of these embryos is going to be implanted because they are frozen, could be implanted in the future. But one thing we do know, one thing we do know is that if you take the embryo and destroy it, that that potential life is gone.

Now you may argue, you may argue that you really ought to opt for the greater good and there could be enormous potential from embryonic stem cell research. If that were the only argument, Mr. Speaker, I would engage in that argument, but it is not because we do not have to kill embryos. You do not have to hurt embryos to get stem cell lines.

I have here a piece today from Roll Call which is kind of an inside paper here on the Hill. And it is quoting from freshman Senator Tom Coburn. He is a freshman there because fairly recently he was here in the House. He came in 2 years after I came in. He is a doctor. He has delivered a lot of babies in Oklahoma. And I called him the other day and he said, I will carry this bill in the Senate.

This is what he is quoted as saying in Roll Call just today: ``Coburn said, It is possible to harvest stem cells without destroying embryos and would focus his efforts on amending the bill,'' that is the bill that will be going through the Senate, ``amending the bill to promote this procedure.''

I also want to note in this week's edition of Time magazine, the first story, a pretty big story on stem cells, ``Why Bush's Ban Could Be Reversed.'' Now, we voted yesterday to reverse that ban. It needs to be voted in the Senate, and then it needs to go to conference and then it needs to go to the President's desk and the President has assured the world that he will veto this because of his respect for life.

I hope that the bill we are discussing tonight reaches the President's desk at the same time as the bill we voted on yesterday so the President has before him the option of signing a bill which opens up all of the promises of embryonic stem cell medical application and still preserves life.

I want to emphasize again, Mr. Speaker, that our bill deals only with the animal experimentation because we want to know that in fact it is efficacious and safe to do the procedures that will need to be done if we are going to reach the potential for medical application of embryonic stem cells.

I would like to for just a moment talk about the general potential from stem cells, whether they are embryonic or whether they are adult stem cells.

There are two basic kinds of diseases in the body. There are diseases from tissue or organ deficiencies, and there are diseases from pathogens. Mostly what we are talking about are diseases from tissue or organ deficiencies, although if there is a pathogen that destroys an organ or a tissue and it might be replaced through embryonic or adult stem cell application, that would be included also. But there are a large number of diseases that represent tissue or organ deficiencies, which appear to hold promise for stem cell medical application.

My colleague mentioned Type 1 diabetes. This is really a very tragic disease. It represents the largest cost of any disease in our country. I see diabetics come through my office and the most heart-wrenching are those little children, juvenile diabetes, sometimes very virulent. They have to sample, several times a day, their blood.

Thank God, we have improved techniques which require just a fraction of a drop of blood. And they have, many of them, embedded in their side a little hockey-puck-size pump that pumps insulin. But they have to sample their blood to know what the sugar level is so they know how to set the pump, so it is pumping the right dose of insulin. This they have to do 24 hours a day. And some of them are so brittle that they have to wake up at night to do this.

When they come to your office with diseases like this, or like multiple sclerosis, or like lateral sclerosis that my grandmother died from, then your heart really goes out to these people. I remember my grandmother's death. I was a teenager. They had misdiagnosed it for quite a while, because this is Lou Gehrig's disease, and it was not all that common. When they finally figured out what it was, there was nothing that could be done for it. We hope in the future, with stem cell application, there will be something that can be done for it.

My grandmother went from falling now and then to degenerating slowly, until just before she died the only motion she had was blinking her eyes. And that was the only way she could communicate with us. One blink for ``yes,'' two blinks for ``no.''

So from a personal perspective, and I suspect many families are like my family, that they have a relative, if not a relative, a friend who has one of these many diseases, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, or Alzheimer's disease.

And, Mr. Speaker, there are a whole host. I have here 63 different autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where the body gets confused as to what is really body. You see, very early in our embryonic development there are certain miracle cells in our body called T-cells that are imprinted with who we are. And that is very essential, because in the future there are going to be a lot of foreign invaders, mainly bacteria and particularly viruses, that would like to occupy us and live there comfortably without being rejected; and that, of course, would be hazardous and frequently fatal. So these T-cells are imprinted with who we are so that they reject everything that is not us.

Well, in many people, and there are 63 diseases here that are listed, in many people these immune reactions get confused, and so we have what are called autoimmune diseases where the body starts attacking its own tissues. Well, the body marshals its resources and many times it has overcome this deficiency, but by that time, the tissues are decimated. So we have the potential that we could provide enormous medical help in a great number of diseases.

There is another potential, which is much debated and explored, and that is the potential difference between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. And there are many people who will tell you that adult stem cells have the most potential because they have presently the most medical applications, 58 as compared to zero for embryonic stem cells. The reason for that, Mr. Speaker, or at least one reason, is that we have been working with adult stem cells for over 3 decades and just over 6 years with embryonic stem cells. And so there has not really been time for medical applications.

But all of the professionals in the area will tell you that, theoretically, because of what embryonic stem cells are, embryonic stem cells way back here in early development of the embryo, that they retain, or they have the ability to make any and every tissue in the body. So, theoretically, they ought to have the most potential.

You will hear, Mr. Speaker, debates on this issue, and it is well to remember that from a teleological perspective, the embryonic stem cells ought to have more application than adult stem cells, which is why all the clamor, why the $3 billion in California voted by the voters for embryonic stem cell research, because the professionals and most people who think about it believe that there is more potential from embryonic stem cells. There may not be, but that is why we need to do the research so that we know what is feasible here.

I just want to spend a moment, Mr. Speaker, going over my personal involvement with this field. As was mentioned by my good friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), I was privileged in a former life to work in a scientific medical environment. I taught medical school for 4 years, I taught postgraduate medicine at the School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. I had the opportunity, while studying for my doctorate, to take a course in advanced embryology. And so when I went to NIH in 2001 with a group from the Hill here, most of them staff members, quite a large number as I remember, for a briefing at NIH on the potential for embryonic stem cell applications, and this was in 2001 before the President came down with his executive order that we could not kill any more embryos; that there were 60 cell lines, maybe not quite 60, but 60 cell lines in existence and that Federal money could be spent only on those, we knew then that these cell lines would eventually run out.

Now they are down to 22 and all of them contaminated with mouse ``feeder'' cells, so there is now a need, if this research is going to continue with Federal funding, there is a need for additional stem cell lines. That is why the bill yesterday and why the bill that we are talking about today.

Because I remembered my embryology, and the next chart here will show what happens with ordinary twinning with fraternal twins, in fraternal twins there are two eggs, and those two eggs may implant in the uterus far apart, in which case the babies will present in separate amnions, or they may implant in the uterus close together so that they will present with a single chorion, I guess it is.

The next chart shows what happens in identical twinning. In identical twinning, early in the development of the embryo, and you will remember the first chart we looked at that went from one cell to two to four to eight, then 16 and on to the inner-cell mass stage, and the embryo can divide at either the two-cell stage or clear up to the inner-cell mass stage. And the little chart here shows two inner-cell masses.

The cell at which it divides determines how the babies will present. Here you see you have two babies in the same chorion and they mimic the two babies that were fraternal twins that happened to implant in the uterus close together. Well, I knew, Mr. Speaker, that in both of these cases half of the cells were taken away from the developing embryo either at the two-cell stage or anything in between clear up to the inner-cell mass, and there are a lot of stages in between here. And when you took half the cells away, the half you took away made a perfectly normal baby, and the half that was left made a perfectly normal baby: identical twins.

So it was reasonable to me that you ought to be able to take a cell or two or three or so away and the cells that were left ought to produce a perfectly normal baby. And I asked NIH researchers, is this theoretically possible? They said, yes, it is theoretically possible.

A few days later I happened to be at an event with the President, and I knew he was struggling with this decision. So I mentioned to him my visit to NIH and the possibility that this could be done. The President handed the follow-up to this to Karl Rove, and so Karl Rove went to

Mr. Chairman, before proceeding as chairman of the Subcommittee on Projection Forces, I believe it appropriate to underscore the magnificent service rendered the Nation by the men and women serving in our Armed Forces around the world who so steadfastly meet every challenge with true dedication and commitment. We thank each and every one of them for their service. And we thank all Americans, specifically the families of servicemembers, for their unwavering support of our servicemen and -women.

History has repeatedly taught us that peace is only achieved through strength. We have sought to apply the lessons learned from the ongoing global operations to the committee markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 in order to strengthen our Armed Forces.

Oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth's surface. The vast majority of the world's population lives within a few miles of a sea coast. Seventy percent of our trade moves by sea. Thus, maintaining America's naval superiority is an imperative. I am pleased to report that the National Defense Authorization Act that we will consider initiates a program to infuse our shipyards with leading-edge manufacturing technology and management systems that reduce shipbuilding costs and to return our shipyards to global competitiveness.

We have also taken steps to confront excessive shipbuilding cost growth by capping costs on specific ship types, recognizing that both the Navy and industry must work together to design and build affordable ships with adequate capability.

Authorization for Department of Defense programs within the jurisdiction of the Projection Forces Subcommittee are increased by $2.3 billion above the budget request. $538 million of the additional authorization is for programs on the military service chiefs' unfunded requirements list.

Authorization is included for two additional Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, an additional T-AKE ship, and to accelerate fielding of the new amphibious assault ship. This is three more ships than the budget requested. Also included is a recommendation to authorize a multi-year procurement for the C-17.

We have also taken several initiatives to begin to address shortfalls in important requirements to the Department of Defense. These programs include:

$418 million to accelerate the development of the amphibious assault ship replacement;

$20 million to upgrade the fleet of B-2 bombers;

$60 million to complete development and evaluation of the Affordable Weapon System, a low-cost cruise missile, and increased authorization for several procurement, research and development programs of the services.

While there is much more to do, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2006 is an important step in making our country more secure. I urge all of my colleagues to support the bill.

I would like to thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), ranking member of our subcommittee, for his extraordinary partnership, dedication, and support. I would like to thank all my colleagues on the subcommittee for their diligence, commitment, and hard work.

I would like to also thank our chairman, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), for his leadership, and our ranking member, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton).

In conclusion, I would like to recognize the contributions and thank the many staff members for their invaluable assistance in preparing

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to join my colleague in a colloquy.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I agree with the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) that the Surface Ship Torpedo Defense program is extremely important for the protection of our high-value ships and sailors at sea. I will encourage the Navy to move expeditiously to field this system with the Anti-Torpedo Torpedo.

Mr. Speaker, we have just heard an impassioned plea to proceed with embryonic stem cell research. Tomorrow we are going to vote on a bill that would expedite embryonic stem cell research. I have here the latest issue of Time magazine. It just arrived in our office, May 23, and the lead article in it says ``Why Bush's Ban Could Be Reversed.'' It is talking about stem cell research.

In view of the interest all across America and in view of the fact that tomorrow we are going to be voting on a bill, I thought it might be well this evening to spend a few minutes putting this debate in context.

What are stem cells? This is a new term to many Americans. Our first chart is a depiction of the development of early embryos and then all of the tissues in the body which develop from this embryo.

The ultimate stem cell here is the zygote itself. The zygote is produced by the union of the egg from the mother and the sperm from the father. A stem cell is a cell which has the capability of differentiating into a number of other cells. Of course, that is the hope of embryonic stem cell research, that we might induce a cell to develop into a tissue, an organ or cells which will be useful in treating diseases.

This is a very abbreviated depiction of the early development of the embryo because it skips the morula stage, and we will come back to that in a few moments because that is the stage where most of the attention is focused now.

This goes from the zygote through the morula and finally, to the blastula and then to the gastrula. Here we see in the gastrula the development of what we call the germ layers. I guess you would say that a cell from each of these three germ layers, a cell from the endoderm, a cell from the mesoderm or a cell from the ectoderm, are all stem cells because they are destined to become a lot of different tissues and organs in the body.

From the ectoderm develops our nervous system and the skin. From the mesoderm develops most of the mass of the body, all of the bones and all of the muscles, the heart, the red blood cells and so forth. And then the endoderm, although widely dispersed in the body represents less mass in the body because it is the lining of the lung and the digestive tract. My chart shows the germ cells, the sperm in the male and the egg in the female.

Now there are cells in all of these that one could say were stem cells. Tissue, and blood is a tissue, the tissue which has the most obvious stem cell that students were taught at least 50 years ago when I first was studying these things, is the stem cell in the bone marrow from which a number of different blood cells develop.

When you are working with adult stem cells, if you want something other than the organs from which this cell could differentiate, then you need to de-differentiate the cell. In other words, you need to convince the cell that it is not exactly what it is as a result of the development process, that it returns to its original undifferentiated, or relatively undifferentiated state, and then it can make other tissues.

The embryonic stem cells philosophically certainly hold the most promise because they are cells from which all of the tissues and organs of the body develop. There is the rationale then that these embryonic stem cells hold the promise of producing anything and everything that might be needed for fighting diseases.

There is enormous theoretical potential from working with stem cells. They are useful in treating diseases that result from tissue or organ deficiencies. We need to differentiate these diseases that result from the action of pathogens. There is a very large list of diseases that theoretically might be treated by stem cell application. Diabetes is one of those. It, by the way, represents the largest cost of all the diseases in this country.

This is probably the one that in my experience is the most heart wrenching because I have seen these little children come to my office. Many times during the day and frequently at night they have to prick their finger, their hand, their ear lobe, something in their body to get a drop of blood, and now we have new instruments that require a pretty small drop of blood, and then this new almost miracle instrumentation analyzes that blood to see what the glucose content is so that they know how to set that pump. Many of them have embedded in their side a little hockey puck size pump that pumps insulin.

This of all the diseases, Mr. Speaker, is the one that perhaps most obviously might lend itself to cure through stem cell research. Giving insulin to a diabetic does not cure the disease. It simply delays the inevitable. The person whether they are young or old will go on to have circulatory problems. They may lose their eyesight. Circulation in their legs may be so bad that their toes become gangrenous and have to be removed. When you see these little children come through your office suffering with this disease, your heart really goes out to them and you want to do everything that you possibly can to make sure that they have every potential for a healthy life. And they will not live so long, they will not live so well as the average person in spite of all the miracles of medicine today because insulin does not cure diabetes.

But if through embryonic or adult, for that matter, if you could do it, stem cell research, if you could develop islet of Langerhan cells, you could then put them anywhere in the body. In our bodies, they reside in the pancreas. I am not sure why because what they do and what the pancreas does are two very different things. The pancreas secretes a large number of enzymes for digestion in the small intestine and the islet of Langerhan cells just happen to be resident there. They could be anywhere. They could be in your tongue, they could be in your toe, they could be in your ear lobe. They could be anywhere as long as there is a blood supply there to pick up the insulin that is made by these islet cells.

There is a long list of diseases: multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease. I have personal familiarity with this because my grandmother died of this a number of years ago, and I remember as a little boy standing by her bedside as she deteriorated and finally the only way that she could communicate with us was by blinking her eyes. She could not move anything else. She had no other way to communicate with us.

There is a hope, realizable, who knows, until we conduct the research and do the medical experimentation, but there is a hope that one might develop from stem cells tissues that could be injected into people with multiple sclerosis or lateral sclerosis. Sclerosis, by the way, means a scarring. What happens is that there is a scarring that inhibits the function of these nerves.

Alzheimer's disease, that is frequently mentioned. That is a particularly tragic disease. Although it was not specifically diagnosed in my mother because she had other ailments that were easier to diagnose, she lived to be 92 and I am sure that she had Alzheimer's because she had many of the symptoms. It was really tragic to watch a woman who was very bright and vital lose her ability to remember, lose a sense of proportion, to be calling, Roscoe, Roscoe. I would say, I'm here. She said, oh, you're not Roscoe because my father was Roscoe, Sr. and she was way back 50 years earlier in her memory. There is a hope that stem cell research could help cure diseases like this.

I have here a very large number of autoimmune diseases. There are 63 of them here. I have mentioned a couple of them. Autoimmune diseases are diseases where the body fails to recognize itself, that is, the parts of the body that have to do with recognizing foreign invaders and assimilating them, ejecting them, killing them.

Very early in our embryonic development, we have a very special kind of life cell which we call T cells. Very early in embryonic development, they are imprinted with who you are. There are 6.5 billion of us in the world and these T cells are smart enough to recognize a difference. There may be somebody out there close to you, but nobody out there quite like you; and you try to take their body organ and put it in you, these T cells are going to recognize it as foreign and move to reject it. Sometimes for reasons we do not understand, these immune reactions in the body get confused, and they attack the body itself.

We have a large number. Lupus was probably the first widely recognized of

these diseases. What has happened is that when the body is attacked, the specific tissues of the body are attacked, they degenerate and become not useful. There is some evidence that the body develops an ability to recognize its own; and so the hope is that after this has happened, if you could replace the damaged tissues, that the person gets returned to normal function. There is enormous potential from use of stem cells, whether they are embryonic or adult, to cure many, many diseases.

The argument today is about whether it should be adult stem cells or whether it should be embryonic stem cells. We have been working with adult stem cells, Mr. Speaker, for over 3 decades, and so there have been a fair number of applications to medicine. You will hear the figure 58. We have been working with embryonic stem cells a little over 6 years. There just has not been time to make those applications, but the fact that there are presently no applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell work does not mean that there will not be and it does not mean that those applications might not be more efficacious than adult stem cell applications.

Indeed, if you will talk to the researchers and the experts in this area, they will all tell you to a man and to a woman that the potential for embryonic stem cell application to medicine should be greater than adult stem cell application just because embryonic stem cells, they are called totipotent, they can produce anything and everything that is in the body. The adult stem cells have already been differentiated, at least to some extent; and so they are limited in their potential application.

There is another very interesting potential that I do not hear often discussed of embryonic stem cells. Fifty years ago when I was studying and teaching in this area, there was an experiment where the researcher went into a mother black mouse and took a little patch of skin in the uterus from one of her little black babies and then he took that little patch of skin, and he went into the uterus of a white mouse with her white babies, and he cut a little patch of skin out of the white mouse and put in that little patch of black skin and when the white mouse was born with that patch of black skin, it did not reject it.

This gives the promise, Mr. Speaker, that there may be less rejection of tissues and organs developed from embryonic stem cells than from adult stem cells. I do not know whether this was a host or donor phenomenon. Both were embryos. All we know is that when the black skin was sewed onto the little embryonic mouse that there was no rejection. If you tried to do that after they were born, I do not know if we have determined at precisely what time they lose that ability, it certainly would have been rejected.

The debate that we are going to vote on tomorrow and the debate which was the subject of the Special Order just before I spoke has to do with whether or not we can effect the needed cures in medicine from adult stem cells or whether we need to move to embryonic stem cells to make this happen. Early in this debate, I had a personal involvement which was kind of an interesting one.

In a former life, I got a doctorate in human physiology. I taught medical school. I did medical research. I went out to NIH in 2001, before the President made his executive order. It was an information meeting at NIH where the scientists working in this field were briefing, they were largely staff members from the Hill. I think I was the only Member there. It occurred to me that you ought to be able to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo, because nature has been doing that forever as far as we know. That is what happens in identical twinning.

I would like to look at the next chart. This is two zygotes. This is not identical twinning. I just wanted to contrast this with identical twinning. This is where we have fraternal twins. They are so-called wombmates. They could be two boys, two girls, one of each. They are conceived at the same time. The mother that ordinarily sloughs one ovum a month this month sloughed two ovums and the sperm, and there are a whole lot of those, millions of them, they found both of them and they fertilized both of them and the uterus was receptive so they both were implanted in the uterus. This simply shows how they present at birth, depending upon how they implanted. If they are implanted far apart, they present one way at birth. If they are implanted very close together, they present another way at birth.

The next chart shows twins from monozygotic twins, that is, from a single zygote, from a single egg. This presentation looks very much like the dizygotic, that is from two eggs, dizygotic twins that implanted in the uterus very close together. Knowing that in identical twinning, regardless at what stage it occurs and it can occur all the way from the two-cell stage clear up to the inner cell mass and there are several stages between these two, but no matter where it occurs, the embryo has lost half of its cells and both parts go on to produce a perfectly healthy baby.

So I reasoned that it should be possible to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the early embryo and I asked the researchers at NIH, was that possible. They said, yes, of course that is possible. But with all the embryos out there that could be simply destroyed to get the stem cells, nobody had determined how easy this was to do. But they said that it certainly was doable.

A little bit later, and this was again before the President gave his executive order, I met the President at an event and I told him very briefly that I had met with NIH, and there was this possibility that we could take cells from an early embryo without harming the embryo. He asked Karl Rove to follow up on that. Several days later, Karl Rove called me, Mr. Speaker, and he said, Roscoe, I went to NIH and I told them what you told the President, and they told me they cannot do that.

I said, Karl, there is some problem here. Either they misunderstood your question or something because these are the same people that go into a single cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in the cell. Of course they can go into a relatively large embryo and take out a cell or two. He went back to talk with them again and called me back and said, they are telling me the same thing. And so the President came out with his executive order which said that Federal funds could be used in research only on the cell lines that had been developed from embryos that had been killed in the process of developing them, that no new cell lines could begin with embryos that had to be killed.

This is only with Federal money, of course. The private sector can do whatever it wishes because there is no law prohibiting the use of embryos. My concern, Mr. Speaker, is that we in Congress ought to be a player in this, and now we are standing on the sidelines.

Mr. Speaker, I see that the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has joined us, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's coming and entering into this discussion.

Before leaving this little experience with NIH, I will, Mr. Speaker, submit for the Record a letter which I received today from Dr. Battey, who is the spokesman for embryonic stem cell at NIH, and what the letter says is, and I will come back to it in a few moments to read a couple parts from it, that what we are proposing to do is certainly possible; that there is no medical or scientific impediment to doing this. I just wanted to put to bed the suggestion that NIH says what we are doing cannot be done in spite of the fact that that is what Karl Rove thought they said.

In my office just a few months ago, NIH kind of sheepishly admitted that there was some misunderstanding in conversation because they had never said that we could not go into an early embryo and take a cell. What they had said, which is true, which is why I am proposing this research, was that we have never developed a stem cell line from that early an embryo. Ordinarily, we develop a stem cell line from the inner mass cell stage of the embryo. But the earlier we get the stem cell, the more totipotent it ought to be and the more efficacious it ought to be in treating the diseases.

I have here, Mr. Speaker, a little diagram which shows the ontogeny, the development of the embryo. It begins, of course, with the egg that comes from the mother, the oocyte, and then the sperm, and it shows only four or five there. There will be millions there, I assure my colleagues. And there is really a miracle that occurs here because as soon as one of them penetrates that egg, there is a big barrier put up so that there is no other candidate. It would be quite disastrous if two of them penetrated that egg because that would create an embryo which would certainly die.

And then the egg, called a zygote, goes on to develop, and it is two cells. And it may split here to make two babies, by the way, identical twins. And then the four-cell and then the eight-cell stage. It is at the eight-cell stage, and I am jumping a little ahead here, it is at the eight-cell stage in a petri dish.

This is what happens in the body. If this kind of thing happens, they can fertilize it in a petri dish. It is at this eight-cell stage in more than 1,000 times now in clinics. It started in England. It is now in this country. They have gone into the eight-cell stage and taken out one cell. They might get two. And they then do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that. In other words, they determine whether or not there are any genetic defects like Down's disease, for instance, in which case they would not want to implant that embryo. They do this for the benefit of their baby because one would not want, if they had a choice, to bring a child into the world that was going to have a less than optimum quality of life because they had a genetic defect.

This is not genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is when they change the genetics. All they are doing here is seeing what genetics are there, and if there is no deficiency in the genetics, they implant the six or seven cells that remain, and more than 1,000 times they have had a normal baby.

All of this happened in the intervening years between 2001 and now. This may have been going on when I talked to the President and when I talked to NIH. I did not know that it was going on, but just a few months ago, this report came out, and now I spent the other day, for a half-hour, probably, talking with two investigators here in Virginia who are doing this.

I just want to spend a couple of moments talking about the debate. The debate is between the use of discarded embryos that the proponents, and that is what the bill is tomorrow, say are going to be thrown away anyhow and why do we not get some good from them by developing stem cell lines from them since they are going to be discarded anyhow?

The argument on the other side is twofold. First of all, it is not certain they are going to be discarded because they can be adopted. What is it? Operation Snowflake where parents can adopt one of these embryos and have them implanted in a mother other than the one from whom the ovum was taken. So it is not certain that they are going to be discarded.

The other challenge to this is that this is a life. In the proper environment, this is a human being. It is an

embryo. Put it in the mother's womb, and it will become a very distinct human being, unlike any other out of the 6.5 billion people in the world. And there are those who feel that it is immoral. The President is among them, and he has said this, that it is immoral to take one life so that we might help another.

The good news is, as the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) said, we do not have to do that because we can take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo.

By the way, umbilical cord blood stem cells are not an alternative to embryonic stem cells. Just a little quote here. This is from a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, one of the best medical schools in the world: ``As a physician-scientist who has done research involving umbilical cord blood stem cells for over 20 years, I am frequently surprised by the thought from nonscientists that cord blood stem cells may provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for research. This is simply wrong,'' he says.

Do they have a place in treating? Yes, they do. But they are not a substitute for embryonic stem cells, and he makes that very plain.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research suggested that 58 diseases have been successfully treated using adult stem cells. That is true.

I asked NIH, is that true that we had 58 treatments from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells?

They said yes, that is true. I said, why is that true? That is true because we have had more than 3 decades' experience with adult stem cells, and just a little over 6 years' experience with embryonic stem cells. There simply has not been time. All of the 58 listed, all of them, are represented by organizations that support stem cell research. So what this says is that all of those physicians that are involved with these 58 applications of adult stem cells, all of them support stem cell research.

The argument on the other side is that it is immoral, that we should not take one life to support another life; and in making those claims, they state the following: this kills human embryos. It does. You may not think that is a problem. You may not see this little bit of life that holds the miracle of chromosomes and against that will develop the whole unique individual, not like any other. Out of 6.5 billion in the world, you may not see that as human life, but it clearly is. It kills a human embryo. You may be okay with that, you may not be, but a great number of people are not okay with that.

They argue that H.R. 810, which is the bill we will be voting on tomorrow, is an empty promise because the embryonic stem cells have not treated a single human disease, and that is true. We just gave the reason for it: they have not been worked with long enough to know whether they can treat a disease or not.

H.R. 810 does not have 400,000 discarded embryos to use, that is true; and the statement is made that if you used these 400,000 embryos, you would only get 275 stem cell lines, and that is because only 2.8 percent of them have been donated for research. That gets you down to 11,000, not 400,000. Only 65 percent of those will survive the thawing. They are frozen. This is not an event that is not traumatic. It is very traumatic to the embryos. A third of them do not survive the freezing and rethawing.

Twenty-five percent of those that are still alive after they thaw, only 25 percent will go on through this development stage, through the blastula, gastrula and so forth, so they can be implanted. Then, even if it has gone that far, in one trial only one out of 18 attempts produced a stem cell line, and in another trial only three out of 40 produced a stem cell line. So that now gets you down to about 275.

Yes, we have not developed perfection yet in these techniques; but 275 stem cell lines is more than 10 times more than all the stem cell lines we have now, which, by the way, I think are almost all in this country contaminated with mouse feeder cells.

I see that we have been joined by my colleague from Nebraska. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman very much.

Mr. Speaker, let me yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman.

I have here a very recent report, ``Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells,'' a white paper by the President's Council on Bioethics, and the next chart shows page 25 from this.

The highlighted part says: ``It may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single cells,'' the process we have been talking about, ``extracted from early embryos and in ways that do no harm to the embryo,'' thus biopsy. ``But the initial success of the Verlinsky Group's efforts at least reaches the possibility that embryonic stem cells could be derived from single blastomas removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them.''

Then there is an asterisk, and if you go to the bottom of the page it says: ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001 before the President gave his executive order.''

There are four potential sources listed here. This source is number two. They do a very good job of discussing this in the body of the text. They talk about parents going for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. They talk about the possibility that you could develop from the cell or cells taken a repair kit.

This is a fascinating potential. This is why we are collecting and freezing umbilical cord blood, because we hope that through the life of that person, there might be some opportunity to use stem cells. They are not embryonic, they have limited application, but maybe, just maybe, we could produce something that would help that person later on with a disease.

But in this case, if they did preimplantation genetic diagnosis and if they developed a repair kit from that, then all that we would ask for is that a few surplus cells from the repair kit could be made available for a new stem cell line.

But that is not even what our research, our paper, our bill asks for. What our bill asks for is simply Federal money to do research on animals, on nonhuman primates, that is, the great apes, which genetically are remarkably similar to humans, if it works there, it probably would work in humans, to determine the efficacy and the safeness of doing this.

Unfortunately, if all that you read was their recommendations, you would be disappointed, because they never therein mention that the parents have made an ethical decision to make sure they do not have a baby with a genetic defect, the parents who made a decision to establish a repair kit so that their baby at any time during their life could have available compatible tissue to fix a medical problem. They simply state in their recommendation section that they consider it unethical to go to an embryo and take a cell out of it just to establish a stem cell lot.

It must be that a different person wrote the recommendations at the end as compared to the person or persons that wrote the text in the front, because they certainly should have mentioned the parents' decision to develop a repair kit, the parents' decision to make sure that their baby did not have a defect. These are decisions that parents make, I think, ethically to the benefit of their baby and for all that we would hope in the future. And, again, our bill deals only with animal experimentation to determine the efficacy and the reliability of doing this.

The next chart shows another development chart, and I would just like to reemphasize: Now, imagine this is not in the mother; this is an infant dibulum, in the ovary and the fallopian tube here. Imagine that this is in a petri dish and not in the mother, and we fertilized the egg, and it has now developed to the eight-cell stage, and we can take a cell from that stage and do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Maybe, as the authors of the white paper said, you could develop a stem cell line from that. We do not know. They simply have not tried. It has been too easy to take and kill embryos to get stem cell lines from them.

There is one other ethical argument that maybe is a problem, Mr. Speaker. They address this in the President's white paper. They do not think it is a problem. When you read that white paper you will see that they are bending over backwards to satisfy all of the concerns that even the most concerned prolife person could have. They do not believe that you could develop an embryo from a single cell.

But if we waited a little later, and I have asked the researchers, the medical people who are doing this preimplantation and genetic diagnosis, if they could wait until the inner cell mass stage, if they could wait until the inner cell mass stage to take the cell. Now we avoid even that potential ethical argument, because we already have a differentiation that has occurred. There are now two kinds of cells in what we call the embryo. There is the inner cell mass, which will become the baby; and then there is the rest of the trophoblast which will become the decidua. The decidua is the amnion and chorion.

Now, you cannot have a baby without amnion and chorion; it cannot grow. So if you take cells only from the inner cell mass, they could never become an embryo because these cells have lost all of their ability to produce the decidua, but they retain all of the ability to produce the cells of the body, the great variety of cells in the body.

I am prolife. I have an impeccable, 100 percent prolife voting record. I would not be here on the floor today talking about a possible solution to this debate if I did not think that this was perfectly ethical and probably perfectly doable.

I hope, Mr. Speaker, that a number of my colleagues will sign on to our bill. We are going to hold this until about noon tomorrow, because we would like to get as many prolife signers as possible.

If the other bill reaches the President's desk, no matter what he decides, some people are not going to be happy. If he vetoes the bill, as he has said he would, then all of those Americans, and I believe it is a majority, as there will be a majority tomorrow that vote for H.R. 810, will wonder why it is not okay to take these embryos that hardly look like a baby, just eight cells, to take these embryos, and they are going to be discarded anyhow. And given the two arguments, they may not be discarded, they may be adopted, and at the end of the day, you are taking a life.

If you think it is okay to take one life to help another, that is okay, but a lot of people do not think that is okay. On the other hand, if he lets it become law, then he is going to offend all of those prolife people who really see this as life.

What I hope, Mr. Speaker, is that my bill can be on the President's desk when he is faced with the unhappy choice that he will have with this bill, so that he can now say, Gee, I have a bill which supports what I want, and that is embryonic stem cell research without harming an embryo.

We are not ready yet to work with humans. This bill addresses only animal experimentation. But as we saw earlier, Mr. Speaker, from this chart that we had from that page of the white paper, let me put that back up because I think it makes the point, it may be some time. That is why we have researchers and that is why we have money from NIH, because it may be some time before stem cell lots can be reliably derived from single cells. They believe that it is possible to do that. It may take some time, taken from early embryos in ways that do not harm the embryo. As we have pointed out, they will be taken to benefit the embryo, to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis and to develop a repair kit for the embryo.

But the initial success of the Verlinsky group's efforts at least raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single-blast embryos removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them. Indeed, if it is taken for preimplantation genetic diagnosis and to establish a repair kit, not only are they not harmed, they are benefited by it.

Mr. Speaker, I know that all America will be watching this debate; they just voted $3 billion in Alaska to pursue this. I believe we can pursue all of the potential miracles that could come from embryonic stem cell research and applications to medicine without harming embryos, and I urge an early vote and adoption of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record:

Department of Health

and Human Services,

Washington, DC, May 23, 2005.

Hon. Roscoe G. Bartlett,

Rayburn House Office Building,

Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Bartlett: I am pleased that Drs. Allen Spiegel and

Story Landis were able to meet with you, Mr. Otis and Mr.

Aitken during your visit to the National Institutes of Health

(NIH) last month to discuss ways to derive human embryonic

stem cells (hESCs). Drs. Spiegel and Landis were serving as

Acting Co-Chairs of the NIH Stem Cell Task Force during my

leave of absence from this position. Earlier this month, I

returned to chair the Task Force. NIH shares your enthusiasm

on the therapeutic potentials of hESC research and thank you

for your continued support of this field.

Drs. Spiegel and Landis briefed me about your April 26th

meeting. I am also aware that you have had previous meetings

with NIH officials, including myself, Lana Skirboll and

Richard Tasca, on this topic. You propose the possibility of

using a cell (or two) removed from the 8-cell stage human

embryo undergoing pre implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)

to: 1) create a ``personal repair kit'' made up of cells

removed from the embryo and stored for future use; and 2) for

deriving human embryonic stem cell lines.

You suggested that creating hESC lines in this manner would

avoid ethical questions surrounding the fate of a human

embryo. Live births resulting from embryos which undergo PGD

and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that this

procedure does not harm the embryo, however, there are some

reports that a percentage of embryos do not survive this

procedure. In addition, long-term studies would be needed to

determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later-

developing injury to children born following PGD. Also, it is

not known if the single cell removed from the 8-cell stage

human embryo has the capacity to become an embryo if cultured

in the appropriate environment.

NIH is not aware of any published scientific data that has

confirmed the establishment of hESC lines from a single cell

removed from an 8-cell stage embryo. We are aware of the

published research of Dr. Yury Verlinsky in the Reproductive

Genetics Institute in Chicago that showed that a hESC line

can be derived by culturing a human morula-staged embryo

(Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2004 Vo. 9, No.6, 623-629,

Verlinsky, Strelchenko, et al). It is also worth noting,

however, that in these experiments, the entire morula was

plated and used to derive the hESC lines. The human morula is

generally composed of 10-30 cells and is the stage that

immediately precedes the formation of the blastocyst.

At the April 26th meeting, NIH agreed that such experiments

might be pursued in animals, including non-human primates.

That is, animal experiments could be conducted to determine

whether it is possible to derive hESCs from a single cell of

the 8-cell or morula stage embryo. To date, to the best of

our knowledge no such derivations have been successful. NIH

also does not know whether these experiments have been tried

and failed in animals and/or humans and, therefore, have not

been reported in the literature. NIH agreed to explore

whether there have been any attempts to use single cells from

the 8-cell or morula stage of an animal embryo to start

embryonic stem cell lines by consulting with scientists that

are currently conducting embryo research. From these

discussions, these scientists believe it is worth attempting

experiments using a single cell from an early stage embryo or

cells from a morula of a non-human primate to establish an

embryonic stem cell line.

Of note, a recent 2003 paper from Canada shows that when

single human blastomeres are cultured from early cleavage

stage embryos, before the morula stage, that there is an

increased incidence of chromosomal abnormalities. Even with

hESCs derived from the inner cell mass of the human

blastocyst, the odds of starting a hESC line from a single

cell are long, perhaps one in 20 tries. Thus, the odds of

being able to start with a single cell from an 8-celled or

morula staged embryo are equally challenging. This would make

it difficult to accomplish the goal of establishing ``repair

kits'' and hESC lines from any single PGD embryo. (Fertil

Steril, 2003 June, 79(6): 1304-11, Bielanska, et al). It is

possible, however, that improvements in technologies for

deriving and culturing hESCs may improve these odds.

NIH concludes that the possibility of establishing a stem

cell line from an 8-cell or morula stage embryo can only be

determined with additional research. NIH would welcome

receiving an investigator-initiated grant application on this

topic using animal embryos. The Human Embryo Research Ban

would preclude the use of funds appropriated under the Labor/

HHS Appropriations Act for pursuing this research with human

embryos. As with all grant applications, the proposal must be

deemed meritorious for funding by peer review and then will

be awarded research funds if sufficient funds are available.

It also bears keeping in mind that it may take years to

determine the answer.

At the April 26th meeting, you had mentioned that twins can

develop when the inner cell mass splits in the blastocyst and

forms two embryos enclosed in a common trophoblast. You asked

if cells from the inner cell mass could be safely removed

without harming the embryo. In animal studies, it has been

shown that the blastocyst can be pierced to remove cells of

the inner cell mass and the embryo appears to retain its

original form but it is not known whether the embryo will

result the birth of a healthy baby. Since this experiment in

human embryos at either the morula or the blastocyst stage

would require evaluations of not only normal birth but also

unknown longterm risks to the person even into adulthood, it

would have to be considered a very high risk and ethically

questionable endeavor. Because of the risk of harm, this

research would also be ineligible for federal funding.

You had also asked NIH about the latest stage in

development that an embryo can be artificially implanted into

the womb. We know that infertility clinics transfer embryos

at the blastocyst stage (approximately Day 5 in human embryo

development) as well as at earlier stages.

Finally, I am providing an additional resource that was

discussed at the April meeting. I have enclosed a copy of a

recently released white paper developed by the President's

Council on Bioethics (PCB) on Alternative Sources of Human

Pluripotent Stern Cells. In this white paper, the PCB raised

many ethical, scientific and practical concerns about

alternate sources for deriving human pluripotent stem cells

without harming the embryo. Your proposal is specifically

discussed in this report.

I hope this information is helpful.

Sincerely,

James F. Battey, Jr.,

Chairman, NIH Stem Cell Task Force.

Enclosure.

Mr. Speaker, the data that led these 30 people you mentioned, Jim Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, and there were about a dozen admirals and generals, and several retired heads of agencies in the government that signed that letter, these were really thought leaders in the country.

And the data that they quoted that led them to write that letter is what is on the board here. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. But we use 25 percent of the world's oil. And let me digress for just a moment. I have not been enthusiastic about drilling in ANWR, because if you have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and if ANWR is a part of that 2 percent, I am having some trouble understanding why it is a good idea to use that 2 percent up as quickly as possible.

Certainly we need oil, but we will need it in the future if our economy continues to grow even more than we need it now. So I think we need to reflect a bit on whether it is a good idea to exploit that resource now.

We import about two-thirds of the oil we use. And the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) said that is just going down hill from the direction we ought to be going, because during the Arab oil embargo, we imported only about a third of the oil that we used, and you may remember then the long lines at the service stations and a few fights over it, I think a death or two.

And you may remember that gas guzzling cars, you could hardly give them away. And now when we are importing two-thirds of our oil rather than a third of our oil, suddenly SUVs and pickup trucks represent more than half of the personal vehicles sold in the country.

So these 30 world and United States leaders who wrote this letter referred to this data. They said, Mr. President, this is an unacceptable national security risk. We cannot be using 25 percent of the world's oil, have only 2 percent of the reserves, and import two- thirds of what we use from other countries without having a big unacceptable national security risk.

And they noted, and the President agreed, because I have heard him say it more than once, that much of that oil we imported comes from countries that do not even like us very much.

This is indeed a big national security concern. Two other bullets on the chart point out some relevant factors that we need to be concerned with. First of all, the bullet here that says we are 5 percent, we are a bit less than that, actually about 1 percent out of 22 in the world, less than 5 percent of the world's population, and having only 2 percent of the known reserves, and using 25 percent of the world's oil, two-thirds of it coming to us from other countries, much of it from across the seas.

If those shipping lanes were interrupted or if there was some impediment to the flow of oil through some choke points in the world, we really could have an economy at risk.

One other thing that I wanted to denote, and that is from this little 2 percent of the reserves that we have, we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We are pretty good at pumping oil. That is both good news and bad news. It is good news in that we are importing only two- thirds of what we use. If we were not so good at sucking that oil out of the ground, we would be importing more than two-thirds of what we use.

The bad news is that it is going to be gone sooner doing that. And the more efficient we become at pumping these reserves the more quickly they will be exhausted.

The Chinese recognize that we are pretty good at this, and as the next chart shows here, they have been scouring the world for oil. And they were in our country a week or two ago and what they were doing is talking with our technical people, how do you could it? How do you get that oil out of the ground from these wells that were nearly exhausted?

This chart shows the world, and by the way, this green here for Russia should come around the other side because that is Russia there right next to Alaska. Russia spans 11 time zones. They are now a major oil exporter.

One of the few countries that probably has several years before they peak in their, they have peaked but that peak is being stretched out because of very poor performance when the Soviet Union was disintegrating. So they have a ways to go before they are on the steep down slope of a curve that we are going to talk about in a minute. But what this shows is all of the places in the world that they have gone to and secured contracts, and in some places bought assets to make sure that they have access to the world's oil.

They are in our backyard. They have contracts in Canada. They have contracts in Colombia, in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, several in the Middle East. They are now meeting with Russia to build a very large pipeline from the Sakhalin Island region, the Russian far east to get oil down to China and perhaps on down to the Korean Peninsula.

China's economy is growing very rapidly, 10 percent last year, about the same the year before. They increased their oil imports last year about 25 percent. I have a set of exponential curves that we will show in a moment that show what those growth rates mean, but we are focusing on energy this evening with particular reference to national security. And China recognizes their dependence on oil, not only are they scouring the world for oil, they have noted that they are dependent on the shipping lanes to get their oil. And they are now aggressively building a blue water navy.

There is no other country other than the United States that has a blue water navy. By that I mean a Navy that patrols the seven seas, that controls access to those shipping lanes.

A couple of years ago, one of the senior members of the Pentagon sent some interrogators to China and India to ask people, men on the street, up and down, from the workers up to the leaders of the country, questions about oil and what they saw as China's future. And they were surprised that most of the people they talked to in China recognized the dependence that China had on oil and recognized how vulnerable they were to disruption of that and how essential it was for them to develop the

capability so that they would have some assurance that they would continue to have oil in the future.

India is also growing rapidly. The next chart I want to show you is the one that brought us here. It is knowledge that we have had for half a century now, actually just about half a century, and this is a chart that was developed by a scientist called M. King Hubbert who worked for the Shell Oil Company. And he was observing the production of oil from oil fields in the United States and he was observing the exhaustion of those oil fields, and he noted that they all follow a bell curve way was not too surprising.

There are many things that follow a bell curve. How tall we are, how long we live. Most things in our world, the most of the data, most of the individuals, most of the length, most of the heights fall in a fairly narrow range in the future, but there are some that were very much less and some that were very much more and we call this a bell curve.

M. King Hubbert rationalized that if he added up all the individual bell curves in the country that he could predict when we would reach that peak. And he noted that when we reach the peak in these individual fields that about half of the oil had been exhausted.

Now, it is reasonable that the first half of the oil is going to be easier to get than the last half and it takes more and more energy to get the last part of the oil and it comes with more difficulty and so you cannot pull it out of the ground as fast. After observing this for a number of years, he made a prediction in 1956 that the United States would peak in oil production in the early seventies. As a matter of fact, it was 1970 that we peaked in oil production, and this smooth green curve here is his prediction. The more ragged green curve, the actual data points show how close to the predicted curve the data points fell.

It did peak in 1970 and we are now sliding down Hubbert Peak. As a matter of fact, we now are producing only about half as much oil as we produced in 1970, when we were self-sufficient in oil. The red curve here shows a similar Hubbert's Peak curve for the Soviet Union, Russia. It was the Soviet Union early on. Now it is Russia. You see how poorly they performed and how they deviated from the projected curve with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They now are getting their act together and they will have a second little peak here. This is larger, the peak back here is higher than the second peak will be.

Most other countries have a single peak and several of them have already peaked in oil production. The little blue line here that does not show up very well on this chart shows what happened with ANWR. And the next chart that shows all of the places that we get oil from in our country. I am sorry. I said ANWR. I am thinking Alaska. This is Prudhoe Bay. Two places in Alaska, one we are getting oil from. That is Prudhoe Bay, and one we could get oil from if we drill there, which is ANWR.

This chart shows the contributions of Texas and the rest of the United States and this is liquids here. And notice what Prudhoe Bay did. We already reached our peak, and we are starting to slide down the peak, and there is a little blip as we slide down that peak from Prudhoe Bay. About a fourth of our oil production in our country comes from Prudhoe Bay. We are now reaching the end of the production from that field.

I am sure all of you can remember a little bit after that there was a lot of optimism because of what was supposed to be a major oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. That is this yellow. That is all it amounted to. We are still sliding down Hubbert's Peak. This did not stop the slide down Hubbert's Peak.

I would like to again mention ANWR. Mr. Speaker, you may be supportive of drilling in ANWR or you may not be supportive of drilling in ANWR, but the reality is that it will not make much difference whether we drill or not in ANWR. That will not come on line until maybe as much as 10 years, certainly not before 5 years. And when it comes on line, it is almost certainly going to be less than Prudhoe Bay was, and you see the fairly small contribution that Prudhoe Bay made.

Drilling in ANWR will not solve our oil problems, which is another concern about drilling there because if it gives people the illusion that we have solved our oil problem then we will have done a great disservice.

The next chart shows a generic curve and this is one that we really need to focus on. It shows a 2 percent rise. Let me show you this one next because this one shows some exponential curves and most people do not really understand the exponential function.

The story is told of the ancient kingdom in which one of its citizens invented the game of chess. It was very popular and the king was very pleased and he told his subject that I would like to reward you for what you have done. Anything which is reasonable I will give you for your contribution to our society.

And the inventor of the chess board said, I am a simple man with simple needs. And if you will simply take my chess board and put one grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the fourth square and just keep doubling the wheat until you have covered all the squares on my chess board, that will be adequate compensation for my contribution.

Well, the king was elated. How simple. All he wants is one grain of wheat and double it for each one after that. What he did not know was of course that there was no way that he could comply with that wish. My understanding is that that would represent more wheat than is grown in the last 4 years in all of the world.

This is the exponential function.

Albert Einstein was asked about the next great energy source in the world after nuclear. What will be next, Dr. Einstein? And he said the most powerful force of the universe is the force of compound interest.

So here we see some curves where you have compound growth. The lower curve here is a 2 percent growth. This 2 percent growth rate represents the rate about the rate at which we have been growing.

Now, some people think you can represent a 2 percent growth with a straight line. But if that is what you project, then each year you have a lesser percentage growth rate than the year before. All of us who have interest in the bank and it is compounded know that what you get at the end of the year is more than the simple interest rate because you get interest on interest if it is compounded. Sometimes it is compounded almost instantaneously by computers. Sometimes it is compounded every month.

But when it is compounded, instead of having this lower flat curve, the 2 percent growth rate follows the second curve. In just a moment we will show you a generic curve that shows how that relates to where we are now.

This next growth rate is 4 percent growth, and this first dotted line here is 5 percent growth. And what I really want to focus on is this steep line here, and that is 10 percent growth and that is the way China has been growing.

Now, at 10 percent growth it doubles in 7 years. That means it is four times bigger in 14 years. That means it is eight times bigger in 21 years. Now, I think that it is unlikely that China will continue this 10 percent growth rate for 21 years. But if they did, they would be using eight times the energy that they are using today.

Where will they find that energy?

I would like to look at a couple of recognitions in news weeklies and they are fairly recent. This one is U.S. News and World Report. It is May 16. This is the last one. And I have here Time Magazine and I think May 9, so these are very current.

I think it is significant that two of our major news weeklies are focusing on the energy problem, particularly the oil and gas part of the energy problem.

The article in U.S. News and World Report is about Exxon Mobil. This is really a giant. ``In the past year the corporate titan began pumping oil and natural gas from eight major new fields, including challenging projects in the deep water off Angola's coast, the icy depths of the North Sea, and the tough terrain of landlocked Chad.'' Yet Exxon's production continued to slip in spite of these new fields. Even these significant additions could not make up for the inexorable decline of the company's fast mature fields around the world.

Then the article goes on to note, ``The company's production eroded nearly 5 percent in the first quarter.''

By the way, in spite of this spectacular production of oil their stocks fell and they have enormous profits. Their stocks fell because they did not reach the expectations and that was because the company's production eroded nearly 5 percent in the first quarter, a rate that surprised analysts and caused Exxon to miss earning projections and therefore their stock fell.

It says here that Exxon has shown ``little concern about its reserves, even though by the government's accounting method it replaced only 83 percent of the reserves it depleted last year.''

They did pretty well because worldwide we are pumping about six barrels of every new barrel of oil that we find.

In a few moments, we will show you a chart which shows that the major oil discoveries from which we are pumping today occurred roughly 30, 40 years ago.

From a national security perspective, which is what we are focussing on relative to energy this evening, this phenomenal growth in China has to be a major concern. Where will they get that oil?

The next curve, the generic curve, shows what is probably the situation today or will shortly be in the near future. Notice that the past bell curves were pretty steep, and you can make them as high and steep as you want. You simply change the abscissas and the ordinate.

This is a 2 percent growth curve, and M.K. Hubbert predicted that the world would peak in its oil production about the turn of the millennium. That was delayed a little because he could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the oil price hikes and the worldwide recession that occurred. Because of that, we reduced the consumption of oil, and there are now many people who believe that oil may be peaking in the world today.

As a matter of fact, yesterday there was what I think to be a fairly significant book that came out, written by the CEO of the largest energy investment bank in the world, Matt Simmons, and the title of the book is ``Twilight in the Desert.'' The content of the book addresses Saudi Arabia and production of oil there. He believes that Saudi Arabia has probably peaked in their oil production. My colleagues may have noticed that a couple of weeks ago when the Saudi oil prince was here that he did not promise the President that they would increase oil production. That may be the right verb. It may very well be that he could not promise the President that they would increase oil production because many people believe that they cannot increase oil production.

This is just that little leisurely 2 percent growth curve. China is growing very much more rapidly you will remember. By the way, when this doubles, which goes from about here to here, that represents 35 years. So you get some idea of the scale here because a 2 percent growth rate doubles in about 35 years.

So you see that the real problem begins not when you reach peak oil, but it begins when you are nearing the peak, and the increase in production shows that it cannot keep pace with the increasing growth of demand. There is some belief that the peak production may, as a matter of fact, be several years off in the future. The latest I have heard is 2037. Even if it was 2037, it is really quite past time that we should have been addressing this.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me again and thank him for that clarification. He is right.

At the top of Hubbert's peak, still about half the oil remains, and the problem is that it is not that we are going to run out of oil. What we have run out of is high quality, readily available, cheap oil, and when the world's demand for oil keeps increasing along this curve, and the production of oil is the blue curve, then you see there is an ever increasing discrepancy between what we would like to burn and what there is to use.

The real question is: What will the world do; what will we do; what will China do; what will Russia do; what will the world do when it is recognized that, in fact, there will be no increased production of oil? The Third World is trying to industrialize. India and China are rapidly increasing their economies and using more and more energy, and by the way, not very efficiently.

One of the things that we might very well do to help ourselves in the end, and everybody, is to show them how to use energy more efficiently. Not only do we use 25 percent of the world's energy, we use it pretty efficiently. You might question, do we really need to use that much energy? We have a chart which we will show a little later that shows that people in California use only 60 percent of the energy of the rest of us in the country, and it would be hard to argue with California that they do not have a quality of life equivalent to ours. So you can use less energy.

I promised a slide, and the next one shows when we found this oil. It shows how long it is between when you find the oil and when you pump it. Of course, we might have pumped it a little sooner, because you are not going to pump oil that people are not demanding, and the world's economy grew. There were enough resources there in the oil in the ground that we could pump it out, but this shows when the peak occurred. This is worldwide. It shows that the peak occurred way back in the 1960s, well before 1970, and now we are peaking in production out here about 2000. So you see it is roughly 30, 40 years after the peak discoveries that we are peaking in the production of oil.

The next chart is a very interesting one, and it shows that drilling more will not necessarily get you more oil. By the way, even the oil companies now have fabulous profits, and ExxonMobil has billions of dollars in reserves. Their turnover is greater than most of the countries in the world. Why are they not out drilling for more oil? It is probably because they recognize what this little chart shows, and this shows what happens to oil drilling with the Reagan administration.

Remember, Hubbert's Peak peaked in 1970. By 1980, when Reagan came to office, we are already sliding down Hubbert's Peak, and that administration recognized that we were producing less oil. Their solution to that was to give the oil companies an incentive to go out and drill more. This yellow line here represents the number of wells drilled, and notice, there is a big spike

just after 1980 when they came in. They drilled a lot more wells but look what happened.

The green here represents the additional finds, as compared to the oil that we are pumping, and except for this one little brief green blip, there is just nothing but red after they started drilling for oil and kept on drilling for oil. Notice where it is now. It is way down. They recognize that there is not much return for aggressive drilling of oil, and so none of the major oil companies now are aggressively drilling for oil.

I mentioned the articles in these two magazines, and both of them reflect the reality that we really do have a national security implication here. This is the May 9 of this year Time magazine, and it has a good article that has questions and answers, and it makes it easy to read that way.

Is the world running out of oil? And the answer is, no, half the oil is left. That is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot get it out fast enough to meet the demands of our growing economies.

So cheap oil is now just part of history? And their answer is, yes, it is going to be expensive from now on.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much the time that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) yielded me.

Mr. Speaker, the special orders of this evening, I think, have been a good example of a problem that faces families and businesses and countries and indeed is facing the world today and that is the tyranny of the urgent. So often, no matter whether it is your family or your business or your government, the urgent takes precedence over the important. It is really urgent that we are talking about confirmation of the judges in the Senate and the possibility of the nuclear option. This is just an example of how frequently the need to deal with the urgent diverts us from considering things which in the long run are going to be very much more important than that.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about here, and this is an article written by Matt Savinar. The introduction to it will really grab your attention if he is correct. This is what he says:

``Dear Reader:

``Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophecy sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global peak oil.''

It is not just Matt Savinar that is concerned about this because he quotes several people in his article. One of them is an investment banker that he referenced. That is Matthew Simmons, with whom I had lunch last week.

Simmons and Company International is considered the most reputable and reliable energy investment bank in the world. Given Matthew Simmons' background, what he has to say about peak oil is truly terrifying. For instance, in August of 2003, in an independent interview with ``From the Wilderness'' publisher Michael Ruppert, Simmons was asked if it was time for peak oil to become a part of the public policy debate. He responded, ``It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks,'' he might have said when energy peaks, ``it will be a tremendous jolt to our economic well-being and to our health, greater than anyone could ever imagine.''

When asked if there is a solution to the impending crisis, Simmons responded, ``I don't think there is one. The solution is to pray. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered, there will be no crisis for maybe 2 years. After that,'' he says, ``it's a certainty.''

Mr. Speaker, if we are talking about things that are important, if he is correct, and this evening we will explore the evidence so that the listener can make up their own mind, but if he is correct, this truly is something which is important.

Former industry insider Jan Lundberg recently pointed out: ``The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices skyward.'' He is talking about a time when oil prices are peaking and that this is the response of the market. ``And as supplies can no longer slack daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day,'' which it is now 84 million barrels a day, ``the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of economy and even daily living in 'advanced' societies. There may be an event that appears to trigger this final energy crash, but the overall cause will be the huge consumption on a finite planet.''

In an earlier hour this evening, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) shared part of his Special Order hour with me, and he tells the story of when he was a little boy, he was told that there was about 250 years of oil remaining in the world. That was grossly over-optimistic; but even if it were true, his immediate response, he says was, gee, what will the world do when the oil is gone?

We may now be approaching peak oil. What will the world do?

``The trucks,'' he says, ``will no longer pull into Wal-Mart or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno- toys and whatnot from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence, and chaos. For only a short time will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all.''

I am not sure that this has to be true. I really hope that it does not have to be true. And what we will be doing is talking about some of the things we need to keep it from being true. And I am sure all have heard of the Lundberg reports on gas prices.

Dr. Ted Trainer explains in a recent article on the thermodynamic limitations of biomass fuels, and this is his quote: ``This is why I do not believe consumer-capitalist society can save itself. Not even its `intellectual' classes or green leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the will to even think about the basic situation we are in. As the above figures make clear, the situation cannot be solved without huge reduction in the volume of consumption.''

Going on in a few moments we will have a chance to look at some curves that put that in context.

Dr. Smalley, in the February 2005, issue of Discover magazine gave the following prognosis as a result of the energy shortage brought on by peak oil and the fact that the world cannot produce oil as fast as the world's growing economies demand it: ``There will be inflation as billions of people compete for insufficient resources. There will be famine. There will be terrorism and war.'' I hope he is not correct.

I am just reading these quotes, Mr. Speaker, to point out that it is not just one person. It is many people who are concerned about this.

The chief economist of Morgan Stanley recently predicted that we have a 90 percent chance of facing ``economic Armageddon,'' while stating, ``I fear

modern-day central banking is on the brink of systematic failure.'' No wonder someone like Matt Simmons says that the only solution is to pray.

And it is not just the people quoted in this article, Mr. Speaker. Recently, there have been two articles in major news weeklies. Just this week in U.S. News and World Report, an article on ExxonMobil points out that this giant was not able to meet its projection production last year. They slipped 5 percent, as a matter of fact. Although they made enormous profits, their stocks still fell because they did not meet expectations. The other article is one in Time magazine, and that is last week's Time magazine: ``Why Gas Won't Get Cheaper,'' and they ask a number of interesting questions in the article and display a considerable understanding of the probability of peak oil. ``Is the world running out of oil?'' And the answer is ``No.'' The world is not running out of oil. What the world is running out of is its ability to produce high-quality cheap oil on demand.

How did we get here? The chart that we have on the easel here shows a prediction that was made in 1956, and I keep coming back in discussions to M. King Hubbert because it was his predictions that started this discussion, which has now been going on for half a century. In 1956, he predicted that the United States would peak in its oil production about 1970. As a matter of fact, it was exactly 1970. How could he do that? How could he watch what was happening in 1956 and conclude that we would peak in oil production in this country in 1970?

What he was doing was watching the exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and he noted that they all followed a very similar pattern. They followed a bell curve, lots of bell curves. If we measure people, how tall they are, we will see some are very short, most are bunched in the middle, and a few are very tall. If we weigh people to see how much they weigh, we will find a few are 60, 70, 80 pounds, very few at that weight. A few would be up at 600, 700, 800, very few there. But the big mass of people are bunched in the middle, and that is called a typical bell curve.

He found that the production of oil followed this curve that is well known to scientists and statisticians. When oil is plentiful in the ground, it is easily pumped and it reached a peak, and he found that when it had reached that peak production rate that about half of the oil had been pumped.

It is reasonable, Mr. Speaker, that the last part of the oil would be more difficult to get. As a matter of fact, I just heard today that the scavaging wells that we have in our country, the yield between three and 10 barrels of oil a day, much of it electrical energy in pumping, are requiring more energy to get the oil out than we will get out of the oil. But, never mind, we may have enough electrical energy, and one cannot put that in their car unless they have awfully big batteries and then it will not take them very far.

But we really do need the oil, and so they are producing the oil, which energy-wise is uneconomical to produce. So after we reached the peak production, we started falling down what is called Hubbert's Peak. This is a well-known phenomenon and M. King Hubbert became a celebrity among his peers because he predicted that the United States would peak in oil production in 1970. He looked at the world situation and made some guesses to how much more oil the world would find. And, by the way, most of it had been found during his lifetime. We are now pumping it some 30 or 40 years after it was found.

And he made a prediction of when oil production would peak in the world, and he said that that would be about the turn of the millennium. It was a little after that, obviously. He could not have known about the Arab oil embargo or the oil price hikes or the worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil, and so we had a few years of grace. Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States and, using those same analysis techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in oil production at about the turn of the century, why should the world leaders not have been concerned that maybe, just maybe, he was right about world oil production peaking about the turn of the millennium? And if that was true, then we should have been embarking on an aggressive program to develop alternative energy sources.

Before leaving this, I would like to point out that the red is what happened in the Soviet Union and now Russia. There are going to have a second little peak here because they kind of came apart when the Soviet Union was dissolving, and we see the oil they pumped did not meet the expectations of the Hubbert's curve.

The next chart I want to show is kind of a schematic curve that shows the relationship between oil demand and oil use. During all of history until this time, there has been adequate oil in the ground and adequate capability to pump it that the oil supply has been equal to the demand for oil. But when we are reaching the peak of this curve and demand keeps on going up, there will be an increasing discrepancy between the amount of oil we would like to use and the amount of oil that is available to use.

This is a 2 percent growth curve. With 2 percent growth compounded, it doubles in 35 years; and so from this point to this point, it has doubled. So that is about 35 years. So it shows that rolling over this peak, and, by the way, sometimes this phenomenon is known as ``the great rollover.'' We have been referring to it as peak oil. It about 35 years from this point to the end of the yellow there. And this points out that the world problems with oil will occur considerably before the peak. In this schematic, it occurs about 17 years before the peak.

Have we peaked? It may very well be a few years in the future. But as production slows down as we reach that peak and demand keeps on going up, even before we reach the peak, there will be a discrepancy, a difference, between what we would like to use and what is available to use.

The next chart shows us something about the challenges that we face, and this is an interesting chart. The top graph here shows the history of the use of energy in the world, going clear back to the 1600s and bringing us up to the present. The brown curve here is wood; and for a very long time, that was the world's only energy source. And then the Industrial Revolution was almost floundering because we had decimated the forests in New England. There are now more forests in New Hampshire than there was at the time of the revolution because we had used the trees in very large numbers for producing coke, for producing charcoal, for producing iron.

And then we discovered coal, and notice how many more quadrillion BTUs we were able to produce with coal. That is for two reasons: one, because the energy density of coal is higher, and because it is more convenient to use.

And then, long before we ran out of coal, we transitioned to oil. And notice then what happened to energy use. That is because, again, these two qualities of oil, one is it is more convenient to use; you could have a coal cart following the engine and shovel coal as we did in trains for a long time and run the train on coal. That is very difficult to do with your car, but oil you can put in the tank of your car, and so we found lots more uses for energy, and the energy density of oil is greater than the energy density of coal. So we see a greatly increased production of BTUs with oil.

The challenge that we face as we roll over Hubbert's Peak, and the available oil does not meet the demands for oil in the world; the challenge we face is to find energy sources which can replace oil. Now, unless there is some sort of energy that we have not envisioned yet that is hidden out there, we just need to go find it, we are going to have to deal with the energy sources that are available to us.

The next chart shows us the energy density of a number of different substances, and it begins with something like domestic refuge which, by the way, can produce a lot of electricity if you burn it rather than putting it in a landfill; brown coal, which is a very poor quality coal, baled straw, this is the biomass that you may hear people talking about, dried dung, we burned buffalo chips when our forefathers went

west in this country, and they still burn dried dung in many parts of the world, and then that is just about the same as wood. Notice that coal is better than wood, higher energy density than wood. Then we go through coke and ethanol, and notice that ethanol does not have the same energy density, it is considerably less than crude oil and, of course, as you refine it, why you get the diesel and petrol, the automotive gasoline, naptha is still higher, aviation fuel is still higher, and natural gas, which contains relatively more hydrogen, still has a higher energy density.

Just a word about this energy density and what that really means. The energy density in these fossil fuels is just incredible, and we have kind of taken them for granted, and we have fashioned a society and economy which is just about totally dependent on them. The energy in one barrel of oil, that is 42 gallons of oil, which today at the pump will cost something like $100; it is about $50 to buy it and another $50 to refine it and transport it to the station. You are paying a little over $2 a gallon, so that is about $100 for that barrel of oil. That barrel of oil, Mr. Speaker, has the energy equivalent of about 25,000 man-hours of labor.

Now, in another life, I worked for IBM and we prepared a lot of responses to proposals, and we would price our manpower in man-years, and a man-year was 260 hours; that is the number of hours a person works in a year. So if I divide 260 hours into 25,000, I get roughly 12 man-years. What that means, Mr. Speaker, is that with this barrel of oil that costs you $100, you have bought the work equivalent of 12 people working full-time for you for one year. What a cheap servant fossil fuels have been for us, and how addicted we have become to using them.

Another little example so that you can get perhaps a more personal appreciation of the energy density of these fossil fuels, imagine how far a gallon of gasoline, not very large, and still cheaper, by the way, than water in the grocery store, unless you buy it in a gallon jug in Wal-Mart or K-Mart or some place like that; but note how far that gallon of gas takes you in your car. And if you are going up a mountain, how long it would take you using some mechanical advantage to pull yourself up that mountain, and you can get some notion as to the energy density in these fossil fuels and the enormous challenge we have in finding alternatives, and alternatives we must find.

The next chart takes a look at some of the options that are available to us as we transition from our enormous dependence on oil and natural gas, which tend to go together, because natural gas is kind of a volatile from oil, it exists generally with oil; remember pictures of old oil derricks that are burning the natural gas off, we did not have pipelines, it was just a waste product and they burned it off. The gas is collected there, it is gas associated with oil; if not, it is vented through the millennia to the atmosphere. Of course, we have some fields of only gas and they generally are much deeper where there has been more heat and all of the oil has, in a sense, been vaporized and become natural gas.

Here we have a list of the alternatives that are available to us, and there are some finite resources that we can tap, and we will need to do that, but we need to recognize two things. One is that there is some economic and environmental penalties that we will need to pay for tapping some of these, and the second is that they are also not forever. So we must not conclude that if we are successful in developing some of these; well there is one of these that could be forever and that is nuclear fusion. I think the odds of getting there, Mr. Speaker, are relatively small; about the same odds as you and I planning on our economic future by winning the lottery. That would be nice, but unlikely, and I think that fusion would be very nice, but just about as unlikely.

We have some enormous deposits of tar sands in Canada, and they have invited us to come there this summer to look at those. They are being exploited, by the way, and China has bought the rights to purchase much of the oil that they are producing from the tar sands and the oil shales. There is a lot of potential oil there. But the problem is that it is very difficult to get. It takes a lot of energy to get, with a pretty high environmental penalty. In a few moments we will show a chart that looks at energy profit ratios and we will see where the tar sands and oil shales fall on this plot.

Then there is coal. I would like to digress for just a moment. We will come back to this chart, but let us look at coal, because I know some people say, gee, we have a lot of coal in this country and China has a lot of coal, we are the two biggest economies in the world now, and why worry, we will just burn coal. And your children may come home from school and tell you there is a 500-year supply of coal. That really is not true. The best estimates today that, at current use rates, with no growth, there is about a 250-year supply of coal. Well, gee, that sounds like a lot of coal. Well, that would tide us over.

But notice what happens when I assume just 1.1 percent growth rate. Remember those exponential curves we showed; with just 1 percent growth rate. Notice what happens with 2 percent growth rate, it drops down to about 100 years. But since there are not very many uses for coal directly, except maybe firing a furnace that produces steam that drives a turbine that produces electricity, we are going to have to convert coal into gas and into oil.

I remember as a little boy that all of the lamps that we burned were not kerosene lamps, they were called coal oil lamps, and that is because we learned that before we were refining oil to get kerosene, we had learned how to get oil from coal, so we can do that again. But notice what happens. When you recognize it, you are going to have to spend some of the energy in the coal to convert the coal to more usable forms. Now, our 250-year supply of coal, with no growth, now has shrunk to just about 50 years. When we have only a 2 percent growth and, by the way, last year the world economy grew 5 percent, we grew about 2 percent, the world economy grew 5 percent, and China's economy grew at about 10 percent last year, which, by the way, they doubled their economy in just 7 years.

We are going to have to depend more on coal clearly to tide us over, but it is a fantasy that it will carry us through to the indefinite future. We have to recognize that it is a resource that we have to use wisely.

Let us go back now to the original chart and look at the nuclear, this is a nuclear option, which is a little different than the other one, because we do have some nuclear options here. We produce 20 percent of our electricity with nuclear power plants in this country. France produces about 70, 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear power. There are three ways in which you can use nuclear power to produce electricity. One of those I mentioned already and that is fusion, and that is what the sun does. That is why we get so much energy from the sun. That is the hydrogen bomb, and you get a lot of energy from that over a very short time period, and it becomes difficult to effectively utilize that, but we are trying. We are trying to exploit fusion so that we can use it in a scale large enough to produce electricity economically. If we ever get there, we are kind of home free, Mr. Speaker, because this really could produce energy with which we could do wonderful things in the world. But the odds of getting there are pretty small, I think. You can use your own judgment, but I think that they are pretty small. So it is something that we need to keep pursuing, but let us not bank on it.

There are two other ways we can use nuclear power. One of them is in the lightwater reactors that uses fissionable uranium, which is probably in shorter supply in the world than either gas or oil. And so that is not a final solution. We really have to ramp up nuclear, and we really seriously need to look at nuclear power. I know there are some environmental concerns, and as long as oil was plentiful and natural gas burns cleanly, why worry about nuclear when you can burn these fossil fuels. But if, in fact, Mr. Speaker, we are at or will soon be at peak oil, then we need to reevaluate nuclear, and I know some of my friends are now taking a new look at nuclear who have been kind of stoutly opposed to nuclear in the past.

Well, since fission with fissionable uranium is limited because of a limited

supply in the world, the third way to produce electricity from nuclear is what is called the breeder reactor. We have none of those in this country. The only one we have here were producing nuclear weapons. France has a number of them. As the name implies, they produce more fuel than they use, and so this could be a big energy source. But it produces, the way we now use it, it produces by-products, Mr. Speaker, which have to be stored away for maybe as much as a quarter of a million years.

I have a feeling that anything which is so hot, that it has so much energy in it that you have to squirrel it away for a quarter of a million years ought to have enough energy in it that resourceful, creative, innovative people could find some use for it. And I think that that is a challenge that we need to address, because if we are going to have anything like a smooth transition and not have the dire predictions that I read in Savinar's article here, if we are going to have anything like a smooth transition to alternatives, we are going to have to use a whole lot more nuclear than we are using now to buy us time to move to these renewables.

Now, with nuclear, we are limited in the kind of energy we can produce. Heat, which can boil water and run turbines and produce electricity, that is the way we use nuclear energy now. Of course, there are limited things we can do with electricity, and so there are other types of energy that we need equivalent to the type of energy that we get from oil.

Now we look at some truly renewable sources, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) earlier this evening was talking about how this is our income, and we ought not to be dipping into our savings, and our savings are things like tar sands and oil shales and coal and so forth; we ought to be able to make due with our income and if you keep dipping into your savings, by and by you will be bankrupt. That is what we have pretty much done as a society is dip into these savings and, from an energy perspective, we are near bankruptcy.

So you look at all of these renewables now and by and by, with the exception of nuclear and how much of that you are willing to put up with in terms of environmental effects and so forth, we are going to have to have a society that runs on these renewables, because obviously, fossil fuels are not forever. Solar is one of them. And by the way, Mr. Speaker, most of the energy that we are using or will use came from or comes from the sun. It is no wonder the ancients, so many of them, worshipped the sun, because they intuitively recognized it as the source of life. It was the sun that made the plants grow, that produced the coal. As a little boy I remember we used to use what was called run-of-mine coal. You took it from the mine just as it came, some big lumps and some dust, and I grew up in western Pennsylvania, and some of the lumps were so big we could not put them in our furnace.

And so I would go to the basement, and with a sledgehammer I would break the lumps of coal to get them small enough to throw in the furnace. And I remember the feelings that I had, Mr. Speaker, when I broke open those big lumps of coal, and there was a fern leaf. And I recognized how many thousands of years ago that plant grew that was producing coal for us today.

And then, of course, it was the sun that made the little organisms grow in those ancient waters in a very much warmer Earth than we have today. It was warm at the poles because there is oil up at the poles. And these little organisms grew in the water. They would die and settle out to the bottom, and then in many places they would fall into deep crevices and the rains would wash sediment in over them. And time and pressure, the sediments were converted to rock, then with the movement of the tectonic plates in the Earth, they would sink down to where heat acting on this organic material trapped under the rocks would be converted to oil and gas.

And so all of the fossil fuels that we are burning came from the energy of the sun. Today, we can harness the energy of the sun in many ways. You build a house with windows that face south, and your house will be warmed by what we call passive solar heating. You can put a little mechanism on the top of your house that has a copper pipe painted black usually inside of it, under glass. You know what happens to your car in a parking lot, it gets really hot inside that glass, and you can heat your water with it.

We now have developed technologies where we can convert the photons into electricity. And the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) earlier mentioned the thin films that we have developed that you can incorporate in tiles for your floor or roof shingles for your house, or siding for your house, which can produce electricity.

That has been fairly expensive, like 26 cents a kilowatt hour. We pay about 7 now per hour now here in the East, but that is really coming down in price.

With oil at $50 a barrel, and Goldman Sachs says it is going up to $105, I do not how they picked that magic number, but since solar is coming down and the price of oil is going up, those curves will cross; and I hope we will see a whole lot more solar, because it is really clean. There are no byproducts, for at least 30 years. Those solar cells will sit there. Every time the sun shines or you have light, they will be producing electricity, less when there is no sun.

Then there is wind energy. Mr. Speaker, I have driven and seen some real forests of these wind machines, out in some of the passes in the West; and they are now producing electricity at 3\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. Some people do not like their looks. I think they look a whole lot nicer than those swaths that we cut through our forests to run these high tension lines; and if we had more of these wind machines closer by, we would have less susceptibility to terrorist attacks, because we would have a distributed energy production, and we would not need so many high tension lines, and you would not have a grid which is at such risk.

Of course, the wind blows because the sun shines, and the differential heating produced by the sun causes the wind to blow, so that really is solar energy. We get it through wind, but it is the sun shining that makes the wind blow. And then there is true geothermal.

Now, that term is used in an interesting way in heat pumps. The ordinary heat pump is not very brightly, wisely conceived, because what it does in the winter time to warm you in the house, it tries to make the outside air even colder; and the summer time, to cool you in the house, it tries to make the outside air warmer.

If you are working not against the outside temperature, which can be zero in the winter time and 100 in the summer time, if you are working against the Earth or groundwater, obviously you are working against something which is a whole lot warmer in the winter and a whole lot cooler in the summer.

And they sometimes call that geothermal. But real geothermal is when you are doing what Iceland does and that is tap the energy from the core of the Earth, which is molten iron, and some places it comes close enough to the surface, sometimes it actually boils the water, it, of course, comes out through a volcano, but some places you can drill down deep enough, if you tap that heat, that is a very large molten core.

So that is an energy source that we have some places in the West we can tap that, which would be an important source of energy, but only in certain places. And then there is ocean energy. Two kinds of energy in the ocean. One is the waves, and of course we have waves in the ocean because the wind blows, and the wind blows because of the sun, and we come back again to the sun as the source of energy.

The other source of energy from the ocean are the tides. And this is about one of the few energy sources that does not come from the sun, and that of course comes from the Moon, because as the Moon goes around the Earth, it has the gravitational pull, and it is pulling the water up about 2 feet. How much energy would it take to raise the whole ocean 2 feet?

There is a whole lot of energy there if we could tap it. And we have tried, but that is very difficult, because there is an old axiom that says that energy, to be effective, must be concentrated. And these tides are spread out over far too great a distance, and they are difficult to tap.

But as energy becomes more and more critical, we should become more and more creative in how we approach tapping that energy source, because there is a lot of potential energy there that could be made available.

And the next point here is agricultural resources. This is one I really am very enthusiastic about. A few cautions, however. Our agriculture in this country is in trouble economically. And there are lots of potential sources of energy from agriculture. The soy diesel and biodiesel are an obvious energy source, and there are now engines today that will run on soy diesel, soybean oil, indeed, as well as on diesel fuel.

So this is a potential source of energy, ethanol, which everybody has heard about. And I would like to digress for just a moment and come back to this chart. I have another chart here that looks at ethanol. This points out some very interesting challenges that we have.

On the right here, it shows how you go from petroleum, that is crude oil, how you go from crude oil to gasoline. And it shows all of the energy inputs at every step from recovering it, to transporting it, to refining it, to hauling it to the gas station.

And to get 1 million Btus out of it, you had to consume 1.23 million Btus of fossil energy. So it cost you about 25 percent of the energy to produce the energy. On the other side here, we look at ethanol. And, of course, we start out with energy from the sun, and corn, and this is the energy input of the fertilizers and so forth to plant the corn and transport the corn and make the ethanol and transport the ethanol.

And for the same one million, it will be more volume, by the way. Do you remember the energy density? Lower for ethanol, more volume, but the same. We are comparing apples to apples, because it is a million Btus. To get a million Btus of ethanol, we had to use .74 million Btus of fossil fuel, still a net gain but not a really big net gain. But still worth doing.

The bottom here shows something really interesting. It shows the energy which is used to produce a bushel of corn. And I want to note how much of this energy comes from fossil fuel. Nitrogen. All of that comes from fossil fuel. All of the nitrogen fertilizers we have today are made from natural gas.

Until we learned how to do that, the only source of fertilizers was barnyard manures and guano. Guano is the droppings of birds and bats over thousands of years accumulating in caves and on tropical islands. There was an industry, before we learned how to make nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas, there was an industry that mined guano. That is gone now; that is not a resource we can fall back on.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether you have noticed or not in the summer time when you water your lawn, it is nowhere near as green as when you have a thunderstorm. You may have wondered why. We used to call a thunderstorm poor man's fertilizer, because what the lightning does in the thunderstorm is to combine nitrogen of the air, and about four-fifths of all of the air is nitrogen, combines it in a form that can be carried down by the rain, into the soil so your lawn does look greener after nature waters it, as compared to you watering it, and that is because of the nitrogen which has been converted to a form by the lightning, which can be carried down by the water.

What will we do for nitrogen when natural gas is gone? Now we can produce it with other energy sources. But we are looking at enormous investments of energy. Because, look, nearly half of all of the energy that went into producing that bushel of corn is just the natural gas and the nitrogen fertilizer.

But let us go on. Here is the seed. Some energy went into growing that. Input hauling, that is fossil fuels. Purchased water. That was probably pumped using some fossil fuels. Chemicals, a whole bunch of those chemicals are made from fossil fuels, which, by the way, we have not mentioned the importance of oil and gas as feed stocks for an enormous petrochemical industry.

Some have very appropriately noted that gas, particularly, and oil are too good to burn. We live in a plastic world; that all comes from gas and oil.

And so many of these chemicals came from oil. For custom work, he came in to harvest on the combine. He used oil to drive his combine, oil helped produce the combine. Natural gas, electricity that could have been produced by these fossil fuels, oil or gas or coal. Here is liquid gas here, and gasoline and diesel fuel.

And then we come to the other two nutrients that we give corn in large quantities, that will put some lime on it to make sure that the Ph is okay. And then phosphate and potash. Now, we use fossil fuels in mining and hauling the phosphate and potash.

So you see, Mr. Speaker, that probably 95 percent, at least, of all of the energy that goes into producing corn comes from fossil fuels. The corn that we eat is in a very literal sense oil. Because if it were not for oil, unless we were producing corn in a very different way than we do today, we would not have corn to eat.

Let us go back to our selection of the options. And we were talking about ethanol, and methanol is similar. You get ethanol from the carbohydrates in plants and corn. You get methanol from sawdust and things like that. This is a one-carbon alcohol, this is a two-carbon alcohol. And then biomass. Biomass is just using corn stocks or switchgrass or trees or something like that to produce energy.

By the way, we still produce a lot of energy with wood. It is generally in industries where wood waste is a byproduct. If you have a lot of sawdust, you burn the sawdust, and that produces energy. That is why the energy on one of those first charts I showed getting from wood is not zero now, because we are still using a fair amount of energy in some industries from wood because it is a waste product otherwise.

And then, of course, waste to energy. I mentioned that previously. We were looking at that as one of the lowest, that was the lowest on that chart, in fact, energy density. But, never mind. There is a whole lot of it. We still could get some meaningful energy out of it.

And then the last one here: hydrogen from renewables. And hydrogen bears spending just a moment talking about it, because hydrogen, contrary to what many people believe, is not an energy source. Hydrogen is, in effect, Mr. Speaker, pretty much the equivalent of a battery. A battery is a handy way to take electrons, electricity, and store them, and then get them back at another time at another place where you want to use it.

That is pretty much exactly what hydrogen is. There is no hydrogen out there that you can suck out of the air, or you can pump out of the ground. The way you get hydrogen is to invest energy to get it from natural gas, or to split water. Water is made up of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen.

So you can get a lot of hydrogen from water. But you will always spend more energy making the hydrogen than you will ever get out of the hydrogen. Well, you say, gee, why are people talking about a hydrogen economy? And why is that a good idea if it will take more energy to produce the hydrogen than you will get out of the hydrogen?

It really is a good idea. And the reason it is a good idea is because once you have got the hydrogen, and you can produce it from like nuclear, coal, biomass, you cannot have a trunkful of garbage and run your car down, but you could produce electricity, and with electricity you could produce hydrogen, and then your car will run very well on that.

When you are using the hydrogen, if you are burning it, it does not matter how you burn it, if you use it in a fuel cell or reciprocating engine, the fuel cell is much better because it has twice the efficiency. You just get water. So the only pollution you have to worry about is the pollution at the site where you made the hydrogen. And the economies of scale make it a whole lot easier to control the pollution there than it does in a million cars running up and down the road. I am very supportive of the hydrogen economy.

I really need to emphasize again, Mr. Speaker, this is not a solution to our energy problem, Mr. Speaker. It will not replace oil. Hydrogen is simply the equivalent of a battery. It is a handy way to take energy from one place, to store it, to take it to another place

where you can use it in a very handy form, that you can use it in a nuclear cell and get at least the twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine, that is the kind of engine you have in your car or truck, and that produces only water as a by-product which is not polluting.

The next chart we will show you shows some of the characteristics that you will have to look for in substitutes for oil as we run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. Here on the ordinate we look at energy profit ratios. What that is is how much energy you have to put in to get energy out. If you are putting in one unit of energy and getting one unit of energy out, you do less than that in producing hydrogen. You put one more than one unit to get one unit out, but never mind. It is still a good idea because hydrogen burns so cleanly and is used so efficiently in a fuel cell.

The abscissa shows the economic effectiveness, how easy is it to transport it and use it. So where you want to be is right in the upper right-hand corner and most giant oil fields are up there all alone. That is gas and oil of course. There is not anything out there that competes with these.

Let us look at the alternatives that we have been talking about. Here is the 1970s direct use of coal. It was sort of good on the energy profit ratio but, boy, was it inconvenient to use. It is way over here on the left. Trains used it directly. You had the coal car and you shoveled it into the train and produced heat and steam and you ran the train with that.

Here is photovoltaics. In 1995 they were not very good. Photovoltaics is another name for solar cells. But we are now getting very much better with them. We are probably even better than this chart shows that we are moving up here. But they will never move to the right because they are stuck on the roof of your house or something like that. So you have to use the energy from them if you want to go someplace like to charge a battery or make hydrogen so you can put that in your car and go with that.

Electricity is produced from hydro plants, from coal fire plants, from nuclear plants; and notice that it is down here very close to the abscissas and it cannot much move from there. And notice that the energy profit ratio is not very high. Never matter, because electricity is so convenient. We do so many things with it, that it really does not matter that it is not produced very efficiently. And of course you cannot transport it very well so it is stuck somewhere down here on the abscissa and it never goes very high on the ordinate.

Look down here, in the worst possible place to be in terms of energy- profit ratio and that is tar sands and ethanol. Of course, the worst place to be is here by zero. It has no energy-profit ratio and you cannot do anything with it. Once you get the oil out of the tar sands and once you get the ethanol, then it is very convenient. But notice how far it is down here in terms of energy-profit ratio. We are putting almost as much energy in as we are getting out of it.

Here is U.S. oil in the 1970s. It was up here, very convenient to use. But it is way down in energy profit ratio because we pumped our good oil a long time before 1970, our easy to get oil. We peaked in 1970 as you know. This is the oil use in 1985. It is sliding down. We are now in 2005. 20 years later. Look what it did in these 15 years. For our oil we are down somewhere near zero here. We are putting in almost as much energy as we are getting out. But never mind because the energy we are putting in is more convenient to get, like electrical energy.

I mentioned previously that some of our stripper wells, we are putting in more Btus of electrical energy than the Btus we will get out of the oil. But we are still doing it because oil is a commodity that is just so useful in our society.

The next chart shows us the transition that we need to go through if we are going to be successful in going from our enormous dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil, and gas, if we are going to transition to these renewables. The first thing we have to do is voluntary conservation.

We have a chart if we can find it of the situation in California. It shows what the Californians did voluntarily. As you can see from this chart, this graph, the average citizen in California uses only about 60 percent of the energy that used in the rest of the country. Now, I know a lot of Californians. They are the biggest delegation here, and none of them believe that they have a lesser quality of life in California than we have in Mississippi or Oregon or Maryland, and they have done that through, much of it voluntary. Not all of it voluntary.

Let us go back to the other chart to show the route California has been following to get where they are. The next is organized voluntary conservation. By the way, there were no rolling blackouts in California because they voluntarily reduced their consumption of electricity by 11 percent which avoided the rolling blackouts that we were sure they were going to have. Now we have organized voluntary conservation. Let us work together. Let us share our experiences.

Monetary incentives, something where government can gets involved. Policies for voluntary conservation.

Efficient technology retrofits. How can we live as well as we are living now using much less energy? We were a very creative people. We really can do this.

Finally, monetary incentives that will increase our efficiency.

The last chart we are going to show here kind of capitulates this and looks at where we are and what we need to be doing. What we clearly need to do is buy time. Remember that earlier chart we are showed, Hubbert's Peak and the 2 percent exponential increase in use of energy? We have got to buy some time or we will be sliding down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, and you buy time by conservation and efficiency.

Conservation you can do very quickly. Turn down the thermostat. Turn out the light when you are not using it. Drive less in your car. Car pool. There are a lot of things we can do for efficiency.

We can buy time by using new technologies. Conservation and efficiency of course go hand in hand. Conservation you can do more quickly. Efficiency you have to develop the technologies to be more efficient. We have done that by the way. Our refrigerators today probably use half the electricity they did a couple of decades ago.

Then we need to use this time wisely. Once we bought some time we need to use wisely.

Now we are about out of time in our special order this evening, and I would like to talk a little bit at another time about Jevons' Paradox and how if the whole world does not do this, Jevons' Paradox which says the harder you work on some problems the worse they get.

Jevons' Paradox could be a real problem here. The whole world really needs to work together here. Suppose we really do heave to and conserve and become more efficient and save a lot of oil and all that happens is that makes it more available to China to grow their economy and grow their military? That is an application of Jevons' Paradox. We are working real hard to solve the problem. And from our personal perspective and national security perspective in this country, we have just made the problem worse because we have made more oil and gas available for China.

But we are all in this boat together and the whole world needs to work together. Let us assume we do. Then we need to use it wisely and we need to make the investments in these alternatives that we should have been making. We have known for at least 25 years that peak oil was coming. If Hubbert was right about the United States, Mr. Speaker, then why was he not right about the world and why did we waste the last 25 years and paid no attention to the obvious necessity of freeing ourselves from this dependence on fossil fuels. For oil, much of that comes, two-thirds of it we import, much of that as the President says from countries that do not even like us.

The benefits of this, additional benefits include business opportunities. We are a very creative culture. We have lots of opportunities to make contributions here. Potential worldwide markets, if we are going to pioneer domestic job creation, environmentally benign technologies that are not producing greenhouse gases.

We need to be a role model. Like it or not we are a leader in the world. We

use a fourth of the world's oil, a fourth of the world's energy, we are a fourth of the world's economy. We are a role model. We have got to be a role model.

Mr. Speaker, I hope we can be a good role model, inspiring the rest of the world to do what needs to be done to conserve, have more efficiency, to buy time, to invest that very wisely. This can create a whole new economy with all of the technologies that are necessary to transition to these renewables.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, we have to have some other way of measuring success other than how much energy you use, a bigger car, a more expensive vacation, an enormous house that you heat and cool. These are the signs of success and they all require more energy. We are going to have to have a different yard stick by which we measure success. We can do it. I am sure we can but will not do it unless we mobilize, unless we all understand that this is something that we need to work together to solve.

Mr. Speaker, I have confidence that America can rise to this challenge, but the real challenge now is for all of us to understand that if we do not do this we are going to face a very bleak future as was quoted from all of these experts that Matt Savinar quotes in his article.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, May 17, 2005, at 9 a.m., for morning hour debates.

Mr. Speaker, we are here this afternoon to build on a discussion that was started last evening when five of us were here on the floor to talk about the problem of energy in general and about oil and peak oil in particular.

I would like to start with a chart that shows some curves that will lead us to this one. Here, we have a 2 percent growth curve, and what this is is the rate at which we are increasing our demand for oil. You will see that it is exponential. It is not a straight line. It goes out and up, and the further you go, the steeper it gets. I wanted to talk for just a moment about these exponential curves because I think a lot of people do not understand the exponential function.

There is a very interesting story about the person who a very long time ago invented the game of chess, and the monarch of the kingdom was so impressed with that contribution that he told the inventor that any reasonable thing that you ask, I will give you. The inventor said, I am a simple man, with simple needs, and if you will simply take my chess board and put a grain of wheat on the first square and 2 grains of wheat on the second square and 4 grains of wheat on the third square and 8 grains of wheat on the fourth square and just continue, continue doubling the number of grains you put on each square until you have gone through all the squares of the chess board, that will be reward enough for what I have done. The king thought he had gotten off lightly; geez, that is easy.

He could not do that, of course, because if you do that, go to the 64th power, that would represent all the wheat that is grown in all the world in 4 years of harvest, I understand, and you notice that is the exponential function.

We see here just a 2 percent growth curve, and many people think of 2 percent growth as a straight line. That is only 2 percent for the first year, but then if it is going to 2 percent for the second year, it is not going to be 2 percent of what existed at the end of that year. So you are kind of getting interest on interest which is what compound interest is, and I think many people have a little appreciation of compound interest.

This is a 4 percent growth curve. It quadruples in 35 years. This is a 5 percent growth curve, and China now is on a 10 percent growth curve. That is this curve. In 7 years, if they continue on this curve, their economy will double, and their use of oil will double if it follows the economy. There is not much way to keep it from following the economy. In 14 years, they will be using four times as much oil, and in just 21 years, they will be using eight times as much oil.

The next chart kind of puts the thing in perspective as far as our country is concerned. We have 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two- thirds of what we use. That is up, by the way, from the Arab oil embargo where we imported just about a third of what we use.

Two other figures are of interest. One is that we represent less than 5 percent of the world's population. We are about one person in 22 in the world, and this one person is so fortunate that we get to have 25 percent of all the good things in the world, a subject for another discussion, but I wonder, Mr. Speaker, if you have asked yourself the question, how come that is true; what is so unique about this country and our culture that this one person in 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? Perhaps we will come here to the floor another day to talk about that because I think there are some real lessons to learn. If you understood how we got here, then we might understand what we need to do to stay here, but that is not the subject of tonight's discussion.

With only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we produce 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are really good at pumping oil. We know how to get oil out of the ground better than almost anybody in the world. As a matter of

fact, we are so good at that, that the Chinese have come here. They may still be here. They were here a few days ago, and they were coming to try and see how we do it, because we are really good at getting oil out of the ground.

What that means, of course, is for the moment we are better off because with 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are getting 8 percent of the world's oil. So we are really maximizing the opportunities we have from the oil that is available to us.

The next chart will show us one of the consequences of this, and I have to go back now about 6 decades to put what we are talking about in perspective.

There was apparently lots of oil available in the world at that time. We were awash in oil, and gasoline was very cheap. I remember buying it at 6 gallons for a dollar. You could not do that today, no matter what the price of crude oil was, because I think there is $0.48 tax per gallon.

And then, obviously, there was a much lesser tax per gallon, because I remember buying gas, 6 gallons for a dollar.

There was during the 1940s and 1950s, a scientist working for Shell Oil Company named M. King Hubbert. He became quite an icon in that world because he made a prediction in 1956 that the United States would peak in its oil production; that we would reach a maximum capacity for pumping oil in this country in about 1970. He made that prediction 14 years before the date at which he said it would happen.

He made that prediction because, as a student of this technology, he had watched the exploitation and the depletion of individual oil fields. He noticed that for every oil field the rate of production increased and increased until after it reached a peak, and then after it reached a peak it was more difficult to get, and so it fell down the other side of the slope, and it always followed a bell curve.

Here we have a bell curve. As a matter of fact, that is the bell curve, the green there. That smooth green line is a bell curve that was predicted by M. King Hubbert. The more ragged green line are the actual data points where they fell on that curve, remarkably close to his predicted curve.

If we look at the next graph, and by the way, before we look at that one, the red one here shows Russia. There are charts for a lot of countries, because a number of countries have now peaked in their oil production.

In this next one, the red one here shows Russia, really the Soviet Union, and they kind of fell apart. And notice that the actual production did not follow the predicted curve. They now are capitalizing on that and they are having a second little peak here, but it is still falling off.

Notice the blue lines here. We will talk about that in just a moment with the next chart here, because what the next chart does is to show where we got our oil from and where we were getting it from when M. King Hubbert made his prediction. When he made that prediction back here in 1956, we were getting a tiny bit of natural gas liquids, and we were getting about half of our oil from Texas and the other half from the rest of the United States.

He predicted that by 1970 that we would peak. And he did that because he rationalized that if you took each one of these little oil fields that was going to follow a bell curve, and if you added up all the little bell curves, you would get one big bell curve for the whole country. And so with some confidence he predicted, by estimating the additional oil that we would find, he predicted when we ought to peak. As a matter of fact, we did peak in 1970.

When we were falling down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, we discovered oil in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska; and there was a lot of oil there. There was hopes that this would solve our oil problem. You see what it did? There is just a little blip in the slope down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. That, by the way, represents about 25 percent of our present production of oil. That is tailing off, as you see, because we are now down pumping relatively the last oil out of Prudhoe Bay.

I am sure, Mr. Speaker, that you can remember all of the hullabaloo, I guess is the best way to say it, about the enormous oil finds in the Gulf of Mexico. We were going to be home free. It was energy and oil for the foreseeable future. That is the little yellow segment here. That is how much it amounted to.

The next chart shows the discovery of oil. We have been talking so far about the production of oil, and the reality is that the world found its oil many years before it produced oil. I hope there is a whole lot of oil out there that we have not found; but by the time we finish this evening, I think you will agree that for our present situation and for the next few years, it really is not going to be of much moment whether we find a whole lot more or not. I hope we do. I do not think the industry expects that we will, because they are now awash in cash. And you may or may not know, they are not spending a lot of that money on prospecting. They believe that they have found much of the oil that is out there to find.

This chart reflects worldwide. Our peak occurred well before this, but worldwide the peak discoveries occurred back here in the mid-1960s, and now we are reaching the peak production about 40 years later. That is roughly what it was in our country, about 30 or 40 years later after we had the maximum discoveries, then you have the maximum exploitation and the highest pumping of that oil.

We were already 10 years down the slope of the other side of Hubbert's Peak when Ronald Reagan came to office. And he and his administration understood that we were becoming every day more dependent on foreign oil, and so they had a solution to the problem. It turned out to be not the right solution, but at least they tried to do something. You may remember those days, and the philosophy was that the marketplace solves problems. And with unlimited resources, the marketplace is great at solving problems. So they theorized if we just gave our oil industry an excuse, an incentive to drill more wells, that they would go out and drill more wells and they would find more oil. So we put in place a number of incentives to go out and drill more wells and, boy, it worked.

This was the rate at which we were drilling wells. And then after Reagan came in, notice how it shot up. Now, the green here represents the excess we had compared to what we were pumping. The red represents a deficit that we are now using more than we pump. And notice that the increased drilling coincided with the beginning of a surge in red, which continued more and more. And notice how drilling has fallen off.

With us having only 2 percent of the reserves and using 25 percent of the world's oil and importing two-thirds of what we use, and with oil at $50 a barrel, you would think that with the big profits the oil companies have that they would now be drilling a lot of wells. They are not drilling a lot of wells. Could that be because they have some reasonable confidence that they have probably found most of the oil that is out there to find?

The next chart shows us something very interesting. We are not the only country in the world that uses oil. China, of course, is a big user of oil. As a matter of fact, they are now the number two importer of oil in the world. I think they are the number two user of oil in the world. They just surpassed Japan, with 1.3 billion people that have some qualities that you can admire, because they are the qualities, at least some of the reason, that America is the great country that it is. We had a great work ethic. We had a great respect for education. And we have been the most innovative society in the world.

But now the Chinese are rivaling us and maybe surpassing us in the work ethic. And if you look at our schools, particularly our technical schools in science math and engineering, you might conclude they had a little more respect for technical education than we have, because not only have they filled the schools up in their country, and they have some pretty good schools there now, but they are also about half the students in our country. Their economy has been growing at 10 percent a year. Last year, they increased their demands for imported oil by about 25 percent. I hope that does not continue, because if it does, the world is going to have an oil crunch or crisis a little sooner than it might otherwise.

This map of the world, and by the way there is an interesting depiction here, and that is the green, which is Russia. By the way, this should be colored green over here too, right next to Alaska. Russia spans 11 time zones. They go almost halfway around the world. And they have got a lot of oil over in what is called the Far East of Russia, over here near the Sakhalin Islands. And China, this symbol here represents China's negotiating with Russia, and they may very well build a pipeline from Russia's Far East down to China, maybe on down to the Korean Peninsula, because the Russians have the oil and the Chinese need the oil.

Not only are they working there to get oil, but they are certainly several places in the Middle East. They are in Africa. They have contracts in these areas. And in many areas they are buying access to facilities to make sure that they will have more reasonable access to oil in the future. They are in our back yard. They are in Colombia; they are in Venezuela.

By the way, they are talking about building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama so they can move oil from one side to the other to more quickly get it to China.

They are in Brazil. They are in Argentina. They are scouring the world for oil. As a matter of fact, they have locked up the oil from the oil sands in Alaska, oil sands that I suspect we are counting on, because Canada is a big exporter to the United States. But they now have, I understand, a 40-year contract, locking up at least some of the production of the tar sands. And that production may well drop off so that the oil available to them through this contract may be a major part of the oil produced in Canada.

This is a reality that we must deal with. Although we are now big, using a fourth of the oil in the world, China, with 1.3 billion people, with an economy growing at 10 percent a year, will double in 7 years. Our economy has been growing more or less 2 percent a year. We are pretty good at efficiency, so our use of oil has only been growing at 2 percent. Even if our economy grows a bit more than that, this 2 percent growth means it will take 35 years before we double our use of oil. But China, at their 10 percent, will only go 7 years before they double the use of their oil.

So when we look to the future, we will have to recognize that there will be a lot more people out there needing oil and looking for oil than just the United States.

The next graph shows us something pretty interesting. It goes back through history, and we go way back. Here we go back to the 1600s and the 1700s, and what this chart shows is the development of the Industrial Age. The first energy source that we really learned how to use was fire and wood, and that is the brown here. You see that we developed an economy with wood. This shows how many quadrillion Btus were produced by wood.

By the way, the Industrial Revolution almost floundered because we were stuck on wood for too long. England was largely denuded of trees to fuel their furnaces for making steel, and we largely denuded New England. I understand there are more forests in the New England States, New Hampshire today, than there was at the Revolutionary War, because those trees had been cut and hauled to England for charcoal to make steel.

But then we found coal, and look what happened to the economy, because coal has a higher energy density than wood. So the economy grew to five times the size in terms of quadrillion Btus.

Then we discovered a fuel source, an energy source even more convenient than coal, and that was oil, and that is the red line here. That is oil and gas, because they frequently occur together. Sometimes it is only gas if you are very deep, and the heat of the Earth and time so that most of the oil has now kind of been converted into gas. But many of the other reservoirs have oil and the gas trapped above it, with a dome of rock over it so it holds it. Otherwise, the gas would have leaked out and the oil would have been of poorer quality as a result of that.

You may have seen pictures of many oil wells in the past that had a big flame burning there at the well. That is because of the natural gas that occurred with the oil, and it was just a product that they did not have any use for because you cannot put gas in a truck and haul it and so they just burned it off at the wellhead. Now, of course, we do not do that and gas is becoming a very precious commodity.

Notice that when we were using a lot of wood, we were using very little coal. When you looked at the energy use across our country in those days, very little coal used and a lot of wood, but soon there was a lot of coal and less wood because coal was more efficient. And look how small oil was here when coal was a big, big factor. But then when we started using oil and found out how superior it was for many uses as compared to coal; why, the use really shot up.

What is there on the horizon today that could take the place of oil when we have run down the other side and as we are running down the other side of Hubbert's peak? The lower curve here, and we have here separated out the petroleum and the natural gas so you do not have the big peak here. If you added these two together, it would be the red line there. We have many fewer years, just this little segment in here. But notice at the bottom those things that we might look to for the future. Nuclear, getting 20 percent of our electricity now, it is not a big percentage of our total energy, but it is meaningful. And solar and wind, they are very little down here but these are the kinds of things that we need to look to for the future.

I would like to go back to the first chart that is on the board here now and just spend a couple of minutes looking at this because this kind of tells us where we are or where we are shortly going to be in the future. This is Hubbert's Peak. By the way, we can make this peak very steep. By compressing the abscissa and expanding the ordinate, you will make it a very steep peak. So whether it is steep or spread out just depends upon the scale you use. Two percent growth. Notice that, at some point, as we near the peak that the 2 percent growth, and that is the oil you would like to use. The blue down here is the oil that is available. Up until this time, all the oil we needed to use has been there. That is pretty much where we are today; although there may be a bit less than we would like to use because oil is not $20 a barrel, it is $50 a barrel. That may reflect an already recognized shortage or potential shortage.

As time goes on, you see the enormous variance between the oil that we would like to use and the oil that is available to use. I would like to make a point that, if we use all the oil for our ordinary economic functions that is available to use, that we are dooming ourselves to a very rough ride in the future, because we will need a bunch of energy, much of it from oil, to develop the alternatives that will be essential as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So, at this point in time, we cannot use that much oil when we would like to be using that much. We can only maybe use that much oil, so we are going to be in a position, unless we can reduce our use of oil to about half of what it is now, we are not going to have the energy available to invest in the alternatives so that will ultimately free ourselves from this dependence on a diminishing resource.

From our perspective in this country, our dependence on a resource that is largely in foreign lands and much of that, a great deal of that, as the President himself said, is in countries that do not even like us and that may be pretty terrible in expressing their attitude toward us.

There are many observers of this phenomenon of peak oil that do not believe that we as a country and we as a society have either the wit or the will to do the things that we really need to do to avoid a train wreck in the future. I would just like to read from a few of those. Some of these names you will recognize because some of them are very prominent names. The first is from a Matt Savinar who wrote a treatise, which I have here and you can find it, Life After the Oil Crash. Just do a Google search and go to Peak Oil and you will find Matt Savinar and Life After the Oil Crash. I would encourage you, Mr. Speaker, to read that if you have not. This is the way he begins his treatise. I almost put it down. I said, This guy has to be a nut to say this. This is what he said. I did not put

it down. I am glad I did not put it down. I read it through. When I finished reading it through, I found it very difficult to argue with his premises unless we make a big, big effort in this country and worldwide to avoid what he says will happen. This is how he begins this article:

``Dear Reader,

``Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.''

That is enough to grab your attention or to convince you that, gee, this guy is a nut, I don't need to read that.

``This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global peak oil.''

If this is true, Mr. Speaker, why have you not been hearing about this? That is a very reasonable question to ask. There is an aversion to bringing bad news. As a matter of fact, in ancient Greece, the bearer of bad news frequently paid with his life for the fact that he brought bad news, and politicians frequently pay with their seat for the bad news they bring the people. And since this was a problem where the sky probably was not going to fall on my term, let's let the next guy deal with it.

We have in our country the tyranny of the urgent. In the business world, they always deal with what is urgent. In dealing with the urgent, you may put off the important. The urgent thing for a business is to have a good quarterly report. If you do not have a good quarterly report, your stock is going to drop, the board of directors may meet, and you may not have your job. So you need to have a good quarterly report. Looking down the road to make the kind of investments that you need to make in the event that Hubbert and, by the way, I really need to emphasize something. M. King Hubbert was dead right, right on, for the United States. He predicted it precisely. Why should he not be right for the world? In 1973, he predicted that the world would peak in oil production about the turn of the millennium. It occurred a little bit later because he could not have anticipated the Arab oil embargo and its consequences or the oil price spike hikes or the worldwide recession that occurred most largely because of the price of energy. So now we got about another 5 years. Somebody should have noticed that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and if he was right about the United States, maybe he could be right about the world. And if he could be right about the world, then should we not be doing something about the situation in the world?

I was privileged to have lunch today with, I think, the largest energy investment banker in the world, Matthew Simmons, adviser of the President, widely known by many people in both the economic area and in the oil area.

``Simmons is a self-described lifelong Republican. His investment bank, Simmons & Company International, is considered the most reputable and reliable energy investment bank in the world.

``Given Simmons' background, what he has to say about the situation is truly terrifying. For instance, in an August 2003 interview with From the Wilderness publisher Michael Ruppert, Simmons was asked if it was time for peak oil to become part of the public policy debate and this was his answer:

`` `It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks,' '' and I think, and he believes, that energy has peaked or will imminently peak. As a matter of fact, he has a book coming out on the 15th. I hope it will be a best seller. It is called Twilight in the Desert. It is a book about Saudi Arabia. He believes, and there is pretty good evidence, that Saudi Arabia has now peaked in its oil production. The oil prince from Saudi Arabia was a week or two here visiting the President, you may remember. The President was very anxious to extract the promise that Saudi Arabia would pump more oil because $50 a barrel oil and $2.25 for a gallon of gasoline is not good for our economy. So it would be nice to have more oil which would bring the price down and would help our economy. You may have noted that the oil prince did not, I think he could not, promise the President that he would increase oil production.

`` `It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks, particularly while 5 of the world's 6.5 billion people have little or no use of modern energy, it will be a tremendous jolt to our economic well-being and to our health, greater than anyone could ever imagine.'

``When asked if there is a solution to the impending crisis, Simmons responded:

`` `I don't think there is one. The solution is to pray. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered, there will be no crisis for maybe 2 years. After that, it's a certainty.' ''

I hope he is wrong. I hope that we in the United States and we in the world recognize the impending crisis as our demand for oil goes ever up and as the oil available to us peaks. Are we here? Are we here? Where are we? We are somewhere near there. There are a lot of experts who agree that we are somewhere near that. And then it starts down the other side. There is this big difference between what we would like to use and what is available to use, and I have already made the point that if we use all the oil for our routine economic functions that is available to us, there will be no energy to invest in the alternatives that we are going to have to have if we are going to transition from the age of oil to the age of renewables. Ultimately, we are going to have to make that transition.

Another expert, Lundberg. You have all heard of the Lundberg report on the price of gas. This is Jan Lundberg:

``The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices up skyward.''

That has not happened. But who knows when it may happen, when there is suddenly a realization that we are not going to be able to increase the production rate of oil.

``And as supplies can no longer slake daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day,'' it is now 84, ``the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and even daily living in advanced societies. There may be an event that appears to trigger this final energy crash, but the overall cause will be the huge consumption on a finite planet.

``The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno-toys and whatnot from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence and chaos. For only a short time will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all.''

I think we all know how thin the veneer of civilization is. Just let the lights go out in any of our major cities for a relatively short period of time and you get some idea of how thin the skin, the veneer of civilization is. I hope he is wrong. But after you read Matt Savinar's, and this is in Matt Savinar's article, after you read that whole article, you will find it difficult as I did, Mr. Speaker, to dismiss that with a wave of a hand, because if it is true that this is the reality, and it was for the United States, why should it not be true for the world? It was true for England. They peaked. Several countries have now peaked. It will be true for the world one day. Everybody admits that. The only difference of opinion is when it will occur. Many believe that we are now at peak or very close to peak oil. These predictions, I think, are made on the assumption that there will not be an adequate response.

One of the reasons I am here today, Mr. Speaker, is hoping that we can educate the American people, the people of the world, to this pending problem. By the way, another example of this tyranny of the urgent; in politics, it is very difficult to see beyond the next election. What political people tend to do are the things that will maximize their vote total at the next election, and talking about peak oil is probably not one of those things to make people feel good about their future. But I think that leadership has a responsibility. I want future generations when they look back on my generation to say, Gee, they did the right thing.

Another observer, Dr. Ted Trainer. By the way, we cannot see beyond the next election very far. Somebody in America, do you not think, Mr. Speaker, needs to be looking down the road?

Who is that going to be if not the elected representatives of the people? And I think the people out there across this great country, Mr. Speaker, are wise enough that they will accept the truth. We are an enormously innovative and creative country. I think that we can get by this. I think that we can have very high-quality lives using much less energy, and I think that we can create a brand-new economy around all of the entrepreneurship, the creativity, the inventions that are going to have to be there when we go from these fossil fuels to renewables.

Dr. Ted Trainer explains in a recent article on the thermodynamic limitations of biomass fuels: ``This is why I do not believe consumer- capitalist society can save itself. Not even its `intellectual' classes or green leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the will to even think about the basic situation we are in.''

I hope, Mr. Speaker, as a result of this evening and several prior times I have been here, and I will be here again. I am an old teacher, Mr. Speaker. I taught for 24 years, and I had an adage that I believed in in teaching, and that is that reputation is the soul of learning. And for 12 years I taught nursing students, and not one them failed the board. And I think that is because I had this philosophy that one never can spend too much time making sure that they understand something. So we are going to spend some time at this podium with the American people until we understand this.

``This is why I do not believe consumer-capitalist society can save itself. Not even its `intellectual' classes or green leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the will to even think about the basic situation we are in. As the above figures make clear, the situation cannot be solved without huge reduction in the volume of consumption.''

And that is what we have been talking about. If we are here, we would like to use oil at this level. We are going to have to use it at this level so that something remains, so that we can make the investments that we have got to make in renewables, or we are not going to get there.

In the February, 2005, issue of ``Discover'' magazine, Dr. Smalley gave the following diagnosis: ``There will be inflation as billions of people compete for insufficient resources. There will be famine. There will be terrorism and war.''

I hope not. But if we really permit ourselves to get to this point where we would like to have that much oil and there is only that much remaining and we recognize that if we somehow denied oil to some other parts of the world there would be more oil for us, who knows, who knows what we might do?

Mr. Speaker, I have been very fortunate. I have never been placed in a situation where I had to do this, but I am not sure what I would do if the life or the health of my wife and children were at risk. And I think we need to be very careful that we do the things we need to do to create a future environment in which we will not be tempted to do things that under other circumstances we would be embarrassed to even think about.

The chief economist at Morgan Stanley recently predicted that we have a 90 percent chance of facing ``economic Armageddon,'' while stating, ``I fear modern-day central banking is on the brink of systematic failure.'' When somebody like the chief economist at one of the world's biggest banks makes a statement like that, it is not a surprise. Somebody like investment banker and Bush consultant Matt Simmons has stated ``the only solution is to pray.''

There was a recent article in ``Time'' magazine. It was pretty near the center, kind of a center spread. It said: ``Why Gas Won't Get Cheaper,'' and they asked several questions, and then they answered the questions. And in broad terms, they were realistic in their answers. Let me go through some of these because I think it is very instructive. This is a major news medium which has now recognized that we may be getting near this point.

``Is the world running out of oil?'' And the answer is: ``No.'' We have got half of all the oil that was ever there. That is not what is running out. World's oil is not what is running out. What is running out is cheap oil, readily available, and high-quality oil. That is running out. We are not going to run out of oil for a long time, but we have run out or are about to run out of cheap oil, and we are about to run out of our ability to increase oil production.

So their next question is: ``So cheap oil is now just part of history?'' And their answer is: ``Correct.'' Then they go on to explain why.

I was talking to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) the other day, the longest-serving Member of the House here on this floor, who has served here, I think, over 52 years, and what he told me was we will never see $50-a-barrel oil again. Now, it may dip. Today I think it may be a bit below $50. But what he meant was that oil is really not going down to $25, $30, $40 a barrel again; that it is going to go up from here. That is a recognition that we are probably at this point where demand is going to exceed supply, and when that happens, a little bit of difference, just a dip in supply, and we have seen what happens to prices.

``Will other sources of energy, like wind power or nuclear power, save the day?'' And then they make a very correct statement: ``Only if they replace oil consumption. Building nuclear plants or wind farms to produce electricity, for example, won't add a barrel of oil to the world's supply because we generally don't use oil for electricity.''

In a few moments, we are going to be talking about the real challenges we have in developing these alternatives. It is not impossible, but it is going to challenge the best of us. There is nothing like a challenge to sharpen the intellect or give one the satisfaction of achievement. And, boy, we had better sharpen a lot of intellects, and there is going to be a lot of satisfaction of achievement if we get by this without the rough ride that these authors in this report were making reference to.

``Why is demand for oil rising?'' And then they talk about China and India. We would like our economy to grow. As a matter of fact, if our economy does not grow at least 2 percent a year, we cannot service our debt. And the interest on our debt at today's low interest rates, pray they stay low, is almost as large as all of the money that we spend on the ordinary military. That does not include fighting the war: about $400 billion on the military, about $300 billion interest on the debt. So the interest only has to go up about 30 percent and we are spending as much interest on the debt as we are for our military. These are the big-ticket items.

Demand is rising. It will continue to rise. And if we have reached the peak, then there is going to be a big difference between what we would like to use and what there is available to use and who knows the geopolitical consequences of that? Who knows the stresses and strains in the world that will occur as a result of that and what this or that nation, including our own, by the way, might do?

Next question: ``Will technologies like hybrid cars, which run on a combination of gasoline and electricity, lower the price of oil?'' And they incorrectly answer: ``Eventually, yes.'' I do not think that the author of this understood that we are close to peak oil. No, it is not going to decrease the price of gas. If we have a massive effort at conservation and efficiency, what it is going to do is to permit us to continue to live well while we reduce our oil consumption below this level so we have something to invest in the alternatives.

``Will higher oil prices cripple the U.S. economy?'' And then he makes reference to another article written by Howard Kuntsler, and it is in a book. ``The Long Emergency,'' he calls it. And it goes something like this: ``Gasoline will soon get so expensive that most Americans simply won't be able to afford it. Suburbs, strip malls, interstate highways, the infrastructure of the modern U.S. economy just won't work anymore without cheap oil, and the U.S. will have to reinvent itself or risk falling into decay.'' That is a pretty dire prophecy.

What does ``Time'' magazine say about that? This is what they say. It is

very interesting what they say. That dire prophecy, though, is really all about timing. What they are really saying is if we do not take the right actions at the right time, that could very well happen. That is what they mean. This is all about timing. If we now aggressively pursue a program of conservation and efficiency and developing renewables, we will have a less rough ride through this crisis.

It is really quite lamentable that we have now blown 25 years. We very well knew we were on the downside of Hubbert's Peak in 1980. We should have then begun to make the investments in the alternatives that would make their use a realistic replacement for oil today. Today we have a very steep hill to climb.

I would like to put the next chart up which shows energy density. This gives us some idea of the challenges that we face here as we look to what is going to take the place of gas and oil. And this lists a number of things that we can burn and get energy from and how much energy there is. Domestic refuse, it does not have much. It is wet, and it has got a bunch of stuff in it that will not burn. But many places are burning it to get electricity, and the excess heat can now provide what is called ``district heating.'' By the way, we do not need to be getting rid of this heat in these big cooling towers and evaporating precious water. This heat ought to be used for heating buildings and so forth. They do that all over the rest of the world. We need to do more of that in this country.

Here is brown coal. That is a cheap coal that has a very low energy density. Straw, we are talking about burning biomass, pretty low energy density. If we burn enough straw and soybean stubble and so forth, we can get some energy from it, enough sawdust. Dung, in some countries they are burning dried dung to heat themselves. We used to do that out in the West. Cow chips, I think they called them. Buffalo chips. They picked them up and burned them there.

Wood, 16.2 gigajoules per ton. Black coal, better than wood, 50 percent better than wood. Coke, even better. Ethanol, notice that the ethanol that we would like to have more of because it replaces gasoline has nowhere near the energy density of gasoline because here is petrol down here at 46 and ethanol has less. But, nevertheless, we will talk in a few minutes about ethanol. It is still a really good idea.

Crude oil; diesel; petrol, automotive petrol; naptha; aviation fuel, higher octane, more energy; and natural gas, more hydrogen and still more energy.

I would like to give just a little anecdotal illustration of how important energy density is. One barrel, which is 42 gallons, of crude oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 manhours of effort. From 8 years with IBM and writing a lot of proposals, I know that 2,060 is a man-year. So this is about 12 man-years of effort. What that means is that for $100, about $50 for the oil and maybe $50 to refine it and transport it to something a gallon for gasoline times 40 is about $100. For $100 one can now buy the energy equivalent worth of 12 men, or women, 12 people working for them all year long, and they bought that for $100. That is the challenge--we have to find something that cheap. And one will say $50 a barrel is not cheap, that $2.25 a gallon for gas is not cheap. But gas is still cheaper than water in the grocery store, is it not? The challenge is to find something with that kind of energy density.

Let me give another little illustration that people may be able to identify with because almost all of us drive cars. We drive a Prius, since 2000. A few weeks ago we had four people, and we were going down into West Virginia, up some mountains down there. We got lousy mileage going up the mountain. We have instantaneous mileage on the Prius so we could see what we were getting. And our mileage was only 20 miles per gallon. But I thought about that. One gallon of gasoline. Members know how big it is. A gallon of milk in the grocery store. One gallon of gasoline took four people and their luggage up a West Virginia mountain for 20 miles. And I thought, Mr. Speaker, how long would it take me to pull my Prius up 20 miles a West Virginia mountain? Now, obviously I cannot pull it up. I am not strong enough. But I can get it up there with some mechanical advantage like a winch that is built into the little thing we call a ``come-along'' and hook it to the guardrail or trees and by and by, if I did it in 90 days, and one can calculate out how far they would have to pull the car in a day, they would be pretty good if they got it up that 20 miles of mountain in 90 days.

That is the equivalent of the 20 years of effort from a single 20,000 man-hours of effort, about 24 years of man work that you get from one barrel of oil. So we have a big challenge in getting a replacement that has the energy density.

I would like to look at one possible replacement, and that is coal. We have a lot of coal. You hear 500 years. That is not true, but we have about 250 years of coal at present use rates, about 250 years at current use rates. That is no growth.

Remember those exponential curves that we looked at a while ago? Just 1.1 percent growth, and that comes down to 125 years. Two percent growth, the curves we have been looking at, we are down to under 100 years. But you cannot put a trunk load of coal in your car and go up the mountain. You have to convert it into something where you can use it, so it is going to take some energy to convert it. It has to be a liquid or gas, and you can make both.

When I was a little boy, the things we burned in the lamps, we had no electricity when I was a child, and we burned coal oil. I kept calling it coal oil for a long time. That was a big improvement over whale oil, by the way, which is what we had before coal oil.

It was called coal oil because we made it from coal. But then we were able to make kerosene from oil, and that was cheaper and easier to make, so nobody used coal oil any more. We may be back using coal oil. After conversion with a 2 percent growth it lasts just about 50 years.

We really need to use oil. It is dirty, big environmental challenges, got to get the sulfur out of it. But still there is energy there and we need to use that energy. But coal, we have to be careful now. These are resources that are finite. When they are gone, they are gone. So we need to plan a future in which we use coal and all of the other of these finite resources in the wisest possible way.

The next chart I want to look at something that is really very revealing. There is a lot of talk about ethanol and ethanol could replace gasoline. Well, yes and no.

Here we have petroleum. You start out with petroleum and you end up down here with 1 million Btus of gasoline at the refueling station. This is all the energy inputs you have to put into the several stages in going from recovery, to transportation, to the refining facility and then transporting it to where you pick it up at the station. So you get 1 million Btus out of the gasoline, but you had to use 1.23 million Btus of fossil fuel to get there, because you have got to expend energy all along this transportation and conversion route.

Now, if we look at ethanol, and we end up with the same thing, 1 million Btus of ethanol, it is going to be a bigger volume, by the way. You remember the energy density? Ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline. But we made them equivalent here because we are talking about 1 million Btus, so we can compare them, we are comparing apples to apples here.

Now we start with solar energy, and that is going to make the corn grow that we plant, and these are all the things that go into corn. We are going to look at that in a moment. That is really interesting. Then we have to transport the corn, and we have to produce the ethanol, we have to transport the ethanol to where we are going to use it.

But notice that for every 1 million Btus of ethanol we have at the pump, we have put in about three-fourths of a million Btus of fossil fuel to get there. Obviously you would not have to use the fossil fuel, you could use corn energy, ethanol energy, but that is going to further depreciate your yield here, is it not? Tonight, 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry, and so our limits to transmute food into energy are obviously going to be limited if we would like to continue to feed the world.

What is on the bottom here in this little pie is really interesting. This is the energy that goes in to producing a bushel of corn. It could be a bushel of

soybeans or a bushel of wheat. With soybeans, by the way, you need less nitrogen here because they are a legume and they have little nodules on their roots and they get nitrogen from the atmosphere. But this is corn. It is going to be typical of wheat and rice.

Nearly half of all the energy that goes into producing corn comes from nitrogen, and nitrogen today comes almost exclusively from natural gas.

Mr. Speaker, before we knew how to get nitrogen from natural gas, we only got it in three places, nitrogen fertilizer. We got it from barnyard manures, and they were pretty limited. The farmer might have a good garden if he concentrated his manures on the garden. But for his fields he had to rely on what we called rotation farming. You planted grass and legumes, the legumes fixed nitrogen and put it in the soil, and after several years you plowed up the sod and you planted corn for one year. That sucked most of the nitrogen out of the ground, so you were back in grass and legumes again until you stored enough nitrogen to get another corn crop.

Today we use natural gas to get nitrogen and without natural gas to get nitrogen, I will let you, Mr. Speaker, draw your own conclusions as to how difficult it would be to feed the world, because you see the enormous amount of energy that comes in through natural gas and nitrogen.

Then there is hauling, that is oil; purchased water, you probably pump that with maybe some oil and gas for energy. Chemicals. Many of the chemicals that are used in farming come from a petroleum base.

By the way, there is something we have not talked about, Mr. Speaker, very important. There is an enormous petrochemical industry out there. In a very real sense, oil, and particularly gas, are too good to burn. We live in a plastic world, and all of these things, lipstick, all of these things, come from oil. There are other sources, but they are not as convenient and nowhere near as cheap. So many of the chemicals come from oil.

Custom work. His tractor was built with oil. It ran on oil. There is a lot of oil there. Natural gas, that is all fossil fuels. Electricity, that could have been produced with oil or gas. Liquid propane gas to dry the corn probably. Then gasoline itself, diesel.

We are not even free of the need for oil when you come to lime and phosphate and potash, these nutrients you have to put on the soil in addition to your nitrogen to grow the crop, because we had to mine those, and haul those. We needed energy for all that, and a great deal of that energy came from oil.

So you can see how much our food, in a very real sense, Mr. Speaker, the food you eat is oil. And in our country, just a word about agriculture in our country. We brag we have the most efficient agriculture in the world. That is because we spend fewer man-hours to produce a ton of this or a bushel of that than perhaps any other country in the world. But we do that because we have these very large tractors that burn a lot of oil.

There is a trade-off here. The fewer man-hours you use, the more energy you are probably going to have to use. So although we have the most efficient agriculture in the world in terms of man-hours of effort needed to produce a crop, we may have close to the most inefficient agriculture in the world in terms of energy in and energy out.

As a matter of fact, the food you eat, which, by the way, each helping traveled an average of 1,500 miles before it got to your plate this evening, the food you eat is quite literally energy because of all of the energy that it took to put in to that food.

The next chart looks at some of the alternatives. We need to come back, Mr. Speaker, and spend more time, because we really need to spend a lot of time on this chart, because if these dire predictions that we read earlier are not going to come true, we have got to pay attention to this chart.

There are finite resources. We mentioned the tar sands and the oil shales. A lot of oil there that is not very good, very expensive to get out. You may spend almost as much energy getting it out as you get out of it, so there is not a big energy profit ratio there.

Then coal, we have talked about coal.

Nuclear, we really need to look at nuclear. There are three forms of nuclear. Fusion is one that will get us home free. I do not think that is very probable. In spite of that, I support all the money, about $300 million a year I think we spend in that sector. Because if we really are able to get fusion, energy, and that is what the sun does, by the way, and most of the energy we use comes from the sun. All of the gas, all of the oil, all of the coal if you believe in a biogenic source, of that, and most people do, came from the sun, which shone a while ago.

Hydropower comes from the sun. The sun lifts water, it falls on the mountain and runs through the turbine and produces power. Direct solar, the wind blows because of differential heating. Ocean energy, differential temperatures in the ocean. Of course, you have some ocean energy from the tides. The only potential source of energy free from the sun is the moon; very diffuse, hard to harvest that.

Fission. Two kinds of fission. We have light water reactors, 20 percent of our electricity. The French produce about 70 to 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear and they have breeder reactors.

At another time, Mr. Speaker, we need to talk about breeder reactors. If we are going to get serious about nuclear, we are going to have to go to breeder reactors, because there is not much fissionable uranium in the world. If we all need to go to nuclear it will run out quicker than coal, quicker than oil, quicker than gas. So we need to talk about breeder reactors.

Well, we will come to the floor another hour and spend most of that time talking about these renewable sources. I hope to have with me then, we had five people here last evening, this is a getaway day, they have gone home. The next time it will not be, and we will have a number of people here, and we will have a good time talking about all of these renewables, the challenges and the opportunities there.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 16, 2005, at 12:30 p.m., for morning hour debates.