Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the career and achievements of a great military officer and constituent of the Sixth District of Maryland--LTC Donald S. Champion. After over 29 years of long and distinguished service Colonel Champion will retire from his present position as Chief, Congressional Outreach Program in the Office of Air Force Reserve, Policy Integration Directorate, AF/ REI, Pentagon, Washington DC. For the past 3 years Colonel Champion has been responsible for all legislative outreach as well as all legislative matters concerning Reserve Plans and Programs and Operations for the Air Force Reserve and Air Force Reserve Command.

Colonel Champion graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University receiving a bachelor of arts degree in communications and public relations. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1979. He attended undergraduate navigator training at Mather Air Force Base, California. Following graduation he attended F-4 Replacement Training Unit at Homestead Air Force Base, Florida, where he was a distinguished graduate. In 1984 he was selected to attend undergraduate pilot training at Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas.

After earning his wings he attended lead-in fighter training at Hollman Air Force Base, New Mexico, where he was selected as Air to Air Top Gun. He was assigned to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia following training to fly the F-15C. There he served as a flight commander. He returned to the training world where he served as a T-37 Instructor Pilot at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas. He went on to become a T-38 instructor pilot at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi.

Throughout his distinguished career, Colonel Champion was consistently recognized for his outstanding performance and dedication to duty. For the past 3 years Colonel Champion has served as a liaison to the United States Congress where he well and faithfully represented the Air Force Reserve to the House and Senate. He was personally helpful to me and my staff during his tenure on the Reserve Staff at the Pentagon. His military awards include the Meritorious Service Medal with one oak leaf cluster and the Air Force Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters.

On behalf of a grateful Nation, I thank Colonel Champion, and his daughters Kelsey and Lindsay, for their commitment and sacrifices made throughout his honorable military career. Congratulations on completing an outstanding and successful career in service to our great Country.

Madam Speaker, I want to begin this evening's discussion by reading a little reminisce that was written by one of my staff members, Dr. John Darnell. He's imagining that he is talking to his granddaughter at some future date, and this little reminisce is called, ``Making It Through the Energy Crisis--Future Reminiscences with my Grandchildren.''

``Grandfather, tell us the story about the men who went to the Moon and barely made it back--and how that was like when the world discovered there wasn't enough oil.

``Oh, you mean Apollo 13. Yes, that story is very much like what happened back in the energy crisis of 2008, before you were born. What those astronauts had to do to survive was very much like what the world had to do.

``Tell us the story, Grandfather!

``Apollo 13 was one of many trips to the Moon and back, some returning without landing. This trip was planned to include a landing to explore the lunar surface. When they left Earth they were on a `safe return' trajectory so that if something went wrong, their craft would have automatically looped around the Moon and returned on the proper path for a safe landing. In order to land on the lunar surface, however, they had to adjust their trajectory for a better orbit for the landing. Once they had made that adjustment, they were no longer on the `safe return' trajectory.

``And, that's when the problem happened?

``Right! A sudden, loud bang announced the problem--there had been some warning signs that something was not right for some time before, but the controllers didn't know what to make of them--and in a similar way the early symptoms of the energy crisis were misunderstood and ignored.

``So, what was the loud bang?

``One of the liquid oxygen tanks that powered the command module's fuel cell and supplied oxygen to breathe had exploded! When they finally realized what had happened, they had to quickly shut off the oxygen to the fuel cell to save what was left. That meant there was no power for the command module. Fortunately, in planning the mission, they had rehearsed what they would do if the command module lost power--they would use the lunar lander as a `lifeboat'! That's like what we called 'contingency planning' in preparing for anticipatable disruptions of the world's energy supplies.

``So, that's how they got back safely?

``Well, yes, but that wasn't all there was to it--their problems were far from over.

``First, not only could they no longer land on the Moon, but the power and oxygen they had assumed would be available were now limited to what the lunar lander could supply--only intended for two people for a few days on the surface--which now had to be stretched out to supply three people for the trip all the way back to Earth.

``How could they get by on so little?

``By purposeful conservation! By that I mean that it was not enough to just use a little less energy; they had to use a lot less.

``The astronauts not only had to save enough to make it all the way back before their supplies ran out, they also had to have enough power to spare to operate the controls of the lunar lander during two course corrections.

``The world in 2008 faced a very similar problem: availability of fossil fuels had reached a peak and could not keep growing to match exploding demand, not to mention needs of business as usual. And, not only did the world have less energy available than it could have used, but, as with the astronauts, purposeful conservation was needed to save enough extra to have resources, including energy, to spare for investing in the shift to a more sustainable energy path.

``It sounds like the astronauts almost ran out of time if they hadn't changed course to speed up their return--which used up some of their reserves! How close did they come to running out?

``Very close. Every minute and every breath used up precious supplies--the time they bought by conserving made it possible to invest in the course corrections, with very little to spare! Not only that, but they had an unanticipated complication: carbon dioxide was building up in their atmosphere--they could have returned intact, but dead from asphyxiation!

``That's spooky--the world today has the same problem--how did they solve their problem?

``It wasn't easy! It took creative, out-of-the-box thinking and collaboration among the crew and backup crew on Earth, using a duplicate capsule on the ground. Eventually they were able to improvise a makeshift device, using materials on hand, including a sock, to adapt the command module's filter to the lunar lander.

``Of course, as you point out, there has been a parallel need to curb global carbon dioxide emissions that has limited choices of technologies as the world has shifted to a more sustainable energy economy. Conservation, itself, dramatic efficiency improvements and carbon-neutral and sustainable energy resources all have helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions far below 'business as usual' projections, while homegrown businesses and jobs have flourished far in excess of the losses in traditional industries.

``They were really lucky to have overcome all those problems to make it back safely when it looked like they didn't have a prayer!

``You're right; it was pretty amazing that they made it! Maybe more than you realize--when they made their course corrections, they had to use hand calculators and steer by hand to hit a reentry 'window' that was like the thickness of a sheet of paper four feet way. If they had missed it, their reentry vehicle would have either burned up or bounced off into space!

``But, it wasn't just luck. They had prepared and rehearsed contingency plans in case of anticipatable emergencies, so they didn't panic; instead they communicated, cooperated, collaborated creatively, and rose to the challenge with determination to do what was necessary to make it, even if it meant some hardship. And some prayer probably didn't hurt!

``It has taken a similar sense of determination, worldwide, for us to make it as far as we have in the transition to a sustainable energy economy. In the past 20 years we have come a long way toward that goal but there is still a long way to go. And it was by no means inevitable or easy. There were many points where it could have gone seriously awry. In the early years there was a lot of denial, anger and blame, and an impulse to fight over control of access to the remaining oil and gas.

``But, there is still oil and gas being used today--we didn't run out--why didn't they realize that we could switch to renewable energy sources like we use today?

``A lot of people thought we could do just that--along with a slew of other things that seemed reasonable . . . But, by the time the crisis hit, fossil fuel prices were killing the economy and everything cost so much that no one had any money to spare to invest in any of the alternatives . . . And, when the shortages hit, there was nothing ready to turn to as a substitute on the scale that was needed--time had become a scarce resource as well as money and energy itself! And, every proposed solution was competing for those same scarce resources!

``Reluctantly, people came to see that only one thing could accomplish what was needed: purposeful conservation! Even in the midst of the crisis, contingency plans could be implemented rapidly at almost no cost, buying time, saving money, extending the depleting resources and further reducing costs by falling demand resulting in lower prices.

``Conservation with the purpose of investing the conserved resources in greatly improved efficiency buys still more time and lowers the level of energy needed for a comfortable standard of living--a level that can be sustainably and affordably be supplied from a variety of sources.

``I see--since even efficiency takes time, money and energy, you have to start with purposeful conservation to buy time and be able to afford it and so on. But, today everyone seems to take that for granted--what made the difference?

``International cooperation instead of confrontation. Consuming Nations committed to reducing their consumption in concert with a calculated decline in production by producing countries--faster than natural depletion rates. This had the effect of making things predictable, creating reserves and extending the resource productivity, assuring that no one is tempted to seek an unfair advantage, and reducing competition for control of dwindling resources, that is wars.

``The second profound change has been the challenge of the 'International Race to Sustainability.' Like the race to the Moon that spawned the Apollo missions, the Race to Sustainability has captured the imagination of innovators all over the world. Much of the resources that had been formerly dedicated to building military capability in anticipation of a struggle of control of fossil resources are now

being directed toward the prestigious goal of leading the Race to Sustainability.

``Now, as you know, there are ongoing competitions that demonstrate self-powered, zero energy communities, both new and retrofitted. Self- powered, net food and fuel producing farms that are now commonplace, as increasingly are self-powered manufacturing in the renewable sector. Even transportation is becoming self-powered with the increasing deployment of highly efficient, Personal Rapid Transit networks.

``Wow, Grandfather, the way you tell it, the story of the world's transition to sustainability is almost as exciting as the Apollo 13 story! We're so lucky to be alive to be a part of it!

``Yes, it is an exciting time to be alive! With new, highly efficient technologies, the energy available whenever there is access to sunshine, blowing wind, running water, the energy of the ocean or the Earth's heat, can bring prosperity! The world has never seen such widespread prosperity! Increased democracy, better education of women, health care are following close behind.

``Thank you, Grandfather,'' very much for this story.

I read this because I think it sets in perspective what we want to be talking about today, and I have a chart here that kind of tells us where we are and what's been happening recently.

This chart could go back through the 8,000 years of recorded history, and it would look just the same as it does in these last 400 years of recorded history. The amount of energy being produced would be very low, not discernible from the baseline as a matter of fact, and now we start with the Industrial Revolution using wood here, and you see the increased energy production. And then we learn to use coal, and boy, it shot up. But then when we learned to use gas and oil, it really took off. And that curve is one that we're going to see several times in the charts that we're going to see just in a few moments, and this curve is on a very compressed abscissa. So it's a very sharp curve.

It shows a couple of very dramatic things. First of all, it shows that the rate of increase in the use of gas and oil up through the Carter years was on such a trajectory that it would now be well off the top of the chart if something had not happened. That something that happened was the oil embargoes in the 1970s and the oil price spike hikes that inspired people to be more efficient. We actually had a recession.

Here you see it as a drop in the demand for oil around the world, and it's not so plain on this chart because the abscissa is so compressed. We're going to see it on subsequent charts.

The rate of increase in the use of oil is now on a very much lesser slope than it was at the beginning. It's interesting to note that the world's population essentially followed this curve. The world's population started out down here through about 8,000 years of recorded history at something like half a billion or so people around the world, and now it's increased to what, nearly 7 billion people. If we had a population on here, it would pretty much follow the rate of increase in the use of fossil fuels here, the release of energy. That's because our quality of life has been so much affected by this incredible amount and quality of energy that we've found under the ground.

The next chart takes us back a few years to show us how we got here and the warnings that we have had, that we were going to be here. Oil at $140 a barrel was not unanticipated if you had looked at the warning signs. And incredibly, most of the world and most of the leaders in our country have chosen to ignore or not look at these warning signs.

Back in 1956, it was on the 8th day of March, a very famous speech was given by M. King Hubbert to a group of oilmen in San Antonio, Texas.

And what he predicted was that by 1970 the United States would reach its maximum oil production. Now, that was preposterous when he made that prophesy because we were then king of oil, I think producing more oil, consuming more oil and exporting more oil than any other country in the world. And to suggest that in just 14 years no matter what we did we would reach our maximum capacity for producing oil was just silly to those who listened to it. But right on schedule, in the 1970s, you can see from the chart here, we reached our maximum oil production, just as M. King Hubbard had predicted. He became a legend, an icon in his own lifetime.

This chart shows us another thing, and that is the attempt by one of the groups out there who are still kind of in denial about whether or not we're reaching that point where the world has no more ability to produce an increased amount of oil. CERA, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, they use this chart to try and convince you that M. King Hubbard really didn't know what he was talking about.

The ``Hubbard curve'' was the lower 48 prediction here, and the actual oil production from the lower 48 are the green squares. And maybe a statistician could convince you that those are different curves, but I think to the average layman, gee, M. King Hubbard had it pretty right, this is what he predicted would happen, and this is what happened.

Now, if you take the total U.S. production, because we found a lot of oil in Alaska and we found a lot of oil--we have about 8,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico--and if you add those two production sites to the lower 48, which he predicted, you see we get just a blip in the slope down the other side of Hubbard's peak.

Now, I want you to take a look at where we were in 1980. That's about here. And you're looking back and you can see, gee, M. King Hubbard was really right, wasn't he? The world did reach its maximum oil production in 1970.

And I'm going to use this time period, 28 years, because I think that we had known, of an absolute certainty, for 28 years that we were going to be here today. M. King Hubbard was right about the United States; we peaked right on schedule. I think it was in 1979 that he predicted the world would be peaking about now.

Now, if he was right about the United States--and the United States is certainly a microcosm of the world--why shouldn't he be right about the world? Essentially no attention was paid to this. Essentially no preparation was made for the inevitability that the world would reach this maximum production.

The next chart looks at where the world has been and where the world is going relative to oil production.

There are a number of bars here which show when oil was discovered and how much of it was discovered. Notice that the first discoveries were in the forties, and then, boy, some really big fields found here in the fifties. And then most of it found in the sixties and peaking about '80. But ever since the sixties it's been down, down, down. And that's in spite of ever-more incentives to find oil, in spite of ever- better techniques to discover oil, like computer modeling and 3-D seismic. And we now have a pretty good notion of the Earth's geology, and it's known that oil can exist only in certain unique geologic formations.

The solid black line here indicates the consumption, the worldwide consumption. Now, we saw that curve on the first chart we showed you. There we had really compressed the abscissa here because we have 400 years instead of 100 years on it. And remember that curve was going up very sharply and then there was the recession during the seventies? And then a much slower rate of increase because today we have much more efficient air conditioners and refrigerators and freezers and so forth. We better insulated our homes. We used to do a lot of things to conserve energy. Note where this curve would be now if this rate of increase had continued. It would be off the top of the chart, wouldn't it? So the embargoes of the seventies and the oil price hikes then were really a blessing in disguise because it encouraged us to do what we ought to have been doing even before that, and that was to become more efficient.

Now, what will the future look like? Now, that depends upon how much more oil you think we're going to find. But I would just caution that one needs to keep in mind this chart that shows what we have found. With ever-increasing incentives to find oil, it's been down, down, down.

Now, the creators of this curve kind of predict what they think the future

looks like, and they have oil peaking in production about now, which is about when M. King Hubbard said it would peak in production. Notice that since the eighties we have not been finding as much oil as we've been using, so we've filled in that difference between what we found and what we use by borrowing from the reserves back here. Everything above this line is a reserve. So we've been borrowing from these reserves.

We have a lot of these reserves left. And their projection for future discoveries--and I would have drawn the curve a little lower--but their projection for future discoveries is this curve. It's not going to be smooth like that, it's going to be up and down, but on the average, probably about that. So you've got to fill in the difference between what we discover and what we use by borrowing from the reserves back here.

Now, you can't pump what you haven't found. So if you think the future is going to be much different from what they project, then you have to believe that we're going to find a whole lot more oil than they believe.

The next chart. I mentioned the speech by M. King Hubbard that I thought was probably the most important speech of the last century. And I think that this one is the most insightful speech of the last century. This was a speech given by Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota on the 4th day of May, 1957, just a bit, a year after M. King Hubbard had given his speech. Now, I don't know if Hyman Rickover knew of M. King Hubbard, I don't know if he had read that speech. But these are a couple of things that he said, which I think are so obvious.

``There is nothing that man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy,'' he said, ``500 million years ago and 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 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.'' Wow, this was 51 years ago. We were then about 100 years into the age of oil, which he called this ``Golden Age.''

I really love this paragraph because I think it is such an apt description of where we are and who we are and what we're doing, which he felt, and I feel, is immoral.

``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly''--I haven't noticed that the world has been doing that with fossil fuel--``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.''

I think of this statement when I hear the pleas of those who say, ``Drill now, drill more, pay less.'' And the unfinished part of that sentence is, ``We don't really care about what happens to our kids and our grand kids, we want it now.''

Another counsel in Hyman Rickover's speech--and he says this 51 years ago, I don't hear our leaders saying this today--``I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants--those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.''

Hyman Rickover knew we were 100 years into the Fossil Fuel Age; he didn't know then how long it would last. Remember he said that no matter how long it lasted, the only important thing was that the longer it lasted, the more time that we have to plan an orderly transition to renewable fuels.

We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safe margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels. How much better off would we have been as a country and as a world if 51 years ago we had listened to Hyman Rickover, who said this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants. I have 10 kids, 16 grand kids and two great-grand kids, and I am genuinely concerned about what I'm going to leave to my kids.

Have we reached peak oil worldwide? This is in dispute by many people, but I just want to give you the data compiled by the two entities in the world that most effectively follow the production and consumption of oil. This is the IEA, the International Energy Association, and the EIA, the Energy Information Administration; the prior a European entity, and the latter a creature of our Department of Energy.

Here is their data, and they have pretty good concurrence. For about the last 3 years they show oil production worldwide as being flat. And what has happened in that 36 months? That oil production has been constant. Try as we might, the world has not been able to increase oil production for 3 years.

Three years ago, oil was about $52 a barrel. Today, it's $130, $140 a barrel. This is exactly what one would predict would happen with the constant supply and increasing demand. This kind of is, energy-wise, the perfect storm, because just at the time that the world has probably reached its maximum capacity to produce oil is just the time that the third world, led by India and China, are industrializing and demanding more and more oil.

Our rate of increase in the use of fossil fuels is only about 2 percent in our country, it's only been about 2 percent worldwide, but that is now increasing. The growth rate in India and China, they're not at all happy with 2 percent. The last data I saw, China's economy was growing at 11.7 percent a year, and their demand for oil was even greater than that because in this rapidly growing economy they haven't taken the time to make sure they're using these energy sources efficiently.

And it's not that we haven't been warned. We certainly knew from M. King Hubbard and what happened in 1970 in our country, and by 1980 we knew of an absolute certainty that M. King Hubbard was right about our country peaking in 1970. And by the way, we have drilled more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. In spite of that fact, we produce only about 8 percent of the world's oil and that's because we have only about 2 percent of the world's reserves.

Your government has paid for four major studies--they've resulted in five reports because one of the studies resulted in two reports--on this issue, and two of those were in '05. This was the first big report called the Hirsch Report, for the senior investigator on it, by SC IC, a very large, prestigious international engineering science organization. The second was a report later on in '05 by the Army Corps of Engineers. Then we had two reports in '07, just last year. The Government Accountability Office did a study, and at the request of the President and the Secretary of Energy, the National Petroleum Council did a study. And all four of these studies, in different words, said that the peaking of oil is a certainty. It's not if, it's when. The peaking of oil is a certainty. And it's either present or imminent, with potentially devastating consequences.

There are some really interesting and important geopolitical considerations, and this next chart looks at those. This is really an interesting chart. This is the ``World According to Oil.'' And this is what our globe would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil reserves it had. And we see some very interesting things here. Saudi Arabia dominates the planet. That's because Saudi Arabia has about 22 percent of all the oil reserves in the world. We think that's what they have. You see, most of the oil reserves are held by countries like Kuwait and Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iraq. We know a little bit more about Iraq because we're there, but these other countries hold their data very close. The world community cannot look at their data. We know what they're producing because we buy it. We really don't know what the reserves are. So these are estimates as a result of what they tell us they have in reserve. We hope there is that much there.

Some interesting things about this ``World According to Oil.'' Look at the United States over here. We have 2 percent of the world's oil. We're 50 percent of the land mass of the globe in the ``World According to Oil.'' And a very interesting thing is that the country from which we get our biggest supply of oil, Canada, has about half the oil

that we have in the lower 48 and Alaska.

The country from which we get our third largest--it used to be the second until a few months ago--Mexico, has considerably less oil than the United States. Now, Canada can export oil because there are not very many Canadians. The Mexicans can export oil. Although there are a lot of them, they're so poor they can't afford to use it, and so they're exporting.

But this shows that the first and third suppliers of oil in our country are very small reserves. They have between them about the same amount of reserves that we have, that is, about 2 percent of the world's reserves.

Another very interesting thing to look at is the size of China and India. More than a third of the world's population, about 2.4 billion people out of a little bit less than the 7 billion people we have. And look at their size. You can hardly find Japan here because Japan is almost totally dependent on outside sources of energy. But these two huge countries demanding more and more energy and they are dwarfed by Russia. Russia has maybe three or four times, three times the energy that we have. They don't have all that much compared to giants like Saudi Arabia, but they, I think, may be the world's largest exporter because they are very aggressively pumping the oil that they have.

The next chart shows us a logical consequence of this. I mentioned how small the reserves in China are; so what is China doing about that? And this chart shows what they're doing about it. This is a map of the world, and it shows where the Europeans have invested, where the Russians have invested, where we have invested, and where China has invested. Where you see a dollar sign, and I don't see very many of them, is where we have invested. This symbol you see where China has invested, and you see it all over the world. They even tried to buy Unocal in our country. But China is now buying oil all over the world, and they aren't just buying oil, they're buying goodwill. Do you need a soccer stadium, a hospital, roads? Why is China doing this? Because in today's world, it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. It is a global commodity. He who comes with the dollars gets the oil. I hope it continues to be dollars. If it's euros or something else, our economy is even in more trouble. So why are they buying oil all around the world? Of course, you can't get inside the heads of the leaders there, but you can only guess why they are doing it from some other things that they're doing.

One of the other things they're doing is very aggressively building a blue-water navy. They're building their navy much more aggressively than we are and much faster than we. They launched--the exact number I'm not sure of, but maybe ten or so submarines last year; we launched one. Their navy will soon be bigger than ours, nowhere what our Navy is.

China this year will graduate six times as many engineers as the United States graduates, and about half of our engineers are going to be Chinese and Indian students. The Chinese will graduate more English- speaking engineers in China than we graduate the total number of engineers in our country. It is impossible for a country that is so aggressively pursuing education in these technical areas, with a huge population and a great work ethic, to not be a serious challenge to us, by and by, economically and militarily.

Is this huge navy that they're building necessary because they want to be able in the future to use their oil and not share it with the world, as now you must? In order to use their oil, they are going to have to have a navy big enough to protect the sea lanes so that they can have access to their oil.

The next chart, this chart shows the 10 companies on the basis of oil production and reserve holdings. Now, we have giants in our country, oil companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell and so forth, and many people believe the price of oil is high because somehow they're gouging us. The bar on the right here shows the reserves of oil, and these are the top 10 companies or countries that hold oil reserves. And you see that 98 percent of all of the top 10 are oil countries, where oil is owned by the country. Now, that was pretty obvious from that chart we had that showed the world according to oil, but this puts it in bar chart form.

Luke Oil, which is kind of independent of Russia, has only 2 percent of the 100 percent of the oil that's owned by the largest 10.

The bar on the left here shows production. This is not who owns it but who is producing it. Now, even though these people own the oil, our oil companies might be producing it for them. But that's not true because, you see, if you take the top 10 in the production of oil, 78 percent are these companies in North Africa and the Middle East, and only 22 percent is represented by the giants: ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP. Only 22 percent represented by these giants.

The next chart shows some numbers that shocked a number of our people. And the President has a letter from at least 3 years ago now by 30 prominent Americans: Boyden Gray and McFarlane and Jim Woolsey and 27 others, including several retired four star admirals and generals, really concerned, telling the President: Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import about two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. What if we didn't have access to that oil? They said this is a problem we have really got to fix.

Now, we are really good at pumping oil. You see our little 2 percent of the oil reserves results in 8 percent of the world's production. So our oil wells are going to be pumped down quicker than the average oil well in the world, and we have actually less than 5 percent of the world's population. We have about 1 person out of 22, and this 1 person out of 22 uses a fourth of all of the oil in the world. This is not lost on other nations. They understand this, and they are watching us to see what we do.

The next chart is a chart from the first study that I mentioned, the Hirsch Report, which resulted in two publications. And this is a chart which shows us very explicitly what T. Boone Pickens is telling us in his ads, that you're not going to drill your way out of this one.

Now, this chart makes what I think and what others think is a grossly unrealistic projection, and that is that we're going to find as much more oil as all the reserves yet to be pumped in the world. Now, as LaHerrere says, this is an absolutely implausible projection. Remember that big chart showing the down, down, down, and they are suggesting that's going to turn around and produce as much more oil as all the known reserves in the world today. And even if that happened, even if that happened, it would push the peaking of oil out to only 2016, it says here. This is one of the reasons T. Boone Pickens says you're not going to drill your way out of this.

Oil consumption up through the Carter years was so great that every decade--and think about this. This is a stunning statistic. Every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Had that curve continued, when you've used the half the oil, which is where I think we are now, you would have 10 years of oil left. And that's not 10 years at this rate because in the future it's going to be harder and harder to get. That's what has happened in the United States, harder and harder to get, less and less of it, and because of the world's supply and demand, ever higher and higher prices.

Look what happens if you find ways to get more of it out. Then you really fall off. If you're concerned about your kids and your grandkids, you would like to leave a little something for them. But even if you did that, it pushes the peak out only to 2037, this chart says.

Now let's look at energy and how much we use and where it comes from because this will tell us what our options are for the future and what our challenges are for the future. I would like to use an analogy relative to this chart which I think is easy to understand. A young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a considerable fortune, and they have established a life-style where 86 percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 14 percent of it comes from what they're

earning. And they look at how old they are and how long they're likely to live, and they say, ``This is going to run out before we retire. We have got to do something.'' There are only two things they can do, one or both of these. Either they can use less, spend less, or make more. And that's precisely where we are in terms of energy, that 86 percent of all of the energy we use is our grandparents' inheritance. It's fossil fuels that were placed in the ground a very long time ago over a very long time span. And we now are removing them from the ground in a very short time period. And, of course, one of the consequences of this is we are now dumping into the atmosphere CO2 that had been sequestered from the atmosphere over a very long time period in the past. We're now releasing that into the atmosphere in a very short time period. And many people are concerned about this increase in CO2 and what it's doing for global warming and climate change and so forth.

Only 14 percent of the energy we use comes from sources other than coal, natural gas, and oil. But eventually as we run down, and oil and gas and coal are not forever--that's obvious that they are finite, that they will run out. The only question is when we are going to reach the peak and how long it will take before we run down the other side of the curve of the age of oil. So ultimately we are going to be living entirely on renewable energy and nuclear energy. Now, we may add some additional renewable energies here. We're the most creative, innovative society in the world, and what we can do when we have to is just absolutely incredible.

Note that a bit more than half of all of the energy we use that's not fossil fuels comes from nuclear. It's 8 percent of our total energy used. It's about 20 percent of our electricity. If you were in France, it would be about 80 percent of your electricity. So, clearly, that could grow. I know some people that have been really opposed to nuclear, but these are bright people, and when they look at a probable alternative to not producing more nuclear, which is shivering in the dark because of lack of energy, more nuclear doesn't look like a bad alternative to shivering in the dark; so they now are more focused on the potential of renewables and nuclear.

And here we look at the present renewables, and you see hydroelectric, and that's probably not going to grow in our country. We have dammed about every river we should and maybe a few that we shouldn't have. The biomass, that can grow a little bit. That's primarily energy produced by the timber industry and the paper industry, wisely, using a byproduct that would otherwise go to the landfill.

Solar and wind here are just trifling. They are a tiny part of the 6 percent here. And they are growing. They are growing like 30 percent a year. But when you start out so small, even 30-percent-a-year growth represents a tiny, tiny percentage of our total energy.

Geothermal here is true geothermal. It's not hooking your air conditioner to ground temperature, which you really ought to do. If you don't do that, what you are trying to do in the summertime to cool your house is to heat up the outside air. If what you're trying to do is heat up the ground, which is 56 degrees, that's a whole lot easier than heating outside air, which is 100 degrees. And the reverse is true in winter, of course.

The next chart shows the U.S. energy consumption by sector. And this is important because where are we going to have our real challenges in energy production? About 40 percent of our energy is electric power, about 28 percent of our energy is transportation, 21 percent industrial, and residential and commercial is about 11 percent.

The next chart looks at where we get the energy from for electricity. Mostly we are talking about liquid fuels, but electricity is also a challenge.

And the take-away from this discussion is that the future for transitioning to renewable alternatives for electricity is a very much brighter future than transitioning to fossil fuels.

And here we look at what we're producing electricity from today. Almost half of it is from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. And that can't go a whole lot. Microhydro might be as big as this by the way without the impacts on the environment that this big macrohydro does by damming up rivers. Petroleum, very little petroleum produced here. Other gases and other forms of energy, pump storage and so forth you see there. Now in a fossil fuel deficient world, coal is going to go away eventually. Natural gas is going to go away eventually. And the petroleum, liquid fuels and coke will go away eventually.

The next chart is a blowup of a tiny part of that chart. And this shows renewables. Only 2\1/2\ percent of our electricity is produced by renewables. It is really small. One-thirtieth of our electricity is produced by renewables, and much of that by wood. And if we want to sustain our forests and still build houses--and we're having trouble stabilizing that now--we probably can't grow that a whole lot. Wind, boy, that can really grow. I look around and I see almost no wind machines, and I see leaves on the trees blowing everywhere. And so we could have a whole lot more wind machines and a whole lot more energy from that. Waste. That could and should grow. But I will caution that that is self-limiting. That waste stream you see go to the county landfill--and watch what is dumped in the county landfill. Almost everything dumped there is going to be the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. And in a fossil fuel deficient world, that waste stream is going to be very small. We ought to be burning it. I think that is a better alternative than putting it in a landfill. What is even better is we ought to be recycling where that is appropriate. But burning is a good idea. But that is not a solution to our problem. And it's not a true renewable. It's a sensible thing to do. But it's not a true renewable, although it's listed here because it's dependent on the use of fossil fuels for using most of it. And they're going to wind down. There will be less and less of that.

Geothermal, that could grow probably a lot because there are several places in our country where we're near enough to the molten core of the Earth, and we can tap into the heat of the Earth. And that is essentially an inexhaustible source of energy. In Iceland, I saw not a chimney in Iceland because all of their energy comes from geothermal.

Solar PV. Wow, I'm a big fan of that. China and Japan have the six largest companies in the world. We used to lead in that area. We have lost that lead. Now six of the largest producers in the world are in China and Japan. That is growing at about 30 percent a year. And wind is growing. Wind is bigger and growing very fast. But we're talking here about percentages of 2\1/2\ percent. This is 1 percent up here. Notice down there that our solar today is a tiny, tiny part of 1 percent, like 1/100th of 1 percent.

The amount of energy that we get from fossil fuels is just incredible. The world uses about 85 million barrels a day. We use a little over 21 million barrels a day, about one-fourth of that. And each barrel represents the work equivalent of 12 people working all year. It has been so cheap, such a high quality and so easy to get. When oil was $12 a barrel, in terms of life improvement by using energy, you could buy the work equivalent of one man all year long for $1. This is why Hyman Rickover referred to this as a ``Golden Age.''

About a year and a half ago, I had the privilege of leading a codel of nine of our Members to China. And I was shocked. My colleagues were shocked when we started talking about energy with China. They talked about post oil. Post oil. We have trouble in our country thinking beyond the next election or thinking beyond the next quarterly report. In China, they seem to think in terms of generations and centuries. There will be a post oil world. And they're looking at what needs to be done to get there in an orderly fashion. They have a five-point plan. And everybody we talked to there knew it. Everybody knew. No matter what sector of government we were in, they talked about the five-point plan.

Number one is conservation. Do you remember the little story I read about the grandfather telling his grandchildren the story of Apollo 13 and the analogy of that to our transition from fossil fuels to renewables, or at least 20 years of it? It all began with purposeful

conservation. That is the number one thing we have to do. That is not just riding in a Prius rather than an SUV. Coming to work the other day, I noticed in front of me was an SUV in one lane with one person in it, and a Prius in the other lane next to it with two people in it. I thought to myself, the people in that Prius are getting six times the miles per gallon per person as compared to the person riding in the

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, July 21, 2008, at 12:30 p.m.

Madam Speaker, there was a very interesting editorial in the Wall Street Journal today. Let me read a bit from it. Talk about timing. It is, perhaps, fortuitous.

``On Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Prague, signing an agreement that's a first step toward protecting Europe from ballistic missile attack. As if on cue, Tehran, yesterday, tested nine missiles, including several capable of reaching southern Europe as well as Israel and U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East. Remind us. Who says Iran isn't a threat?''

Yesterday's test offered no big surprises about Iran's missile technology, but they are a useful reminder of just how real the Iranian threat is and how rapidly it is growing. One of the missiles tested was the latest update, the Shahab-3, which has a range of about 1,250 miles. Replace the payload with a lighter one, say, a nuclear warhead, and the range gains 1,000 miles.

Add a booster, and the range can be extended even farther. North Korea did just that with its Taepodong-2 missile.

Technology that is passed along to Iran. U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran will have a ballistic missile capable of reaching New York or Washington by about 2015. But Iran may already have the capability to target the U.S. with a short-range missile by launching it from a freighter off the east coast. A few years ago, it was observed practicing the launch of Scuds from a barge in the Caspian Sea.

This would be especially troubling if Tehran is developing EMP, electromagnetic pulse technology. A nuclear weapon detonated 100 miles over U.S. territory would create an electromagnetic pulse that would virtually shut down the U.S. economy by destroying electronic circuits on the ground. William Graham, head of a congressional commission to assess the EMP threat, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee this morning. We hope someone asks him about that.

I attended that hearing. And he was asked about that.

Let me give you a few quotes from his testimony this morning.

``Several potential adversaries of the capability to attack the United States with a high altitude nuclear weapon generated electromagnetic pulse, and others appear to be pursuing efforts to obtain that capability. A determined adversary,'' he says, ``can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication. For example, an adversary would not have to have long- range ballistic missiles to conduct an EMP attack against the United States. Such an attack could be launched from a freighter off the U.S. coast using a short- or medium-range missile to loft a nuclear warhead to high altitude.

``Terrorists sponsored by a rogue state could attempt to execute such an attack without revealing the identity of the perpetrators.

``Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism, has practiced launching a mobile ballistic missile from a vessel in the Caspian Sea. Iran,'' he says, ``has also tested high altitude explosives of the Shahab-3, a test mode consistent with EMP attack, and Iran described the test as being `successful.' Iranian military writings explicitly discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely harm the United States.

``While the Commission,'' he says, ``does not know the intention of Iran in conducting these activities, we are disturbed by the capability that emerges when we connect the dots.''

Dr. Graham was the principal author of a report produced by the Commission to assess the threat to the United States from electromagnetic pulse attack.

And let me read a single statement from the introduction to this study. ``The electromagnetic pulse generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.''

And a little later we'll have a chance to note what those catastrophic consequences are.

Here is a report, the CRS report for Congress. ``High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse, HEMP, and High Power Microwave, HPM, devices threat assessments.'' And they discuss also this electromagnetic pulse.

The first chart shows us a quote from one of our now Senators that I had the privilege of serving with on the Armed Services Committee in the Congress before he went to the Senate, John Kyl. He says, ``Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, which I chair,'' he says,

``held a hearing on a major threat to the United States, not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea,'' and he might have added Iran.

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

The next chart is a quote from Major Franz Gayl, ``The impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries. The less-developed societies of North Korea, Iran and other potential EMP attack perpetrators are less electronically dependent and less specialized while more capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern conveniences.''

What they're saying is that if this EMP attack was made in one of these countries, that they would not be hurt anywhere near as much as we because they have a much less sophisticated infrastructure.

``Conversely, the United States would be subject to widespread paralysis and doubtful recovery,'' doubtful recovery, ``following a surprise EMP attack. Therefore, terrorists and their coincidentally allied state sponsors may determine that given just a few nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles the subjection of the United States to a potentially non-attributable EMP attack is more desirable than the destruction of selected cities. Delayed mass lethality is assured over time through the cascade of EMP's indirect effects that would bring our highly specialized and urbanized society to a disorderly halt.''

What is this EMP that these several reports and articles have been talking about?

The next chart, and this comes from the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency, and this shows how an EMP is produced. Our first exposure to this was way back in the early 1960s, 1961, I believe, over Johnston Island in a test, and then we were testing nuclear weapons in a test called Starfish. I think that was one in the series of the Fishbowl tests. And this test was the first one that we had conducted above the atmosphere. All of the other tests had been on a tower or underground. This one was above the atmosphere.

And we had some very surprising results from that. It was about, I think, 800 miles away from Hawaii and almost instantaneously, there were effects, electronic and electrical effects, in Hawaii from this extra atmospheric detonation of a nuclear weapon.

This chart shows what happens when the nuclear weapon explodes. There are some gamma rays that come out. They produce Compton electrons. And these Compton electrons then flow at the speed of light, line of sight, and if the weapon is, say, 300 miles high above the United States, that would cover all of the United States.

This EMP wave is like a lightning strike, although different than lightning. Or a static electricity. A really strong static electricity everywhere all at once. It's just hard to conceive of something like this, that there would be a simultaneous over all of the United States lightning strike, although not quite like lightning, that would destroy, if it were strong enough, all of the electronic devices in our country.

The features in EMP from a high altitude burst they say is wide-area coverage, high-field strengths, and they note here 50 kilovolts per meter. A little later we will talk about what the EMP Commission learned from a couple of Russians, Soviet generals who are now Russian generals, who said that the Soviets had developed 200-kilovolts-per- meter weapons. We will discuss a little later what that means.

Broad frequency band of a very broad range or frequency from D.C. to 100 MHz. ``Absence of most other nuclear weapons effects.'' There isn't any fallout because there is nothing to fall out. Fallout is produced when a weapon is detonated at the surface or near the surface and it blows a lot of radioactivity up in the air. In this case, there isn't any material blown up in the air so there really isn't any conventional fallout.

The next chart shows us the range, what would be covered by a weapon detonated at various altitudes. And this is looking at the center of our country near Iowa and Nebraska. And the surface, little red dot here in the middle, if it's detonated on the surface, very small area is impacted. If it is 60 miles up, you'd get a broader area; 200 miles up, you get a still broader area. And if you go 300 miles up, it covers all of the United States, the tip of Maine and Florida and the State of Washington.

The next chart shows, again, the coverage of an EMP, and this one shows how the intensity of the field degrades with distance. And there is this so-called ``smile effect'' from it. And the color coding over there shows the degradation of the intensity. It starts out with red in the middle, which is 100 percent, and then we get to the purple out here, and that's 50 percent. And you see that the degradation is cut into about half by the time you reach the margins of our country.

That's important when we look at the next chart because the next chart redacted the names of the Soviet generals, and now Russian generals is now redacted. The Commission--this is from the EMP Commission report.

``The Commission met with Russian Generals `blank' and `blank' who claimed: Russia designed a `Super-EMP' nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the near future.''

And one needs to note the close working relationship between North Korea and Iran.

The next chart further looks at this threat. And this again is from the EMP Commission, a Commission set up 4 years ago by legislation that I initiated. They have been working for 4 years now, and we are planning this year to extend their life another 4 years because it is absolutely essential, as you will see as we go on with the discussion, that both our military and our national infrastructure be aware of this threat and do reasonable things to protect our military and our country against this threat.

``EMP is one of a small number of threats that may,'' they say, ``hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society.'' That is quite a statement. What that means is that EMP is one of a small number of threats that may end life as we know it. It could ``disrupt our military forces and our ability to project military power.

``The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than during the Cold War.'' Then there was only one adversary. Today there are potentially many who have nuclear weapons or could acquire nuclear weapons and missiles and even short-range missiles, as was pointed out, that could be launched from a tramp steamer off our coast.

Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP's strategic attack option. My wife raised this question: Should you really be talking about this because you are giving these people ideas? And I assured her that every one of our potential enemies has in their open literature detailed discussions of an EMP attack and how it could be used and how they would use it.

A little later I'm going to show you a chart which is in Russian writing, and we can show you from the open literature of any of these countries that might launch an attack against us, in their open literature they know. Ninety-eight percent of the people in our country may know nothing about EMP and what it could do to us, but I will assure you that 100 percent of our potential enemies know all about EMP and what it could do.

The threat is not adequately addressed in U.S. national and homeland security programs. Dr. Graham is a scientist, and scientists frequently are capable of understatement. This is a gross understatement. The threat is not adequately addressed. The threat is not addressed.

You know, some things are too good to be true, and usually if something is too good to be true, it's not true. This thing is so bad, the potential is so

enormous, that some people think, gee, that's just too bad to be true, so it can't be true, like that's too good to be true so it can't be true, but I'm afraid this is true.

The next chart, and I'm really pleased at the quality of the nine members of this commission. These are top people with many, many years of experience. When I was just finishing my first two years of teaching medical school, 56 years ago now, Dr. Johnny Foster was designing nuclear weapons for our country, and he was the director of LLNL and the director of DDR&E.

Mr. Earl Gjelde, chief engineer and acting director, Bonneville Power Administration, very knowledgeable in our grid and its vulnerabilities.

Dr. Bill Graham, who was the chairman, he's had a long, long experience, has been appointed by a couple of different administrations. He was a science advisor, for instance, to President Reagan. He was Rumsfeld's deputy in their very important study on the emerging threat of ballistic missiles.

Dr. Robert Hermann, director of NRO. NRO is very interesting. Of course, just a moment to talk about NRO, National Reconnaissance Organization. Until just a few years ago even that name was secret, and they spend probably more money than almost any other agency in our country. There were several billion dollars that they couldn't account for, and we finally decided, gee, for what they do, that's small change, and we won't worry about that. You see, the NRO is the organization that buys and launches all of our incredibly expensive spy satellites, and he was the director of NRO; principal deputy assistant secretary to the Air Force; senior vice president, United Technologies.

Hank Kleupfel, advisor to the President's NSTAC; vice president of the very prestigious International Science Applications International Corporation.

General Lawson, a four star general, with a lot of experience.

Gordon Soper, who has a lifetime of experience, is director of the Nuclear Forces C3, the chief scientist at DCA.

And one of my favorites is Dr. Lowell Wood, director's staff, LLNL; technical advisor, SSCI and the House committee, the committee on which I serve.

When I first became interested in EMP, I called Tom Clancy, whom I know, and I knew that he had an EMP sequence in one of his books. And so I knew he knew something about it. And so I called to ask him about it. He said, well, if you read my book you know all I know about it because I put it all in the book. But he referred me to the person who he said was the smartest person hired by the U.S. government. That's a tall order because we hire a lot of people, but this Dr. Lowell Wood, he said, is the smartest person hired by the U.S. government.

And then Dr. John Woodard, who is executive vice president and deputy director of Sandia National Labs. That's an interesting one because I went out to visit the last of our 10 children who has a Ph.D. in computers working at the Sandia National Labs, and he brought home from work some little things that they had sent him that led me to believe there might be some expertise in Sandia National Labs that would be of use in our evaluations of this EMP threat.

So I asked him to inquire about that, and the next day I was over there I think for four or five hours for a classified briefing. Well, I didn't know when I went there that Dr. John Woodard, who is the executive vice president, was one of the nine members of this commission. So that was a very, very fortuitous trip.

I just wanted to note how impressive this group of people are.

Potential adversaries know about EMP. I wanted to spend just a moment on this because I don't want anybody to believe that we're somehow letting the cat out of the bag here in telling people what they don't know, and this is from the EMP Commission itself.

``Hypothetically, if Russia really wanted to hurt the United States''--oh, let me tell you about this. I was there and I think there were about nine of us, a codel, and we were in Vienna, Austria, with three members of the Russian Duma, Vladimir Lukin, who was ambassador here at the end of Bush I, and the beginning of the Clinton administration; the third ranking Communist, a tall, handsome blonde, Alexander Shabonof; and a bright, rising star in one of their parties there, Vladimir Rushkoff.

And we were there in Vienna with a personal representative of Slobodan Milosevic, and Slobodan Milosevic had the three captives, remember, and he wanted rid of them. And his personal representative there said, you understand how important it is for him to get rid of those three people, because if any harm comes to them while they're under his control, that's going to be bad news for him.

Jesse Jackson was there, and they really did not want to release them to Jesse Jackson. They wanted to release them to us. The head of our codel had promised that he wouldn't go there. I had not promised I wouldn't go, and so I volunteered to go. Other members of our codel said, gee, I wonder if we really ought to go, and maybe there will be several additional captives there if we go.

I assured them that if the Russians went with us--and by the way, the Russians joined the G-7 to become the G-8, and 6 days later, the framework agreement which we negotiated there was approved by the G-8. The only large country in whom the Serbs had confidence was Russia, and Russia told us, whatever we agree to in these negotiations, the Serbs will agree to.

Well, Vladimir Lukin sat in this hotel room in Vienna, Austria, for a couple of days during these talks, with his arms folded across his chest. He was very angry. He was looking at the ceiling. He said, you spit on us; now, why should we help you? And he made that statement because the United States had kind of said, you know, then oil wasn't $140 a barrel and Russia was very poor and their military was in decay, and we essentially told them, you know, we're the big boy, we'll take care of this, we don't need you.

And so Vladimir Lukin was kind of smarting under that, and he said, You spit on us; now, why should we help you? And then he made this statement. He said, If we really wanted to hurt you, with no fear of retaliation, we'd launch an SLBM, submarine launch missile. We wouldn't know where it came from; it came from the sea. And we'd detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and it would shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.

Alexander Shabonof, the third ranking Communist who was there, smiled and said, And if one weapon wouldn't do it, we have some spares, like about 10,000 is how many spares they had.

So I was there when they made that statement. The Chinese military writings describe EMP as the key to victory and describes scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in a conflict over Taiwan. They read all statements from the EMP Commission.

A survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by the Commission found widespread knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility, including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.

As I said earlier, maybe 98 percent of our people don't know much, if anything, about EMP, but I can assure you that 100 percent of our potential adversaries know everything about EMP.

Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse. This is from the Iranian Journal, March of 2001.

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

And the next chart shows a continuation of these statements to assure us that when we talk about EMP and the fact that we are vulnerable and we really need to do something about that that we're not letting the cat out of the bag.

This is from an Iranian Journal, December of 1998. ``If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. 150,000 computers [belong] to the U.S. Army. If the enemy forces succeeded in infiltrating the information network of the U.S. Army, then the whole organization would collapse, and the American soldiers could not find food to eat

nor would they be able to fire a single shot.''

This, by the way, is one of the other--when the report said there were just a few weapons that could bring us to our knees and end life as we know it, a really aggressive cyber attack that brought down all of our computers--and our computers control everything. They control your power grid. They control your communication. That is what they're talking about here.

``Terrorist information warfare [includes] using the technology of directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse.'' This is the Iranian Journal.

Terrorists have attempted to acquire non-nuclear radio frequency weapons.

What we're talking about specifically today and what our hearing was about and what the editorial in The Wall Street Journal was about was nuclear-produced electromagnetic pulse. We can produce here on Earth a very focused, targeted EMP. It is conceivable, for instance, that you can mount one of those in a van and go down Wall Street and shut down all the computers in the buildings right next to you. That is a very local thing. It would be hurtful, but we could recover from that.

The next chart really is an interesting one. To convince you that our potential enemies really do know about this, this is from a Russian journal, and there it is in Russian and it's obviously EMP. You can see the detonation of the weapon. You can see the sparks here in the power grid. You can see the resisters here, the fuses probably, they're all exploding.

The next chart shows an American translation of what the Russians were saying in this chart, and you will notice the same two figures here.

Electromagnetic fields arise from nuclear explosions which produce impulsive electrical currents and stress in aerial and ground conductors and cables--this is a direct translation, and it's sometimes hard to translate into smooth English words in another language--and in radio station antennas. Radio waves are also produced which propagate to large distances. And boy, they do propagate to large distances.

Electromagnetic fields and currents in the atmosphere arise as the result of the formation near the explosion of a shining region and a large region of ionized atmosphere produced by penetration radiation.

This is our translation of their description of the nuclear detonation and the production of these alpha particles and these Compton electrons.

Source, currents and stresses exhibit transient impulse with characteristics close to the impulse caused by lightning discharges. Its duration is a few milliseconds.

Well, some of the pulses, as a matter of fact, last a couple of minutes. There are some very long wavelengths in this that will couple with railroad tracks, for instance. There's some very, very short wavelengths which will couple with the tiniest fields in a chip.

For ground and aerial explosions, at a radius of a few kilometers from the center of the explosion, overstress between conducting aerial lines or electrical supplies and grounds reach tens and hundreds of thousands of volts.

While between the arteries of underground cables--ah, that's another thing, burying your cables won't protect you. Some of these long wavelengths reach underground and couple with the cables underground. So essentially everything is taken down. The one thing that is immune to it is fiberoptics. But unless you're using optical switching, it will do no good to use fiberoptics because the EMP will take out the switching. So if you have optical switching and fiberoptics, then you're immune to it.

But we can make all of our systems immune to it. It costs some money. Our fighter planes are all immune to it. The President's Air Force One is EMP hardened. We have a few satellites up there that are EMP hardened. But about 95 percent of all of our military communications go over commercial satellites. And the satellites are the weakest link in the chain because it is very expensive to put stuff in space; it costs $5,000, $10,000 a pound. And hardening increases weight as well as expense. And so nothing of our civilian infrastructure, space infrastructure is hardened.

A single detonation 300 miles high above our country would take out all low Earth orbit satellites that are a line of sight. The prompt effects take that out. And then the Van Allen belts are pumped up, and the other satellites will all be dead in a few days to a week or two. And it would do you no good to launch other satellites even if you could because the Van Allen belts will stay pumped up for a year or so.

Of course this effects everybody. This is the strike that comes back to bite you. And so your enemy would have to be prepared that they would also have no satellites because a single weapon would take out all of the Earth's low orbit satellites; no more GPS, for instance.

The next chart is a look at why EMP? Why would an adversary use electromagnetic pulse? States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for EMP attacks offers the greatest utility. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against the U.S. military forces in a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland.

There is no way that a nuclear weapon could be used at ground level that would produce anywhere near the effects that are produced by a nuclear weapon detonated in space, producing this EMP pulse.

EMP may be less provocative of U.S. massive retaliation compared to a nuclear attack in a U.S. city that inflicts many prompt casualties.

If there was an EMP attack on our country, all that it has done is to take out all of our computers, which means we have no power grid, we have no communications. How do you respond to that? Are we now justified in vaporizing the grandmothers and babies in the country from which it was launched? By the way, unless it's launched by Russia, which has thousands of missiles, or by China in the future, I don't think we will know who launched it because I don't think that any nation will launch against us from their soil because our satellites would detect the launch and we would know where it came from. And why should they? They're a long way off. Our shores are close to the oceans, and there are thousands of ships in the north Atlantic shipping lanes. It is impossible to keep track of those ships. It would be very easy to--and their literature talks about this--using a short range or a medium range missile, to launch from a ship.

There is a very interesting story--I hope that it is published, I was given a prepublication copy of it--called ``One Second After.'' And it's a story of what happens in our country with an EMP attack. It's a very well written story. It's in the hills of North Carolina. And there is a retired colonel who is there teaching in a university there. And on his child's 12th birthday, I think it was, they're having the birthday party and the lights go out. And he notices in a few minutes that there is no noise from the interstate, which is just over the hill. And he walks over to where he can look down on the interstate and he sees that all the cars are parked on the interstate and people are walking around the cars.

The story runs for a year. And at the end of the year--and I asked the members of the commission, they said, well, it might not be quite that bad, but at the end of the year in this story called One Second After there are only 25,000 people still alive in New York City, 90 percent of the country's population is dead, only 80 percent of the population in the area in which the story is set in North Carolina is dead. I said that for many people this is just too bad to be true, and so they don't even want to think about it.

During the Clinton administration he had a commission to set up, headed by General Marsh, to look at critical infrastructure. And they came to testify before our Armed Services Committee and we asked them, did you look at EMP? He said yes, we looked at EMP. Well? Well, we decided there was not a high probability of an EMP attack, so we didn't look at it anymore. I said, well, gee, with that attitude, if you haven't already, when you go home tonight you're going to cancel your fire insurance. I mean, that's why we have insurance, when there is a low probability, high-impact event. And I know of nobody at the end of the year, I've never heard anybody come and complain, gee, you know, I bought that fire insurance and my house didn't burn.

All that I want my country to do is to make the kind of an investment

that represents the equivalent of buying fire insurance on your house. Now, I have fire insurance on my house, I wouldn't sleep well tonight if I didn't, but I haven't hired somebody to stand there and to yell ``fire, fire,'' when he sees a fire. I'm content with my smoke alarms and so forth. But I've done what I think is a reasonable thing. But as the EMP Commission pointed out, our country has not done what would appear to be a reasonable thing in preparing for this eventuality, neither in the military nor in the private sector.

And these two studies that I referred to, the one by CRS, the Congressional Research Service, and the other by this commission, both of them paint the same picture, that an EMP attack on our country would be catastrophic. Now, there is something that we can do about that. And the Commission ends with a number of recommendations.

What would we do if there was an EMP attack on us? Not a building is hurt, you are not hurt--for the moment. Although, if it was really this 200 kilovolt per meter weapon--and we have not tested anything more than a fourth of that, about 50 kilovolts per meter--if it really was that weapon, the members of the commission are fairly confident that everything comes down, which means that you're in a world where the only person you can talk to is the person next to you, unless, by the way, you happen to be a ham operator with a vacuum tube set because vacuum tubes are a million times less susceptible to EMP.

I remember a number of years ago a Soviet MiG pilot defected to Japan, and you may remember that. And we were disdainful of the Russians because their planes still had vacuum tubes; they're a million times less susceptible to EMP. And the only way you could go anywhere after this really robust EMP laydown is to walk, unless you happen to have an old car that has coil and distributor. These are really tough; they almost certainly would be immune to this.

EMP could compare to a nuclear attack on a city, kill many more Americans in the long run--nobody immediately--and we die in the long run because we do not have any electricity, we do not have any transportation. The average city has 3 days supply of food. And go to any of our major cities and have the lights go out for a few hours and you will see how thin the veneer of civilization is.

EMP could, compared to a nuclear attack on a city, kill many more Americans in the long run from indirect effects of collapsed infrastructure, power, communications, transportation, food and water. City water is not flowing, the septic system is not working.

What do you do? There are a number of recommendations--we'll look at a few of those in a few moments--that they make. But the commission is convinced that, with reasonable expenditure, we can do something meaningful to protect ourselves against this. And by the way, our very vulnerability invites this attack. They know how vulnerable we are, it's in their public writings. They know that.

Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military strength and societal survival--vital to survival, they're making the point--challenge the integrity of allied regional coalitions and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to the high-tech West than to rogue states.

To a state without our sophisticated infrastructure, losing electricity wouldn't matter much. There are many countries in the world that have a few hours of electricity in the morning and a few hours of electricity in the evening, that may have only water at certain hours of the day. And when they do that, they plan to store that water so that they will have enough for the rest of the day. So cultures like that would be nowhere near as much affected by an EMP attack as we would.

Technically, an operational EMP attack can compensate for deficiencies in missile accuracy--if you miss by 100 miles, it doesn't matter; it really doesn't matter if you miss by 100 miles--fusing range, reentry vehicle design, target location intelligence, and missile defense penetration. It really doesn't matter. None of these things matter. You just shoot a weapon. If a scud launcher goes up about 180 miles, that's plenty high to shut down the whole northeast and well down the mid coast. And it really doesn't matter if you miss where you would like it to detonate by 100 miles, it really doesn't make any difference.

The next chart shows the kind of technology we used to have during the Cold War. This is a trestle on which we have a large airplane. And we are doing simulated EMP attacks on that airplane to make sure that we have hardened the airplane. That's all mothball now, we aren't doing that anymore. By the way, it was impossible to really simulate an EMP attack because of the long line effect. There isn't any way, with this EMP burst created here on Earth, that we could cover an area miles long. And railroad tracks, power lines, any of these things are antennas. And there are some very long wavelengths here that, coupled with very strong structures like miles of power lines or miles of railroad tracks, and you really can't simulate the line effect. But we've done as good as we can do. And after hardening, we would test the planes to make sure that we had hardened them.

The next chart is one that is from this study of the EMP Commission. They started out looking at the military, but since all of our military bases are surrounded by towns and cities and suburbs and so forth, and since none of our military bases are stand-alone, as far as how power is concerned, they have some UPS units, some units that will produce temporary power, but few of them will last more than 48 hours and then their tank of fuel has run out and the generators stop working.

And so they started looking at the interface between the military and the civilian infrastructure, and they became very, very concerned about how interrelated and how fragile our national infrastructure was. It has grown to accommodate the growth of our population and our increased demands for energy, and it is not designed as an integrated system as it would be if you didn't have any of this and you started from scratch and put the whole thing in; it's kind of added on to and added on to. And so they have this little chart which shows, like a house of cards, the interrelationships between oil and gas and communications and water and banking and finance and government services and emergency services and transportation and electrical power and fuel. Look at the lines that run there, they all run from electrical power. If you don't have electrical power in our world, you don't have anything. Very few things operate without electrical power. So they were very concerned about the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.

One of a very few high-altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMPs simultaneously over wide geographical areas. Just one will do, as the previous chart showed, if you detonate it about 300 miles high over Iowa or Nebraska. Unprecedented cascading failure of our electronics- dependent infrastructure could result. As a matter of fact, if one of these super EMP-enhanced bombs is used, you will change that word to ``would'' result because there is no question but that that would bring down our whole infrastructure.

Power, energy, transport, telecommunications, and financial systems are particularly vulnerable and interdependent, and they would all come down. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause large-scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the Nation's life.

Again, I say you would essentially, if this biggest weapon was used that produces 200 kilovolts per weapon, you would be in a world where largely the only person you could talk to is the person next to you unless you had that ham radio with a vacuum tube in it, and the only way you could go anywhere is to walk unless you happened to have a car that had a coil and a condenser.

Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these infrastructures, almost totally. Without adequate protection, recovery could be prolonged months to years. That's a very long time to hold your breath in a situation like this.

Now we will look at the conclusions and they had a number of conclusions. One of the conclusions was the EMP

threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels. U.S. strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, preparation, protection, and recovery. And one of the first things that we should do is to look at recovery. Should it happen, what would you do?

I remember that during the Cold War, I was working for IBM corporation, and I was concerned about what we would do when we came out of the fallout shelter. And then those fallout shelters were so prevalent, so omnipresent, that IBM was giving their employees interest-free loans to build a backyard fallout shelter. And I asked myself what would I do when I come out of the fallout shelter because it's going to be a whole different world? Then we were looking at perhaps hundreds of nuclear weapons falling on our cities and taking them out, but we had all of the fallout shelters, the civil defense things. Any public building you went into, there were brochures there telling you what you ought to do and how to do it. So people were really thinking about it. And in schools you practiced what you would do if there was an attack. You would put your head down between your knees and so forth. I remember that when I worked for the National Institutes of Health, we had drills there because our big research hospital there was going to become, I think, a 500-bed hospital for casualties. Then we developed and the Soviets developed the hydrogen bomb, and we weren't even sure that the hospital was going to be there after that. It was certainly going to be there after the conventional nuclear weapon. But we were preparing for that. So we can do something to prepare.

Critical military capabilities must be survivable and durable to underwrite U.S. strategy. If the enemy knows that they cannot shut down our retaliatory force, they will be much less inclined to do this unless they plan to do it in a very covert way. By the way, the book that I mentioned, this attack on our country, ``One Second After,'' the attack comes from a missile which is launched at sea, and then after the missile is launched, the ship is sunk so there are no fingerprints.

The next chart shows some conclusions, some action items. The 2006 defense authorization bill contains a provision extending the EMP Commission, and now we have the 2008 bill, and we are hoping to extend it now until 2012. The commission has been very effective. I will tell you that your military now is acutely aware of this and the Pentagon is aggressively addressing it. I come from Maryland, and I was pleased when the commission members told me today that Maryland is one of two States in the country that is as a State doing something about this. And so we hope the Commission will be very active in the next 4 years, and they are going to States, they are going to rotary clubs, they are going everywhere they can go to tell the people about this and what we can do and should do.

Terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of attack. As I mentioned, our very vulnerability invites attack, and we can reduce the probability of attack if we do something meaningful to protect ourselves.

The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical infrastructures. Indeed they do. I have been concerned that our Homeland Security Department is doing essentially nothing in the area of civil defense. And I remember very well the Cold War. I was born in 1926, and I grew up during the Depression and then the long World War II and the long Cold War after that. And I remember we would have blackout drills, and one of the neighbors would be assigned on a volunteer basis to make sure that everything was blacked out. This was during the war when there was some threat that enemy bombers might be coming over our country. And then during the Cold War that followed that, every public building you went into would have literature telling you how to produce a fallout shelter, how to improvise one in your basement if you hadn't built one outside, the kind of food to store. It was available for sale at many places. How much water you needed. They had pictures of the fallout shelter and the beds and so forth and how you would make due there for the several days to a couple of weeks. And they made available monitoring equipment so that you would know when it was safe to go out when the radiation levels had fallen down to where it was safe to go out. So everybody--we practiced in schools. At our workplaces we practiced. And today there is essentially no attention given to advising individuals, businesses, churches, social clubs what they can do individually and collectively, and I will tell you that our strength is going to be determined not so much by our military, which is going to be okay, but our strength as a country is going to be determined by what we have done individually as families, as small communities to protect ourselves so that we do not become immediately a ward of the State.

And they asked Dr. Bill Graham what he had personally done. He has a generator which is not plugged in. Plug it in. It's hooked to the electrical system. It's a long line, effective, a big antenna. It's much more likely to be damaged if it's plugged in. With 200 kilovolts per meter, by the way, it's probably all gone anyhow. But if it's a lesser intense weapon than that, not plugging in it would make a difference. He has food and water for several days.

The average city has 3 days supply of food, 3 days supply of food. And I noted in the hearing today that if in anticipation of this, a year or 2 before and even a decade because this food, nitrogen packed and freeze dried, will last a very long time, then you are a patriot because now you're stimulating the economy. But if you wait until the hurricane is at the door or the missile attack is imminent and you do exactly the same thing, now you're a horder. Have you thought about that difference? You've done exactly the same thing. You put away food and water and essentials for survival. If you do it well ahead of the event, now you're a patriot, doing the right thing. If you do it immediately before the event, now you've become a horder. And nobody likes a horder.

The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan to help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur. This is not me saying that. It is the EMP Commission saying that. Citizens need to become as self-sufficient as possible. And they note something which is really very important. There are a number of things, a Hurricane Katrina, almost nobody there had made any preparation for this. And with hours they now were dependent on services from a government that wasn't there, that couldn't get there. And the Federal Government will tell you don't count on us for at least 72 hours. You need to be on your own. And I think that the really wise thing to do would be to be prepared for several days to several weeks. And there are any number of natural events or human-caused events that could result. Suppose it was a major strike. Oil is now 141 or so dollars a barrel, gas is over $4 a gallon, diesel nearly $5 a gallon. At some point the trucker may decide enough is enough, we quit, in protest, you've got to do something about this. A 3-day supply of food in the stores. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a meaningful supply in your home so there are a number of storms that you could weather in addition to this one? Citizens need to become as self-sufficient as possible.

Well, I have been concerned about electromagnetic pulse now for a number of years. I am very pleased that we were able to get this commission set up. I am really pleased with the quality of the commission and what they have been able to do. And now we are extending it. We have already passed the bill in the House here. We're extending it now for 4 more years, to 2012, and I look forward to the commission's being active. And this is really very stimulating and challenging, and meeting a big challenge like this and overcoming it is exhilarating. And I will tell you, rather than watching silly programs on television, the family would be much better rewarded and would feel better if they would sit down and say what can we do to prepare for this? Because our country is going to be stronger if I am self- sufficient and maybe I have enough to help somebody else, so that I'm not a ward of the State. And I hope that your government--the Homeland Security is the right place to look--is going to become more active in telling you what you need to do. But if they

don't, go back and look at the advice given during the Cold War. What we were encouraged to do then, what we did then is precisely the kind of thing we need to do now. Now, there was lots of preparation. There were fallout shelters that would accommodate hundreds of people. If you went to Switzerland, if you go today, you will find that all of Switzerland can go underground with enough food and water to last them for quite a while. Now, we never had that level of preparedness, but we were enormously better prepared then than we are now.

Well, Madam Speaker, I am pleased for this opportunity to talk about this very important subject, and I hope that we become less and less vulnerable, which will reduce the threat more and more.

Today oil, I think, went to its highest price ever, about $140 a barrel. So all of America is now thinking about energy and oil, and I would like to start this evening's discussion by referring to some comments made in a speech 51 years ago, the 14th day of this past May, by Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, to a group of physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

I would encourage everyone to pull this speech up, a Google search for ``Rickover'' and ``energy speech'' and it will pop up. Or you can go to our Web site, and you will find a link there to it.

Hyman Rickover was a very perceptive person, and every time I read this speech I am again amazed at how prophetic and insightful he was. He says in this speech 51 years ago, Remember now, there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created, he says, by solar energy 500 million years ago and 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--and this is 51 years ago--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. This was counseled 51 years ago.

What he's saying is that it's obvious that oil cannot be forever. That it is finite; one day it will run out. He noted that at this time we were about 100 years into the age of oil, which he called ``this golden age,'' and he noted that how long it lasted was important in only one regard: that the longer it lasted, the more time would we have to plan an orderly transition to other sources of energy which will, of necessity, be renewable sources of energy.

Then this last little paragraph here is one that I really like. It is so perceptive and so prophetic of what our attitude has been. Fossil fuels, he says, resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent, that is the leaders of the world's countries, will use this 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 not care one wit how his offspring will fare.

The next chart is an additional quote from this same speech. He says, I suggest this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendents. We really haven't done that, have we? I have 10 kids and 16 grandkids and two great-grandkids, and I think a lot about our responsibility to our descendents, those who will ring out the fossil fuel age. Hyman Rickover noted that in 8,000 years of recorded history that the age of oil would be but a blip in the history of man.

We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.

Our behavior has in no way indicated that we recognize the inevitability of reaching a maximum production of oil and then less and less and less oil until finally there is none of it left. Obviously, it is not infinite. Obviously, one day it will be gone. Where are we? Where are we in this long sequence of events from the discovery of oil, its massive use, and finally the waning use of oil until we finally transition to other fossil fuels?

The next chart shows what's happened in our country, and we need to go back 52 years ago to kind of put this in perspective because 52 years ago, the 8th day of March, in San Antonio, Texas, an oil geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert gave a speech to a group of executives and other oil people assembled there in San Antonio. And he told them that in just 14 years, the United States--which was then, I think, king of oil, producing more oil, consuming more oil, exporting more oil than any other country in the world--he said in just 14 years, our country is going to reach its maximum production of oil. And after that, no matter what we did, the production of oil was going to fall off, as you can see from the chart here which shows the production of oil in our country.

And he was predicting the lower 48, Texas and the rest of the U.S.A., and to him the rest of the U.S.A. was the rest of the 48 States. And in 1956 at this point he was predicting that in 1970, just 14 years later, that we would reach a maximum oil production. After that, it would fall off.

Now, we found a lot of oil in Alaska, and we found some oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and we learned to get more natural gas liquids; but in spite of this huge discovery in Alaska and through that 4-foot pipeline--and I've been to Dead Horse, to Prudhoe Bay and seen the beginning of that pipeline--through that for a number of years flowed 25 percent of our domestic production.

In spite of that, except for this little blip, it's been down, down, down. And now in the lower 48 we produce well less than half of the oil that we did in 1970.

We have tried very hard to make M. King Hubbert out a liar. We have drilled more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. We are really, really good at finding oil. We're really, really good at pumping oil.

The next chart shows that another prediction M. King Hubbert made has, in fact, almost certainly come true. In 1979, that's just 9 years after we peaked in our country, using his same analysis technique, he predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

Just a word about his analysis and how he did it. It's no magic. He observed that in our country that an individual oil field increased its production until it reached a maximum production, at which time about half the oil had been pumped, and then the last half of the oil, as is reasonable, was harder to get and so less and less was pumped. So you had a little bell curve produced by that.

And he reasoned that if he knew how many little bell curves there were in our country and how many more fields we would find, that he could then predict when we would be reaching our maximum oil production. And using that technique, he predicted correctly that we would reach our maximum production in 1970, just 14 years after he made that prediction.

Using that same technique, he looked at the world and the world fields and all of the countries producing oil, and he calculated that we should be reaching the world maximum production, called ``peak oil,'' about now.

On this chart are two curves. These are data collected by the two entities in the world that probably do the best job of keeping track of the production and consumption of oil, and of course they're the same. We use what we produce. This is the IEA, it's an international organization, and the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Energy. And both of these, as you can see, have oil production essentially flat for the last 36 months.

Now, what's happened with this flat oil production for the last 36 months is

shown by this lower curve here, and obviously this is a bit old because this shows oil at only $95 a barrel. I didn't make it all that long ago, this chart. It now would be well off the top. I think it hit $140 a barrel today. Well, that's what happens when you have a static supply and an increasing demand. The price goes up and up.

The next chart, and this is a really information-filled chart, and if you had only one chart to use, this would be the chart because it has so much information in it. The bars here show the discoveries of oil and the year on the abscissa here on which they were discovered. And you see that we were finding a lot of oil back in the 1940s. By the way, I can remember when gasoline was kind of a little gas war, and it was kind of on sale. It was $6 per gallon. Another age, wasn't it?

Then we found a bunch in the 1950s, and boy, it really peaked out in about the 1970s, which is interestingly the time that M. King Hubbert said that we would reach our maximum oil production.

And then ever since then, it's been down, down, down, down, down, and that's with ever better techniques for discovering oil. We now have 3-D seismic. We have computer modeling. And still our discoveries of oil, year by year, on average have gone down, down, down.

The solid black line here represents the consumption of oil, and we're going to see this curve on several of the other charts that we're going to show. And this shows a very interesting exponential growth through the Carter years, with a stunning statistic.

Every decade up through the Carter years, we used as much oil as we had used in all of previous history. Now, think about that for a moment. Had we continued on that path, when you have used up half of your oil, you would have just 10 years of oil remaining. But fortunately, we didn't think it was so fortunate at the time. Fortunately, we had the Arab oil embargo price spike hikes in the 1970s, and a worldwide recession resulted from that, and there was actually a decrease in the use of oil. It actually fell off.

Following that, we really put some effort into efficiency. Your refrigerator is now two or three times more efficient than it was then, and most of the energy using things, your refrigerator, your air conditioner, are very much more efficient than they were then. So now the rate of growth is very much slower, as you can see. Notice what would have happened had we not had that shock and put some effort into efficiency. This curve would have gone off the top of the chart here.

Well, you know that if you integrate under a curve, the area under the curve represents, in this case, the volume used. You can understand that, if you note that, you could round off these discoveries by putting a line like so, and the area under that line would represent the totality of the discoveries. So the area under this line represents how much we have used.

From about 1980 on, we have found less and less on the average each year, and we've been using more, but we had a lot of reserves back here that we hadn't used. So now we are dipping into these reserves, and we're filling in this area here with reserves from back here.

Now, yes, here are some reserves, and we'll find some more. There's a lot of dispute about how much more we're going to find, but I will tell you that most of the world's experts believe that we have probably found about 95 percent of everything that we will find, and the new finds are really interesting. The big one in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, was under 7,000 feet of water, 30,000 feet of rock, and they haven't yet started to exploit it with oil at $140 barrel because it's very hard to get here.

Now, what will the future look like? Well, you're going to have to make some guesses and educated guesses as to how much more we're going to find. Those who put this chart together think that on the average it will be like so, but obviously, it won't be as nice, smooth like that. It will be up and down, but on the average like that. I'd draw the line a little lower actually if I were averaging, a little lower than that.

Then we have all of these reserves back here we haven't used, and so we now, in addition to what we find in the future, we can use more because we can use them back here. And so we will be going down, down, down. If we go up, up, up, by the way, you're soon going to run out of these and fall off of a cliff, but fortunately, geology won't let us do that because we can only get it so fast, which is our problem today. We aren't able to produce oil any faster than we are now producing it. Within some limits, we can control what the future looks like with enhanced oil recovery and so forth, but one thing you cannot do is pump oil that is not there.

I'd like now to return to the next chart to another quote from Hyman Rickover. He says: Whether this golden age, this age of oil which he called the golden age, will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.

That is precisely what we have not done. You saw in one of the previous charts, the demand has grown and the supply is static, and when that happens, of course, you have an increase in price, and the price has gone up from $10 a barrel a relatively few years ago to $140 a barrel today.

The next chart is from one of four studies that our government has paid for. This was the first of those four studies and the biggest. This one was done by the big SAIC corporation, Science Applications International Corporation, a huge, very well-regarded company. And the study was headed by Robert Hirsch, and so this is called the Hirsch Report, and they present a chart there which is a very interesting one.

For reasons that are difficult to understand, some, including some in our Energy Department, are predicting that we will find as much more oil as all the reserves that are yet to be pumped. And it's a really interesting story how they got there to that conclusion. But they're predicting that we will find almost as much oil as we now know exists that we can pump.

Most of the world's experts--and this number will be up and down a little bit--but most of the world's experts believe that the recoverable oil at the end of the day will be about 2 trillion barrels. This table has it at 2.248 trillion barrels, roughly 2 trillion barrels. They're predicting that we'll find enough more to represent 3 trillion barrels. That's a lot more oil to find from that previous chart we showed. You would have to reverse the trends of the last 30 years, where it's been down, down, down, and now you're going to reverse that and it's going to go up? Laherrere says that what they're proposing is absolutely implausible. Laherrere is a French expert in this area.

But I show you this chart because even if we found that much more oil, the maximum production of oil would be pushed out only, according to this chart, to 2016. That curve that I told you you would see again and again, the rapid increase in use through the Carter years, the oil price spike shocks of the 1970s, the reduced demand worldwide, and then the slower rate of growth now, they're predicting a 2 percent growth. This is 2 percent.

By the way, exponential growth, Albert Einstein was asked what the next great force in the universe was going to be after nuclear energy, and he said the greatest force in the universe is the power of compound interest. You see, 2 percent growth, and that's so small that our stock market really doesn't like that, and it begins to go negative with 2 percent growth. But 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. It's four times bigger in 70 years. It's eight times bigger in 105 years. And it's 16 times bigger in 140 years. So even very modest growth like 2 percent, gee, that's not much, but it's 16 times bigger in 140 years. And we still expect our children's children to be around in 140 years.

Now, this chart has another illustration on it. Suppose we're able to use some enhanced oil recovery and really suck it out fast, and you now continue up to 2037. You've now pushed the peak over to 2037, and then you fall off a cliff. Again, you cannot pump what is not there.

I will tell you that this is most unlikely to happen. I do not think the technologies are there to pump the oil that fast, but the point that I wanted to make in this chart was that even if

we found as much more oil as all of the oil that's now known to be there that can be pumped, it would push the peak out--this chart says only to 2016. That's not very out. That's just around the corner.

As a matter of fact, that Hirsch Report said that unless you anticipated peak oil by two decades you would have some economic consequences. If you anticipated it by only a decade, you would have very serious economic consequences. So even if this is true, even if this is true that we find as much more oil as all the oil that we currently know is out there to be pumped, it would push it out only to 2016. So we should have started an aggressive program of renewables a couple of years ago if we're going to avoid serious economic consequences.

The next chart is just another chart showing this same phenomenon, how little additional time you get with enormously increased discoveries of oil, and you need to think about this when you're thinking about pumping the oil in ANWR and on the Outer Continental Shelf and under our public lands. If ANWR has 10 billion barrels of oil--and that's the 50 percent probability. The 95 percent probability is considerably less than that, and 95 percent is more probable obviously than 50 percent probability. But suppose it has the 50 percent probability, that oil would last the world only 120 days. Now, I say the world because under present circumstances it is impossible not to share your oil with the world, because if we use oil that we produce, then the oil we might have bought from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia or Iran, someone else can buy. So, in reality, you are sharing your oil with the world.

Well, the only way not to do that, by the way, is to own so much oil that you don't need to get any from the outside, and then to use it all for yourself, even though others may need the oil more than you. Obviously we're not going to be doing that because we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil.

This chart shows that roughly 2 trillion again. They show it as 1.92 trillion, and they show the peak occurring about 2010 roughly now with that. But if we find, again, this huge amount of additional oil and it goes up to 2.93 trillion, roughly the 3 trillion that you saw in the previous one, that will move the peak out only to about this point. It's a little different in their calculation, how far it moves the peak out, but all of this is within the lifetime of our children. And then they think that we will find a lot of unconventional oil. In a little bit I think we'll have a chance to talk about some of that unconventional oil. We may get a lot of that. We may not get much of that.

There's another dimension in this whole discussion that I have a couple of charts on, and the next chart introduces this, and that is the geopolitical implications of where we are.

This was a statement by Condoleezza Rice, our Secretary of State in 2006: We 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.

And I'm sure that she had in her mind when she said that the next chart, which is a really interesting chart. And this shows the world according to oil, and this shows you what our world would look like if the size of each country was determined by the amount of oil that it had.

And you see here that Saudi Arabia really dominates the landscape, and it should because Saudi Arabia has, we believe, 22 percent of all the reserves in all the world. And notice the countries very near them: Iraq, tiny little Kuwait, Iran. These are one, two, three and four in terms of supply of oil in reserves in all the world. United Arab Emirates, you almost have to have a magnifying glass to find them on the map, and look how much oil they have. Here we are, United States, bunch up there in Canada and the Lower 48 here. We only have 2 percent of the oil in the world. This represents one-fiftieth of the land mass here.

And our biggest supplier of oil is Canada. Our third biggest supplier of oil--it was the second until a few months ago--is Mexico. And notice, they have less oil than we. As a matter of fact, together I don't know that they have any more oil than we have. They're exporters, because in Canada there aren't very many people, and in Mexico the people are too poor to buy the oil, and so they're able to export it. Now our second largest supplier is Saudi Arabia. Notice, Venezuela dwarfs everything else in this hemisphere.

Another really interesting thing to look at is the size of China and India in this ``World According to Oil.'' Here they are, China and India; about 2.3 or 4 billion people total, having less oil than the United States, with a booming economy. The economy in China, the last data I saw, growing at 11.7 percent. Japan in its heyday never grew faster than that, and notice the tiny amount of oil that they have.

Notice Russia. Russia is one of the largest exporters in the world today. They don't have the most oil by any means, but they're very aggressively pumping their oil and exporting it. And they are considerably larger, many times larger than we, and they have a much smaller population than we have. Well, very interesting map. And this points out some of the geopolitical realities in the world.

The next chart shows China's response to this reality. China has seen this ``World According to Oil,'' and this is their response to it. This shows our globe, and it shows the countries on it. And these little symbols represent who is buying the oil. Now, there are a few dollar signs, not very many, as you see. And there are a lot of these symbols that represent China. As a matter of fact, they almost bought Unocal in our country. Remember all of the hysteria over that possibility a couple of years ago?

Look what they're doing in the Middle East. Look what they're doing in northern Africa. Look what they're doing in Indonesia and in Russia. They're buying oil all over the world. At the same time, thinking about this geopolitical picture, at the same time that they are aggressively buying oil they are aggressively building a blue water navy. Why would they buy the oil when in today's world it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil? We own only 2 percent of the world's oil, but we use--and the next chart will show that. The next chart shows that we use 25 percent of the world's oil, owning only 2 percent of it. And we import almost two-thirds of what we use. And we're able to do that because he who comes to the auction block with the dollars buys the oil.

So why would China buy oil when in today's world it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil? The country that comes with the dollars buys the oil. Could it be that they're buying this oil and building this huge blue water navy because one day they may have to tell the rest of the world, gee, I'm sorry, we have 1,300,000,000 million people clamoring for the benefits of an industrialized society and we just can't share this oil. Something to think about, isn't it?

The next chart is another look at this geopolitical reality that we're in. And there are two bars here. The bar on the right shows the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of how much reserves they have. Well, pretty obvious from looking at that ``World According to Oil'' that most of those are going to be over in the Middle East. As a matter of fact, among the top 10, 98 percent of all the oil is owned not by companies, but by countries. And only 2 percent is owned by Luke Oil, which is kind of a company. One might argue that it had a lot of national control.

The bar on the left represents the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of how much they produce. Now, the really big guys that a lot of our people are concerned about because they're making big profits, they don't look big at all when you look at it from a world perspective. They own none of the oil of the top 10. They don't even count in the top 10 countries or companies that own oil. And they represent only 22 percent of the production of oil. They're pumping somebody else's oil is what that means, and not much of that relative to the oil that's produced by these countries.

The next chart is another quote from the Hirsch Report. And this came out

in `05. Our country has paid for four reports, all saying essentially the same thing. And you may ask a really legitimate question, how come I haven't heard about these? All saying essentially the same thing: ``The peaking of oil is either present or imminent, with potentially devastating consequences.''

The first report was the Hirsch Report early in '07. Later in '07 was another report by the Army Corps of Engineers saying essentially the same thing. Then last year, in '07, there were two reports, one by the Government Accountability Office, and another requested by the Secretary of Energy and the President, the National Petroleum Council. They came out last year in '07. All four of these reports say about the same thing, the peaking of oil is either present or imminent, with potentially devastating consequences. Now, how come you haven't heard about this? Why hasn't your government told you about this? And why haven't you heard about a really aggressive program to address the challenge presented by this reality?

World oil peaking is going to happen. This was in the Hirsch Report, '05. ``World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter.'' It happened in our country in 1970. The same person who predicted that predicted the world would be peaking about now. I have a very simple question I've asked myself over and over again. If M. King Hubbert was right about the United States--and he was, incontrovertible evidence that he was right about the United States--and if he predicted in 1979 that the world would be peaking about now--and by the way, by 1980, we knew of a certainty that he was right about his prediction of the United States because, in looking back from 1980, we can see, gee, he was right. In 1970, we really did peak, and we're now over the peak and sliding down the other side. Shouldn't someone have said, gee, if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, might he not be right about the world? And if, in fact, he is right about the world, shouldn't we really be doing something about this? It's an interesting question. I'm not sure I know the answer to it.

People tend to hear what they want to hear, they tend to see what they want to see. My wife tells me that I shouldn't be talking about this. She said, don't you know that in ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news. And I tell her this is really a good news story. The good news is that if we start today to fix this problem, the ride is going to be less bumpy than if we start tomorrow. And the second good news about this is that--I'm really exhilarated by this. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and this is a huge challenge. I believe that America is up to this. If America knew what the problem was, if America knew what needed to be done to solve the problem, I think that we would do now what we did in World War II. And I lived through World War II. I was born in 1926. Yeah, you've done the arithmetic right, I'm 82 now. And I lived through World War II, and I remember how everyone was involved in that war. And I think Americans would do that again.

This maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. That was in `05. Now, 3 years later, this is within a decade, and most of them were predicting it peaking about now. Some uncertainty, and a lot of things contribute to that uncertainty, and that's what he talks about here in the rest of this paragraph.

``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge.'' And then this statement, ``The world has never faced a problem like this without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact.'' Now, if peaking is upon us, it is impossible to do this mitigation a decade before the fact. ``Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.''

The next chart is additional quotes from this Hirsch Report. ``The peaking of oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem.'' As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically.'' Wow, that's exactly what's happened in the last few months, isn't it? ``And without timely mitigation''--which we have not done--``the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.''

Now, these are the words of a very serious study done by one of the most prestigious organizations in our world today. ``Without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.''

The next chart. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, this may be worth a million, huh? Here is a guy with his huge SUV, and he's standing beside the dwarf of a pump there, ``Demand and Supply.'' And he says, ``Just why is gas so expensive?'' That's what happens when the demand exceeds the supply.

The next chart looks at U.S. energy consumption by sector. I would like to spend a few moments now looking at the gross energy picture. Energy, by the way, is a very unique entity. You use it once. You can't recycle it. All energy eventually ends up in the lowest form of energy, which is heat. And then it gets radiated to space and it's gone. If you want more energy, you've got to either get it from the sun as it comes in, or the consequences of the sun, the wind blowing and so forth, or the waves. Or you've got to find energy that was produced by the sun a very long time ago. And of course it was the shining of the sun that made the little organisms grow in these ancient, subtropical seas that then settled to the bottom and sediment came in. And we believe the Earth opened up, the tectonic plates moved and they were submerged, so they were close enough to the molten core that, under the right temperature, the right pressure, with enough time, finally became gas and oil. And there is no gas there unless there is a rock dome over it to hold the gas, otherwise it escapes, and then you have some really gummy oil that's going to be extremely difficult to get. The Saudis are now trying to exploit a field like that, the Khurais field, I think they call it. And they may get 1,000,200 million barrels a day starting next year, but it's a very technical field. They've spent billions of dollars drilling wells. They're going to inject seawater under pressure to periphery the field to try to move the oil, which is very stiff and sticky, to the center of the field where they can then move it out to the well.

But this shows the U.S. energy consumption by sector. Electric power, 40 percent; transportation, 28 percent; residential and commercial, 11 percent; and industrial, 21 percent.

The next chart shows us what we use to produce the electricity. And I wanted to look at this because I want us to remember that we have two basic kinds of energy we use today; one is electric energy and the other is liquid fuels energy. And there is some ability to use one or the other, but there is a limit to what this transferability is. But some of the energy we use to produce electricity could be used in our cars and trucks and trains and so forth.

Coal, actually, we could use that; the Germans did it, the South Africans did it when they were producing oil from coal by the Fisher Tropes method. It's a 100-year-old method, we know how to do it. And we could convert our coal into a gas or a liquid. Here is natural gas, and you see city buses running on natural gas. Nuclear, that just produces electricity. Hydro, that just produces electricity. Petroleum liquids and coke, not very much there. About 3 percent of our electricity is produced by diesel, by liquid fuels.

I just wanted to show that, by conserving in electricity or by producing a lot more of our electricity with nuclear, which now produces only about 20 percent, we could free up some of the natural gas and some of the coal that could be converted to a gas or liquid because our really big challenge in the future is liquid fuels.

I'm pretty sanguine about what we can do electricity-wise for the future, much less sanguine about what we can do for liquid fuels.

We use some renewables. The next chart shows us the renewables that we're using. And I want you to look at the scale of this. This is 1 percent. I think totally 2\1/2\ percent of all of our electricity is produced by renewables.

And we have lots of wind machines. We have lots of solar panels on the roofs of houses. And the biggest one of these is wood and then wind.

By the way, this is wood waste used by the timber industry and by the paper industry. The opportunities to massively grow this are not all that much. Waste energy is a great idea, but we need to remember that a huge waste stream is largely the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. In a fossil fuel-deficient world, that waste stream will be nowhere near as big as it is now. But for the moment, it represents an opportunity to create more electricity, and I think we ought to be exploiting it.

This is true geothermal. That's tapping into the molten core of the Earth. You go to Iceland. I didn't see a single chimney in Iceland. They get all of their energy there, as far as I know, from geothermal. We have some places in our country where we are close enough to the molten core of Earth that we could do that.

Here is solar, and I'm a big fan of solar. I have a little getaway place in the mountains of West Virginia, and I'm off the grid. All I have is solar there. But notice the trifling amount. This is 1 percent here, 1 percent, this whole thing. Notice the trifling contribution that solar is making now.

The next chart, this is an interesting one because what it does is it shows us how much of our energy we are getting from fossil fuels.

We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance, and they now have established a life- style where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent of the money comes from their income. And the inheritance, if they live a normal life span, the inheritance is going to run out before they die, before they retire even. So, obviously, they have got to do something. They have got to either spend less or make more. That's precisely the predicament that we are in. It's the predicament that Hyman Rickover was cautioning about 51 years ago. We get 85 percent of all of our energy from coal, petroleum, and natural gas, and we get only 15 percent of it from other sources. The major part of those other sources is nuclear power, which provides 8 percent of our total energy for the country, about 20 percent of our electrical energy.

And here are the renewables. These are the things that Hyman Rickover was talking about, which we inevitably will transition to. Now, we may for a long time be able to get a lot of energy, maybe much more than this, from nuclear. But except for nuclear energy, this list, and you could make it a little bigger and include a few more things in it, but this is the kind of the things that we are going to have to be living on in the future. We will inevitably transition to renewables. Oil is not forever. It will run out. The only question is when. So we need to be doing something about this.

The next chart shows some things that I have personally been involved with to help this transition. Renewable energy and energy tax credits, I introduced a bill in the House which is a companion bill to the Senate, Senate 2821, the Cantwell-Ensign bill. And this passed the Senate, by the way, 88-8. And the House bill is 5984. What it does is to continue the tax credits for developing renewables. Without those tax credits, they are not yet competitive with oil. If we wait until they are, the challenge will be even greater and the problem even bigger. So we must get these things going now. We should have had them going a long time ago. And we really need these tax credits. They are about to expire.

Renewable domestic sources, H.R. 6107. I set up, with my good friend Tom Udall from New Mexico, the Peak Oil Caucus. And we have a resolution that we hope the Congress will vote on, recognizing the reality of peak oil and the necessity of doing something about it.

ARPA-E, I'm a very strong supporter of ARPA-E. DARPA, after which ARPA-E is patterned, is part of our defense organization, and it has been enormously successful in pioneering envelope-pushing things. The Internet is the result of early work by DARPA. All of our unmanned aircraft wouldn't be here if it weren't for DARPA, and we think that we need something like that in energy. The government needs to be involved in this. Some of the things we need to push are not near enough term that businesses can justify investing money in it. That's why we have DARPA. It has been enormously successful for the military. And I'm a big fan of ARPA-E. We need to prioritize what's probably going to work, where we should invest our money.

CAFE standards, I have been a big fan of increasing CAFE standards.

The other day driving to work, I noticed in front of me in one lane was an SUV with one person in it. In the lane next to it was a Prius, and I drive one. I bought the first one in Congress, the first one in Maryland, as a matter of fact. But I noted that the two people riding in that Prius were getting six times the miles per gallon per person as compared to the one person riding in the SUV. We have enormous opportunities for conservation.

Let me note at this point that there's only one thing that will bring down the price of oil. For the moment drilling won't do it because that oil will not flow for years. Investing in renewables will not do it because they will not be of any moment for a while. I'm a strong fan of renewables, and I now signed on to a bill to drill in ANWR if we use all of the Federal revenues to invest in alternatives because we desperately need to accelerate the development of these alternatives. Only one thing will reduce the price of oil, and that is to use less of it. Supply and demand. Now, there is a little bit of speculation in there, but the market will eventually punish them if they are artificially increasing the price of oil. If you buy oil for $140 a month from now if, in fact, it's $130, you've got to come up with $10 a barrel for every future barrel you bought. They cannot forever inflate the market. Ultimately they will pay for their sins if, in fact, this is going on.

Farms can't produce all of their own energy and some for the people living in the city. We're really in trouble for the future.

Tax credit for hybrids, we really need to extend that. People are buying hybrids. You know, $4 gas is a big incentive. We need to accelerate that. We need to incentivize people to park their SUV, to get in this hybrid, which will get more mileage.

Fuel flexibility, neutrality. This is an interesting one, the so- called DRIVE Act, and what this would do would mandate that all of America's cars in the future will be flex-fuel cars. It costs less than $100 per car, to build a car that would burn any fuel. The only cars produced in Brazil are flex-fuel cars. They can burn gasoline. They can burn ethanol. They can burn any percentage mixture of ethanol and gasoline. And we can have flex-fuel cars that can burn any fuel. We have no idea 10 years from now what fuels will be out there to use because the average car stays in the fleet for 16 to 18 years. So we need to be making these flex-fuel cars so we will be prepared to use whatever fuels are available in the future.

The next chart, and this is kind of an expansion of the previous chart we saw. What this looks at is the energy sources that are available to us as we transition from fossil fuels ultimately to renewables. We have some finite sources and we have nuclear. We have finite sources, and these are the tar sands and the oil shales and coal. Just a word about each of those, and I need to come to the floor and spend a lot of time talking about these because there is a lot of irrational exuberance, as Alan Greenspan would say, about the potential for production from some of these sources.

Just a word. The tar sands of Canada are getting a million barrels a day. They know what they are doing is not sustainable. By the way, the world uses about 85, 86 million barrels a day; so a million barrels a day is a bit more than 1 percent of what we use. But it's not sustainable. They're using gas that will run out. They're using water that will run out. They're thinking about putting a nuclear power plant there. I understand if you think of it as a vein which is now on the surface, when that's mined, it ducks under it and overlays; so they're going to have to develop it in situ. They don't know how to do that. There's a huge amount of potential oil there, more than all the reserves of oil in all the world. But how much we can develop it and how quickly we can develop it is really very uncertain at this time.

Oil shales, the same thing can be said about those. Those are in our country out in Colorado and Wyoming and so forth, Utah. We have probably 1\1/2\ trillion barrels of potential oil there. This isn't really oil, but with some heating and so forth, it can be converted into oil. Nobody yet is exploiting any of that. A lot of money has been spent there. Shell Oil Company did a big experiment a few years ago. We may get a lot from that; we may get little or nothing from it. It is very uncertain.

Our coal, it's said we have 250 years of coal. Let me hold that discussion for just a moment because we are going to have a little chart in a moment if we have time for it.

Nuclear, I'm a big fan of nuclear. There are three ways to get nuclear power: One is the light water reactor, the fissionable uranium. That is finite. It will run out. We cannot build power plants forever and fissionable uranium. But we can go to breeder reactors, which, as the name implies, produces more fuel than they use. You borrow some trouble when you go to those, transporting fuel for enrichment, weapons-grade fuel, and so forth, but it produces really clean energy.

Then there's nuclear fusion. If we get that, we're home free. That's what the sun does, and that's what we do in the hydrogen bomb. But to control that, we have been working on it for a long while, and it's always very elusive, always way out in front of us. If you think you're going to solve our energy problems with fusion, you probably think you're going to solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery. I think the odds are probably about the same. By the way, that doesn't keep me from enthusiastically voting for the $250 million a year we spend on fusion because if we get there, we're home free. That's all the energy we could ever need forever. But the high probability is we are going to be using a combination of these renewable sources. The next time I come to the floor, I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about realistic expectations for these renewables.

Two bubbles have already broken: the hydrogen bubble and the corn ethanol bubble. The National Academy of Sciences said if we use all of our corn for ethanol, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. All of it. And the amount we have used has now driven up the price of food around the world, as you have noted. They made a similar observation for soybeans. If we use all of our soybeans for soy diesel, it would displace 2.9 percent.

By the way, they noted that for corn ethanol, all of the corn going to ethanol, if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, they said, you would save as much gas as using all of our corn to produce corn ethanol. We get incredible amounts of energy from these fossil fuels. The quality and quantity of energy in these fossil fuels is just incredible.

I mentioned earlier that I was excited by this. This presents a huge challenge to us. We had a huge challenge in World War II. I lived through that. And what I think we need to address this problem is a program that involves everybody in the Nation. And the last time that happened was in World War II. Everybody needs to be involved. We had a victory garden. We had daylight savings time. We saved our household grease. No new cars were built for people in 1943, 1944, and 1945. And then we need the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, and we need the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. I'm convinced that, properly informed, the American people can perform miracles. I think we once again can become an energy-exporting country, energy exporting in the terms of exporting the technology it takes to exploit these renewables. I'm excited about this. I think we need challenges. Our young people's lives are just too easy in this country. As I tell audiences, young people, some of them, not a majority of them, spend far too much time watching dirty movies and smoking marijuana. They wouldn't be doing that if they had a real challenge. I can imagine Americans going to sleep at night saying, ``Today I used less energy than I did yesterday and I'm okay.''

Just one last chart and then I have got to close. The last one.

Using less energy doesn't mean you have a lesser quality of life. It doesn't mean you have a lesser quality of life. This chart shows a number of the countries of the world and the amount of energy they use and how good they feel about life on the ordinate. Here we are, using more energy than anybody else in the world, but notice, there are I think 24 countries, some of them using only half the energy we use, that don't feel as good about life as we do; they feel better about life than we do.

There are lots of opportunities for efficiency and conservation. We will come to the floor and talk about realistic expectations for what we can get out of these renewables and about all of the opportunities that we have for efficiency and conservation.

I'd just like to close, Mr. Speaker, by saying that America really can respond to this. We have performed miracles in the past, we can do it again. So I am excited about this. With my wife's counsel that I shouldn't be talking about this, I think that this is a good news story because America really, really, really responds well to a challenge. We did it in World War II, we did it in putting a man on the moon. We can do it here again.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I submit the following for the Record:

Requesting Member: Congressman Roscoe G. Bartlett.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658.

Account: RTD&E, Army, Combat Vehicle and Automotive Advanced Technology.

Legal Name of Requesting Facility: Mack Trucks, Inc., Volvo Powertrain North America.

Address of Requesting Facility: 13302 Pennsylvania Avenue, Hagerstown, MD 21742.

Description of Request: The requested fund will be used to build, test, and evaluate up to five heavy tactical trucks with hybrid electric power trains. The program's goal is to provide the military with a more fuel efficient, cleaner, and easily maintained heavy truck power train. A secondary goal is to provide a truck engine that can provide the same electricity source as a traditional diesel generator.

Requesting Member: Congressman Roscoe G. Bartlett.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658.

Account: RTD&E, Air Force, Multiple UAS cooperative concentrated observation and engagement systems against a common ground objective.

Legal Name of Requesting Facility: Proxy Aviation Systems.

Address of Requesting Facility: 12850 Middlebrook Road, Germantown,

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that my colleagues for the last hour helped to make the point that oil is high and gasoline is high because there is an imbalance between supply and demand. There are a lot of differences of opinion as to how we got here, why we're here and what we ought to do to reduce the price of gas.

The next chart is really an historical one. This whole saga begins in 1956 when a geologist of the Shell Oil Company gave a talk to a group of physicians on the 8th day of March in San Antonio, Texas. And he made a prediction which was an audacious prediction then. At that time, the United States was the king of oil. We were producing more oil, using more oil and exporting more oil than any other country in the world. Here we were in 1956. He predicted that just 14 years later, in 1970, the United States would reach its maximum oil production. That was sheer heresy then. Nobody believed him. He was ridiculed. But right on schedule, 14 years later, in 1970, the United States peaked in oil production.

Now he was predicting this for only the lower 48 States, which is shown here, Texas plus the rest of the United States. Then we found a lot of oil in Alaska. We found some oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And we learned more and more how to get oil from natural gas liquids. By 1980, looking back, you can see, gee, M. King Hubbert was really right, wasn't he? We did reach maximum oil production in 1970. I'm going to keep coming back to that.

The next chart shows this same curve. If you will look at the red lines, that is up to 1970 and after 1970. The yellow triangles represent the prediction of M. King Hubbert for the lower 48. The red diamonds are what we actually produced because we found additional oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico that he did not include in his prediction. But notice that that just produced a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak. And there was a lot of oil. Alaska alone for several years was one-fourth of our total production of oil.

This chart is presented by Cambridge Energy Research Associates to convince you that M. King Hubbert didn't know what he was talking about. Now if you were a statistician, you might be convinced. But for the average American, they don't see this yellow triangle curve being meaningfully different from the green squares. And the intent of this presentation by CERA was to convince you that you really shouldn't believe M. King Hubbert when he predicted that the world was going to be peaking in oil about now because he was wrong about his prediction of peaking in 1970. I would think just about everybody would say, gee, he got it pretty right, didn't he? He predicted this, and this is what it was, and that seems to follow pretty closely.

Now what do we mean by ``peaking?'' By ``peaking'' we mean that the oil field, the country, the world, whatever universe you're looking at, has reached its maximum production for producing oil. And this happens in each individual oil field. And that is how M. King Hubbert was able to so accurately makes his predictions because he noticed in an individual oil field that the production of oil increased and increased until you reached a high point at about which half the oil was pumped, and the last half logically is going to be harder to get than the first half, and so it's going to be less and less oil as you went down the other side. He predicted that the United States would peak in 1970. We did right on schedule.

And then in 1979, he predicted that the world would be peaking about now. And here we have the data from the two entities, the IEA and the EIA, that track the use, production and consumption of oil. And as you can see, they are in reasonable agreement. And for roughly the past 3 years, oil production in the world has been flat. By the way, if they were drawing this chart today, it would be a much taller one. They would have to change the scale for the price of oil because they had it here about $95 a barrel. Now it's way off the top of the chart, off 130 something dollars a barrel. But these two curves are still plateaued.

The next chart is a quote from what I think will shortly be recognized as perhaps the most insightful speech given in the last century. That speech was just found a few years ago and was put on the Web. And you can get it by doing a Google search for Hyman Rickover, the Father of our Nuclear Submarine and energy speech, or you can go to our Website, and there is a link there.

It really was a very prophetic speech. Remember, that was 51 years ago, the 14th day of this past May, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. And these are some of the things he said in that speech. And I hope you will pull it up and read the whole speech because it's really very insightful and very prophetic. There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago, he says, and took eons to grow to their present volume. The world as a whole and our country included has appeared to behave as if these fossil fuels were inexhaustible. The plea now to reduce prices is simply to drill more.

What we will see shortly is that, as everyone will know, if you stop and think about it, that oil is finite. It is not infinite. There is a limited supply. The only thing that can be argued is how limited is that supply? He says, in the face of the basic fact that fossil fuels are finite, now our behavior has been a denial of this reality. 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 regard: 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.

Have you noticed anybody anywhere doing what he suggested here? I really love this next paragraph because I think it really describes us, I'm sorry to say. 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. I have 10 children, 16 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren. When I am asked to vote to drill in the Arctic National Refuge and our public lands and offshore, I remind them of the fact that I have these children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. And I ask them, wouldn't it be nice if I left a little oil for my kids, my grandkids and my great grandkids? When they appeal to me to vote to drill in these places, I ask them, if you can pump ANWR tomorrow, what would you do the day after tomorrow? And there will be a day after tomorrow.

The next chart is another quote from Hyman Rickover. I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly. This is 51 years ago. I think this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. He may be the first person that I can find who recognizes that there would be a Fossil Fuel Age. In the 8,000 years of recorded history, Hyman Rickover noticed that the Age of Oil would be but a blip in the history of man. Wow. What a time it has been. We might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to provide a safe margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.

And one day, friends, there will be a world without fossil fuels. Now that is not tomorrow. And we are not running out of oil. Half of all the oil that will ever be recovered is yet to be recovered. What we're running out of is our ability to pump this oil as fast as we would like to use it. We now are, I believe, at the top of Hubbert's peak. We will have a lot of oil pumped in the future, as much as all the oil we have pumped in the past. But it will be ever harder and harder to get. Less and less of it will flow. And it will come at higher and higher costs.

The next chart really helps us to put this in a perspective. I haven't gone back the 8,000 years that Hyman Rickover mentioned. I have gone back only 400 years in history because it wouldn't matter because if I went back the rest of the 8,000 years, the use of energy would not be as wide as the baseline here, and so it would still look like this chart.

This shows the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It shows that it started with wood, then, coal, and then gas and oil. And wow, did it take off with gas and oil. Now we're going to see this curve in several other charts. In most of those charts we will have expanded the abscissa, so that this curve will look a little different.

What we have here is the incredible increase in the rate of the use of oil up through the Carter years. Every decade up through the Carter years we used as much oil as we had used in all of previous history. Now that is an incredible statistic. What that means is that when you use half of the oil, that only 10 years remain. Now that is not going to be 10 years of increasing rate and then you're going to be fall off a cliff, because that is not the way we can pump the oil.

The next chart introduces us to another reality that we really need to be cognizant of. Not only is there a limited amount of oil in the world, but how it's distributed in the world is important. The world according to oil. This is what your planet would look like if the size of the Nation was relative to how much oil it had in reserves. Saudi Arabia dominates the landscape. It should. It has about 22 percent, a bit more than one-fifth of all the reserves in the world. Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, second, third and fourth, have huge amounts of oil. Russia and Venezuela have large amounts of oil. Russia now I think is the number one exporter in the world. They don't have the most oil in the world. But they are very aggressively pumping it. We're very aggressively pumping oil by the

way. Here we are, the United States, with 2 percent of the oil in the world, and we are producing 8 percent of the oil in the world.

It is an interesting depiction here. It shows some really interesting things. The first and third largest suppliers of oil to our country are Canada and Mexico. Mexico just slipped to number 3. They used to be number 2. Now that has been taken up by Saudi Arabia. But notice that Canada and Mexico together have about as much oil as we. Canada doesn't have much oil. They can export oil because Canada doesn't have very many people. And Mexico's people are too poor to use it. So they can export oil. I read one account that said within 8 years, Mexico, our third largest supplier, will be an importer of oil. Notice that Venezuela dwarfs everything else in our hemisphere.

Another really interesting thing here is the size of China and India. Here they are, China and India, and together, they don't have as much oil as the United States, with more than 2.3 billion people and with rapidly growing economies.

The next chart looks at this distribution of oil, where it is in the world another way, and you could have seen most of this from that chart. Here we look at the 10 largest reserves of oil in the world. Who owns them? Ninety-eight percent of those big 10 are owned by countries, not companies. Luke Oil, in Russia, is kind of independent, and they have only 2 percent.

Now, who produces the oil?

In this country, we focus on the big 4, and some people think they're gouging us. We have legislation now to look at whether they're gouging us or not. But 78 percent of all of the oil in the world is produced by those in the top 10--this is 78 percent of the top 10--by the 98 percent of the top 10 who have the oil. The big oil companies produce only 22 percent of the oil, and the amount of oil that they own isn't even large enough to show up in the top 10. Notice they don't even show here.

The next chart is another way of looking at these realities. These numbers, by the way, inspired 30 of our leading citizens--Boyden Gray and Jim Woolsey and McFarland and 27 others, who are some retired four- star admirals and generals--to write a letter to the President, saying, ``Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two- thirds of what we use is an entirely unacceptable national security risk. You really have to do something about that.''

Subsequent to that, in a State of the Union message, the President noted very correctly that we're hooked on oil. That's a good analogy. We are as hooked on oil as the drug addict is hooked on his drug. The President made that very clear. We are less than 5 percent of the world's population--1 person in 22--and we use 25 percent of the world's oil.

As I mentioned before, we pump 8 percent of the world's oil, which means we're pumping our oil fields four times faster than the average in the world.

The next chart is one where, if you only had one chart to look at, this chart has more information on it than any other chart that I have seen relative to oil and relative to where we are and where we'll probably be.

Here is the curve that you saw before. It was a very steep curve, do you remember? I said that you would see it in subsequent charts, and here it is again. We have really spread it out here. Before, it went 400 years. Now it goes 100 years, 1930 to 2030. You will see here the recession that occurred in the 1970s.

There is an old saying: It is an ill wind that blows no good.

The good thing that came out of those oil price spike hikes in the 1970s was the reality that, gee, we could use this oil more efficiently. Boy, we've really done that. There was a recession that resulted in an actual drop in the demand for oil. Then we came out of that recession, and we were focused on efficiency. Your air conditioner is probably three times as efficient now as it was then, and so is your freezer.

So now we are growing our economies at the same rate we were growing them before, actually faster, because China and India were not really involved then in using huge amounts of energy. Now the growth is much slower. So let's be thankful for those oil price spike hikes in the 1970s, because it alerted us that we really could do better, and we really are doing better.

These bars here show when we found the oil, and we found most of it a long time ago. There were some huge finds back in the 1950s and some really, really big finds in the 1960s to 1970s. Notice that, from about this point on down, from 1980 particularly on down, it's down, down, down, down. This is with ever better techniques for discovering oil--3- D seismic and computer modeling. On the average, every year, we have found less oil than we've found the year before.

Now what will the future look like?

It's obvious on this chart that, ever since about 1980, we have not found as much oil as we're using, so now we've been dipping into the reserves. This area here, which is volume of oil, has been made up with using some of the reserves we found back here. So what will the future look like? There are two things that will determine what the future looks like:

One is how much oil we find and the rate at which we use the reserves we already have.

Now, you can make a judgment as to how much oil we will find in the future. I, personally, wouldn't have drawn this line. It won't be smooth like that; it will be up and down, but I wouldn't have drawn that line quite that high. I think it comes in a little lower if you're looking at that, but let's assume that that's what it is.

The difference between what you find and what you're using is going to have to be made up by dipping into the reserves back here. So you make your own judgment as to what the future would look like, and that will depend upon the rate at which we use these reserves and the amount of new reserves that we find.

The next chart shows a projection of discoveries, which is totally inconsistent with the chart we just saw. This is a projection of discoveries by the Energy Information Agency. This is a very interesting and kind of bizarre thing that has happened. The USGS does some computer modeling, looking at: Gee, where will we be in the future? How much oil will we find? They do some computer modeling, and they put a lot of inputs, different ones, into the computer, and then they get results out.

They took the mean frequency of that, and they compiled some data which said that the mean of what we're going to find--the F, they said--looks like this number. Well, somehow, when that got to the Energy Information Administration, that F became a P for probability. They make use of that, which, from a statistician's perspective, is just bizarre.

They make the statement that the 50 percent probability is the mean-- of course it is not--and that the 50 percent probability is more probable than the 95 percent probability. This is fairly old. This is several years old now, as you can see, but they made a prediction way back here that the 50 percent probability green line is the amount of oil we were going to find in the future. We've been finding it at this rate. This is the discovery rate. They said, somehow, it's going to turn around, and it's going to go back up following that green line.

The 95 percent probability is the yellow line there. Well, obviously, 95 percent probable is more probable than 50 percent probable, and it's no surprise that the actual data points have been following the 95 percent probability.

The next chart is from one of four reports that your government has paid for and has pretty much ignored. Two of these reports came out in 2005. This is a quote from the first of those done by SAIC, a very large, prestigious, international organization. This was paid for by our government. It's called the Hirsch Report, after Robert Hirsch, who was a principal investigator on the report. Another one came out a little later in 2005 from the Corps of Engineers, and it says essentially the same thing that this report says. Then in 2007, two additional reports came out--one from the Government Accountability Office and, later in the year, another from the National Petroleum Council.

All four of these say essentially the same thing in different words, that the

peaking of oil is a certainty; it is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences. Now, that's the message of all four of these reports.

This is a quote from the first of those reports: ``World oil peaking is going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter.''

That happened in our country in 1970. It is inevitable. It will happen in the world. Oil is finite. The amount of oil in the world is not infinite. There will be a time when we reach the maximum production of oil, after which, it is going to be harder and harder to get, and less and less will be available at ever-increasing costs. That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others are less certain when peaking will occur. There are a lot of things, a lot of complexities, that determine that: Geopolitical things, the economies of the world. A lot of things affected it. Technology affected it.

Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. Then they make a statement, a stunning statement. The world has never faced a problem like this. You cannot go back in history and find any precedent for this problem. The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact--and apparently from the data we just showed you, the fact is upon us. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.

Previous energy transitions--wood to coal and coal to oil--were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. The things that have been happening in the last few months are quite revolutionary. I was surprised at how quickly food shortages developed around the world.

The next chart is another quote from the first of these four reports that your government has paid for: ``The peaking of world oil production presents the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking has approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically.''

Wow, that's exactly what has happened, isn't it? It will increase dramatically.

This, I believe, is the 46th time that I have come to the floor. I began, I think, on the eighth day of March in 2005. When I first came here, oil was 50-couple dollars a barrel. Now it's about $135 a barrel. Gasoline, I think, was less than $2 a gallon. Now it's over $4 a gallon. So it is true that these prices have increased dramatically. The economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented, they say.

The next chart--and I show this chart because it really depicts this very clearly. I have two charts to address this problem. I just want to make the point that drilling for oil is not the ultimate solution. This chart assumes that we are going to find as much more oil as all the reserves that now can be pumped. That's incredible. You will remember that chart of the oil that we found going down, down, down. What is going to turn that around? This chart assumes that we're going to find as much more oil as all of the oil that is yet to be recovered. This is that curve. I told you you'd see it again in several charts. Here it is again, the dip in the 1970s, and here we are a little after 2000.

This chart was made a few years ago. This red line here is the mean of 2 percent growth and 2 percent decline with what they say is the mean, the expected value, of 3 trillion barrels of oil. You will see data that varies a little bit, but it is the amount of oil that most experts believe will ever be pumped. Now, discovered oil that will ever be pumped is about 2 trillion barrels. This has it at 2.28 trillion barrels. This predicts we're going to find, roughly, 800,000 more barrels. Almost half of all of the oil that we have ever found they predict is going to be found in the future. Even if we do that, that pushes the peaking of oil out, they say, on this chart to only 2016. Wow, that's not very far out.

Now, they have another line here which says, if you extend this growth further and assure that you're going to have a very rapid decline, then you can push the point out to 2037.

The next chart looks at these same data. Here, they have, roughly, the 2 trillion again. I told you the numbers would vary a little bit. Here is the 2 trillion again. This is 1.92 trillion. We would have peaking about now if that had occurred. This is from CERA again. CERA believes that we will find as much oil as all the oil that is yet to be pumped, and they don't show me further on. I have no idea what that curve will do and how abruptly it will fall after that, but even with their predictions, they are pushing the peak out only--well, you can see it here--to about 2030, which was the peak on the other chart.

Unconventional oil. This may be a good time to spend just a moment talking about unconventional oil. We, actually, have some huge reserves of unconventional oil.

The most exploitable of these reserves is in Canada, it's the tar sands of Canada, and they are huge, 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That's more oil potential there than yet all the oil yet to be recovered in all the fields of the world. And they are producing about 1 million barrels a day.

So why aren't we sanguine and the future going to be rosy? Because what they are doing there, they know they cannot continue to do it, it's not sustainable. They are using natural gas, which will run out, and then they may have to build a nuclear power plant.

They are using water, which is a limited water supply. I understand they are now using a shovel which lifts 100 tons. They dump it into a truck which hold 400 tons, and they hook that with natural gas, maybe using more energy than they get out of the oil, but, never mind, the natural gas is stranded. By that we mean that there is not many people to use it.

Natural gas is very hard to move from one place to another. It's stranded and so it's cheap. Economically they are producing this, I understand $18 to $25 a barrel and it's bringing $135 a barrel. That's a really good profit margin.

But the profit margin you really need to be looking at here is the energy profit margin. How much energy do you put in, and how much energy do you get out?

Well, soon, when they have exploited this above ground, my understanding is it ducks under an overlay and then they are going to have to decide how to develop it in situ. They don't know yet how to do that.

We have in our country huge potential reserves. It's not quite oil, but with some manipulation it can be made into oil. These are the so- called oil shales of our west. We have there at least probably 1.5 trillion barrels of oil again. But, so far, no one has found any economically feasible way to develop these potentially enormous reserves.

Now, we use, in the world, about 84, 85 or so million barrels of oil a day. In our country we use 21 million barrels of oil a day. Each barrel of that oil--and when I first saw this number, I couldn't believe it--each barrel of that oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year.

I thought, wow, that can't be true, just a barrel of oil, 42 gallons. Then I thought how far that gallon of gasoline at $4 a gasoline, by the way, still about the same price as water in the grocery store, how far that gallon of gasoline took my Prius. It takes me 48 miles.

Now I can pull my Prius 48 miles, but that would take a long time with come-alongs and cables and guardrails and trees and so forth to pull it along that 28 miles.

What that means is that until very recently, when oil prices spiked up, I can remember when oil was $10, $12 a barrel. When oil was $12 a barrel you could buy the life-style improvement of one person working for you all year for $1.

At $12 a barrel, one barrel is the work equivalent of 25,000 man- hours of 12 people. No wonder Hyman Rickover in his speech said that the poorest of people live better than ancient kings. This has enabled us to establish an incredible quality of life.

When I look back at this, you know, I keep asking myself the question, why didn't somebody, when we found this incredible wealth under the ground, stop and ask, what can we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time?

That is not what we did. What we did was no more responsibility than the kids who found the cookie jar or the

hog who found the feed-room door open. We have just been pigging out. A lot of my colleagues would like to continue doing that.

What they want to do is drill. I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, two great grandkids. I want to drill, but I want to use what we get from drilling to invest in alternatives. My wife has a great--and I see I am joined by a great friend, and I am going to yield to him in just a moment--my wife has a great observation on all of this. She uses that old country and western--it's too late now to do the right thing.

We have blown 28 years. I say that because by 1980 we knew really well of a certainty that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States peaking in 1970. By 1980 we knew that, no question about it. He predicted in 1979 that the world would be peaking about now. I keep asking myself the question, why haven't we done something about it?

I thank you, friend, for joining us. I am happy to yield to you.

Thank you, sir. I am really honored you came to join me.

You mention doing things. The thing that you mentioned is right on our chart here. I was very pleased. I think I may be the only original cosponsor on your bill to drill in ANWR and use all of the revenues to invest in alternatives.

Because I have said for all the years now that I have voted ``no'' for drilling in ANWR, that because of my kids, my grandkids, and great grandkids and their future that I would vote to drill in ANWR when we used all the revenues we get from ANWR to invest in alternatives.

Your bill does that, and so I was proud to sign on. By the way, I will note that there will be some environmental impact in ANWR. There is always an environmental impact. When I go out the door and step on my grass there is an environmental impact. But I think that my walking on the grass is justified.

It's obviously a trade-off. If you have a dollar and you spend it for a Coca-Cola you can't spend it for a candy bar. So everything we do in life is a trade-off. I think that the environmental damages that will be done in ANWR will be minimal compared to the advantages of our country and our civilization resulting from the monies that we are going to spend on the developing alternatives.

Thank you, sir. I am honored you came to the floor to join me.

Here is a list of the things I have been personally involved in, the Senate 2821, Senators Cantwell and Ensign, passed it 88-8. It's a bill that extends renewable energy tax credits.

Our companion bill to that, H.R. 5981, simply picks up the Senate bill. If we pass that bill in the House, then it goes directly to the President.

This is a bill I was just talking about with my good friend, Don Young, renewable domestic resources, ANWR, I am happy to be I think the only original cosigner of that bill. I am honored that he gave me that opportunity.

Peak Oil Caucus and resolution, I started the Peak Oil Caucus with my good friend, Tom Udall.

H. Res. 12 is a resolution that says that the Congress recognizes that there is such a thing as peak oil. I mean, how can you not recognize that the sun comes up and the sun comes down. Of course, there is such a good thing as peak oil.

I proudly supported a new law not yet fully supported by our administration, ARPA-E. This is patterned after the enormously successful DARPA that has brought a lot of things to fruition. We wouldn't have an Internet if it weren't for DARPA. We wouldn't have pilotless airplanes if it weren't for DARPA.

I want an ARPA-E. We are going to have very limited resources, very limited time. What are we going to invest it in? There are some things that businesses with its short sight and the next quarterly report just can't invest money in. That's what DARPA has been doing for years with such enormous success, just investing in these things that are really risky but have enormous payoff. That's what DARPA has done very successfully. That's what I hope ARPA-E will do too.

I voted to increase CAFE standards. I was driving to work the other day and one lane in front of me was an SUV with one person in it. In the lane next to it was a Prius. By the way, I bought the first one in Congress and the first one in Maryland, now driving a second one. There were two people in the Prius, and I noted to myself, the people in that Prius are getting six times the miles per gallon, per person, as compared to the people in that SUV.

We have enormous opportunities for conservation, and there is only one thing that will reduce the price of oil tomorrow. Drilling will not do it, because no oil will flow for years after we start drilling.

As a matter of fact, it will make the problem a bit worse tomorrow, because it takes energy to drill, and that will simply compete for additional energy. Only one thing will reduce the price of oil tomorrow, and that's use less of it. There are only two ways we will get there.

One of those the market will provide, and that is if we wait until oil gets so

high that it destroys the world's economies, and then those economies will collapse and the demand for oil will collapse, demand destruction, they call it, and then the price will drop. That's a very painful way to get the price down.

The only other way to get I down, by reducing demand, is to simply voluntarily reduce demand. We have a lot of opportunities to do that.

Let me run through this chart. I have a self-powered farm. If a farm can't produce all its own energy and a little bit left over for somebody else, we are in trouble for the future, aren't we, as we run down this other side of this fossil fuel curve.

Tax credits for hybrids, I would like to expand that so that more people would be encouraged to buy them, to give more tax credits for those.

Then the DRIVE Act, the DRIVE Act would require that all of our cars, for about $100 extra--maybe less than that with our max production-- would be flex-fuel cars and they could use any fuel. By the way, every car produced in Brazil today is a flex-fuel car. They look just like ours. They cost just a trifling more to do. Who knows what the fuel in the next 16 years will be. A fleet turns over every 16 years, roughly. So we ought to be prepared for that. We really do need flex fuel cars.

The next chart, and this one points out another reality of the world in which we live, and this is who owns the oil? Now, we have looked at that another way previously, but this looks at the countries that are buying oil.

You can see a dollar sign there in a few places, not very--I have to look to find them, by the way, but I really don't have to look to find the symbols for China. They are everywhere. They are everywhere.

They are Russia, they were going to buy Unocal in our country. They are heavily invested in south--not only are they buying oil, they are buying goodwill. Do you need a soccer field? Hospital, how about roads? So China is out there very aggressively buying oil all over the world.

The next chart, and I would like to put where we are in context and look at all of the power we are using. We have been looking just at transportation. That is where the real challenge comes in the future.

This looks at U.S. energy consumption by sector. Electric power, transportation, and we have been talking primarily about liquid fuels. So 2 or 3 percent of this is produced by diesel, but we are using gas. And gas is not thought of as a liquid fuel, but you will see the city buses running on gas, and so it is appropriate to look at that.

Here is transportation, industry, residential and commercial.

The next chart looks at the reality of the future. It is very obvious that oil is finite, that it will not be here forever. Hyman Rickover was the first that I know of who in a very dramatic way called our attention to that.

We will eventually transition. Geology will ensure it. We will transition from fossil fuels to renewables. We have some finite resources to help us do that. We have already talked about the tar sands and the oil shales. I have no idea how much we will get from those. I don't know how much money I might win in the lottery, but I don't plot my future on future winnings in the lottery. And I am going to win no money in the lottery because I don't play the lottery.

So we need to have a plan B. Coal. In a few minutes I will have a chart that looks at coal. We have a lot of coal compared to the rest of the world. Our fabled 250 years of coal is not really 250 years. The National Academy of Sciences recently looked at it. They say we haven't looked at coal since 1970, and we have been using a lot of coal since 1970. They said we now probably have 100 years of coal at current use rates. But be very careful when someone says ``current use rates.''

We have great difficulty in understanding the exponential function. When Albert Einstein was asked after nuclear energy, what is going to be the next great force in the world?

He said the most powerful force in the world is the power of compound interest. Just 2 percent growth, so anemic that our stock market doesn't like it and it tends to shudder when you only have 2 percent growth, 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years, eight times bigger in 105 years, and 16 times bigger in 140 years. That is just 2 percent growth. And so this 100 years at current use rates could easily shrink to 25-30 years with increased use rates.

Then we have nuclear. I am a fan of nuclear. It has been very safe. We produce roughly 20 percent of our electricity with it. And France produces 75-80 percent with it. We use a light water reactor using fissile uranium, and that will run out. Then we can go to breeder reactors and as the name implies, breed fuel, and we won't run out of that. But we do buy some problems with that of transporting weapons grade material for further use.

But those I think are solvable problems. The only one that gets us home free is nuclear fusion. That's harnessing the power of the hydrogen bomb. By the way, we have a great nuclear fusion plant, it's called the sun. That is how it produces its energy.

I happily vote for the $250 million a year that we spend on fusion, but I think the odds of commercializing that are relatively small. I would be delighted if we are able to do that, but I would not count on that. You have to have a plan B.

Now we look at the renewable sources. And by and by, all of our energy will come from sources like these and maybe a couple more that we might add to it. Solar and wind and true geothermal. A lot of people talk about geothermal where you are hooking your air conditioner to ground temperature. Gee, do that please because what you are trying to do in the summer when you air condition your house is heat the air outside when it is already 100 degrees outside. It is easier to warm up the ground which is 56 degrees; and in the wintertime, 56 degrees looks pretty warm compared to the 10 degrees it might be outside.

But the geothermal I am talking about is tying into the molten core of the earth. They do that in Iceland. I don't see a single chimney in Iceland.

Ocean energy, an incredible amount of potential energy in the oceans, but hard to harness. We are working at it.

Agricultural resources, soybean and biodiesel. Just a word about those. I am a big fan of agriculture. I come from a farming background. I hope that agriculture will play a meaningful role, but it will not be a huge role.

The National Academy of Sciences has said that if we used all of our corn for ethanol and discounted for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. They said if we used all of our soybeans for diesel and discounted for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.9 percent of our diesel. These are trifling numbers.

They noted that as far as corn ethanol is concerned, using all of our corn, we use only a part and now we are driving up the price of corn, wheat and soybeans because we diverted land, and droughts drove up the price of rice and so now there is hunger around the world and we are partly to blame for that. They said that if you tuned up your car and put air in your tires, you could save as much gas as using all of our corn for ethanol.

Methanol that you might get from wood, biomass, and the huge interest now that I think is a bit overly optimistic is on cellulosic ethanol. I am an old dirt farmer. Let me just note something that I think is intuitive. I can't imagine that we would get a whole lot more energy from our wasteland that wasn't good enough to plant anything on than we could get from all of our corn and all of our soybeans which would produce, for corn, replace 2.4 percent of our gasoline, and for soybeans, 2.9 percent of our diesel. I can't imagine we are going to get a whole lot more than that from our wastelands that aren't good enough to grow anything on. If you want to mine those and rape them of their organic materials for the next couple of years, you might get a meaningful amount. But sustainably, at least to some measure, this year's weeds grow because last year's weeds died and are fertilizing them. Now we will get something from cellulosic ethanol.

There are two bubbles that have broken already. The first big bubble that was going to be our savior was hydrogen. Remember that one? I think people figured out that hydrogen is not an energy source; it is an energy carrier. You will always use more energy producing hydrogen than you get out of it.

Why hydrogen. Because if we have a fuel cell where we can burn it and use it at least twice as efficiently, and when you use hydrogen you get water and that is pretty clean. So it is a great candidate for a fuel cell. We are at least two decades away from a fuel cell.

The second bubble that broke is the corn ethanol bubble. I am predicting that the cellulosic ethanol bubble will break. We will get something from cellulosic ethanol, but it will not be the huge amounts people are predicting we might get.

Waste to energy, great idea. And there is a good plant here in Montgomery County, but what you are burning there is largely a waste stream, the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. For the moment it is a good idea; but long term in an energy-deficient world, you are not going to waste so much. Remember, I grew up during the Depression: Waste not, want not. That is certainly not our motto today when you look at our landfills.

Gas hydrates. I want to mention that because there is more potential energy there than all the other energy sources I have talked about. These are little, frozen modules on the bottom of the ocean. There are huge potential amounts of energy there. But let me note that there are huge potential amounts of energy in the tides. The moon lifts the whole ocean two or three feet. When I carry two 5-gallon buckets of water, they are heavy. The problem with that energy and the tides and the problem with the energy in the gas hydrates is that it is very scattered and diffuse. Energy to be useful must be concentrated. And we will get something out of all of those, but it will not be enormous amounts.

This chart looks at a very interesting reality, and that is we are very much like the young couple that had their grandparents die and left them a big inheritance and now they have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of all of the money they spend comes from their inheritance and only 15 percent from their salary. And they look at the inheritance, and it is going to run out before they retire, and so obviously they have to do something. They have to spend less or make more. That is precisely where we are because 85 percent of all of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels, coal, petroleum and natural gas; only 15 percent from renewables, a bit more than half of that from nuclear. Here are the renewables we saw on the other chart. This is 7 percent. So solar was 1 percent of 7 percent; so 0.07 percent. Big deal.

And I am a big fan of solar and it is growing at 30 percent a year, but when you use 21 million barrels of oil a day, that is an incredible amount of energy. It is a huge challenge to find alternatives that will produce that amount of energy.

The next chart shows us the U.S. electricity generated by fuel source, and notice some of this we can use in cars. In fact, we can use a lot of the coal. Natural gas, buses run on natural gas. If you had electric cars, you could do it with nuclear. And the others are much smaller. Hydro is 6 percent a year or so depending on how much rain we have.

The next chart shows electricity generation by renewables, and this blows up the renewables part of it. The wood, wind, waste, geothermal and the solar. This is 1 percent up here. The total amount we use is 100 times higher. So you see solar down there, it is just trifling. I think it will be huge in the future. The most aggressive country in the world for solar is Germany, and they have poor sunlight compared to the United States. But they recognize that they have to do something to transition.

The next chart, and I want to spend just a moment on this chart because the reality is this should have led people to understand we weren't going to get all we could want from corn. This bottom part, this is the amount of energy that goes into producing corn. Almost half is natural gas that is used to make nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learned how to do that, the only nitrogen fertilizer came from barnyard manure and guano. Guano is the droppings of birds and bats, and if we wait another 10-20,000 years, we will have some more. But that is gone now. It was a big industry doing that.

The amount of energy that goes into producing ethanol from fossil fuels is incredible. This just looks at the energy that goes into producing. Indeed, there are some who believe that we use more energy producing ethanol than we get out of ethanol. Our Department of Energy believes it is probably 80 percent, and the National Academy of Sciences use that number, too. Probably 80 percent of the energy that you get out of ethanol was put in there with fossil fuels.

I would like to put up the chart that we began our discussion of things that could be done, and I would like to say in my closing moments that I feel very exhilarated by this. There is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge. This is a huge challenge. The American people are the most creative, innovative people in the world. If they really understood what we needed to do, they would do what the people of my generation did, and I am 82 years old. I was born in 1926. I lived through World War II. Everybody had a victory garden. We had Daylight Savings Time so you could work another hour in the victory garden. We didn't do that because somebody told us we had to, we did it because we knew we needed to do that.

I think the American people, properly challenged, if they really understood the challenge, I think the American people would rally, and I think we could once again become a major exporting country, not just exporting ideas to other people who then do the manufacturing. I want to do the manufacturing here and be a manufacturing and exporting country. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world.

Mr. Speaker, what we need is a program that has the total commitment of World War II. Everybody in America needs to be involved. We need to have the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, and we need to have the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We are capable of that. The American people are waiting for that.

The solutions that are now suggested to us are only partial solutions. I am kind of glad with my 10 kids and 16 grandkids and 2 great-grandkids that we didn't drill every place that we might have drilled. Now there is a little oil for them, and they will be involved in this transition.

So I hope, Mr. Speaker, with more knowledge of where we are, that the American people will rally to the challenge and the United States will be what it has been in the past, a leader in technology, and a major manufacturing and exporting country.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 45 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, June 23, 2008, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

Thank you very much, Randy, for organizing this special order this evening.

Most of the founders of our country were deeply religious. You wouldn't know that by reading our textbooks. They have been bled dry of any meaningful reference to how religious our founders were.

One of those founders was Patrick Henry. And his words, some of his words may be in our textbook, ``Give me liberty or give me death.'' But I will bet you the textbook will not include the context of this.

This was said on March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia; and this is what he said. ``An appeal to arms and the God of hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God. I know not what course others may take but, as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.''

Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman, toured this country in 1831, and this is what he said. ``I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her great harbors, her fertile fields and boundless forests, in her rich mines and vast world commerce, in her universal public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless constitution.

``But not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.''

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln declared a National Day of Humiliation, and I really love his words. He was not supposed to be a really religious man, but listen to what he said. ``We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity where we have grown in numbers and wealth and power as no other Nation has ever grown.

``But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blesses were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

``Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self- sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that the God that made us! It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.''

Abraham Lincoln understood that this was an experiment. In his Gettysburg address he said ``Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new Nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.''

We're now engaged in a great civil war testing where that Nation or any Nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Mr. Lincoln, this has been a very successful experiment. But I think the words of Alexis de Tocqueville are true, that America will continue to be great so long as America continues to be good.

And Mr. Forbes, it will be very difficult for America to continue to be good if we forget how much we depend on God. Thank you for yielding to me, sir.

Mr. Chairman, I strongly encourage my colleagues to support the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009. As ranking member of the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee, I applaud the efforts of Chairman Taylor and his staff who have done an excellent job of meeting the needs of our sailors, aviators and marines.

I also want to thank my staff who did a great job. They helped prepare this statement and so they modestly did not include themselves. Thank you, staff, very much.

The bill accelerates the planned refueling complex overhaul of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. It fully funds the next generation carrier, the fiscal year 2009 Virginia class submarine and provides procurement for a second Virginia class submarine in both fiscal years 2010 and 2011. The bill also authorizes two T-AKEs and two Littoral combat ships.

There are several areas where the committee disagreed with the President's budget requests. For example, the bill would not allow the Navy to terminate the LPD-17 production line. The bill would slow the pace of the DDG 1000 destroyer program while providing the Navy with the flexibility to reevaluate its options for service combatants and reduce risk for the next generation cruiser.

On the aviation side, the bill continues to support the alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. It also provides additional funding to address emergent P-3 aircraft repair issues.

With regard to Marine Corps programs, the chairman and I share concerns and the same goals about the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and its survivability. The Marine Corps has responded to our concerns by making design changes that will improve its survivability by 50 percent over the baseline. But I believe that more can be done. I have asked the chairman if we can continue to examine this bill's proposed $40 million cut to the EFV program to ensure we achieve this important goal.

The bill extends the committee's prior work to expand nuclear propulsion for shipbuilding. Last year, we required the Navy to include integrated nuclear propulsion for the next generation cruiser. This year, the bill would require that future amphibious assault vessels also include nuclear power.

The Navy's 2007 study on alternative energy for ship propulsion indicated that the break-even price for nuclear propulsion for amphibious ships was a market price of $178 per barrel of oil. We're creeping up to that number. Oil hit a new record of $133 a barrel today.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I would like to note that several of our colleagues, all three of them sitting in the Chamber in front of me, are retiring at the end of this Congress. My very good friend, Duncan Hunter; good friend, Jim Saxton; and my classmate, Terry Everett, thank you all very much for what you have done for your country, for our servicemen and -women. You have my deepest respect and gratitude.

Mr. Chairman, I ask my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, several days ago I came into the office early and I found at my door the usual package of newspapers and I opened them up and was placing them out on the table, and I noticed the headlines. And this is every paper that was at my door that morning. There were four newspapers and there were three inside-the- Beltway newspapers intended primarily for those interested in the Congress. I want to go through the headlines in every one of those papers.

Here is the Baltimore Sun, and they had two headlines above the fold both related to energy, ``Demand Eats Supply,'' and ``Energy Bill Aids Payouts on Rise.''

Then I went to the Washington Times and there was a headline, ``Bush Lays Gas Blame on Congress.''

And then I went to the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal headline was ``Grain Companies' Profits Soar as Global Food Crisis Mounts.''

Then I turned to the U.S. News part of the Wall Street Journal and what do you know, above the fold there were two more headlines, ``Bush Prods Lawmakers on Economy and Energy Prices,'' and ``GOP Senators Urge Halt to Oil Reserve.''

Then I noted the three papers that are kind of inside the Beltway papers: Roll Call, ``Alexander Eyes Energy Agenda''; The Hill, ``Politics At the Pump''; and Politico had ``Gas Prices Fuel Effort to Jam the GOP.''

So every one of these seven papers that were on my doorstep that morning had headlines talking about energy. Now I noted just a few days before that

there was a New York Times op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman. This is what he says about energy. Here is what is scary. Our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy, then you want to raise taxes on the things that you want to discourage--gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars--and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage--new renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite, he says.

The gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today, and I quote, ``Maximize demand, minimize supply, and buy the rest from the people who hate us most.''

This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering, he says. We borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. No, no, no, we will just get the money by taxing Big Oil. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars, he says.

For almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production of tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. And a little later I will go over this bill that has already passed the Senate, and we have introduced it in the House now.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down. Stalemate, he says.

I first came to this floor to talk about this subject more than 3 years ago. It was, I believe, the 14th day of March in 2005. I noted then that we have known, we had known at that time for 25 years that we would be facing this crisis. Now it is 28 years. We have known for 28 years that we would be facing this crisis. I will present the evidence for that in just a moment, and I think the evidence is absolutely unassailable. Anybody who looked at the evidence would have to conclude that there was a reasonable, indeed probably a high probability that we would be here today with oil at over $100 a barrel.

This all started in 1956 on March 8 when an oil geologist from the Shell Oil Company gave a speech that I think may shortly be recognized as the most important speech given in the last century. He gave that speech in San Antonio, Texas, to an audience of people interested in oil. What he told them was at that time absolutely audacious and incredible. He told them in just 14 years the United States is going to reach its maximum oil production and no matter what you do, after that the production of oil will decrease year by year.

At that time the United States was the largest producer of oil in the world, the largest consumer of oil in the world, and I think the largest exporter of oil in the world. So this was absolutely audacious to suggest that the king of oil in just 14 short years would reach its maximum ability to produce oil.

He was a pariah for a number of years, and then in 1970, when right on schedule as this chart shows, when right on schedule the United States reached its maximum oil production, he became a legend in his own time. He made his prediction in 1956. You see how much oil we were producing then. In 1970 we were producing a lot more oil. And right on schedule, just as he predicted, the United States after that produced less and less oil each year, in spite of several things, Mr. Speaker. In spite of finding a lot of oil in Alaska. And notice just a little blip down the slide of what is called Hubbert's peak as a result of this enormous find in Alaska. I have been to Prudhoe Bay, a 4-foot pipeline through which for a number of years a full 25 percent of all our domestic production flowed. And then a big find some years later in the Gulf of Mexico. I remember the hype over that find. You see the yellow there, just a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

So not only did we find a lot of oil that M. King Hubbert had not included in his prediction, his prediction included only the lower 48 States, in spite of this large find of oil in Alaska and the large find of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and in spite of increasing amounts of natural gas liquids, we today produce about half of the oil that we did in 1970.

Another thing that we have done, we have drilled more oil wells than all of the rest of the world put together. In spite of doing that, in spite of ever-better techniques for finding oil, computer modeling and 3-D seismic, in spite of ever-better techniques for getting the oil, enhanced oil recovery, nothing we have done has proved M. King Hubbert a liar. He said we would peak in oil production in 1970, and we did. And we have been sliding down the other side of Hubbert's peak ever since.

In 1979 he predicted using the same analytical techniques which aren't all that hard to understand. He noted that in an individual oil field, that the production of the field increased and increased and increased until it reached a maximum which was when about half the oil was exhausted. After that, the last half which reasonably would be more difficult to get, was more difficult to get and production was slower. And so he rationalized that if he could add up all of the little oil fields in the United States and make a good prediction as to how many more we would find, he could have one big bell curve which is basically the shape of that curve, and he could then predict when the United States would reach its maximum oil production. He was right on target.

Using that same technique, he predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. Now I say that we have known this for 28 years. I say that because by 1980 it was very obvious that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We were already well over the peak and sliding down the other side of what is called Hubbert's peak. What did we do? We have done as a world, as a country, absolutely nothing to prepare for the inevitability that M. King Hubbert would probably be right about the world because he was right about the United States.

Now as the next chart shows, the two entities which track oil production and consumption, and it is essentially the same thing, very little oil is stored in the world compared to the amount that we use, that is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Defense, and the IEA, the International Energy Association, both of those track very well the production of oil. And you can see they have the production of oil about flat for the last 3 years.

Now when I first came here, and I think that was 43 times ago, I think this is the 44th time I have been to the floor, when I was here in 2005, oil was about $50 a barrel, a little over $50 a barrel. Using the predictions of M. King Hubbert, I with some confidence have been saying now for these 43 times, 44 times including tonight, that we were going to get here, that the world was going to reach maximum oil production.

And we ought to have been preparing for this. And since we hadn't been preparing in the past, we ought to start preparing for this with some realistic measures.

Notice what happened to the price of oil. Of course, when you have a static production and an increasing demand, the supply/demand mechanism which controls the pricing of almost everything in our world, caused an increase in the price of oil. Now, it would be well off the top of our chart here. We're now at $123, $124 a barrel. That's well off the top of the chart here. As far as I know, these lines are extending out flat. There is no increase in oil production.

The next chart, this chart shows the discoveries of oil through the years, and it shows the use of oil through the years. Now, if you had only one chart that you could look at, this chart, I think, conveys more information than any other. And even without M. King Hubbert's predictions, I think that you would conclude that we're probably going to max out in oil production about now. Because look what we have here.

We have discoveries back through the 1940s and the 1950s, and boy did we discover it in the 1960s and the 1970s, and then another surge around the 1980s. But down, down, down since then. And

that's in spite of ever better technologies for discovering oil, ever more interest in discovering oil. It's been down, down, down.

Now, obviously, if you add up all of these bars, you will know the total amount of oil that we have discovered. That is frequently done by simply drawing a smooth curve over those bars. That tells you that the area under the curve represents the total volume. I say that because there's another curve here which is very important, and that is the consumption curve.

Notice that early on in the 1960s, boy, in the 1970s, we were finding enormously more oil than we were using. So every year we had bigger and bigger reserves behind us that we could rely on. And then about 1980, when the discovery of oil was down, and we were using more and more oil, ever since about 1980, we have been using more oil than we found. Well, we could do that because we had extra back here that we hadn't used. So we simply could borrow from this and pump it here and fill that volume with it.

I want to point out something about this curve which is really very interesting. You notice how steep the curve is here. This is up through the Carter years. Now, had we continued on that trajectory, we would now be well off the top of this chart.

The oil price spike hikes of the 1970s, and the recession that occurred then, notice the little dip there, were really blessings in disguise. There's an old saying that it's an ill wind that blows no good.

I lived through all of those gas lines, even, odd, the end of your license plate, the day you could fill up your tank.

But look what happened as a result of that wake up call. Boy, are we more efficient now than we were then. Look at the slope of this curve as compared to the slope of this curve. And we're getting even more and more efficient. This is an exponential rise. And it would be off the top of the chart.

As a matter of fact, there was a stunning statistic during the Carter years. Every decade the world used as much oil as it had used in all of previous history. Now, that's stunning, because what that says is that when you used half of it, only 10 years will remain. We're very much better off.

By the way, oil's not going to run out in 10 years or 20 or 30. We have another 150 years of oil, gas and coal, but at ever decreasing amounts, ever more difficult to find, ever more expensive.

When we talk about peak oil and the energy crisis, that does not mean we're running out of oil. What that means is we're running out of our ability to produce oil as fast as we would like to use it.

Well, what will the future look like?

Now, I said if you had only this chart to look at you could make some really educated guesses about what the future is going to look like, because you cannot pump what you have not found. And unless you think that there's going to be some startling new discoveries in the future, it's been down, down, down, for 30 years. Unless you think there's going to be some startling new discoveries in the future, these are the reserves that we have to fill in the volume here about what this chart suggests we might find.

Now, it won't be smooth like that. It will be up and down, but it might be reasonably that kind of a slope.

So I think that even without the predictions of M. King Hubbert, just looking at this oil chart, it would be very easy to conclude that we probably, very soon, if not now, would have reached the maximum production of oil.

The next chart looks at some of the geopolitical consequences of this. This is the world according to oil. This is what the geography of the world would look like if the size of the country was related to how much oil it had. Some really interesting things here.

Saudi Arabia dominates the landscape. They should. They have 22 percent of all the known reserves of oil in all the world. And notice, their near neighbors, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, second, third and fourth. United Arab Emirates. You almost have to have a magnifying glass to find them on the map, and there they are. Look how huge they are in terms of the amount of oil they have. And then Northern Africa.

Here we are, the United States. The yellow means that we're a big user of oil. Our small size means we don't have much. And notice the people from whom we get most of our oil. Canada is our Number 1 supplier. They have much less oil than we. But they don't have very many people so they can ship oil to us.

Mexico, until about a month ago, was our Number 2 supplier. But their largest oil field, which is the second largest oil field in the world, Cantoral, is now in steep decline, about 8, 10 percent a year. Now our Number 2 supplier is Saudi Arabia.

Mexico. But notice that Mexico and Canada together have little more oil than we have. And we have only 2 percent of the known reserves in the world. Maybe they have 3 percent. Maybe all three of us together here have 4, 5, 6 percent of the oil in the world. That's all.

Even more alarming, notice the size of China and India. Here they are. 1.3 billion people and 1.1 billion people, more than a third of the world's population, and they have less oil than the United States has.

When you go to China, and I did with 8 other Members of Congress about 16 months ago, and they begin their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. So China knows that they have to transition.

The next chart is kind of a bar chart which shows the same thing, pretty much, that we saw in that chart. If you take the 10 largest owners of oil in the world, 98 percent of all that oil belongs to countries rather than companies. Saudi Aramco, National Iranian, Iraqi National Oil, Kuwait Petroleum Company and so forth. Only 2 percent by Lukoil, that's a big Russian oil company.

Now, if you look at the 10 producers of oil, 78 percent of the first 10 producers of oil, all that oil comes from countries, not companies, again, these nationally owned oil companies. And only 22 percent comes from the big three.

There's obviously a lot of angst over the high price of oil, and people are looking around for who to blame. And there are a lot of people who blame the big oil companies. They're gouging us.

There are a lot of people who blame the OPEC countries, and many of them are here; because they say they're holding back on oil to drive the prices up. Probably neither one of those things are true. There is pretty good evidence that OPEC is pumping oil about as fast as it can pump oil.

Russia, not a part of OPEC, but a big producer, noted several weeks ago that they had reached their maximum oil production.

Saudi Arabia, just last week admitted to maximizing out on oil production. They're trying to bring a new field on-line, the Kuras field. It's a very technical field. It may get 1.2 million barrels a day. That's a lot. But they may get nothing. They've spent billions of dollars drilling wells. They're going to have to flood the field with seawater under pressure because that oil is so tightly held in the rocks that it won't flow. And if they do is just right they can get the oil to flow in large amounts, and they may get for quite a number of years, 1.2 million barrels a day. But that's kind of iffy.

But even if they get that and get it on-line, it will barely maintain their present oil production. It will not increase their oil production.

The next chart speaks again to this geopolitical situation. This is the chart which shows who is buying oil where in the world. And you see these symbols for Russia. Here they tried to buy UniCal in our country. They have bought a lot of the production from Canada, South America, the Middle East, Northern Africa. You see their symbol all over the map.

Why are they buying oil? Today it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil. The person who comes, the country, the company that comes with the dollars buys the oil. It doesn't make a bit of difference.

We own only 2 percent of the oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the oil in the world because we come with our dollars and we buy the oil from those who have it for sale.

So why would China be buying oil? You can't get inside their head, but you can make some prognostications from what you see. You go to China, by the way, and they talk about post-oil. There will be a post- oil world. It's not forever. It is finite. It will run out. And China is talking about post-oil.

But while we still have some oil, they have a policy, a 5-point plan, and everybody knows it over there, all of their leaders know it, not just the people in energy and oil and coal know it. Everybody over there talked to us about the 5-point plan.

Number 1 is conservation. That's where whatever country, and this is where it's got to begin. We have now run out of time. We have run out of excess energy. We can buy some time and free up some energy if we have an aggressive program in conservation.

Number 2 and Number 3 were alternatives, and as many of those as you can from your own country.

Number 4 may surprise you. Be kind to the environment. They know they're awful polluters, but they have 900 million people in rural areas that, through the miracle of communications, know the benefits of industrialization. And I think they see their empire unraveling the way the Soviet empire unraveled if they cannot meet the demands of these people.

So why are they buying all the oil? At the same time they're buying this, oh by the way, they're not just buying oil; they're buying good will. Would you like a soccer stadium? Is it hospitals you need, roads? So in addition to buying the oil they're buying goodwill.

At the same time that they're doing this, they are aggressively building a blue water navy. They launched many times, I don't know the exact number, maybe 10, submarines last year. We launched one.

Now, their submarines aren't ours yet, but I would note that they are graduating six times as many engineers as we graduate, and about half of our engineers are Chinese students.

I was stunned the other day when I learned that in our patent office more than 60 percent of the applications for a new patent come from Asia.

They are very aggressively building a blue water navy. Might the day come that they would say well, gee, I'm sorry, guys, but we have 1.3 billion people, the oil is ours and we can't share it.

Today there's no alternative, the way the marketplace works but that you're going to share your oil.

The next chart, and I've already mentioned some of these numbers. We have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil. By the way, these numbers encouraged 30 of our prominent leaders, Jim Woolsey and McFarland and Boyden Gray and 27 others, several retired 4-Star admirals and generals to write a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two- thirds of what we use is really a totally unacceptable national security risk.

We've got to do something about that. That little 2 percent we have, by the way, from that we produce 8 percent of the world's oil. So we're good at pumping oil.

As I mentioned earlier, we have drilled more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. So it is not surprising that we're pumping down our oil reserves four times faster than the rest of the world. We have a bit less than 5 percent than the world's population, and we use 25 percent of the worlds' oil.

I'm going to next look at some of the things that I personally have been doing and some of the things that Congress has been doing, and then I am going to recognize my very good friend, Zach Wamp from Tennessee, who has come with us to share some of this time with us.

Physiologist.

Thank you very much for your observations.

We're doing a number of things in the Congress. It would have been a whole lot better if we were doing them 25, 28 years ago, by the way, because what we're doing in the Congress will not be adequate to meet the challenge. But it's a start. It's what we can do.

I have a book here that came across my desk: ``A Very Unpleasant Truth . . . Peak Oil Production and Its Global Consequences'' by two very credentialed authors, both Ph.Ds from one of our large oil companies. And they say in this book, The first and most important thing that needs to be done is to educate and convince the public that a problem even exists; and that's what I have been trying to do for more than 3 years now. The public must accept, they say, that the current system based on cheap oil is not sustainable and cannot be kept intact regardless of what politicians promise.

Let me mention quickly four things that I'm personally involved with and personally doing.

We have a new bill just introduced last evening. It is a companion bill to S. 2821 that has enormous support that I will mention very briefly. Our bill is H.R. 5984.

In one of his columns last week, New York Times' Thomas Friedman decried the stalemate that has so far prevented the extension of renewable energy tax

credits that would otherwise expire this year. I noted that in some opening comments this evening, and this was one of the things that inspired us to pick up this Senate bill and to file it in the House.

This bill does several things: Extension and modification of the renewable energy production tax credit; extension and modification of the solar energy and fuel cell investment tax credit; clean renewable energy bonds; extension of the special rule to implement FERC restructuring policy; extension and modification of the credit for energy efficiency improvements to existing homes; extension of the tax credit for energy efficient new homes; extension of the energy efficient commercial buildings deduction; modification and extension of the energy efficient appliance credit.

So it's a broad-based bill. It has passed the Senate by 88-8. It has 43 cosponsors in the Senate. We have 35 original cosponsors in the House and two more have been added to that today.

This bill has gotten a lot of support from the community out there. The Christian Science Monitor has an article on it supporting the bill. ``Big Oil's Friends in the Senate'' is an editorial by New York Times on this subject, and here I have a list and I want to just mention a few of those because it's so important. It notes how broad the support is for this bill.

Here are letters from the National Association of Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Industry Leaders Association. And then I have here a letter signed by more than three pages of double column organizations, more than three pages, double column, and let me just mention a few of them.

American Council on Renewable Energy, Alliance to Save Energy, Alternative Fuels Renewable Energies Council, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, American Solar Energy Society, American Wind Energy Association, the Audubon Society, Babcock and Brown, Bloom Energy, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, California Energy Commission, Center for Energy and Environmental Sustainability at James Madison University. Constellation Energy, well-known locally. They provide much electricity for the Baltimore area. The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, Earthjustice, Edison Electric Institute.

And so you notice the broad, broad spectrum of support for this bill from a lot of those who are concerned about the environment and those who are concerned about the simple fact that we have got to have more energy.

Environmental Defense Fund, Exelon Corporation, GE Energy, Geothermal Energy Association. Greenpeace? The Home Depot, Honeywell, Idaho Rural Council, John Deere Renewables, JP Morgan, League of Conservation Voters, Lowe's Companies, Michigan Alliance of Cooperatives. National Association of Home Builders, a very conservative organization to which I belonged in another life. National Association of State Energy Officials, National Electrical Manufacturers Association.

I'm reading, by the way, about one-tenth of all of those who have signed on.

National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northeast Public Power Association.

Oh, my, more pages, one-and-a-half more pages. I won't bother reading those, but it's the same kinds of broad, broad spectrum.

Like Suntech, I'll mention Suntech, second largest solar cell manufacturing company in the world. Six years ago it didn't exist. I was privileged to have lunch with the young Chinese man who started it just 6 years ago, and now, it's number two in all of the world.

Another thing that I am doing personally, we are having a SMART Green Showcase in conjunction with the SMART Organization. This will be on July 18 in Frederick, Maryland, and we're going to showcase there a number of smart energy solutions for many of the problems that homeowners and small businesses have. It has its own Web site, www.smartgreenconference.com. So you can find more information on it there.

I have a bill, the Self-Powered Farm Energy Bill. We're going to give a prize to the first farm that can demonstrate that they're capable of independence from off-site sources of energy, fuel, and raw materials; a community resource for food and energy. They will have food and energy left over to provide for the community or raw materials for food. It minimizes or eliminates ongoing operating expenditures to off- site entities for fossil fuel-derived energy; employs sustainable farming practices for long-term soil fertility; and produces at least two times as much energy, including fuel or raw materials for fuel, as it consumes.

Now, if we can't do this, we're in trouble. If our farms can't be energy independent, and I think they can, and we have a prize for that farm that will get there first.

The next chart speaks to the fourth thing that I'm personally involved in. This is the DRIVE Act. The Dependence Reduction through Innovation in Vehicles and Energy is what DRIVE stands for. The purpose of the bill is to achieve liquid fuel independence through alternative energy sources. Some of the key points include incentives for the auto industry to produce flexible fuel, hybrid and electric vehicles; the conversion of gas stations to fuel stations, where consumers can plug into an electric car to fill up on ethanol; as well as tax credits for Americans who buy flexible fuel cars.

It costs so little, maybe less than $100 to build a flex-fuel car. Every car in Brazil is flex-fuel. They could be, I think should be in our country, and we have a bill, H.R. 670, on flex-fuel vehicles, incenting the industry to move to flex-fuel vehicles. When we have the new fuels we'll be ready for it. If we haven't done that, there will only be a small percentage of the cars that could use the new fuels.

In addition to these things, I'm working with my colleague, Democratic Congressman Mark Udall from Colorado, to distribute a new report about green collar jobs from energy efficiency and renewable energy technology. This industry is small but it is really growing. The report is called Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: Economic Drivers for the 21st Century. It's available for free. You can download it at www.ases.org. Solar power grew worldwide by an average of 18 percent between 1980 and 2000. It's accelerated dramatically in recent years, growing by close to 50 percent annually since 2002. In spite of that dramatic growth, it still produces a tiny, tiny percentage of our electricity. That's because we get electricity production in huge, huge amounts, primarily from coal, 50 percent in our country, and from nuclear power and hydro power. Those are the three largest sources of energy for coal.

From a significantly larger base, wind power has also been growing rapidly. U.S. wind power capacity surged 45 percent in 2007. So lots of new jobs are being created. We need to create more.

I want to spend the remaining time, and it won't be very long, looking at the alternatives that we have and what reasonable expectations should be. And I need to come back, and we'll spend a full hour just looking at reasonable expectations.

I'd like to point to two expectations that did not turn out to be reasonable. It kind of represented the irrational exuberance that Alan Greenspan spoke about in the market.

The first of these was hydrogen, not hydrogen from renewables as the chart indicates here but hydrogen from any source. Remember, we were going to have a hydrogen economy? The President mentioned this in his State of the Union. I think we spent $1.5 billion on it. You don't hear anybody talk about hydrogen today, and that's because I think we've finally figured out that hydrogen is not an energy source. It is simply a way to carry energy from one place to another place.

There is no hydrogen out there free for the having. You have got to produce it by using more energy than you will get out of hydrogen. That is the immutable second law of thermodynamics. If you can repeal that law, you can repeal the law of gravity, and then we have a whole different world, don't we? So hydrogen is rarely, rarely mentioned now because that bubble broke.

Another bubble that broke very recently was the corn ethanol bubble. High, high hopes were held out for corn ethanol, very unrealistic expectations. I did some computations with Dr. John

Darnell, the most broadly knowledgeable scientist that I know and I'm privileged to have on my staff. We did some back-of-the-envelope computations several years ago and convinced ourselves that ethanol from corn could never make any meaningful contribution to freeing us from our need for oil.

The National Academy of Sciences has now said that if we use all of our corn for ethanol, every bit of it, and discounted it for fossil fuel input, which is huge, at least 80 percent--and you're just kidding yourself if you're burning fossil fuel in another form and pretending that you're displacing gasoline. If we used all of our corn for ethanol, discounted it for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. They noted that if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires you could save as much gas.

Well, now there's a backlash over corn ethanol. A U.N. official said that what we had done was a crime against humanity. There are other factors involved. One of the major ones is the very high cost of oil as energy, but certainly, our diversion of corn to ethanol is one of the factors that has increased the cost of food around the world. And I was shocked at how quickly these food shortages developed, and just a couple of weeks ago, you remember reading about food riots in a number of the countries in the world.

There is a new bubble that I think will break, and that is the cellulosic ethanol bubble. We will get something from cellulosic ethanol.

Oh, the National Academy of Sciences has also looked at soybeans for soy diesel, and they said that if we use all of our soybeans for soy diesel, no soybean oil for our cooking, no soy protein for feeding our cattle and so forth, if we use it all for soy diesel, it would displace 2.9 percent of our diesel.

Now, I'm going to make an observation, just an intuitive observation, the kind of thing that I think a rational person might conclude. We grow our corn and our soybeans on our best land. It's level, it's fertile. We dump all sorts of fertilizers and herbicides and insecticides on it to nurse out these huge, huge yields of corn, 250- bushels per acre.

Now, we are going to get this cellulosic ethanol from our wasteland. It's not good for growing corn or soybeans or wheat or any of these things. And just intuitively, I wonder how much more energy we could get from our wasteland, which isn't good for growing any of these crops, and we're going to get it without fertilizer, how much energy can we get from that sustainably? Well, we can get a lot the first year and the second year by simply going in and in effect raping the soil, taking off all the organic material.

But to at least some measure and in some soils to a very large measure, this year's weeds and grasses grow because last year's weeds and grasses died and are fertilizing them. It's a recycling of the nutrients that is really, really apparent in a tropical rain forest. If you take the tropical rain forest vegetation away in many places, you leave what's called laterite soils which grow very little because all of the nutrients were in circulation, in growth, death, decay, rebirth and growing again. It's all recycling.

So we're going to get some energy from cellulosic ethanol, but it is not a silver bullet. It will not solve our problem.

Here I have a look at all of the different places from which we might get energy, and I'm going to put the last chart up now because our time is just about out. I want to come back and I want to spend the full hour talking about realistic expectations from tar sands, more potential oil than all the oil in the world. Oil shales, again, in our country, more potential oil than all of the oil deposits in the world.

How much can we realistically expect to get from them? I'll make a very quick observation. We are very much like the young couple that has gotten a big inheritance from their grandparents and they're living lavishly. Eighty-five percent of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from what they earn. And it's going to run out before they die, so obviously they've got to do something, they've got to earn more or spend less.

That's precisely where we are. Eighty-five percent of all of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. It will run out. It is not forever. And so this 15 percent is going to have to grow. And about half of that is nuclear, the rest of it is a broad spectrum of potential renewables here. That's going to have to grow.

By the way, I think that this is an enormously exciting challenge. I am excited about this. America is the most creative, innovative society in the world. With proper understanding and proper leadership, we really can do miracles. We put a man on the moon in less than a decade.

I think we need a program that has a total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war, I know what it was. Daylight savings time, victory guard, nobody told you you had to do it, that's just what you did because you were a patriotic American.

We need the technology focus of putting a man on the moon--and many of us remember that exciting decade--and we need the urgency of the Manhattan Project. I think once again America has become a major manufacturing and exporting country, manufacturing and exporting to the rest of the world the technologies for sustainable renewables.

Mr. Speaker, I think this is a challenging opportunity, but it will not be easy. And we have very unrealistic expectations about what we can get from many of these things. Two of the bubbles have already broken. I will predict the next bubble that will break is the cellulosic ethanol bubble. We will get something from that; it will not be the huge amounts that people expect that we will get from that. So I look forward to coming back and talking for another hour about realistic expectations: What can we realistically get from these renewable sources?

Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate and honor two young students from my district who have achieved national recognition for exemplary volunteer community service by the 2008 Prudential Spirit of Community Awards program, an annual honor conferred on the most impressive student volunteers in each state and the District of Columbia.

Connor Dantzler of Damascus has just been named one of the top honorees in Maryland. An eighth-grader at John T. Baker Middle School, Connor is being recognized for his ``Health through Humor'' program. He has distributed over 5,000 joke books to patients,

their families and caregivers at hospitals and care centers throughout Maryland. In addition to delivering books to participating hospitals and health care centers, Connor spends time with patients and their loved ones. ``I've shared a smile and positive moment with a lot of people,'' said Connor. ``I hope that these efforts have made a difference to those who really needed something to laugh about.'' I am sure they did.

Christopher Anderson, a sophomore at Westminster High was named a finalist and will receive a bronze medal. I heartily applaud Christopher for his initiative in seeking to make his community a better place to live by renovating an outdoor break area for the Association for Retarded Citizens of Carroll County to make it accessible to disabled residents. Inspired by his uncle who has Down syndrome, he recruited more than 40 volunteers and raised $3,000 for the project. Christopher and his volunteers removed old rock, built special picnic tables, replaced wooden sidewalks and planted trees and shrubs in order to make the area handicapped-accessible. It will continue to have a positive impact on the lives of others for years to come.

Young volunteers like Connor and Christopher are inspiring examples to all of us, and are among our brightest hopes for a better tomorrow. The dedication and commitment by Connor Dantzler to sick hospital patients and Christopher Anderson to disabled individuals should fill all of us with pride that America's community spirit is strong. On behalf of the residents of Maryland's Sixth District I am honored to publicly thank and congratulate Connor and Christopher for their volunteer efforts. You give us hope and confidence that America's future will be led by a new generation of inspiring and compassionate leaders.

Mr. Speaker, I came early to our office yesterday morning, and I opened the door and took the newspapers inside and put them out on the reading table. And as I took them out, seven of them, four newspapers and three of the kind of inside-the-beltway papers, I noted the lead story above the fold. In the Sun there were two stories: ``Demand Eats Supply, swiftly rising food prices are undoing progress in fighting hunger globally''; and another above the fold headline: ``Energy Bill Aid Payouts on Rise.'' Then I picked up the Washington Times and noticed an above the

fold headline, ``Bush Lays Gas Blame on Congress.'' And then I picked up the Washington Post, a major headline above the fold: ``Syphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars.'' And then the Wall Street Journal, the biggest headline above the fold, with a graphic and picture above it: ``Grain Companies' Profit Soar As Global Food Crisis Mounts.''

And then I took the three inside-the-beltway newspapers to put them on the reading table, and I looked at the headlines there, on the front page: ``Gas Prices Fuel Effort to Jam GOP.'' ``Alexander Eyes Energy Agenda.'' The first of those was Politico; the second was Roll Call. And the third, The Hill: ``Politics at the Pump.''

So, Mr. Speaker, the seven papers that our office gets, every one of them yesterday had as their leading story above the fold something about energy prices and food prices, which, of course, are related.

Also appearing today, and I wanted to make sure that we didn't miss this New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, a very well-known author and commentator, which describes America's energy problems as the ``predictable consequences of an energy strategy that would be exacerbated by the most popular proposed changes to maximize demand, minimize supply, and buy the rest from the people who hate us most.'' In a little bit, I will read some other excerpts from this very interesting op ed piece by Thomas Friedman.

I have here a little book which came across my desk, signed by one of the authors to Representative Roscoe Bartlett: ``You are a political voice in the dark. Please continue trying to shed light on this critical issue.'' And the critical issue he's talking about is explained in the title of his book, ``A Very Unpleasant Truth . . . Peak Oil Production and Its Global Consequences.'' And I turned to the little page that talked about who the authors are, about the authors: W.D. Lyle, Jr. holds a Ph.D. in engineering from Purdue University. L. Scott Allen holds a Ph.D. in physics from SMU. Both are retired scientists from the Exploration and Producing Technical Center of a large international oil company. They have been awarded over 40 patents and coauthored or authored more than 50 technical papers with contributions appearing in a variety of journals such as Science, Geophysics, Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the Journal of Petroleum Technology. Both authors, it says, live in the Dallas area. So those are obviously well-respected authorities in their fields.

And I turned to chapter 6: ``What About Alternative Energy Sources and What Should We Do Now?'' And it begins by saying, ``What must we do now to prepare for and respond to the inevitable and impending energy crisis?''

And, Mr. Speaker, the seven papers that I just referred to and the headlines on all of them about energy and food would indicate that maybe, just maybe, we're on the cusp of this crisis.

And then he says, ``The first and most important thing that needs to be done is to educate and convince the public that a problem even exists.''

Long before I got this book, more than 3 years before I got this book, I thought also that that was the most important thing that needed to be done. And so, Mr. Speaker, I think this is the 43rd time I have come to the floor to spend an hour talking about the challenge. Really it was to explain to the American people the challenge that we face, to educate and convince the public that a problem even exists. Well, I think these seven headlines indicate that at least the editors of those papers thought that a problem existed because they were all talking about the high price of energy and its consequences on food prices.

But education is not the only thing that I have been doing. I have been personally involved in at least four activities, which I think will help to advance America on the path that we need to be treading. I'm sponsoring, in conjunction with the SMART Organization, a Smart Green Showcase on July 18 of this year in Frederick, Maryland, that will offer smart energy solutions for homeowners and small business owners. There is a lot of information out there. There's a lot of new technology that just isn't widely known. Practical ways you can use less energy, save money, and help our country transition to domestic, cleaner, and renewable energy sources. The conference will provide educational and networking opportunities for homeowners and representatives of large and small businesses, academic and nonprofit organizations.

This Smart Green Showcase has its own Web site, and I would encourage you to go to that Web site, www.smartgreenconference.com, for a fuller explanation of what will be shown at this Smart Green Showcase.

In the next few days, I will submit a bill that is a companion bill to a Senate bill, S. 2821, that was introduced in the Senate on the 3rd day of last month by Senator Maria Cantwell and Senator John Ensign, and almost half of the Senators have already signed onto this bill.

I have a brief summary of the bill, and because what it does is so important to where I think we need to be going, I am going to take just a moment to read this brief summary. This Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008 amends the Internal Revenue Code to extend certain tax incentives for energy production and conservation. It extends through 2009 the tax credit for production of electricity from renewable sources. For example, biomass, geothermal energy, landfill gas, and trash combustion.

It includes marine and hydrokinetic renewable energy as a resource eligible for such credit. It allows sales of electricity produced from renewable resources to regulated public utilities. This one is really very important to encourage everybody, even every homeowner, to produce electricity. If they are not using it, sell it back to the power company.

It extends the Energy Investment Tax Credit for solar energy through 2016 for fuel cell and microturbine property through 2017. It repeals the dollar per kilowatt limitation for fuel cell property under the Energy Investment Tax Credit. It allows public electric utilities to qualify for such credit.

It extends through 2009 the tax credit for residential energy- efficient property expenditures. It repeals the 2000 limitation on the tax credit for solar electric property. It allows an offset against the alternative minimum tax of tax credit amounts. It extends through 2009 the tax credit for investment in clean, renewable energy bonds, increases the national limitation amount for such bonds.

It extends through 2009 deferral provisions relating to the recognition of gain by certain electric utilities, and extends to 2009 the tax credit for nonbusiness energy property. It includes residential biomass fuel stoves, that is pellet stoves, as eligible energy property for purposes of such credit.

It extends through 2010 the tax credit for energy-efficient new homes. It extends through 2009 the tax deduction for energy-efficient commercial buildings, and increases the allowable amount of such deductions. Finally, it extends the tax credit for energy-efficient appliances, to include appliances produced in 2008, 2009, and 2010, and it revises and updates energy efficiency standards for such appliances in accordance with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

As shown on the first chart here, I also have a Self-Powered Farm Energy Bill, H.R. 80. This is really a very significant approach to addressing our energy problems because we are going to have to turn more and more to our farmers for energy and products that are produced by energy, that in the future will have to be produced with less energy. This bill would support Federal research, development, demonstration, and commercial application activities to enable the development of self-powered farms that are net producers of both food and energy. They should be capable of independence from offsite sources of energy. A farm standing all alone.

Mr. Speaker, if our farms can't be energy independent, we really, really have a huge challenge for the future. I think this is very doable, and this bill will offer awards, rewards to those who do that. Offsite sources of energy, fuel and raw materials for fuel. A community resource for food and energy or raw materials for fuel would minimize or eliminate ongoing operating expenditures to offsite entities for fossil fuel-derived energy, employ sustainable farming practices for long-term soil fertility. We mustn't forget that what

we do to make our farms energy independent and to get energy from our farms, that we must be really concerned about sustainability. It would be easy for a few years to mine the soil, that is take out of the soil more than you're putting back. But if it is not sustainable, it will not be useful for the long term.

Employ sustainable farming practices for long-term soil fertility and produces at least two times as much energy, including fuel or raw materials, or fuel, as it consumes both onsite and in the transfer of farm products to market.

The next chart shows an additional bill, H.R. 670, that I have introduced, American Energy for America's Future, the bipartisan DRIVE Act, Dependence Reduction through Innovation in Vehicles and Energy Act. What this does is to encourage transition from depending so much on liquid fuels from oil for transportation and move to electricity for transportation.

And the reason for this, Mr. Speaker, is pretty obvious, if you stop to think about it. We use two kinds of energy largely in our lives today; electricity for many, many things, but not much for transportation. Most of our transportation comes from fossil fuels, from oil, and some gas. You see city buses advertising that they are running on clean natural gas.

We have lots of opportunities to produce more electricity. We can do more solar. France produces 75, 80 percent of their electricity from solar. We have enormous opportunities to grow wind and solar. They are now growing at something like 30 percent a year. That is incredible growth rate. But they started very small. So even with that big growth rate, they are still producing a very minimal amount of energy to the grand mix of energy.

We can get a lot more energy in those parts of our country where you're close enough to the molten core of the Earth to get true geothermal energy. You go to Iceland, I have been there, and I did not see a single chimney in Iceland. They may have one. I didn't see it. They get essentially all of their energy there from geothermal energy. That is tapping the molten core of the Earth, which will heat water, and you can do lots and lots of things with it, and hot water.

Then, of course we have lots of opportunities for microhydro, without the kind of impact on the environment that our macro hydro has had with these huge dams and we try to compensate with fish ladders and so forth, compensate for the damage we have done to the environment with fish ladders and so forth so the fish who are spawning can get around to them. So we have lots of opportunities for producing electricity.

Our options for producing more liquid fuels are far more limited. So this is a very important bill. We are going to be talking for the rest of our few moments together today about these opportunities for producing more liquid fuels. You will see that they really are limited. We really do have a challenge there.

So to the extent that we can move transportation dependency from oil to electricity, we will have done a great deal to minimize our dependence on oil and free ourselves from dependence on oil, as the President appropriately said in his State of the Union Message, from people who don't even like us.

I wanted to just spend a couple of moments reading some additional comments from Thomas Friedman's article. I don't read this because I necessarily agree with everything he says, but I read it because I think that it's very important, as this little book said, that the American people understand the seriousness of the challenge that faces us.

So let me read a few more excerpts from his article that appeared today in the New York Times. The title of his little op-ed piece is called: Dumb as We Wanna Be. ``Here's what's scary: Our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy, then you want to raise taxes on the things that you want to discourage, gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars, and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage, new renewable energy technologies. We are doing, he says, ``just the opposite.''

``The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today.'' Then I quote again, ``Maximize demand, minimize supply, and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.''

Then additional excerpts from the article go on to say, ``This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering. We borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. No, no, no. We'll just get the money by taxing Big Oil. Even if you could do that,'' he says, ``what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars.

``For almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production of tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down. Stalemate.''

You know, as I said, I read this not because I necessarily agree with everything he says, but I read it because it is a very important voice that is saying what I have been trying to say for more than 3 years now, Hey, we face a problem. We have really got to do something about that problem.

The next chart, this is a little cartoon which I think tells the story that many people don't believe. Just why is gas so expensive, over $3.50 a gallon now? Just why is gas so expensive? The cartoon says it with just two words, a tiny little supply and a huge big demand.

Now there are many people who believe that gas is very expensive at the pump because the major oil companies are gouging us. Many people think that gas is high at the pump because the oil from which we refine it is very expensive because the Arab world is holding back and not producing as much oil as they could produce, or somehow gouging us.

The reality is that neither one of these commonly believed reasons for our high gas prices are probably true. There may be a little gouging here and there by stations and so forth. The price of oil is not determined by our big oil companies, ExxonMobil and Shell and Royal Dutch. The price of oil is determined, as this cartoon indicates, by how much there is and how much we would like to use.

The Arabs don't determine the price of oil. They can affect the price of oil. If they could produce more oil, they could drive down the price of oil by increasing the supply so it would be more consistent with the demand, and that would reduce the price of oil. There is increasing evidence that they could not do this. That is they could not increase their supply.

Russia, a couple of weeks ago, announced that they had peaked in oil production. That they could no longer increase their production. Just last week, Saudi Arabia indicated that they had reached a maximum oil production. They have the granddaddy of all oil fields, the Ghawar, a huge field, producing 5 million barrels a day. They want to bring online a new field. I read a lot about the technicality of that field. It's very interesting, what they have done. This is the field that has a lot of potential oil in it. Khurais, I think. It's hard for me to pronounce words with k-h.

They have hired Halliburton to drill a large number of wells, and what they plan to do, what they hope to do, is to flood that field where the oil will not flow. If you drill down in that field, you will not get any oil, although there is a great deal there, and they hope to make this oil flow by pumping water in at the periphery of the field under considerable pressure.

But this is a very delicate operation, because if they pump at too high a pressure and too large a volume and the water overflows the oil, it could seal off the little interstices through which the oil would flow and it might kill the field, so there would be no oil from the field. But hopefully they won't do this. They are very good at this technology. And if they are able to develop this field, they will get, they hope, 1.2 million barrels a day. This, they hope, will make up for the oil that

they are not getting as the present fields they are pumping tail off. They have reached a maximum production of oil.

The next chart is a chart whose history begins in 1956 with a talk which I think will go down as the most famous speech given in the last century by M. King Hubbert to a group of oil engineers and business people at San Antonio, Texas, in 1956, 52 years ago, on the 8th day of March. This was 1956. Here we are, 1956 right here.

He told them that in 1970, this point here. This part of this chart was not available. All they had was this, rapidly increasing oil production. We were the largest producer of oil in the world, the largest consumer of oil in the world, and I think the largest exporter of oil in the world. He said in 14 years, in 1970, the United States will reach its maximum oil production. Shell Oil Company asked him, please don't give that talk. You will make us look silly and make you look silly. He gave the talk, and for a long while was an object of derision. Then, right on schedule, in 1970 we reached our maximum oil production.

Now, they didn't know that in 1970. You only know you have reached a maximum when you look back and see, gee, we were pumping more oil then than we are now. But this was clearly, clearly known by 1980, because you can see by 1980 here we are well down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

There are a couple of things in this chart that he did not include in his analysis. He couldn't have known that we were going to get so much natural gas liquids, and he looked at only the lower 48. He didn't look at Alaska, and he didn't look at the Gulf of Mexico, where we have found huge amounts of oil.

I have been to Alaska, to Dead Horse, to Prudhoe Bay, and I have seen the very beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which for a number of years now about one-fourth, about one-fourth of our total domestic production has been flowing.

Well, you can see that even when you add the oil which he did not include in his analysis, the oil that we got from the find in Alaska and from the Gulf of Mexico, that that was just a blip on the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

Now, we have done a number of things to try and reverse this, because we are not at all comfortable in this country having only 2 percent of the world's oil and using 25 percent of the world's oil. We have very good scientists and engineers, and we have used a lot of enhanced oil recovery. We have used discovery techniques, 3-D, seismic and computer modeling to go out and find more oil, and we have drilled more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together.

In spite of better discovery, of aggressive pumping of these fields with this enhanced oil recovery, in spite of drilling more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together, and in spite of finding oil in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, we today are producing about half as much oil as we produced in 1970.

I spent a few moments looking at this chart. I think it is very important to understand what M. King Hubbert predicted and what happened and the reality that no matter what we have done, we have not been able to reverse what he said would happen, and that was in 1970 we would reach our maximum oil production, and that after that, no matter what we did, oil production would fall off.

The next chart, if I can have the next chart, the next chart is a quote from one of four different reports that our government has paid for and not totally ignored, but largely ignored. They all say the same thing, by the way. This is from the first of those four reports done by SAIC, a very large, prestigious international engineering science organization. Dr. Robert Hirsch was the principal author of that, so it is frequently called the Hirsch Report. He says here on page 64, ``World oil peaking is going to happen.''

Now, the same person that predicted that we would peak in 1970, in 1979 predicted that the world would be peaking about now. I have asked myself a question so many times and asked the question to others, if M. King Hubbert was so right about the United States and if he predicted that the world would be peaking about now, wouldn't it have been appropriate to have a plan B, a plan B which recognized that that might happen, and, gee, you better have some contingency plans preparing for it? When I say ``we,'' I mean the world. That is not what we have done.

There is no indication, as evidenced by the behavior of any company or any country, that any of these entities have been doing anything to address the huge challenge that we would have if in fact the world followed the course that the United States so predictably followed, that the world would peak about now. ``World oil peaking is going to happen,'' this report said. ``World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' this report says. ``The world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history to guide us,'' is what this report says. There is no lesson from the past that you can use to guide you as to what you need to be doing to get you through this challenge.

The next chart, this is a chart of data which is compiled by the two leading entities in the world that track the production and consumption of oil. Now, we store a little, very little, in our strategic reserves in this country and some other countries, but, by and large, all the oil we produce is consumed.

``Peak Oil: Are We There Yet?'' These two agencies are the IEA, the International Energy Agency, a part of the UN, and the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our own Department of Energy.

The IEA, the international one, says that for the last 18 months or so we have reached a plateau in oil production. As a matter of fact, just at the end of the line they have drawn through there up and down, because it is not a constant thing, up today and down tomorrow and so forth, it is actually tipping over just slightly. The EIA, the green line, shows that from their data we have been constant and actually a little lower now, but relatively constant in oil production for the last 3 years.

Now, if in fact the world's production of oil has been flat in the last 3 years, and these are the two best recognized entities in the world for tracking this, if in fact it has been flat for the last 3 years and demand has continued to go up, what would naturally happen to oil prices?

Well, oil prices were, what, when they started, $50-some dollars a barrel. Now, they are off the chart now, about $110 today. It has dropped off a little from the $120 of last week. I think that dropoff, Mr. Speaker, is because $120 oil is just plain too costly for a lot of the world and they haven't been able to use it. They just make do with less. So we have some higher reserves than we thought, and the speculators now are speculating that the price of oil will come down for the moment because of these reserves. Of course, $110 oil, the price is off the chart here.

M. King Hubbert predicted in 1979 that the world would be peaking about now. All four of these studies, the first one I mentioned, the SAIC study, the second one, the Corps of Engineers study, the third one, the Government Accountability study, and the fourth one, one done by the National Petroleum Council, and all four of those say essentially the same thing: Peaking of oil is inevitable, absolutely inevitable; that it is either present or imminent, with potentially devastating consequences.

Now, I say again, if M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, and we spent quite some little while looking at that chart, and in spite of everything that we have done, better oil discovery, aggressive pumping of the oil, enhanced oil recovery, and although we drill more wells than the rest of the world put together, M. King Hubbert 's prediction is still true. Today we are producing about half the oil we produced in 1970. He predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. These four studies all said that peaking of oil is inevitable. They didn't know when it would occur.

These data from the EIA and the IEA would lead you to believe, unless this is just a little plateau and it will take off again, and the next chart we will look at, if we can have the next chart now, the next chart will tell us how likely it is that this is just a little plateau and then it is going to take off again.

If you had only one chart to look at, only one chart to use for informing yourself and talking about this subject, this would be the chart. This chart shows in the bars here going back as far as 1930 the discoveries of oil, and, boy, it was up and down. We found some big fields in some of these years, so we got some huge spikes. But notice the general trend of this. Since about 1970 it has been down, down, down, down, and that is in spite of evermore aggressive and better techniques for finding the oil.

Now, if this peak is just a plateau and is going to take off again, then you need to believe that one of two things is going to happen: Either we are going to find very quickly better ways of teasing out from the reserves we are now pumping more oil, or we are going to find more reserves of oil, more big reserves of oil.

The solid black line here indicates the oil that we have used. And the world was in a very happy position up until about 1980. Every year until 1980, we found more oil, sometimes a lot more oil, than we used that year. If you integrate under this curve, you will get the total volume of oil that we have used. So this area represents the volume of oil that we have used.

Now, ever since about 1980, of course, we have been finding less oil than we use, so now this area here has been filled in by reserves back here. They are still there. We know they are underground. We know we can pump them.

Now, how much more will we find in the future? Most of the experts believe that we have probably found, of conventional oil--we will talk in a few minutes about unconventional oil. Most experts believe that for conventional oil we have probably found 90 percent, 95 percent of all the oil we will find in the future. Those who made this chart suggest that future discoveries will follow a descending curve, ever less and less, as we go further and further into the future, because once you found some oil, then additional oil is more and more difficult to find. Now, this clearly won't be that smooth, it will be up and down, but they are suggesting it will follow a curve much like that.

Now, what will the future look like? What the future will look like will depend upon your perception of several things: How much more oil you think we will find; it will depend upon how aggressive you think we can be in pumping oil. But one thing is certain: You cannot pump oil you have not found.

Now, the way this chart is drawn, it doesn't go clear out until the end, of course; it goes out another 150 years. Every year, and this has been the experience in the United States, less and less oil, harder and harder to get. And now, with the world situation, not true in our country because nobody else made up the deficit for the oil we didn't pump; and so for a long while, even when our oil production was dropping off, oil was still $10 a barrel because other countries could produce it quickly and easily, and they did, so that made up for our shortfall. But that is not going to happen in the future because, as indicated by a prior chart, as indicated by all four of these studies, paid for by your government, delivered to your government, oil is going to peak.

And if the United States is a microcosm of the world, you would reasonably judge that, no matter how aggressive we become, and we have been really aggressive in our country, like drilling more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together, you still are not going to reverse that decline.

So what the future looks like, and you see the oil that you are using here above the amount of oil that you found is going to have to be filled in by reserves from here. You can use your eye and transfer these reserves there and see reasonably what that curve will look like.

The next chart presents a little schematic. Now, I will point out what is quite obvious: That this peak can be made very sharp if I compress the abscissa and expand that ordinate, that will become a very sharp curve. Here, I have spread it out so it is a very gradual curve. This is a 2 percent growth curve. That is about the rate at which the world has been increasing its use of oil. By the way, 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years; it is four times bigger in 70 years; it is eight times bigger in 105 years; it is 16 times bigger in 140 years.

This led Albert Einstein to answer a question asked by someone after we had discovered nuclear energy: What will be the next big energy force in the universe? And his response was: The most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. And, of course, compound interest is compound growth.

This chart shows a 35-year growth period, the yellow. I think we are about here, and peaking is either present or imminent. And most people are looking at avoiding any problems in the future by filling the gap. If this is what you have available and this is what you would like to use, this yellow area represents the gap.

There are a lot of things out there that we can exploit to get some liquid fuels from. In their totality, most of the experts that are really seriously looking at this, in their totality, most people believe that it will be extremely difficult to produce as much liquid fuel as we now are using, let alone filling the gap. I will say that that will not bring us to any calamitous end. We have enormous opportunities for conservation and efficiency.

The other morning as I came into work, I noticed in one of the lanes in front of me a big SUV with one person in it. In the lane right next to them was a Prius with two people in it. Now, the Prius, I have one, we get about 48 miles per gallon. That is at least three times that SUV. Isn't it? So the Prius gets three times the miles per gallon of the SUV; and there were two people in it; so that means that miles per gallon per person was six times better in the Prius with two people in it than it was in the SUV with one person in it. And the Prius is a very comfortable vehicle, and riding with someone else makes the trip to work more enjoyable. So, we have lots and lots of opportunities to increase our efficiency.

The next chart is an interesting one, because there are a lot of people who believe that somehow we are going to find a huge amount of more oil out there. In a few moments we are going to talk about some of these potentials. And there may be a lot out there. But what I am saying is that we really need to have a plan B, because there is nothing that we have done in our country which has avoided the inevitable slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak that M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956.

This is a chart again from Robert Hirsch, and he gets this from EIA, Energy Information Administration, and they are predicting here in this chart that we will find as much more oil as all the reserves we now know to be able to be pumped.

Most experts believe that the ultimate amount of oil, the total amount that we will pump in the world from the beginning to the end of the age of oil will be about 2 trillion barrels. Here it is 2.2. They are suggesting here that we will find another nearly 1 trillion, because this curve is based on what they call the main or expected value of 3 trillion barrels. Now, that means that they think we are going to find just about as much more oil as all the oil which we now have in reserves which can be pumped.

Now, even if that curve occurs--and this is because of that exponential growth. Even if this occurs, the peak is pushed out from here to 2016. The dotted line, by the way, and I don't know if it is even doable. The dotted line shows what would happen if you would have an aggressive, enhanced recovery and pump it more quickly. It pushes the peak out a little bit, and then you fall off a cliff after that.

This black curve, by the way, you will recognize from the big black curve on the oil chart, remember, with all the bars going up. This is the recession in the 1970s. If it weren't for that--the old saying, it is an ill wind that brings no good. And that ill wind of those Arab oil price spike hikes and the worldwide recession that followed that, that is this dip here, we actually were using less energy for a while, we really looked at our efficiency. And your air conditioner now is probably three times as efficient as it was then. Your freezer, the same thing. If we had not done that, look at this curve, look where it would be, off the chart.

There was a stunning statistic during the Carter years, and that was that

every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That is really different now. This slope you can see is very much less than this slope. So this was kind of a blessing in disguise, because it woke us up, and we now have a much lesser challenge than we would have had if we not had those oil price spikes and that little recession in the 1970s and this call to arms that resulted in a lot of equipment that is now a whole lot more efficient.

The next chart is a fairly recent statement by Shell Oil Company CEO van der Veer. By the year 2100, he says, 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-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand. It may be a little sooner than that, as indicated by these curves from the IEA and the EIA. As a result, he says, society has no choice but to add other energy sources.

The next chart is one that kind of puts this in perspective. This looks at the industrial age.

By the way, there is a fascinating speech that was given. If M. King Hubbert's speech was the most important speech of the last century, I think the most insightful speech of the last century would be the speech given by the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover, given 51 years ago the 14th day of this month to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you do a Google search for ``Rickover'' and ``energy speech,'' it will pop up.

He noted then that we were about 100 years into the age of oil, which--and he uses just beautiful expressions, which he referred to as the golden age. And truly it has been a golden age. And he had no idea how long the age of oil will last; now we have a much better idea. But he made a very important statement. He said that, how long the age of oil lasted was important in only one regard: That the longer it lasted, the more time that we have to plan for an orderly transition to nonfossil fuels.

About 17 months ago, I was privileged to lead a codel of nine Members of Congress to China to talk about energy. Interestingly, they began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Wow, I thought, these people think in terms of generations and centuries.

We are a great country, and a part of our affluence and our greatness is that we have a near-term focus, essential for our business, but I think it would be nice if we had a little longer term view, too. It is hard for our businesses to see beyond the next quarterly report; hard for elected officials to see beyond the next election. But they were talking about post-oil, and what they would be doing and what the world should be doing now and would be doing in a post-oil world.

Well, Hyman Rickover talked about 8,000 years of recorded history, and he said that the age of oil would be but a blip in the history of man. I only have here about 400 years of that 8,000 years; but if you went back to the rest of the 8,000 years, it would be flat because we use very little energy. Here is the industrial revolution beginning with wood; and then we have coal; and, boy, did it take off when we found gas and oil.

This is the same curve that you have seen before, by the way. This is the dip in the 1970s in the lesser slope now. Here, we have compressed abscissa and expanded the ordinate, so now we have a very sharp curb compared to the very gradual one we have been looking in the past.

If I superimposed on this a graph of population growth, it would explode from roughly \1/2\ billion here, following this up almost exactly to the nearly 7 billion people we have in the world today.

This reality, as the next chart shows us, introduces us to a very challenging geopolitical reality. We have 2 percent of the world's reserves; we use 25 percent of the world's oil; we import almost \2/3\ of what we use. We pump four times faster than the rest of the world. We produce, from our 2 percent, 8 percent of the world's oil production. So, we are pumping and our more wells than all the rest of the world put together are working. We are pumping down our reserves faster. We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, one person in 22, and we use \1/4\ of the world's energy.

The next chart speaks a little more to this geopolitical challenge that we face. If you look at the top ten owners of oil, that is the bar on the right here, it is mostly countries that own it: Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraqi National Oil, and so forth.

And Luke Oil which is kind of private in Russia has only 2 percent. These are the top ten.

If you now look at the top ten producers of oil, they are really big guys: ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch, BP. They produce only 22 percent of the oil. Most of the oil is produced by countries rather than companies.

The next chart speaks further to this geopolitical challenge that we face. This shows what China is doing around the world. The dollar signs indicate where we own some oil. You don't see very many of them here. This symbol indicates where China owns oil, a lot of it in Russia. Notice they have bought up oil all over the world.

The next chart speaks again to this geopolitical challenge that we have. This is what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil they have. Very interesting. Saudi Arabia dominates the landscape. They should, they have 22 percent, more than a fifth of all of the oil in the world. Iraq, Kuwait, and you have to get a magnifying glass to see the United Arab Emirates on a map. Russia, not a giant compared to the others, but they are an aggressive pumper of oil. I think they are now the number two producer of oil in the world.

Venezuela, it dwarfs our part of the world. Bigger than everybody else in this part of the world, but notice we get most of our oil from Canada. Our third largest producer of oil is Mexico. Together they have about as much oil as we have. Canada doesn't have very many people, and they are too poor in Mexico to use the oil and so they can export the oil. But this speaks again to the geopolitical challenge that we face.

The last chart, I just wanted to look at the sources from which we are going to get liquid fuels. I have argued that because we face this huge challenge in the future, and because it is going to be very difficult to produce as rapidly as we would like to, the liquid fuels to replace what won't be there as we slide down the other side of the world, Hubbert's peak, that it would be nice to have in reserve a little bit of the oil we know that is out there which is why I have not been enthusiastic about drilling in ANWR or offshore or on our public lands.

Maybe it is because I have 10 kids and 16 grandkids and two great- grandkids. And I came to Congress because I was afraid that my kids and grandkids weren't going to live in the same kind of country that I grew up in. I thought we had too much government, it taxed too much, it regulated too much, and it spent way too much. I would just like for my kids and my grandkids and great-grandkids to have the same opportunity I have had, and energy is so important in our world. So I have been resistant to immediately drilling in ANWR and offshore and on our public lands because it is like money in the bank that is yielding huge interest rates. I don't think you ought to rush to the bank and pull it out and spend it. It will be even more valuable later.

We will get a little of this and a little of that. There is no magic bullet out there. I am sure everybody is familiar with what happened with corn ethanol. We are using so much corn for ethanol, it has raised the price of food around the world. Farmers have diverted land from wheat and soybeans to corn. Rice harvests are down. Costco, I understand, will sell you only one bag of rice now.

Mr. Speaker, let me close by saying I am kind of exhilarated by this. There is no exhilaration like meeting and overcoming a big challenge, and I think America is up to this. With leadership, I think we can once again become an exporting country. We have the technology and the know- how. We are the most innovative, creative society in the world. I think when America understands this challenge, they will be up to the challenge, and America will lead the world in moving from fossil fuels to renewables.

I think I will be here a week from today, and what I want to do at that time is spend most of the time talking about realistic expectations from all of these alternative sources of liquid fuels.

I rise in support of this resolution commemorating Earth Day and its goals and ideals. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 by 20 million people. That same year, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency to protect public health and the environment and Congress amended the Clean Air Act with the goals of improving the national air quality, reduce auto emissions, and create antipollution standards.

We have come a long way as a Nation since that first Earth Day. In 1972, when Congress passed the Clean Air Act, only 26 percent of the Nation's streams were safe for swimming and fishing. Today, about 60 percent of our streams are safe for such purposes. This day has a very special meaning for me because of my childhood experiences with streams. In the early thirties, I grew up in the coal mining country of western Pennsylvania, and every one of the streams that I could get to was called a sulfur creek because it contained waters that had leached the sulfur out of the mines. There was only one thing that lived in those creeks, and that was a little red wiggly worm. It must have been tough because nothing else lived there. The rocks were all covered by a slimy, orangish kind of a film. I am sure those streams weren't safe to swim in, but we swam in them anyway because we were too poor to go to the pool. I didn't know where a pool existed. So Earth Day has a very special meaning for me. Those streams

now, I think, are all clear thanks to our attention to that.

A few years later, when Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act, ensuring EPA regulate the quality of our drinking water, today many Americans receive annual reports on the quality of their drinking water. In 1987, the United States joined other nations in signing the Montreal Protocol to phase out the production of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs. As a result, the use of CFCs has been reduced drastically.

As a Nation, we also focused efforts on educating the public on the benefits of recycling and the clean up of hazardous materials from our lands and our waterways. In the 1990s, under President George Bush, we passed the Pollution Prevention Act and the National Environmental Education Act to emphasize the importance of preventing pollution, while educating the public on the potential effects their actions might have on the environment.

During the same period, the EPA established the Energy Star program to provide consumers with information on the availability of energy efficient appliances.

I would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that our efforts on efficiency have really been dramatic, and if it were not for the greatly increased efficiencies we have, we would be in even more trouble environmentally and with oil today than we are.

In 1993, President Clinton launched a program encouraging Federal Government agencies to buy recycled and environmentally friendly products. In recent years, President George W. Bush signed the Brownfields Revitalization Act to reclaim and restore thousands of abandoned properties and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act to prevent forest fires and preserve the Nation's forests.

Throughout the last three decades, efforts have been made to educate the public about the importance of conserving resources, preserving the environment and protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink. Americans have a better quality of life due to our own efforts to clean up the environment for ourselves and our children.

I support this resolution recognizing Earth Day and urge my colleagues to support it.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think that a tipping moment occurred for most Americans when in that spacecraft hurdling toward the Moon they looked back and took a picture of our Earth, how small it was from that vantage point, and we suddenly recognized that the more than 6 billion of us who occupy this Earth ride a rather, in the grand scheme of things, tiny spacecraft. It is our only home.

I am very appreciative of the emphasis today on Earth Day, because I think that it is more than appropriate that we focus on this tiny orb that we are privileged to occupy as we hurdle through space. I remember staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning for that first walk on the Moon, and I remember those early pictures, and, gee, this is our Earth, and it really isn't all that big, is it?

So I thank those who got this legislation together. I am in strong support of recognizing Earth Day and encourage all Americans to do so.

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

Mr. Speaker, if Thomas Jefferson could be resurrected today, he would be surprised by many things that he found. As my good friend from Texas just indicated, he would be enormously surprised by the size of our Federal Government, because he had envisioned a country in which we had a very limited Federal Government.

But there is something else that I remember about Thomas Jefferson that would really surprise him today. What he wanted for his new country was a largely agrarian society, with just enough cities to provide the manufacturing necessary to sustain an agricultural economy. He wanted this, he said, because he didn't want his new country to be blighted by the decadence of cities, as were the countries of Europe and the British Isles that they came from. He really, really would be quite surprised if he could be resurrected and come to our country today, wouldn't he, where far, far more than half of our people live in cities far larger than any he could have imagined at that time.

Mr. Speaker, this, I believe, is the 42nd time that I have come here to the floor to talk about energy and primarily about oil. The first time I came here was a little over 3 years ago. Oil was just over $50 a barrel then, and I was talking about a history that, had we paid attention to it, would have told us that today, or sometime roughly near this, we would be here with oil at $115 a barrel, that is what it touched in Asia overnight, and with gasoline at the pump out there averaging somewhere near $3.50 a gallon.

It was absolutely inevitable that we would be here. It was predicted that we would be here. And with all of these warnings, we really should have been doing something about that, and why we weren't is a very interesting subject.

There were two speeches given on energy in the last century that I think will be increasingly recognized, one of them as the most important speech given, and the other one the most insightful speech given.

I have here a quote from what I think was perhaps the most insightful speech given on energy. It was a speech given by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the 14th day of May, 1957.

He says, ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D.,'' he was looking ahead, ``world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion.'' He really missed that, didn't he? It is nearly 7 billion. He really had a pretty good concept of what energy was doing for us, but he had underestimated the contribution that energy would make to the growth of our population, because we are now somewhere near 7 billion people, with 90 percent of that growth, more than 90 percent, taking place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the first doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years. And, of course, it required less than that, because we are now far more than doubled.

The next chart kind of depicts what Hyman Rickover was talking about. What this shows is the last part of that 8,000 years of recorded history. We have here only about 400 years of it. But if you went back the rest of the 8,000 years, the graph would look about the same. The production of energy was down there so near zero that it looked like it was on the zero line.

Here we see the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It began with wood, of course. That is the brown line there. Then we discovered coal and we produced considerably more energy. Then we discovered gas and oil, and, boy, it shot up. Now, if I had a curve of the growth in population, it would just track almost precisely this curve in the increase in energy available.

This is an interesting curve, and I would like to spend just a moment looking at it. It is a very steep curve. Now, we can make this curve much less steep if we spread out the abscissa and compress the ordinate, and a little later we will have some curves that are that way. But you can still see the essentials of what this curve shows you.

Here is the oil price spike hikes of the seventies. You will see it resulted in a worldwide recession that actually reduced the use of oil. And now, after recovery from that recession, with a great deal more respect for efficiency, we are now increasing our use of energy at a very much lesser slope.

Now, in this chart where we have such a compressed abscissa, that is not as evident. It will be later. Later when we come to that I will point to the fact that this very steep curve, were it to have continued, we would be off the top of the chart and we would be in considerably more trouble relative to energy than we are today.

The next chart is another quote from this great speech that Hyman Rickover gave a little over 50 years ago. ``There is nothing that man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves.'' When they are gone, they are gone. You can't recycle energy. When it is used, it is gone. They were created by solar energy a very long time ago, he says 50 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--I want you to listen to this statement, so insightful--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 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.

Fifty-one years ago. Tremendous advice. He recognized this. And he says we were living in a golden age. Exactly how long this golden age lasted would be only important in one regard. The longer it lasted, the more time we would have to shift to alternative sources of fuel, because fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal, are not infinite. They are finite. They will run out. The only question was not if, it was when will they run out. He said the longer they lasted, the more time we would have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources.

The world has done essentially none of that in the 51 years since he made that statement and gave that counsel. We have behaved in our use of fossil fuels as if they were in fact infinite, as if they would always be there. Tomorrow there will be another huge find, and we can just go on using as much energy as we wish for as long as we wish.

The next chart is another quote from Hyman Rickover. ``Whether this golden age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population.'' And oil is $115 a barrel and gas is $3.50 a gallon at the pump because we have not been able to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population and our growing economies in this country and around the world, and we now have an imbalance between supply and demand. The demand is greater than the supply, and whenever that happens, of course, the price goes up, and the price has gone up.

The next chart is a quote from one of four studies that have been paid for by your government and have been pretty much ignored by your government. All four of these studies have said essentially the same thing, that peaking of oil is either present or imminent, with potentially devastating consequences, and we really need to be doing something about that.

The Corps of Engineers was one of those studies, the second one, in September of 2005. An earlier one, the Hirsch Report, was in February of 2005.

Then last year there were two more reports, one by the Government Accountability Office, and the other by the National Petroleum Council.

Oil, they said, is the most important form of energy in the world today. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility and cost. It has been really cheap. One barrel of oil represents the work output of 12 people working all year, 25,000 man-hours of effort.

When I first saw that statistic, I said, gee, that can't be true. Then I thought about it, how far that gallon of gas, still cheaper than water in the grocery store, carries my Prius; about 47-48 miles.

I know I could pull my Prius 47, 48 miles with a come-along and using guardrails and trees and so forth. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 47 miles?

Certainly it is true that historically no other energy resource equals oil's qualities. Its quality of energy and the quantity of energy in these fossil fuels, particularly, oil is just incredible. That's one of the big challenges we face in finding alternatives for these fossil fuels is something that has the quality and the quantity of the energy in these fossil fuels.

The next chart is a cartoon that asked the question ``Just why is gas so expensive?'' You can see here a tiny little supply and a huge demand, and that, of course, is why oil is so expensive. It's because the demand exceeds the supply.

This problem is an even more demanding problem than just a supply and demand, because as the next chart shows us, the major supplies of oil come, as the President said in one of his State of the Union messages from countries that don't even like us, this is a chart which shows what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil it had in the ground.

You see here that Saudi Arabia dominates the landscape. Saudi Arabia represents about 22 percent of all the reserves of oil in the world, and you see how large the reserves are in countries like Iraq and tiny little Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. You almost have to have a magnifying glass to see them, they are so small. Look how huge they are relative to oil, then Iran huge. Russia, just a couple of days ago, Russia had indicated that had they had reached a maximum capacity for producing oil.

The United States, we have 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world. We use a fourth of the world's oil. What I really would like to focus on is the size of India and China over their more than a third of the world's population, and they have less oil than we have, and we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world.

The next chart has this in some numbers, and these numbers inspired 30 of our prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, McFarland, Boyden Gray and 27 others to write several years ago a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, and we used 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use is an almost totally unacceptable national security risk, and we really have got to do something about that. That's true that this represents a huge national security risk.

This was recognized in our next chart by the Secretary of State in a comment that she made before a Senate committee just a bit over 2 years, April 5, 2006. ``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 politics of the way 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.'' In that all-out rush, China is scouring the world and buying up oil reserves wherever they can find them.

The next chart looks again at the geopolitical picture. Why is oil just so expensive? Many people believe that OPEC is gouging us. Others believe that our oil companies are gouging us.

The truth, of course, is that the price of oil is determined by the relationship between the supply of oil and the demand for oil.

Our large companies and the countries that are producing oil just happen to be happy recipients of this confluence of events which demands more oil than is available and so the price is up.

What this chart looks at is the top 10 of the oil and gas companies on the basis of how much oil they have. You see that 98 percent of these top 10 are all countries, they are not companies.

Most of the oil in the world is not owned by companies, it's own by countries. LUKOIL, which is kind of an independent oil company in Russia, is only 2 percent at the top of this bar.

The bar here looks at the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of production. Now, we have huge oil companies. ExxonMobil, the largest one in the world, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP, collectively, they produce only 22 percent of the oil, and these state-owned fields produce only 78 percent of the oil.

The next chart I mentioned, China's interest in scouring the world and looking for oil, wherever you see a dollar sign on this chart, we have bought some oil. Here I see a dollar sign here, I see a dollar sign, not very many of them. When you see this little Chinese symbol kind of a sign here that's where China has bought oil.

Here is one, they tried to buy Unocal in our country. You see their symbol all over the world. They are aggressively buying oil all over the world.

In today's world it really doesn't make any difference who owns the oil, the person who has the dollars. It's an auction, a bidding process. The person who has the dollars buys the oil.

Why would China be buying up oil if they simply come with the dollars and you buy all the oil they need on the world market? Well, it's hard to get inside another person's head, but it may just be that they are looking to the day when they will not be able to share their oil with the world.

Now, all the oil in all the world is shared with all of the world. It's all a huge auction pool and everybody contributes and everybody buys. That happy day may end.

The next chart. If you had only one chart to look at to inform yourself about where we are and what the challenge is, I think this would be the chart. This chart shows bars that represent the amount of oil that we discovered year by year. You see that we had huge, huge discoveries back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Then from about the 1980s, I am really starting about the 1970s on, we progressively found, choppy up and down, but less and less and less oil. That's in spite of ever-better techniques for finding oil.

The solid black line here represents the oil that we have used. Here is the 1970s, and notice the reduction in use there as a result of a worldwide recession brought on by the oil price spike hikes then.

Now, this is an expansion of the abscissa--and I indicated earlier we would have a chart where there is a huge difference in slope. Remember we had that red one just going straight up. If we could compress this abscissa we could make that one go almost straight up.

But notice how much less the slope is after the recession of the 1970s. That's because the world woke up and said, gee, oil is expensive, isn't it, and we can do better, and let's be more efficient.

The air conditioner you have today may be two or three more times more efficient, as is your refrigerator. We now have fluorescent lights, and they are very much more efficient than incandescent lights. So this lesser slope of the curve represents increased efficiency. Were it not for that, notice where we would be on the curve now, we would be off the top of the chart now, wouldn't we, if this kept going.

By the way, I want to just make one observation about exponential growth. This is, of course, exponential growth. Albert Einstein was asked, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big force we find after nuclear energy? His response, the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest.

Just 2 percent growth, that's so anemic, that our market doesn't like it. It really kind of teeters, it stutters a little and doesn't grow with 2 percent growth. Things tend to be pessimistic, but 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years, it's 4 times bigger in 70 years,

it's 9 times bigger in 105 years and it's 16 times bigger in 140 years, just 2 percent growth, compound growth. So if this compound growth had continued, this will be off the top of the page.

That was kind of a trauma going through the 1970, but we really should look back on it and say how lucky we were that we had a wake-up call because look what happened? We got much more efficient, and so now we are in much less trouble than we would have been had we not had this chalk, and we would have continued along this curve.

The next chart, the next chart is one from the U.S. Corps of Engineers. In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve, production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak and then declines at a rapid pace similar to its initial increase.

The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, this is one of the four studies your government paid for and is now ignoring. It's not whether the production will peak but when. Oil is not infinite in its supply, it is finite. There is only so much.

One day we will reach our maximum capabilities for producing oil. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline.

Once peak oil curves, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease. They might have gone on to explain what that's going to do to our economy.

The next slide--and I have to go back more than 50 years to put this in context--on the 8th day of March in 1956, the most important speech, what I think will certainly recognize will be the most important speech of the last century was given, and this speech was given by a Shell Oil Company scientist, M. King Hubbert, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota.

At that time, the United States was king of oil. We were producing more oil, consuming more oil and shipping more oil than any country in the world. What M. King Hubbert told them was that in 16 short years, 14 short years, you are going to reach your maximum production of oil. He made that prediction in 1956. And sure enough in 1970, the yellow symbols here we reached our maximum production.

Now, the actual maximum production was a little bit higher, it was the green squares there, and they tended to be a little bit higher going down the slope on the other side of Hubbert's peak. Some would have you believe the difference between M. King Hubbert's predictions the gold triangles and the oil that we actually pump indicate that he didn't really know what he was talking about.

Well, it did peak in 1970, and it did go down after that. If you aren't a statistician, I think the average person would look at that and say, gee, he really got it pretty right didn't he.

Now the red squares there on the other side represent the total amount of oil that we pump, because he had only predicted the lower 48, and we added huge amounts of oil from Alaska, a fourth of our total production for the last several years, and from the Gulf of Mexico. Even with those hugely large extra supplies, there was still just a blip in the slope down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

Now the same person that predicted that the United States would be peaking in 1970. In 1979, he predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

We have kind of blown, not kind of, we have blown the last 28 years, because by 1980, here we are in 1980, we looked back and, boy, M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We did peak in 1970. In spite of drilling more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together, we have not been able to make a liar out of M. King Hubbert.

Today we produce about half of the oil we produced in 1970. In the lower 48 we produce way less than half of the oil that we produced then.

Now in 1979 he predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

The next chart has data from two entities in our world that are pretty good at tracking how much oil we pump and use. By the way, we use all we pump. There are no big reservoirs of oil waiting to be used. I would caution that I don't think these entities have the same fidelity in predicting how much more we will find in the future, but they do a very good job of tracking what we've used. This is the EIA and the IEA. The IEA is the International Energy Agency. You hear them referred to. They are the ones that are tracking what is going on in Iran with their nuclear thing. And the EIA is the Energy Information Administration and is a part of our own Department of Energy. Both of those have oil production plateauing; one of them for about 3 years, and the other for about a year and a half.

What happens when demand keeps going up and supply stagnates? This price curve shows you what happens. We had a comfortable dip here in prices less than a year ago, but now they are skyrocketing, and $115 is off the top of the chart. We need to make a new chart to show where 115.

The question I ask myself and audiences is: If M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, which is a microcosm of the world, we did peak in 1970, and it is clear every year after that we have less and less oil, why wouldn't the United States be a microcosm of the world, and he predicted the world would be peaking about now, why wouldn't we have done something about that? Why have we continued to behave as if gas and oil and coal were forever, that they would never run out? What we want to do now is to rush out to our public lands to offshore, to ANWR, and to drill. I asked them, if you can drill ANWR tomorrow, what will you do the day after tomorrow? And there will be a day after tomorrow.

I think about that. I have 10 kids and 16 grandkids and 2 great- grandkids. They are going to be here the day after tomorrow. We are leaving them a huge debt. Check my voting record, it is not my fault. We are leaving them a huge debt, and I asked them, Wouldn't it be nice if we left them a little oil. And they smile, and the next thing they are asking, Would you vote to drill in ANWR. No, I won't. Or on our public lands or offshore until you commit to me that you will use every bit of energy you get from those sites to invest in alternative energy because we have now run out of surplus energy. If we had any surplus oil, it wouldn't be $115 a barrel today, would it. So I will vote to drill there when I have a commitment that we will use all of the energy we get there and invest it in the development of alternatives.

The next chart is a detailed chart of our production and decline. Here is what M. King Hubbert predicted of Texas and the rest of the United States. And then we have learned to get some gas from natural gas liquids, a huge find in Alaska, a big find in the Gulf of Mexico, just a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak.

The next chart shows some projections of what we will find in the future. Although with really good techniques and a lot of energy, we have gone out there, a lot of incentives, we have looked for the last remaining oil deposits and we have found less and less and less as time goes on. What this curve does is smooth out the big bars we saw before. Here we are at this point. They were projecting how much more we were going to find. We don't have time, but there is a really interesting metamorphosis that took place here.

The USGS, in trying to predict how much more oil we would find, has several computer models. They put different data into those models, and they get different results out. They have run many simulations, and they put all of those simulations on a chart and they get the mean of the simulations. They think that they are putting in good data and so they should be getting out good data. They take the mean of those, and they say this is the most probable amount of oil we will find.

Somehow that ``F'' for frequency, maybe it was a bad font, but somehow it showed up as a ``P'' or probability when it got to EIA. And then they make some bizarre applications of statistics.

They say that the 50 percent probability, the green one here, which they say is the mean, and of course 50 percent probability is not a mean, it is 50 percent probability. They say the 50 percent probability is more likely than

the 95 percent probability. Of course that defies logic in that it obviously is not more probable because the actual data points have been following, as you expect they would follow, the 95 percent probability.

I will say again: These two agencies, the IEA and the EIA do a really good job of tracking what we produce and use. I would be careful about accepting their prognostications of what we are going to find.

The next chart is one from the first big study that I mentioned, one of the four that your government paid for and it is largely ignoring. This is called the Hirsch Report done by SAIC, a huge, international, very prestigious, scientific engineering organization.

I have highlighted this phrase because it is so shocking. ``The world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history to guide us.''

We have never faced a problem like this. You cannot go back in history and find any problem that will help you decide how you are going to get through this. The world has never faced a problem like this.

The next chart. They say that the peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. They say that the economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented. Wow, strong words. The world has never faced a problem like this, unprecedented risk management problem. Nothing like it in history. Nothing to guide you. The economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented.

The next chart is a schematic. This shows what we have been talking about, a 2 percent rate of growth, doubles in 35 years. The yellow there is 35 years. I think we are about here. Notice the shortfall occurs a little before peaking, although the IEA and the EIA both have oil peaking, so we may be about at that point.

Most people when they look at that chart say we have to fill that yellow space because we have to have all of the liquid fuels that we would like to use. I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that it is exceedingly unlikely that we will be able to fill that blank to make up for the deficit between what we would like to use and what will be available. Filling the gap, I think, is not feasible. And what Hyman Rickover cautioned 50 years ago, 51 years ago now, we should note today, and that is we need to plan in an orderly fashion to move from fossil fuels to sustainable renewables because geology will demand it. We will move when the oil is not there, when the gas is not there, and when the coal is not there. Then we will have moved to alternatives. Whether that is a bumpy ride or a really bumpy ride will depend on what we do now and in the immediate future.

The next chart is a really interesting one because it shows us again this rapidly accelerating use of oil, then the recession of the 1970s, and a lesser slope after that. This chart assumes that we may find as much more oil as all the recoverable oil we now know exists. Most experts believe that roughly, at the end of the day, there will have been roughly two trillion barrels of oil pumped. We have pumped about a trillion barrels now. Most experts believe we have another trillion barrels to pump. This assumes that we are going to have a total of three trillion barrels.

Now if we have one trillion barrels remaining of the two original, we have pumped one and if there is a total of three, that means that they are presuming that we are going to find another trillion barrels of oil. If we do that, by their own calculations it will simply move the peak out from around 2000 or a little after 2000 to 2016. That is not very far. That is the effect of exponential growth.

During the Carter years, every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. That is a stunning statistic. Thank goodness for those oil price spike shocks and the efficiency that resulted from that or else we would be in a really troubled world today.

What that means is if you use as much each decade as you use in all of previous history, when you have used half of the world's oil, which is where we are, then you would have 10 years of oil remaining. We have slowed down so if you do those calculations, the 88 million barrels a day, a trillion barrels remaining, that comes out to roughly 30 years. It is not going to be 30 years of constant production and then fall off the cliff because it is going to be harder and harder to get, more and more expensive, and getting less and less each year no matter what we do.

The next chart is a quote, very recent quote, January 22 of this year, by the CEO of Shell Oil, Royal Dutch Shell. ``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 after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.'' That may have already happened, as we noted from that former chart and as we see with gas over $10 and oil over $115 a barrel.

``As a result'' he says, ``society has no choice but to add other energy sources.''

Have you noticed society doing that at any aggressive clip?

The next chart, and I want to spend some meaningful amount of time looking at what are those alternatives. We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big inheritance. The young couple has now established a really lavish life style. They are living it up. Eighty-five percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance--coal, petroleum, natural gas--and only 15 percent of it comes from their income. Now they look at how old they are, they look at their grandparents' inheritance, and see it is going to run out before they retire. They have to spend less or make more. That's exactly where we are.

Eighty-five percent of all of the energy we use is the equivalent of our grandparents' inheritance. We inherited it. It is there in the ground, coal, oil and gas. And only 15 percent of the energy we use is something else.

Now this 85 percent is going away. We have reached the maximum production, and if the world is going to follow the model of the United States, no matter what we do, the production in the world is going to be less and less, harder and harder to get, more and more expensive. That has happened in our country. And in spite of drilling more oil wells than all of the rest of the world together, and in spite of having the best oil people in all of the world, we have not been able to make M. King Hubbert out to be a liar because we still today, with all of that technology, with 530,000 producing oil wells, we still are producing only about half of the oil that we produced in 1970.

Well, what are the alternatives? What will we be using at the end of this magnificent age of oil?

And Hyman Rickover didn't know how long it would last. They were about 100 years into the age of oil. Oil had not peaked then. It wouldn't peak for another 50 years, 51 years or so, so he had no idea how long it lasted. But he said how long it lasted was important in only one regard; that the longer it lasted, the more time we would have to plan a rational transition from oil to other sustainable renewable sources of fuel.

Well, here we are today, and what have we done?

The President said in one of his State of the Union addresses that we are hooked on oil. We are indeed. And I think that rushing out there to drill in public lands, to drill in ANWR, to drill offshore is exactly the equivalent of giving a dope addict another fix. As the President says, we really, really do have to wean ourselves from these fossil fuels.

By the way, there are three groups out there that want to do this for very different reasons. One of those groups is the national security group that I mentioned that is really concerned that we have only 2 percent of the oil, and use 25 percent of the oil, and import almost two-thirds of what we use. Our second largest importer now is Saudi Arabia. It was Mexico. They've fallen back. That really places us in a very precarious position.

The President has indicated that we really must transition from these fossil fuels to renewables. What will they be?

And here we have a brief listing, and I think that this subtends about all of the possible renewables. By the way, we get more than the non fossil fuel energy nuclear power. 8 percent of the 15

percent is nuclear. We get about 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. It's down just a little. Now 19 something, roughly 20.

The French get about 75, 80 percent. But we still produce more nuclear than France because we have a whole lot bigger economy than France has. We're the largest nuclear power producers in the world. That could and probably should grow. Only 7 percent in other renewables.

The things that I'm very fond of are solar and wind. I have a place off-grid, and I have solar panels and I have wind machines and batteries for storage, and so I'm a huge fan of solar and wind.

But these were 1 percent of 7 percent in 2000. They're really growing, growing maybe 30, 40 percent a year. That's huge growth. So they're four or five times bigger. .28 percent, big deal because this is only .07 percent. So these things that will be important sources of energy in the future are now very small, growing; rapidly, but still very small.

Wood, this is the paper industry and the timber industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product, and there's not a huge potential for growth there without doing what North Korea, has done, for instance. They're just cutting down their forests.

Waste energy, that's very popular. And there's a great facility up here in Northern Montgomery County. I've been by. I would be proud to have it by my church. It looks really nice. The waste comes in in big containers and in railroad cars and I don't even see it. And they handle it very well. I didn't even smell it when I was there.

But I want to caution that this huge waste stream is the result, largely the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. Look at it. Almost everything in that waste stream was the result of using oil, gas or coal. It's a really great idea now. Recycle what you can, burn what's left, better than burying it in the ground somewhere. But that's not a silver bullet, not a solution to our problem because in an energy-deficient world, this is really going to shrink because the energy just isn't going to be there to create all this waste.

Conventional hydro. Huge. We've tapped out on that in our country. We've probably dammed up some rivers we shouldn't have dammed up. But some people believe we could get as much from micro hydro. There's some really good small pelt wheels and turbines and so forth.

Alcohol fuel. 1 percent back then. Now, we've had a huge push for alcohol fuel.

There have been two big bubbles that have broken, two big hopes. One of them was the hydrogen economy. You don't hear very many people talking about it anymore. I think it's probably sunk in that hydrogen is not free for the having. There's no place you can go, like you can go for coal or gas or oil and drill a hole and get hydrogen.

You get hydrogen by using one energy source, using another energy source to create the hydrogen. You split water, or you use electricity, or you get it from natural gas. But you will always use more energy getting the hydrogen than you will get out of the hydrogen. That's the second law of thermodynamics. And if we can violate that law, why we can set aside the law of gravity, and then we won't have the kind of problems that we have today with energy, will we? That's an inviolate law that won't change.

So why are we talking about hydrogen if you will never get as much energy out of the hydrogen as it took to make the hydrogen? For two reasons. One, when you finally burn it, the product you get is the oxide of hydrogen. It's burned hydrogen. We call it water. When you look at water, it's burned hydrogen is what it is. And it's really clean, isn't it?

And the second thing is it's a great candidate for a fuel cell, which is probably at least two decades off. So you don't hear much talk about hydrogen. It may 1 day be an important part of our energy economy, but that day must await, I think, the development of the fuel cell because if you're simply going to put hydrogen in a reciprocating engine, why wouldn't you put the fuel from which you made the hydrogen in your reciprocating engine and save that fuel loss in the transition?

The second big bubble that broke was the corn ethanol bubble. And I really had high hopes for this before I did some back of the envelope computations, because I saw our farmers who were getting too little for their crops, huge energy represented in these crops, and I think they will make a meaningful contribution to our energy future. But not in the dimensions that were anticipated for corn ethanol.

The National Academy of Sciences, and this isn't Roscoe Bartlett, this is National Academy of Sciences, although my back of the envelope computations came to the same conclusion. The National Academy of Sciences says if we use all of our corn for ethanol, every bit of it, use all of it for ethanol, and discounted it for the fossil fuel input, which is huge, in fact, some people believe if you really cost account all the fossil fuel energy that goes into producing ethanol, more energy goes in than you get out of this. They were using 80 percent, which is probably not bad; that that would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. That's all of our corn, displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline.

They noted wryly that you could save as much gas if you tuned up your car and put air in the tires. And by the way, you would save half your gas if there was two people in every vehicle out there instead of one which is in most vehicles. You would save half your gas if your vehicle got 40 miles per gallon, rather than 20 miles per gallon, both of which are very doable with a little planning and buying the right car, by the way.

I think was 2 or 3 days ago there was a major headline above the fold in the New York Times saying that Third World leaders were complaining to us that we were starving their people because the high price of corn incented our farmers to shift land from wheat and soybeans to corn. That drove up the price of wheat and soybeans. There have been some problems producing rice around the world and, anyway, these commodities tend to more together. So the four basic foods of the poorest people in the world, they said, have been driven up drastically, essentially doubled in price, because we're making corn ethanol.

Hyman Rickover, by the way, I don't have that quote here but please do a Google search for Rickover and energy speech, and it'll pop up. He cautioned that you probably shouldn't be eating your food. 51 years ago. Maybe we should have listened.

Geothermal. That's true geothermal. That's not hooking your heat pump to ground temperature, which is a really good idea. If you think about what you're asking that heat pump to do this winter, if it wasn't hooked to ground temperature, you were asking it to cool the outside air, which might have been 10 degrees, so that it could warm up your air in the house. That's what you're doing.

How much easier its job would have been if it had been looking at 56 degrees, rather than 10 degrees, because 56 degrees is what ground temperature in here, it's mean annual temperature, it's what the water is that comes out of the wells.

Now, this summer, if you have an air conditioner in your window, and it's not a heat pump tied to the ground, what that air conditioner is going to be trying to do is heating up the 100 degree air outside so it can cool your house inside. Pretty tough job.

But if you had tied that air conditioner to ground temperature, now it's looking at 56, which looks really cool, compared to 100, doesn't it?

I didn't understand this phenomenon as a 7-year old, and I grew up without electricity and an inside toilet on a farm, and we kept our food in a spring house. And I thought there was something magic in that spring house and I didn't understand it, but I knew it was magic because I went in that spring house in the summertime and it was so cool. And I went in that spring house in the winter time and it was so warm.

Of course, when it was 100 outside, that spring house, which was maybe 65, that was Pennsylvania, it'd be a little colder than here, maybe 60 or so, that really seemed cool. In the winter time 60 seemed really warm compared to the zero or 10 degrees outside, so I thought there was something magic in that spring house.

The next chart takes a little deeper look at some of our alternatives. Now, we do have some finite resources, and we can exploit those, and we will exploit those, and we should exploit those, but they are finite. Some of them are huge.

The first of these are the tar sands in Canada. They are huge. There's as much potential oil in those tar sands as there is in all of the known reserves of oil in the world, more actually.

So why aren't we euphoric over that? It's because it's very difficult to get.

The Canadians are now using natural gas, which will run out. They're pumping water, which will run out. They're creating a huge tailings pond, which is kind of an environmental disaster, and they're producing a million barrels a day. That's a lot. It's a little over 1 percent of what the world uses. We use about 88 million barrels a day.

But they know it's not sustainable because they're going to run out of gas, they're going to run out of water, and what they're now exploiting is kind of on the surface, and it will soon kind of duck under an overlay, so they have to develop it in situ, and they aren't quite sure how to do that.

So there's a huge amount of energy there, potential. But there's also a huge amount of potential energy in the tides. The moon lifts the whole darned ocean 2 or 3 feet. That's a huge amount of energy.

But, you know, getting that in your gas tank is quite another thing. Energy, to be effective, must be concentrated, and in the tides it certainly isn't concentrated.

Now in our west we have oil shales, and they are really huge, maybe even bigger than the tar sands in Canada. Nobody yet is commercially exploiting those. There are some vigorous attempts today, and there may be some exploitation of those. There's at least a trillion barrels, maybe a trillion and a half, two trillion barrels there. And different experts differ on how much of that may be recoverable. But, again, because it's there, it's not in your gas tank, we will recover some of that.

As oil goes up, Goldman Sachs says by the end of the year it could be 150, $200 a barrel. Who knows?

The more expensive oil gets, the more sources there are of oil because you can now use oil which would have been prohibitive in cost with oil at lower prices.

Coal. I know a lot of people who say, don't worry about the future; we have sure supplies of coal. We have 250 years of coal, at current usage rates.

Be very careful, calibrate what people say when they tell you at current use rates. Now, if we had 250 years of coal, and we don't, I'll come to that in a moment. But if we had 250 years of coal at current use rates, if you increase that use only 2 percent, that's not much, we will have to do more than that. But if you increase it only 2 percent it shrinks to 85 years. The power of compound growth.

And if you use some of the energy coal to make it a gas or a liquid, because you can't put coal in the trunk of your car and go down the road, it now shrinks to 50 years.

And when one other observation. We have no alternative but to share it with the world. Let me tell you why. Because if we get oil from coal, we're then not buying some Saudi oil, which somebody else can buy, so it has the exact effect of sharing it with the world. That is inescapable. There is no way to avoid that.

So now that 50 years, since we use a fourth of the world's supply, and that 250 years was at current use rates for us in this country, not the whole world, now that 50 years, divided by four, shrinks to 12\1/2\ years. So if we had 250 years of coal and we increased its use only 2 percent, converted it to a gas or a liquid and shared it with the world, and we have no alternative, it'll last 12\1/2\ years.

But the National Academy of Sciences says we haven't looked at the coal reserves since the 1970s and they believe there is more like 100 years at current use rates. So that 85 years and 50 years now shrink to something roughly half of that, and the 12\1/2\ years sharing it with the world may shrink to something like 5 or 6 or so years sharing it with the world.

The coal is there. It is huge. But our use of energy in the world is huge, huge. Eighty-eight million barrels a day, each barrel having the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. That's an incredible amount of energy. Just look at the road you travel home on tonight and see the cars there, and that's replicated 1,000 times in our country and thousands of times around the world.

I was in Beijing a little while ago and they banned bicycles in parts of Beijing. There is no room for them. So many cars on the road. I was late to an appointment in Beijing because of traffic jams, late to an appointment in Moscow because of traffic jams there. I was there in 1973, and the streets were almost devoid of cars. You saw a military vehicle now and then. That's all you saw then. A whole different world now.

Well, there's nuclear, and we now get 8 percent of our total energy, almost 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear that could and probably should grow. But the nuclear we're now using, which is whitewater reactors using fissionable uranium is limited because there is a limited supply of fissionable uranium. That won't last forever.

There are breeder reactors. Nobody uses them for energy production. The breeder reactors, as the name implies, make more fuel than they use. You buy some problems with those, like you have to enrich the fuel and it's weapon's grade stuff and you have to move it around and there's challenges for terrorists getting it and such; but you get energy from it.

Then there is the only silver bullet that gets us home free, and that is nuclear fusion. I happily vote for the roughly $250 million a year that we spend developing that. We're joining with other countries in helping to develop that. I think the probability is low that we will ever be able to exploit that on a commercial scale.

Now, if you're sanguine believing that we're going to solve our energy problem with nuclear fusion, you probably think you can solve your personal financial problems by winning the lottery. You might do it. But the odds of you solving your personal financial problems by winning the lottery are about the same as our solving our energy problems by using fusion.

But because it is such an incredible source, the only thing that gets us home free, I happily support, and I would support more money if we had more skilled people out there who could be looking at this.

The next big bubble that we're talking about now is biomass, and I would caution, how much more energy you think that we can get from wastelands out there that aren't good enough to grow corn and soybeans on, that we could get from all of our corn and all of our soybeans?

I would like to take the last couple of minutes to note a couple of things that we have been doing.

I have a bill, and this is going to give a prize to the first farm that can be totally energy independent. If our farms can't be energy independent, we're really in trouble, aren't we?

The next chart is a bill, the Drive Act. That will encourage the development of vehicles that are more efficient that are flex-fuel. You can use any fuel. Not corn ethanol, but any of the alternative fuels.

I would just like to note that I find this whole challenge exhilarating. There is no exhilaration like meeting and overcoming a huge challenge. I spent some time going over these potential alternatives. I just want realistic expectations. There's no silver bullet out there. It's going to be a little of this and a little of that. And America is very good at that.

What we need in this country is a program that has a total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. I'll be 82 years old on my next birthday, about 6 weeks from now. I lived through that war.

We need the technology commitment that we had when we put a man on the moon, that focus, and we need the urgency of the Manhattan Project. And I think that Americans are up to this challenge. I think we can lead the world in developing the technology to take us away from the fossil fuels to these other sources of energy.

The next chart I have already gone through. I will indulge for just a moment with the last chart. This is a great one to end on.

Mr. Speaker, this is a chart that shows how satisfied you are with life and how much energy you use. There are 22 countries, some of them using half the energy that we use that are happier with life than we are. There's lots and lots of opportunities out there to live really well using less energy,

and that's our challenge, and with proper leadership, America is up to it.