Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I wish to make the following disclosure in accordance with the new Republican Earmark Transparency Standards requiring Members to place a statement in the Congressional Record prior to a floor vote on a bill that includes earmarks they have requested, describing how the funds will be spent and justifying the use of federal taxpayer funds.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009.

Account: MilCon, Air National Guard.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Air National Guard.

Address of Requesting Entity: 7700 NW Beaver Drive, Johnston, Iowa 50131.

Description of Request: Authorizes appropriation of $5.6 million for the construction of a new Vehicle Maintenance Facility and remodeling of the existing Communications Facility located at the 133rd Test Squadron in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Updating facilities at the 133rd Test Squadron is of the utmost importance and highest priority for the Iowa National Guard. This project is approved on the U.S. Air Force Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP), and has been assigned the number HEMT039066. The facility is significantly short of space due to the expansion of the unit's mission, manning and resources. Since it is the only unit designated to test future Command and Control (C2) projects for the U.S. Air Force, the performance of the 133rd Test Squadron is vital to Air Force missions. A detailed financial plan based on form DD 1391 required by the Department of Defense for military construction projects follows.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment asking the Chief of the National Guard Bureau to develop a report on the effectiveness of certain Guard ``empowerment'' provisions that were contained in the FY08 Defense Authorization Act.

Mr. Chairman, since September 11, 2001, the United States has increasingly turned to the men and women of the National Guard to provide much needed support in our efforts to prosecute a global war against radical Islamic jihaddists. Answering their Nation's call to arms, Guard units from across the country have faithfully and courageously served in harm's way on the front lines of this historic struggle.

The men and women of the Iowa National Guard are no different. Just last month, constituents from my congressional district in Western Iowa welcomed home members of the Iowa Army National Guard who returned from deployments in Iraq. As has been the case with many Guard units across the country, this is not the first welcome home ceremony that these units have enjoyed in the past few years.

And yet, while the Guard is deploying many of its members to distant battlefields, it is still expected to meet the many demands of its domestic mission. Despite the Nation's need for men and women of the Guard to serve on the battlefield, our State Governors must continue to have ready access to the Guard to respond to the emergency and disaster relief needs of their States.

There is no doubt that the services and capabilities of the Guard are in high demand. In many respects, this is due to the fact that both active duty commanders and governors know that when they call, the Guard will be there. They also know that Guard members can always be counted upon to complete their mission in the most efficient and professional manner possible.

The many demands placed upon the Guard, however, have begun to wear down its capabilities. To address this, Congress included several provisions in the FY08 National Defense Authorization Act intended to boost the standing of the Guard within the Department of Defense. The ``empowerment'' provisions included the elevation of the Chief of the Guard Bureau from the rank of Lieutenant General to the rank of full General. The bill also made the Guard Chief the primary advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on Guard matters.

In addition to these important changes, the bill also made the National Guard a joint agency, charges the Secretary of Defense with writing the Guard's charter, and requires that the Deputy Commander of the Northern Command be a member of the Guard.

All of these changes, Mr. Chairman, were aimed at ensuring the National Guard would have a clearer voice in policy and budgetary discussions within the Department of Defense. To determine the extent to which these empowerment provisions have accomplished this goal, my amendment asks the Chief of the Guard Bureau to submit a report to the Secretary of Defense analyzing the effectiveness of the empowerment provisions. My amendment then requires the Secretary of Defense to submit the Chief's report to Congress with the Secretary's own comments on the matter.

Mr. Chairman, as we continue to wage a global war against radical Islamic jihaddists, it is imperative that we give the National Guard the resources and pull necessary to ensure it is able to remain an integral part of this fight and to ensure it is able to carry out its duties with respect to its domestic mission here at home. To do this, we must see to it that we are responsive to the needs of the Guard. With the passage of the empowerment provisions in last year's Defense Authorization bill, we have taken some important first steps toward addressing the 21st century needs of the Guard. But only the Guard itself will be able to tell us if these changes have hit their mark and are having their intended effect.

This amendment will allow Congress to get important, first-hand feedback from the Guard on this important issue, and I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting its passage.

Mr. Speaker, I was detained while attempting to reach the floor to cast my vote on rollcall 338 earlier this afternoon. Had I been able to reach the floor before the vote was closed, I would have voted ``no.''

Madam Speaker, I thank you for recognizing me to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

As a means of transition, and in fact it is not normal practice, but I would ask the gentleman from Texas if he might still be available to perhaps enter into a colloquy. If the gentleman from Texas would be interested in entering into a colloquy, I would be happy to ask him if he would yield for a question. I have been interested in listening to the presentations by the folks here, and I would ask if the gentleman from Texas would be willing to enter into a short colloquy just as a matter of clarification on our energy position?

Thank you. And I know you have been here on the floor talking about energy for the last hour. Just as a matter of transition, I would just ask a few clarifying questions.

The first one is, as I heard discussion about the Outer Continental Shelf, is there a nuance there? Are you for or against drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf for more energy?

Reclaiming my time then, drilling the Outer Continental Shelf is part of the solution. We would agree on that?

I appreciate that response from the gentleman from Texas. So as we go down through this list of things that we might do, drilling the Outer Continental Shelf would be on the table. Drilling ANWR is on the table?

Let me just if I could then thank the gentleman and go through a list of things that I think that we should engage expand the supply of energy. Drill the Outer Continental Shelf, gas and oil. Drill ANWR. Open up nuclear. Drill non-national park public lands. Expand ethanol, biodiesel, solar, wind, clean burning coal. And then out of this whole piece of the energy pie, then add another slice to that, which I presume you have talked about tonight, and that would be the slice called conservation.

Would that be the picture you are looking at that I think I heard as I listened to your presentation tonight?

So for those reasons I asked for those clarifications, that helps me in my transition as I go into the presentation that I hope to make tonight on energy. I just want to make those clarifications, because it does provide for a transition for us, and it also identifies some common ground that we have.

I would state to the gentleman from Texas that my view is that the free market does prevail and that more Btus of energy on the market will help to hold down the increase in prices, and, if all goes well, to actually reduce those prices of energy. That is the approach that we should be able to arrive at in a bipartisan fashion. If the gentleman would agree?

I would yield to the gentlewoman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas and the gentlewoman from Texas. I know it is a little bit irregular to engage the people that have just completed a special order, but I think it is important for us to engage across the aisle.

I will transition to the things I came here to say, but I will be looking at the proposals that you have made here tonight and the language that you have. And I have been relatively aggressive on this energy issue, and I think we need to be very aggressive on this energy.

In fact, as we look across the spectrum of all of the components of energy, I wouldn't make anything off limits. I want to drill the entire Outer Continental Shelf, and I know of no natural gas spill that has affected the environment in a negative way. In fact, I don't know an Outer Continental Shelf oil drill that has affected the environment in any lasting negative way.

We did see a lot of stability in the Katrina hurricane and the subsequent hurricane that came after that. There was one oil platform that was broken loose in the Gulf, and it was pushed 60 miles and came upshore down by Mobile, Alabama. However, there wasn't a significant spill. We can do this.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman's remarks from Texas. I believe also that, at the very minimum, we ought to go out there and tack some wells in right up against those Chinese Cuban wells that are going in within 45 miles of Key West. I am all for that. And let's at least build a little barrier and get our share of that well and start pipelining it back in here if we can. I would be significantly aggressive on all of this.

I would say on the upside too, Madam Speaker, and to the American people, there are a couple of good things going on in America. One is that we have the structure put together where we can produce the first refinery since 1975. There will be a vote that comes up, it will be primary night, June 3rd, and if the people in Union County, South Dakota, decide they want to have a refinery in their Hyperion refinery, then very likely that will be the biggest roadblock for a large refinery to come in that would deal with the pipeline coming down from I call it the tar sands in Northern Alberta, a tremendously large oil supply up there. A pipeline would come down, and the crude oil would be refined there and then distributed across the area in a network of pipelines. That is something that we will find out here in a few weeks, if that is going to happen.

Another thing that America doesn't seem to know is that there is a nuclear plant that is being constructed--thanks again to the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Lampson--there is a nuclear plant that is being constructed in South Carolina. I am not certain when that goes on line, Madam Speaker. But those are two large milestones that are being driven by the market and by the need.

It is not being driven by this Congress. It is not being driven by this Congress, because this Congress has not taken any action to open up opportunities for refineries or open up opportunities for nuclear power plants or any other kind of power plant to be built.

This is happening because market forces are driving them, and the regulatory resistance is being overcome by very high energy prices. It is not because Congress reduced the regulations. It is not because Congress provided incentives. It is because the costs of energy are so overpowering that it is now starting to roll over the top of the prohibitory regulations that have been put in by this Congress and signed by more than one President.

So, the overall picture, Madam Speaker, is this: This is what I call the energy pie. It is a pie chart, and this is energy consumption 2007: 101.6 quadrillion Btus. Now, I could explain what all that is. That is a lot of Btus. It is important to look at it proportionately. Let's just say that is 100 percent of the energy consumption by British Thermal Unit in the United States.

This pie chart represents the percentages of their consumption that comes from each of these sources of energy. Natural gas, 23.3 percent of our energy consumption in the United States is natural gas. We use that for heating energy and for production energy and a lot of other ways. Natural gas is clean burning and it is environmentally fairly friendly. Also the coal is 22.4 percent. So coal and natural gas comprise about equal amounts, very equivalent amounts of energy consumption in the United States.

Then we go to nuclear. It is larger than most people will think. Even though we haven't built a nuclear plant since 1975, 8.29 percent of our energy consumption in the United States is produced by nuclear. That is a piece that in France, for example, their electrical generation is produced by nuclear. 78 percent of their megawatts of electricity are produced by nuclear. If the French can do that and do that without incident, do that without fear, do that without concern, we can produce a lot more energy by nuclear here in the United States. Now, that is environmentally friendly. It is clean burning. It is the safest form of electrical energy that we have, and we have been remiss in not continuing to develop our engineering capability to produce nuclear.

That slice of the energy pie could get a lot larger. It could take up some of this going to coal, it could take up some of this going to natural gas, because there is electrical production generation in each of these, natural gas and coal, and actually a lot of it, and the nuclear could be a bigger piece of this pie.

As we go around the chart, the hydroelectric is 2.4 percent. That is probably not going to get any bigger. That requires we build more dams. There are a lot of regulators in the way that don't want to see that happen.

As we go around the chart, you can see small pieces, geothermal, wind, solar, all less than 1 percent of the energy consumption. Fueled by ethanol is almost 1 percent is all. We would think that would be a lot more, Madam Speaker. 1 percent, but a growing number. Biodiesel is a tiny .06 percent of the energy there. Biodiesel is a fledgling part right now, and it may well become significant. Today it is a small piece. Wooden waste is bigger than we would think.

Then we get to gas, 16.9 percent, and diesel and heating oil, et cetera, is 8.84, and jet fuel, 3.31, and other petroleum projects, asphalt and heavy oils and those, 10 percent. That is the energy consumption. 101 quadrillion Btus of energy consumed in the United States.

Now, if we are going to look at how we address this energy situation, Madam Speaker, we need to look at it from the whole pie chart perspective. So often we are here debating on whether we should be drilling in ANWR or whether we should drill the Outer Continental Shelf or whether we ought to grow ethanol from corn or maybe grow ethanol from cellulosic, which is a big part of what is in the farm bill that maybe we will see again tomorrow.

What do we do with solar? There is plenty of solar power that cooks the United States, especially in the summertime and especially in the Southwest. Can we collect that and turn that into energy? Perhaps.

But as we have this debate, we can debate the relative merits of these sources of energy. But what I am not hearing the Members do or the leadership do or the American people or the business world in America, no one is out there pitching the big picture, pitching this picture that we had the conversation with Mr. Lampson, and that is the entire picture of energy, the holistic picture of energy, this energy pie. What is our solution? No one thing.

No one thing is the solution. And there are some parts that need to be bigger on this pie chart and there are others that need to be a little smaller on this pie chart. But maybe, maybe our solution instead is let's make all of these pieces of pie a little bit bigger and let's produce more BTUs of energy out of every source that we can.

As that happens and as market forces dictate, we will see, I believe, fuel from ethanol get up above 1 percent. I think actually from a gasoline standpoint we can take it to 13, 14, or maybe even 15 percent of the energy that today is being consumed by vehicles that burn gasoline or that burn generally a 10 percent blend of ethanol. So maybe this 1 percent here of the overall can become as much as 15 percent of the gasoline component, say 15 percent of this, 16 or 17 percent of the BTUs which is in gasoline today. That is one of the ways that it might change in proportion.

And so then another way that we can look at this is if we can produce a little more biodiesel, we can take a bigger piece out of the diesel fuel on this side. If we can increase nuclear, as I mentioned, then we can take a bigger bite out of the electrical production. And if we can produce more electricity with nuclear, then the pressure comes on natural gas and comes on coal to give up a little bit of that market share to nuclear. When that happens, it puts the coal and the gas in different areas and different markets, and perhaps keeps the price from going up or maybe even can get us a little bit lower price on our energy.

I think this: If we are consuming 101.6 quadrillion BTUs of energy and we are producing--this is the chart behind here, this is the energy that we are actually producing here in the United States--71.7 quadrillion BTUs of energy.

And so, Madam Speaker, just roughly speaking, we are producing about 72 percent of the energy in the United States that we are consuming here in this country, 72 percent of the energy. The balance of it presumably is imported.

Now, we can import it from Canada, we can import it from Venezuela, we can import it from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East; in fact, we do that from all of those places. But when we do that, it does a number of things to us. It makes us vulnerable and dependent upon Middle Eastern oil, for example, and makes us also dependent on Venezuelan oil and energy, and it makes us dependent upon the Canadians. Which is the least of my concerns. I am very happy to be doing business with the Canadians. If we are going to be importing energy from the western hemisphere or anyplace on the planet, I think from the Canadians is as good a place as there is. And we do import some oil from Mexico as well.

But if we are only producing 72 percent of the energy that we are consuming, that means then that we, just by simple math, are importing 28 percent of the energy that we are consuming. And I believe that we are importing 61 percent of the oil and gas or the crude oil, the products that we are using here in the United States, 61 percent of that imported. And as you see, we are producing I think all or very close to all of our own coal, we are producing a percentage of our natural gas. Not all of it, because a fair amount of that is imported into the United States. If you look at the hydroelectric, we are producing all of that, the geothermal, all of that. There are a number that we are doing, wind, solar, ethanol, as it goes around the corner. We are producing most of that.

But these other energies, the ones that we are most dependent on, Middle Eastern oil, 61 percent of our crude oil products imported, much of that from the Middle East. We are very dependent upon it, and that needs to change, Madam Speaker.

So my policy is this. And I don't know, I haven't identified the distinctions between my approach and the gentleman from Texas who spoke in the previous hour. But my policy is this. Take this pie chart that we have, let's produce a lot more natural gas. Let's go offshore, drill the Outer Continental Shelf. Let's drill everywhere offshore in the United States. Let's first rush down there and set up our drill rigs right up against those Chinese drill rigs 45 miles from Key West and tack those wells in there and start pulling that oil out and work our way back. We will build a fence between us and them of oil wells right there on that line between Key West and Havana.

There is a lot of natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf. And in that region from the gulf coast around Florida and back again, there are known reserves of at least 406 trillion--that is trillion with a T--cubic feet of natural gas that can be tapped offshore down that way. And there is a lot of gas in the gulf coast altogether.

We can produce a lot more natural gas. We can punch holes around the Outer Continental Shelf. We can do that offshore almost anywhere in the United States. There is natural gas almost everywhere offshore in the United States. But we need to expand that where we can develop the fields and be able to transport that gas effectively and efficiently. And the most promising region is offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf of Florida.

Now, I have a growing list of Florida Members of Congress who are willing to support drilling offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf, because they understand that this Nation is vulnerable to other countries for energy supply. And they are understanding more and more that if they are going to build generating plants in Florida, and they increasingly want to build them as natural gas fire generating plants, that they are going to have to go along with the idea of tapping into the resources that they have offshore in Florida itself.

So, they are concerned that people sitting on the beach might see an oil rig out there and not come back to the beach and sit down in the sunshine. Beautiful State, beautiful beaches. I don't think they are matched anywhere. But if you cannot see an oil well 200 miles offshore, you can't see a gas well 200 miles offshore.

To give an example, somebody in the Midwest that might think like me, if I am sitting down between Iowa and Missouri on the Missouri line, on the State line at say Lineville, for example, a little town right there on the Missouri line and Iowa, and I am sitting in my lawn chair gazing off to the north up to the Minnesota border, roughly 200 miles, maybe a little less, that is about what we are talking about. If we are worried about drilling offshore in Florida, 200 miles offshore in Florida, roughly the equivalent of sitting on the Iowa-Missouri border and wondering about whether you are going to have something mess up the scenery that is going to be a drill rig that would be up on the Minnesota border that far away and perhaps even a little further away, as I say, a growing number of the members of the Florida delegation willing to tap into this.

But truthfully, I say this to the good members of Florida, both Republicans and Democrats, those resources that

are offshore are American resources, not Florida resources, not Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana or Texas resources. These are American resources, the resources that were claimed by President Reagan on the Outer Continental Shelf out to that 200 mile limit, I think the year was 1983. It seems as though Jimmy Carter made a move in that direction, too, and I can't remember exactly what he did, but I believe President Reagan declared our influence and declared the mineral rights out to the 200 mile limit. It wasn't a declaration of the Governor of Florida or the Governor of any other State that is a coastal State. It was a declaration by the President of the United States that claimed those resources for all the people in the United States.

And so as much as I like to see coalitions and like to see us get along and cooperate with each other, Madam Speaker, I will submit that the good people in Florida and the rest of the way around the coast, really, let's bring them into the dialogue. But this is an American situation, not a Florida or a Louisiana or a Texas situation, and we need to make a decision for America. I am increasingly hearing the Florida delegation make such decisions and take such stands.

If push comes to shove, I am going to say that it is America that will decide; it needs to be this Congress that decides. We need a President that will help us decide to do that, drill the Outer Continental Shelf. If we do that, natural gas gets more plentiful, and the law of supply and demand keeps these gas prices from going up and in fact pushes them down. If we can put a lot more natural gas into the marketplace, that means Florida can have the electricity that it needs to run its air conditioners, and it means that they can have the natural gas that they need to generate their electricity, and that natural gas can be delivered to the rest of the country, heat our homes, run our generating plants that we need, too.

But, Madam Speaker, I would submit this. Let's put more natural gas into this marketplace. Let's put a lot more natural gas into the marketplace. But let's not turn a lot of it into electrical generation. Let's use this for the things we need it for. Let's use it for industrial production, plastics, for example. Mr. Peterson from Pennsylvania has given speech after speech on those necessities.

But let's also use the natural gas for fertilizer production, because that fertilizer is what is necessary in order to provide food for the American people and the people of the world. You simply can't produce food without nitrogen, the nitrogen that either is drawn from the air naturally through a crop or nitrogen that is put into the ground through the fertilizer. And 90 percent of the cost and of the feedstock that goes into the production of nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas itself. And so more natural gas available on the marketplace means that we will come back and rebuild the fertilizer production industry in the United States, and it frees up a lot more gas for the production of the things that we need as far as industrial production is concerned. Home heating is another way we can use natural gas.

And if we increase the production of the natural gas and we start taking away from the generation of electricity by natural gas and replace that with nuclear, you can start to see how the pieces of this pie will shift. American production can increase for natural gas, but actually the share of the overall consumption of energy could actually diminish even though we increased it because we will have more energy on the marketplace and more energy in the form of nuclear, which is here; the 11.73 percent of our production of energy is nuclear. But if we are down to the other chart, then it is 8.29 percent of our consumption is nuclear. That gives a sense of what we can do with this energy, grow the size of the energy pie.

Madam Speaker, this chart, this is energy consumption, 101.6 quadrillion BTUs of energy consumed in the United States, which tells us that about 28 quadrillion BTUs of energy is imported into the United States. So this energy pie that I just sat down here on the floor needs to be at least matched by the production energy pie chart here. And another thing that we can do is add another slice to this pie called energy conservation, so that on this consumption side we can replace some of that consumption of energy with the conservation of energy, efficient homes, efficient vehicles, and efficient generating plants, efficient plants of all kinds.

That is the view of the energy situation here in the United States, Madam Speaker.

And then I have another bar graph right here that helps lay out the proportionality of the different kinds of production that we have. I started on the bottom. For petroleum, it is 39.14 percent of our production. So we are dependent upon petroleum products significantly. It is almost 40 percent.

We go to natural gas. That is another well product, another petroleum hydrocarbon product, 23.25 percent of natural gas. These two things of course come out of the ground, deep wells, not quite of deep of wells as a rule. And coal. Coal has traditionally been a big part of our energy consumption here in the United States. And you see how, as we go to nuclear with 8.27 percent energy consumption, now it goes down 2.5 percent, hydroelectric about the same, ethanol less than 1 percent. And it gets down to where these other pieces, biodiesel, solar wind, geothermal and that are all tiny in comparison.

Another way to look at this is as we grow fuel by ethanol, that bar gets longer. Hydroelectric probably stays the same. And wind can get bigger, solar can get bigger, biodiesel can get bigger. But we are in the early stages of this, Madam Speaker. We have a lot to do, and we have a lot to do to expand each one of these kinds of energy that we have.

We are a Nation, we are a Nation that is sitting on a significant amount of natural gas. We actually have a wealth of natural gas. And I recall a statement made into the Congressional Record by a Member of Congress from Colorado about 3 or 4 years ago, and that is that we have enough natural gas in the United States underneath the non-national park public lands that if we would drill that natural gas in the known reserves, there is enough there to heat every home in America for the next 150 years, Madam Speaker, 150 years of heating every home in America just with the gas that is underneath the non-national park public lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, primarily.

And why can't we do that? Why can't we open up all those areas to drilling? We have do so in an environmentally friendly fashion; We have done so without spillage in a significant way without any kind of permanent environmental damage. And we need to open up our non-national park lands for drilling and for distribution. We can't be shutting people out of there by shutting off roads and not allowing them an ability to deliver the product. We have got to open this up and get the energy into the marketplace.

We do that, drill our non-national park public lands and we drill the outer continental shelf for gas and oil and we drill ANWR. And ANWR is the piece that I asked the gentleman from Texas about. I have long been an advocate for drilling in ANWR. I took a trip up there a few years ago because I had listened to the rhetoric about ANWR.

And the constant statement was that this is a natural, beautiful arctic wilderness. It's a place that wildlife needs to be able to roam without being disturbed by man, pristine wilderness area.

And so I remember seeing commercials on television that showed a beautiful alpine forest, a beautiful alpine forest represented as Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And so I'm sitting there, like any American would be, thinking, boy, if we go up there and bulldoze those trees and start putting roads in and pipelines in and drilling into that beautiful alpine forest, it'll never be the same.

And I wasn't really totally shocked or surprised when I got up there, but I started to put all the pieces together. I was looking around for trees. And as we flew north, it was a long flight from where I saw the last tree out the window of the plane before we got to the place up there in ANWR where they want to drill. In fact, it's about 700 miles from the most northerly tree approaching the Arctic circle. It's about 700 miles south of the area they want

to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and then in a region with that Eskimo town called Kaktovik. That's about 250 to 300 people that live up there right on the Arctic Ocean.

So as we flew over that area, we flew over the north slope of Alaska, which had the pipeline. The Alaska pipeline was built beginning in 1972. And the wells were drilled up there beginning about that same period of time. And so for all these years we've watched crude oil be pumped down out of the north slope of Alaska into that pipeline and down to the Port Valdez, where it's been loading tankers, and the tankers have then gone down to the refineries along the West Coast.

Madam Speaker, the question continues, and that is that comments continually come to my office about allegations that that crude oil from Alaska is being exported to places like Japan. And once again, I looked into that. Once again I got the answer back that says no, that oil is going to the United States. It goes down for United States production.

Early on there were some market forces that sent some of that oil across over to Japan. It has been a long, long time since any of that oil has gone anywhere except into the U.S. marketplace. So I think we can be confident that the oil that would come out of ANWR would also come into the U.S. marketplace. In fact, it would go into the same pipeline.

And as the oil wells in the north slope start to wind down and start to slow in their production, we need to ramp up production next door in ANWR to bring that oil on-line and keep that Alaska pipeline full. If we fail to do that, the line will corrode on the inside and, as it starts to, it'll take a fair amount of renovation work to get it back up to speed again if we don't keep it working most of the time.

And so, as I looked at the ANWR region, and flew over that 19.6 million acres, I was looking for caribou herds that would be scattered out all over the place, and perhaps a lot of musk oxen and birds and polar bears, et cetera.

But, Madam Speaker, as much as we flew over that area and looked, from end to end, out and back, as low as we could safely fly, all of us looking out the window, the pilot finally spotted four musk oxen, four oxen standing out there in 19.6 million acres. And I'm sure we missed some animals. We didn't see them all. They were standing there with their head down, doing nothing, just standing there, four of them all in a little group. And we saw that, and two big white birds. I don't know what kind they were. That's all we saw for wildlife across that whole region.

But what we know is this, that there is not a native caribou herd in ANWR, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It is a kind of a maternity ward where caribou migrate in from Canada in the spring, starting perhaps a week or 10 days into May, and they have their calves in there in that region around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And once those calves get big enough, then they migrate back to Canada mid June or the latter part of June. That's the extent of the caribou herd.

Now, if we're worried about caribou, we ought to look and see what happened to the caribou herd on the north slope of Alaska where we have about, let's say, 36 years of experience up there building pipe lines, drilling oil wells and delivering oil onto the marketplace of the world.

And so the caribou herd that was 7,000 head of caribou back in 1970 today is over 28,000, and the herd is growing. That doesn't tell me that the work that's been done on the north slope has been detrimental at least to the caribou herd which is more than four times what it was back in 1970 when they first began the operations. Court injunction shut it down for 2 years, and then the work really began in 1972, as I recall.

But from 7,000 caribou to 28,000 caribou on the north slope, I don't think we ought to worry about the caribou, if that's our issue, and any kind of environmental reason that they might come up with on the other side of the aisle not to drill. So all the indications are that the caribou are going to do just fine with the pipeline running through them and some oil rigs that are drilling.

We think, somehow, that wildlife just simply is not compatible with man and not compatible with machines, not compatible with oil drilling or pipelines or road construction or populations. So Madam Speaker, I would submit that there are a number of examples that would beg otherwise, and that would be--

Well, one of those easy examples would be, let's see, I get my days right. Night before last, as my wife and I were walking down the street at about let me see, pretty close to Sixth and Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast, there a furry raccoon ran down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, almost in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C. And a raccoon figured out how to live inside Washington, D.C. It's the first one I've seen running around on the streets. I was quite surprised, but there he was.

Another example, Madam Speaker, would be, I recall my wife and I were doing a little road trip. We had driven up to the end of the road in northern Ontario. And there's a paved highway that goes up to a city by the name of Red Lake, Ontario, actually a fairly small town but along the shore of the lake there, a beautiful region. And it's vast and it's wild, and it's open wilderness.

But I'd always been concerned about how the eagle would adapt to humanity. And I recall working on a job in Southwest Iowa where the Department of Natural Resources, in a heavy timber, discovered one of the earliest eagle nests in modern times in the State of Iowa. And this would be back in, I believe, 1986. The game warden told me about the eagles nest, but would not tell me where it was because he said that if I would walk down there I would scare the eagle off the nest and the eagle would fly away and the eggs wouldn't hatch. That was the concern about scaring an eagle out of their reproduction operation. And that was things we heard many times, that these animals do not, and they're not very compatible with humanity.

Well, Madam Speaker, I don't know what happened to that eagle out in that heavy timber in Southwest Iowa. I presume she hatched out her eaglets and they flew away, because we've got a lot of eagles living in the country side now, these 22 years later.

But what I did see up there in Northern Ontario were the highway, a paved highway that actually has a reasonable amount of traffic going north and south. It's two lanes. But it's split around a high line pole, a big tall high line pole that was perhaps over 100 feet high. And as we drove by, we had the top down, and I looked up on top of that pole and there was an eagle nest with an eagle sitting in it, keeping an eye on all the traffic that was buzzing by right directly underneath its necessary.

Now, that tells me that animals are fairly compatible. All of them maybe are not. And the argument about the spotted owl, I don't have quite the personal experience rebuttal to that. But we do know that peregrine falcons live pretty well in the city if they can prey on the pigeons that also live pretty well in the city.

And so time after time we find out that animals adapt to their environment, and a lot in the same way that people do. They will find a way to find some feed and find some shelter and reproduce and hatch some little ones out. The caribou found out how to do that in the north slope.

There's not a problem in ANWR. No one can create an environmental scenario that tells me that we should go without energy in America.

But we do have the situation where the Secretary of the Interior has put the polar bear on the threatened species list. Now, this polar bear that has watched its population over the last 2 decades go from about 7,000, maybe as low as 5,000 polar bear, now up to about 25,000 polar bear. That would be the world population of polar bear. We've watched polar bear numbers that are blossoming, anywhere from 3\1/2\ to five times the population of polar bear that it was 20 years ago.

And yet, for the first time in the history of the country, the Secretary of the Interior has put an animal on the threatened species lists because of the predictions from the global warming enthusiasts of what will happen to its environment if they are right.

Now, Madam Speaker, I will submit that that polar bear will become the

tool and the pawn and the toy of litigation after litigation after litigation that will be designed to shut down the development of energy exploration and production in all of those regions where the polar bear might roam or might have roamed. That's what we can expect coming, because this debate isn't really about the well-being of the polar bear.

This debate is about people on that side of the aisle, not all of them, but I do believe the majority of them, Madam Speaker, that really in their heart of hearts don't mind seeing expensive energy. They don't mind seeing $4 gas. In fact, I don't think they'd mind seeing 6, 8 or $10 gas because they believe that the higher the cost of energy, the less of it we will use.

If gas goes to six bucks or 10 bucks, more people will park their car, more people will ride their bicycle, more people will walk, more people will take mass transit, and more people will stay home. If all of that happens, their calculus is that we'll use less energy per capita, instead of more energy per capita, and the net result will be that, in their mind, that they saved the planet from global warming.

Well, this is a long ways from subtle science, and we should not be handicapping the economy of the United States of America for the purposes of people who believe we should have a more expensive energy policy.

So in spite of what I heard the gentleman from Texas say, and I don't discount his word, nor do I challenge his integrity. I will submit that his party has only brought energy issues to this floor of Congress that have raised the cost of energy by making it more scarce.

They've tried to bring windfall profits taxes on the energy companies. They're the ones that are keeping our energy at least as low as it is today. They're slowing the increase in prices, companies like Exxon, for example, that are putting billions of gallons of gasoline out there in the marketplace.

If they stop producing because we punish them, gas is going to go up, not down. We don't get cheaper gas prices by punishing energy companies, and we don't get cheaper gas prices by taxing companies after the fact in windfall profit taxes, Madam Speaker, because what will happen is they'll sit around the boardroom and they'll decide, wait a minute. We paid our royalties to the Federal Government for the energy that was there. We entered into these agreements in good faith. We're an efficient company, an efficient company that drilled and explored the leases that they paid for, put that energy on the marketplace for a fair market price and paid the royalties to the Federal Government for that.

Now, how do we come in and change the deal?

How do we say, if you don't renegotiate those lease agreements with the Federal Government, we're not going to let you enter into another lease agreement. We're going to hold a gun to your head and make you capitulate and change. The deal's not a deal, according to some folks on this side of the aisle, and a lot of them are driving the agenda.

And so, Madam Speaker, I submit this, that a deal must be a deal. And we can't be penalizing energy companies that are out there exploring, risking billions of dollars in capital, and putting gas and diesel fuel and oil and kerosene and jet fuel and asphalt for our roads all out there on the marketplace, keeping the price as low as possible.

They're competing in this marketplace. And yes, they are making some money. But if their Board of Directors are listening, they're hearing what this Congress is saying to demonize the people that are producing the energy, and they're starting to wonder, shouldn't I take some of that billions in profit and invest that in some other industry someplace where Congress isn't going to come in and tax me after the fact?

If they play by the rules, every company that plays by the rules should be able to count on the Federal Government keeping their part of the bargain. And whatever the tax structure is when they enter into the agreement should be the tax structure that they comply with, at least for that year that they've entered into and the corporate tax and the royalties that are designed to be part of it.

I've spent my life in the business world, 28 years meeting payroll, doing construction work, entering into contracts, some written, many written actually, many more verbal contracts, sometimes a hand shake, sometimes we didn't bother, sometimes it was over the phone, sometimes it was just simply eye contact, nod, and we have the kind of relationship where we know we'll each keep our deal.

I respect a contract. I respect a deal and an agreement. That's what makes the economic world go round. People that have integrity that understand that a deal is a deal are what keeps this world going. And we have verbal agreements that go on up into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the end, we're evaluating the character of the people that are entering into those.

I would also submit that one of my favorite energies here on this chart, the energy production, which is the fuel by ethanol, this .94 of a percent here, is getting a bit of a bad rap. And it's getting a bit of a bad rap by the folks who just simply don't like the competition of ethanol. I think it's become a political argument rather than a rational scientific argument.

I know a couple of scientists in this Congress who are working and tracking the three laws of thermodynamics, and I hope they're paying attention when I make this argument, Madam Speaker, and that is this: according to Argon Labs out of Chicago--first the argument that comes from ethanol's critics is it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it. Madam Speaker, I submit that's factually incorrect.

If ethanol from corn can only be calculated if you take a bushel of corn and you say, All right, now I have this bushel of corn here sitting here at the ethanol plant, I want to convert it into ethanol. How much energy does it take to convert this bushel of corn into ethanol compared to how much energy do I get out of this bushel of corn? And if you're going to be fair about it, if we're comparing it to gasoline, we have to also measure how much energy it takes to refine the same amount of energy from crude oil into gasoline, because it takes energy to do that, too.

Here are the numbers, Madam Speaker. To produce one Btu of energy in the form of ethanol from corn, you will consume, according to Argon Labs, .67 Btu as the energy that it takes to get an entire Btu out of corn in the form of ethanol from shell corn sitting at the gates of the ethanol plant. That's the equation.

But if you go down to the oil refinery, let's just say in Texas, and you have a barrel of crude oil sitting at the gates of the oil refinery of Texas, how much energy does it take to get a Btu, a British thermal unit of energy in the form of gasoline out of that crude oil? That, Madam Speaker, is 1.3 Btu's; .67 to get one out of corn ethanol, 1.3 Btu's to get one out of gasoline refined from crude oil. Almost twice as much energy to craft gas out of crude as it is to convert corn into ethanol, Btu to Btu.

Another way to look at that is a gallon of gasoline is, for round purposes, is 100,000 Btu's of energy. Let's just say it takes a little bit more of a gallon in the form of ethanol, but let's say we had two jugs sitting here, one has ethanol in it and one has gasoline in it, each are 100,000 Btu's. Well, to produce 100,000 Btu's of ethanol it took 67,000 Btu's of energy to convert corn into ethanol. 67,000 Btu's to get 100,000. And to convert crude oil into 100,000 Btu's, roughly a gallon of gasoline, it takes 130,000 Btu's to get your 100,000, roughly a gallon's worth.

So there's your answer, about twice as much energy to convert gas from crude oil as it is to convert corn into ethanol.

Those are laboratory scientific facts, Madam Speaker, and those are facts that ethanol's critics cannot get around. And so let me take us to another level.

Since it doesn't take more energy than you get out of it, .67 Btu's to get one full Btu of energy out of corn, since it doesn't take more energy, it does for gasoline, it doesn't for ethanol, then the only other argument that remains is well, food versus fuel, Madam Speaker.

And the argument that we're using this corn for fuel instead of feeding the world population, well, we have a lot of folks who think we take field corn and, I suppose, set it on our plates and cook

it up and feed it. Now, that may well be how we make grits. I don't know that. We don't make any grits in Iowa, but I do have a little sack on my shelf. And other than that, our corn goes to about some 300 products, maybe a little bit more than that. Corn sweetener and a whole variety of products including, I think, the forks, knives, and spoons at the Longworth cafeteria are today now made from corn.

But we produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn last year in the United States. Now, that's the annual crop for the 2007 crop, 13.1 billion bushels of corn. Now, if we're going to argue that food prices went up, I'm going to take that argument away also from ethanol's critics, and here's how it is. We produce 13.1 billion bushels of corn. We exported more corn than ever before. We exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn. And so more corn exported than ever before, and you subtract that 2\1/ 2\ billion from the overall crop of 13.1, you end up with 10.6 billion bushels of corn left over after we exported more than ever before.

Then we converted 3.2 billion bushels of corn into ethanol, roughly 9 billion gallons of ethanol, 3.2 billion.

So remember, we were at 13.1 billion bushels, overall production, minus 2\1/2\ billion bushels for export, leaves us 10.6 billion. Then from that we subtract 3.2 billion that went to ethanol. That takes us down to 7.4 billion bushels of corn left over for domestic consumption.

Now, that happens to be the exact number that is the average of our corn that's available for domestic consumption for all of the other years of this decade is 7.4 billion bushels of corn.

So one would say by this argument we didn't really take any corn out of the availability for food for domestic consumption in the United States because we still have 7.4 billion bushels left over after we exported 2\1/2\ billion bushels after we converted 3.1 billion bushels into ethanol, we still end up with 7.4 billion. But additionally, we have to add back in half of the bushels that we converted to ethanol because at least half, Madam Speaker, of that corn has a retained feed value in the protein that we did not use, the protein that goes back in livestock feed in the form of DDG, dried distiller's grain.

So you add 1.6 billion bushels back in, and that says last year, 2007 crop, the average annual domestic corn crop for the decade is 7.4 billion, but the 2007 year, there's 9 billion bushels of corn that were available for domestic consumption. That says the supply for domestic consumption went up, not down. If the supply went up, then we can't be arguing that the food-versus-fuel argument, although I will say that if you dump 3.2 billion bushels of corn into the domestic market, and it would push the price, and that would be a lot better for our livestock producers, especially our pork producers.

But that's not the case. It's 9 billion bushels available where 7.4 normally are available. I think that takes that argument away that the high costs that are there today that are putting so much pressure on our pork producers are at the burden of ethanol, yes, it's part of it. It's part of it.

But, Madam Speaker, I will submit that the low dollar is a bigger part of it. And according to some financial experts that I have met with, people whom I respect, their judgment is sound and they're well respected in the country, the cheap dollar has more to do with high grain prices and high gas prices than most people will calculate.

So, for example, if about 35 percent of the value of our commodities, such as crude oil, is wrapped up in the cheap dollar, we could take $129 crude oil and say well, about two-thirds of that is where oil would be today if our dollar were shored back up and it was more traditional values than it is right now. And I know that some think that we should try to encourage the European Union to devalue their Euro. I don't know that that can be done from the United States any more effectively than we can convince the Saudis to put more crude oil out on the marketplace.

But we can shore up the value of the dollar, Madam Speaker. We can and we should shore up the value of the dollar. And we ought to take some dollars out of circulation. We ought to make an announcement that we're going to hold a tighter money supply and push the value of the dollar up. If that happens, and we can get the dollar back to its traditional values, the gas that we're looking at today that on the streets tomorrow or by next week will be $3.80 a gallon, would only be, with a more traditional value of our dollar, about $2.47 a gallon. That's still too high in my view, Madam Speaker.

So the combination of these things, the combination of the speculators that expect that energy is going to be more scarce in the future, is driving up the price of energy, the intimidation effect of windfall profit taxes and higher regulations and the constant beating that the energy supply companies take here on the floor of this Congress pushes up the energy prices.

The bill that passed today that was debated yesterday, the NOPEC bill, the bill that says it's unlawful for the organization, the petroleum export companies, OPEC, the bill that says it's unlawful for OPEC to exist and grants the authority to the Department of Justice to sue those OPEC countries, and if they successfully bring suit, one could presume that they could freeze the accounts of the investments of those oil companies here in the United States, at least the sovereign wealth accounts that they might have invested in U.S. products. It is a move that drives up more energy prices.

The Middle Eastern countries that are part of OPEC, because when we passed NOPEC here in this Congress, they are not going to produce more energy to get Congress off their back because they know Congress doesn't know how much energy they produce. They know this, that the oil that sits underneath their land is their oil, and they will market it in a way that serves their interest best. That's the bottom line. That's free market capitalism. And even though a lot of those countries don't have the level of freedom that we have, they do understand the market system.

So if we say to them that we're going to turn the attorney general loose, create a task force to study this and then give the attorney general the authority, the Department of Justice the authority to bring suit against the OPEC countries, I'll submit this, Madam Speaker, they're not going to produce more energy; the best we could hope for is they produce the same amount of energy, and we have to hope that they don't reduce that energy supply, and we have to hope that they don't pull their capital out of the United States out of fear that their assets could potentially be frozen in the aftermath of a suit that could be brought by the attorney general.

Only bad things can come from the NOPEC bill that passed the floor of this Congress. It's going to make energy either the same or more scarce. Just like every other piece of energy legislation that's been brought in this Pelosi Congress that's made energy more scarce, more expensive, provided more regulations and more intimidation, more taxes on our energy producing companies. That's wrong.

And what we have been doing is growing an industry. We've been growing the corn-based ethanol industry. This piece right here. This probably, by now, exceeded 1 percent of our overall energy consumption in the United States.

We need to, Madam Speaker, grow the size of the energy pie. This is the energy production chart, 71.7 quadrillion Btu's of energy produced from all of these sources, and they come with crude oil, liquefied petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro-electric, geothermal, ethanol, biodiesel, solar, wind, all of these sources. This is the energy production chart, 71.7 quadrillion Btu's. This is the energy pie that we need to grow.

We need to grow this energy pie to the size of this energy pie, Madam Speaker. This one that is 101.6 quadrillion Btu's. Now this circle should be bigger in proportion to the one behind it. We will get our graphics down a little better later on, Madam Speaker, but this is what we need to do: grow the size of the energy pie so the energy- consumption chart, which is behind here, excuse me, the energy- production chart, which is behind here, equals or exceeds the size of the energy consumption chart which is this one here, the 101.6 quadrillion Btu's.

If we do that, we will see energy prices go down in America, we will see gas at a price that a working man and woman can afford it again, and we will see ourselves become significantly less

dependent, in fact independent from foreign sources of energy and oil and, and if we do that, the prospects for America's balance of trade, the prospects for the stability of our currency, the prospects for the future of the United States of America, of our children and grandchildren and each succeeding generation, gets greater and greater.

That is our responsibility, Madam Speaker. It is our responsibility to advance the American dream. Advance it for our children and advance it for our grandchildren. We need to do that with a comprehensive approach to the big picture in every way that we can. We cannot do it by increasing the cost of energy by making it more scarce and intimidating our energy-producing companies. That's the theme that the American people understand.

And I will submit, Madam Speaker, that the clearest thing for the American people to understand is drill ANWR. Drill in ANWR, drill now, drill as fast as we can. It doesn't take any 10 years to get that energy on the marketplace.

How can we, on the one hand, how can we say, well, there's only enough energy up there to last for 5 years and we can't get it into the marketplace for 10? That doesn't make sense to me, not in a Nation that can have a Manhattan Project that can, in a few very short years, produce an atom bomb and deliver it, or in a few very short years, from the time John F. Kennedy said we're going to the moon, by 1969 we were on the moon.

A Nation that can produce a nuclear weapon in the fashion that we did, a Nation that can go to the moon in the fashion that we did has got to get the regulations and the taxes out of the way so that we can produce the energy that we need in the form of ethanol and biodiesel and wind and solar and nuclear and hydroelectric. And the list goes on and on and on, including coal, gas, diesel fuel, et cetera.

Madam Speaker, it's commonsense to the American people. Let's first drill ANWR and send that message that this Nation is finally ready to produce energy. Let's do that, and let's take it a step at a time, or all at once if we can, but whatever we do, we owe it to our children and grandchildren to grow the size of the energy production pie in the United States of America.

With that, Madam Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. It's a privilege to address you.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself so much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it's painfully obvious to the American people that the price of gasoline is going up. This week the national average price per gallon of gas hit $3.77; that's up 63 cents from the same period last year. At every fill-up, American families are reminded that driving anywhere is going to cost them more than ever.

Higher gas prices cause a real drain on family finances, and if they remain high, they could serve as a drag on our economy. In fact, I believe they do serve as a drag on our economy.

Rising gas prices and subsequent congressional interest are not a new phenomenon. It seems that every year Congress conducts a new investigation of the oil industry. By my estimation, in this House, House committees have held no less than 20 hearings, and that's on the gas prices. In the House Judiciary Committee, alone, we've held two hearings just this year, and there's another one scheduled for this Thursday. Those hearings were last year, one more scheduled for this Thursday.

Despite all of this, all this oversight, the price at the pump continues to rise. As the Federal Trade Commission has reported, though, changes in world oil prices have explained 85 percent of the changes in the price of gasoline in the U.S. The price of gas at the pump closely tracks the price of a barrel of oil in the world market.

Further, the FTC has repeatedly found that there is no broad-based collusion to fix prices or engage in price gouging in the retail sale of gasoline.

Another factor impacting the price at the pump has been the decline of the dollar. While the cost of oil has gone up worldwide, its impact has been felt more in the United States because of the lower value of the dollar, vis-a-vis other countries. For example, while the price of West Texas intermediate crude, in dollars, has increased almost 109 percent since January of 2007, that would be the beginning of the 110th Congress, Mr. Speaker, it has only increased 78\1/2\ percent if it's calculated in euros or 84 percent in yen. ``Only'' seems like an interesting phrase to put in there. But a 109 percent increase in dollars, 78\1/2\ percent in euros or 84 percent in yen.

So what can Congress do to reduce fuel prices? It can expand the domestic supply of energy. Yet time and again, the Democratic leadership has rejected opportunities to increase that supply and bring gas prices down.

What has the majority brought to a vote?

Well, this is the second time in this Congress that we're considering NOPEC. Everyone knows that the world oil price is dictated mainly by the quantity of oil that the organization of petroleum exporting countries is willing to supply and, of course, in relation to the demand for that oil.

Most would argue that the presence of this cartel, controlled in large part by totalitarian or hostile regimes, is not helpful. The question is, though, what could or should Congress do about it? NOPEC is one possible solution to this problem, but because of the Act of State doctrine and the concept of sovereign immunity, Americans are precluded from suing the cartel that controls a good portion of the world's oil supply. This bill would change that or at least attempt to.

However, there is no certainty that enabling the Attorney General to sue OPEC for an antitrust violation will result in lower gas prices for Americans. Given the instability that such a suit might create in the world oil market, this legislation would be long on psychic compensation, but short on actual returns to America's pocketbook.

I'm concerned about the unintended consequences of this bill. Moreover, this particular bill has no consideration, has had no consideration in the House Judiciary Committee. In addition to the NOPEC provision which the House considered last year, it also creates a task force at the Department of Justice to study the anticompetitive aspects of the oil and gas markets. Yet the Federal Trade Commission has studied this area repeatedly and found no widespread collusion.

So, Mr. Speaker, what we are doing here is administratively burdensome on the Department of Justice and at best is duplicative of efforts that already take place at the FTC.

I recognize this bill will likely pass the House again today, but I urge the majority to quit with the cheap theatrics and easy votes. This Congress

should be considering legislation to actually expand oil supply such as drilling in ANWR. We're not seeing a vote on drilling in ANWR in this Congress, in this 110th Congress, or drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, where I happen to know there are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. But, rather, these bills are brought up that might prompt OPEC countries to turn off their supply of oil to the U.S. or to squeeze it down.

That's my opening statement and my view on this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the minority whip, Mr. Blunt of Missouri.

Mr. Speaker, I would yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis), the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time remains on each side.

I have no further speakers, and Mr. Speaker, I'd yield myself so much time as I may consume.

I would remind Mr. Speaker and remind the body, the substance of this bill and what it really does; that is, it outlaws OPEC. It outlaws the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and it removes the sovereign immunity for these countries and establishes a task force in the Department of Justice, and then, additionally to that, it produces a GAO study to study mergers. That's how I go through and read the bill, those three things I think we should keep that in mind on what the bill does.

What it doesn't do, this bill doesn't outlaw the congressional cartel that has blocked our energy production in this country. I take us back to the 109th Congress when we had almost all Republicans that were ready and did come to this floor and voted to drill in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which by the way you'd be hard-pressed to find wildlife up there, and I've been there to look.

But we had almost all Republicans that voted for it. A small group of them joined together with the Democrats and blocked drilling in ANWR. That was the 109th Congress. That's when we were pushing to put more oil on the market, more energy on the market, instead of this effort, the 110th Congress, this Pelosi Congress, to take energy off the market.

The same kind of situation prevails with drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. Well, within that definition of the Outer Continental Shelf, with the exception of borders between us and Cuba, the Chinese are drilling for natural gas at 45 miles off of Key West. And we aren't willing to go out and drill the Outer Continental Shelf, either off Florida or off of California, as Mr. Lewis talked about in his presentation.

Instead, we're here sending a message to the rest of the world that we want to set up the scenario so the Department of Justice can step into this and file a suit against sovereign countries that are conducting business.

Now, I don't know how someone on the other side can be for unions collectively bargaining and against OPEC collectively bargaining, but that is one of the ways to define this.

Another thing that's going on is an attempt to suspend, maybe, logic, but attempt to suspend the law of supply and demand. We rail away against high gas prices. We've heard that over here. I'm opposed to high gas prices, but I'm for putting more energy on the market, more Btus into every form of energy that comes in, but instead, we intimidate and send a message.

Even if this bill gets vetoed, which I believe it will, we're sending a message over to the OPEC countries that we want to litigate. Rather than develop our own oil supplies, we want to litigate? What does that say to them? If you're sitting on a board of directors of a corporation, you get that kind of message, you make a decision about what to do with the capital.

Now, if you're an OPEC country, you're going to be making a decision on what to do with your oil. If the United States Congress says we're going to sue you, OPEC countries, what are those countries going to do? They've got about three alternatives. They can hurry up and hustle up and put more oil supply out there, which is what I think the majority hopes they will do. Or they can say, wait a minute, I'm going to hold this the way it is because we've got a good business plan here; I'm offended but I'm not changing anything. Or they might just decide a little bit out of spite to turn the spigot down a little bit to say we'll show you.

Now, the gentleman from Virginia said the President went over to the OPEC countries with hat in hand, and he did, and I'm sorry to see that. I'm sorry to see the President of the United States ask and get the response that he got, but that's driven because we have not opened up the energy supplies that we have in this country. We haven't moved ourselves towards energy independence. Instead, we're paying the Pelosi premium on gasoline.

And the gentleman from Wisconsin, when he spoke of $65 a barrel oil and the last time this bill came up and $3 gas, and today, by his numbers, and it moves pretty quickly, $125 a barrel for oil and $4 gas, and I wondered about this level of outrage then versus now. And so I just did a little math. At what percentage of the price of gasoline then, the last time an OPEC bill was here on this floor, what percentage of that was wrapped up in the cost of crude oil, oil at $65 a barrel and $3 gas? If you take a gallon of crude oil, the cost of a gallon of crude oil was 52 percent of the cost of that gallon of gas. $1.55 a gallon was the cost of the crude oil. Today, the cost per gallon of crude oil, according to the gentleman from Wisconsin's numbers, which I don't dispute, is $2.98 a gallon just to buy the crude oil. That relates out to 75 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline is tied up in the cost of the crude oil, if you rate it accordingly.

We're getting a better bargain now in relation to the cost of crude oil than we were then. It's a higher percentage of the overhead of our refineries and distributing companies. They are doing, I think, a good job of getting it here, but the oil markets are high. They are high because of the cheap dollar. They're high because we have sent the wrong message out there, and speculators are taking advantage of this. This sends another wrong message out there.

So if you're an OPEC country, what do you do? You can, as I said, provide the same or less oil on the market. One thing you might do is maybe pull some investments out of the United States to send another message, don't be trying to intimidate us from Congress; let us do some business. Or another thing that happens is that it erodes, Mr. Speaker, our relationship with those Middle Eastern countries. Those countries that are our allies, those countries that are our friends, those countries that we need strategically in that part of the world, and they need us, this makes it harder for us to work together strategically.

So everything in this Pelosi Congress has taken energy from the market. Instead, now we have legislation that outlaws cartels and would set it up so the Department of Justice could eventually bring suit and presumably freeze the assets ultimately of the countries that are invested here in the United States of America.

Because of the cartel in Congress, this cartel that says if it is green, it's good; if it's energy, it's bad; a cartel of people in this Congress that believe that the cost of energy going up is a good thing because people will burn less gas; if they burn less gas, then somehow it saves the planet, you've convinced me. You've convinced me that a significant element of the Democrat Caucus really doesn't care about high energy prices except the higher the prices go, the less gas will be bought and burned and there will be less carbon emissions into the atmosphere. That's the wrong priority.

We need more energy on the market, not less. We've got to grow the size of the energy pie. That pie chart that shows the 360-degree circle, that's got the slices that are gas, diesel fuel, ethanol, biodiesel, solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, all of those, and one slice of the pie for conservation as well, Mr. Speaker, all of those things is what we need to do. More energy on the market, not less, not litigation.

We need to have a vote on ANWR, and I'd challenge the majority to produce that vote so the American people can understand where they stand.

I oppose this bill.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3480, the Let Our Veterans Rest in Peace Act, provides increased penalties for the desecration of the graves of America's fallen soldiers.

It is fitting that we consider this bill today on the eve of Memorial Day, a national holiday to honor those who died in defense of our country. Sadly, last Memorial Day weekend in Washington State, the graves of 97 war veterans were desecrated. American flags honoring those men and women were burned or replaced with homemade swastika flags.

Last year, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, over 700 markers were stolen from the graves of American soldiers. These bronze plaques and flag holders were placed at every veteran's grave as a memorial to honor their service. In Texas, the grave of Purple Heart recipient Lance Corporal Jeremy Burris was desecrated only 2 days after his burial. Flower arrangements, personal notes, and flags decorating the grave site were torn down and destroyed. All of this destruction to steal and sell wire flower stands.

In Georgia, a bronze statue depicting a Marine's boots, rifle and helmet was ripped out of the ground at the grave site of Corporal John Stalvey. Other graves have also been vandalized to steal the bronze plates traditionally placed on the grave sites of fallen service men and women.

With the price of bronze on the rise, thieves are stealing these markers to sell as scrap metal. The cost of brass markers has risen to $28 each. Some counties cannot afford to replace the metal markers, so they are being forced to turn to cheaper aluminum markers.

Whether these acts are motivated by greed or protest, destroying the grave of any person, let alone those who have died fighting for our country, is inexcusable, and these crimes must be met with swift and strong punishment.

Mr. Speaker, the desecration of these graves not only disrespects the men or women that rest there, it dishonors those serving in our Armed Forces today. H.R. 3480, the Let Our Veterans Rest in Peace Act, directs the U.S. Sentencing Commission to review and amend its sentencing guidelines to provide a sentencing enhancement for any offense involving the desecration or theft of, or trafficking in, grave markers of veterans.

Our Nation's fallen heroes fought and died for their country, for our country, and their memories deserve better. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, again, I support this bill in its entirety. It is a time that has come. I urge its adoption.

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

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

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

Now I must oppose this legislation, Mr. Speaker. It amends flawed legislation enacted this year that unjustifiably bypassed the normal committee process.

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008 contained an expansive new refugee program that could result in well over 100,000 refugee admissions to the United States over the next 5 years. This provision was never considered, let alone approved, by the Judiciary Committee or on the House floor.

It's simply irresponsible for this Congress to hand out over 100,000 green cards without allowing for the normal deliberative review process. The provision grants 5,000 ``special immigrant'' green cards a year for the next 5 years to Iraqi nationals who meet the following criteria: They are citizens or nationals of Iraq; they were employed by or on behalf of the United States Government in Iraq on or after March 20, 2003, and they were employed for not less than a year; they provided faithful and valuable service to the United States Government; and they have experienced or are experiencing an ongoing serious threat as a consequence of their employment by the U.S. Government.

Now, I would say, Mr. Speaker, that our military that served in the line of fire has experienced a threat as a consequence of their employment of the U.S. Government, so has most everyone who has served any duty in that country. And this is a wide-open definition that allows the State Department to make a determination based upon a broad definition that says if they've experienced an ongoing serious threat as a consequence of their employment, and ``ongoing'' is not defined.

This provision is well-intentioned, however, it is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the State Department estimates that each of the 5,000 beneficiaries will bring an average of four family members with them who will not count against the cap. Therefore, the provision would result in, according to State Department estimates, upwards of 25,000 green cards being granted per year for 5 years. My math on that is 125,000, Mr. Speaker. Given that legal immigration now regularly exceeds 1 million persons a year, and the American people, by overwhelming margins, do not want to see further increases at least until we enforce the law and get operational control of the border, these numbers today are irresponsible.

Second, the provision will produce a drain for pro-U.S. and pro- democracy Iraqis actually living in Iraq. This potential exodus may prove devastating to efforts to rebuild that country.

Third, the provision grants refugee status to aliens who do not meet the long-standing statutory definition of a refugee--a person who is persecuted or who has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion. That's the definition that exists today that the State Department could act under, Mr. Speaker. But we should not be setting such precedent without very careful deliberation.

Fourth, terrorists could easily infiltrate this program and not only gain access to the U.S., but attain the benefits of legal permanent residence and then U.S. citizenship. These benefits include the ability to travel the world over with the knowledge that one can easily return to the U.S., leaving us more vulnerable.

The inclusion of this refugee program in the Department of Defense authorization bill without adequate deliberation was a mistake, and in this follow-on bill it also is a mistake. Therefore, I cannot support today's legislation.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, this discussion is about the technical changes to existing ill-advised legislation that came through this Congress, not through the Judiciary Committee, but it came to this floor without the due process and the consultation that would come from people on both sides of the aisle that could have examined this and measured the consequences, in fact, the unintended consequences of this legislation.

Under current law the President can set the number of refugees, and the Secretary of State administers this. We've met with the Secretary of State on this, and the definition I provided in my remark of existing law that is well-founded and well-tested says that the refugees meeting this standard can come into the United States under a number of items as agreed to by the administration, generally by the Secretary of State. And a person who would qualify would be a person who is

persecuted or who has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. These applicants that would come under this standard don't meet this standard that exists under refugee law because the threat is not as great, and they want to open this up for folks that have not faced a threat that is as great.

So now the language that's in the bill that we are seeking to technically correct here is language that says, well, what kind of standards do they meet? Well, up to 125,000 of them, perhaps, over this 5-year period of this authorization, what do they have to be? They have to be an Iraqi. They have to have worked for Uncle Sam. Their work had to have had value. And then they had to have experienced or maybe currently are experiencing a serious threat. And I will submit that everybody that works for the Federal Government experienced a threat. Anybody that set foot inside the Green Zone experienced a threat. Anybody that set foot outside the Green Zone probably experienced a greater threat. So the experience of the threat that's defined in this bill is opened up to all Iraqis that might want to present themselves if they are an Iraqi; if they worked for the Federal Government, if Uncle Sam cut them a check, worked for a year; and then if their work had value, which I think all work really does have value.

So what we're doing here is a technical correction that shouldn't have been passed in the first place, that should have gone through the regular order, that should have been submitted to the committee process, who would have had the opportunity to examine the effect of the numbers in this open door for perhaps 125,000.

So we can talk about process here, Mr. Speaker, and we can debate about the right way to bring legislation through so that we have an opportunity to perfect that legislation. But I think the bottom line is there's a consequence to this that weighs poorly for the Iraqi people in general. And that is if this legislation is technically corrected today, if this legislation passes and receives the signature of the President and becomes law, perhaps 125,000 Iraqis, perhaps more, can come to the United States under a standard that's looser than the refugee standard that the Secretary of State has to uphold today, and a Nation of about 26 or 27 million people could lose 125,000 of its best citizens and its best people. The allies of the United States of America and coalition forces, the people who believe the most in freedom, those who stepped up and did put their lives on the line, those that will be the vitality to rebuild a country that's emerging from the surge and continuing day by day, and the numbers and the data that we are looking at look more and more optimistic, they need good people.

It's people that are policy. We know that in our own offices. We know that within our companies. We know that within our own military, within our own government. People are policy. Good people in Iraq will rebuild Iraq. We need people there. I want to see Americans go there to help. I want to see the Iraqi people stay there and rebuild their country. That's a high level of patriotism for them to show.

This is a bill that discourages that and actually works inversely to the best interests of the United States and the best interests of Iraq. So I urge its defeat.

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

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

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

Mr. Speaker, aliens who participate in medical residencies in the United States on J exchange program visas must generally leave the U.S. at the conclusion of their residencies to reside abroad for 2 years before they can be eligible for permanent residence or status as H-1B or L visa nonimmigrants. The intent behind this policy to encourage American-trained foreign doctors to return home to improve health conditions and advance the medical professions in their native countries.

In 1994 Congress created a waiver of the 2-year foreign residence requirement. The waiver was available if requested by State departments of public health for foreign doctors who committed to practice medicine for no less than 3 years in a geographic area or areas designated by the Secretary of Health and Human Services as having a shortage of health care professionals. The number of foreign doctors who could receive the waiver was limited to 20 per State.

Congress has extended this waiver on multiple occasions and has also expanded the numerical limitation on waivers to 30 per State. The waiver is set to expire on June 1 of this year. In fiscal year 2007, 768 foreign doctors received waivers.

H.R. 5571 will further extend the waiver until June 1, 2013. I support this bill. The waiver program assists people in rural and inner-city communities in getting good quality and accessible medical care. As I look at the problem of access to health care and the way we have addressed it in this Congress, it gives me a foreboding feeling to see where we will be in 10 years or so. I think it's an important piece, a small piece, but an important piece of our health care plan. I urge its adoption.

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

I have no further speakers, and I will yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill. I think reauthorizing the J visas for access to health care across this Nation, allowing people practicing medicine to come in at the rate of 30 per State, and look around to see which States utilize that and which ones don't, it is easy for us to see those States that need that access to health care. This will help. It will help in a lot of the States. In fact, it will help in all the States, if they use it.

I urge its adoption.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of House Concurrent Resolution 354, honoring the birth of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. This resolution accompanies the LBJ Foundation's upcoming centennial celebration.

Lyndon Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, in central Texas, not far from Johnson City, which his family helped settle. He endured rural poverty in his younger years, working his way through Southwest Texas State Teachers College, now known as Texas State University, San Marcos.

President Johnson's well-known commitment to civil rights began early in his political career. When he was elected to Congress, Johnson worked to get

black farmers and school children equal treatment in his congressional district, and in 1938, secured Federal funding for housing in Austin, Texas, for those who lived in poverty.

After six terms in the House, Johnson was elected to the Senate in 1948. In 1953, he became the youngest minority leader in Senate history. The following year, he became the majority leader.

During his 24 years in Congress, Johnson garnered unprecedented experience in the passage of legislation, experience that materialized into the many civil rights laws he signed as President. When Lyndon Johnson took office following the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he spearheaded passage of the 1965 Higher Education Act, which quadrupled the number of African American college students within a decade. He did the same with Medicare and Medicaid legislation, and within another decade, African American infant mortality was reduced by half.

Johnson also played a crucial role in ending the de jure segregation in America by signing the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, which banned discrimination in employment. As a proud Republican, I stand here, Mr. Speaker, I remind you and this body that that was with a majority of Republican votes in the House and in Senate that passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and President Johnson truly worked in a bipartisan fashion across the aisle and could not have passed that without bipartisan support and a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate.

After Martin Luther King, Jr.'s voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, President Johnson said that even one American's disenfranchisement, ``undermines the freedom of every citizen.'' In that spirit, he signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His efforts allowed more African Americans to vote, and to run for office.

As a result of President Lyndon B. Johnson's historic efforts in the fight to end racial segregation, we now live in a more representative America. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this resolution.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would yield back the balance of my time and urge adoption.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia for his hard work and the chairman for his hard work.

Mr. Speaker, I will hit a quick list in my 1 minute. This bill cuts direct payments. We should not do that. That's green box, and that helps us stay in compliance with WTO.

It cuts a blenders' credit on ethanol. We should not do that, because that slows capital investment into ethanol production from corn.

It requires Davis-Bacon wage scales, which will reduce the numbers of ethanol plants we can build from five with the same money down to four. It imposes union scale in the countryside. We should not do that.

It has in it Pigford farms, which the gentleman spoke to, that's ripe with fraud. I will prove that over the months as it unfolds.

The other side of this coin is--you have to ask and answer this question--how does this bill get better if it fails here on the floor of this Congress? What comes out of the House and the Senate in a better configuration? Does it get better or does it get worse?

If you can paint a scenario by which it gets better, then you vote ``no.'' If you paint a scenario by which it gets worse, you vote ``yes.''

Madam Speaker, it is an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And of all the issues that are before this country today, tonight, yesterday, last week, last month and tomorrow, energy is the number one issue that is on the minds of the American people.

And as the American people pull into the gas pump and pay $3.60 or $3.70 for a gallon of gasoline, and if they are buying diesel fuel for their truck or maybe for their diesel automobile, they are up there at $4.17 and $4.20 a gallon, and that inflation of the fuel cost is on the minds of all Americans. And it costs us all in a number of different ways.

I have a group of constituents, and a lot of them use something like a gallon, gallon and a half of gas to go to work every day. We don't all live in a compressed place in the inner city like millions of Americans do. Some of us live 25, 30 or 40 miles from our work. Even if we get a car that gets 20 or 25 miles to the gallon, we might still drive, if it's 25 miles to the gallon, 25 miles. That's a gallon of gas to get to work. And it's a gallon of gas to get home. And that gallon of gas at $3.60 adds up over the week, an extra gallon going to work, and an extra gallon coming from work. And if you do that Monday through Friday and sometimes for half a day on Saturday, that means that over the week, let's just say that gas is up $1.50 a gallon from where it was not that long ago, that's $1.50 extra going to work and $1.50 extra coming home from work. That's $3 a day, $20 a week, perhaps $18 to $20 a week, and that's $80 or more a month. That $80 more a month is a significant amount out of the paycheck of the American people, Madam Speaker.

We can deal with that, Madam Speaker, if we adjust. We can make these adjustments as we go. We can squeeze our budgets down. We can carpool a little bit. We might go to the auto dealer and buy ourselves a car

that gets a little better mileage. And that's happening. Those dealers that are selling high-mileage vehicles are doing okay right now.

Some of the American people can't afford to trade up in their vehicles. And some of them have to drive the vehicles that don't get as good mileage. And some of them have to go to work every day. And when they pull into the gas pump, and they stick the nozzle in the tank and fill that tank up, they know that they're paying in most States a State tax, as well. Certainly where I come from in Iowa there is a State gas tax. And that goes to build our roads. And there is 18.4 cents of Federal tax on the gasoline that goes to build our roads. And when they stick that nozzle in the tank, squeeze that nozzle and fill the tank up or put in $20 or whatever it is they can afford, they don't mind paying that 18.4 cents because they want to drive, Madam Speaker, on a good road.

And yet that 18.4 cents doesn't all go to road construction, road improvement and road maintenance. A lot of that 18.4 cents is broken up into a number of different categories. Seventeen percent goes to mass transit. Three percent goes to trails. About 28 percent, according to the Transportation Committee a few years ago, goes to archeological and environmental compliance.

And if you add up the pieces of that gas tax, of that 18.4 cents, it comes up to the point where maybe one-third of the 18.4 cents in Federal gas tax actually goes to build and maintain the road that these cars that are paying the tax are driving on. So it's one thing to have a gas tax. And it's another to apply the gas tax to the place where it's used. If this is a user's fee, if we are taxing the gas because cars wear out roads, and trucks that use diesel and pay diesel tax wear out roads and we need to rebuild them, refurbish them and resurface them, then it doesn't make sense that such a high percentage of that gas tax dollar goes to something other than the roads that are being driven on.

Now, the rationale is we need trails because that's where we put our bicycles, and that takes them off of the highway. Well, it does to some degree, but it's not a user's fee for the bicycles.

If we take the position that mass transit takes people off of the roads and puts them into, say, the subway system, for example, the ``L'' in Chicago, the Metro here in Washington, DC, then if it takes them off the roads and it slows down the congestion in our highways and it frees up our roads, if you put people in the subway, under the tunnel, in the city, it does do that. But the people that are riding under the city that don't own a car, that don't buy any gas, that are going back and forth cheaply from job to job, those people are getting a discount at the expense of the people that are paying the gas tax.

For example, and I will just pick a number, if you go down to the South Capitol stop, here in Washington, DC, and you decide you want to go out to Falls Church on the Metro, I think that's about a buck and a quarter to take that ride out to Falls Church. Well, you can't get a taxi ride out there for that, and you can't drive out there for that, but you can take Metro out there for a buck and a quarter. Now, that's nice, a lot of folks do that. They take that ride out there to Falls Church or points beyond. Travel around within our cities and Washington, DC, and most of the major cities in America are on the subway, and they do that very subsidized with the 17 percent of that gas tax that's paid for by people that are driving cars and buying gasoline.

I wonder, why is it that the majority in this Congress, headed up by Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the San Francisco approach to energy, coupled with the Massachusetts approach to finances, how can the Democrat administration that's here, the Democrat leadership that's here in this Congress, how can they continue to bring education or bring energy bills to this Congress that constantly reduce the supply of energy, tax the energy more, regulate the energy more, seek to impose windfall profit taxes on our energy producers, do all of that, which reduces the amount of energy that's on our market, which drives up the cost of gasoline. Why do not the constituents of the people that are in this majority, the ones who hold the gavels to chair the committees, why don't their constituents rise up and say that's enough, I want cheaper gas. I don't want to pay $3.60, I don't want to pay $3.70, I don't want $4 gas and I sure don't want to buy $129 crude oil by the barrel.

My constituents rise up and say let's do something. Why don't theirs? Why is it the red zones in America want less expensive energy and always--and why is it the people in the blue zones in America are willing to tolerate higher energy costs?

That question is one that actually has an answer. When one examines it, I come up with this conclusion. If you are driving on the roads of America, and, especially, if you live a long way from your work, that gallon or gallon and a half of gas that you have to burn to get to work and that much to get home again and do it every day, if you are in that kind of an environment, and you are paying for the gas, it matters to you right now, $3.60 gas matters right now, and you don't maintain the tax so much because you need a good road to drive on.

But if you go out every day and you don't own a car, if you don't own an automobile, and you go down into the subway and you get your season ticket or your daily ticket, and you run it through there and you get on the subway, you get on the Metro and you take your subsidized ride, you are not thinking, thank you, gas-buying America for helping to fund my ride on this subway today. You are just thinking this is the way the expenses are in my life, they aren't so bad, I can deal with that. I don't know what's wrong with those people that think we should not--and the people that are riding the subways in America don't understand why it is that those of us that are buying gas want to drill in ANWR, want to drill the Outer Continental Shelf, want to drill the nonnational park public lands in America and provide a distribution system, including pipelines, including collector pipelines, including access roads, so that we can pull this energy that's underneath this continent and bring it into the marketplace.

They don't understand that because it doesn't matter to them, because the gas price is paying for their ticket on the Metro, their ticket on the subway, their ticket on the ``L,'' their ticket on the trolley cars in San Francisco. That's the problem.

There's a political imbalance here. Alexander Titler said at one point, and I will paraphrase his statement, that when a majority of American people figure out that they can vote themselves benefits from the public treasury, on that day democracy ceases to exist. That is from Alexander Titler, more than 100 years ago.

He understood what would happen within this great constitutional republic that we have if we are going to let people go to the polls and vote, and if they elect representatives to come here to this Congress and go to the State legislatures and the county supervisors and the city councils in America and vote themselves benefits from the public treasury when there is a disproportionate share of tax that is being paid by a smaller percentage of the people. When a majority of the people in the United States of America, if they are to this point, where a majority of the people are not paying taxes, and yet they go to the polls and vote themselves benefits from the public treasury, look what happens.

They don't care how much tax there is on the rich, because there is no tax on the poor, at least so to speak, and the people that are riding the subsidized mass transit, they don't care how much tax there is on gasoline and they don't care how expensive it gets. After all, they are not paying the price for that.

But if we would index the price of a ticket from South Capitol to Falls Church to the price of gasoline, and if we would tax that ticket for the equivalent amount of gasoline so that they could help fund the construction of their mass transit and their construction and the maintenance of our roads, it would be a far more expensive ticket to take that ride on the Metro. The people that are paying the price would be demanding something entirely different of their Members of Congress.

This reflexion that we have here, this apathy about high gas prices, this apathy about short energy supplies, this

reverence, this love, this almost irrational religion about opposing drilling in ANWR, a place that I can't imagine that oil could be in a more logical and better place for humanity to access it than ANWR. Now, having heard a lot of arguments against drilling in ANWR, I thought it was important for me to go up there and visit. I did do that.

As one who was signed up to go on the original pipeline back in 1970 that opened up the oil fields in the north slope of Alaska, I was signed up to go up there, and the court injunctions stopped the exploration and the development of that pipeline in 1970. I got married in 1972, the court injunctions were finally lifted later on that year. That was the year that my wife convinced me that I should stay home in Iowa, and I think it might have been very good advice. But, in any case, we began the right-of-way construction for the pipeline in 1972 or early 1973 and opened up the oil fields up there in the north slope of Alaska about that same period of time.

As we move forward till 1983, 1993, 2003, 35 years, in 35 years we have developed a lot of oil, we have pumped a lot of crude oil down through that pipeline to Valdez and put it on our oil tankers and headed them to points south and to oil refineries south of Valdez, Alaska. In all that time, despite of the fact that there have been some very minor leaks on the pipeline, and without regard to where the tanker did run ashore there in, I believe, it's Prince William Sound, those events will happen occasionally.

The cleanups took place immediately along the pipeline. The very minor leaks that they have had, they have been very minor spills. They have been cleaned up immediately. The impact on the environment has been either zero or negligible, depending on whether you want to make the environmentalist argument or the oil producers' argument.

But zero environmental impact or negligible environmental impact in any case does not remove the argument that it was the right thing to do. To drill the north slope, it was the right thing to do to build the Alaska pipeline. It's absolutely the right thing to do to move to the east and develop the oil fields in ANWR and pull that oil up out of the ground and pump it into the Alaska pipeline and send it south. That needs to happen. The oil is there.

I read an article in one of my local Iowa newspapers here over the weekend that said, so, why would you want to drill ANWR if there is a guarantee that the oil that's there would eliminate the United States' dependency on foreign oil for 5 years? The criticism was, what are you going to do in the sixth year?

Well, if somebody has got a 5-year solution for $3.60 gas, I want to take it. I want to take it right now. I want to punch those holes in the ground. I want to connect those pipelines up, and I want to get that oil coming south.

If we had done that 5 years ago, we would have that north slope connected to ANWR, and that oil would be coming out of the ground today. It would be holding down the increase in energy prices. It wouldn't have changed the world supply on such a point that it would be utterly dramatic, but it would be holding down the increase in costs and, in fact, it would be cheaper today if we had put that ANWR oil on the market 5 or 10 years ago.

If we go then to the Outer Continental Shelf, offshore to Florida in particular, natural gas prices have been volatile. They have been way up, they have come back down a ways. They are back up a little bit again.

High natural gas prices have almost destroyed the domestic production of fertilizer in the United States because natural gas is the feedstock. The cost factor of 90 percent of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of natural gas when you go through the process of conversion of natural gas and anhydrous ammonia.

Because of high natural gas prices, that fertilizer business has gone offshore. We are sitting here with 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf, and we can't go offshore to Florida and drill some natural gas wells 199.9 miles offshore? That's the 200- mile mineral rights that were declared by Ronald Reagan back in about 1983.

We can't punch a well out at 199.9 miles to bring up the natural gas that we know is there and put it into the marketplace by the trillions of cubic feet, 406 trillion cubic feet? We are blocked from doing that because environmentalists say don't drill, don't drill in ANWR, don't drill the Outer Continental Shelf, don't drill 200 miles offshore in Florida because, well, maybe we would pollute the environment with a natural gas well, when there is not a single historical example of a natural gas well that's polluted the environment.

Natural gas comes up out of the ocean floor every day by the millions of cubic feet, and it bubbles to the surface just like we saw it bubbling to the surface during Katrina in the hurricane in the aftermath in the floods of New Orleans when there was a natural gas pipeline break. I actually saw two of those myself, alive, for real, bubbling up out of the water that had flooded New Orleans.

It wasn't a pollution into the environment, it had bubbled up into the atmosphere and was dissipated in the atmosphere. That's the worst thing that happens in a natural gas well is if you get a natural gas leak. It goes into the atmosphere, it does what it does, it bubbles out of the ocean floor every day all across the globe.

The environmentalists are opposed though. They are opposed because they are opposed to producing energy. They are opposed to having energy on our market. They team up with the tourism industry in places like Florida that is concerned that we will set up a drill rig out there at 199.9 miles offshore, way beyond our ability to be able to see it.

Let me think about this. Christopher Columbus figured out the world was round by watching the ships come into port, and he could see the top of the masts first. The closer the ship got, the more he saw the ship because he figured out the curvature of the earth put that ship a little over the horizon as it came forward. He could see the top of the mast, more of the mast. After a while he could see the hull, then he could see the whole ship. He surmised, correctly, well, the earth is round. That's why you don't just happen to see that ship materialize when it comes forward to you across the ocean.

For the same reason you can't see an oil rig, I am advised, about 12 miles out. You can argue that, and whether it's 12 more or less, but you don't see that oil rig at 199.9 miles.

Imagine a place on the surface of this earth that's 200 miles away from you. I think for me, roughly 200 miles would be if I were standing on the Missouri border, the southern border of Iowa. If I went down to Lineville and maybe Pleasanton and stood there, and I looked north about 200 miles to Minnesota, if there is a drill rig on the Minnesota border, I am not going to see it from the southern border of Iowa and Missouri, it's too far.

But we still can't put a drill rig out at 200 miles offshore in Florida because they are afraid that somebody might be concerned that they can see it from the beach of Florida, they might not drive down there and sit on the beach and it will diminish tourism? Yet the Chinese can bring in drill rigs within 45 miles of Key West and be punching oil wells down into the open sea north of Havana 45 miles south of Key West. Forty-five miles in the middle, the Chinese are there drilling oil for the Cubans, and we can't drill 200 miles offshore, and why?

A vote went up in the Senate today that failed to open up ANWR. It failed to open up the Outer Continental Shelf, and it failed to open up the energy supply here in the United States of America. And yet 60 or so Senators voted no.

Here on this floor, if this vote comes up tonight, Mr. Speaker, or tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, I am confident that the votes don't exist in this Chamber for the responsible thing to take place, for us to step up and say let's tap into our energy supply. Let's drill into ANWR, let's drill the Outer Continental Shelf, let's go to the nonnational park public lands in the United States and drill the places where we have the oil.

There was some data that came out about 4 years ago that identified that if we would drill the nonnational park public lands in America for natural gas, we know there is enough natural gas there to heat every home in America for the next 150 years.

So what nation in its right mind would sit here and twiddle its thumbs

and agonize over $3.60 a gallon gas, what Nation would set a policy that brought energy bills to this floor, over and over again, energy bills that diminish the supply of energy on the marketplace, tightened up regulations and made it more difficult to develop energy, imposed windfall profit taxes on energy producers. This is the Pelosi Congress that had a plan, had a strategy for energy? We had a new energy policy, what is it? It is at least $1.60 a gallon higher gasoline, that is what the energy policy is. There is no strategy to solve the problem. There isn't a strategy.

And so their constituents, Speaker Pelosi's constituents, give her a pass because they have the San Francisco trolley car subsidized by the gas buyers in America.

And the constituents coming out of New York, they give their congressmen and congresswomen a pass because they are riding on the subway subsidized by the gas buyers in America. Seventeen percent of the gas tax goes to mass transit.

And the people riding on the Metro here in Washington, D.C., they're riding around on transportation subsidized by the gas buyers in America.

There is no outrage over here because the folks on this side of the aisle have figured out how to tax the folks on this side of the aisle for their energy. There is no outrage over here because the folks on this side of the aisle don't believe we ought to have cheaper energy. And even if they did believe that, they don't believe in the law of supply and demand. This law of supply and demand which says if you increase the supply and decrease the demand, the prices will fall because the producers have to lower their price in order to sell their product. If you reduce the supply and increase the demand, the prices will go up because sellers will know there is a high demand for their product. Those consumers will be searching to buy that product, and the price will go up.

This Congress has reduced the supply of energy, all kinds of energy. The demand for energy is going up and the price is going high.

I mean, this is not a complicated equation, Mr. Speaker. The drug dealers in America figured it out a long time ago. If there are a lot of illegal drugs on the market and not many buyers, illegal drugs get cheap. If there is only a little bit of illegal drugs on the market, if our law enforcement people are successful and they interdict those illegal drugs at our southern border, for example, then if the supply has been shut down by an aggressive law enforcement effort, we know a couple of things happen: The price of illegal drugs goes up, and probably the quality goes down. That happens. The drug pushers have it figured out. Why is it that the majority in this Congress doesn't have it figured out? I think they do have it figured out, actually, Mr. Speaker. But my question is why do their constituents not have it figured out?

So the supply is down. The demand is up. The price for energy is up, and what is really going on, what is behind this all is not just a, I will say a lack of concern about the high cost of energy, but a belief, Mr. Speaker, that high energy prices will cause people to use less energy, drive less, maybe buy less, and shut down and diminish the consumption of energy in this country. And it is a belief on the part of the majority party that if you can start to slow down the consumption of energy, you are doing something really good because in their mind we are saving the planet.

If we use less energy because the cost is high, we will use less energy consumption. Less energy consumption means fewer greenhouse gases, fewer greenhouse gases escaping into the atmosphere means the abysmal energy policy that drives up the cost, the higher energy gets, the more you save the planet. That's what is going on in the minds of the people in San Francisco, in Massachusetts, in the inner cities of America, those people who are not faced with having to put the nozzle in the tank and pay 18.4 cents a gallon in tax and pay $3.60 or $3.70 for that gasoline, and be subsidizing the mass transit, the people in the city that are supporting their Members of Congress that are driving up energy prices, cutting down on supply.

You cannot suspend the laws of nature and nature's God. They cannot be suspended. What goes up must come down, that's gravity. That was Newton's law. The law of economics is that if you have a lot of supply and little bit of demand, the price goes down. If you have a little bit of supply and a lot of demand, the price goes up.

The sun comes up in the east, not the west. It doesn't rise over San Francisco and San Francisco values; and if you think you can suspend the law of supply and demand, then you're out there in Pe-la-la-losi- land if that's what you think.

So our solution, Mr. Speaker, is this: And it is a Republican solution. It is a rational solution, and it is a commonsense American solution. It recognizes this: We have an overall energy pie chart, this circle, this 360-degree circle. In it are these slices of this energy pie. The slices are our consumption of energy, gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, ethanol, biodiesel, and the list goes on. Energy conservation is another slice of this overall energy pie.

You put that all together out there and what we need to do for our solution is grow the size of the energy pie. We need that pie chart of all of the Btus that are consumed in America. That energy that is consumed, we need a lot more on the marketplace. If we do that, if we increase the amount of Btus that are in this marketplace, then we will push the price down. And as we push our price of energy down, that means then that there will be more of that energy available. There has more energy available, more in proportion to the consumption we have. We push the price of energy down, and that means the cost of American goods get cheaper, not higher. That's the equation. That is not suspending the law of nature and nature's God. That is recognizing the laws of the economic dynamics of supply and demand.

And so, Mr. Speaker, this is simple commonsense, simple commonsense that the American people will understand once we convey the message to them, and this Congress needs a debate on energy. There is another debate that is going on on energy right now, and it is one that has been constantly harped at and chipped away at by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The list of critics goes on. Generally it is critics that look around and they think that somebody is making some money and it is not them, and so they should figure out how to undermine that effort to make money.

About 10 or 11 months ago I had people come to me, Mr. Speaker, and say what do you think is going to happen? Can we lose the blenders' credit for ethanol? Can that be reduced or eliminated? How strong is the support for ethanol in the Congress? I would say to them, no problem, I don't think there is any problem. I am not finding a logical, cogent argument that says we should not be building ethanol plants and producing ethanol from corn. That was maybe 10 months ago, Mr. Speaker.

And yet as these 10 months have unfolded, I have seen more and more arguments, and some have come to the floor of this Congress, and they made some arguments. They were arguments of convenience, but not necessarily arguments of logic. In fact, I don't believe they could sustain themselves in the face of laboratory facts and a logical analysis.

So here's what we have done. I have shaken the hand that squeezed the nozzle that pumped the first gallon of ethanol into a tank. That was back in about 1977. That was a State senator from Corwith, Iowa, named Senator Thurman Gaskill. He squeezed the nozzle that pumped the first gallon. I think we ought to bronze that hand. Maybe we should have bronzed the nozzle. That was a dream and a vision back in 1977 when crops weren't worth much and they needed a way to expand the markets for the commodities that we were producing. They were looking for different ways to provide that marketing of our commodities, and so they began developing an ethanol industry.

The first thing that happened is they went to ADM and Cargill and said you are the people producing ethanol. You have the skill and the technology and the talent and the infrastructure to do this. Those companies were not that interested. So they set about producing their own ethanol. I visited some of

those farms where they got out the torch and the welder and the band saw and they put together a still that looked like it could have been, oh, in the mountains of Tennessee a couple of generations earlier. Sorry, Mr. Speaker, the metaphor just came to mind. It could have been a still anywhere down there in that moonshine country. And yet what it was, it was an ethanol production plant on farms in Iowa. As they built these plants, they would get their efficiency that they could get. They would reach a level, and then they would go back and take the torch and cut it up and start all over again. They finally built an industry. Minnesota led very well. I want to give them credit for that. They passed legislation in the Minnesota legislature that provided a tax benefit, and I don't remember exactly the structure, but it was up to 15 million gallons of ethanol for a plant that size. So it was a subsidy to get this jump started. And then they mandated that a blend of ethanol be in all gallons of gasoline sold in Minnesota, and that worked pretty good.

Some of those Minnesota farm boys went to work and put together their engineering degrees, and a couple of really good companies grew out of that. And other companies will grow out of it. And today, they are producing millions and millions of gallons of ethanol out of corn. This all grew because we needed to figure out how to market our products. It didn't grow necessarily because gas was high, but it sure fit into the situation we are in today.

Then here I am, Mr. Speaker, and people are coming to me and saying, What are we going to do about the high cost of food? Somebody told me the other day that food prices have gone up 64 percent. I reject that. I haven't seen a number like that. I don't believe a number like that, Mr. Speaker. I look back at the numbers for food inflation for 2007, and the ones I see are food that has gone up 4.9 percent; not 64 percent, but 4.9 percent. And they blame that all on ethanol because we are taking corn and converting it into energy. Food versus fuel. If you would Google ``food versus fuel,'' you will find all kinds of hits because that seems to be the argument du jour, food versus fuel.

I will argue that is not what should be debated here. But if it is, if food is up 4.9 percent over 2007, energy is up 18 percent over 2007. Why are energy prices higher, because we have a diminished supply and an increased demand. The law of supply and demand says energy costs went up 18 percent. Food went up 4.9 percent, but we dumped and produced 9 billion gallons of ethanol into that marketplace. And because we did that, into about a 142 billion gallon consumption of gasoline, because we did that we held down the price of gasoline with our ethanol.

I would submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that the food inflation, that 4.9 percent in food inflation, was driven up more by energy costs, high energy costs, than it was because there was corn taken off the market.

In the first place, Mr. Speaker, the corn that goes into ethanol is not initially there for human consumption. I mean, it gets produced into some 300 different products, including high grade corn sweeteners. And that's a smaller percentage of the crop that goes into those things, Mr. Speaker. But what it does go to is primarily into animal feed and to livestock feed, cattle and hogs and poultry, primarily.

And so here's how the equation works. And I say this into the Congressional Record for that purpose, Mr. Speaker. We don't have less corn on the market for the 2007 production year. We've got more. We produced more corn than we've ever produced before. The law of supply and demand works. So using corn to produce ethanol would have to have taken corn off the market in order for the price of food to go up.

Well, here's the equation. We produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn in 2007. That's more than ever before. And we exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn for 2007. That's more than ever before. You can take your math and subtract that down. And then, from that we also converted 3.2 billion bushels of corn into ethanol, 3.2 billion bushels. But out of that 3.2 billion, we add back in half of that, because we didn't convert the corn into ethanol; we converted the starch into ethanol. We preserved the protein, rolled that back into the feed stock, and so that's worth 1.6 billion added back into that equation.

The net result is this: You take 13.1 billion bushels and you subtract 2.5 billion for export, you subtract another 3.2 billion bushels that went to ethanol, but you add back half of that, which is 1.6 billion bushels because that's back into the feed supply and dry distillers grain. You end up with 9 billion bushels of corn available for domestic consumption.

The average throughout the balance of the decade was 7.4 billion bushels of corn available for domestic consumption. Last year was 9. So we increased by 1.6 billion bushels the amount of corn that's available for domestic consumption.

And yet I've got economic and financial gurus around America that say ethanol has driven up the commodity prices and driven up the food cost prices. What's their math based on, Mr. Speaker? I've given the math for this. If you produce more corn than ever before and you put more into the domestic market than ever before, what's the argument that ethanol drove up the price?

I'd argue instead that the cheap dollar has driven up the price of food, and the cheap dollar has been a big reason why energy has cost us more. And so if we would shore up the value of our dollar and bring that dollar up to where it was in more traditional levels within the last couple to 3 years, we would see about 35 percent reduction in gas prices, diesel fuel prices, crude oil prices to the American dollar.

We'd also see a little reduction in our grain prices, corn, soybeans, soybean oil, those things that go into energy. And it would slow down some of our exports. And that's true, and it would shift our balance of trade back the other way.

On balance, I think it's the right thing to do, Mr. Speaker, shore up the value of the dollar, grow the size of the energy pie, put more Btus on the market in every way we can, continue and accelerate the construction of the nuclear generating plant in South Carolina, first one since 1975.

We'll see what the voters of South Dakota say about building the Hyperion oil refinery in Union County, South Dakota. If they say yes, then that means that the pipeline down from Alberta in the tar sands in the northern part of Alberta comes down into that region and we refine gasoline there and send the gas and diesel fuel and the other petroleum products and send that to the points across the North American continent. That's a good thing for us. That means more gas and diesel fuel and more oil into the marketplace coming out of Canada.

I'd lot rather do business with the Canadians than I would the Middle Easterners. We're awful close to the same kind of people when you go up there and visit the Albertans, and I'd very much like to see that happen.

If we can continue to do that, if we can drill the Outer Continental Shelf, if we can drill in ANWR we can put that crude oil on the marketplace. We can expand the ethanol production from corn.

And we'll see how this cellulosic goes. I think it's five to 10 years away before we have an effective cellulosic production of ethanol.

We do all of those things, and we continue to put coal out here, which is one of the cheapest alternatives that we have, and develop nuclear, I would do hydro electric if we can figure out how to get it done, and to the extent that wind and solar will work, yes, we should do those things. All of those pieces of the energy pie need to be expanded so that there's more and more Btus on the market.

That, Mr. Speaker, is our solution. And yes, conservation is a part of that. And cars that can be more fuel efficient are a good thing. But to mandate that at 75 miles to the gallon says that there's lots of folks that would have to park their Harley. A lot of motorcycles don't get that kind of mileage, Mr. Speaker.

That's some of the energy piece that we're dealing with here. Another one is, another myth that needs to be blasted out of the water, Mr. Speaker, is the myth that it takes more energy to produce ethanol out of corn than you get out of it. It's simply not true.

It can't be held up in a laboratory experiment, and it cannot be held up when you do that experiment in the ethanol production plant.

But according to Argon Labs, Chicago, here's the analysis, the argument that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of the ethanol. Here's what it actually takes.

If you set a bushel of corn at the gates of an ethanol plant, let's just say in Iowa, Mr. Speaker. It could be anywhere. It takes .67, two- thirds of a BTU in energy of input into that plant to get 1 BTU of energy out in the form of ethanol from corn. Two-thirds of a BTU input, 1 BTU coming back out in the form of ethanol from corn.

But if you have a barrel of crude oil sitting outside the gates of the refinery in Texas, and you need to refine that crude oil and refine the gasoline out of the crude oil, it takes 1.3 BTUs in energy to refine 1 BTU out of the crude oil.

So remember that equation, Mr. Speaker. .67 BTUs to get the 1 BTU of energy out of corn in the form of ethanol. 1.3 BTUs to get 1 BTU of energy in the form of gasoline out of crude oil, almost twice as much energy to extract gas from crude as it takes to convert corn to ethanol, 1 BTU matched up against 1 BTU. That, Mr. Speaker, is the real analytical answer on where we are with this energy.

And as one of the gentlemen here and I have debated many times, his argument that it takes energy to produce a tractor, energy to produce the combine to farm the fields; it takes energy to pump the water and water to produce ethanol. This list goes on and on.

And as I look at this and I read the studies, and I read one of those studies. It was about a 63-page long study that supposedly concluded that it takes a lot more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it. And I read through there and it's so much energy to produce the combine, so much energy for the tractor, seven trips across the field, so much fuel used in each one of those trips, allowing 4,000 calories for the farm worker per day, charged against the production of corn that we're convert to go ethanol. That, Mr. Speaker, is a, I will call it an obscene stretch of science, and it never should have been taken seriously, and would not have been if the people were quoting that ``scientific report,'' and I put that in quotes, that scientific report, if they were serious, if they were intellectually honest, they would have had to say this study doesn't hold water; it doesn't hold ethanol, and this study doesn't hold crude oil.

But my argument against that is that if you want to calculate seven trips across the field, the energy it takes to produce the tractor and the combine, 4,000 calories a day for the farmer, then you also have to calculate the energy that it takes to drill the oil well, produce the oil rig, set the workover rig up there, manufacture the pumps and the pump jacks and the piping and the casings and all of that equipment that it takes to complete the old field and do the collector lines that come in and set up the refinery and all of the energy that it takes to refine, including the 1.3 BTUs in energy for every BTU you get out of crude oil; and if that doesn't match up against the corn, from an energy standpoint, you still have to go calculate the energy that it takes to produce the battleship and cast the anchor for the battleship and produce the M-16s and the F-16s, and all of the equipment that it takes and all the manpower that it takes to defend our interests in the Middle East, including the bulletproof vests. And then there's the price of blood on top of that, Mr. Speaker.

No, there's not a comparison. It takes a lot less energy to produce ethanol out of corn than it does to produce gasoline out of crude oil, and that is an important part of this.

And we have a farm bill coming up, Mr. Speaker. This farm bill may be on this floor tomorrow. And as the people sat in the conference committee and brought their amendments forth and the process, you know, it's not a perfect process, and it's not one that if the public saw it all happen would be very comfortable with it, Mr. Speaker.

But they've done some things such as reduce the blenders credit on ethanol from 51 cents a gallon down to 45 cents, 6 cents dinged out of that. Some of that's rolled back up to cellulosic ethanol at $1.01 in blenders credit, under the hope that there'll be a cellulosic industry that would be built. It may be built, Mr. Speaker, with that kind of a subsidy. I don't know.

But I know this, that $1.01 in blenders credit for cellulosic ethanol sets that ethanol up as a separate kind of product that would be indistinguishable from corn-based ethanol or any other kind. And if food versus fuel is the argument, then with the food versus fuel argument, one day somebody's going to look out and decide, there's so much subsidy out here for my cellulosic, my switchgrass base ethanol that I think I'm going to take that field that's been corn rotated every other year, and I think I'm just going to put it into permanent switchgrass. Imagine how that works if that turns out to be millions of acres year after year after year in permanent switchgrass, because there's a subsidy, a cellulosic-based ethanol, that land will come out of food production and it will go into fuel production. Then we truly have a debate. We truly have a debate about food versus fuel, and that imbalance in cellulosic ethanol subsidy sets the stage for just that kind of a problem, Mr. Speaker.

And if I look at some of the other components of this farm bill, one of the components that I am very concerned about is the kind of veiled insertion of the Pigford Farms issue into the farm bill. Now, Pigford Farms, we might remember, goes back to pre-1995. 1995, then Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman stepped up in a press conference and he said to America, the United States Department of Agriculture has discriminated against black farmers. And in that confession it started a class action lawsuit. That class action lawsuit moved forward. There was negotiation on it, and finally they reached a consent decree. And that consent decree set up a way by which those black farmers that had been discriminated against could go file a claim, and that claim would be resolved.

Now, the claims were often $50,000 or the settlement was often $50,000. The applications that came forward, they estimated there would be 2,500 applications, maybe as many as 3,000 applications that came from farmers that alleged that they were discriminated against, perhaps because they'd been denied a loan, for example. And I don't doubt, Mr. Speaker, that this happened, that we had black farmers that were discriminated against. And I don't doubt that there were some that deserved to be compensated for that discrimination.

But I question, Mr. Speaker, the numbers that have unfolded since then. We spent $1 billion in settlements to the black farmers that were going to be about 2,500. And this, by the way, is their attorneys that put this number on at about 2,500 claimants.

Well, those numbers of claimants have grown and grown and grown. The consent decree was resolved. There was a statute of limitations, a sunset on the time by which they could file a claim. And that sunset period of time has long since passed.

And then there was an effort to bring this forward before the Judiciary Committee and open up Pigford Farms again, Mr. Speaker. And I sit on the Ag Committee and on the Judiciary Committee. There are two of us that sit on both of those positions. And I look back at the numbers and I listened to the testimony, and I saw what was going on.

And the President of the black farmers testified that there were less than 29,000 black farmers. The number that was produced as the best estimate came at perhaps 18,000 black farmers. Now, the number that was estimated of those that might file claims, not the number discriminated against, but those that might file claims, came to 2,500, Mr. Speaker.

So we're working with 2,500 that might have been discriminated against, that might have filed claims out of a universe of 18,000 black farmers. And today, we're looking at 96,000 claims on something that's been closed and settled all in and all up and all done, $1 billion for presumably 2,500 now grown to 96,000 claims, or potential claims, which is another $3 billion written into this Farm Bill in a nice little subtle way where you would hardly notice that it's there. And not very much of America knows what this is about.

I have talked to people who have administered these accounts and claims in the USDA. They had to reach out across the country and pull people in, bring many to Washington, set them down and deal with the claims and deal with the claimants one-on-one. And they went to the South to do that, too.

And I looked through some of these applications, and some of them are just ludicrous and ridiculous. And some of our FSA, at the time ASCS, directors, who sat there and day after day dealt with those claims, simply sat down and they poured their heart out to me, and said I cannot believe it. I can't believe my country is doing this. I can't believe my country carries such a guilt complex that they would open up the checkbook of American taxpayers for something that has this high a level of fraud.

And they tell me, Mr. Speaker, 75 percent minimum fraud rate in these claims. 75 percent. Now that may or may not be right, but I sat down with the administrator of these claims, had that discussion with this individual, and of the 96,000 claims, I asked, Have there been people discriminated against? Have black farmers been discriminated against? And the answer was, Yes, I believe there are. And I accept that answer on face value, Mr. Speaker.

Then I asked the question, Of the 96,000 claims, how many actually suffered discrimination? And the answer was, Mr. Speaker, 50. And when my staff asked the question while he was taking notes, 50,000? The answer came back, No, 50. Five-zero. Now that may or may not be the actual number, but I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that's a lot closer to the real number than the 96,000 that we're looking at in claims.

And this account, this slot that's written into the Farm Bill for Pickford Farms, the line that's in there at $100 million I will guarantee will be a lot higher than that. But this Congress cannot be in the business of taking taxpayer dollars from the hardworking Americans and putting them in the hands of people that decide they want to defraud the Federal Government when there is a consent decree and a resolution of a class-action lawsuit and the court wraps this up and says, Any claims that are not filed after this date are not valid.

We have no business in this Congress opening that back up again, because what we're doing is opening up the checkbook of the American taxpayer and handing a blank check to anybody, anybody that will come forward that's of color and say, Well, I wanted to farm; or, I would have liked to have filed for a loan; or, I did ask for one but nobody answered me; or, I went to the door and shook it but it was locked and it was or wasn't business hours. I may not know where the Farm Service Administration office is, but by golly, I wanted a farm and I was just so intimidated by their attitude I never tried.

All of these claims are rolling out here at us, and it's the taxpayers that will end up paying it, Mr. Speaker, $3 billion. Not $100 million. $3 billion wrapped up in the Farm Bill.

Another thing, Mr. Speaker, is the language that's in the Farm Bill that sets up and requires the Davis-Bacon wage scale for ethanol- production facilities and biodiesel-production facilities. Davis-Bacon wage scale. That, Mr. Speaker, is this: federally mandated union scale for construction workers out there in the rural areas of America in the corn belt, in the soybean belt, in the farm areas where we have merit shop employees, good employees, highly skilled employees. We pay them what they're worth. Some of us bring them in and we give them a full year-round job and we give them health insurance, retirement benefits. We want to keep them. We set up the scenario by which we can keep our employees.

But if we're compelled, when we're working on ethanol-production facilities or biodiesel-production facilities, to pay a federally mandated union scale, that means there will be fewer trainees, there will be fewer vocations, there will be fewer that learn the skills; and we'll have to go into the union hall and hire people out there and put them into the job.

And I can tell you how that works: If you got somebody out there that's worth $16 an hour and the Federal Government mandates said you pay them $26 an hour, then you bring them out and you put them to work and you set them in the seat of the machine and you work them hard for all 60 minutes of every hour, and the instant you don't need them again, boom, they're gone. You send them back off the job site. And then you put your salaried employees in, and they've got to grease the machines and scoop the dirt out of the tracks and fuel them, and you may or may not do the maintenance; and the next day they come again. And you drive them. You drive them. You use them like machines because you can't afford to bring them along and train them. They have to be there. They have to know.

But if we allow merit-shop employees and let the employers do the hiring and the employers make the deal with the employees, what business is it of the Federal Government to tell an employer and an employee, We won't let you two make a deal on what you're worth? If the employer thinks you're worth $14 an hour and the employee thinks that's a pretty good paycheck, the Federal Government might step in and say, No, you have to pay that man $18.50 because the lack of wisdom of this Federal Government somehow is that the employer is a victimizer and the employee is a victim.

I met with an employer last weekend--I guess it's two weekends ago now, Mr. Speaker--who said, Here's how it is. It was last weekend. If we are paying too low of wages, nobody shows up and wants the job, and we can't recruit people to come in here and go to work. If we're paying too much in wages, there's a lineup outside that door, people that want to come to work for the company that's paying too much money.

There's a happy medium in the middle. We provide that happy medium. We pay the wages we need to pay to get good employees to go to work, and it is supply and demand that determines what wages are, wages and benefit packages, including health insurance and retirement benefits. Those are the things that come with a labor market.

We don't need the Federal Government to mandate a union scale and call a prevailing wage. And by the way, Davis-Bacon wage scale is not and has not in my judgment ever been a prevailing wage. It's always been an imposed union scale, and it is, as far as I can remember. I can't think of another one. So I'm going to say I believe, Mr. Speaker, it is the last vestige of Jim Crow laws here in America because Davis- Bacon was designed to keep black construction workers out of the trade unions in New York City. That's a fact of history. It's a Jim Crow law designed to discriminate against black construction workers in the trade unions in New York City that happened in 1931.

It still has a process--I don't allege today that it's actively race- based, but we do know that the unions kind of sort who comes and who goes within their unions, and it's different from place to place and locale to locale across the country. But it is a union scale, not a prevailing wage; and if we're to go out and do the survey, there are States that impose mini Davis-Bacon, they call it, which distorts the pay scale, too.

If supply and demand sets the price for oil and for gas and for ethanol and for biodiesel, it also sets the price for crude oil, for corn and beans and gold, and all of those commodities. Supply and demand, Mr. Speaker, needs to set the price for labor as well. It will do that without the Federal Government's help, and we will not build the renewable energy infrastructure that we could have built with Davis-Bacon requirements in this Farm Bill that's coming up.

We will not, and in fact, the Davis-Bacon scale drives the price up someplace between 8 and 35 percent of the cost of the project. I use 20 percent because that's the most common when you look at it. And I have worked in this all of my life. Nobody else in this Congress has the experience I have with the Davis-Bacon wage scale.

So 8 to 35 percent increase in the cost, averaging at 20 percent. That just tells you this: If you want to build five ethanol plants, strike the Davis-Bacon provision. If you only want to build four ethanol plants to save money, ride the thing out. If you want to build an apprenticeship program, a job skill that comes from within, something that emerges from companies that are training employees and building up this knowledge base, if you want to

build that, don't have Davis-Bacon in there. You have to have a merit shop to get that done.

If you want the knowledge base in the Midwest where the renewable energy is so when we build out all of our energy plants and we get that done, we can export that knowledge and go around the world, you've got to strike Davis-Bacon, Mr. Speaker. If you want the Midwest to be to renewable energy what Texas is today to the expertise on oil, you've got to strike Davis-Bacon. You can't have that provision in there.

We need to grow the size of the energy pie, Mr. Speaker, and we cannot suspend the laws of nature and nature's God. You can't suspend the laws of gravity. The sun comes up in the east around Maryland and the eastern shore. It doesn't come up around San Francisco, and if you believe otherwise, you're out there in Pe-la-la-losi-land.

I thank Mr. Smith, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, for yielding, and I appreciate the privilege to address this issue before this Congress.

First, I want to point out that I believe there has been a constructive compromise that has been reached across this aisle that has not necessarily closed loopholes but made some clarifications that help protect this country from kind of a blanket waiver, so to speak, with any of those formerly potentially violent members of the ANC.

And for me, I come to this debate with more concern than many because I still maintain vivid memories of what went on in the streets of South Africa during those anti-apartheid riots and demonstrations and strategic actions that took place, black against white, white against black. I also have vivid memories, Mr. Speaker, of actions taken in this country and positions taken politically and the divesting of investments within South Africa by many American companies as an incentive to end apartheid, which was, I believe, a sin against humanity to have a policy that identified some people as

being more equal than others, and I believe it's a sin against humanity to maintain those policies, whether they are in the United States or South Africa or anywhere else.

I offered an amendment to the Judiciary Committee before this bill, and the purpose of it was to send a message because I have traveled to South Africa and I have met with people there who expressed to me some concerns, and because of that, I've also dug a little deeper into the readings in the current events. It will not be a surprise to the members of the committee that I'm concerned about the land transfer that is part of the federal policy of South Africa, to transfer a significant portion of land from, right now, under the deeds held by white South Africans into the deeds of black South Africans. I made it clear in the committee that I do not compare this to the things we see going on in Zimbabwe. That is far different and that is without benefit of the rule of law. But there still remains a concern.

I also want to point out, and I promised Ambassador Welile Nhlapo, who is the Ambassador to the United States from South Africa, that I would make this statement. And he came to my office yesterday. We sat down in my office for a good, strong hour and discussed these issues. And he assured me that there are constitutional protections that exist and statutory protections that exist to protect all property owners in South Africa and that there will not be a transfer of real estate property into the hands of black South Africans at the expense of white South Africans without due process of law and constitutional protections. I voiced my concern about that. He reassured me that that would be the case.

And I pointed out to him that it's difficult for us in this country to reach an objective position on these issues that are racially charged because it's so much wrapped up in who we are. And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, for the observation of the body, to listen to an analysis of the political campaigns that are going on now and, in fact, today to listen to an analysis of the predictions of those going to the polls in the Democrat primary in places like Indiana and North Carolina, which are taking place right now, you cannot hear a political pundit/talking-head analysis without race and gender coming into that debate.

So I challenged Ambassador Nhlapo that that's a very difficult standard, that we can't meet it here in this country. As old as our traditions are for freedom, as much sweat and toil and blood has been spilled to make people free and keep them free, we still can't extricate ourselves from being wrapped up in that debate and have our public policy identified by whom we might side with rather than how we might analyze the Constitution or the law. It's difficult here in the United States with our traditions; it's far more difficult in South Africa. We had that discussion. It was a constructive discussion.

And I rise today, Mr. Speaker, to support this bill and to encourage open dialogue globally and continuing communication and interchange with the people of South Africa and people of all nations on the Earth.

I would remind, also, the body that the record of post-colonial Africa is not a stellar record. There are many problems in the continent, many of those in the southern part of the continent of Africa. And as I travel and visit there and go into the AIDS orphanages in particular and can step into the villages where there isn't a single adult of reproductive age unless they are a missionary, it has been devastating to the continent. We need to have an open dialogue and be frank about our problems and be open in our discussion. Hiding our dialogue because we're afraid we might hurt someone's feelings only pushes the problem further downward instead of letting it surface so that we can all address it together with open eyes, open ears, and open dialogue.

That's what we did yesterday in my meeting, which I so gratefully received Ambassador Nhlapo into my office. And in that engaging conversation, I'm confident that we have opened up communications for a continued dialogue, and I trust that this bill will open communications for further dialogue, and I certainly support this.

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

Mr. Speaker, the Federal Government under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which we refer to as SCAAP, reimburses part of the expenses that States and localities incur in incarcerating illegal immigrants who have been convicted of a felony or of two or more misdemeanors. And, in fact, I would bring the Chamber's attention, Mr. Speaker, to a report that was issued by the GAO in April of 2005 that identifies that the Federal Government is reimbursing 25 percent of the cost of the incarceration of criminal aliens within the institutions in the United States. But H.R. 1512 expands the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program to compensate States for incarcerating illegal immigrants who are charged with, and not only convicted, which is under the current program, charged with a felony or two or more misdemeanors.

I stand here, Mr. Speaker, and applaud the gentlelady from California for bringing this legislation because I think this is a constructive change to our policy, and the language very simply adds the words ``charged with or'' to the existing language of compensation for those ``convicted of.'' And it recognizes that there are significant costs involved in processing criminal aliens in the investigation stage, the arrest stage and the indictment stage. And as those costs mount and are incurred, we need to be sure that we take this position, that it is the Federal

Government's job to guard and protect our borders. That is not the job of a political subdivision. It is essentially the job of the Federal Government.

When we fail to do our job, when we don't have sufficient constraints in place at our borders or at our airports or our ports of entry, then the result of it is that this burden of law enforcement falls upon the political subdivisions, on the States, on the cities and on the counties to enforce the law. And when they do, they incur these costs. This bill, H.R. 1512, seeks to lift off some of that burden. And it certainly wouldn't be all of it.

Lamar Smith, the ranking member of the full Judiciary Committee, and I both believe the available statistics on criminal illegal immigrants in the United States leave much to be desired. There is too little data on illegal immigrants imprisoned in the United States. We don't really know how many there are or what crimes they are charged with or convicted of or how much time they spend in our prison systems.

And I particularly can speak to that, since I asked for the GAO study that was completed in April of 2005. I thought in that study I would get the answers to the percentages of our inmate populations that are criminal aliens, what crimes they might be convicted of, and quite a list of things that would help us establish our policy, both law enforcement policy and our immigration policy.

However, that report came back not quite apples to apples. And there are conclusions that can be drawn. There are also gaps to their knowledge base. And because of the inspiration that is brought forward, because of this bill of Ms. Sanchez, H.R. 1512, we engaged the Judiciary Committee in dialogue about how we can better gather that information. I am really pleased that Ms. Lofgren, the Chair of the Immigration Subcommittee, of which I am the ranking member, and Mr. Smith, the ranking member of the full Judiciary Committee, have agreed to send a joint request to the Government Accountability Office to develop additional statistics on criminal alien immigrants. I look forward to working with Ms. Lofgren, Mr. Smith and others on this particular subject matter. This is something we vitally need to provide statistics that will help us establish a better immigration policy.

As we move forward with this piece of legislation that I believe is a constructive move in the right direction that helps to compensate, and it won't be all, but it will at least in part help to compensate the political subdivisions for their costs incurred to enforce laws against criminal aliens, it adds to it those charged with a crime, not just those convicted of a crime or two serious misdemeanors.

But into this negotiation also will be the formal request for the GAO study to look further at the effect of crime on the United States of America by criminal aliens. And the question has got to be constantly before us, since we are charged with the responsibility of protecting the American people. And it is very much a constitutional responsibility. We are also constitutionally charged with the responsibility of establishing immigration policy. The executive branch is charged with the responsibility of enforcing that policy, however aggressively or lack of aggression they might have. The result is that some get in through the borders, through our ports of entry. Some commit crimes, and some of those crimes that are committed are of a very heinous nature. And the cost of those crimes against this society can be quantified if we can identify the numbers of crimes that are being committed by criminal aliens and in what categories they are in, where they are being incarcerated, what lengths of terms they are serving, and especially, Mr. Speaker, when they are released, when they are released from a municipal jail, a county jail or a State penitentiary, let alone from a Federal institution, when they are released, we need to know if they are released into the hands of ICE, if they have been processed for deportation, if that happens to be the law, or if they are released back into the streets. And if they are, we need to ask the question, are they committing further crimes?

So what is the level of effectiveness in our law enforcement system? What percentage of our overall crimes are being committed by criminal aliens? What are those crimes? What's the price against society, and how does this break down into all these categories that I have mentioned in a fashion that will allow us, as a Congress, to prudently step back, take the empirical data that we are expecting to receive from the Government Accountability Office and after the submission of this request, and process that into policy that reflects the best interests of the people in the United States of America.

I think this bill is a healthy step in the right direction. I think it's a prudent thing to do, and I think it says the right thing to the people in America. I applaud the gentlelady for bringing H.R. 1512, and I support the expansion of SCAAP funding to those who have also been charged with a crime.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself so much time as I may consume.

Just in summation, this is a component of taking this legislation in the right direction, and it's important that we compensate political subdivisions. When the Federal Government is not doing the job they need to be doing, this is the natural result of it.

I expect that this has come from a request of those political subdivisions. Although they aren't making this request necessarily in my district, there are many jails in my district that will be beneficiaries of this piece of legislation.

I urge its adoption, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, it's an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

I listened to my colleagues with great interest, and I appreciate the constitutional acumen that they bring to the floor. I honor their work and support their statements, and do through a rather unsmooth segue into the issue that I believe needs to be addressed here, Madam Speaker, so that there can be a greater depth of knowledge about the subject of energy in this country.

First of all, there is a certain idea that somehow we can talk about energy conservation and we can pass legislation to require automobiles to get 75 miles to the gallon and somehow that's not going to cost a price in quality of life or in engineering costs. And some people believe that that can actually happen. And I know that if we go so far as to mandate such a thing, you would have to park your Harley today because it wouldn't get that kind of mileage. And if that's going to happen with a family automobile, I would like to know how that is designed to be done without putting us in a very flexible and crashable vehicle that doesn't provide very much safety for the people that are inside.

I'm concerned about that approach, Madam Speaker, and I'm concerned about an approach that believes that there is maybe only one or two things we can do with energy, and maybe there is a silver bullet here to solve all of this.

Madam Speaker, there is no silver bullet on energy. It is a cost of everything that we do. A cup of coffee, a pair of shoes, a suit, a ticket to the ball game, a television set, everything that we might buy or consume, including all of our food, the price of it is wrapped up in energy. And inflation of energy is inflation of everything. And as we watched gas prices go up since the beginning of this Congress, this 110th Congress, when Speaker Pelosi took the gavel, gas prices have gone up over 50 percent in that period of time. And the promise was, well, there was going to be a commonsense approach to energy.

Madam Speaker, I'm still waiting for that commonsense approach. I've seen pieces of legislation come across this floor a number of times in this 110th Congress, and every piece of legislation that addressed energy raised the cost of energy, and no piece of legislation increased the supply of energy, which would reduce the cost.

The law of supply and demand is that if you have more supply than you have demand, prices fall because the sellers have to discount in order to turn their product into cash. And if you have a demand that's higher than the supply, the price goes up because the buyers are willing to pay more because they want it; so they compete for the product.

Just the same way as if you're a great athlete, Madam Speaker, and maybe only a few people can sky walk above the hoop and slam the ball down through in a basketball court, and only a few of those people get offered the millions of dollars because it's a rare talent. There's a lot of demand for that kind of talent and only a little bit of supply. So the price for a very highly talented basketball player goes up and up. The same goes for all of our sports. We can see that easily. If you're a clutch pitcher and you can step into a baseball game with the bases loaded and nobody out and are ahead by one run and take them down three at a time and you can do that consistently and perform well under pressure, if you've got that kind of control, you're worth a lot of money in that arena because the supply is low and the demand is high.

Well, with energy the supply is low and the demand is high, just like it is for a very talented basketball player or a very talented attorney or a very talented actress or a very talented CEO. So how do you reverse this when you're dealing with the American people, whose standard of living and quality of life is wrapped up in this cost of energy? And, Madam Speaker, I will submit that we must increase the supply of energy, in every category that we intend to use energy, we need to increase the supply.

Now, if you'll imagine, Madam Speaker, in your mind's eye, a pie chart, a 360-degree pie chart of all the components of our sources of energy, and that would include gasoline and diesel fuel and natural gas and clean burning coal. It would include wind energy, solar energy, ethanol, biodiesel and biomass, hydroelectric, and it would include nuclear. And also on that pie chart, we need to add a slice in there for energy conservation because energy conservation is--on this, Madam Speaker, I agree with the majority party. Energy conservation is an important component of our overall energy solution.

But there is no energy solution that has been offered by the leadership here. We do not have a commonsense solution that's been offered by the leadership. We have pieces of legislation that raise the cost of energy, blocking certain parts of the publicly owned lands from drilling. And the places where we could drill, there has already been a blockage of being able to transport natural gas or oil through those public lands. So we have taken millions of acres of oil-producing lands off-limits, off-limits to the American people, while we are dependent on foreign oil. The exact opposite that I believe that we should do.

And we're not drilling in ANWR. Now, ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whoever named that was really thinking ahead if they thought that they wanted to lock up a lot of energy underneath the frozen tundra. But I went up there to look at that land. I really thought that if I would get up there, I would find ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--I believed I would get there and it would be teeming with wildlife. I thought caribou would be running all over the place and there would be some wolves there picking off the strays, and I thought there would be some musk-oxen and maybe some Arctic fox, and I thought I would see an alpine forest because I had seen that in one of the commercials that said ``Don't drill ANWR.''

Well, I went up there, and I did actually do the research to find out where the furthest-most northerly tree is. If you remember, Madam Speaker, I think you and I learned this in eighth grade science class that the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle are lines around the globe--on the northern hemisphere, the Arctic Circle is a line around the globe, north of which trees don't grow. So it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody to find out there are no trees in ANWR. And it was a surprise to me to find out that there is no resident caribou herd there. I did see four musk-oxen as we flew all over ANWR looking for some wildlife. We saw that and two white birds, and that was the extent of it, although there are some whales that get harvested as they swim along the shoreline and there are some polar bears that live up there along the shore. So it's not without wildlife.

But we drilled in the North Slope of Alaska back in 1973--1972 and 1973 was when it began. There was a great concern about disturbing the natural regions up there and a concern that we would tear up the natural tundra and it could never be replaced again and that there would be oil spills that soaked up that couldn't be cleaned up.

And, Madam Speaker, I went up there and found out that we have drilled in the North Slope, and we have done it well. And if we fly across that North Slope and look around, I couldn't identify a single oil well, not one. They are all submersible pumps set down below the ground level. And the pads that are there for workover are places that they drive to on ice. So when the ice melts in the summer, there's no sign that anybody approached the well. And the caribou herd went from 7,000 head in 1972 to 28,000 head as of a couple, 3 years ago. That's a fourfold increase in caribou herd in the North Slope in Alaska, in a region that was alleged to have been

poised before it was drilled to having the wildlife and the natural environment there damaged significantly. It has not been, and there is no example that it was. The only example that we can find is that caribou like to get up on the higher ground where the wind blows the flies off of them and they like to have their calves up there out of the water; so their population has increased. But those are the caribou herds that are resident to the North Slope of Alaska, but there are no caribou herds that are residents in ANWR. So the natural animal life there won't benefit quite as much except the caribou do migrate into ANWR to have their calves in the spring starting about mid-May, early to mid-May, and then along about mid-June or the latter part of June when the calves are strong enough, they walk back over to Canada, where they actually do live.

But in that whole region in the North Slope, no spills, no measurable impact on the environment. And we can do the same thing, only better, in ANWR. We can do it with about a 2,000-acre footprint, and we can drill directionally, and we can open that up and we can bring that oil over to the Alaska pipeline, pump it down to Valdez, and put it on tankers and ship it like we have done out of Alaska for years and years successfully. That oil needs to come out. It needs to come out of the ground. It needs to go into the marketplace.

You cannot defy the law of supply and demand. If you shut down the supply and the demand remains the same, the price goes up. If you increase the demand and you keep the supply the same, the price goes up. We have both of those things happening. We have a demand increase, and we have a supply growth that's being shut down.

And not only that, Madam Speaker, but instead of voting down drilling on publicly owned land, and I will say nonnational park public lands, we need to open up our nonnational park public lands for drilling. We need to do that. We need to drill in the Outer Continental Shelf, primarily offshore Florida, where we know there are at least 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And where the people who are sitting on the beach, there's a concern that if they have information that there's a drill rig out there at 199 miles, though you can't see it much beyond about 12 miles, but if there's a drill rig out there offshore at 199 miles, some folks are afraid that people won't go sit on the beach if they hear a rumor that there's a drill rig out there. So we shut off a 200-mile limit for exploration when a country like this needs the natural gas and a country like this needs the oil. We need to drill the Outer Continental Shelf all the way up and down our coast off of California, all the way north as far as there is energy. We need to tap into it. We need to tap into it all, Madam Speaker, and put it all on the market.

And we need to add into that the alternative energy uses that we have. We have developed a tremendous industry in renewable fuels. And I speak from a base of, I will say, experience, and I represent the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. There are 435 congressional districts in Iowa, and of the 435 districts, there's only one that produces the most renewable energy, and that's the Fifth District of Iowa, when you count ethanol, biodiesel, and wind.

But I see my good friend from California, former chairman, now ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Duncan Hunter, to whom I'd be so happy to yield.

And I appreciate your being down here, Duncan.

Reclaiming my time, Madam Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) for coming to the floor and filling us all in on this report.

I look at the statistics, and absolutely I support the mandate of Congress. You say 700 miles, but when you calculate curves in the border, it comes out to 854 miles, as the gentleman has said. The 22 metric tons of drugs and you add to that the 368 tons of----

Of marijuana. And I happen to know that the value of those drugs coming across our southern border are $65 billion worth of illegal drugs.

That is with a B. To try to get one's mind around $65 billion; what is that? Well, for example, PEMEX, Mexican nationalized oil company, produces about $28 billion worth of oil pumped out of Mexico and along the Gulf; $28 billion. This is about 2\1/2\ times the value of all the illegal drugs coming into the United States. The 250,000 criminal illegal aliens that are incarcerated in the United States amounts to 27 percent of the criminal population, the inmate population in our Federal penitentiaries, and there is a report that came out in April of 2005 that shows that we are funding about one out of every four prisoners that apply. And you do the math on that, and it comes out to about 25 percent of our State and local prisons are criminal inmates there as well.

So when I look at what happens in places like Israel, where they have built a fence that has been almost 100 percent effective, you can't make the

argument, I don't believe, that it's not effective when you put up a barrier to keep people out. It's a lot different than building a Berlin Wall, for example, to keep people in. This is a barrier to keep people out. And with those that do come in, the crime that comes in with that, as the gentleman from California said, a reduction of 56.3 percent in the Smugglers Gulch area.

There are Americans that are dying every day in this country at the hands of people that if they were simply kept in the country where they are citizens, their crimes would be perpetrated someplace else. The measure of that is far greater than our casualties in the Middle East. I don't think there's any way to calculate it otherwise.

As I add to this argument, I ought to point out also that the news I saw showed that in Tijuana over the weekend there was a running drug gang fight where they were driving through the streets, shooting at each other, with tourists around and residents around, and the number that I saw was 13 killed, and those that were killed, the way I understood it, were all criminal drug gangs.

I want to reiterate too the utilization of the waiver. As I have tracked that through the news, I also commend Secretary Chertoff for utilizing the waiver to go forward and build the fence. As the gentleman from California references, the fence and the triple barriers that exist down in the southwestern Arizona area, San Luis, south of Yuma, I remember visiting there and asking the question of Secretary Chertoff, We always hear the statement if you build, I will show you an 11-foot ladder, you build a 20-foot fence, I'll show you a 21-foot ladder.

I saw the fence down there, and as I asked this question, Has anyone defeated this barrier, and it had to be asked a number of times, and the answer came back no. When I was there, no one had defeated the new triple fencing barrier that was constructed in the San Luis area where the crossings have gone down from 138,000 to 4,000.

I ask the gentleman from California, are you aware that anyone has defeated the triple barrier fence anywhere?

I thank the gentleman from California, who has been the leader on this fence and made sure the first got built and is here making sure that we get the last of it built. I just submit we don't have to build exactly 2,000 miles of fence to get this all done. I submit we build the Duncan Hunter 700/854 miles of fence and then we will just keep right on building as long as they keep going around the end. If they stop going around the end, we can stop building fence. If they start going around the end, we'll start building some more.

I thank the gentleman from

California. There's a lot more to be taken up on that. As a matter of transition on the cost of this border, we are spending $8 billion on our southern border. When you calculate the cost of funding Border Patrol and all their equipment and all of the costs that are associated with that, as well as the costs of ICE and the enforcement that we have along on the border, about $8 billion a year. That is $4 million a mile. Now we can build interstate for that kind of money. Instead, we just simply want to build a couple of fences with some sensors on it and invest that money and get the return back in the first year.

As we recruit Border Patrol that come to work, I ask them to keep your spirits up and get tied into the mission. Often there is a loss of notion on that lack of mission if it's not clearly articulated. There isn't a place to compromise the law. When someone violates it, we must enforce it and follow through with prosecution. We need to put the resources in your hands so you can do that. You are brave Americans serving this country, serving us well. I go down along that part of the border and sit down in nice quiet meetings with brave Americans that are serving this country and I hear your stories. I hear them anonymously sometimes. And I sit along the border in the dark at night and watch and listen as the infiltration comes through.

I have got a sense of what you're up against. I'm sure I don't appreciate it the way you do, being faced against it every day. I appreciate the work, as this Congress does, and I appreciate the gentleman from California coming to the floor.

I wanted to swing back to the energy piece of this, Mr. Speaker, and as I talked about the different components of the energy pie, the overall pie chart, our sources of energy, and I listed a whole series of them: Gas, diesel, biodiesel, and nuclear, wind. The list goes on. Not necessarily to repeat them all, but just to refresh in our eye the things we are talking about here from the sources of energy that we have.

I was in the process of making the statement that of all 435 congressional districts in America, there is one congressional district that produces more renewable energy than any other congressional district. That is the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. We are in the top three in ethanol production of all the congressional districts. We are the top biodiesel-producing district of all of the congressional districts. We are in the top one to four on wind. Perhaps today we are third or maybe second on wind generation of electricity. If you add up the Btu's we are converting into renewable energy sources, the Fifth District produces more than anybody else. So we ought to know a little more about it.

First of all, and I need to debunk some of the myths that are out there. One of them is a myth, it is a myth that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of the ethanol. That is a myth. There was a college professor that did a study that went back and added up all the energy it would take to produce the tractor and smelt the steel and produce the rubber for the tires and transport the tractor and the combine and the cultivator and the application equipment all the way to the farm field. They calculated all of the energy that it took to do that, as well as the energy it took to make seven passes over the field, if I remember that number correctly. It didn't add up quite good enough yet so they charged against the energy consumption to produce ethanol, this is to raise a crop of corn, by the way, 4,000 calories a day for the farm workers because it takes energy to keep them going.

When you get to that point, Mr. Speaker, you have to know that they are grasping at straws, they are reaching pretty hard to try to pull in as many ways that they can describe that there's energy consumption in ethanol production through corn. Well, let me submit, Mr. Speaker, that first of all, if you add all that up, then you can make anything so inefficient, we couldn't possibly do it. But the corn is going to be raised anyway. So that description isn't valid and it's not a rational way to compare how much energy that we are getting out of corn versus how much energy it takes to produce the equipment that raises the farm crop.

If we are going to measure the amount of energy used to produce tractors and combines that are used in the field, along with the diesel fuel or the gas that is in the tractor and in the combine and in the trucks that haul the grain away, then by the same comparison we have got to look at the energy that is consumed when we produce gasoline out of crude oil. It isn't just an inequation of a barrel sitting at the refinery of Texas. It is all of the military that has to go over to defend the oil fields. It's the anchor, all the energy it takes to cast the anchor for the battleship and all the energy it takes to produce weaponry of all kinds, and the F-16s that have to fly in the air and the bullet proof vests and armored Humvees. How much energy does it take to drive an army? Are they consuming 4,000 calories a day? Perhaps they are. In fact, I'd submit more than that, as much as they are up against.

If you add all that up, you can compare that to the energy it takes to produce tractors and combines and energy in the form of ethanol out of corn. But I will submit that that is a ridiculous path to go down to try to prove something. I think that the study that said that it took more energy to produce ethanol, the specious one about measuring the energy it took to produce the tractor to farm the corn is a specious study and it is invalid and it was grasping at straws.

When the same people go back and calculate what it takes to put an army in the field and a navy in the sea and an air force in the air and how much fuel to drive all of that, compare that and the energy you get out of the crude oil versus the energy you get out of corn, we are still going to look really good, although neither comparison is valid.

So what is valid is this. We are going to raise the corn anyway. We have the oil out there coming out of the ground anyway. So what is valid is each one of them has a commodity price, and as Adam Smith said, the value of anything in the marketplace is the sum total of the capital that it takes to produce it and the labor that it takes to produce it. So when you add up the capital and the labor, and you look at the price, the market price, you will have those two things together.

For example, crude oil has gone up by the barrel from, not that long ago, $50 a barrel, to $118 or $119 a barrel. That more than doubled over the last year and 15 months or so.

Why is that? Because of supply and demand. Because it has gotten more scarce, because there is more demand on the oil, and because the cost of capital and production and labor have gone up.

So we measure the value of the commodity in the marketplace. What does it command when it is marketed as a commodity? What is corn worth by the bushel, what is crude oil worth by the barrel? That is how we determine what it is worth.

I will submit this, Mr. Speaker, and that is that if we put a barrel of crude oil sitting outside the gates of the refinery, let's just say in Texas, and we are going to have to refine that crude oil and do what we call crack gas out of that crude oil, that takes energy to do that. And the energy that it takes to crack one Btu out of gasoline out of crude oil is 1.3 Btus of energy to do so.

If you put a bushel of corn sitting outside the gates of an ethanol plant in Iowa, for example, anyplace in the corn belt, and you are going to produce one Btu out of that corn in the form of ethanol, it will take .67 Btus of energy input to get one Btu out in ethanol in the form of corn.

If you do that in gasoline coming out of crude oil at the refinery in Texas, you will use up 1.3 Btus to get one Btu back. It is almost, by modern numbers, actually, twice as much energy consumed to produce gasoline from crude oil as it takes to get ethanol out of corn. That is a laboratory fact. It is not a negotiable one, it is not an opinion, it is a laboratory fact.

And they worry about water consumption, how much water does it take to produce ethanol for the amount of water that it takes to produce gasoline. Cracking gasoline takes significantly, multiple times more water than producing ethanol out of corn. Cracking gas out of crude oil, a lot more water than ethanol out of corn.

So we take care of those two arguments. Those things stand up with laboratories tests. Those are finite numbers. They are not negotiable. They are a matter of scientific fact. It isn't even ``settled science,'' in the way Al Gore would say his opinion is. It is laboratory facts.

So, now we have this ethanol, and we have put it into the marketplace and we have produced upwards perhaps in the last year somewhere near 9 billion gallons of ethanol. And that is putting a dent into the overall supply. We are burning about 142 billion gallons of gasoline in a year, so the 9 million gallons of ethanol is approaching that level where it is significant in its contribution in keeping the cost of energy down.

But the argument comes back then to me and across the airwaves of this country, Mr. Speaker, that we have high food prices because the production of ethanol has taken corn off the marketplace and made food prices higher.

Now, why is it that people that don't understand the law of supply and demand when it comes to the cost of energy can all of a sudden discover the law of supply and demand when it comes to food prices, and then misinform themselves for the suitability of their own argument?

So it works like this: We don't consume a lot of field corn for human consumption. Most of it, if it is not processed into some 300-some different products, but most of the field corn is used in livestock feed and it does get converted into food that way.

But here is how this works. In 2007 we produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn. Of that, we exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn. That left 10.6 billion bushels back for us, 10.6 billion to use here domestically. Of that, we converted 3.2 billion into ethanol, a little over 9 billion gallons of ethanol. That left 7.4 bushels of corn for domestic production. That 7.4 billion gets added back to it at least half of the corn that we use for ethanol, because there is a high grade animal feed product that is a by-product of ethanol production. That would be about 1.6 billion bushel equivalent added back in.

So we end up with exactly, by my calculation here, 9.0 billion bushels of corn to be used here domestically for animal feed, for processing into the things that we process it into. And so the argument would be, well is that 9.0 billion bushel, is that more or less corn than we normally have for domestic production?

We pushed our production up, and over the last 6 years we have produced an average of only 10.3 billion bushels of corn, and we have exported about 2 billion. So that takes us down to 8.3 billion bushels of corn available in an average year. Last year there was 9 billion bushels available. And yet the people who don't understand the law of supply and demand when it comes to energy seem to think that even though we have more domestic corn available on the market here in the United States, even after we exported more corn than ever before, somehow they think that is what is driving up food prices.

Mr. Speaker, I submit food prices are driven up because of energy costs, not because of the supply and demand on corn, because we have more corn. And so all we have to do is look at the numbers to understand this and realize the cheap dollar has been driving up commodity prices for food, it has been driving up gas prices, it has been driving up the cost of defense.

I would be happy to yield to my friend from California.

I thank the gentleman from California for bringing his background and expertise to this. Sometimes there is a different view on things between California and Iowa, and I don't find that to be the case when it comes to common sense, particularly when it has to do with energy production and when it has to do with the immigration issues that are there.

I have, of course, traveled to ANWR and seen the situation up there. I would add also that the people that believe that we are going to run out of energy supply here in the world and so somehow we should not tap into the known energy, what would be a better time to go where we know we have a lot of energy than right now, get up to Alaska and drill that?

We are hearing also announcements of huge energy finds around the globe. For example, we know that there are tremendous reserves of oil off the West Coast of Africa, and offshore is a good thing in that part of the world because it is actually easier to provide security offshore than onshore in some of those areas. Brazil has announced two huge crude oil finds, oil fields, there. And with the Chevron find in the Gulf of Mexico a year-and-a-half or so, it was another huge find. And they announced the other day there are 3.4 billion barrels of oil in the North Dakota and Montana area, in that overthrust area they were drilling in 20 or 25 years ago. Now they go down about 10,000 feet and they have to drill then from there horizontally with new technology, and they can draw the oil out. There are 3.4 billion barrels of oil up there, along with one of the world's largest oil supplies, the oil sands area in northern Alberta, which we hope to build a pipeline down and tap that in and refine it here in the United States. We have got that going on. We have a nuclear power plant under construction in South Carolina today. So we are taking some steps.

But the barrier here in this Congress, the leadership that is provided currently with the people that hold the gavels, it is all about cutting down on the supply of energy and raising the price, because I think that they believe, and maybe the gentleman from California is better tuned into this myopic belief, but I think they believe that if they can raise the cost of energy and take supply down, people will ride bicycles and park their car. And that doesn't help grandma very much in January in Iowa when she is 10 miles away from town. But if they ride bicycles more and then drive up the cost of everything we do, somehow that saves the environment and saves the planet. That is what I hear coming out of the voices in Congress.

I would ask for the judgment of the gentleman from California.

As the gentleman knows, my view on this, and I think we would concur, is that I always say grow the size of the energy pie. Take every slice of that pie. Let's produce more domestic gas, more domestic diesel fuel and more cleaning burning coal. Let's keep wind energy going, and whatever we can do economically with solar, and expand the nuclear. I would expand the hydroelectric if I could do it and add the ethanol and biodiesel to it. I am sure I am leaving somebody out. But if you can find a way to produce energy and get it into the marketplace, biomass is another one.

We have got some closed systems coming now where we can take an ethanol plant and ship corn in there, feed the corn; the glutton or the dried distiller grain comes out and gets fed to cattle in the feedlot; it is converted to beef; and then the manure goes into biomass and creates the energy that drives the ethanol plant. It is a closed system.

We are developing systems now where we can take the byproduct and convert that into a high concentrated CO2 environment and produce photosynthesis which traps the carbon gas out and turns it into cellulose and energy. We are only in the first phase of renewable energy production, and, as the technology develops, each piece of it as it comes forward to me is just fascinating how far we will be able to go.

I thank the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I just hope that we all recognize that it is getting towards evening here in Washington, D.C., and there are some folks that do go off and go to bed or call it a day. The gentleman from California has worked diligently in this Congress for more than 20 years, and I recognize that and appreciate it.

As I move forward here on the energy policy, I wanted to reiterate this equation so that the point on ethanol efficiency, Mr. Speaker, does come home in a clear way. It is this: We have more corn available to us domestically now than we had as an average over any time in the last 20 years that I can come up with for records.

It works like this: In 2007, we produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn. I believe that is the largest crop ever. Out of that, we exported more corn than we had ever exported before, to foreign countries, just shipped it off in the form of grain. We exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn. That left us 10.6 billion bushels left, and out of that we took 3.2 billion bushels and produced ethanol with it, around 9 billion gallons of ethanol.

And, we get to add back in--that left 7.4 billion bushels for domestic consumption, which is real close to the average available for domestic consumption over the last 6 to 7 years, but half of the corn that went off to be produced into the 9 billion gallons of ethanol gets added back into the formula because it goes back into high-quality animal feed. So, we end up with an effective remaining amount of 9 billion bushels of corn into the domestic market here in the United States where the average previous years in the same decade comes to about 7.6 billion bushels of corn available for domestic consumption here in the United States.

So, we increase the supply of corn for domestic consumption even though we exported more corn than we had ever exported before, even though we produced 9 billion gallons of ethanol. And all of that, and we get the allegation made by the slightly informed that food prices are up because we have turned more corn into ethanol and that has hurt us. It has actually been a big help.

And what we can do is we can take that number and try to be logical about it and realize that the high price for food comes from two things. One is the cheap dollar; the cheap dollar that if we would take the price of energy up--if we would uphold the value of our dollar, shore up the value of our dollar, we could take perhaps one-third of that cost out. And so the gasoline that we are paying $3.50 for today would be worth maybe about $2.15 if we could shore up the value of the dollar. Corn that sold cash in Iowa last week for $6 a bushel would be around $4 a bushel. Say it is 55 or 60 cash today, it would take it down to below $4 a bushel if we could take one-third of that out by shoring up the dollar. It would slow down some of our exports and it would change some of the equations, but it would add more stability into overall markets, and we should do that.

But there is a great big future for corn-based ethanol. And it is not a full solution by any means; and in fact, if I look at our corn production and look at our gasoline consumption, I have to think that somewhere in that 13 or 14 percent category is about where we end up, Mr. Speaker, of how much of the gasoline in this country we can substitute ethanol for. But that is a part of it. And if we can get 13 or 14 percent, it surely was worth it to start building wind chargers to produce electricity when we thought we would have to cap that off at about 15 percent because it is not a stable enough supply to produce all of the energy that we could have. And that is a tremendous capital investment, Mr. Speaker.

So, this corn does have a future. And it has got a future in ethanol, and it is a future that needs to be sustained and maintained by this Congress. The blenders credits have got to stay in place, and we have got to maintain the import duty on Brazilian ethanol, because if we take that off, we will be building infrastructure to produce more ethanol in a place like Brazil. They can produce, they can build their own infrastructure with their own capital. We need to put capital back into the corn belt and into the ag areas of the United States so that we can build out this renewable energy infrastructure. If we do that, we will have an industry there that will provide renewable fuels over and over again.

And the people that argue that corn ethanol has a carbon footprint know the worst that you can say for it is it is carbon neutral, because the carbon that is sequestered by the photosynthesis is released, some of it, back in the atmosphere in the form of CO2. But we can convert that CO2 into a useful byproduct. We are in the process of developing it. I believe we have the science to do that. We don't have it up to the industrial proven model yet.

But I would argue this, Mr. Speaker: That about $5.50 bushel a corn, by the time we process not quite 3 gallons a bushel out of that corn into ethanol we get about $7 worth of ethanol out of that bushel of corn. And then when we add to that where through the fractionization process we crack out the germ, and out of the germ we take the oil. And the oil, some of it is there, it is for food grade consumption high quality oil that is worth about 85 cents a pound now. And then we get a lower grade oil that goes into biodiesel. And so we could take the corn oil, some goes to human consumption, some goes into biodiesel. That taking the corn oil out allows then the remaining grain to leave a residue for a dried distiller's grain that can then be digested by hogs and poultry because the oil is out. It is the oil that gives them a problem.

So if we do the fractionization process of the corn and take the germ out and take the oil out of the germ, when we are done, this is a more useful feed than what it is today, it is more versatile, because it can go to a lot of different livestock where right today cattle have an advantage. $7 worth of ethanol and a bushel of corn.

By the time you add up the dried distiller grain feed amount, and by the time we take the CO2 and convert that into a useful byproduct by using photosynthesis and converting it into biodiesel and the residue of that going back as a feed grain, we capture it all. We capture it all and roll it into something useful. And the short back- of-the-envelope calculation comes to about $7 worth of ethanol in a bushel of corn that is worth about $5.50 and another $7 worth of high- value product that we used to call byproduct.

When the byproduct gets to be worth more than the primary product, then the byproduct is no longer a byproduct. We could actually get that point. And, I had better not utter those words into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, but we have made significant progress. And the value added on this bushel of corn at about $5.50 turns into about $14 if we do this right, with no carbon footprint, a carbon plus instead of a carbon neutral. No downside on this. And it takes half the energy to produce a Btu in the form of ethanol out of the corn as compared to gasoline out of crude oil. It takes a lot less water.

And, by the way, the water that it takes to grow the crop, the folks that are critical, they will say they will charge all the water off as if we irrigated that corn. About 12 percent of the corn in America is irrigated; the balance of it is just God's watering it for us. And so it is going to rain anyway. If it is going to rain anyway on that field, you can't charge that water usage against ethanol production, Mr. Speaker. It defies common sense to see such logical contortionisms going on on the parts of the critics that will not stand down here and lay out fact against fact against fact.

Facts are, we have more corn available for domestic consumption than ever before. We have exported more corn than ever before. And, we have produced, we have turned more corn into ethanol than ever before. We have done all of those things all in the same year, and the inflated costs of food has not related in a significant way to the overall cost of grain. It is more related to the cheaper dollar than it is the supply and demand of the commodity corn.

And so, Mr. Speaker, I submit that we are on the right path, and we need to put more into the infrastructure and we need to produce more ethanol. And, if we can do that, we are helping to solve this problem. And, by the way, food prices appreciated by about 4.9 percent over the last year. Energy prices, Mr. Speaker, appreciated 18 percent over the last year. And a significant portion of the food price appreciation, the increase came because of energy price increases. The cost of energy has a lot more to do with the cost of food than the supply and demand of that food does, because an energy component goes into everything, the distribution and the processing of it, as well as the raising of it.

And so how high would gas be today if you took 9 billion gallons off the market as we put 9 billion of ethanol in? If you took that 9 billion gallons off the market, how much more costly would gasoline be today and how might it change the equation?

I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that food is cheaper today because of corn-based

ethanol. And I would submit that the energy we have today is cheaper because of corn-based ethanol; and, that this equation works out very good for the farm bill, too, because, for example, in 2005, there is a government program, a subsidy that has been there since the 1930s, it paid out in 2005 $6.8 billion in counter-cyclical and loan deficiency payments. The counter-cyclical and LDPs paid out a total of $6.5 billion in 2005. By 2006, the subsequent year, commodity prices were up high enough that that zeroed out. There was no $6.8 billion going into counter-cyclicals and LDPs. And if you charge that all to ethanol demand--and I have already made the argument you don't. But if you do, if you sustain and you are on the side of this argument, Mr. Speaker, that it really was the consumption of corn through ethanol that drove up the price, then you have to also argue that the $6.8 billion in farm subsidies disappeared because of ethanol.

So, at no cost to the taxpayer and a program that had been there in some form or another since the 1930s, we did pay back in that same year $3 billion in blenders credit. So there was a net savings to the taxpayers of $3.8 billion out of the $6.8 billion that was subsidized the year before. That is pretty good, too.

I don't know of a way that we can do this calculation in a macro national perspective and not come up with corn-based ethanol as a great big plus for the country. It is more energy. It doesn't reduce our food supply, at least by the numbers that we have. Now, if we go overboard, it can. And it doesn't taken away from our export of corn. We still exported more corn than ever before. We have more corn available on the market. It takes about half as much energy to produce a Btu out of corn at the ethanol plant as it does to produce a Btu of energy in the form of gasoline at a refinery out of crude oil.

All of these numbers that I produced here are based in fact, and I can anchor the foundation numbers down by laboratory numbers, Mr. Speaker. This is a picture of the real facts, and I challenge those folks who disagree to come up with something that is solid, a calculation. Give me something that is empirical. Don't give me your feelings, don't give me your senses. Don't say, gee, I just feel this or I feel that. Look at the whole picture, look at the big picture, but look at the composition of the numbers, build a formula there, and see what it does for America. We are on the right track, not the wrong track.

I recognize that the gentleman is here from Maryland who has the next special order. In that case, and out of deference to him, I would, Mr. Speaker, thank you for your attention here tonight and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I am quite pleased to come to the floor and be recognized to address you. I am especially honored to be the first Member of Congress to address this Congress after Dean Popps has been appointed, as has just been read into the Record. I want to talk about two patriotic Americans this evening, and then transition to some other subject matter.

Dean Popps is one of those who has served his country, and done it very well. He was one of the first people to go into Iraq as part of the team with Paul Bremer, a person who gave up a pretty easy path here in the United States that he had earned for himself to take on a very difficult and challenging path to serve his country. I have seen him stand as we loaded wounded on to planes at Landstuhl, his hand over his heart and a tear in his eye.

And he will serve this country very well on the appointment that has just been read into the Record. And I look forward to the results of that service as I have seen the results of his past service. It is a matter of coincidence that I arrive here to hear the reading, and I can't pass up the opportunity to say a few kind words about the most qualified individual that could possibly come forward to serve on the commission. I look forward to that service, Madam Speaker.

Then, I also have come to the floor to convey a message, that conveys a message to you, Madam Speaker, that reflects across the United States Congress in listening to the remarks that were made by the previous speakers, including the gentleman from Florida, about our operations in this global war on terror; and global war on Islamic Jihadists is a more appropriate way to address our enemy.

Our enemy has a global presence, and they are attacking us globally and they have been doing that for 20 or more years, perhaps more than 25 years, in the modern era here, and we need to recognize who they are. Our soldiers and our troops recognize who they are, but there seems to be a myopic vision on the part of a lot of Members of Congress that happen to be right now in the majority. And I regret that I have seen this war turned into a political tug-of-war rather than a policy that we are committed to, and we are committed to in large numbers, to grant the authority to engage in the liberation of the Iraqi people.

And now that this has gone on for a while, and even though the casualties in the beginning were far, far less than those predicted by the very detractors today that say that the accumulated casualties over the last 5 years are more than this Nation can bear and that we should leave Iraq under any circumstances, according to their view, and let the calamity begin.

Well, the calamity began in the aftermath of Vietnam, and the body count by the time the killing fields in Cambodia were totaled up was some number between 2 million and 3 million people.

But today, because of the courageous actions on the part of all of our military, and that absolutely includes our Commander in Chief, the 25 or 26 or so million in Afghanistan breathe free. They voted for the first time on that piece of real estate on the planet, ever, because of U.S. and coalition forces liberating them. And there have been a number of elections in Iraq and another one coming up, a place where we can't say that they actually had a representative form of government. No constitutional republic existed there.

Today, they have a significant measure of freedom, and in fact their safety and security has improved dramatically, partly and in a large way because of the result of the surge, also because of the result of the diplomacy that takes place, not on the part of some of the self- appointed emissaries that think that they should be the Lone Ranger on American foreign policy, those who don't seem to understand our Constitution or the Logan Act.

No, Madam Speaker. I am talking about the American soldier, the American Marine, the American Airman, and the Sailors too, and particularly the Seabees that are on the ground, that are playing soccer with the Iraqi kids and handing out candy and nurturing them and saving children, saving their lives, and teaching them a little bit of English and learning a little bit of Arabic and being part of the cultural exchange. Those are the people that are earning the peace, and their lives are on the line, and every one of them is a volunteer. And they want to complete their mission, Madam Speaker.

This brings me to a message that I received in my e-mail, I am going to say a couple of weeks ago that I received this e-mail. It is from a Captain Sean P. O'Brien, 5th Battalion, 25th Field Artillery, 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, a forward operating base somewhere in Iraq, and I will not divulge that location. I have watched as an older boy and then a young man, Sean O'Brien, grow up and learn patriotism and the cost of freedom, and know that some had to serve and some would sacrifice, and he volunteered to do so. He is a decorated veteran. He received a Purple Heart in Afghanistan, and went back into the theater of war and now he is there in Iraq. And he sent this e-mail to me, and, Madam Speaker, I would like to read it into the Record. Captain Sean P. O'Brien.

Hello again from Baghdad. I am not sure what is going on in the news these days, but I would like to offer another perspective.

As important as it is to the media to sensationalize a story, the nuisance of these attacks is just that. If there was ever a time that we were taking the wood to these jerks, it is now. The few that are causing the problems, and I mean the few, seem to be cut off, and they are fighting like it. They are making incredibly huge tactical errors, and their support seems to wane very easily in the face of the coalition and Iraqi Security Forces' resolve.

I have seen with my own eyes the bravery of the Iraqi Army. They really are fighting for their country, and they are making the kinds of sacrifices we like to remind ourselves of our own heroes. The Iraqi police, not as successful, but still holding their own, especially when they know that we have got their backs.

I hate this job. I hate being away from Dawn and the kids, but I love seeing the enemy's cowardice and the inconsistencies disintegrate into their death when they are met with deliberate and disciplined prosecution. They push teachers and kids out of schools and fight from the schoolhouses. They arrange coordinated attacks from mosques. I suppose, as any insurgent would, their best weapon is a booby trap.

By the way, a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government is an insurgent. Please note, established government.

The largest share of the attacks has been aimed at anything that represents the government, not so much coalition forces. Our mission is to protect the populous. The populous wants to be safe, and they demonstrate it. The Iraqi Army is getting stronger every day, and they give their lives for it. The enemy is very reactive and therefore easily predicted.

Something to think about. We are not leaving here. No one has told me this, but I do know that over the last 60 years we still have troops in the following places: Korea, Japan, and Germany. What is the difference? Hazard pay? Only a rhetorical question, he notes.

And Captain O'Brien goes on:

All countries are now contributing culturally and economically. Is the sacrifice any different now than it was then? Was it worth it to help them out? Is it worth it now?

To leave this place would be the same as standing by, idly watching your neighbors's house burn to the ground. It is irresponsible and it is morally wrong to ever consider such a thing.

Freedom is so important. It is one thing to say it; it is another completely to watch someone die for it or for someone else's.

All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of

war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no internal authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense once all peace efforts have failed.

It is personal. The enemy wants to kill us because we are Americans. There is nothing else they want. They hate us; they hate who we are and what we represent. There is nothing to offer an extremist except extreme measures. However, all of that is just an effect.

Is it moral to fight an effect and not a cause? Yes; when your inaction means a culture will suffer for generations.

The real issue to consider is possibly: What is there to gain by a destabilized Iraq? And, who is to gain?

At the end of the day, the evaluation of these conditions and for the moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have the responsibility for the common good. That is you and me, the American.

And back to the destabilizers. Imagine a few of these cowards kidnapping a loved one of yours, beating them, and then filming your loved one on their knees. You hear the words ``Allahu Akbar'' chanting in the background, meaning ``God is great,'' and then you watch these hooded cowards saw the head off of your loved one with a dull knife. Fear is their only actual weapon, and this weapon is not effective in the face of a self-aware citizen army and populous such as the Americans and, soon, as the Iraqis will be.

Interesting that Senator Obama wants to immediately sully the prestige of his sought office by offering an open meeting to those who want our Nation to burn. To give away the store is the best analogy I can think of. No matter.

Captain O'Brien goes on: I have faith in the American people not to allow that conflicted man to represent the United States in any way. So naive, yet the amount of naivety seems to demonstrate that his intentions are calculated.

You should be proud of our Joes and Joeys over here. All are still giving some, and some have and are going to give all. But don't mourn them; honor them, and understand the sacrifice they are making and for whom they are making it.

Have a great day. It will be good to come back when we are done.

Captain Sean P. O'Brien, 5th Battalion, 25th Field Artillery, 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, Baghdad.

Madam Speaker, that is a sample of the e-mails that I get. And that I think is the most profound one and among the most compelling, and I think it tells the body and the American people what goes on in the minds and the hearts of our uniformed Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, and Sailors over there.

And as I looked them in the eye on that soil and they ask me, how could anyone consider calling us home before we finish our mission? And they repeat to me that they are all volunteers. Every single one that serves in that theater is a volunteer. They volunteered for their branch of the service. They have, in doing so, that period of time that they have signed up or re-upped for is certainly a period of time in which they knew that they were likely to be deployed over to that part of the world.

They are willing to put their lives on the line for our freedom, our liberty, and our posterity, Madam Speaker. And for us to sit back here and argue that we are tired; we are tired, when they are the ones that are fighting this war? What has America sacrificed? We have sacrificed some of our sons and daughters. We have given them a great deal in Iraq and around the world. Blood and treasure is priceless, and blood is far more priceless than treasure.

We have given them a great deal, but the price that has been paid by the individual American is small in comparison to what is being paid by our military that are standing there in their uniforms, volunteering, saying: Let us complete our mission. Let us be victorious and then come home. Let us leave a legacy of freedom in Iraq and in Afghanistan and across the world.

And think what the map of the world looks like. It sometimes takes courage. Sometimes it takes a level of leadership to do the noble thing. And, Madam Speaker, I wonder sometimes if we have lost our ability to take ourselves back to what is noble and what is right and what is good and what is just.

But Ronald Reagan did the noble thing. He did the noble thing when he gave the speech when he said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.''

And, Madam Speaker, if the American people knew the story on how difficult it was for that language to remain in President Reagan's speech, how many Chicken Littles, how many people that wanted to play the cautious route, those that didn't have the courage, those that didn't want to be, could not and did not have the courage to do the noble thing, tried to pull that language out of Ronald Reagan's speech because they were afraid of what Gorbachev might do. They didn't like the idea that it would be adding to the tension and adding to the friction, because they were afraid of confrontation, Madam Speaker. And to fear confrontation means eventually you will have it, because it is the bullies of the world that will poke their finger in your chest. And if you fear the confrontation and step backwards to avoid the finger in your chest, then the bully will take a step forward and poke his finger in your chest again and again and again.

Countries, dictators, tyrants are the bullies of the world. And when you reach the point where you are up against the wall, then you can decide whether you are going to fight or whether you are going to grovel. But I can tell you, he has chosen that ground, and you make that decision on his terms, not yours.

The American people have been a bold people that have made the decisions on which ground to fight on our terms, not theirs. And Ronald Reagan made that decision when he stepped up and said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' And that laid out that inspiration. And a few years later, the wall came tumbling down.

When that wall fell down in Berlin, I watched this unfold on the news, and that was when I knew I needed to go get cable TV and a broader news cycle, because the whole story for the analysts was how families that had been divided by the wall could now come together, and they were breaking champagne bottles in their family reunions on the wall. And some were there with hammers chiseling away at the Berlin wall.

They missed the point. It was weeks and weeks and weeks before you could find a mainstream media, talking head pundit that even would utter the words that were close to the truth that most of us commonsense American people saw as we watched it on TV when the Berlin wall came down, hammers and chisels, a piece at a time. That was literally, literally, the Iron Curtain came crashing down.

The Iron Curtain that was constructed across Europe at Yalta on February 11, 1945 came crashing down beginning November 9, 1989. And the analysts in America didn't understand what that meant, and they didn't understand what it meant when Ronald Reagan said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' They didn't understand what it meant when Pope John Paul, now The Great, uttered his words and weighed in on this and gave an inspiration to the Christian reformation of Europe. And, how those minds and those voices together gave inspiration, along with Margaret Thatcher who, when she looked at Gorbachev and talked with him and met him, said to Ronald Reagan, ``This is a man with whom we can do business.''

And I don't know how good of a business he did for the interests of the Soviet Union since it collapsed some time later, but the business that got done was this, Madam Speaker. The strategy, the noble strategy of playing some brinksmanship, taking some risks, being bold, doing the American thing, doing the free world thing, and the contest was this. And Jean Kirkpatrick said it as she stepped down as ambassador to the United Nations, I think the year was 1984. Ironic that it would be, actually. But I remember her saying, and I read this in an article in the newspaper about page 3 or 4 in a tiny little three column inches; she said, what is going on as she resigned her ambassadorship to the United Nations: What is going on here in the conflict in the world, the Cold War, is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the question was,

would the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before the Soviet Union checkmated the United States militarily?

Mr. Speaker, that was the contest that was going on. Ronald Reagan understood that. Margaret Thatcher understood that, and I think Pope John Paul the Great understood that and upped the ante and took the risk and did the bold thing and challenged. When he challenged, it added inspiration to a people. When they found that the emperor had no clothes, that the bear had no teeth, the bear had no claws, and they found that the will was not there any longer on the part of the Soviet Union to exterminate people who were just trying to get over the wall for their freedom, then they defied authority, and almost bloodlessly the wall came down. The Iron Curtain came crashing down and freedom echoed all of the way across Europe clear to the Pacific Ocean.

Hundreds of millions of people breathed free because of that courage and that boldness and that nobility of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul.

That kind of bold move is what it takes for people to achieve freedom. It was a bold move to draft and sign the Declaration of Independence and hang that out in the public square and understand that as they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, they well might be hanging in the public square as well, our Founders, that signed the Declaration.

They took that risk, and many of their lives were ruined. But the birth of this country began and freedom was inspired. A bold and noble act brought forth the United States of America. A bold and noble act brought down the Berlin Wall, crashed the Iron Curtain, and a bold and noble act freed the Iraqi and the Afghani people.

Mr. Speaker, taking myself back to those moments in history, the noble times when people have been bold and had the courage to take a risk and know that bad things could come out of a bold decision, but seldom do any better things come out of decisions that are not so bold. I could go through history and talk about the Declaration of Independence, as I stated. And additionally, Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the boldness with which he stuck to his guns and said we will preserve the Union, and almost at any cost, and it was a high price that was paid.

And the boldness to which Abraham hung to the principle of freedom for all people. He said, ``As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master,'' and he acted on it.

My information from an accomplished historian is a story that I have to qualify because even though I am assured it is a true story, it is such a good story. Many things are attributed to Abraham Lincoln, so I am a little cautious. It is inspirational regardless of whether we can verify it to be fact. I have done some steps to verify. I believe it to be a fact, but I am not certain.

So I put that caveat in there, but I think it is important to consider this inspiration.

As Abraham Lincoln was considering whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he had deliberated on it for some time. The political climate was different then than we imagine it might be. And he called his cabinet together. He spoke to the cabinet.

He said I have this Emancipation Proclamation, and I am seeking your counsel as to whether I should sign it. So he went around the table. They were all men in those days. And the first cabinet member, the first man said Mr. President, I don't think you should sign the Emancipation Proclamation because, after all you can't free anybody south of the Mason-Dixon Line because we don't occupy any of that territory and we have no authority since they have seceded from the Union, so it would be meaningless. President Lincoln listened.

Then he went to the next cabinet member. The next cabinet member said, Mr. President, I think it is meaningless because you can't free anybody by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. And furthermore, the African Americans who live north of the Mason-Dixon Line are already free. So it would be meaningless.

So he went to the third cabinet member who said, We have some people wearing our Union uniform that are fighting against the Confederates for other reasons. They want to bring the Union together, but they believe in slavery, and so you will lose some of the support of those soldiers who really aren't against slavery. They are there because they want to hold the Union together.

They went around the table. The cabinet was smaller then, but there was a different reason from each cabinet member. But each one advised President Lincoln, no, no, no, no, all of the way around the cabinet table. Every cabinet member advised President Lincoln do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

And the leadership of courage, the nobility of the man, President Lincoln looked at his cabinet members and he said, ``Well, gentlemen, the aye has it.''

``The aye has it,'' Mr. Speaker. That is courage. That is vision. That is nobility. That's the thing that we see out of our soldiers in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is not getting easier in Afghanistan. The casualties are going up there. We do have support from a lot of our allies in Afghanistan, and we have significant support in Iraq from our allies there.

But we must not fold, we must not blink, we must not fail. We should listen to our uniformed military who are putting up the sacrifice. If I hear over here again, ``I am tired of this war,'' find me a volunteer soldier that is not tired of war. But the numbers of those who support finishing this thing with the honor of a victory, and those who anticipate, as I do, an Iraq that is free, a moderate, Arabic nation that will be an ally that has significant oil resources in the Middle East, one who will be inspiring to the rest of that part of the world, that part of the world that has been in constant conflict and turmoil for centuries, we need to work with this principle that free people don't go to war against other free people.

If we have free people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we do, that happens to be on the west and the east border of Iran, respectively. As they see the prosperity and the peacefulness and the opportunity and the freedom that exists today and will be an expanding freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, can anybody imagine that the Iranian people will not want to partake in that freedom and prosperity? They will be inspired by their neighbors.

We can see that part of the globe bond together, free people, moderate Islamic nations who control their own government, people with a voice in the destiny of their nation. That is what I envision and what President Bush envisions. That is what we need to have the courage and the nobility to stand with. In the long run, first it saves American lives in the long run. Second, it changes the habitat that breeds terror.

If you look around the world, we have a list of countries that are called nations of interest. The nations of interest are the nations that produce terrorists. The reason they do is because they have the habitat that produces terrorists. Some is poverty, some is religion, some is culture. There is a hatred of freedom there and there is a love of death, as we heard the gentleman from California in his presentation earlier this afternoon.

That habitat can be changed. And we have lost Benazir Bhutto to this world, to this temporal world that we are in at this time. I got to know her and I had a number of conversations with her. Upon our first meeting, it was shortly after September 11, and I sat down with her one-on-one in Storm Lake, Iowa, I would add. And I asked her a series of questions.

One of my questions was, How do we get to the point where we can achieve victory in this war since this is an amorphous enemy and it is not a command-and-control structure and there is not a piece of real estate that we can go and capture and occupy and say we won? How do we win and declare victory? How do we know when we have won?

Her answer was you've got to give them freedom. You've got to give them a chance at democracy. If you do that, they will change their focus from hatred and terror toward their families, their communities, their neighborhoods, their country, and their mosques. If they do that, they will no

longer be focused on hatred and I will pick it up from there. That is how we erase the habitat that breeds terrorists.

Another way to describe it, Mr. Speaker, is if you're sitting on your porch and a hornet should fly along and sting you on the arm, you are likely to swat the hornet and rub the arm a little bit. If it happens 2 weeks later, that is two too many, but it is not so alarming. But if the whole hive comes and stings one of your children or grandchildren to death, maybe 200 or 300 stings by 200 or 300 hornets, and for an unforeseen reason kills one of your family members, you no longer sit on the porch with your Raid can and your fly swatter. You go find the hive or hives, and you eradicate the habitat that breeds that kind of venom.

We are going another step here. We are eradicating the habitat that breeds that kind of venom, and we are replacing it with a positive habitat that breeds brotherly love and neighborly cooperation and common interest of commercial opportunity and an opportunity to weigh in to promote the destiny of their country.

All of those things come from the kind of mission that our military has been on, the kind of mission that Sean O'Brien has been on, and these things can and will flow from our efforts should we have the courage and the nobility to stand.

As I listened to my predecessor speakers, I am going to say illogical language about energy keeps coming forth from the microphones over on that side.

I would challenge them, and I would yield to anybody that comes up with a single thing that the Pelosi Congress has offered that put more energy on the market, anything that puts more Btus in the marketplace, that puts more gas into the market, more diesel fuel, more ethanol, more biodiesel, more wind or coal or nuclear or solar? Any single thing that has been proposed by the other side of the aisle that has put more energy into the marketplace?

I will yield if you can come up with an example. But I am going to say that answer is zilch. Not one, nada, no Btus more on the market. Every single move in these 15, going on 16 months of the 110th Congress, every single move by the Speaker's leadership has been to take energy off the market, make it more scarce.

I don't understand how the constituents for the people who advocate such a thing can tolerate suspending the law of supply and demand, making energy more scarce, driving the prices up. Gas prices are up 50 percent since Nancy Pelosi took the gavel; 50 percent.

We are paying $3.51 a gallon for gasoline today. Crude oil prices dropped a little today. They were almost $120 a barrel. They dropped about $6. That is about 5 percent. That is a good thing.

But to listen to the other side, Mr. Speaker, they ask us to believe the idea that somehow George Bush controls global oil prices, as if $120 a barrel for crude oil is something that only Americans are paying, but Europeans are not and Australians are not and Africans and South Americans are not.

The truth is this is a global market. If you really want to protect yourself from rising oil prices, you can hedge that on the futures market. Go buy yourself some barrels of oil. If you think oil is going up to $200 or $300 or $400 a barrel, buy some now. Invest in that now.

Invest that in the futures. You can protect your interest on that. But this is a global price. George Bush can't control the oil prices. Here's a news flash. A President of the United States can't do that. He can affect them, yes. This Congress can affect them too. But it has to do with how you affect the supply and what you do with the tax and the regulatory structure.

We need more refineries. We need to drill ANWR. We need to drill the Outer Continental Shelf. We need to drill the non national park public lands in America, and we need to build roads in distribution areas so that we can do that, so that we can deliver that oil to the marketplace.

And if we look around at what technology is doing, when oil prices went up, what happened?

Well, we know there's a huge oil supply in Northern Alberta in the tar sands, and we're working with the Canadians, and I hope the deal doesn't get destroyed by initiatives here that are anti-energy in this Congress, Mr. Speaker.

But we need to bring that pipeline down from Northern Alberta, and we bring that down into the heart of the United States and refine that crude oil of the Canadians and that huge supply that's there, and we need to tap into ANWR, and move to the east from where the north slope is, similar terrain and topography, and bring that oil into the domestic market of the United States; more importantly, get it on to the world market so we can cut down on, increase the supply so we can reduce the cost of the energy that we have.

If you saw that there was a report by USGS that they had identified an oil reserves in North Dakota, some spilling over into Montana; hopefully Mr. Pomeroy knows about this. I'm sure he does. 3.4 billion barrels of oil up there. And they have to go down nearly 2 miles and do horizontal sand fractionalization to make that happen. But that's a tremendous amount of oil that's domestic, two big oil finds.

We also have the Chevron find down on the Gulf Coast within the last two years, a huge oil find. And the Brazilians have tapped into an oil find, a couple of different ones that look like they could rank in the top three of the oil reserves for the world. And we know that the west coast of Africa has a tremendous amount of oil.

So let's get this going. Let's put a lot of oil on the market, a lot of energy on the market.

And, Mr. Speaker, I'd direct the body's attention to what really does control the cost of energy. This is a little chart that we made up that, it is a pie chart. And this represents, this pie chart is 360 degrees. It is the whole of the energy that, as energy consumed in the United States, last year in 2007. This is in Btus. So in case you'll know what this number is, Mr. Speaker, being an astute individual.

We consumed 101.5 quadrillion Btus last year in the United States of America. Of those 101.5 quadrillion Btus, it breaks out this way as a percentage: 23 percent natural gas, petroleum, gas, 39.24 percent, and you go on up the line. We've got coal at 22.4 percent, nuclear at 8.29. That's got to be a diminishing number because we haven't built a nuclear plant in the United States since about 1975 or maybe 1978. There happens to be one going in now in South Carolina. I am glad to see that.

Let's expand the nuclear. It's very clean and very safe. It's the safest electrical supply that we have in the United States.

The hydroelectric has not been expanding, either, and I'm all for expanding that. That sits at 2.3. Geothermal, small little piece there, wind, small little piece, solar, very small piece. Fuel ethanol, not as big as someone might think. .94 of 1 percent of the energy we consume in the United States is ethanol. And the biodiesel is .06 percent, not very big.

And then wood and waste is bigger. I think that's going to be your biomass, remainder of the biomass component of this.

The thing we need to do for energy in the United States is expand every one of these slices of the energy pie; put more Btus out in each one of these colored pie categories that we have; make this circle a lot bigger so that the number of Btus that we produce is great enough that it puts pressure and downward pressure on the market prices. That's our mission. That's an energy policy.

And by the way, another slice of that pie needs to be conservation. That's not in there. We need to add conservation to that as well, Mr. Speaker.

So as we move forward in this policy, let's keep in mind you can't suspend the law of supply and demand. We can't be living in ``Pah-la- la-losi Land.'' We've got to understand that what goes up must come down. That's the law of gravity.

The sun comes up in the east, not the west. It doesn't come up in San Francisco, it comes up over on the Atlantic ocean side of this. That's not going to change, and no amount of talking about it will change where the sun comes up. And no amount of talking is going to change the law of supply and demand, except taxes and regulation, which are going up on our energy producers, not down.

So I'll argue, Mr. Speaker, we need to supply more energy, not less. The idea that more expensive energy is a good thing for Mother Nature, that somehow, if you raise the price of gas to $3.51 or $4.50 or six bucks or seven bucks, that somebody's going to get on a bicycle and ride around town instead of driving around in their car, that may work in some occasions, but it doesn't work out very good for Grandma that's got to go 10 miles to town in January in Iowa. She can't put the chains on her bicycle and do that. She'll get in her car and she'll drive, and she'll pay a higher price out of her Social Security and her fixed limited income because you're driving up the price of gas; you're not driving it down. And it's limiting the quality of life, and people are having to make tough decisions.

We need to take action to put more energy on the market, not less. And if we do that, we can see these prices go down, not up.

And I'd add to that that the value of the dollar is a significant factor in this. The depreciation of the dollar, the dollar value needs to be shored up. A significant part of the cost of energy is because it takes more dollars to compete with the higher value currency in foreign countries, Mr. Speaker.

And so that is a summary of some of the things I came to the floor here to address. I want to thank you for recognizing me and the privilege of speaking here on the floor of the House of Representatives.