Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I really want to thank the gentleman for organizing this hour this evening.

The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) mentioned the energy future, and I have a chart here which looks at the past. If you understand how we have gotten here, why, you may be able to see the future a little better.

The gentleman mentioned the wood, and that is the brown line way down here. Then the gentleman mentioned

coal. We transitioned, and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) mentioned that also. We transitioned to coal. You see that we got lots more energy out of coal than we got out of wood.

Then look at the energy that we get out of oil. Of course, as we look to the future, we need to find something that will at least come close to producing the kind of energy that we get from oil.

Our next slide relates to something the gentleman said about energy represents the ability to do work. Here we have a chart which lists the energy density in a variety of things that we get energy from.

To kind of put this in perspective, I would like to note that if we come down here to crude oil, I will give you some idea of the energy density of crude oil, one barrel of crude oil, 42 gallons, represents the energy from 25,000 man-hours of labor. That is about 12 man years of labor. That is the equivalent of having 12 people that work all year for you. And what will it cost you for that? $100 today, about $50 for the barrel of oil and maybe $50 to refine it and distribute it. So that is the kind of energy density that we get from fossil fuel.

Now, we are going to have to find something that comes close that that in the quantities we are using fossil fuels. We are talking about oil and gas. We use in our country 21 million barrels of oil a day. The rest of the world uses 63 million barrels of oil a day. That is 84 million barrels of oil a day total.

If you look here, you will see we did go to higher and higher energy density fuels. As we moved along, you can burn domestic refuge, and we ought to be doing that, by the way, instead of putting it in landfills. We ought to be burning that. Some are doing that. You get heat for the surrounding houses, you get electricity from it.

Brown coal, that is not very good coal. Straw, you can burn bailed straw, that is called biomass. There are lots of things you can do with biomass. In some parts of the world they burn dried dung. That also has lots of energy in it, about the same as wood.

Then we move to black coal, that is what we really mean by coal. You see coal has a higher energy density than wood. And here is coke and ethanol. Notice that ethanol has a lesser energy density than crude oil and diesel and petrol, that is what you put in your car. Naptha has a higher energy density, aviation fuel a still higher energy density, and natural gas, it was mentioned, the hydrogen content goes higher and higher in these so you get more energy out of it.

The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) mentioned the agricultural revolution. We have a chart here that looks at the agricultural revolution. This is a very interesting chart.

The top part of the chart shows how we get energy from petroleum, and it goes from petroleum clear down to gasoline and all of the energy inputs in the stages that are involved in doing that. You have to recover it. Here is the energy input that you need to recover it. You have to transport it. You have got to refine it. You have got to transport it again. And this is what you get from it, 1 million Btus of gasoline at the refueling station. And what did that cost you? It cost 1.23 million Btus. So about a fifth of all the energy you started with in petroleum now is gone in getting this gallon of gasoline.

Well, on the other side here we have now energy from ethanol, from corn. If you go down, we have to farm the corn, we have to produce it, we have to transport it, we have to produce it, we have to transport it again to where you are going to use it, and we still have the 1 million Btus, a little more than a gallon here, by the way, because it does not have the energy density of gasoline. But still we are making the equivalent 1 million Btus. Notice that that took 0.74 million Btus of fossil energy. The difference, of course, was the energy we got from the sun. So here we are capturing energy from the sun to make ethanol.

The bottom of this chart is really very interesting, because this points to a big problem that we face in this country particularly, and in the world in general, as the availability of fossil fuels winds down, because this is the total energy requirement that goes into a bushel of corn.

Notice the kind of energy that goes into that bushel of corn. Nearly half of it is nitrogen. That comes from natural gas. Before we learned how to get it from natural gas, the only place we got it from was barn yard manuers or plants that put it in the soil in rotation farming or guano that we mine from bath caves and tropical islands.

Notice as we go around this pie, the input of oil. Here we have input hauling, that is oil. Water, that was moved probably with energy from fossil fuels. Chemicals, a lot of host chemicals are made from fossil fuels, an enormous petrochemical industry. Custom work. The fellow came in to do custom work, he used some oil. His tractor was made with oil. Natural gas. Electricity. Natural gas goes along with oil. Electricity could have been produced with natural gas or oil. Propane, again, a product of fossil fuels. Gasoline, diesel.

So far, almost everything here is the product of oil or oil itself, is it not? And then we get to some things we mine. We can mine phosphate, lime and potash, but it takes energy to mine those and that energy probably came from oil. So the food you eat in a very real sense is oil, is it not, because that is where the energy came from to produce that food.

Then you have the very interesting chart of income savings and inheritance, and I have a chart here that looks at some of the alternatives. These have been mentioned. We will just spent a couple of moments looking at these alternatives, because we have been talking about it this evening.

We have some finite resources and we need to husband those carefully. We need to use them only as we have to. Some of them will not be very valuable. Tar sands and oil shale may cost you almost as much to get the energy as you get out of the energy after you have gotten it. Coal, and I want to put a coal chart up here in just a moment, because that is a very interesting one. And then nuclear. Several of the speakers have mentioned nuclear this evening.

There are three kinds of ways you can get power from nuclear. Fusion, I hope we get there. If we get there we are home free, are we not? I think the odds of getting there are not all that good, so you better not bank on it, the same way you better not bank on solving your personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice too, but the odds are not real high that you are going to do it. Then there is the light water reactor, which we have, and then there is the breeder reactor, which we do not have, which we are certainly going to have to look at if we are going to be serious of getting nuclear energy.

Then there is a whole list of renewables here. These are the ones we really need to be focusing on. But the big challenge here is, and I want to put the last chart up, is to move so we can make do with the energy from these alternatives, because it is not going to be as available in as large a quantity or with the energy density of the fossil fuels. So I want to put up the last chart, and that is the chart that shows the things we need to be doing.

These are the kind of things we need to be doing. The first thing we need to be doing is voluntary conservation. Let me put up very quickly the chart that shows California. This is a really interesting one.

It shows that you do not have to depreciate the quality of life to useless energy. Californians use about 60 percent as much energy per person as in the rest of the country. It would be hard to argue they do not have a good lifestyle.

Let me put this down and look at the next one. The next thing we need to do, we need to organize voluntary conservation. If we can organize, we can do a little better job. Then this is with the government cuts in now. We need to have monetary incentives, some policies for volunteer conservation. We have to conserve to buy time so we can use the fossil fuels remaining, not only total fuel our present economy, to make the investment we need to make in these renewables so we will be able to sustain ourselves for the duration.

Then we need to go to efficiency. We have done a lot with efficiency. Your present refrigerator is at least twice as good as the one 20 years ago in terms of efficiency. Then again the government is involved, we need to have monetary incentives and policies for efficient technologies.

I would say to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), we should have

been moving down this path for the last 25 years, because in 1980 we knew absolutely moving down Hubbard's Peak. Tomorrow I think we have another opportunity in one of these special order hours to talk about this. We will be able to do this in more detail. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me and for organizing this hour this evening.

Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago I read a treatise written by Matt Savinar, and I was galvanized by his introduction. Let me read it.

``Dear reader,'' he begins, ``civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the whacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophesy 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.''

Mr. Speaker, in the weeks since I read this, I have checked with a large number of experts in this area across the country and indeed around the world. He could be right. He will be right unless we appropriately address this big challenge which faces the world and particularly faces the United States, and that is what we will be talking about in our Special Order this evening.

I have been joined by the gentleman from the eastern shore of Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest), one of my colleagues who shares a concern in this area of energy, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) was talking about growth in the use of energy; and I have here some curves, some exponential curves. Ordinarily, when people think about growth, they may think about a straight line. And on the bottom here it shows the extrapolation of 2 percent growth starting at this point. If it is a straight line, it would look like that. But that is not 2 percent growth because every year we are growing something less than 2 percent. To be 2 percent growth, one has got to grow 2 percent more than they were the last year, and that is called exponential growth, and this is a 2 percent growth curve for exponential growth, just 2 percent.

The next curve here is a 4 percent exponential growth curve and then 5 percent. And I put on here the growth curve that China has been following, and that is a 10 percent growth curve. In just 7 years, if they are growing at 10 percent, they double. They double again in the next 7 years; so in just 14 years, they are four times bigger. They double again in the next 7 years so that at 21 years it is eight times bigger. That is why this curve is so sharp.

China is now following this growth curve. It is very difficult for one's economy to grow at 10 percent without their energy use growing at somewhere near 10 percent. So we need to keep that in mind as we go through the charts that are going to follow this, that China is growing at this rate. The world, by the way, grew last year at 5 percent. We grew probably a bit over 2 percent in this country. Of course, we were way ahead to start with; so with our 2 percent growth, we are still way out in front of everybody else in terms of the amount of energy we use.

As a matter of fact, the next chart shows some figures which alarmed 30 of the leading figures in our country: Jim Woolsey and McFarland and Frank Gaffney and 27 others who wrote a letter to the President just a few weeks ago, and they noted to the President that we have only two percent of the world's oil reserves. By the way, from that two percent, we are generating eight percent of the world's oil. And what that means, of course, is that we are getting four times as much oil relatively out of each of our wells as the world gets out of their average wells, so we are really good at pumping oil. In fact, we are so good at pumping oil that just recently, the Saudis came here to find out how we do it, how we get out those last dribs and drabs from our oil reservoirs, because we have been doing this for a very long time. We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person in 22 in the world, but we consume 25 percent of the world's energy, and we are importing about two-thirds of that. And, as the President himself said, a lot of that oil comes from countries that do not even like us.

These 30 people, about half of them were retired generals and admirals. There were several retired secretaries of previous administrations. These were really the leaders in America that wrote to the President: Mr. President, this is an unacceptable national security risk that we have only two percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import two-thirds of that. By the way, that is up from about one-third that we imported during the Arab oil embargo. We peaked in 1970. As a matter of fact, the next chart shows when we peaked and we can get a better idea of this.

To explain how this curve got here, I have to go back about six decades. It was in the 1940s and 1950s, a scientist at the Shell Oil Company named M. King Hubbert was watching the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each of those fields followed a bell curve. The oil came out very rapidly at first and then, when it reached a peak, at which time he noted about half of the field had been pumped, and then it stands to reason the last oil out of the field is going to be harder to get, so there was now a downslope. So in 1956 he kind of guessed at the additional fields that we were going to find in this country, and he mathematically calculated when we should peak, and he thought that would be in the early 1970s, and he made this prediction in 1956. As a matter of fact, we did peak in 1970.

Now, his curve is the smooth curve here, his projected curve, and he did that back in 1956, and the data points here, the rougher curve, the actual data points which fall remarkably near his curve, Prudhoe Bay, the Alaska oil, that occurred after we were already on the down slope of what is called Hubbert's Peak here, and we see what Prudhoe Bay did. And then we are going to go to a chart just after this that shows the different places we get oil from in our country.

The red curve here shows Russia, and when the Soviet Union was falling apart, they had more oil than we, so they peaked higher. When the Soviet Union was falling apart, they did very poorly and, as a matter of fact, there is now a little secondary peak, here is a recovered one, but it is on down; the first peak was considerably higher than the second peak.

The second chart shows where we get our oil from. A great deal of it came from Texas. I saw some early photographs of some of the oil fields in Texas, and I will tell my colleagues, the oil derricks were about as close together as trees in a forest, just an incredible bonanza of derricks down there getting this oil out of the ground. The rest of the United States is the big area here, natural gas liquids, we have learned how to liquefy natural gas, and now that is supplementing the petroleum.

There are two parts of this curve that I want to pay special attention to. One of them is Alaska here, that is Prudhoe Bay. And notice that it was just a little blip in the downslope here from Prudhoe Bay, we are still going down. It delayed it just a little; it never got back to the peak production in 1970. By the way, we are now sliding down this curve and we produce about half as much oil now as we did in 1970.

Mr. Speaker, I am sure that my colleagues can remember all of the hullabaloo about the enormous finds of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. That was going to solve our energy problems for the foreseeable future. What that turned out to be is this little yellow here. That is all there was to it. And again, it did not bring us back to where we were in 1970; we are still sliding down Hubbert's Peak.

I would like to come back to the Alaska oil for just a moment. We are now talking about going into ANWR. It really does not matter whether one is for going into ANWR or one thinks that is a pristine wilderness that we should not drill in, because the amount of oil in ANWR is probably not more than half of this. Even if it were that much, it is not going to come on line; the chairman of the Committee on Transportation, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) says it may be 10 years before it comes on line, and it is really not going to make enough difference to matter. My concern is that if we drill in ANWR, Americans will think, gee, we have solved our energy problem, we are drilling in ANWR. It will be little more than a nit in terms of the enormous amounts of oil that we use. That kind of helps us put ANWR in perspective, because this is Prudhoe Bay, which may be twice as large as ANWR. So it kind of gives us a picture of what we can expect from

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 59 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 4, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, on March 24 of this year, 30 of the prominent leading individuals in our country wrote a letter to the President about what they considered a very

critical national security issue. The letter was signed by Robert McFarlane, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Boyden Gray, Timothy Wirth, and 30 other people, including 12 retired generals and admirals, five Secretaries of Defense Departments, and several retired Senators and Representatives.

To understand their concern, we need to go back about 6 decades to a sequence of events that brought us to a situation that very much concerned them. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we use 25 percent of all of the oil used in the world, and we import two- thirds of that. We have less than 5 percent of the world's population.

How did we get here? The next chart shows us that, and this goes back the 6 decades that I mentioned to a Shell oil scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert who, in the 1940s and 1950s watched the exploration, the pumping, and the exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each of the fields followed a bell curve. It rose to a maximum, and then it fell off as they pumped out the remaining oil. He noticed that at the peak of that curve, that about half of the oil had been consumed from the average field. It is logical that the second half of the oil would be harder to get and take more time, and it would not flow as quickly. He theorized that if you added up all of the individual fields in the country, you could predict when that country would peak in its oil production. And in 1956, he made a projection for the United States. Fourteen years later, which was when he said it would occur, the United States peaked in its oil production.

This curve here in green, the smooth, green curve was his prediction. The little more ragged curve, the points that do not fall quite on the curve were the actual data points which we see fell remarkably close to his prediction. We are now well down that curve. We are now producing less than half of the oil that we produced in 1970.

The red curve there, by the way, is the curve for Russia. There is going to be a second peak there, because after the Soviet Union fell, they kind of got their act together and they are going to have a second peak, but not so high, and so their real peak was when it is shown there.

The next chart shows us the elements of the oil in this country, where we got it from. We see a whole bunch of it came from Texas, and then the rest of the United States, and then nos gas liquids, the red above, and we see what is called Alaska there. That is all the oil that we got from Prudhoe Bay, the north slope, a lot of oil. But it really did not make a very big difference. You see, we are still sliding down that slope and there is just a little blip produced by Prudhoe Bay, and then we slide down the slope.

Mr. Speaker, we remember a couple of years ago, the Gulf of Mexico oil, and that oil w going to solve our oil problem. That oil is represented by that yellow there. Not a whole lot, and it did not stop our slide down Hubbert's peak. The amount of oil that may be present in ANWR is predicted to be, who knows; it may be very little, it may be a whole lot, but the prediction is about half of what was in Prudhoe Bay. So you may agree or disagree that we should drill in ANWR, but it really does not matter because there is not enough oil in ANWR to really make a difference.

The next curve we have shows a very simple curve, the problem that we face. If, in fact, we have reached peak oil, and I spoke here on the Floor a bit more than 5 weeks ago for an hour on this subject and we have had a lot of people come through our offices and a lot of phone calls and e-mails from all around the world, and I will tell my colleagues that there is nobody who does not believe that we are either at peak oil or will shortly be at peak oil. As this chart shows, you do not have to be at peak oil to have a problem. If peak oil occurs here, and we are here, you see that there is a bit of yellow between our use curve and by the way, this use curve is only a 2 percent growth. Now, we think that if our economy is not growing 2 percent, that the sky may fall, the stock market reacts very badly, and this is only a 2 percent growth curve. Look what happens with this 2 percent curve, with that yellow there, that is what we would like to use at only 2 percent growth, and the blue line there shows us the oil that will be available. Now, we cannot use oil that is not there. So that is going to be all the oil that we have available to use if, in fact, this is correct.

Now, I would point out 2 things. One is that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. Using exactly the same prediction techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in about 2000. It did not quite, because he could not have known about the Arab oil embargo or the big price spike hikes or the world recession that resulted from that net delay that is probably occurring about now. But we have a problem of a shortfall before we actually get to peak, and that is probably where we are now.

Let me just spend a moment on this chart, because I want to point out some realities here. This is the amount of oil that we would like to use, following up this just 2 percent slope. And the amount of oil we will have to use is represented by the blue curve here. But we cannot use all of that oil for the present purposes for which we use oil, because if we do, there will be no oil left over to make the investments we have to make in the alternatives and the renewables that ultimately must take the place of oil, because you see, we are shortly going to be sliding down Hubbert's peak.

The next chart shows us the slopes of these peaks when you have more than a 2 percent growth. This is the 2 percent growth line, if you chart out with 2 percent growth and then extrapolate that as a straight line, but that is not what growth is. Growth is always exponential. It is like compounding interest, and people understand compound interest, and I am not sure why they do not understand exponential growth, but 2 percent growth follows this curve, it does not follow this straight line curve. The next curve above it is only 4 percent growth. I would note that last year, the world economies grew by 5 percent on average. Now, we did not do quite that well, but China did a whole lot better. China grew at 10 percent. I was kind of playing around with this chart and I think the 10 percent curve goes about here.

Mr. Speaker, with a 10 percent growth curve, every 7 years, it doubles. That means in 14 years, it is 4 times bigger, and in 21 years, it is 8 times bigger. As a matter of fact, one of the biggest forces in this world is the force of exponential growth, and it is very difficult for a lot of people to understand. Albert Einstein was asked, Dr. Einstein, you have been instrumental in developing nuclear energy. It is really very powerful; from a little tiny bit of this, you get a great big explosion. What will be the next big energy source? And his response was the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest, which is an exponential growth curve.

The next chart shows a reality here that we really need to pay attention to, and this was the reason, this was the reason for the letter that these gentlemen wrote. It was in the letter that they said, the United States' dependence on imported petroleum poses a risk to our homeland security and economic well-being. If we have only 2 percent of the known reserves, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import more than two-thirds of it, and as the President said himself, much of that oil, he said, we rely upon energy sources from countries that do not particularly like us. Yes, Mr. President, that is true. Most of the reserves of oil are in the Middle East, and many of those countries go a bit further than just do not particularly like us.

What we have here on the easel is a view of the world which shows what China has been doing. China has been scouring the world, looking for oil. And all of the blue, here is where China has been: In the Orient, in the Middle East, several places in the Middle East, in our backyard. They have contracts in Canada, they have contracts in Colombia, they have contracts in Venezuela, they have contracts in Brazil, they have contracts in Argentina, and they almost bought an oil company in our country; they were just outbid a little. They will be back again trying to secure an oil company in our country.

China now is the second largest importer in the world. Last year, they increased their demand for oil by 25 percent. Now, that will not go on year after year, because last year, they shut

down a lot of coal-fired power plants because the pollution was killing them, so they bought a whole bunch of diesel generators; I suspect that the pollution might be almost as much from them, but they are more widely distributed, which is one of the reasons they used so much oil last year.

The next chart shows us something very interesting about energy and the effect that it has had on civilization and on growth of economies. On this chart, and I am sorry that most of it is blank, but that is just the reality of what has happened through history. We started out the industrial revolution relying on wood, and here it is, the brown curve here. We were burning wood. As a matter of fact, the industrial revolution almost floundered before we discovered that we could get energy from coal, because we had largely denuded New England in sending the trees to England to produce charcoal to produce coal. There is a little relic of bygone years up by Thurmont, Maryland, and they denuded the hills of Thurmont, Maryland for a tiny foundry there in Catoctin, up near Thurmont, and then we discovered coal. And notice, there is a big jump. This is quadrillion Btus.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 59 minutes p.m.) the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 21, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot live in the land of the free without thanking the brave veterans who secure our liberty. It is my privilege to honor Colonel Orville Hughes from Monkton, Maryland, selected Veteran of the Year by the Joint Veterans' Committee of Maryland.

Colonel Orville Hughes served our country for 27 years in the Army during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He was a POW in Germany, earned a Silver Star in Korea, and served as the military attache at the embassy in Vienna, Austria. He earned many other commendations, including the Legion of Merit and the Purple Heart.

After his retirement from the Army, Colonel Orville Hughes continued to serve our country through the DAV, VFW, Military Order of the Purple Heart, American ex-POWs, and the American Legion.

I hope that by honoring the contributions of Colonel Orville Hughes to the country we love, we will appreciate and be inspired by his great example of achievement and service to others.

Mr. Speaker, Congress typically writes laws with a broad application, but sometimes a special situation, such as this one, requires unusual legislative action. Life is sacred. Many across America have voiced support in an effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive. Nothing can diminish the importance of life.

Terri Schiavo suffered a heart attack 15 years ago and experienced brain damage. While in the hospital, tubes were inserted in her digestive system to provide nutrition and

hydration. Three years later, Terri was still talking when speech therapy was discontinued. Terri Schiavo is currently not terminally ill or in the process of dying. She is brain damaged, but she is otherwise healthy. Terri Schiavo is not on artificial life support. No extraordinary measures are being taken to keep her alive.

Ms. Schiavo is a living person. She is awake and aware of her surroundings. Many are galvanized by her cause because like me, they recognize that the right to life is one of our core fundamental human values.

The 14th Amendment states, ``No State shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.'' In this special circumstance, we were left with a last legal recourse to help save her life by providing her with the opportunity to have her case heard before a Federal court. There is clear precedent for Federal review of life and death cases.

I strongly value the importance of States' rights. This case does not weaken my resolve to fight for States' rights. The State and Federal government should not take life, but by giving the Federal court an opportunity to hear the case, this allows one more opportunity for Terri Schiavo to live.

Judge Greer of the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court stated, ``I see no cogent reason why the committee should be able to intervene into a case involving the decision of whether or not to remain on life support.'' He added, ``I don't think that legislative agencies or bodies have business in court proceedings.''

I respectfully disagree. The Constitution not only outlines a separation of powers but also a system of checks and balances. It is Congress's duty to hold the judicial branch accountable or to act itself within its powers when it believes it is necessary.

The driving force behind many people's efforts on behalf of Ms. Schiavo was plainly to save her life. Yet there have emerged a number of difficult and complicated issues. I applaud the efforts of those who fight for Ms. Schiavo to live. These issues resonate with many as some of us contemplate how we would like to die. I, however, focus on how Congress can protect Ms. Schiavo's life because that is of paramount importance.

Mr. Speaker, in this first chart we have some headlines from The Washington Post just a month or so ago. These are headlines from just one day in The Washington Post. The Dow drops 174 points driven, the article says, by economic damage from rising oil prices, the plunging dollar, and growing worries about consumer spending. It goes on to say that a recent oil price rise of 20 percent is continuing to crunch the profits of struggling airlines and is believed to be a factor in disappointing retail sales.

Another headline: ``Dollar Slides Against the Euro and the Yen.'' And another headline: ``Consumer Confidence Slips in February.''

Now, should we have had any indication that these were going to be the kinds of headlines that we have been reading in our paper recently? We need to go back a few years, as indicated on this next chart. Let us go back to the 1940s and the 1950s when a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, a geologist, was working for the Shell Oil Company. He was watching the discovery and the exploitation and final exhaustion of individual oil fields. He noticed that every oil field followed a very typical pattern. It was a little slow getting the oil out at first, and then it came very quickly and reached a maximum, and then it tailed off as it became more difficult to get the oil out of the ground.

This followed a bell curve. Here is one of those bell curves. Now, bell curves are very familiar in science, and in life, for that matter. If we look at people and how tall they are, we will have a few people down around 4\1/2\ or 5 feet and some up to 7\1/2\ feet; but the big mass fall in the middle, clustered around 5\1/2\ to 6 feet.

Looking at a yield of corn, a few farmers may get 50 bushels per acre, some may get 300, but the big mass today it is somewhere around 200 bushels per acre for corn.

Hubbert noticed when the bell curve reached its peak, about half of the oil had been exhausted from the field. Being a scientist, he theorized if you added up a lot of little bell curves, you would get one big bell curve, and if he could know the amount of reserves of oil in the United States, and he was doing this in the 1940s and early 1950s, and could project how much more might be found, he could then predict when the United States would peak in its oil production.

Doing this analysis, he concluded that we would peak in our oil production in 1970. This curve is what is known as Hubbert's Curve. The peak of the curve is what is known as Hubbert's Peak. Sometimes this is called the ``great rollover'' because when you get to the top, you roll over and start down the other side. It is frequently called ``peak oil.'' So peak oil for the United States occurred in 1970, and it is true that every year since then we have pumped less oil and found less oil. The big blue squares here are the actual and Members see they deviated a little from the theoretical as M. King Hubbert predicted, but not all that much.

At the bottom, see the difference the big field in Alaska made, and see what that made in the down slope, that never increased production in our country. It just meant that we were not going down quite as fast. You can see that here on the curve. Notice that the Alaska oil production was not the typical bell curve. It should have been, but a couple of things meant it could not be. One was it could not flow at all until we had a 4-foot pipeline. So the fields were developed and they were waiting; then we got the pipeline on board, and it was filled with oil and oil started to flow, and Members see the rapid increase here. It could not flow any faster than through that 4-foot pipe, and so it levels off at the top. We have pumped probably three-fourths of the oil in Prudhoe Bay.

Many people would like to open up ANWR. ANWR has considerably less oil than Prudhoe Bay, so the contribution will be significantly less. I want to note on this chart we also have the red curve, which is the theoretical curve for the former Soviet Union. It is a nice bell curve, peaking a little higher, they have more reserves than we do, and later because we entered the industrial age with vigor before the Soviet Union was quite there. Notice what happened when they came apart; notice how precipitously it fell here. After they got things organized, the fall stopped and now they are producing more oil. As a matter of fact, we might see a little upsurge in this; but the general trend is still going to be down.

On the next chart, and we have here the same Hubbert Curve, but the abscissa is a little too long and the ordinate a little too compressed, so it is not the sharp peak that we saw before. That is the curve we saw before. It shows the Texas component, and it shows the rest of the United States; and it also shows some natural gas liquids. We learned how to extract those a little later. So if you were plotting that as a bell curve, it would peak about here. It is little and then it is much, and then it tails off.

This is the contribution of Alaska, and you can see this not going to be our salvation to pump ANWR because ANWR contains probably not even half as much as Prudhoe Bay. And notice the small contribution that Alaska made. And that is not a bell curve for the reason I mentioned before because we had to develop the fields and they waited for the pipeline, and then it would surge through the pipeline when it was developed. So you do not see the tail getting greater and tailing off.

This is gulf oil. Remember the hullabaloo about the big finds of gulf oil that were going to solve our problem? That is what it did. There never was a moment in time between the big Alaska oil find and all of the pumping discovery and pumping in the gulf, there never was a moment in time when it decreased the fall in our country. The peak occurred, as you see here, about 1970.

Now, the next chart shows what is happening worldwide.

The red curve here shows the actual discovery of oil. Notice that that peaked. There was a big find here that distorted the curve a little but if you rounded that off, you would have the typical bell curve. It started somewhere back here off the chart, then it peaks, and then it is downhill and it tails off. These are the discoveries. The last find there is simply an extrapolation. We have no idea where it is going.

We are, by the way, very good at finding oil now. We use 3D seismic detection techniques. The world has drilled, I think, about 5 million oil wells and I think we have drilled about 3 million of them in this country, so we have a pretty good idea of where oil is.

A couple of Congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science. One of the first things I wanted to do was to determine the dimensions of the problem. We held a couple of hearings and had the world experts in. Surprisingly from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic, there was not much deviation in what the estimate is as to what the known reserves are out there. It is about 1,000 gigabarrels. That sounds like an awful lot of oil. But when you divide into that the amount of oil which we use,

about 20 million barrels a day, and the amount of oil the rest of the world uses, about 60 million barrels a day, as a matter of fact, the total now is a bit over the 80 million that those two add up to. About 83\1/2\, I think. If you divide that into the 1,000 gigabarrels, you come out at about 40 years of oil remaining in the world. That is pretty good. Because up until the Carter years, during the Carter years, in every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Let me repeat that, because that is startling. In every decade, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. The reason for that, of course, was that we were on the upward side of this bell curve. The bell curve for usage, only part of it is shown on this chart. That is the green one down here, the bell curve for usage. Notice that we are out here now about 2005. Where is it going? The Energy Information Agency says that we are going to keep on using more oil. This green line just going up and up and up is a projection of the Energy Information Agency. But that cannot be true. That cannot be true for a couple of reasons. We peaked in our discovery of oil way back here in the late sixties, about 1970. In our country it peaked much earlier than that, by the way. But the world is following several years behind us. And the area under this red curve must be the same as the area under the green curve. You cannot pump any more oil than you have found, quite obviously. If you have not found it, you cannot pump it. If you were to extend this on out where they have extended their green line, even if it turned down right there at the end of that green line, the area under the green curve is going to be very much larger than the area under the red curve. That just cannot be. We will see in some subsequent charts that we probably have reached peak oil.

Let me mention that M. King Hubbert looked at the world situation. He was joined by another scientist, Colin Campbell, who is still alive, an American citizen who lives in Scotland. Using M. King Hubbert's predictive techniques, oil was predicted to reach a maximum in about 1995, without perturbations. But there were some perturbations. One of the perturbations was 1973, the Arab oil embargo. Other perturbations were the oil price shocks and a worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil. And so the peak that might have occurred in 1995 will occur later. How much later? That is what we are looking at this evening. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that if not now, then very quickly we should see world production of oil peak.

What are the consequences? What are the consequences of this depletion? The remaining oil is harder to get. It requires greater energy investment, resulting in a lower return on energy invested. That is the energy-profit ratio, which is decreasing. When we started out, you put in one unit of energy and you could get 30 out. Then that fell off, and then we found a few more fields and we got really good at extracting oil with better techniques. It looked for a little while like it was going up, but look what happened. It falls off to where it would have come anyhow if this curve had simply gone down. This is an inevitable consequence of pumping a field.

Lower profits are not the only concern. When more energy is required to extract it than is contained in the recovered oil, that is, when this ratio is less than 1, notice, we are over there at about 1984, we have got to get now another 20 years, I am not quite sure where we are now when you plot that day. We are getting very close to the unit it takes as much energy to get the oil out as you get out of the oil. It may still seem profitable from a monetary perspective, but when you are using more energy to get oil out of the ground than you are getting out of the oil, then clearly you need to leave it there when we reach that point. I mentioned the bump there was caused by a few more discoveries and particularly by increased efficiency in pumping the oil.

What is the current U.S. status? We have only 2 percent, between 2 and 3 percent, not really known for certain, but approximately 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. By the way, we have about 8 percent of the world production. What that means is if we have only 2 percent of the reserves and 8 percent of the production, that means we are real good at pumping oil, does it not? That means we are pumping our reserves at roughly four times faster than the rest of the world. That means that this 2 percent will not stay 2 percent by and by because we are so good at pumping oil, we are going to be down to 1 percent of the known reserves in the world and we will still be using about 25 percent of the world's oil. We are now importing about two-thirds of that. At the Arab oil embargo we imported about one-third of that. So we are now importing, relatively, two times more oil, actual quantity much more than that, but relatively about two times more oil.

Chart 6 shows us that more drilling just will not solve the problem. This is a very interesting chart. This shows the difference between the amount of oil that you are finding and the amount of oil that you are pumping. Notice from 1960 on until about 1980, declining for sure, but every year except for one we found more oil than we pumped. The yellow line up here is drilling. You remember the Reagan administration and all the emphasis on drilling because we knew that we were approaching this flipover point where we were going to be pumping more oil than we found and so there was a rationale that if you just give them a profit motive and you have the right incentives, tax and regulatory incentives and so forth, they will go out and they will dig more wells and they will find more oil. Sure as heck they went out and dug more wells. But did they find any more oil? As a matter of fact, in 1982, more oil was used in looking for oil than the oil they found in 1982. Pretty consistently for every year after 1982, we have used more oil than we found. Today worldwide we are pumping at least six barrels of oil for every barrel that we find.

Chart 7 shows that worldwide discoveries are repeating the U.S. pattern. This is a rough bell curve. You find a big find of oil and it is going to make a spike. This is average for 5 years. If you look at it on a year for year, it is really up and down as you find big reservoirs of oil. But generally it starts low and it goes up and it comes down. It follows roughly a bell curve. I would not pay too much attention to the figures on the ordinate here, because the area under this curve must equal just a little bit over 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. If I visually sum the area under this curve, it is going to equal something more, not frightfully more but something more than 2,000 gigabarrels of oil which from other sources we know ought to be the total amount of oil under the sun. Notice that we are tailing off to something very low. It is unlikely that we are going to find big additional finds in the future. Again, we are very good at that. We have dug about 5 million wells worldwide. We have done a whole lot more than that explorations with detonations and seismic and 3D and computers and we are very good at looking at the kind of geology where you might find oil. There is just no real expectation that there are going to be big additional fields of oil found out there. This dropoff in discovery is really in spite of very improved technology for finding oil.

Chart 8. This is a very interesting chart. It has nothing to do with time, because on the abscissa here, we have the number of wells that are drilled, the cumulative oil caps, and on the ordinate, we have the amount of oil that was found. For any relatively big field, here we are talking about 50 gigabarrels. Remember, there are about 2,000 gigabarrels worldwide, so this is a meaningful part of the world reserves of oil. We see that that goes up and up and then it tails off. You cannot find what is not there. No matter how many more wells you drill, you are not going to find oil that is not there. The same pattern should be apparent on a world scale.

Chart 9. This is a very interesting chart. It is a little too busy, but let me try to explain what is there. The oil companies for reasons of pricing and regulations and so forth have had the habit through the years of underreporting initially how much oil they found. Then later when it was appropriate to their license to produce more oil, they would report additional oil. They never found any additional oil, they simply reported oil they had found previously. By the way, you may

have noted that three times in the last roughly 3 weeks, oil companies have admitted that their estimates of the reserves were exaggerated and have downscaled the reserves that they said were there. If you took the original reporting of the reserves, you might be able to construct a curve, a straight line curve which said we are just getting more and more. But if you backdated that to the actual discoveries, then you get this curve. This curve is asymtoting at a bit over 2,000 gigabarrels, which is about what the world's experts say had been there. We have now pumped about half of that. We have about 1,000 gigabarrels remaining.

What now? Where do we go now? One observer, Matt Savinar, who has thoroughly researched the options, and this is not the most optimistic assessment, by the way, but may be somewhat realistic, he starts out by saying, Dear Readers, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. I hope not. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is a 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 the phenomenon known as global peak oil.

Why should they be terrified? Why should they be terrified just because we have reached the peak of oil production? Last year, China used about 30 percent more oil. India now is demanding more oil. As a matter of fact, China now is the second largest importer of oil in the world. They have passed Japan. When you look at how important oil is to our economy, you can understand the big concern if, in fact, we cannot produce oil any faster than we are producing it now and there are increasing demands, as there will be, for oil. In our country, for instance, we have a debt that we must service. It will be essentially impossible to service that debt if our economy does not continue to grow. So there are enormous potential consequences, which is why he says that these people are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as peak oil.

What can we do to avert the kind of a catastrophe that he hints at with those words? We must not squander an opportunity. One is always reminded of Malthus. I am sure you have heard of him. He was looking at the increase in world population and he looked at our ability to produce food and he says, gosh, those two curves are going to cross because the world population was increasing faster than our ability to produce food and we are going to have mass starvation. That did not happen. The reason that did not happen was because Malthus could not have anticipated the green revolution, which, by the way, was made possible almost entirely, well, the plant science had a lot to do with it but better plants and better genes without the fertilizer to make them grow is not going to do you much good, so the green revolution was very largely the result of our intensive use of oil. Most people do not know it, but all of our nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. You may have observed that when you have a thunderstorm in the summertime, your lawn is greener than when you have watered it.

That is because of what is known as poor man's fertilizer. The lightning combines some of the nitrogen so they can be carried down by the water and one's lawn is, in fact, greener after a thunderstorm than it is when they water it. We have kind of learned how to mimic lightning, and we now know how to make nitrogen fertilizer from gas. By the way, before we knew how to do that, the only sources of nitrogen fertilizer were barnyard manurers. If one is on the Eastern Shore with a lot of chickens, one could go a long way with that now in agriculture, could one not? But barnyard manurers would fertilize only a tiny percentage of the nitrogen needs of our plants.

And other than that it was guano. My colleagues know what guano is. Guano is the droppings of bats or of birds on a tropical island, their droppings accumulating for thousands of years, and there was a major industry in sending ships around the world to tropical islands and getting the guano.

We must not squander the opportunity that we have. Jevons Paradox becomes applicable here. Just a word about what Jevons Paradox is because I am going to mention it a time or two again. But Jevons Paradox says that frequently when one works to solve a problem, they really make the situation worse.

Let me give one little example. Suppose there is a small businessman who owns a store. He is really concerned about peak oil, and he is concerned about energy, and he wants to do something. His little store is using $1,000 worth of electricity a month, and he decides that he can really cut that use. So he does several things. He gets a storm door. He puts on storm windows. He insulates more. He turns down the thermostat, and he asks his workers to wear sweaters. And he is successful because he reduces his electric bill from $1,000 to $500. Almost no matter what he does with that $500, he has just made the situation worse by doing that.

Let me explain. One of the things that he may do, and it is a natural thing for a small businessperson to do, he may decide, I could hire more people and have a bigger business if I expanded. And so now he will expand, and he will still be using as much energy. Or if he decides to invest his money, if he invests his money in the bank, the bank will lend his money out five or six times, and at least some of those loans will be to small business people. And what the small business people will do is to create jobs and use energy. So the store owner is concerned about energy and the environment and being a responsible citizen, cutting his use of electricity, because everybody did not do it, because only he did it and nobody took advantage of the opportunity that was presented because he used less energy, he really contributed to the problem.

Because after he expanded his business, he would be using still more energy. Or if the money was lent out by the bank and small businesses created more jobs and they used more energy, the situation would have just gotten worse.

All that the ``green revolution'' did was temporarily extend the caring capacity of the world. If we think about that, ultimately if we cannot do something about it to stabilize it, the green revolution just made matters worse. In the meantime we have all eaten very well in spite of the fact that about a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry tonight; but on the average, we are eating very well, and because of the average American, we are eating maybe too well.

But what we have done with the green revolution is to permit the population of the world to double and double again. So if we cannot now make sure that we stabilize population and bring it to the point where it can be supported by a technology where there is not what was ordinarily perceived as an inexhaustible supply of oil, there will simply be more people out there to be hungry and starved if we cannot meet their needs. So we have got to make sure that whatever we do to solve this problem that Jevons Paradox does not contribute.

Chart 10, this shows that this growth cannot be sustained forever. The greatest power in the universe, Albert Einstein was asked this question: Dr. Einstein, you have now discovered the ability to release energy from the atom. We get just incredible amounts of energy from the atom. A relatively small amount of fuel in one of our big submarines will fuel it for 33 years now. Enormous energy density. And they asked him, Dr. Einstein, what is the most energy-intensive thing in the world? He said, ``It is compound interest.''

That is what we have here in this exponential curve. And by the way, we, and when I say ``we,'' I mean the world, have been using oil as if our economy could just continue to grow on this unlimited exponential curve. Whether it is 2 percent a year or 5 percent a year or near 10 percent, which is what China has been growing in the last few years, we are still on an exponential curve. Not quite so steep if we are on a lower growth rate. It goes up and up forever and ever.

Obviously, there is not an inexhaustible amount of oil in the world; so we have the exhaustible resource, which is this lower curve. It reaches a peak,

which, if not now, shortly. Oil, as the Members may have noticed, is $54 or $55 a barrel. I saw the other day one future had sold for $100 a barrel, and the experts are saying we are probably going to see $60 before we see $50. We will wait and see.

The third curve here is the renewable resource curve. Do not be confused by the size of these curves. They are simply placed here so that lines would not cross other lines. But in actual practice, the renewable resource curve is likely to be nowhere near the peak of the exhaustible resource curve, energy.

Let me give a little example of what the problem is and why this is almost certainly true. One barrel of oil, 42 gallons of oil, equals the productivity of 25,000 manhours. That is the equivalent of having 60 dedicated servants that do nothing but work for someone. We can get a little better real-life example of this. A gallon of gas will drive a 3-ton SUV, and some of those are better than others, and let us say it takes it 20 minutes, which some will but most will not. Most are around 10. But let us say one gallon of gas will take a 3-ton SUV 20 miles at 60 miles an hour down the road. That is just one little gallon of gas, which, by the way, is still cheaper than water. We pay more for water in the grocery store than we pay for gas at $2 a gallon at the pump, added up.

How long would it take one to push their 3-ton SUV the equivalent of 60 miles an hour, 20 miles down the road? To get some idea of the energy density in these fossil fuels, there is just nothing out there in the alternatives that have anything like this energy density. There are some potentials, nuclear, and we will talk about those in a little bit. But of the general renewables, there is nothing out there with that kind of density. So this curve is likely to be much lower than this curve; and notice that if it is, in fact, going to be renewable, it cannot go to an unrealistic height. There is only so much wood to cut. Easter Island had that experience. When they cut the last tree, they totally changed the ecology.

The Bible talks about the large clusters of grapes and the honey and so forth that they found when the spies went out. That now is a desert. The Cedars of Lebanon, the grand Cedars of Lebanon that built the temple, that is now largely a desert. Why is it a desert? Because they cut the trees, they changed the environment, they changed the climate. So obviously this line has to be a reasonable sustainable level. It just cannot go on forever.

The challenge, then, is to reduce consumption ultimately to a level that cannot be sustained indefinitely without succumbing to Jevons Paradox.

How do we buy time, the time that we will need to make the transition to sustainability? Obviously, there are only two things that we can do to buy time. One is to conserve, and the other is to be more efficient. And the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) mentioned our increasing efficiency. We have done a great job. Our refrigerators today are probably twice as efficient as they were 20 or 30 years ago. But instead of a little refrigerator, we have a big one. Instead of one, we may have two. So I will bet we are using as much electricity in our refrigeration as we ever used.

Conservation, we can do that. Remember several years ago when there were brownouts, blackouts in California and we were predicting, boy, the next year is really going to be rough? Do the Members know why it was not and we did not see any headlines about blackouts in California? Because knowing that there was a problem, the Californians, without anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their electricity consumption by 11 percent. That is pretty significant. And that avoided the rolling blackouts or brownouts.

And, finally, we must commit to major investments in alternatives, especially as efficiencies improve. This must ultimately lead to the ability to do everything within the capability of renewable resources. If we have got a solar breeder, and this shows a picture of a solar breeder. That, by the way, is about 5 miles from my home. It was built by Solarex, and it is a sign of the times. Mr. Speaker, this is now owned by BP. They know that oil is not forever. They are now the world's second largest producer of solar panels.

A few years ago, the largest buyer of solar panels in the world, and I do not know if that is true today, but a few years ago it was Saudi Arabia. Why would Saudi Arabia, with the most oil in the world, be the biggest purchaser of solar panels in the world? The reasons are very simple. These are not dumb people, and they figured out that solar panels were better for them in producing electricity than oil because they had widely distributed communities that were very small. Electrons in a wire are very different than oil in a pipeline. Put a gallon of oil in a pipeline up at Prudhoe Bay, and a gallon will come out where it goes on the ship. If we put electrons in a line which is long enough, nothing will come out in the other end. It is called line loss.

And they knew that in their small communities, widely distributed, with the enormous line losses they had from big plants, that they would be better off with distributed production.

By the way, just a hint to our people who are concerned with homeland security, the more distributed production we have, the less vulnerable we are going to be to terrorist attacks on our power infrastructure.

Transition to sustainability will not happen if left applying market forces alone. Everyone must be part of the effort or Jevons Paradox will prevail. If only our country tries to do it and nobody else helps, we will just put off the day when we must make the transition, and it will be even more difficult. The market will, indeed, signal the arrival of peak oil. To wait until it does, however, is like waiting until we see a tsunami: by then it may be too late to do anything.

We now are doing a lot of talking here in the Congress and fortunately across the country about Social Security, and it is a big problem. But I tell the Members if the problem of Social Security is equivalent to the tidal wave produced by the hurricane, then this peak oil problem is equivalent to the tsunami. The impact and the consequences are going to be enormously greater than the impact and the consequences of Social Security or Medicare or those two put together.

It will take a sustained, conscious, coordinated national and even international, effort. If everybody is not working together and buying time by conserving and being efficient and using wisely that time we bought, then all we do is put off the inevitable.

The hydroelectric and nuclear power industries did not arise spontaneously from market forces alone. They were the product of a purposeful partnership of public and private entities focused on the public good. This is what we have to do relative to alternatives.

As I mentioned, California solved their energy crisis by voluntarily reducing their demand for electricity. Time, capital and energy resources are all finite. We have only so much time until it would be too late to avoid a real problem. Capital is limited and energy resources are certainly limited.

This time it will not be like the seventies. The big difference between now and the seventies is that in the seventies, we were just going up this curve, we were nowhere near the top of the curve, so there was always the ability to expand, to surge. If, in fact, we are now at peak oil, there is no such ability remaining.

Is there any reason to remain optimistic or hopeful? Let me go back to Matt Savinar, that not-too-optimistic journalist. ``If what you mean is there any way technology or the market or brilliant scientists or comprehensive government programs are going to hold things together or solve this for me or allow for business to continue as usual, the answer is no. On the other hand, if what you really mean is is there any way that I still can have a happy, fulfilling life, in spite of some clearly grim facts, the answer is yes. But it is going to require a lot of work, a lot of adjustments, and probably a bit of good fortune on your part.''

What now? Well, what we need to do now clearly is to buy time, and we buy that, as I mentioned, with efficiency and conservation. This will keep energy prices affordable. If demand continues to increase and output cannot increase, energy prices are going through the ceiling.

So we have got to reduce demand so that prices do not get so high that it is impossible to invest the capital necessary to develop the alternatives,

using existing conventional technologies to make the transition as new technologies are developed.

We must use it wisely. If we do not use it wisely, and I have talked about Jevons Paradox several times, we have got to make investments in efficient, sustainable technologies, further reduce requirements for energy in any form, making smaller systems feasible which reduce both initial and operating costs.

The benefits are enormous. Additional benefits include business opportunities, lots of business opportunities we do not even dream of. Look at the business opportunities created by putting a man on the moon. I have 200-some companies in Maryland alone which are there only because of technology breakthroughs in putting a man on the moon.

That same thing could happen if we had a Manhattan type project focusing on renewables, potential worldwide markets, if we are the leader, and we have every reason to be the leader because we have the biggest problem. We can develop worldwide markets, domestic job creation and environmentally benign technologies with potential to reduce and or eliminate pollution. We could be a real role model.

We are, as I mentioned, less than 5 percent of the world's population, and we use 25 percent of the world's energy. I was in Europe a month or so ago, and their comment was somewhere between anger and disdain. ``You are still only paying $2 a gallon for gasoline in your country.'' It is $5.50 or $6.00 a gallon there. And they are not unmindful that this one person in 22 in the world is using 25 percent of the world's energy. We have a real opportunity to be a role model.

Let me put up the last chart. This is potential alternative solutions. For what time we have remaining, let me ask my colleague, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) to join us as we talk about this.

I have only have some of the potential solutions here. I just want to go down this list and look at these. There may be some others. The gentleman mentioned hydrogen from the ocean. That is certainly one.

There are some finite resources here, ones we have not maximally exploited here, and some renewable resources here, and we want to spend another whole hour talking about this, because there are a lot of things to talk about in these resources. But almost none of these have the density of energy that we find in fossil fuels.

There are tar sands in Canada, there is oil shale in this country, but it takes an awful lot of energy to get energy out of those. You may not have much more than a one-and-a-half to one. I have heard it takes six barrels of oil to get one net barrel of oil out of these tar sands and oil shale. There is an awful lot there, but there are considerable environmental costs and enormous economic costs to develop it.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, of course the real challenge is to have everybody agree on what the facts are. I suspect a big percentage of the people that might read or listen to what we say this evening had not even heard of peak oil.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, but now we must do it on a global basis, because of Jevons Paradox, if all the world does not cooperate, we will not get there. Had we

paid attention to M. King Hubbert and not relegated him to the lunatic fringe, and he was right as evidence indicates on his prediction from 1970, had we paid attention to him we would have had at least 20 years headstart, and then we could have done it alone in this country because we are so big and use so much of the world's energy.

Before we leave coal, we are going to come back to this and spend another hour with a lot of detail on this, but someone said there are 500 years of coal, that is not true there is maybe 250, at present use rates. But as oil becomes harder and harder to find, we are going to turn more and more to coal, and that 70 years with enormous environmental penalty will shortly become a relatively few years. That is not forever. But we will be leaning on coal more than in the past nuclear.

Three ways we can get nuclear energy. For one of them we are home free, and that is fusion. We send a little less than $300 million a year on that. I would like to spend more if there was the infrastructure out there to support it, because if we get there, we are home free.

But I kind of think that hoping to solve our energy problems with fusion is a bit like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial problems by winning the lottery. That would be real nice. I think the odds are somewhere near the same. I am about as likely to win the lottery as we are to come to economically feasible fusion.

I hope I am wrong. Frequently my hopes and my anticipations are different. My anticipation is we are not going to get there because of the enormous engineering challenges. My hope is I am wrong and we are going to get there.

Two other ways to get energy from nuclear. One is the light water reactor, which is all we have in this country. By the way, tonight when you go home, every fifth home and every fifth business would be dark if we did not have nuclear. It produces 20 percent of all of our electricity. But there is not all that much fissionable uranium in the world, so we are not going to get there with light water reactors.

France produces about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They have a lot of breeder reactors. They do what the name implies, they make more fuel than they use, with big problems, in enrichment, shipping it around, squirreling away the products for a quarter of a million years. That presents enormous challenges to us.

So there is the potential here in nuclear, but a lot of problems involved with it. It is not just that simple. By the way, it takes a lot of oil to build a nuclear power plant.

At some point, you pass the point of no return where there is not enough readily available high-quality fossil fuels to support our present economy while we make the investment we have got to make to transition to these renewables. And then we come to true renewables: solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy. All of these suffer.

By the way, I am a big supporter of these. I had the first hybrid electric car in Maryland. I had the first one in the Congress. I have a vacation home that is off the grid and totally powered by solar. And I am going to put in a wind machine. I am a big supporter of this.

But the energy density here is very low. And it is intermittent. It takes a lot of solar panels to produce the electricity that you use in your home. It takes 12 of them to power your ordinary refrigerator just as an example. So those are real potential, and they are growing. Wind machines now produce electricity at 3\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. That is getting competitive. A whole lot of them in California. They are in West Virginia. We are putting some up on Backbone Mountain in western Maryland.

Boy, if we could get down there to geothermal we would have it, would we not?

There is not a single chimney in Iceland because they do not need them. They have got geothermal. They have a little bit of it in the West. But for most of the world that molten core is far too deep for us to tap.

Is this tying the school to the molten core, or is it simply using a heat pump and exchanging, not with the air? What you are trying to do in the winter-time is cool the air and what you are trying to do in the summer time is heat the air.

It is indeed. But you still have to have energy to use that. You are much more efficient using a heat pump that is tied to the ground, to groundwater than it is to the cold air in the winter and the hot air in the summer. If you are thinking about what you are trying to do is to cool the cold air in the winter time and to heat the hot air in the summertime. And obviously ground water is very much better in both seasons than either the air in the winter or the cold, the hot air in the summer or the cold air in the winter.

Ocean energy. You know, it takes an enormous amount of energy to lift the ocean 2 feet. That is roughly what the Moon does in the tides, is it not? But the problem with that is energy density.

There is an old adage that says what is everybody's business is nobody's business. And the corollary to that in energy is if it is too widely distributed, you probably cannot make much of it. And we have really tried to harness the tides. In some fjords in Norway where they have 60-foot tides you put a bar there, when it runs in you trap it and then you run it out through a turbine. When it is running out, you can get some energy from it. And there is potential there, a lot of potential energy. But you know it is very dispersed. We have a hard time capturing that energy.

I suspect that our hour is about up, and this is maybe a good place to end. We are going to come back and spend another hour looking at agriculture, enormous opportunities from agriculture. But let me remind the gentleman that we are just barely able to feed the world now. And if we start taking all of this biomass off the field, what is going to happen to the tilth of our soil, to the organic matter in our soil, which is essential to the availability of nutrients in the soil by the plant. So there are lots of challenges here. There are lots of opportunities here. And we will spend another hour talking about them. Thank you very much. And I yield back, Mr. Speaker.

Madam Speaker, the Supreme Court cases, Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU seek to remove the Ten Commandments from government property. These cases represent a concerted effort to ignore the central role and contributions of religion in American history and culture.

In 1854, Congress studied the assertions that America is a Christian Nation. They concluded, ``The Founding Fathers had no fear or jealousy of religion itself nor did they wish to see us an irreligious Nation.''

The Ten Commandments are a historical and cultural embodiment of America's commitment to a government based upon the rule of law. The Ten Commandments reflect our Nation's Judeo-Christian history and our Founders' deep religious faith. That is why the Ten Commandments should continue to be displayed inside courtrooms throughout our country, including the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Speaker, today, I am reintroducing ``Holly's Law''--a bill that would suspend FDA approval of the drug RU- 486. This bill has been introduced with 48 cosponsors. Senator Jim DeMint has reintroduced Holly's Law in the Senate.

Holly's Law is named in memory of Holly Patterson, an I8-year-old Californian who died after taking the drug in 2003. When I tell people that the FDA approved a drug to treat a life-threatening illness that has killed three pregnant women and seriously injured dozens of other pregnant women in the United States, they're shocked. They want to know why the FDA and Congress would allow a drug that kills and injures young women to stay on the market. RU-486 is a drug that always kills babies and sometimes kills and seriously injures healthy young women.

I urge my colleagues to support Holly's Law to take the dangerous and unsafe drug RU-486 off the market.

Mr. Speaker, on December 17, 2004, the People's Republic of China announced its intention to include a new ``anti-secession law'' in its legislative agenda for the upcoming March session. This bill is expected to set up a legal framework for the incorporation of Taiwan. According to press reports, this law will also oblige the Chinese military to invade Taiwan immediately if there is a future Taiwanese ``declaration of independence.''

There are many potential roads to a resolution of the well-entrenched differences between Beijing and Taipei. China's choice here could result in regional violence, instability and undermine democracy. This law will likely erode any goodwill that has arisen across the Straits over the years. It is in the interest of the region and the United States to see that the negotiations between China and Taiwan be resolved peaceably.

The Bush Administration has said that its policy is to inspire and encourage the growth of democracy. This law, which may compel military force against Taiwan, should signal concern by the Administration. China should not seek to impose its communist government upon the 23 million Taiwanese people.

The Taiwan Relations Act states ``that the issues between Beijing and Taiwan be resolved peacefully and with the assent of the people of Taiwan.'' China's anti-secession law signals a change in the status quo and is a roadblock on the path to peace.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall vote No. 31, I had thought that I had voted and that the machine had accepted my vote. Apparently, it did not; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the Congressional Record show that had my vote been accepted, I would have voted ``yes'' on rollcall No. 31.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane), a dear personal friend and a great servant to our country and the United States Congress. I am joined tonight in this historic Chamber of the United States House of Representatives in our Nation's Capitol by many colleagues of the 108th Congress. We are all trying to do what is impossible. We want to share with those who listen and with posterity a glimpse of the extraordinary accomplishments of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane) as an individual and as a legislator.

The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane) is a giant. In 40 years of participating in the political life of our country, his ideas, energy and leadership contributed structure, muscle and heart to the ascendancy of conservative philosophy and a Republican majority in the United States Congress. Could this change have been envisioned without the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane)? I doubt it. Could this change have occurred without the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane)? I doubt it.

This giant on the American political stage was a mentor and became a friend to me very quickly after I was sworn in as a Member of Congress in January of 1993 as a 66-year-old freshman. That is when I came to know him. This is where I can offer my personal tribute to him.

Indeed, I knew of him and admired him many years before that. I can remember in 1980, in meeting with personal friends and conservatives, when we mentioned the conservative movement and we were looking for an icon, someone who really represented that movement, it was the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane). I had never seen him. I had never met him. But I knew him through my many friends who had admired him for a number of years before I became politically interested.

And then the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane) came more than 13 years ago when I was running for Congress. I did not have a chance of winning, but he came anyhow, and he came to a little local town, and he did a fundraiser for me. So I am here partly because of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane) and his confidence in me.

For many years here I attended every Wednesday afternoon the ACORNS meetings in his office. What a privilege and an opportunity to meet there some of the Members of Congress, the House and the Senate, who had gone on before and all of the history that they shared, and I remember fondly all of those ACORNS meetings in the gentleman from Illinois's (Mr. Crane's) big office, and he had an enviable office here in the Congress. He deserved it. He had been here longer than any other Republican Member of the House.

America is different because of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane). The most influential think tank in our Nation was started by a protege of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane), the Heritage Foundation. His shadow and his legacy is very long indeed. This House will not be the same without the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane).

My heart has missed a number of friends that I have made here in this House, but I will tell my colleagues I will most fondly remember and most intensely miss my friendship with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane). He is indeed a giant. I thank him very much for his service to his country and for his friendship to me.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

This amendment, which is the text of H.R. 3583, will establish a study to provide an objective analysis of whether the current capabilities of the infrastructure in the region around our Nation's capital are adequate in the event of a mass casualty disaster.

I have worked closely with the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin), the gentlewoman from Virginia (Mrs. Jo Ann Davis), and I have worked closely on this legislation; and we are very pleased by the wide bipartisan support of our colleagues in Maryland, Washington, and Virginia.

This amendment calls upon the Secretary of Homeland Security to create a commission to report to Congress its findings. In particular, I have looked forward to working with the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) to address her concerns concerning the implementation of this amendment. I will commit to the gentlewoman to ensure that the GSA will have major input into the study, that it will not predispose an alteration of the definition of the national capital region, and that it will assess existing emergency response capabilities among the public and private sectors in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, what capabilities would be necessary in the event of a mass casualty incident and recommendations to correct any shortfalls.

This commission will specifically study the major Federal interstate highways out of America's capital. Normal rush hour traffic around our Nation's capital can last as long as 4 hours. In the event of a terrorist attack or other emergency in Washington, D.C., millions of people would be unable to evacuate and get home to their families.

In June 2003, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Board urged Congress to analyze whether the current definition of the national capital region meets current needs. I am pleased that they support this amendment.

I would also like to recognize an important local health care provider, Adventist HealthCare. Adventist HealthCare has two hospitals, Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park and Shady Grove Adventist in Rockville, along two of the designated evacuation routes developed by the D.C. Division of Transportation. Adventist HealthCare has independently committed to invest over $360 million to develop and begin implementing a comprehensive plan to ensure that they are prepared for the potential of a mass casualty event.

Cooperation and coordination between relevant Federal Government agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and private sectors, are very important.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Virginia (Mrs. Jo Ann Davis).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, on 9/11, our world changed. What used to be adequate for the greater metropolitan area of Washington, which is defined by the national capital region, generally, what was adequate then may not be adequate now.

This is a very simple amendment. It simply asks for a commission to study; we need to look at what the national capital area represents, and is the infrastructure here adequate to meet the kind of a terrorist attack that we might anticipate in the future? It is a very simple amendment, sir.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, many thanks to our great chairman and ranking member for a job well done.

Our subcommittee portion of H.R. 4200 will provide the men and women in the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force with better tools now and in the future to meet the challenges to win the war on terrorism and ensure continued U.S. Naval superiority.

One reason for that is the dedication of the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor). I am grateful for our strong and cooperative relationship. I am also very pleased by the hard work of all of our colleagues on the Subcommittee on Projection Forces. I want to add a very special thanks to our very good and hardworking staff.

One of the most important provisions in this bill is a shipbuilding initiative to strengthen the ability of America's shipyards to compete in the global marketplace.

The LHA(R) amphibious assault ship program initiative will ensure that the Navy and Marines will benefit from improved capabilities while stabilizing America's industrial base capacity. It would not have been possible without the leadership of the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) and Secretary Young.

Other shipbuilding initiatives include commencement of the LCS, Littoral Combat Ship, and the DD(X) advanced destroyer programs and a modernization program for the DDG-51 Aegis destroyer.

The bill supports modernization of the B-2 bomber and the development of the JSF, Joint Strike Fighter.

This bill is critical to meet the challenges and demands placed upon our armed services to prevail in the global war on terrorism. It strikes a fine balance between modernization of existing weapons programs and platforms and the development of new systems. This is an extraordinary challenge.

The surest path to peace is to prepare for war. With H.R. 4200, we take important steps to equip our forces for the future. I urge all of my colleagues to support H.R. 4200.