Floor Statements

I rise in support of H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. I have the privilege of serving as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee's Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. Our jurisdiction includes approximately $78 billion of selected programs within the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Office of the Secretary of Defense procurement and research and development accounts.

I first want to thank the subcommittee's ranking member, Silvestre Reyes from Texas, for his support this year in putting the bill together. Ours is a truly bipartisan effort, as it is for the full committee under the leadership of Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith. The committee's focus is on supporting the men and women of the Armed Forces and their families, providing them the equipment they need and the support they deserve.

Our first priority, of course, is in providing the equipment to support our military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill adds no additional funding for the Department of Defense programs within the subcommittee's jurisdiction. The bill, however, reallocates approximately $1.5 billion from canceled, delayed, or otherwise lower priority programs to higher priority requirements.

First, an additional $425 million is provided for modernization of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The Army budget request would result

in a costly production break for these two programs in 2013, which could last anywhere from 1 to 3 years. These production lines cannot be turned on and off like a light switch. The unique skills of the workforce cannot be just put on the shelf to be retrieved several years down the road. For the Abrams tank production alone, there are almost 900 suppliers. Seventy-five percent of these suppliers are small businesses. Based on the information we have received to date, it is more efficient to keep these lines warm than it would be to shut them down and start them up again.

Second, an additional $325 million is provided for the National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account for equipment shortfalls.

Thirdly, the bill increases funding at Army and Air Force test ranges by $209 million. The Pentagon has recently acknowledged its proposed large fiscal year 2012 reductions in Test and Evaluation in the Army and Air Force could lead to ``unintended consequences'' and acknowledged the need to readdress this issue, especially in regards to complying with the Acquisition Reform Act.

Finally, acquisition and sustainment of the engine for the F-35 aircraft over its lifetime is estimated to cost well over $100 billion. The Armed Services Committee has believed and continues to believe that the F-35 engine acquisition and sustainment should be done on a competitive basis. That is why, on a bipartisan basis, the committee has strongly supported the final development phase of the F-35 competitive engine program since it began nearly 6 years ago. Although the committee's bill provides no additional funding for the F-35 aircraft competitive engine program, the bill takes strong bipartisan action that was supported by a recent vote of 55-5 by the committee to enable the competitive engine contractor to continue development of the competitive engine at no expense to the government or the taxpayer.

I strongly urge all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this bill's innovative approach to continue the F-35 competitive engine development program.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank a truly superlative staff, and again want to thank the chairman and ranking member for assistance on a really good bill.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to spend just a few moments putting the debate that we are having on Medicare in perspective.

This year, our budget deficit will be close to $1.6 trillion. That is a really big number. Well, what does it mean? Well, it means that about every 6 hours--as a matter of fact, a little less than that--we accumulate another $1 billion deficit that adds another $1 billion to our debt.

This $1.6 trillion is, as a matter of fact, about a half trillion dollars more than all the money that we come here to vote to spend. We spend the better part of 12 months debating a large number of authorizing bills and voting the appropriations bills to spend just a little over $1 trillion. Our deficit is $1.6 trillion. That means it's about a half trillion dollars more than all the money we vote to spend. What that means, Mr. Speaker, is that if we had no military--just don't fund it, send all the service people home--if we had no Department of Education, no Department of Commerce, if we emptied all of those large buildings full of government bureaucrats, we would still have about a half trillion dollar deficit. What that means of course is that there is no chance, no opportunity of balancing the budget by cutting spending in all of those programs that we spend the better part of a year debating here.

Well, if that wouldn't balance a budget, what then must we do? It's very clear that if the deficit is about a half trillion dollars more than all the money we vote to spend, that a lot of the spending that accumulates this deficit is in programs that we don't vote to spend money on. These are programs that pay the interest on the debt, that's kind of mandatory spending--if you don't do that you're in big trouble--and it's Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.

And so in this debate on Medicare, it's not just the Medicare Trust Fund that we're talking about that will go bankrupt--it will because today and every day, with no time out for holidays or weekends, 10,000 of our baby boomers retire and they stop paying into these funds and they start drawing from these funds. And so as we debate this subject, we need to remember that it's bigger than Medicare, that even if you could agree that Medicare will somehow magically be solvent, it really won't matter if we have a country that's bankrupt, will it? Because you can't have a Medicare program in a country that has no government because it has gone bankrupt, and that's what is going to happen if we don't get a handle on this debt. And it's a huge problem.

Our leadership on our side of the aisle worked very hard to keep the promise that was made during the campaign of cutting $100 billion from spending this year. That's a lot of money to cut. But even if we had cut the $100 billion, that would have been one-sixteenth of the deficit. But it turned out to be an amazing disappearing $100 billion. It shrunk to $61 billion, then it shrunk to $38 billion, and then when CBO looked at the actual outlays this year of how much we would save, it shrunk to $352 million. That is, Mr. Speaker, about one-third of 1 percent of what we promised. And even if we had delivered what we promised, $100 billion, that would have been roughly 6 percent of the deficit, one-sixteenth of the deficit.

So when we talk about these individual programs, it's nice to keep in perspective the overall picture of where we are. If you are excited by challenges, you will be exhilarated by this challenge because this is a huge, huge challenge that our country faces.

We now are about a decade into a new century and a new millennium. And it's interesting to look back at the last century and ask ourselves what was probably the most important speech given in the last century. Now if you were to ask that question of 100 people, probably not one of them would cite the speech that I'm going to tell you tonight was the most important speech of the last century, but I think that if you were to ask that question 10 or 15 years from now, that almost all of those 100 people would tell you that this speech is probably the most important speech of the last century. It was given on the eighth day of March in 1956 by a man named Marion King Hubbert--generally known as M. King Hubbert--to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas.

At that time, the United States was king of oil. We were the first major industrialized nation in the world. We were pumping more oil, we were using more oil, we were exporting more oil than any other country in the world. And M. King Hubbert told this group of oil specialists that in just 14 years--by 1970--the United States would reach its maximum oil production, that no matter what they did after that, oil production in this country would fall off. That was audacious, it was unbelievable--as a matter of fact, it wasn't believed. M. King Hubbert was relegated to the lunatic fringe. How could it be that a country that had discovered this much oil, was king of oil, producing more oil, consuming more oil, exporting more oil than any other country in 14 years is going to reach its maximum production and then fall off?

You know, if you stop to think about it, oil one day will run out, won't it? I started asking myself that question a lot of years ago when I was teaching school, and I taught a class in biology, and all of the publishers would send me their textbook hoping that I would use it in my class and they could sell it to the members of the class.

And I remember I was asking myself the question, you know, oil can't be

forever. When will there be a problem? Next year? Ten years? A hundred years? Maybe it is a thousand years. I had no idea. I had no idea when this crisis would occur. But obviously there had to be a time in which oil would run out. And if there's such a time when oil will run out, there has to be a time when you've reached your maximum ability to produce oil.

Well, the chart that I have here shows what happened. He made that prediction here in 1956. We were here. He said in 1970--that's the peak up there--that we would reach our maximum oil production. This chart shows where that oil was coming from--from Texas, from the rest of the United States, from natural gas, liquids.

And then we made two big oil discoveries. He hadn't included Alaska and he hadn't included the Gulf of Mexico. You can see Alaska there, just a little blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak, and there you could see the fabled Gulf of Mexico in yellow there, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. It hardly made a difference, did it?

The United States now produces about half the oil that it produced in 1970, and that's in spite of the fact that finding oil that M. King Hubbert did not include in his prediction. He included the lower 48. He did not include Alaska. He did not include the Gulf of Mexico.

But in spite of finding a fair amount of oil there, today we still produce half the oil we did in 1970.

Now, by 1980 if you look on the charts--but in 1980 you could look back and you could say gee, M. King Hubbert was right, wasn't he? The United States did reach its maximum oil production 10 years ago. Wow.

What that means, of course, is that won't the world at some time reach its maximum oil production? How could you argue that the United States is not a microcosm of the world? If the United States reached its maximum oil production in 1970, when would the world reach its maximum oil production? As a matter of fact, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would be reaching its maximum oil production just about now.

Well, if M. King Hubbert's speech was the most important speech of the last century, one might ask the question, ``What was the most insightful speech of the last century?''

Now, I don't know if these two men even knew each other. I don't know if Hyman Rickover, who I think gave the most insightful speech of the last century, don't know if he even knew that M. King Hubbert existed. He was going to talk about the same phenomenon from a very different perspective.

His speech was given the 15th day of May, just a little over a year later, in 1957. The audience was irrelevant, but the audience was a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. For many years his speech was lost. And just a few years ago it was found, and it's on the Internet now. And if you'll just Google for ``Rickover'' and ``energy speech,'' it will come up. And I'm sure that you will agree that it is probably the most prophetic speech that you have ever read.

I'm sure you will agree that it might very well be the most insightful speech of the last century. I have some quotes here from Hyman Rickover's speech. And you know, I'm sure that speech was still around in 1980 when you could look back and see, gee, in 1970, we really did peak in oil production in this country, didn't we?

And looking at what Hyman Rickover said there really should have been some pause, shouldn't there? There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy. Oh, it's really interesting. Almost all of the energy we use today came from or comes from the sun. It was the sun that made the plants and so forth grow that produced our gas and oil. It's the sun that, with differential heating, makes the winds blow. It's the sun that lifts the water and the clouds, then drops it on the mountains, it runs down to produce hydroelectric power. No wonder many of the ancients worshipped the sun. They kind of understood how important it was to their economy, didn't they?

They were thinking about solar energy 500 million years ago that took eons to grow to its present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. Wow, what a profound statement he makes here: ``The longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''

Now, this speech was given in 1957. That's more than a half century ago.

This next quote, I love this next quote. ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.''

You know, I think of that statement when I notice how eager we are to ``drill, baby, drill.'' Drill more, pay less. I have 10 kids, 17 grandkids, and 2 great grandkids. When the Vice President came here to try to get me to vote to drill in ANWR, I told him I'd be happy to vote to drill in ANWR when he promised me they were going to use all the revenues we got from ANWR to invest in alternatives. Because more than a half century ago, Hyman Rickover said that's precisely what we should be doing. And we had not been doing any of it.

I noted to the Vice President that we were going to leave our kids a huge debt. I had no idea then how really huge it would be because that was several years ago. I said wouldn't it be nice to leave them a little oil so that they might have something to work with that huge debt?

The next chart is another quote from Hyman Rickover. ``Whether this golden age,'' as he referred to it--and wow, what a golden age it's been--``Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.'' Nearly 7 billion people in the world and energy from fossil fuels, particularly oil, is absolutely essential to their survival. ``Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength--mental and physical--to obtain the bare necessities of life.''

When I first got some statistics on oil and the energy density of oil, I could not believe them. One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of work. I saw that number and I said, That's incredible. That means it has as much energy in one barrel of oil, 42 gallons. That's 12 people working all year long.

I drive a Prius. And then I thought, you know, a gallon, not very big, a gallon of gasoline will take my Prius--the most recent mileage is 53 miles per gallon. Now, I could pull my Prius 53 miles, but it would take me a spell, wouldn't it? I would have to use come-alongs hooked to the guardrail or trees off to the side and pull the Prius, but it would take me quite a while to pull my Prius 50 miles, and that's just one of those 42 gallons in a barrel of oil. So I guess that 25,000 man hours of effort is really the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil.

And of course what that incredibly cheap energy has done has permitted us to develop a really great quality of life. And Hyman Rickover referred to that as this Golden Age.

The next chart, and he kind of missed it a little here as you will see, in the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000, world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion with 90 percent. Well, we kind of passed that, didn't we? We're not quite double that, but we're past that. So growth exceeded what he thought it would be.

It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling. The next doubling will require only 50 years. As a matter of fact, it required less than that. And the path we are on, you know, we're just going to have increasing numbers of people while we have decreasing supplies of energy to support them.

The next chart, another quote from Hyman Rickover. You know, reading this, after 1980, when you could look back and see that M. King Hubbert was

really right about the United States, shouldn't our leaders have sat down and said, gee, what are we going to do about that?

One final thought I should like to leave with you. ``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.'' Have we done any of that? This is the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover. Great advice.

The next chart gives a perspective that Hyman Rickover talked about, and this looks at the age of oil. It goes back to 1630. It could go back to the time of Christ and the chart wouldn't change because the amount of energy the world was using was so small that it wouldn't show above the baseline here. And then we entered the Industrial Age. The brown line there is wood. We started with steam engines and fueling them with wood. And then we found coal, and that's the black line there. And then we found gas and oil. Wow, look what happened when we found gas and oil.

Now, we are going to see this curve again. And we are going to see it again and again. A very steep rise. With this very long time in the abscissa, that rise is really very steep. We will see some other charts where we have stretched out the time and the rise is not so steep. But notice what happens at the very top up there. It fell off and then rose again. That's the recession of the seventies, the Arab oil embargo. You know, you need to thank them for doing that because we woke up. Look what would have happened if that hadn't happened and that exponential curve kept on rising. It would be off the top of the chart.

Our next chart shows that in a different perspective. This is called the oil chart. And if you had only one chart to look at to inform you, this would probably be the one that you would want to look at. The curve that we saw in the last one, that red curve, I said you would see it again and again, and here it is. This is the curve. Now, it was very steep there because they had compressed this time, and so it went up. This is that drop-off in the seventies. Notice what would happen if we hadn't become more efficient as a result of that. This curve would be off the chart by the year 2011.

The vertical bars here show the discovery of oil, and we started discovering it in the forties. And, boy, in the fifties, and sixties, and seventies, huge peak in the seventies. And then by 1980--the black line here represents the use of oil--by 1980 we were using as much oil as we were finding. And after 1980, we always have used more oil than we found that year. But no matter, because there is a huge reserve back here. So we are now filling this space between what we found and what we use by dipping into those reserves that we have.

How long will they last? This chart indicates the future discoveries will be on an ever-decreasing slope. It won't be smooth like that because this has been up and down. That will be up and down. I want you to make your own judgment as to how much of that we're going to find.

By the way, this chart was what, '04 was when this chart was created, and they were predicting that the world was going to reach its maximum oil production probably about what, '10 or so there. As a matter of fact, they were somewhat optimistic, as we'll see a bit later, the peak oil production. Oh, the next chart shows some of that. And we will look at the next chart.

There are two entities in the world that do a very good job of keeping track of how much oil we pump and use. Of course we use all we pump. There is no big reservoir of oil anywhere. And this is the EIA and the IEA. One of them is a creature of the OECD in Europe, and the other is a part of our own Department of Energy. And these are their records of how much oil we have produced.

And notice that for about the last 6 years now we have been plateaued in oil production at about 84 million barrels a day. We are stuck there for about the last 6 years at 84 million barrels a day.

When demand goes up--and the increasing economies in China and India and the developing world, the demand is really going up. When demand goes up and there is a constant supply, what happens to prices? You know, $50, $80, $100, $147 finally. And that high price of oil combined with a silly housing bubble that we produced in this country, and the world's economy is kind of near collapse. And then oil fell to a bit under $40 a barrel. But as soon as the economies picked up again, the price of oil increased, and now it's roughly $100 a barrel.

The next chart looks at the world's picture, and the dark blue on the bottom here is conventional oil. Notice that it increases. They have it at about 2006. There is now general recognition by experts all over the world, even the naysayers like ExxonMobil and CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, now concede that oil peaked in about 2006. But we have had unconventional oil, and we have had natural gas liquids. We are finding more and more natural gas. And there is natural gas liquids. You won't probably put that in your fuel tank because it's propane and butane and that kind of energy source. This chart admits that we have reached the peak, and it's going to fall off. Doesn't this look very much like Hubbert's curve for our country, falling off?

Now, I am sorry I don't have the next chart that they created just 2 years after this, but let me tell you the differences. The chart they created 2 years after this has two main differences. One, it went out to 2035 instead of 2030. Notice that the total oil production, adding up all of these various sources of oil, came to 106 million barrels a day, they thought, by 2030. Now, just 2 years later--this was an '08 chart--by '10, they had produced a chart that said that the peak production 5 years later was going to be only 96 million barrels a day. They had lowered their expectations. They also had lowered their expectations of how much oil we are going to be getting from our current fields, because this line had dropped off considerably lower in their chart just 2 years later.

Now, they have our availability of oil ever going up and up, down to only 96 million barrels a day in 2035 in their next chart. But the contribution to that is very little of it comes from our conventional oil. Most of it is going to come from oil from fields that we have discovered and not developed. That's the light blue. And the red there is from fields yet to be discovered. And that disparity is even more acute in the chart that they developed just 2 years later.

I will tell you with considerable confidence that those two wedges are not going to occur in anything like that magnitude. The world inevitably will follow the same curve that the United States followed.

We reached the peak in 1970. We have been falling off ever since. In spite of finding oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, in spite of drilling more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together, today we produce half the oil we did in 1970. This relates to the discussion that we are having about the budget and about Medicare.

Paul Ryan had a bill which he called the ``roadmap,'' and it was a way to get at the problem of our debt and deficit, and it was pretty tough. It was so tough that only about 12 or 13 of us signed onto that roadmap.

Then we came to the budget debate, and all but four Republicans voted for that budget. I was almost the fifth one not to because I didn't think that it was going to solve our problem. It didn't cut enough. We weren't going to balance the budget.

Paul says that his budget pays down the debt, but it doesn't balance for 25 years. And to make it balance in 25 years, he projects fairly robust growth. That robust growth will not occur because, as soon as the world's economy picks up and the demand for oil picks up, since we have done nothing that we were advised to do by Hyman Rickover more than 50 years ago in planning an orderly transition to other sources of energy, when the price of oil goes up again to $125, $150 a barrel, even if you believe that our economy is going to

pick up--and it won't--it still takes 25 years to balance the budget. So what we are talking about tonight in this energy thing really, really is important in our budget debate as well.

The next chart is an interesting one. This was from several years ago, before the peaking of oil. It shows the exports in the world and when they thought oil would peak. Here is the year they thought it would peak--and some of them a very long time from now. Well, Deffeyes said before 2009, and it certainly was before 2009, but it occurred earlier--well, 2006 and 2007. It occurred in 2006.

The next chart shows exactly these same things in a pictorial form so that you can see some of them. They weren't going to miss the bet, were they? They could occur any time during those many, many years there, but there is almost unanimous agreement now that oil did peak in 2006.

The next chart shows four studies. There are five reports, but there were only four studies because two reports came from the same study.

Your government paid for four different studies, two of them issued in 2005 and two of them issued in 2007. There was a second iteration of the DOE report here that occurred a little later, in '05 and '07. They all said essentially the same thing, that the peaking of oil was either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences.

Now, why did your government pay for four reports? Because they didn't like what the first report said. Then they got the second one that said the same thing, and they didn't like that either. So they ordered a third one, and they didn't like what that report said either. The President finally ordered the National Petroleum Council report.

The next chart is one of the quotes from the first report, which is a big SAIC report. Dr. Robert Hirsch was the leading investigator, so it's frequently called the ``Hirsch report,'' and I have a couple of quotes from this.

The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, up to $149 a barrel; and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented.

On the next chart--and this was all out there since 2005--world production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and will decline thereafter.

They said that with quite some confidence because it happened in the United States, unquestionably, and the United States has to be a microcosm of the world. That maxim is called the ``peak.'' A number of confident forecasters projected peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Well, it occurred well within the decade.

The world has never faced a problem like this. It is unprecedented. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions--wood to coal and coal to oil--were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. This was in 2005. Your government didn't like what that report said, so they just ignored it.

In the same year was another report by the Army Corps of Engineers, and I have several quotes: The current price of oil is $45 to $57 a barrel and is expected to stay that way for several years.

Wow, even the experts get it wrong sometimes, don't they?

Oil prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years.

Well, it reached $147, but it didn't reach $180 because the economy collapsed, and the demand for oil went down. With the demand down, the price went down.

The next chart is another quote from this same study. Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Youngquist, Albert Bartlett--my namesake. I wish I had some of his genes. He has given a great speech on energy. Google for ``Albert Bartlett, an energy speech.'' He has probably given his speech about 2,000 times now. It is the best speech I have heard on energy-- have estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. It occurred in 2006. They didn't miss it very much.

The next statement isn't from the Corps of Engineers. It's a statement from Condoleezza Rice, which I thought was a very insightful statement:

We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is--I will use the word-- ``warping'' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now, a diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.

Good advice. What did we do? What did we do?

The next chart is another quote from the Corps of Engineers:

Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no energy source equals oil-intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then.

All ignored by your government.

On the next chart, there is another quote from this same study by the Corps of Engineers. Well, they're quoting Jean Laherrere and our Energy Department. Just go back and look. Historically, you can Google and find him, I'm sure. They are projections of what energy was going to be available to us. This is his quote on that, Laherrere's quote:

The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate--you have to have that much discovery rate to keep up with what we're using--for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide surge and the deliberate efforts to find the largest remaining prospect.

We are finding more oil. One of the big finds in the Gulf of Mexico was under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. A big discovery of oil is 10 billion barrels. We use 84 million barrels a day. That means, in 12 days, we use 1 billion barrels of oil.

That's a staggering number. What that means is if you found 10 billion barrels of oil and you could get it all out, that will last the world 120 days. Big deal.

The next chart is Shell Oil. By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be radically different from today's. The world's current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step change in the growth rate of energy demand, and Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy access to oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand. That didn't wait until 2015. It happened in 2006. But he was generally right. This was of an absolute certainty going to happen.

The next chart presents us with a dilemma that many people are concerned about. It's a national security issue. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We are only a little less than 5 percent of the world's population. We import about two-thirds percent of what we need. Many people rightfully believe that having only 2 percent of the world's reserves and using 25 percent of the world's oil and importing two-thirds of what we use presents an undesirable national security risk. As a matter of fact, there were 30 prominent scientists and thought leaders who wrote a letter to President Bush saying exactly that.

Notice that, though we have only 2 percent of the world's oil, we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We field more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. It's like several kids sharing a soda and they have half a dozen straws in one soda, you can suck it down pretty quick, can't you? And that's where we are with oil.

The next chart is an interesting one. And what this chart shows us is the energy density of these various types of fuel. Notice that oil aviation fuel, boy, that's refined, isn't it? It's got lots of energy. And so does natural gas, which is why natural gas is a great fuel for cars if you have the infrastructure to

support that. But notice all these other sources of energy, the energy density in oil is just incredible. There's nothing else, there is no readily available source of energy that comes even close to the energy density in oil as we look at alternatives.

The next chart, and some people will tell you, yes, I know, oil is short, but who cares? Because we are king of coal, we're the Saudi Arabia of coal, we have enough coal to last us for a long time. I've had Members tell me it will last us 500 years. A commonly quoted amount of coal is we have a 250-year supply of coal--at current use rates. Note when people tell you how much of something we have at current use rates, think about what increasing use will do to that. If we increase the use of coal only 2 percent--and we'll increase the use more than that as we run down on oil and we have learned to do what Hitler did and South Africa did to create oil and gas from coal--just a 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. That's not enough growth to keep our stock market happy. It wants more than 2 percent. But 2 percent doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years. It's 8 times bigger in 105 years. It's 16 times bigger in 140 years. So that 250 years of coal shrinks to just 50 years of coal, by 85, if you use it as coal, but if you're going to use some of the energy to convert it to a gas or liquid, now it shrinks to 50 years. So your 250 years shrinks to 50 years if you have only 2 percent increase in its use and if you convert it to a gas or a liquid.

But the reality is that there is no way you can avoid sharing that coal or the gas or oil you would get from it with the world. Because if you use oil or gas that you've made from your coal, then somebody else buys the oil from Saudi Arabia or Hugo Chavez. So the reality is that you have no alternative but to share it with the world. We use one- fourth of the world's oil, so that means it will last the world 12\1/2\ years.

Now the National Academy of Sciences says we haven't looked at the coal reserves for a long while, since the 1970s, and they think we probably have about 100 years of coal at current use rates. But even if we had 250 years at current use rates, just 2 percent gross shrinks to 85, convert it to gas or a liquid and it drops to 50, and you have no alternative but to share it with the world. So it drops to 12\1/2\ years.

The next chart shows us something very interesting. What it shows us is that we don't have to look to a decreased quality of life if we are using less energy. This is the human development index. It's a per capita energy consumption. You notice that we share a lone position way out there at the end of the curve. But notice how flat that curve is on top. The people using roughly half the energy we do, the human development index, which is life expectancy, education level, relative income, is about the same as ours using only half the energy we use. As a matter of fact, that's where Europe is. They use half the energy we use.

The next chart looks at some of the same phenomena in a different way. This is how happy people are with their station in life. Now here we are, using the most energy, that's on the bottom, how much energy you are using, we use the most energy, and we're pretty happy about things, aren't we? But notice how many countries, I think there are 22 of them, that feel better about their quality of life than we feel using, some of them, only half as much energy as we use.

Now on both of these curves you have to get back down to about here, which is about one-third as much energy as we use before you start falling off quickly in these indices or in your perception of quality of life.

The next chart looks at our energy consumption. Where does our energy come from? We've been talking about oil. But we're getting energy from a lot of other sources too, from natural gas, most of it from oil, from petroleum, from coal, from nuclear about 8 percent, which is about 19 percent of our electricity. This is total energy production, not electricity, but 19 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear. If you don't like nuclear, drive down the road tonight and note that every fifth house and every fifth business would have no lights if we had no nuclear. So it is a little wedge in there, 6 percent, which is renewables--just 6 percent. And notice--well, hydroelectric is a big part of that; biomass, that's the paper industry and the wood industry burning by-products and so forth and waste-to-energy, instead of putting it in a landfill you burn it; geothermal, that's true geothermal, tapping into the molten core of the Earth; wind and solar, look how tiny they are. They have huge potential for growth. But at the moment they are pretty, pretty small.

The next chart shows us something interesting, and that's about efficiency. The bar on the left looks at incandescent lights. My wife got a few chickens recently, and she put a lightbulb over them to give them heat because about 90 percent of all the energy from the light bulb, more than 90 percent, goes to heat. But if you use a fluorescent--look at it--enormously more efficiency in the fluorescent. And if you do go to an LED, look at the ratios in a LED. I have an LED flashlight, and I forget when I put batteries in it. Notice most of the new cars in front of you have LED lights.

The next chart kind of puts this problem in a global perspective. This is the world according to oil. It's what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil it had. Now we've got to modify this a little because WikiLeaks just exposed some papers from Saudi Arabia that said they've been fibbing about how much oil they have, that they really have 40 percent less oil than they said they have. That's true I think of all of the OPEC countries, because back when they could produce enough oil to drive the price of oil down, they could produce a certain percentage of their reserves.

But if they wanted to produce more oil, they just said they had more reserves. They didn't find any more oil, but some of their reserves magically grew on paper. It was kind of a contest amongst liars, and Saudi Arabia was exposed. So it would modify a little, but still most of the oil is in that part of the world.

Here is the United States, 2 percent of the oil. We use 25 percent of the oil. Our biggest supplier of oil is Canada. Our third biggest supplier is Mexico. Both of them have less oil than we, but Canada has few people, so they can export. Mexico has a lot of people, but they are too poor to buy the oil, so they can export. Just a few months ago, Mexico slipped to number three supplier and Saudi Arabia now is our number two supplier of oil.

I want you to look at China and India over there. They are tiny. Last year the Chinese bought 13 million cars. We struggle to sell 12 million cars. They have 1.3 billion people, and they are entering the industrial age.

Mr. Speaker, the next chart looks at this same global picture in a somewhat different way. The left bar is the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil production. Now, we think ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and BP are pretty big players, don't we? They have only, collectively, 22 percent of all of the oil production in the world.

The right-hand bar looks at another part of this, and that is who has the oil. Notice that our big three or four don't even show up over there. These are the top 10. Almost all of the top 10 are Arab countries where it is not a company that owns the oil; it is a country that owns the oil. LUPE Oil, which is kind of private up there, they show it white, in Russia, is only 2 percent of the total amount of oil held by the top 10 countries in reserves.

Anyway, China is buying up reserves all over the world. And I asked the State Department why would they do that since in today's world it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. The person who comes to the global oil auction with enough dollars--and let's hope it stays dollars and doesn't go to Euros or we are in really big trouble--you buy the oil you want. We have only 2 percent of the oil, we use 25 percent of the oil, and we aren't buying oil reserves anywhere. What is the difference? The State Department's answer, and I don't think that is the correct answer, they told me that China didn't understand the marketplace. Come on now. A country that during this recession dropped from 14 percent growth to 8 percent growth, and they don't understand the marketplace?

China is doing something else simultaneously, by the way. They are aggressively buying a blue water navy.

Do you think the time might come when China says, hey, we have 1.3 billion people, and these 900 million people who are in rural areas through the miracle of communications know the value of an industrialized society and they say, gee, how about us? I think China sees their empire unraveling the way the Soviet empire saw their empire unravel if they can't meet the needs of these people. China is buying oil reserves and building a big blue water Navy because the day will come they will tell us, gee, I'm sorry, but it is our oil. We have 1.3 billion people, and we can't share the oil.

I led a codel to China a little over 4 years ago, and I was stunned. This wasn't just the people concerned about energy in China; it was everybody we met. They talked about post-oil. There will, of course, be a post-oil world. It will be a long while from now. Hyman Rickover had no idea how long this age of oil would last. He was 100 years into what we call this golden age. We now know pretty much how long the age of oil will last. We are about halfway through it. We are 150 years in it. And he was right, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, Hyman Rickover said the age of oil would be but a blip. It will be about 300 years long. We are about 150 years in it. From now on, the next 150 years, there will be less and less. It will be harder and harder to get, more and more expensive.

This is the five-point plan. Conservation. My wife says that she thinks that conservatives ought to be interested in conservation--they don't seem to be--because they come from a common root. Conservatives aren't interested in conservation. That is the only thing we can do to buy some time, to free up some energy so we can invest in developing alternatives.

The second and third are domestic sources of energy and diversify as much as you can.

The fourth one may surprise you: environmental impact. Be kind to the environment. They know that they are not. But as I mentioned, they have these 900 million people that are clamoring for the benefits of an industrialized society, so they are building a coal-fired power plant every week, and they are starting the construction of 100 nuclear power plants.

And the fifth bullet here: international cooperation. They know that there is no way that any one nation can face this problem alone, that we need international cooperation. But while they plead for international cooperation, they are planning for the eventuality that we won't have international cooperation because they are buying up oil reserves all over the world. And they are not just oil reserves; they are buying goodwill. What do you need, a soccer stadium? roads? a hospital? Wherever they buy oil reserves, they are buying goodwill. And remember, they are simultaneously building this huge blue water navy.

What now? Our next and last chart for this evening, What America Needs. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. If we understand the problem, there is nothing that we can't do. Our people just need to understand the problem. We need to have leadership that understands the problem. I tell audiences that the innocence and ignorance on matters of energy in our general population is astounding; and, sadly, we have truly representative government.

Well, what do we do? We need the total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. I was born in 1926. I know the total commitment we had during that war. There has been nothing like it since. We need the technology and intensity and focus of the Apollo program to land a man on the moon. That cost $275 billion in 2006 dollars, which is when oil peaked. And we need to have the urgency of the Manhattan Project. Minus that, we are going to face the kind of disruptions that were forecasted by the Hirsch Commission, the big SAIC report.

The world has never faced a problem like this. I like challenges. They excite me. And this is a huge challenge. It is an exhilarating challenge, but I know with proper information, with proper knowledge, with proper leadership, the United States is up to the task.

By the way, developing this green technology will again make us an exporting country. People brag about we have this nice, clean, service- based economy. If you think about that, no matter how much you charge for cutting each other's hair and taking in each other's laundry, that is not going to be a viable economy. Only three things produce wealth, and manufacturing is a major one of those. That is now all moving offshore.

We can again become a major manufacturing country by focusing on this green technology and by developing the alternatives that we must develop if we're going to continue to maintain our quality of life.

I look forward to a very challenging future.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 40 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 25, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Thank you very much for yielding.

If our only reason for being in Afghanistan was to deny sanctuary to al Qaeda, I probably would have asked time from the gentleman from Ohio and be speaking from the other side, because when we are successful in Afghanistan, that will not have denied sanctuary to al Qaeda because they will simply go over into Pakistan. If not there, they'll go to Yemen and Somalia. If we leave Afghanistan now or if we leave Afghanistan before victory in Afghanistan, we will have sent a message to the world that their suspicions are really true, that all you have to do to the United States is make it tough for them and they will pull out. We did it in Beirut. We did it in Somalia. It is absolutely essential that we win here, or our credibility is gone forever as a major player in geopolitical things in the world.

A second good reason for staying in Afghanistan is that if we can have a fledgling democracy there, that will send a very powerful message to the Middle East from which most of the world's oil comes. There is a lot of upheaval there, and a stable democracy in Afghanistan would be enormously important.

Beyond denying sanctuary to al Qaeda, there are very good reasons for staying in Afghanistan until we have victory. Our young people there are doing an incredible job. I just came from there a bit over a week ago. We can succeed there, and I think we must succeed for the two reasons I mentioned.

I don't think that anybody would object to paying workers on these projects a real prevailing wage. The problem is that what's called a ``prevailing wage'' is not the prevailing wage.

I have a friend who does a lot of ornamental ironwork. A lot of these buildings around here he has done. He lives out in Hagerstown. The contracts that he has to put that in require him to pay prevailing wage when he puts it in down here. The same people that install it down here do the work of preparing it out there. This is a good job in Hagerstown, and that's only--what?--about 70 miles from here. When he comes down here to put it in down here, he has to double their pay for the time he's down here.

It's just not prevailing wage, and that's why it's wrong.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Last week, there was WikiLeaks activity that pointed out a huge problem that we in the world face. WikiLeaks released some confidential emails that indicated that the Saudis had only 60 percent of the oil that they had advertised they had. I think this is probably true of most of the OPEC countries that were incentivized to exaggerate their oil reserves when they were permitted to pump a percentage of the oil reserves.

Mr. Chairman, there is almost nobody now who doesn't agree that the world reached its maximum production of conventional oil in 2006. We've been stuck now for about 5 years at 84, 85 million barrels a day of oil. Increasingly, the difference between conventional oils, which are now falling off in production, and that 84, 85 million barrels a day is that it is made up by unconventional oil, like the heavy sour of Venezuela and the tar sands of Alberta, Canada.

Our military has been very wisely pursuing a goal that the rest of us should have been involved in. Maybe they read Hyman Rickover's speech from 1957 where he noted that, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. He didn't know then how long it would last, but he said how long it lasted was important in only one regard--the longer it lasted, the more time we would have to plan an orderly transition to other sources of energy.

Of course we have done none of that in spite of the fact that we have known for 31 years with absolute certainty that we were going to get here today, because by 1980, we were already 10 years down the other side of Hubbert's peak as predicted by M. King Hubbert in 1956.

The military has been attuned to this problem much more than any other part of our society, and they have been very wisely pursuing alternative fuels because, as we wind down on the available fossil fuels, the world will ultimately, of course, move to alternative fuels. The military has several reasons for doing this. It is a very aggressive program, a very wise program; and I think that it would just be tragic if we were to eliminate the funds for this.

They increasingly need to move to alternatives for all of those reasons; and the rest of us need to move to alternatives for an additional reason, that they now are moving to alternatives that they can produce on site to reduce the long supply trails that create so many casualties over there.

They ought to have been doing this earlier. I am delighted they're doing it now, and I think it would be a national security tragedy if we were to deny them the funds to continue doing this.

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

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

During the debate to strike funding for the F-35 competitive engine you're likely to hear many statements that just don't square with the facts in the program. Just today, I have heard that it has been stated that the primary engine for the F-35 aircraft has, in one case, 200,000 flight test hours; another statement said 20,000 test hours. The reality is the F-35 primary engine has, as of the end of 2010, just 680 flight test hours and has 90 percent of its flight testing to go.

You're also likely to hear that there are almost 30 U.S. military aircraft that operate with a sole source engine. That's interesting. The F-35 aircraft is a single engine aircraft. No fighter aircraft engine has ever been required to do what the F-35 engine is required to do--provide powered flight and also power a lift fan for the short takeoff and vertical-landing F-35B. In fact, this challenging act of physics has just resulted in the F-35B being put on ``probation'' by the Secretary of Defense, requiring redesign of the F-35B unique engine components. The current estimate to complete development of the F135 primary engine has been extended several years and the estimated cost to complete the development program is 450 percent above the February, 2008, estimated completion cost.

In fact, only two U.S. operational aircraft are single engine aircraft--the Air Force F-16 and the Marine Corps AV-8B. The F-35 is scheduled to replace those aircraft and will not be operational until at least 2016. The F-16 was the first aircraft to use an alternate engine, beginning in the mid-1980s, and still does so today. Accident rates have trended from 14 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours in 1980 with the Pratt & Whitney engine, when the alternate engine program was first funded, to less than just 2 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours in 2009 for both the Pratt & Whitney and the GE engines. A review of the AV-8B accident data last year indicated an accident rate six times that of the other Navy fighter aircraft, the F-18, and over 3\1/2\ times the rate of the F-16. The AV-8B will be replaced by F-35B. So while the alternative engine F-16 has benefited from competition, with an accident rate having declined by a factor of seven, the AV-8B has an accident rate 3\1/2\ times that of the F-16.

Some will cite that the F136--that's the competitive engine--will require $2.9 billion over 6 years to make it competition ready. It's interesting to note that the cost increase in the contract for the current primary engine, the F-35, is $3.4 billion, and that does not include other government costs, independent research and development, and component improvement program funding. The entire remaining development of the F-35 competitive engine could have been funded with the overrun to date in the F-35 primary engine. Further, the GAO has found that key assumptions in the cost to go for the F-35 competitive engine were unnecessarily pessimistic based on historic experience with the original alternate engine program.

One of our colleagues has said that the F-35 primary engine is ``5 to 7 years ahead of the F136 alternate engine in development.'' This is not the case at all. First, the acquisition strategy for the F-35 competitive engine called for it to begin 4 years after the primary engine. The Pentagon told us last April that the competitive engine was only 2 to 3 months behind schedule of the original plan. At the same time the Pentagon notified the committee that the F135 primary engine was 24 months behind the schedule set in the original October, 2001, contract. In other words, had both engines begun at the same time, the alternative engine would now be almost 2 years ahead of the primary engine.

I don't know why there's such confusion over the facts related to this issue. Our committee has followed this issue for over 15 years, and we ask you to support the F-35 competitive engine program as an important element to controlling F-35 program costs and future force readiness. The GAO has looked at the competitive engine programs. They have noted that historically the competitive engine always does two things: it makes the engines cheaper and it makes them better. Notice the accident rate that I noted earlier.

Furthermore, this new aircraft is supposed to be ultimately 95 percent of all of the aircraft in all of our services. Can you imagine what would happen if there was a problem with the engine and we had to stand down. We would have essentially no fighter aircraft in any of our services. It is essential we continue with the alternative engine--and I hope not just to continue its development, to make the primary engine better and cheaper, but to provide a second engine for duplication.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Offered By: Mr. Bartlett

Amendment No. 508: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following:

Sec.__. No funds made available in this Act, or any prior

Act, may be used for grant agreements or contracts with

facilities defined in 7 U.S.C. Sec. 2132(e) if those

agreements or contracts allow or encourage the breeding of

chimpanzees.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

When I came to the Congress 18 years ago, I was assigned to the Armed Services Committee. The subcommittee slots on Armed Services are determined by seniority and Member preferences. We all get together in a room and we select our committees, and as the more popular committees are filled, less and less opportunities are available to junior Members. For reasons that I am not sure I fully understand, the Personnel Subcommittee is always the last to fill up, and since I was the lowest ranking person on the Republican side, I ended up on the Personnel Subcommittee.

Ike Skelton was then senior enough on the Democrat side that he chaired that Personnel Subcommittee. And those were tough times for the military. We really didn't have enough money, and I remember that Ike was really stressed. He was stressed to the point that he was actually emotional that we didn't have enough money to meet the needs of our service people.

I saw then a Congressman who was deeply concerned about the military, and I remember how all of us on the subcommittee were relieved when the appropriators gave us another $1 billion. Do you remember that, Ike? It was Jack Murtha who led that fight, and we got another $1 billion for our personnel.

I have now worked with Ike and served with him for these last 18 years. I have gone with him on really hard-working CODELs.

Ike, I can't imagine a more dedicated person, someone more interested in our troops, more knowledgeable about our military, more concerned about the future of our country. It has been, sir, an honor to work with you, and I am certainly going to support the Ike Skelton National Defense Authorization Act.

Madam Speaker, I've been involved with the LCS program from its very inception; and when the Navy announced that they were going to do a down select with this competition, I was somewhat dismayed because these are two very different ships, an aluminum trimaran, and the more conventional ship optimized for these special missions. And I wasn't sure that we knew enough about the potential of these two ships to make that down select during this competition.

So I was very pleased when Sean Stackley called me and said that they were surprised and shocked by the quotes that came in. Competition, you know, really does matter. And when the down select was threatened, each of these competitors came in with a really good price.

So I was very pleased when the Department decided that they would like to buy 10 of each of these ships. These are multi-mission ships. I'm sure one of these ships will be better for one mission than another, so I am very pleased that we're taking this route; and I couldn't be more supportive of where we're going now with this.

If we're ever going to get to a 313-ship Navy, the LCS is going to play a big part of that. This is going to be a huge class of ship. A half of that class is going to be bigger than almost any other class of ships that we have had, so this is a win-win for everybody, and I'm pleased that we are taking this route.

Will the gentleman yield?

For 4 years I was the chair of this subcommittee, and Mr. Taylor was my ranking member; and then the leadership in the Congress changed, and for 2 years, I was his ranking member and he was my chair. And then, sadly, due to our term limits on the Republican side of the House, I had to leave that subcommittee, but never left my interest, strong interest in that subcommittee.

And I will tell you that there is no person in the Congress who has been more committed or more effective in making sure that we have the right kind of Navy, the right size Navy.

When I first came here, I looked up Gene Taylor because we shared some social things. And as a Democrat, he kind of shone out as different than the other Democrats. And we've become the very best of friends since then. He tells people that we're joined at the hip, and indeed we are.

Gene, it's been a real, real pleasure to serve with you, and your departure is a grave loss to this Congress and to our Nation. I've been honored to serve with you, sir.

Thank you for yielding.

You know, one might wonder at our priorities. For the first time in many, many years we don't have time to pass the defense authorization bill, but we do have time to pull out a very controversial part of that, whose passage no one will argue will be particularly helpful; it just not might be too hurtful. Maybe that's just one more reason that our favorable ratings are somewhere between used car salesmen and embezzlers.

There's an old adage that says he who frames the question determines the answer. I've had a graduate course in statistics, and I would certainly not have reached the conclusion that was reached from these studies. Thirty percent, almost twice that in the marines, said this would be a bad idea. Fifteen to 20 percent said it would be a good idea. You can't take that 50, 55 percent that didn't have an opinion and say that it is a good idea. If I was a statistician, I would have reached exactly the opposite conclusion. Thirty percent is a huge number.

You know, no matter what my sexual orientation was, I couldn't be supportive of this. We are now fighting two wars. Three of the Joint Chiefs have said this would be very disruptive. There are a lot of prejudices out there. I might regret those prejudices, but I can't change the fact that they are out there. This will not be conducive to good order and discipline. This is not the time to do it. There may come a time when we can do this in the military. This is not that time.

Madam Speaker, let me first note some press clippings today that caught my eye, kind of signs of the time. One of them talks about a 1,900-page omnibus appropriations bill that is being prepared. You know, there will be no one person in the country that has read all of that bill, and I think the American people are not supportive of bringing these huge bills to the floor that nobody has had a chance to read.

But that wasn't what caught my eye so much as the subheading: ``Earmarkers feast on pork one last time before diet.'' And then in brackets it says it includes the Joint Strike Fighter second engine.

I would like to make a couple of comments on earmarks. I know that they are symbolic of frivolous, wasteful, out-of-control spending in Congress. Even though the total amount of money in earmarks is pretty small, they still are symbolically a very big and important issue.

I can live without earmarks. I've had earmarks. I publish them all on my Web site. None of them have sought to aggrandize me.

When I first came to Congress, I thought that robotics ought to be of increasing importance to the military, and so I supported what is called earmarks. We call them, in Armed Services, plus-ups. I supported a little company in Carroll County. They now are owned by General Dynamics, and they are now the largest military robotics manufacturing company in the United States; that probably means the largest in the world. And they will tell you that, if it weren't for my earmarks, they might not be here.

I would note that the unmanned aircraft were earmarks. I would also note that the Pentagon fought the aircraft carrier when it was first suggested, and it was Congress who pushed the aircraft carrier.

I would like to reflect for a moment on the plus-ups in the military, which are really fundamentally different from earmarks other places. You see, if you do an earmark on alternative energy--and everybody wants to look green, and so just about everybody who does earmarks will have an earmark or two on alternative energy. And that money all comes out of the program money for a little alternative energy lab in Golden, Colorado. They never know how much money they're going to have. They never can really adequately plan or execute a program because their money gets taken with these little green earmarks that so many of our Members like to have.

That's not what happens in Armed Services and Defense. Defense is a bit more than 50 percent of all of our discretionary spending--$600 or $700 billion. Whenever you have that many programs with that much money involved, there are bound to be some of them that don't go as planned and the money doesn't get spent. And so, near the end of the year, that money is gathered together and we have, in the past, gone to the chairmen of the services and asked them, If you had more money, what would you buy? And they respond, Gee, we would like to have this and that. We call these ``unfunded priorities.''

Then, the Members turn in their lists of requests, and these are all judged

against some standards that everybody has agreed on. You don't get all your earmarks. I publish all of mine on my Web site. You certainly don't get them all. I can live without earmarks. But I would just like to note that the President's budget is one long series of earmarks-- spend money for this, spend money for that, spend money for the other thing--put together by people that you have never seen, that you will never see, that are not accountable.

Now, I understand the psychology of earmarks, and I'm very supportive of doing away with earmarks. But I would like to make a point about plus-ups in Defense. You see, the President's budget is at least a year old. It takes a long time to put together that big budget--some parts of it are a couple of years old--which means that all the new technology of the last year can't be in the President's budget. Traditionally, we have used plus-ups in Defense to make sure that we don't fall behind our potential enemies. So if you would like to make sure that we're always potentially 1 year behind the Chinese and the Russians, then just don't have any plus-ups in Defense.

I am a big supporter of doing away with earmarks because I think that symbolically they have become poison and they tell the American people that we are out of control and irresponsible. But, at the same time, I would like to note that we have got to have something to permit us to introduce the latest technology to our military, because it can't be in the President's budget. So let's call them plus-ups or something and ban earmarks elsewhere, but make sure that we don't fall behind in Defense.

Another thing that was in the news was the leadership is not going to bring a separate Defense authorization bill, but they have taken one small part of that bill out--the Don't Ask, Don't Tell. One may wonder at the priorities. For the first time in many, many years, we're probably not going to have an authorization bill. And if we have an appropriations bill, it will be a part of this big 1,900-page omnibus. One might wonder a little bit about priorities when we're engaged in two wars and we face a resurgent Russia and a booming China that it is maybe not important to pass the Defense authorization bill, but it is really important to bring to a separate vote Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Then there are a couple of articles that I was really pleased to see--and we'll talk a little bit more about those later--from the National Defense Magazine: ``Navy Takes Biofuels Campaign Into Uncharted Waters''; and the second headline is that the ``Air Force Tells Biofuels Industry to `Bring It.' '' They want to buy these alternative fuels. There were two articles; one by Beidel and one by Grace Jean. And a little bit later, we'll have an opportunity to look at biofuels and their role and why the military is focusing so much on these.

And then an interesting article in the L.A. Times, ``Pressure builds in the House to pass tax-cut package.'' A little bit later, we'll have an opportunity to look at taxes and should we cut them. We really have a huge debt, getting bigger every day. Getting money from our people to bring down this debt is important.

So what are the arguments for cutting taxes? Benjamin Franklin, in 1787, came out of the Constitutional Convention, and he was asked--and one of the stories has it that it was a lady who asked him that. I like that story--Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? What have you wrought? And his answer was: A Republic, madam, if you can keep it. A very short response: A Republic.

But I thought we lived in a democracy. At events we do that Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, and you come to that part that says, ``the Republic for which it stands,'' and then we get up and talk about this great democracy that we live in. What is the difference between a republic and a democracy?

Before reflecting on that and why it is important to understand that difference, I would like to spend just a moment looking at Benjamin Franklin's hope: ``if you can keep it.'' I wonder what he thought the biggest threat to this Republic, this Constitution would be. I kind of think he wasn't all that concerned about foreign powers that got here across a big ocean in sailboats. I'm sure he had some concern about threats from outside the country. But I kind of think that he might have been more concerned about threats from within: A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.

What is the difference between a republic and a democracy?

I'd like to use a couple of examples of a democracy to help us understand that two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for dinner would be a democratic process; the majority wins in a democracy.

So what do you think is going to happen if the body is made up of two wolves and a lamb, and they are voting on what they are going to have for dinner?

If it is a democracy, there will be lamb for dinner because the majority wants that. If it is a republic and the constitution, or whatever they call the body of laws that they live by, says you can't have lamb for dinner, you won't have lamb for dinner, no matter whether the majority wants it or not, because, you see, it is against the law. In our country, we would say it's unconstitutional.

I really kind of hesitate to use this next example of a democracy, but I hope you will understand.

A lynch mob is really an example of a democracy. Isn't the will of the majority being expressed in a lynch mob? Aren't you glad you live in a republic where it is not the will or the whim of the majority that controls but the law that controls?

I remember back a number of years ago when, I believe it was, Harry Truman nationalized the steel mills. They were going to strike. Back then, it mattered that we wouldn't have any steel made as we had some manufacturing in those days. It wouldn't matter a whole lot now, would it? The economy was already in trouble, and it was going to be in even bigger trouble if they did that, so Harry Truman nationalized the steel mills. That was a very popular action. A huge majority of the American people applauded that because that made them, you see, Federal employees, and as Federal employees, you can't strike. That was a hugely popular action--an executive order. The Supreme Court met in emergency session. In effect, what they said was, Mr. President, no matter how popular that is, you can't do it, because it's unconstitutional.

Now, why is this important?

Congress is doing a lot of things that are not specifically permitted by the Constitution. Four years after the Constitution was ratified, there was the Bill of Rights. They started with 12 amendments, and 10 of them made it through the process: two-thirds of the House, two- thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the State legislatures. We call them the Bill of Rights. There was a lot of argument that they really didn't need to do that, because every one of those rights so explicitly enumerated in the Bill of Rights was implicit in the Constitution, itself.

We in the Congress today involve ourselves in almost everything that affects citizens of the country. We use two different things in the Constitution to justify doing that. One of them is ``promote the general welfare.'' That's in the Preamble to the Constitution, itself. It is also repeated in the preamble to section 8, which specifies what the Congress can do. The Preamble of the Constitution simply says: ``promote the general welfare.'' But in the first paragraph of article I, section 8, it says to promote the ``general welfare of the United States.''

What they were talking about was the responsibility of making sure we had a strong country. Words change their meanings, and their use of the word ``welfare'' didn't even come close to our use of the word ``welfare'' because, when we think of welfare, we think of a big organization that handles a lot of money and that takes care of people who are in need.

Then, in the Bill of Rights, there are the last two amendments, which are seldom referred to. The Ninth Amendment simply says that essentially all the rights belong to the people, and the people have chosen to give a few of those rights to the government.

A few days ago, I was privileged to spend an hour or so with one of the Justices on our Supreme Court, and he gave a very interesting example. He had a piece of paper like this, and he tore off a little corner of it:

These are all the rights that we have--and he tore off a little corner of

it--and we're going to give this much to the Federal Government.

Just a little.

So the Ninth Amendment reiterates that. It says that essentially all the rights belong to the people except for those few that they give to the government.

Then there is the 10th Amendment. This is the most violated amendment and the least referred to amendment in the Constitution. The 10th Amendment in everyday English--it's written in Old English and legalese--you've got to kind of interpret. What it really says is, if you can't find it in article I, section 8, you can't do it.

Now, we do a whole lot of things that you can't find in article I, section 8. We use two things to justify that. One is the ``promote the general welfare.'' If it helps people, if it makes things better, we can do it. The second thing we use is called the commerce clause, which says that Congress has the responsibility and the authority to regulate commerce between the States. Now, there is nothing that doesn't pass over a State line, so you can argue that, therefore, we can concern ourselves with anything and everything--and we do.

But then I asked myself the question: If that were how they wanted us to interpret the Constitution, why did they put all that detail in article I, section 8--like duties and imposts and excises, and borrowing money and regulating commerce?

Well, that's the one they use.

Establish uniform rules of naturalization, laws for bankruptcy, coining money.

Somehow we gave that away to the Fed without amending the Constitution. I'm not sure how.

Provide for the punishment of counterfeiting, to establish post offices and post roads, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, this is, copyrights and patents to constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court.

That's our lower Federal courts.

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations.

Then all the rest of it deals with just two things--to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and then the military.

The last paragraph, of course, relates to the seat of government, what we call the District of Columbia.

Then it ends with a paragraph that is used to justify doing anything and everything we want to do: ``to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.''

But the 10th Amendment says, if you can't find it in article I, section 8, you can't do it. Now, there are three big things that we do--more than three, really, but there are three big things we do that I can't find there. One is our involvement in education. Another is our involvement in health care, except for our military, and the third one is philanthropy.

By the way, Madam Speaker, if you will do a Google search for Davy Crockett--he was a Congressman from Tennessee and a farmer--you will find a very fascinating discussion of philanthropy. We don't have time here today to go through it, but you will be fascinated by it. Then he gave a speech on the floor, talking about philanthropy.

Now, these are good things. We support the National Institutes of Health. We support the National Academy of Sciences. None of these things are in the Constitution, and we do them all without amending the Constitution.

Since these are good things and they help us, why should I be concerned?

They're not explicitly permitted by the Constitution, and we haven't amended the Constitution so that we can legitimately do it. Let me tell you why I am concerned.

This little country--and we're little, one person out of 22 in the world--and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world. And I ask myself the question, why? What is so special about us that just one person in 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? We no longer are conspicuously the hardest working people in the world. We no longer have the highest respect for technical education. This year, the Chinese will graduate seven times as many engineers as we graduate. About half of our engineering students are Chinese students. And we no longer have the most respect for the nuclear family. This year, almost 50 percent of all of our children will be born out of wedlock.

Why then are we so darn fortunate, that just one person out of 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world? You may have other reasons, Madam Speaker, but I think that our enormous respect for our civil liberties established a climate and milieu in which creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish, and I think that if we put at risk these civil liberties, we put at risk who we are.

If we can rationalize that because it's a good thing to support the National Institutes of Health or provide health care or have a Department of Education, that you can then just kind of ignore the Constitution, that sets, I think, a very dangerous precedent because, in the future, it may be that a majority of our people will feel that a minority of our people should be denied some of their civil liberties. And if we can just rationalize that we don't have to pay any attention to the specifics of the Constitution and these other things, why couldn't that happen to our civil liberties? And because I am so convinced that these civil liberties are such a huge reason that we are such a favored country, I'm very concerned that we shouldn't just ignore the Constitution because what you're going to do seems okay and popular and going to help.

I remember back when we were congratulating ourselves because we had a budget surplus. We had to raise the debt limit ceiling. Kind of jokingly I asked our leadership, what are you going to tell the American people--all these months you've been telling them we have a budget surplus and now we're voting to raise the debt limit ceiling? Why would we have to raise the debt limit ceiling if we've had a budget surplus? We did have a budget surplus, and we did pay down a debt, but it wasn't the national debt. It was the public debt.

I suspect, Madam Speaker, that there are not a large percentage of the American people that know the difference between the public debt and the national debt. The public debt is the Wall Street debt, the debt we owe to people who have bought our securities, who have loaned us money. The national debt is the sum of the public debt and the trust fund debt.

You see, we have about fifty trust funds. Two of the biggest ones are Medicare and Social Security, and we have been running surpluses in those fortunately because when the baby boomers all come on line, we're going to really need those surpluses, but there's no money there.

You see, this budget surplus was in what we called the unified budget, when we put the trust funds on budget, and then we made the perfectly irrational statement that the Social Security surplus offset the deficit. Well, if you have taken the money that you have taken out of the paychecks of our citizens for Medicare and Social Security and you spend it, which is exactly what we've done, you have incurred another debt.

So what we did when we had this surplus, we paid down the national debt; for every dollar of national debt we paid down, there was another dollar increase in the trust fund debt. The sum of those two debts is the national debt. And if we kept our books on the accrual method, which we require of every business with more than something like a million dollars in transfers of money during the year, there never was a moment in time, I'm told, that the national debt really went down.

Now I talk about this tonight because we're going to talk about taxes and what we haven't done and what we should do, and I just wanted to point out that when Congress tells you what the deficit is, add several hundred billion dollars to that, now less this year than other years because this year for the first time there was no surplus in Social Security, but there was a whole lot of surpluses in other areas.

So, remember, it's the unified budget and the public debt that they're talking about, but it's the national debt that we need to fund, and that's the debt that determines how much money we owe and what the interest on that money will be.

Madam Speaker, I've thought a lot about taxes. If we had a zero percent tax rate, we'd collect no money. And then if we had a 100 percent tax rate, we'd collect no taxes because nobody would work if you're going to take all their money. So I thought a lot about what's that magic number: somewhere between zero percent where you collect no taxes and 100 percent taxation where obviously you'll collect no taxes because nobody's going to work. Somewhere in there is the magic number where you're going to collect the most taxes.

Now obviously if taxes are too high, 100 percent, nobody's going to work; and if you come down from 100 percent, people are going to drop out. It's not worth working; the government takes so much money. So what is that magic number where we will not depress the economy and, therefore, have the biggest revenue from our taxes?

I submit that it is probably less than where we are now, because Tax Freedom Day, I think, is sometime in April. I haven't seen the number for this last year. But Government Freedom Day--that's when you can work the first day so that you can have money to buy your car and pay your mortgage and send your kids to college--that's sometime in July. For a year or two, it was just about July 4th, and I thought, How nice. That's the second freedom that we now have. We have the freedom to use the money that we've made for ourselves; government's not going to take it.

Tax Freedom Day is sometime in April; Government Freedom Day is in July. You may have a different perspective, but I think that that's kind of a pretty big burden. As a matter of fact, we may be collecting less revenues from taxes because the taxes are that high.

I want to spend the time remaining in talking about these last two articles that I mentioned, biofuels and our defense focus on energy. I have some slides here that will help to illuminate this. Of course, the thing that we're all concerned about now is the economy and taxes, and I think that if you don't factor energy in, oil particularly, you won't have considered all of the inputs that are going to determine what our economy will be.

The first slide that we have here, the first chart, it's several years old as you can see, 2008, a couple of years old, and you will see the highest price for oil there was less than $100 a barrel. It really went a little after this to $147 a barrel. These two lines here are the lines that are compiled by EIA and IEA. One of those is a creature of the OECD, to which we belong, and the other is a part of our Department of Energy. And they have been pretty consistently agreeing with each other. This, starting in 2002 and ending in 2008, represents the amount of oil that the world has pumped. And you'll see, for about 3 years before the recession, the supply of oil was constant.

Now, with a constant supply of oil and increasing demands, this year, China sold more cars to their people than we did in our country. China has now become the largest CO2 emitter on the globe, not yet the largest energy user, because they are not as good as we are at reducing the CO2 footprint. But what this says is that 3 or 4 years before the recession, the supply of oil was constant and demand was going up in our country.

We like to grow. The stock market has a lot of trouble if you only have about 2 percent growth, you may have noticed. And the Chinese are growing. India is growing. Brazil is growing. So there were increased demands for oil. And so the price you can see going up here. It went from $50 to $100 to nearly $150 a barrel. And then the recession.

Now, what does the future look like? Because unless you have some concept of what the future is going to be like, you won't be making rational decisions about taxes and spending, because energy is a huge, huge part of our lives. We live better than any civilization has ever lived at any time, largely because of the enormous supplies of this energy.

This next chart is world oil production, looking to the future and where will it come from. The dark blue here is conventional oil. That's the kind of stuff we have been using for a lot of years now. We started using it way back in the early 1900s, and we are producing more and more and more. And now, as this chart shows, we have reached a peak. It's called peak oil.

By the way, that happened in our country in 1970. It was predicted 14 years before that by M. King Hubbard, who was relegated to the lunatic fringe and ridiculed. But right on schedule, as he predicted, in 1970, we reached our maximum oil production in this country. The world, this chart says, has reached it now; and apparently that is so, because, as you just saw from the previous chart, both the EIA and the IEA had oil production flat for the last 4 years.

Now, what will the future look like? This is their projection of what the future will look like. They say that we are going to get from this light blue area a lot of oil. By 2030, we are going to be getting as much oil from fields yet to be developed as we are getting from all of our developed fields now. That may or may not happen. But even more speculative is this interesting red area: Crude oil, fields yet to be found. And that's almost as big in 2030 as the fields we now know and the fields we have discovered and are yet going to develop.

Now, the brown area is enhanced oil recovery, live steam and CO2 and pushing a lot of seawater down there if you are near it. These are ways to get some more oil out or, you know, opening up the fields down there and shale and so forth can get more oil out. So this is the additional oil we will get from fields that we now have. That's their guess as to how much that will be.

Nonconventional oil, that's like the heavy sour from Venezuela, and it's like the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, which are very interesting, about a million and a half barrels a day. Bitumen, I think, is what they call it. It won't flow, so you have to cook it and then add some volatiles to it so that it will flow.

I am reading a very interesting book, written by a Canadian, with a long discussion of the Alberta tar sands. They soon will have mined all that you can do by surface mining, and then it kind of ducks under an overlay that is too big to remove economically. So what they are going to have to do then is develop it in situ, which means, like, you know, pumping live steam down there to make it 1,000 degree temperature to soften up the stuff so that it will flow.

But this is a guess as to how much unconventional oil we will get. And then with natural gas--and we are using more and more natural gas-- there are some liquids that will come with that, so they will increase.

I think that both this light blue area and the red area and maybe the others, too, are kind of wishful dreams. I think that we will be more than lucky if this top line here is level. I think we will be more than lucky if we can make up through developing fields that we have already discovered, discovering new fields, and enhanced oil recovery and so forth, we will do very well if we can make up for the oil we are not going to get from the fields that we now know.

The next chart shows that in a very different way. If you had only one chart that you could look at that would help you decide what you need to do about your economy and what you need to do with taxes, I think this would be the chart. There is a lot of information on this chart. The vertical bars here are the amount of oil that we found in each of those years. And you can go back to the thirties a little and the forties and, wow, the fifties, and then it exploded in the seventies and through the eighties. And we just found a lot of oil, a whole lot more than we were using, because this solid line here represents the oil that we were using. Of course, the area under that will be the total amount of oil that you have used. And if you draw a curve over these, the area under that curve obviously represents the total amount of oil that you have found.

So up until about 1980 or so, we had, every year, found more oil than we had pumped. But then after 1980, look what happened. We are using more and more and finding less and less. Now, this chart is about 5 years old, as you can see, because the lightly shaded area there, which was a projection for the future, begins at 2005. And they were projecting a peak at about 2008 or 2009. That's precisely what happened, as you saw from the first two charts.

Now, the discoveries for the future are not going to be that very smooth

ever less and less. It's going to be up and down like this. But it's not going to be this kind of magnitude. The oil that we are finding now is in very difficult places. A major find in the Gulf of Mexico is under, what, 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. That is way down there.

An oil discovery of 10 billion barrels of oil, we heave a sigh of relief. Ten billion barrels of oil. Why do we worry? Why do we still worry if we've found that oil? And we may find several fields of that size. That is because, in the math, it's pretty simple. Every 12 days, we use about 1 billion barrels of oil. We use 84 million barrels a day. I think 84 goes into 1,000 a little less than 12 times. So every 12 days, we've used a bit more than 1 billion barrels of oil. So that big find of 10 billion barrels will last 120 days. That's it.

Notice the discontinuity in this use curve, a very interesting phenomenon. Notice the date back in the seventies.

The Arab oil shocks back then, it changed the world. In a way they were fortuitous and good, because look what happened, or look what would have happened if we didn't have those oil shocks.

This is the rate of increase in the use of oil. Had that exponential curve continued, we would be off the charts. That was a big wake-up call. And we, and most of the rest of the world, became very much more efficient in the way we use oil. Your new freezer and refrigerator and air conditioner is very much more efficient than those of the seventies and early eighties.

Exponential growth is a poorly understood phenomenon. Albert Einstein was asked, when they were talking about nuclear energy and what that was meaning to the world, what was going to be the next big thing that we'd find? And he said the most powerful thing in the universe was the power of compound interest.

If you just think about that, 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. And 2 percent growth is not much. It's kind of feeble. Our stock market doesn't like 2 percent growth. It wants more than that. But 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years. It's 8 times bigger in 105 years. It is 16 times bigger in 140 years; 16 times bigger in 140 years. Obviously, we're not going to be using 16 times as much energy in 140 years from now as we are using now.

So when you're thinking about spending and taxes and what we ought to be doing you need to keep in the back of your mind this reality. Gas is now a bit more than $3 a gallon. Oil is what? Pushing $90 a barrel. And the world is struggling to get out of this recession.

There are many economists who believe that when the world comes out of this recession it's going to demand a lot more oil. But we're up against a peak. We can't produce oil any faster. So when you have this demand for oil, and it cannot be supplied, the price is going to go up.

And you know, we, in this country, attributed this recession that we're trying to recover from to the housing bubble. But it was kind of the perfect storm. At the same time that we were doing grossly irrational things with financing these houses, we were also hit by peak oil. And I guess it's an economist debate as to whether it was the cost of energy effect or the housing bubble that was most responsible for bringing us to our knees.

Now, you can make any projection you want about the future, but one thing is absolutely certain. You can't pump oil you haven't found and developed. And the probability that we're going to be pumping meaningfully increased amounts of oil in the future is very, very small.

The next chart is one you need to be looking at when you're thinking about our taxes and our economy and what we ought to be doing, because this is the world according to oil. And the premise here is, let's draw a world where the size of the country is relative to how much oil in reserve that it has. What would the world look like? And then let's color it, so that those who are using a lot of oil show up as yellow, and then blue and then on down to lesser amounts of oil.

Well, you look at us over here. A couple of really interesting things. We don't have much. And we're the only country colored yellow. So we're big users of oil, and we don't have much. Well, we don't. We have only 2 percent of the world's reserves. We use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import about two-thirds of what we use.

Our largest exporter is Canada. Wow, they don't have probably as much oil as we have, and they don't have very many people either, so they can export oil.

Until very recently, our second-largest exporter was Mexico. They also have less oil than we. But their people are too poor. They have a lot of people. Their people are too poor to use the oil, and so they're exporting the oil.

Within about a decade, by the way, the rate at which they are using the oil and the decline in the rate at which they are producing oil, and that's about a decade, maybe less, Mexico will be an oil importer.

Venezuela. Hugo Chavez dwarfs us and Canada and Mexico and all the rest of South America. Huge relative to this side of the Atlantic, huge supplies of oil.

Saudi Arabia represents 22 percent of the landscape, if the country was sized relative to the amount of oil it has because it has about 22 percent of the reserves of oil in the world.

Iraq and little Kuwait, it looked to Saddam Hussein like an errant province down there on the southeastern border. Tiny. Qatar, even smaller United Arab Emirates, hard to find them on the map, isn't it? Look how big they are as far as oil is concerned.

And Iran, a present and growing problem.

Now, look at China over there. China's next to the biggest user, blue, next to the biggest user of energy to us.

By the way, this lighter blue here in Iran. With their present curve for exporting oil and their present increasing use of oil, within a decade, Iran will cease to be an exporter. And this is one of the problems that we face in the world. All these developing countries have increasing populations that, through the miracle of communication, know the benefits of industrialized society, and they're saying, hey, what about us?

There are 900 million people in China, three times our population, that live in rural areas that are making just that request of the Chinese government: What about us? So China has a huge challenge in supplying the energy needs of this developing population.

And there's Russia. They are vying now with Saudi Arabia to be the biggest exporter of oil in the world. They have more than us. About the same as Venezuela. They don't have anywhere near as many people as we have, and they don't use, per capita, as much energy as we use. So Russia is a big exporter. As a matter of fact, as I said, they're vying with Saudi Arabia to be biggest exporter in the world

India. Can you find India on the map there? A billion people, growing rapidly. Buying oil.

So you can see the challenge that this presents. And the recognition that we have got to look at our taxes, and we've got to look at our economy relative to the world situation and energy and what is likely to happen to the price of gasoline, because about 70 percent of all oil is used for transportation, and 90 some percent of all transportation is oil.

Relative to this is an interesting statement from Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State: We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word ``warping'' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something about the ``warping'' now of diplomatic effort by the all out rush for energy supply.

I don't have the chart here, but China is now buying oil all over the world. Why would China buy oil when it doesn't make any difference today who owns the oil? The person who comes to the auction with money, as we do every week, because we have only 2 percent of the oil, we use 25 percent of the oil; we simply buy the oil from those who have it because we come with the money to do that.

Your government has paid for four studies. Here are the four studies that they paid for starting in 2005, two of them in 2005, 2006, 2007. And one of them had two reports, but there were four studies: The DOE report, the

Hirsch study, Army Corps of Engineers, and Government Accountability Office. Oh, and the National Petroleum Council also did a study, but two of these are from the same study, just was reported later. All of these said essentially the same thing, that peaking of oil is either present--we didn't know then; you never know until you look back that it's peaked--or, imminent, with potentially devastating consequences.

I just wanted to spend the last few minutes we have in looking at some of the statements in these four reports.

I think that we paid for the second, third, and fourth because we weren't happy with what the first report said. That was the Hirsch report. But they ended up all essentially saying the same.

Let's just spend the last few minutes we have together looking at some of the comments that were in these reports.

This is the Hirsch report: World peaking of oil is going to happen. It is obvious. Oil is finite. One day it will be gone. But before it is gone, we are going to reach our maximum ability to produce oil. Peaking of oil is going to happen.

Then they say that the world has never faced a problem like this. Unprecedented. The world has never faced a problem like this.

From the same report: The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically--$147 a barrel--and without timely mitigation-- which we have not done--the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented.

Now, we need to be thinking about this when we are thinking about taxes and spending. We are going to face some huge challenges.

By the way, I find facing a big challenge and meeting it successfully is very exhilarating, so I see these reports as challenging and exhilarating.

This next one is from the Army Corps of Engineers' study: Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. And, if you think about it, this is really true. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as a frontline energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. As President Bush said, ``We are hooked on oil.'' That is true.

This is a quote from Gene Laherrere, a very early pioneer in this, with Colin Campbell, a Frenchman and Scotsman, I think. But they were a number of years ago predicting that this was going to happen and the world should be paying attention.

We have had very optimistic projections of how much oil there is going to be in the future. These people have come down from that, by the way, way down from those hopeful projections. But this is Laherrere's assessment of the USGS Report: The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.

So Laherrere said that what they were proposing was utterly implausible. Now they have come way down from those projections.

As we are thinking about our taxes and our economy and what we need to be doing about that, this is a reality that we need to pay attention to. This is the top ten companies on the basis of oil production and reserves. The left one is production.

Now, we have some big giants like BP and ExxonMobil and Shell. They have 22 percent of the production. Companies that are owned by--well, they aren't companies, really. They are owned by a country. They have 78 percent of all the production.

Now, when it comes to reserves, our three big guys don't even show up among the top ten. They aren't even there. Ninety-eight percent of it is from countries like Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraq National Oil, Kuwait Petroleum, and so forth. LUKOIL, which is kind of private, Russia, is 2 percent.

As you are thinking about our taxes and our economy and what we ought to be doing, you really need to factor this in because it is a geopolitical reality that is going to make cutting taxes and reducing spending so that there will be something to buy this energy with, which is really going to go up, or our quality of life is going to plateau and turn down and our economies are going to sour quickly with very difficult recovery.

All these charts, by the way, you may have noted, are from the Government Accountability Office, a very respectable nonpartisan organization.

Worldwide Proven Oil Reserves by Political Risk. How much of it can we really count on and how much of it has some political risk involved? Well, let's see.

Low political risk, 413.

These are billion barrels, by the way, and these are going to add up to a bit over 1 trillion, which is a generally accepted number of how much oil is out there. Now, we will add a little to it, but it is not going to be a huge amount we add to it.

Medium risk, 314. And high risk, 389.

What this says is that only roughly one-third, a little more than one-third of the oil that is out there has low political risk, we could really count on in a pinch that it is going to be there. The other may not be there because there is medium and high political risk.

This same dynamic is shown in the next chart here, and this is by investment risk. Where can the big oil companies invest their money? Where can we invest our money? Where do we have low risk? Where do we have high risk?

Well, in 384 billion barrels, there is no foreign investment. They own it all. They don't need any money, so there is no foreign investment there. Only 165 billion barrels have low risk; 164, medium; 402, high. So just a whisker over one-fourth of the oil that is out there has low and medium risk.

I have been privileged to spend this hour talking about our economy and the impact energy is going to have on that.

Madam Speaker, I have come to this floor nearly 50 times to talk about an energy subject. The last time that I was here in the well addressing this subject was about 2 years ago. During those nearly 50 appearances, I came here as a prophet. And now I return to the floor as a historian, because the event that I was concerned about and predicting has in fact occurred.

Let me explain. In the middle of the last century, two speeches were given by men just about a year apart. I am not sure they even knew each other. They both talked about the same subject. The first of those speeches was given in 1956. It was, I think, the most important speech of the last century. It was given by an oil geologist to a group of oil men in San Antonio, Texas, in 1956. At that time, the United States was king of oil. We produced more oil, we exported more oil, we used more oil than any other nation in the world.

M. King Hubbert predicted to that audience that in just 14 years the United States would reach its maximum oil production. That would be in 1970. And then we would produce less and less each year after that. Remember the context. The United States is in 1956 the largest oil producer in the world, the largest oil exporter in the world, the largest oil user in the world. This was an absolutely preposterous prediction. And so M. King Hubbert was relegated to the lunatic fringe.

Just a year later, about a year later, the father of our nuclear submarine

gave a speech in 1957, May 15, I believe, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a group of physicians. The audience is irrelevant. You can Google and get this speech. It was found a few years ago, and it's now on the Internet. If you Google for ``Rickover and energy speech'' it will come up. His speech had nothing to do with the audience that he was talking to, because he could have been talking to any audience.

Hyman Rickover noted that we lived in what he called this golden age of oil. We had been about 100 years into that age of oil. And he noted how much of the quality of life that we enjoyed then was a result of having discovered how to exploit this resource that we found under the ground.

Every barrel of oil--and when I first heard this statistic I was unbelieving; how can it be?--every barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of effort. That means when oil was $12 a barrel, that wasn't all that long ago, you could buy the energy- enhancing qualities of a person working for you all year long, and you could buy it for $1. Because there are 12 man-years of effort in a barrel of oil.

When I first heard that statistic, when I first read it, I thought, gee, that can't be true. And then I thought: I drive a Prius car, and it gets an honest, if you are careful the way you drive, about 50 miles per gallon, a little less in the winter. With the winter blends you don't get quite the same mileage. And you know, if I pushed my Prius 50 miles I could do that, but it would take me a long time to pull and push my Prius 50 miles. And just one gallon of oil, one out of the 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, will take my Prius 50 miles. So I thought, well, gee, that's probably true, isn't it, that there are 25,000 man hours of effort in one barrel of oil.

Hyman Rickover made what I think was an obvious statement. He was a scientist, of course, and he made what I think was an obvious statement, and that was that oil would not last forever. And he said that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man that the age of oil would be but a blip. He had no idea how long the age of oil would be. When he spoke, we were about 100 years into the age of oil. He did not know how long it would last, but he was certain that in the 8,000-year recorded year history of man it would be but a recorded blip.

We now know how long the age of oil will last. By the way, he made several very meaningful statements. One of them was that how long it lasted was important in only one regard. The longer it lasted, the more time we would have to plan an orderly transition to other sources of energy. Of course, we have done none of that.

We now know how long the age of oil will be. We are now about 150 years into the age of oil, and we are not going to run out of oil for a while. But what we are running out of is our ability to produce oil as fast as we would like to use it.

Back to M. King Hubbert and his speech just the year before Hyman Rickover gave his speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fourteen years elapsed; and sure enough in 1970, and we didn't know it in 1970 because we had to look back a few years after that to see that was it really true. But in 1970, we indeed did reach our maximum oil production in the United States. If you look back now at the oil production, it's very obvious that that was true.

By 1980, it was conspicuously true. We were really, really now moving down the other side of what is frequently called Hubbert's Peak. And so I tell audiences that we have now blown 30 years when we knew of an absolute certainty that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States: we did peak in oil production in 1970. And he predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

Now, it's very rational that the United States would be a microcosm of the world. And if he was right about the United States peaking in 1970, shouldn't we have had some concern that he might just be right about the world peaking about now?

We peaked in oil production in spite of the fact that we have found oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico that M. King Hubbert did not include in his prediction. And in spite of the fact that we have now drilled more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together, not only have we peaked in oil production, but we have slid so far down the other side of Hubbert's Peak that we now produce just about half the oil that we produced in 1970.

As a matter of fact, we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil. We really know how to pump oil because with that 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, we pump 8 percent of the world's oil.

What that means, of course, is that on the average, our wells are going to run dry sooner than the average well around the world, because we are pumping our oil four times faster than the average well in the world.

I have some charts here that may illuminate what we have been talking about. I have not seen the sequence of these charts, and so we will just speak to them as they come up.

The first chart is what is known as the oil chart, ``Peak Oil, the Growing Gap.'' If you had but a single chart to look at to tell the story of where we have come from and where we are going, this, I think, would be the chart.

As you can see it, it's a little out of date, because we were predicting the future back there in, what, about '05 and now we are at 2010. And when we get to that part of the chart, we will see how very correct this chart was in its prediction.

The vertical bars here are the discoveries of oil and when we discovered it, and notice that back in the late 1930s and 1940s there were some meaningful discussion and, boy, they just crescendoed through the 1960s and the 1970s and some in the 1980s.

Now, this solid black line here is our consumption of oil. And, of course, the area under that curve indicates the total consumption of oil up to that time. So you can see, up until the 1980s, we were discovering oil faster than we were using it. So we were accumulating an ever bigger and bigger reserve of oil. That's all of this oil above that use line.

It's a production line and a use line. We didn't store any. We used it as we produced it, so it's both the pumping of oil and the consumption of oil.

Now, since the 1980s we have had to dip into these reserves because our discovery of oil has fallen down and down and down since the 1980s. As a matter of fact, we now find only about one barrel for every four or five or six barrels of oil that we pump.

Now, you can make some predictions about the future from this oil chart, how much oil would we be using. This is the world, by the way, oil production, and world use of oil and how much reserves do we have left and how long will they take us. You can make some guesses about how much more oil we will find, and we are now finding some meaningful reservoirs of oil. We may find a reservoir of oil that has 10 billion barrels of oil. Wow, that sounds like a lot of oil, doesn't it?

And maybe our concerns about the future of oil go away when we find 10 billion barrels of oil. We use 84 million barrels of oil a day in the world, and it's pretty simple arithmetic to figure out how many times 84 million goes into a billion, and it's a bit less than 12. What that means is that in less than 12 days the world uses a billion barrels of oil. What that means is when they tell you that we have discovered a field of 10 billion barrels of oil, that will last the world 120 days.

Now, how much more oil will we find? Much of the oil that we are finding now we are not pumping because you can't even develop those fields at, what, $85, $90 a barrel, wherever we are today with oil, because it has got to be more expensive than that before you can afford to develop these fields and pump the oil.

And, also in these new fields, which are generally very deep, maybe under 7,000 feet of ocean and 30,000 feet of rock--as some of the big finds in the Gulf of Mexico were--oil has to be a bit higher than it is today before you can afford to develop these fields and then one never knows how much oil you are going to get, in fact, from those fields.

Well, back to the oil chart here. If you look at, oh, here's the 1970s, remember the Arab oil embargo and the big shocks that we had in the 1970s? That produced some traumatic and very fortunate changes in the world, and its use of oil.

Notice, notice this exponential curve up to the 1980s, to the Arab oil embargo, the 1970s and 1980s. Had that continued, had that exponential curve continued, it would be now off the top of the charts. That was a real shock to the world's economy and to our country, and we developed some more efficient ways of using energy. So now with more people living better, the slope now is very much lower than that previous slope.

I just want to pause and reflect for a moment on this exponential function because it is a poorly understood function. When someone tells you that there is enough coal, for instance, to last us 250 years at current use rates, be careful to note that at current use rates.

Now the National Academy of Sciences says, in fact, we probably don't have 250 years of coal at current use rates. It's probably closer to 100 years of coal at current use rates because we haven't really looked at those reserves since the 1970s.

But let's say that we had 250 years of coal at current use rates, and we are going to increase its use only 2 percent. Now, that's not much. As a matter of fact, our stock market doesn't like an economy that's growing at only, at only 2 percent. But if we increase the use of oil just 2 percent, the 250-year supply drops to 85 years. You see, just 2 percent increase in growth doubles in 35 years; it's four times bigger in 70 years; it's eight times bigger in 105 years; it's 16 times bigger in 140 years.

There is a very interesting story about the exponential function. I don't know whether it's true or not, but it's a nice story.

Chess was invented in an ancient country, and the king was so impressed with the contribution that he told the inventor of the chess game that he would give him anything he wished up to half his kingdom. And the inventor of the chess game said I am a very simple man, I have simple needs. If you will just take my chess board and put a grain of wheat on the first block and two grains on the second and four on the third and eight on the fourth and just continue doubling those grains of wheat until you have reached the last of those, what, 64 blocks on the chess board, that will be adequate, sir.

The king thought to himself, silly fellow. I would have given him anything up to half my kingdom, and all he asked for is a few grains of wheat on his chess board.

Had he been able to make that contribution, of course, it would have consumed all, it would have consumed more than a decade of all the world's production of wheat. This is the exponential function, doubling it. So whenever you hear somebody say, we have so much of gas or coal or oil or whatever it is at current use rates, please calibrate that. What does it mean if we increase its use? And by the way, we are going to be needing to use coal for things other than just coal and stoking a furnace and making electricity. We would like to make some oil out of it as Germany did during World War II and South Africa did. And you can make some gas out of coal. And if you use some of the energy from coal to convert it to a gas or a liquid, if you have this 250 years--which we don't--and it drops to 85 years at only 2 percent growth rate, it then drops to 50 years if you use some of the energy and divert it to gas or liquid.

And then there's another very interesting reality that you will deal with whether you like it or not. You will share your oil with the world. You can't avoid it because if you were using the oil you've produced from your coal, someone else will be buying the oil from Saudi Arabia that you might have bought. So the reality is that you will share it with the world. Since we use one-fourth of the world's oil, 4 goes into 50 12\1/2\ times. What that means is that now this 250 years of coal, reduced to 85 years with only 2 percent growth, reduce to 50 years if you use some of its energy to convert it to a gas or a liquid, and then it shrinks to 12\1/2\ years as you share it with the world, as you must, because there is no alternative if you use oil produced from your coal; someone else will buy the oil you might have bought from Saudi Arabia or some other oil-producing country.

Well since the 1980s we have been consuming some of the reserve because we've not found enough oil to meet our needs. Now this chart, as you can see, the actual known amounts, ended in about 2005. And then you see the lighter shaded part on the other side where it shows their prediction. And they predicted that oil production worldwide was going to peak in about 2010. Here we are. Now I think a little later we will have some charts that show, in fact, that that was true.

Now what happens from now on? You can make your own guesses as to what is going to happen from now on, you can make your own assumptions. We have still much of this reserve left that we can pump, fortunately. This amount we've pumped here is just about this amount. So we have about this whole amount here covered by my hand that we can yet pump.

Now we're going to find some more oil. The chart here shows an orderly downward progression because the more you find, the less there will be to find in the future, so the less you are going to find in the future. It will not be like that. It will be up and down like this, but it is going to be down and down because most of the large fields that will be found have been found. So you can make your own assumptions about where this is going in the future by assuming how efficient can we get, how much conservation are we going to do, how much more oil will we find. But from this oil chart, you can do a lot of predicting about what the future is going to look like.

This next chart is a quote from Admiral Hyman Rickover in this talk that I mentioned that he gave to this group of physicians in 1957, There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago. It took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect--the longer they last, the more time that we have to invent ways to live off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

Now, of course, we have done none of that. We and the world in general have behaved as if all you need to do to find more oil is to go look for more oil and it will just be there if the market incentives are appropriate.

I love this next paragraph: Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.

This is Hyman Rickover's statement. One might conclude looking at the behavior of our civilization that this is precisely what we have done. I have 10 children, 17 grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. Would it be okay if I wanted to leave them a little oil? We are leaving them a huge debt. And wouldn't it be nice if they had some oil, gas and coal? Now they will have some. But as we will see in future charts, it will not be what they would like to have.

This is a fairly new chart, and it shows what I predicted. I said that I was a prophet because nearly 50 times I came to the floor, the last time about 2 years ago, then I was predicting that conventional oil was going to peak. And here they show it. This is the dark blue. Look at it. 2010, it's peaked. And they recognize that the world situation will not be meaningfully different from that in the United States, that it's going to go down, down, down. And here it goes.

Now they're making an assumption here that you may or may not agree with. I hope they are right. I doubt that they are right, because what they say here, and this is crude oil fields yet to be developed, and this red is crude oil fields yet to be found. And they believe that by 2030, that's not very far in the future, that by 2030, about two-thirds of all the oil that we will be using will have come from fields yet to be developed and fields yet to be found.

Now there are many experts in oil that will tell you that this is a happy dream, that there is little chance that that is going to happen. Now we have some other sources of oil. We have natural liquids, and they see those growing. We have nonconventional oils, and

they will grow somewhat. These are heavy, sour oils, for instance, the kind that we get from Venezuela. It's the oils that we get from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada, at considerable expense of energy, environment, and so forth. Well this same chart produced 2 years ago would not have looked like this because just 2 years ago, the same people that give you this chart today would have had conventional oil production going up and up. So now there is a recognition that conventional oil production has, in fact, as predicted by M. King Hubbert, peaked in the world. It peaked in our country in 1970.

The next chart shows some detail of that peaking. There are two entities in the world that do a really good job of tracking the production of oil. They do not do as good a job in predicting the future of oil production. They do a very good job in tracking how much oil is being produced. One of those is a part of our Department of Energy, the EIA; the other is a creature of OECD, the IEA, and you see those two curves here, and they both show essentially the same thing, and that is, in the 3 years before the recession, oil production was flat across the world, 84 million barrels, a little over 84, 85 million barrels a day of oil production.

Now, pretty simple economics: With flat production and increasing demand, what happened to the price of oil? Oh, here it is. Now this chart only goes to less than 100. You remember it went to $147 a barrel a little bit later off this chart? Well now we had the recession worldwide and demand for oil dropped conspicuously.

The price of oil momentarily dropped from $147 a barrel to less than $40 a barrel. The world's economy has begun to recover now, and the price of oil is slowly inching up. It is $85, near $90 a barrel.

I am reading a book brought to me by an oil scientist, an engineer from Canada, and he makes a prediction that I have been making, so I have some additional confidence that I can restate that prediction. It is that unless we do something really serious about conservation and about efficiency and about husbanding the fossil fuels that we have remaining, that the next recovery will be short lived; because as the world recovers, it will demand more oil and there will not be more oil because we have plateaued, and so the price will go from $100 to $150 to $200 a barrel and the economy will be squelched.

Four years ago I led a codel of nine Members of Congress to China to talk about energy. I was stunned. They began their discussion of energy by talking about ``post oil.'' Now, in our country and in the Congress here we have a lot of trouble thinking beyond the next election because it is really important that you get yourself reelected. And our businesspeople have trouble thinking beyond the next quarterly report because, gee, that better look good or the stockholders are really unhappy and the board of directors may replace you if that doesn't look good. So it came as quite a surprise to me that here are people who are looking a long way down the road. We are not post oil yet.

By the way, I say we know how long the age of oil will be, and it will be about 300 years. Hyman Rickover said that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. He had no idea how long it would be in 1957 because we were there on the ascending part of Hubbert's peak. But he knew that it was finite and he knew that it couldn't last forever and knew that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man that the age of oil--the golden age, he called it--would be but a blip. We now know how long the age of oil will be. It will be about 300 years.

We are about 150 years into the age of oil, and we are not running out of oil. There is a lot of oil left out there; at least as much more oil to pump as we have pumped in the last 150 years. But for the future, that oil will be ever harder and harder to get and more and more expensive. We are now slipping down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

We have talked a lot about Hubbert's peak, and here is some old data on Hubbert's peak. It went up in 1970, and then down. You see where we are today. The actual is the green squares there. We now are down to less than half the oil that we have produced in 1970. That is, again, from drilling more wells than all the rest of the world put together, from finding oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, which we didn't expect to find.

There are two other interesting things on this chart. Hubbert's prediction was the little yellow triangles here. The actual production from the lower 48 is the green. If you add the oil we found--and remember the huge find of oil in Canada and Alaska, and I have been there. I have been at the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline. It was just a blip in the downward slope of Hubbert's curve. Now, there are those who would like to convince you that Hubbert didn't know what he was talking about because there is a huge difference, they will tell you, between his actual prediction and those green rectangles.

Now, I think the average person looking at that would say, gee, he got it pretty close, didn't he. Now a statistician looking at it might say he kind of missed it. He predicted that we would peak in 1970. We peaked in 1970. We are now about half of what we were producing in 1970.

I mentioned, when we put our first chart up, that if you had only one chart, that would be it. I think if you were allowed a second chart to give you some idea of the challenges we face, this would probably be that second chart.

This is the world according to oil. This imagines a world in which the surface area of a country is relative to how much oil the country has. So the more oil the country has, the bigger it appears on this map; and the less oil a country has, the smaller it appears on this map. And then the things are colored. The coloring is who uses the oil. Well, you can't read this, but yellow is the biggest users of the oil. That shouldn't surprise you. That is us. The blue is the next biggest users, and green next down the line.

Well, look at this chart. Saudi Arabia is pretty big. As a matter of fact, it is 22 percent of all of the land mass in all the world if the surface area of a country is relative to how much oil it had.

And look at little Kuwait there. It looked like a little province on the corner of Iraq to Saddam Hussein when he wanted to claim it. Wow, look at how much oil it has--just about as much Iraq has. And Iraq and Kuwait and Iran are big oil producers.

By the way, look at Iran there. It is a pretty big oil producer, and notice its color. It is blue. It uses a lot of oil. Not nearly as much as we use, but it uses a lot of oil. The truth is that, within a decade, Iran will be an oil importer if their domestic use continues at its present rate and they do not increase their production.

Just looking at production in these OPEC countries, back when the world could produce more oil than it might use, if they produced extra oil, it simply drove the price of oil down. Remember when OPEC got together and decided to reduce the production of oil so we can keep the price up. And then they said the amount of oil that you can pump is a certain percentage of your reserves of oil. So OPEC countries that wanted to pump more oil, they just suddenly had bigger reserves of oil without finding any new oil. They just said they looked at it again, the statistics, and they had more oil than they thought. Well, having said that, they could then pump more oil. So we really aren't sure what the size of these countries are, but they are big. But we aren't sure how big, because we are not sure how truthful they were in what they said about their reserves.

By the way, they pumped oil for 10 years, and they still had as much oil to pump as they had 10 years ago, without finding any new oil. So there is a lot of suspicion about how much oil is really there. But there is a lot of oil there, and the size of the countries, the oil reserves are relatively what is shown here.

Our biggest importer of oil is Canada. Until a bit ago, our second largest importer of oil was Mexico. That has been replaced now by Saudi Arabia.

Look at Canada and Mexico. They don't probably have much more oil than we have. Canada has way less than we have, maybe half to a third, yet they are our biggest importer. They can do that because they don't have very many people in Canada to use the oil.

Mexico, which has two-thirds as much as we, they were our biggest exporter of oil. We got the second largest amount of oil from Mexico until recently. They have a lot of people, but they can't afford to buy the oil, so they are exporting the oil.

The second-largest oil field in the world was the Cantarell oil field in Mexico. This was an interesting field. There was a Mexican fisherman by the name of Cantarell, who brought his fishing nets in, because they were fouled with oil, and took them up to Pemex, which is the national oil company in Mexico. If your fishing nets are fouled with oil, you know who to go to because all of the oil is owned by the national company there.

So they finally said, Gee, where are you finding all this oil? We didn't know we'd spilled that much oil.

He said, Come. I'll show you.

He showed them, and it was kind of bubbling up out of the ocean, and they had drilled there.

For a number of years, it was the second-largest oil field in the world. The largest, of course, is the huge Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia. The Cantarell oil field in Mexico is now in rapid decline, falling about 20 percent a year.

Look at Venezuela. Wow, it dwarfs us, doesn't it? Venezuela has-- what?--two, three times the amount of oil that we have.

See if you can find Europe on this map. Here they are. They're tiny, tiny little countries. Lots of people. Little oil. Dependent on somebody else.

The really remarkable thing, though, is China. It is blue over there. It's getting close to yellow. Just a few months ago, China surpassed us as the largest CO2 emitter in the world. There are 1.3 billion people in China.

Look at India. Dwarfed. Dwarfed by China. Here it is. There are a billion people in India. Through the miracle of communications, these people know the benefits of an industrialized society, and they are demanding of their leadership those benefits, so there is a huge, huge demand for energy in China and India, and they have very little.

Russia. I think Russia is now the largest exporter of oil in the world. They don't have the most oil, not by a long shot, and most Russians are too poor to use much oil. They are very aggressively developing their oil fields, and so Russia is now a major exporter of oil. But note the relative size of Russia. I would think Kuwait is probably larger than Russia, isn't it?

Well, you can imagine all of the geopolitical frictions that are going to occur in the future as the availability of oil becomes less and less, as it is harder and harder to get and as its price goes up and up. What do you think will happen with the demands and the tensions in the world?

Well, as I've said, if you had two charts to look at, the oil chart-- the first one we showed, I think--would be the first one. This would be the second one because there is an awful lot that you can conclude and surmise from this chart.

Now, this chart was implicit in the last chart that we showed you, but this shows it more dramatically. This left-hand bar is the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil production in 2004. That was a few years ago, and it would be a bit different now.

Gee, here are the big boys, those huge corporations that can have a $1 billion profit, which is not excessive because it's a lesser percentage than the smaller, profitable, little company. Here they are: Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP. They have only 22 percent of the top 10 production. Seventy-eight percent of that is all in country- owned oil facilities. Look at them: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela, and so forth.

Now, the picture is even more distorted if you look at the right-hand bar. These are the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserves in 2004. The big actors in our country don't even show up on that chart. They own so little oil that they're not even among the top 10. They don't even exist on that curve. There is only one that is only kind of not national, and that's Lukoil, in Russia, which is 2 percent. Otherwise, all of the reserves, the top 10 largest reserves--all of those--are owned by countries rather than companies.

I mentioned that I went to China. I led a CODEL there--there were nine of us--to talk about energy. They began their discussion of energy by talking about ``post oil.'' That kind of blew me away that they were thinking this far ahead. Then they had a five-point program, and everybody knew it. It wasn't just the people concerned about energy. Everybody we talked to in China was tuned into this five-point plan:

Conservation. You know, there is a lot of conservation back in the Arab world.

Do you remember the van pools? We didn't have any cell phones then and no Internet, but we had 1-800 numbers, and you were encouraged to get in van pools.

Do you remember the little decals over the light switch? Don't be foolish--turn out the light when you're not in the room. Do you remember the decals over the thermostat? Turn it up in the summertime and down in the wintertime. Do you see any of those things now?

We knew then it was only temporary. I am having a lot of trouble understanding our collective response to these two situations. Back then, we knew it was temporary. We didn't have enough oil because the Arabs wouldn't sell us the oil. They had plenty of oil to sell. They just were unhappy with us for the moment, and they wouldn't sell us the oil. Yet we did rational things in conservation: We got more than one person in a car. We, you know, turned off the light switch. We turned up the thermostat in the summertime and down in the wintertime.

I have no idea why, collectively now, we don't have this kind of a response when oil is more than $80 a barrel and when there is a growing recognition that the world has reached its maximum production of conventional oil, and we will be more than lucky if we can find enough unconventional oil, or new oil, to make up for the loss that we are going to have in conventional oil as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

Conservation, what is it? Conservation is using a Prius instead of a gas-guzzling SUV. That's efficiency, I guess, too. If you put two people in it, then it's really conservation, isn't it?

I remember driving down the road, with two of us in our Prius, and we passed an SUV. I thought, gee, we're getting--what?--six times the miles per gallon, per person, in this Prius at 50 miles per gallon than that one person is getting in that SUV. We could almost immediately, if we had to, if we had the will to, drastically cut our use of energy for transportation. Drive down the road, and see how many people are in the HOV lane. Look at how many of our people are driving with one person in a pickup truck or an SUV.

A bit ago, I was in France, and I was looking at how many people were driving pickup trucks and SUVs for personal transportation. On that trip, I did not see a single SUV. On the trip before, I saw one. They weren't driving it. It was parked in the parking lot up at that church up on the hill. I don't know how long it had been there. As far as I can see, they don't even make in Europe the equivalent of our passenger pickup trucks. They have some little trucks that are about the size of ours, but they aren't vanity kinds of trucks. They are ugly, little things that are really utilitarian. They carry stuff around. It's not something you would buy to carry yourself back and forth to work.

There are enormous opportunities for conservation. This is where China says it begins.

Then they say: Domestic sources of energy and diversify as much as you can. That's what everybody is trying to do, and many of those domestic sources will be alternative sources of energy.

Then the fourth one is very interesting: Be kind to the environment. They recognize that they are a huge polluter, but they have 900 million people in rural areas who, through the miracle of communications, as I mentioned, know the benefit of an industrialized society.

They're asking, Hey, what about us?

And China, I believe, understands that if they can't meet the needs of those people, that they may see their empire begin to unravel the way the Soviet empire unraveled. So they understand that although there is a huge

environmental consideration, there is an even bigger consideration on their part to supply energy for these 900 million people in rural areas. So they build a coal-fired power plant, about one a week--I forget the number, a fairly large number of nuclear power plants that are presently under construction.

The fifth part of this is a really interesting one, international cooperation. They know that there is nothing really meaningful that any single country can do, and so they plead for international cooperation. I was so impressed in that picture when they looked back over their shoulder on their way to the Moon, and you saw this little spaceship that we call Earth, and that's it, that's all there is, and there's nearly 7 billion of us living on it.

And so they recognize that this has got to be a global, international cooperation; or it's going to be really tough. But while they plead for international cooperation, they plan in the event that there won't be any.

Here is a chart, a world energy picture in January--this is '05, so they would have acquired some more oil since then--and you can see the little symbol here for Chinese investment in oil and gas. They are buying oil and gas all over the world. And I asked the State Department, why would they do this because today it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. We own only 2 percent of the oil, and we use 25 percent of the oil; that's because we go to what is in effect a global market for oil and we bid and we get 25 percent of the oil. So today there is no advantage in owning oil. So why would the Chinese be going around the world aggressively buying oil and gas? By the way, they almost bought an oil company in our country. You remember all the furor over that when they almost bought that oil company here.

Well, at the same time China is buying gas and oil around the world, they are also buying goodwill. What do you need, an airport? Hospital? Soccer fields? Roads? Watch the newspapers at what China is doing as they go around the world buying this gas and oil.

Well, at the same time they are buying gas and oil around the world, they are very aggressively building a blue water navy. Now a major concern of China is Taiwan, a little country the size of Maryland, 23 million people--we have about 5 or so--three-fourths uninhabited because it's mountainous. Oh, gee, you can inhabit mountains. But I went to Taiwan. You don't inhabit those mountains. They are really, really steep.

China has 1.3 billion people. Why are they so concerned about Taiwan? I had the privilege of spending about an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half or so and we explored that. The concern of course is that if Taiwan can declare its independence, so can a number of other provinces; and they see their empire unraveling. And so I hope, pray, please, tonight that we can resolve Taiwan issues through diplomacy rather than war.

Well, at the same time they are buying all this gas and oil and buying goodwill around the world, they are also aggressively building a blue water navy. They don't need a blue water navy to protect their interests in Taiwan; a brown water navy will be just fine there, thank you. I believe--I hope I'm wrong--I hope I'm wrong about a lot of things, by the way--every time I came to the floor, just about 50 times, and talked about peak oil I said I hope I'm wrong, because if I'm not wrong, the world faces some real challenges. By the way, that's not all bad. There is nothing so exhilarating as meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and the energy future that we face is a huge challenge. So I find it exhilarating.

Remember the exhilaration of putting a man on the Moon? We need to have that same kind of exhilaration. What are we going to do so we can continue--not just us, but my 10 kids, my 17 grandkids and my two great-grandkids, so that they can live as well as we're living? We're going to have to be very creative and innovative, and we can do that in our country.

I hope that the day does not come when China says, gee, guys, I'm sorry, but it's our oil and we can't share it because we don't have enough for our people, and we have a navy big enough to say that we're not going to share it. I hope that day doesn't come.

There are three groups that have common cause in solving three very different problems with exactly the same remedy, and these three groups are forever harping at each other, criticizing each other's premise instead of locking arms and marching forward, because the solution to three very different problems is just about exactly the same solution.

One of those groups is the group that these statistics identify that are really concerned about our national security. We have 2 percent of the oil reserves in the world. We pump that oil, I mentioned earlier, really fast. We produce 8 percent of the oil. We have only 5 percent, a little less than 5 percent, of the world's population and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil, importing about two-thirds of what we use.

Now what is the solution to this? The solution to this is to develop more of our own oil if we can, but that's really tough because we are now really down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So the ultimate solution to that is alternatives. So those who are concerned about national security want to free ourselves from dependency on foreign oil by using alternatives because of national security interests.

A second group we've been talking about all evening are those that are concerned that it just is not going to be there. Of course, the solution to diminishing supplies of fossil fuels is to supplement them with alternatives.

And there is a third group that we haven't talked about yet--and I am kind of a card-carrying member in all three of these groups--and that is a group that's concerned about climate change. Now, I don't know if they're right or wrong, but what I do know is that what they want to do about that is exactly the right thing to do from a national security perspective.

It's exactly the right thing to do, if you believe in climate change or peak oil. These three groups all have exactly the same solution to very different agendas. What we ought to be doing is stop harping at each other's premise and simply lock arms, because whether you believe that the excessive use of fossil fuels is changing the climate or not is irrelevant because excessive use of fossil fuels is certainly diminishing their supply. And from our perspective, a national security perspective, we don't have enough of them. So the solution to all three of these problems is more dependency on alternative fuels.

We are near closing time, and I just want to point out--and we'll come back again because there are some wonderful quotes from these five reports--four studies, but two are reports from one study. Your government has paid for four different studies; all of them were prophetic. As I mentioned, we are now historians because peak oil has occurred. But all four of these studies were saying--they were in '05, '06 and '07. And your government didn't like the conclusions of the first one in '05, and so they had another one in '06, another one in '07. They all said the same thing.

The peaking of oil is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences. We still aren't paying much attention to this, are we? With the world's economy still floundering and oil already at more than $80 a barrel, what do you think will happen to the price of oil when the world's economy really starts to come back?

Well, let's end our discussion here tonight. I have been pleased to spend these moments with you talking about something that's very important to me but I think even more important to my 10 kids, my 17 grandkids, and my two great grandkids.

When we come back again, we're going to talk about these reports and what they said, and we'll have some quotes from these reports.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 41 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, December 3, 2010, at 4 p.m.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor a constituent of mine who was recently honored by his peers within the trucking industry. Mr. John ``Jack'' Saum was named the 2010 Dealer of the Year by the American Truck Dealers, ATD, and Heavy Duty Trucking magazine during the annual ATD Convention and Expo in Orlando, FL. The award recognizes excellence in dealership performance, industry leadership, civic contributions and community service. The winner was chosen by a panel of distinguished professors from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

Mr. Saum is Chairman of the Board of Beltway Companies, LLC, which is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland in my Congressional district. Beltway Companies LLC is a truck dealership with six locations in Maryland which provide sales, parts and service to a large number of trucking companies and their truck fleets. Two of Jack's dealerships are in the Sixth District. Central Maryland International Truck is in Hagerstown, Maryland. Central Maryland International Truck and Idealease is in Frederick.

Mr. Saum has been involved in the truck business for more than 40 years having begun his career with International Harvester as a sales trainee in 1969. He held a series of management positions with International Harvester in the Northeast region of the country before joining Beltway International in 1984. Mr. Saum initially served as general manager at the Beltway dealership and assumed the role of dealer principal in 1997 when he purchased the dealership.

Under his leadership, the dealership grew exponentially from a single point location in Baltimore to six locations throughout Maryland.

Mr. Saum is also a strong supporter of green technologies both in commercial trucks as well as dealership fixed operations. His innovative business approach is exemplified in his ``A New Truck is a Green Truck'' initiative which focuses on environmentally friendly truck technologies. With support from the National Automobile Dealers Association, NADA, and Navistar, Mr. Saum has led efforts to educate public officials about the environmental and fuel efficiency advantages of new truck design improvements with a focus on new diesel-powered trucks, diesel-electric hybrid trucks, auxiliary power units, APUs, and retrofit programs. Another example of Jack's commitment to being a green truck dealer was his incorporation of ``green'' features at his newest dealership in Frederick. Jack installed a recycled oil heating system at this state-of-the-art facility that reduces the carbon footprint of Beltway's operations.

As part of his education outreach, Jack contributed a new class 8 18- wheeler ``green truck'' as an exhibitor at the second annual Go

Green Conference that I hosted in Frederick, Maryland on June 7, 2010. This free community service event featured more than 125 exhibitors including over 25 energy efficient, low emissions green vehicles. These exhibitors were mainly small and local businesses, like Jack's, committed to help homeowners and small business owners discover practical ways you can save money, use less energy, protect our environment and go green on any size budget.

Jack has been a winner of multiple awards from International for dealership performance, financing, lease and rental and operations excellence. More importantly, Mr. Saum was named International Dealer of the Year for 2004 which is the highest honor an International dealer can earn.

Madam Speaker, I am honored to represent Mr. Jack Saum and many of his employees at Beltway Companies, LLC. I ask that you and other Members of Congress join me in congratulating him for this recent honor and for his effort on behalf of his fellow customers, his fellow business owners and all Marylanders. I wish him the best for continued success in the future.