January 2007

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hall of New York). The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we vote here in the House on an energy bill. And I thought it might be appropriate to spend a bit of time this evening looking at where we and the world are relative to energy. I have here a chart with some numbers on it that inspired 30 of our prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, among them retired four star admirals and generals, to write to the President a letter which said, ``Mr. President, we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. We consume 25 percent of the world's oil, almost two-thirds of which we import. And that presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that to free ourselves from the necessity of buying foreign oil.''

The President recognizes that this is a problem. In his recent State of the Union message he said that we are hooked on oil.

There are a couple of other interesting numbers here. We represent actually a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We represent about one person in 22 in the world. And with only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the rest of the world. We have been pumping less oil each year now for several years, and with this high pumping rate that decline will accelerate.

How did we get here? To find how we got here, you have really got to go back about 6 decades. I didn't know last year on the 14th day of March, when I gave the first speech here on the floor about peak oil, that I was just 6 days beyond the 50th anniversary of what I think will come to be seen as the most important speech given in the last century. This was a speech given by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil company geologist, to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas. At that time, if you look back in your history books, you will see that we were the largest producer of oil in the world. We were the largest consumer of oil in the world, and we were the largest exporter of oil in the world.

And M. King Hubbert shocked his audience by telling them that in just about a decade and a half, roughly 1970, the United States would peak in oil production. And no matter what we did after that, our production of oil would decline.

I have here a curve which shows his prediction. His prediction is the small green symbols here, and the actual data points are the larger green symbols. And you see they reasonably followed his predicted curve. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office, we were already well down the other side of Hubbert's peak, and we knew very well that M. King Hubbert had been right about the United States.

Now, in 1969, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would follow the United States in peaking in oil production about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world?

It has now been 27 years since we knew, in 1980. We are already 10 years down the other side of what is called Hubbert's peak. And we knew that he [Page: H656]was right about the United States and he had predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? And shouldn't we have been doing something about anticipating this world peaking oil production?

The red symbols there, by the way, are a similar curve for the former Soviet Union, now today, Russia. And you see that when they fell apart they did not meet their expectation, so they are now having a second little peak, but they will follow the general downward trend.

How was M. King Hubbert able to predict this? We had already been producing oil for quite a while in 1956, and M. King Hubbert had watched the exploitation and exhaustion of some individual oil fields, and he found that they always followed what we call a bell curve. Small production at first, and then increasing and finally reaching a maximum, and then falling off the other side.

This bell curve is very familiar. If you weigh people, some will be very light and some will be very heavy, but most of them are somewhere in the middle and they follow a bell curve. If you measure the heights of people, they will follow a similar curve, or the number of mice in a mouse's litter. There are just a great many things that follow this kind of a curve.

So he noted two things, one, that most of the fields tended to be exploited and exhausted in a bell curve, and when they had reached a maximum, for the average field, half of the oil had been pumped. And so he rationalized that if he knew how many fields the United States had, and how many more we would discover, if he added up all the little bell curves he would have one big bell curve which would indicate when the United States would peak in oil production.

He did that. His math may be difficult to follow, but his reasoning is pretty simple. He did that, and he predicted it would be 1970. And right on schedule, we peaked in 1970.

I have been joined on the floor by my good friend, also from Maryland, Wayne Gilchrest. And before I yield to him, I would just like to introduce what he is going to talk about by quoting here from the International Energy Agency. This is a recent press release. And what they say here, ``The energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive. But it also shows how new government policies can create an alternative energy future which is clean, clever and competitive.''

They go on to say that ``energy demand increases by 53 percent between now and 2030.'' Well, it may. The demand may increase by 53 percent, but the use will not increase by 53 percent because, as you will see when we develop the subject this evening, the oil almost certainly will not be there to meet this demand.

Over 70 percent of this increase comes from developing countries led by China and India. World oil demand reaches 116 million barrels per day in 2030, up from 84 million barrels today in 2005 and 2006 and 2007. That number really hasn't changed. We have been on a plateau for the last 3 years of about 84, 85 million barrels of oil per day.

By the way, we use about 21 million barrels a day, about exactly one-fourth of that. Most of the increase in oil supply is met by a small number of major OPEC producers. Non-OPEC conventional crude oil output peaks, they say, by the middle of the next decade. Most observers believe that that has now peaked and, as a matter of fact, the world is about to peak. These trends would accentuate consuming nations' vulnerabilities to a severe supply disruption and resulting price shocks. They would also amplify the magnitude of global climate change.

Mr. Gilchrest, I am pleased to yield to you. They introduce the subject that I know you are very much concerned about, and that is what our increased use of fossil fuels is doing to our climate and how it is affecting global climate change and global warming.

Mr. GILCHREST. I have sort of a summary, I guess you could say, a Global Warming 101 Introductory, which will take about 10 minutes, so I am not sure how you want to proceed. Do you want me to just give this sort of a 10-minute introduction to global warming, or break it up with your dialogue?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I think that would be very instructive for our audience. Please do.

Mr. GILCHREST. Congressman Bartlett is talking about peak oil, the idea that our energy from oil is a finite resource, it is limited. And what I would like to do, in conjunction with that, is to give a perspective on one of the legacies of the age of oil, and that is global warming, heating the planet, upsetting that delicate balance between what the Earth has been used to for thousands of years, and the natural range of fluctuation in the climate, to what we have done in less than 100 years as a result of burning fossil fuel, oil in particular.

So here is how I would like to proceed. Number one, the Earth has a livable climate. The biosphere, which is the area of the planet that contains life forms that we have become familiar with is possible because of something called the greenhouse effect.

Now, in our atmosphere, we have oxygen, water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, a number of different chemical mixes which provide us with the air we breathe and the type of atmosphere that produces, in part, the climate that we have, hence the greenhouse effect. It is warm enough and cool enough for life, as we know it, to exist.

Now, one of the most important greenhouse gases, other than water vapor, other than oxygen, other than methane--all of these contribute to the greenhouse effect--is carbon dioxide, or CO

2.

Now, even though carbon dioxide is less than 1 percent of the makeup of our atmosphere, it is critical in the heat balance of our planet. Now, that sort of gives us an idea of the importance of these greenhouse gases and the importance of carbon dioxide.

Now, is the Earth warming? There is no question, everybody would say yes, the Earth is warming, and it has been warming for the last 10,000 years. It has been warming for the last 10,000 years because that was the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, and sea level has been rising, and the planet has been warming all of that time. [Time: 21:00]

It is warming, in part, because there is an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Ten thousand years ago, and you can evaluate this by looking at ice cores and checking the bubbles out, and see what the content in our atmosphere of CO

2 was by looking at those bubbles in ice cores from Greenland or the Antarctic, and CO

2 was about 180 parts per million in the atmosphere 10,000 years ago. CO

2, a greenhouse effect, or a greenhouse gas, was at 180 parts per million 10,000 years ago.

If we move forward almost 10,000 years to the year 1890, in 1890, CO

2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million. It took just about 10,000 years for CO

2, a greenhouse gas, which helps the balance of Earth's climate, it took almost 10,000 years for it to increase almost 100 parts per million.

Now, let us look at the year 2000. In the year 2000, CO

2 was 380 parts per million. In effect, the natural causes before the Industrial Age were really in full swing. The natural causes gradually warmed the planet over 10,000 years very slowly.

What we have seen in the last 100 years, actually, about the last 50 years, is a dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, something like we have not seen for hundreds of thousands of years and perhaps millions of years. So CO

2 in the atmosphere right now is 380 parts per million. We haven't seen that much CO

2 in the atmosphere for 800,000 years. Now, as a result of this, we are going to see some changes in our climate.

Let me make this last comment, though, about CO

2 in the atmosphere, about the heat balance, about how the greenhouse gases intermix with the atmosphere. Human activity, burning fossil fuel, has put into the atmosphere in a little more than 50 years what the natural processes took out of the atmosphere, and it took more than millions of years to effect. In less than 100 years we have changed the atmosphere more than the natural processes of the Earth have changed the atmosphere in millions of years.

Now, what are the ramifications of this? Well, warmer seas and warmer temperatures. If we want to associate [Page: H657]that with hurricanes, we have more frequent, stronger hurricanes as a result of that. Warm seas are fuels for hurricanes.

What is that doing to our economy? What is that doing to our coastal communities? What are some of the other implications?

Well, one other significant implication is sea level rise. If you went to Ocean City 10,000 years ago, and we know Ocean City in Maryland was not there 10,000 years ago, if you went to Ocean City, where Ocean City was supposed to be 10,000 years ago, you would have 75 more miles to go before you got to the ocean; 10,000 years ago you would walk from Alaska to Russia, easily, there was a land bridge, a wide land bridge.

Today we know that you can't. That is because sea level has been rising, and it has been rising because of the natural consequence of global warming, but now there is a significant change. For example, the temperature has increased, sea level temperatures have increased. In the last 20 years we have lost 40 percent of the volume of the Arctic ice. The Arctic ice cap, we have lost 40 percent of the volume of that.

Let us take a look at Greenland. In Greenland, it has 630,000 cubic miles of ice, Greenland, 630,000 cubic miles of ice. If that were all to melt, sea level around the globe would rise 23 feet.

Now, we know that Greenland's ice shelf is melting. Recently it was discovered that it is melting 10 times faster than anybody could have ever anticipated. A few years ago, it was losing about 80 cubic miles of ice a year, a few years ago. Today, just a matter of a few years later, it is losing now, and it is accelerating, 80 cubic miles of ice are melting every year.

When I say melting, it is not dripping. This is running off. In fact, the greatest contributor to fresh water to the world's oceans is not the Nile River, it is not the Amazon River, it is ice melting, pouring off the ice shelf of Greenland.

What is that going to do to our coastal communities, our coastal economies? What happened in Katrina, in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama? What is happening in a fairly more frequent occurrence to States like Florida or South Carolina, or even States like ours, the State of Maryland? What other changes might there be?

CO

2, carbon dioxide, is being absorbed at an increasing rate by the world's oceans. How will the oceans change as a result of this absorption of CO

2? It will become more acidic. The ocean chemistry will actually change in the ocean, and it will become more corrosive.

What is the problem with an acidic ocean that is more corrosive? Some of the best habitats in the world for the world's most abundant fisheries are coral reefs. Coral reefs cannot survive in an acidic ocean. A whole host of ocean creatures will be disrupted in their process to reproduce or in their process to exist at all. There will be warmer temperatures in the atmosphere, increased forest fires, increased infestation, increased invasive species, changing in agriculture practices, changing in weather patterns. There would be more significant rain storms, more significant snow storms.

Storm cycles would be difficult to predict, shifting in vegetation zones, habitat lost for a whole range of flora and fauna species and 40 percent of ice lost in the Arctic ice shelf right now, and accelerating, may be gone by this midcentury, a whole range, including polar bears or endangered species.

The coastal economy, the coastal economy in the United States is 50 percent of our GDP, 50 percent of our GDP. The likelihood of sea level rise as a result of all of this is going to be between 1, and more likely, at least 3 feet, that will clean out, wipe out, disturb, destroy most of the coastal cities in the United States on the Atlantic and gulf coast.

We are looking at New York City, Boston, Wilmington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, coastal areas from Maryland down to Florida, including Miami. Much of the peninsula of the State of Florida will be under water, not to mention, if you look at the State of Maryland, much of the peninsula, the Delmarva peninsula.

The natural range of fluctuation has been disrupted by the burning of fossil fuel, by oil, a limited resource, the end of the Oil Age and what are the consequences, the last 100 years of the Industrial Age, the age of fossil fuel, the natural range of fluctuation for CO

2, methane gas.

The temperature range in the last 10,000 years has been fairly close and predictable. Now, imagine a straight line, and what does a hockey stick look like? We have corresponded the increase in CO

2 with the increase in atmospheric temperature, the increase in land temperature, and the increase in sea level temperature. All of this corresponding to the increase in burning fossil fuel, and as a result, the increase of methane carbon dioxide.

I want to end with a quote from a gentleman called Norman Cousins, who had an illustrious career in journalism and in politics. Norman Cousins says, ``Knowledge is the solvent of danger.'' And the key to the successful understanding and opportunities for a brighter outcome with what Congressman Bartlett is talking about as ``peak oil,'' the end of the age of oil, and its consequences in global warming, the key to understanding and finding a solution is knowledge.

Mr. Bartlett, thank you very much for the time.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. What the gentleman has been talking about is more than valid reason for pursuing the development of alternatives, if no other. Why would we want to increase CO

2 more? Why would we want to threaten more the quality of life in this world?

The Congressman and I have been to Antarctica twice; one of those trips we went together. Down in Antarctica, 90 percent of all the fresh water in the world is locked up in the ice there. It is nearly 2 miles high, and 70 percent of all the world's ice is locked up in Antarctica. Now that hasn't really started to melt yet, although it has threatened. I am told that calculations indicate that if the polarized caps in the Greenland ice shelf, if they were all to melt, the ocean levels would rise 200 feet.

Now, if you look around the world you will note that a big percent of the world's population lives within 200 feet of sea level. This would be a monstrous, monstrous change.

There are three very good reasons for pursuing alternatives, which is what the bill tomorrow is going to be talking about. One of those is certainly a climate change, because what we are doing now is releasing CO

2 that was bound up in these plants and organisms that grew aeons ago, and it took many, many years to tie up the CO

2. Now we are releasing it very quickly as we burn these fossil fuels.

A second reason, of course, is I just don't think that the oil is going to be there, which is what we are talking about tonight as ``peak oil.''

The third really good reason for doing it is the reason the President advanced, and that is, it really is a big national security risk to be so dependent on foreign oil.

What I have here on this chart is another depiction of Hubbert's peak, and this is by the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, commonly referred to as CERA, and they are trying to indicate that one should not have confidence in the predictions of Hubbert because his curve didn't exactly actually follow his prediction.

Well, by golly, it is pretty close to actually following his prediction. Here is the U.S. actual production in red. You will see there is a little second peak here, and the next chart will show that is because of Prudhoe Bay. We found a lot of oil there, but that was not in M. King Hubbert's prediction. He hadn't imagined that we would be going to the North Slope of Alaska to drill.

So the little yellow ones here are his prediction. Notice that the actual Lower 48 has followed very closely, very closely, his prediction. We are now down to, even with Prudhoe Bay, we are now down to about half, about 5 million barrels a day. That is the red one over there, as compared to roughly 10 million barrels a day at our peak.

The next chart shows better where their oil comes from. Hubbert's prediction covered the Lower 48, and that is this gray area here. Now we need to add to that gas liquids. The big find in Alaska here, and that is what causes this little blip here in the downward slope. I remember a number of years ago, these fabulous discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, which is supposed [Page: H658]to solve our problem for the foreseeable future, that is the yellow there. Notice it hardly makes a shadow on the downward slope of Hubbert's peak.

The next chart is really a chart that we could spend a long while talking about because it has a great deal of information on it. The bars there represent the discoveries, and you notice that we were discovering oil way back in the 1930s, big discoveries in the 1940s, and then lots of discoveries which peaked about 1970, and since then it has been going down, down, down.

The solid black line here indicates the amount of oil that we have been using. Notice that for a long while we were accumulating big reserves of oil; everything about this solid black curve is reserves that we have in store that we can use later. [Time: 21:15]

But then in about 1980 there, you can see these two curves cross. I say two curves, because obviously you could draw a smooth curve through the peaks here, and these two curves crossed about 1980. Ever since 1980 we have been burning more oil than we found. Today we burn two or three barrels of oil for every barrel of oil that we find. So for this period, between 1980 to the present, we have been using up some of the reserves that we have back here, but still a lot of those reserves remain.

Now, what will the future look like? Well, there is a big difference of opinion in what the future will look like. The persons that put this chart together believe that by about 2010, about 3 years or so, the world will peak in oil consumption. Some believe that it has already peaked, others believe it may peak a little after 2010, and then it will go down.

Now, they have made some guesses as to how much oil we are going to find. I am not sure I would have drawn that curve exactly that high, because a smooth curve might bring you down about here. I think they have been very generous in the amount of oil that is yet to be discovered.

By the way, the world's experts on oil believe that we have, most of them, we have probably found about 95 percent of all the oil that we will ever find. You notice that when we find oil now, we find it in very difficult places to get to. The last big find was in the Gulf of Mexico, through 7,000 feet of water, and then about 30,000 feet of rock and dirt until you get down to the oil. We aren't now developing that field, and I am told, you can be told a lot of things that aren't true and I don't know the veracity of this, but I am told we will be developing that field when oil reaches $211 a barrel, because that is what it will cost to get the oil out of that field.

I just want to spend a moment looking at this before we go to the next one. If you draw a smooth curve through these bars, the area under that curve represents the total amount of oil that we have found, and the area under the consumption curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have consumed.

Now, it is very obvious that you can't consume oil that you haven't found, and you can make the future, within reason, look anyway you like. But what you can't do is pump oil that you haven't found. Unless you believe that we are going to find a whole lot more oil than indicated by their projection, then you have some choices as to what that downslope is going to look like.

You can be very aggressive and use enhanced recovery techniques, you can pump steam down there, you can pump CO

2 down there, you can flood it with sea water as the Saudis do to get their oil out. You get it more quickly. But if you get it more quickly, you have less to get later on.

So we have choices facing us as to what that downslope will look like. But, remember, you can't pump oil you haven't found, and the area under the consumption curve cannot be larger than the area under the discovery curve. They have to be the same area ultimately, the same volume.

Here is a prediction by our Energy Information Agency, and it is a very interesting one, and they use some unusual statistical approaches. But this is a curve through the discovery peaks. Let me put the other one up just quickly so you can see the similarities here.

Notice the big peak here in the late 1940s and 1950s and another peak here. They have kind of smoothed that out here. You can see this is the early peak here and then the later peak and then down, down, down.

We get to the point we are at now, and they make some very unusual predictions. The yellow line there, they say, is the 95 percent probability, and the green line is the 50 percent probability, and the blue line is the 5 percent probability. And they say that the 50 percent probability is the average, the mean, and, of course, probabilities and means don't mean the same thing, so therefore, that is what our production is more likely to be.

Surprisingly, this curve that has been going down for a number of years they thought was going to turn around and go up. But notice for the roughly 5 to 10 years after they drew this first curve, notice the red symbols there. They have been following what you would expect they would follow, and that is the 95 percent probability. Ninety-five percent probably is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent probable, and that is what it has been following.

Here is another chart from CERA, and it shows something very interesting. First, I want to look at the left here. This is the low, they say, is the 95 percent probability. Now, the 95 percent probability is the most probable, so it is not the low, it is the most likely.

Then they say the high probability is almost 4,000 gigabarrels. The mean is right in the middle. Most of the experts in the world believe that we have found about a little over 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. I use the term ``giga,'' because a billion in England is a million million, and in our country a billion is a thousand million. So everybody understands giga. A giga is a thousand million. We have consumed about half of that and about 1,000 gigabarrels, maybe a little bit more, but roughly a thousand gigabarrels remains.

Several Congresses ago I was privileged to share the Energy Subcommittee on Science, and I wanted to get some idea of the dimensions of the problem we face, so we had the world's experts come in for a hearing. And I was surprised at the unanimity. It was like from 970 to 1,040 gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world, not a big spread.

Now, what they are showing here is that if in fact we find as much more oil as all the oil that now remains discovered, if we find as much more as all the oil that remains discovered, we will still peak at 2016, 9 years from now, if we find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists, that we know exists in the world. If you don't find that, then we peaked about now and it is going to start down this way.

Another thing they have shown here is if you

aggressively develop these fields and pump life steam down there or put CO

2 down there or pump sea water down there, you can get it more quickly. But then look what happens. It falls off more quickly too.

Again, the area under this curve has to be the same thing as the area under this curve. You can't pump more because you are pumping it faster. Now, with enhanced oil discovery, you might get a little more, because you might get some oil that you wouldn't have gotten with conventional techniques.

Here is another more recent chart from the Oil Information Agency. They have been pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil. They said it was going to be an undulating plateau. I agree, it is going to be an undulating plateau. So they show here with what I think are wildly optimistic estimates of how much oil we are going to find, they believe that we are going to find twice as much more oil as all the oil we now know exists. That just isn't very probable.

But even if we find that much oil, they have a peak. Notice it. They say it is an undulating plateau. I agree. With the world's economies and demands and warmer temperatures, which is why oil is down a bit now, because we have warmer temperatures in our country, I agree it is going to be undulating plateau. They are pooh-poohing the idea of peak oil, and they show in this curve peak oil. They show it I think a good many years beyond when it will actually occur.

This little curve down here is closer what I think is reality. They have 1.92 trillion, and it is just a bit over 2 trillion, I think, so maybe it would extend [Page: H659]a little beyond this. But notice they are showing this peak about now, aren't they? So if we don't find this enormous amount of additional oil, it will be peaking about now. What they are saying is if we have only 2.93 trillion, we will be peaking at this point.

I have a quote here from one of the world's experts on oil, Dr. Laherrere, and this is what he says, and I think that it is kind of difficult to argue with his logic. Jean Laherrere made an assessment of the USGS report.

Now, it is the USGS report that provides the data that permits CERA to make their prognostications. He concludes that the USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, he says, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects. Today we have 3-D modeling and seismic use, and so we know pretty much what the world's geology looks like.

I might take just a moment to talk a little bit about this geology, because it is very important in understanding how much more oil we are likely to find.

How did the gas and oil get there? Well, nobody was there when it got there, so we really don't know, but one of the best guess its is that a very long time ago the Earth was very much warmer than it is now. As a matter of fact, there were subtropical seas at the North Shore of Alaska. In the North Sea, there were subtropical seas. And every cycle the vegetation grew, and then when it matured or if there was a fall, and it may have been warm enough there was no true fall, but still there was a cycle of life, and it grew and sank to the bottom as algae does now in the ponds and so forth. And then waters washed erosive materials off the surrounding hills and it mixed with the organic material. This continued for an a large number of years until there was a lot of mixture of organic material and inorganic material there.

Then the tectonic plates of the world moved, and we know that happened, and it opened up and sank and went down to a depth where the temperature was appropriate, closer to the molten core of the Earth, and where the pressure was appropriate, and then cooked there under this pressure for who knows how long, and this organic material, mostly plants, maybe a few small animals, gradually became what we know as oil.

Now, the oil is made up of molecules of varying lengths. Some are very short and they are in fact gasses, if you let them escape from the oil. Some of them are very long, and that makes the waxes and so forth that we find in oil.

Now, if there happened to be a rock dome over top of this deposit way down there that is now being cooked and pressurized for a long while, if there is a rock dome over that, the gas that escapes will be trapped under that rock dome. So when you come along and drill a well through that, and you get down to the oil, the oil is going to be under pressure because of that gas above it. So you have what you call a gusher. The gas pressure above pushes the oil down and up the drill pipe and it continues to gush until that gas pressure has been relieved.

Now, this may not be the way that oil and gas were formed, but there isn't any better guess as to how it was formed. And if that is in fact the way it was formed, then we can make some guesses as to how much more oil and gas we are likely to find, because we have done a pretty good job of matching the geology of the Earth.

What you need to find is some of this organic material buried deeply for a long while with a rock dome over it so it captures the gas. By the way, if it doesn't capture that gas, you end up with something like the tar pits of California, and you end up with the tar sands, they call them oil sands, they are tar sands, thank you. They flow about as readily as the blacktop driveway out here, unless you heat them up, which is what they do, and combine them with some shorter chain molecules so that when they cool they will still flow.

The loss of these gasses has produced what we call our oil shales in the west. By the way, there are huge, huge deposits of these tar sands and oil shales.

As a matter of fact, the deposits of each of those represents way more than all the fossil fuels that we now know exist in the world, and the Canadians are making some heroic efforts because their big fields are up in Alberta, Canada, and they have a shovel up there that lifts 100 tons and they dump it into a truck that carries 400 tons and then they carry it and cook it. When it is cooked, why, the oil flows and then they mix it, as I said, with something with shorter molecules, a solvent, so when it cools it will flow and they move it out through pipes. With this heroic effort, they are getting about 1 million barrels a day. That sounds like a lot, 1 million barrels a day, but we use 21 million barrels a day. That is about 5 percent of what we use, and just a bit over 1 percent of what the world uses, because the world uses about 84-85 million barrels a day.

And what they are doing is not sustainable, because they are cooking this with natural gas that is what we call stranded. By ``stranded'' we mean there are not very many people there to use it, and natural gas is hard to transport unless you liquefy it and are near a port, so it is cheap. So I understand they may be using more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. But from a dollar and cents perspective, it makes sense, because the gas is really cheap and they are producing that oily understand for $12 to $25 a barrel, again, you get various estimates of this, and they are getting $50 to $60 barrel for it. So dollars and cents-wise, that makes good sense. [Time: 21:30]

From an energy profit ratio, it does not make any sense at all. Natural gas is a high quality feed stock for an enormous petrochemical industry.

One of the things that we use it for, by the way, is making nitrogen fertilizer, and without our ability to make nitrogen fertilizer, we could not begin to feed the world. It is not just the plant breeder, and he has done marvelous with developing new plants. It is all of the fossil fuel energy we use in agriculture, and a great deal of that is used in making nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas.

I have next a little schematic here, and this kind of smoothes out these curves. By the way, the world has been increasing its use of oil about 2 percent. That does not sound like much, does it, 2 percent? But 2 percent exponential growth doubles in about 35 years. It is four times bigger in 70 years, and it is eight times bigger in 140 years.

Albert Einstein was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the detonation of the nuclear bomb, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great energy force in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. Exponential growth.

I have a namesake, no relative. I wish I had some of his genes. He is really very brilliant. Dr. Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, he gives the most interesting 1-hour lecture I have ever heard on the failure of our industrialized society to understand exponential growth. Just do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and energy, and it will come up and you will be fascinated with this 1-hour lecture.

Here we show this little schematic curve. It is a 1 percent growth rate. Remember, that doubles in 35-years. This point is twice as high as this point, and that represents 35 years. Notice that the shortage occurs before we reach the peak.

The shape of the bell curve and the exponential growth curve indicate that you are going to have shortfalls in supply, price is going to go up before you might reach the peak, and maybe, just maybe, we are in this time right here. A lot of the evidence indicates that is true.

The next chart is one that really gives you some pause when you look at it. Let us just look at the upper one because the bottom one is an expansion of the upper one, separating the gas from the oil here in the red curve. But this shows only what 400 years, a little less than 400 years of more than 5,000 years of recorded history. The use of energy in our world was so small back in 1750 that that brown there which is [Page: H660]wood is just about the baseline, is it not?

The industrial revolution started with wood. The hills of England were denuded to make charcoal to make steel. Catoctin Furnace, a little historic site up in Frederick County, they denuded the Catoctin Mountains where Camp David now is, thankfully the trees grew back, they denuded that making charcoal for that furnace.

The industrial revolution really took off when they discovered coal, and it was stuttering when they finally discovered gas and oil. Then look what happened.

The hockey stick, that is the hockey stick that Congressman Gilchrest was talking about, look what it did. It just goes straight up. Notice here what happened in 1970. There was a real oil price shock there, and the world used somewhat less oil. We are now very efficient in the way we use oil in this country. Air conditioners probably are twice as efficient at least as the ones you used in 1970. If it were not for our increased efficiency we would be in even more trouble with energy today.

But what I want to point out is that we are about 100, 150 years into the age of oil. That is this. If Hubbert was right, and he was exactly right about the United States, why should he not be right about the world, this is going to be a bell curve. By the way, you can make this thing look steeper or shallower depending upon the dimensions and the ordinates, the absinthe ordinate and abscissa. Here, of course, we have 400 years on the abscissa so it is very compressed so it makes the curve look higher, but that is exactly the same kind of curve we have here. We just spread out the abscissa here so that we spread it out. If you really push these two things, that is going to peak up high in the middle.

Out of 5,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will represent about 200 to 300 years, remaining about 100, 150 years. What will our world look like post age of oil?

The next chart shows us something that is alarming a number of people, and this is a little drawing of the world. It has a number of symbols on it, and one of those symbols shows where China is securing rights to buy oil, and they are all over the world. This symbol here was Unocal. They almost bought Unocal, one of our oil companies. They are buying oil all over the world. They are scouring the world for oil.

I just came back from a trip to China, and we went there to talk about energy by the way. I was pleasantly surprised when they began their discussion of energy by saying post-oil. They get it. I wish we did. They talk about post-oil. They recognize that they are big polluters. As a matter of fact, I have a reference here that says by 2010, just 3 years from now, they will be a bigger CO

2 producer than we are, in just 3 years. Their economy is growing, the last 2 quarters, at more than 10 percent a year. That doubles in 7 years. It is four times bigger in 14 years. It is eight times bigger in 21 years, 1.3 billion people. I saw essentially no bicycles on the street and traffic jams like we have at rush hour here in Washington.

Well, the fact that they are scouring the world for oil indicates their understanding that this is going to be a resource in short supply for the future. We can spend a long time talking about China and what they are doing. They are aggressively building a blue water navy.

A blue water navy is different than the brown water navy, brown from the silt that comes out the rivers near shore, little navies that protect you from somebody coming from afar. They are rapidly developing a blue water navy. Last year, for instance, we launched one submarine. They launched 14. Now, their submarines are not ours but 14 submarines is 14 submarines.

I have here a very interesting statement from our Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem.'' I am thankful you recognize that. ``I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way the politics of energy is I will use the word `warping' diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something now about the warping now of diplomatic efforts by the all-out rush for energy supply.''

It would be nice if everybody in the administration understood that and we were doing something meaningful about it.

So what do we do? Well, I think that any rational person would understand that you need to get busy developing some alternatives if you are going to run out of these fossil fuels. By the way, these fossil fuel are just incredible. The energy in these fossil fuels is just unreal.

I have an article, really not an article. It was a

speech given by Hyman Rickover in 1957, 50 years ago this year, and I want to read something that he says here which is really interesting. He understood 50 years ago, ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously,'' little more than you are working, but you have got to sleep, ``or one-twentieth horsepower. Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.''

And it has gotten even more golden in these last 50 years, has it not?

Hyman Rickover understood very well our dependence on fossil fuels. One barrel of oil controls the energy of 12 men working all year for you. If you figure out what that costs, it is less than $10 to purchase the equivalent work of a person all year long.

Now, if you have some trouble getting your minds around that, imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel carries your car. And by the way, it is considerably cheaper, a little over $2 a gallon, than water in the grocery store.

Now, how long would it take you to pull your SUV or your car or push it as far as that little gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel take it? I own a Prius. We get under normal road driving conditions 51 miles a gallon. It would take me a long time to pull my Prius 51 miles.

Another indication of the incredible energy benefit from fossil fuels, if you work really hard all day long, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. It may be humbling to recognize in terms of fossil fuel that we are worth less than 25 cents a day, but that is the reality, and that is why we live so well.

As Hyman Rickover understood 50 years ago, if that was true what he said 50 years ago, it is true in spades today, is it not, because we have even more helpers to make our life quality higher as a result of our use of energy.

Well, what do we do if we are going to run short of fossil fuels? Obviously, we have no surplus oil to invest in the development of renewables. If we did, oil would not be $50, $60 a barrel, but we can free up some oil and buy some time with a very aggressive conservation program.

Matt Simmons, who has written a really good book on Saudi Arabia called ``Twilight in the Desert,'' and he makes the case that Saudi Arabia has probably peaked in oil production. They will not tell you that, but you notice they cannot make good on any promise to increase oil production so he may very well be right. Then after having freed up this energy and bought some time, we must use it very wisely. We would get a lot of benefits from that.

Life is just so easy in this country that we are bored. We are watching awful movies. We are doing drugs because we are bored. There is no exhilaration like facing a big challenge and besting that challenge. There is nothing that puts flavor in pie so much as work, and I can imagine Americans, when they understand the problem we face, going to bed at night saying, gee, today, I used less energy than I did yesterday and I lived just fine, and tomorrow I am going to do better. [Page: H661]

But we need leadership that is not here yet so that we will do that. By the way, big benefits. We could once again become a major exporter. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. Properly challenged, we will figure ways to get this alternative energy. We could again be a major exporter. Today, we are a big, big importer, as you know, $800 billion trade deficit this year.

We are a role model whether we like it or not. When you use 25 percent of the world's energy, you are a role model. Not a very good one today. We profligately use energy, way more energy than the average person in the world. It really is possible to be much more efficient.

This is a fascinating chart, such a simple one, but what it shows is the heat that you get out of an incandescent bulb and the light you get out of it. Ninety percent of it is heat which is why I use an electric bulb for brooding little chickens. I am not so much interested in the light as I am the heat from it. Now fluorescents are much better, and I saw there was a Time magazine cover page that had a pile of coal there. I think it was on the cover page, and they have one of these screw-in fluorescent bulbs beside it. Five hundred pounds of coal, that is the amount of coal you save in the life of that one fluorescent bulb, that is here.

But notice what you get out of light omitting diodes. I have a little light omitting diode flashlight that I carry. I put two little batteries in it, and I have forgotten when I put them in. [Time: 21:45]

It just lasts so long. We have the same amount of light out of each one of these, but notice the enormous amount of heat you are getting out of the incandescent bulb and the tiny amount of heat that you are getting out of the light emitting diode.

There are lots of opportunities in our society to live well and comfortably using a lot less energy. I don't have the chart here, but the average Californian uses only about 65 percent as much electricity as the rest of America, and it would be hard to argue that Californians don't live well.

This next chart is a really interesting one, and what it shows here on the abscissa is the amount of energy that we are using per person and what it shows on the ordinate here is how good you feel about life. You couldn't feel any better than 100 percent, and notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy in the whole world and we feel pretty good about it; but notice how many countries that use less energy than we feel even better than their quality of life. Let's go way back here to Colombia. They use a fifth as much energy as we; they feel almost as good about their quality of life as we feel.

If you drew a curve through this, you need some minimum energy to feel good about life, but once you go up that steep part of the curve, the minimum energy is pretty flat. We can move way back here on the curve and feel just as good as we do now about life. You don't have to use the amount of energy that we use to feel as good about life as we do.

The average European, the countries are scattered through there, but the average European uses half the energy we use and, by the way, pays more than twice as much per gallon of gasoline and they have been doing that for a very long time.

We are shortly going to run out of our 60 minutes this evening and we will need to come back to finish this, but obviously we have got some finite resources here that we can use. When we come back, we are going to talk about the resources available to us to meet the challenge of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. And, by the way, we will transition either on a time scale that we have chosen or on a time scale chosen by geology.

As we run down the other side of Hubbard's Peak and the world has less and less supply of fossil fuels, we will transition. It can be a bumpy ride, or it can be a really bumpy ride. But Americans are up to it. We need leadership and knowledge. And we will be back again to talk about the finite resources available to us and all those fascinating opportunities in renewables.

END

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, we come here to the well tonight to continue this discussion about energy. I have enjoyed listening to my colleagues Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Gilchrest, who have been talking about the need for changes in our energy policy to effectuate an energy efficiency policy for this country, to use our innovative talents to come up with new technologies to deal with our energy challenges, and to really bring our energy policy from the 19st century into the 21st century. And the good news is tomorrow, Thursday of this week, in just the third week of the 110th Congress, this new Congress is going to start with a big step out of the 19th century, which has been represented by the last Congress, and into the 21st century, which is represented by this Congress, and I am pleased to report to the House tonight and to the country, tomorrow the Democratic majority with some help from some of our friends across the aisle will pass a bill which will cause a major shift in the energy policy of this country.

In the last Congress there was a clear direction of the energy policy of this country, and under the last management of the U.S. Congress the basic operative rule was to give billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the oil and gas industry, the most profitable industry in the history of the solar system, over $10 billion in tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. Tomorrow, that money will be returned to the citizens of the United States for the use in developing a truly 21st century energy plan.

Tomorrow, the Democratic majority held Congress or House of Representatives will pass a bill which will reel back in $14 billion of taxpayer money that was sent to the silk-lined pockets of the oil and gas industry, and that is a good thing for Republicans and Democrats and Independents and for our grandchildren for reasons we will talk about tonight. It is a good reason because when we reel that $14 billion in giveaways to the oil and gas industry that happened in the last Congress, what we will do tomorrow is take that $14 billion and create a fund of money belonging to the American people that will be used for the development of new technologies, creative new sources of energy, energy efficiencies, more efficient vehicles, more efficient appliances, and a way to beat global warming.

So we are going to convert the giveaways from the oil and gas industry that happened in the last Congress to an investment in the future of our country to have a new energy technology, technologically based future for the energy source of this country. We are going to do it for three reasons. And perhaps those three reasons are obvious, but I want to state them.

Tomorrow when we pass this bill, we will create a fund called the Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve. Not really much of an acronym; I didn't get to name it. But the Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve will be a fund with $14 billion that will be taken back from the oil and gas industry and be used for our inventors, our businessmen, our academicians, our people who are doing great work to develop new sources of energy, and we will do this for three reasons. I will go through them quickly.

Number one, we will use this fund to develop a domestic source of energy for this country. We will use this money to develop the new advanced biofuels, the second generation ethanol, the cellulosic ethanol, the advanced biodiesel systems so that we can start buying our fuel from Midwestern farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks. We know the trouble we are in in the Middle East due to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and we are going to break that oil addiction, not rhetorically, but in reality.

Second, we are going to use these funds to develop new clean energy sources that can stop global warming. We are going to have energy efficiency which can have efficient appliances rather than dirty appliances that waste energy. We are going to have energy efficient cars, plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles that can use biofuels developed in the Midwest; energy created by wind turbine, solar energy and perhaps clean coal, wave power. You name it. [Page: H662]We have a thousand flowers that are going to bloom in energy if we use this money in a smart way to stop global warming.

And, third, we will use this money to create a new energy source of jobs in this country. It is about time to start building fuel efficient cars in this country, new technologies here. It is time to reel those jobs back in.

So I am very excited what will happen tomorrow. It is the first step in a long road of what we will talk about tonight, the new Apollo Energy Project. And we have a new Member of the U.S. House who has brought a new vision of energy, Mr. John Hall of New York. And I will yield to Mr. Hall.

Mr. HALL of New York. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I am excited to be here at this time, at this point in history when our country will finally, beginning in this House of Representatives, begin to act on renewable energy and conservation in a meaningful way. And I also want to say that I hope Northeast farmers will also be able to contribute to the biofuels that will be developing.

I have a friend in New York State who is driving around in a stock diesel Jeep Liberty 4-by-4 that he is running on biodiesel made from wood waste at a renewable tree farm that makes furniture in New York, just north of my district in Representative Gillibrand's district, but it is minutes from where I live in Dover Plains, New York. There is no modification needed to the vehicle. The company that is making this fuel runs all their farm vehicles on it, they run their road vehicles on it. Every scrap of leaves and sawdust and little twigs and things that are parts of the tree that are too small to go into the furniture they make goes into making biodiesel fuel, and it is very successful.

The only thing that is lacking is the knowledge on the public's part that they can ask for it, and the law of supply and demand will work for renewables the same way it does for any other form of energy or any other commodity.

I called up my own local oil company in my hometown of Dover and asked if they had biodiesel to sell for me to burn in my home heating oil system, my furnace that heats our home, and they said yes. And I said, ``What is it?'' And they said, ``20 percent soybean derivative.'' And I said, ``Sign me up.'' And I asked the gentleman on the phone, ``How is it?'' And he said, ``I am the owner of the company and I burn it in our house, and it burns cleaner than regular home heating oil.''

So it is similar to the situation I ran into when I served in county government and we were dealing with markets constantly fluctuating in recyclables, for instance, where one month you might make money on recycling paper and the next month you might lose it. It depends on how many plants are built to recycle it and how many new communities start to do so in earnest.

If our country and our citizens know to ask for wind power, which we get in my home the first 1,500 kilowatt hours per month from a wind farm in Atlantic City. And that is only one of many wind installations that are being put up around the northeast. There is a big wind farm in the Tug Hill Plateau in the Adirondacks that is going to figure majorly in New York's energy supply, and in the Finger Lakes region also. Farmers are finding out that they can lease space on their property for wind turbines, make royalties on it or lease payments from the utilities on it that will pay their property taxes and enable them to stay in farming. The cows don't care. They graze under the wind turbines, and meanwhile they are turning overhead and cranking out the energy.

The Jersey Atlantic Wind Farm in Atlantic City that my wife and I are buying power from will be amortized in 5 years. It consists of five 380-foot-tall wind turbines. Each turbine is a greater surface area than a football field and taller than the Statue of Liberty and generates 7 1/2 million watts of power when it is running at peak operation.

So if it is free in 5 years, the investment is paid off. After that, you have free energy, you have no pollution, zero emissions, and as you were saying it helps our balance of trade deficit, it cuts back on the money that we are sending to the Middle East oil potentates that are funding the madrasas that are training people that we then have to send our military to go fight. It cuts back on oil spills. It cuts back on asthma and emphysema in the inner cities, the particulate emissions. So it is a win-win-win situation with jobs being created here, with the dollars that we are spending on energy being kept here.

And I would just like to say once again that I am proud to be a part of this action of repealing and closing loopholes. It is not a raise of taxes as our colleagues on the other side of the aisle were saying before, but it is actually closing tax loopholes, subsidies, and giveaways that they created in the last Congress and transferring those funds to these renewable energies.

Mr. INSLEE. If the gentleman will yield. Very much so, it is claiming what should be rightfully ours. We essentially gave away oil that belongs to the citizens of the United States, and gave it away with no royalties. It was a giant, giant giveaway program. And subsidies in certain circumstances are appropriate for nascent growing industries, but this is a mature industry. There was no reason to give a company that made $20 billion profit last year more of our taxpayers. You are paying twice when that happens. You are paying at the pump, and then you are paying on April 15 when you are paying taxes that are given to these oil and gas companies.

I want to just touch on your wind sample. Today I had the Director of the Bonneville Power Administration that runs the electrical grid in the Northwest today, and he was telling me that wind power today is cheaper, cheaper than essentially any other system that we have to generate electricity, at least in the Pacific Northwest, cheaper than coal even. [Time: 22:00]

For those that say wind cannot be an integral part of the system, a study came down from a Minnesota group last week which evaluated how one can integrate wind because the wind does not always blow. It is not a totally reliable system, so you have to integrate it into your system.

They concluded it is so cheap you can integrate it by having backup gas turbines sometimes to kick in if the wind doesn't blow with minimal to no increases in prices.

This revolution that is happening in energy that we will start tomorrow, sort of the Concord Bridge moment for the energy revolution here, is all over the country. You mentioned in your neck of the woods, it is not just the Midwest, in Washington State we are going to have the biggest biodiesel plant in the Western hemisphere. It is going to be up and running next year.

Minnesota has huge growth in wind power. Wisconsin has a company that is building wind turbines so fast they cannot fulfill the orders. Missouri has just started three huge wind farms. This is something all over the country.

When I talk to businesses, what I find is there is not a State in the country that does not have some business that is going to benefit from what we will start tomorrow, which is new energy revolution. California in Silicon Valley is developing these new solar cells that could be 30-40 percent less expensive. A company called Fiber Forge in Colorado is starting to make composite bodies for cars that could be 40 percent stronger and half the weight. This is a national effort. All of us will get to brag about it some day.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Klein), a new Member of Congress. Thanks for joining us.

Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is a pleasure to be here with Mr. Hall, my good freshman friend from New York, and my good friend from the State of Washington. I know you have been leading the fight for a number of years and trying to get our focus, not only in your State, but throughout the country on the idea of renewable energy sources.

Many of us in the freshman class came to this year's campaign and this Congress with a view that this is an opportunity of historic proportion. This is an opportunity for us to recognize that this is a once-in-a-generation calling, no different than our predecessors had with the Manhattan Project. I know that many seniors in my district in south Florida have talked about that, the calling of their generation to make sure that World War II would end [Page: H663]with an atomic weapon. Of course we all know that when Sputnik went up in the early 1960s, a little before my time, but at a time when this country saw this little tin can up in space and thought this could be a threat of possibly bombs coming from outer space into our country, and John F. Kennedy saw this as a time and place for us to engage our private sector, our universities, our public, to create a new generation of scientists and mathematicians who would put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. By 1969, they did that. And now the science and technology that came out of the space program has broad applications to our daily lives.

I view this, as do many Democrats and Republicans, as a time in our country's history when we need to make ourselves energy independent. I believe it. There is nobody in this room or in this country who doesn't believe that Americans, when they put their nose to the grindstone, can't accomplish anything. We can. We can and we will.

This has the unbelievable capacity of recognizing three great elements in this day. One is national security. We should never, ever have to make another foreign policy decision based on where the next drop of oil is coming from. That is a strategic mistake of unbelievable proportions. To have to import 60 percent of our oil from unstable countries around the world that in many cases are taking some of the dollars that we send over, the millions and billions of dollars, and financing both sides of the war on terror is wrong.

Recognizing that is something we need to do for our own national security, inside the United States, is crucial.

Secondly, we all understand the environmental impacts. I know my colleagues that are speaking tonight have led the fight on this, and many others. And recognizing whether it is global warming or any of the other environmental impacts of some of the technologies that are used today with oil and other things, these are issues that we need to take up.

I live in Florida. We have had a battle in Congress, and I was not in Congress last year, but many of us fought the fight back home: We don't want drilling off the coast of Florida, or in Alaska in the refuge. Those are false choices made by the administration.

The right choice is we don't have to have more oil drilling. Oil drilling will be a part of our energy solution, but we don't need drilling in places which will have a potential of having a tremendous long-term environmental impact. Off the coast of Florida, we have a very large tourist industry. We have wonderful reefs. We have a beautiful environment in our oceans and bays and the Gulf Coast. We can't afford to do that. It is not good for anybody in this country. There are choices that allow us to have alternative energy.

And of course the last thing is the new economy. Many have talked about the fact that in this economy today we have lost jobs overseas. We don't have steel manufacturing like we used to. We don't produce a lot of the products. The science of alternative energy sources and the commercialization of that technology and those products can once again be our big technology boom like we had in the 1990s in this decade, and for decades to come. It will make us energy independent, and it will be exportable science to the rest of the world.

Mr. INSLEE. I was talking to a businessman the other day who wants to develop the Chinese market to sell China thin solar film technology to become the distributor in China of a technology developed in America. Talk about a great thing for our balance of payments.

You talked about the original Apollo project. We have named our bill, the first step we will talk about tomorrow, the New Apollo Energy Project because we believe, as John F. Kennedy did, that we have unlimited innovative capacity. But what we don't have at the moment are policies to put that innovative genius to work.

For instance, we are spending less than 16 percent on energy research in total in this country. We are only spending 16 percent of what we spent on the Apollo project. That is just abysmal. We had at least as much of a challenge as trying to get to the Moon.

I had a utility executive in my office today. He told me this factoid: We spend more on research about dog food than the utility industry does on new energy in this country. I don't want to belittle dog food, it is important, but we need to boost our research. Tomorrow we will put $14 billion back into the pockets of Americans to use in part for research, the tremendous things that are going on. Every time I pick up the phone, I learn about a new technology being developed.

I yield to Mr. Hall.

Mr. HALL of New York. I am just looking at the uses

of the Strategic Energy Efficiency and Renewables Reserve, and I will get that out in one sentence, to accelerate the use of clean domestic renewable energy resources and alternative fuels, to promote the utilization of energy efficient products and practices and conservation, and to increase research development and deployment of clean, renewable energy and energy efficiencies and technologies.

The word ``conservation'' is in there, and it is one that has been sadly neglected. In fact, it was unfortunate a few years ago when our Vice President said conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is no way to build a national energy policy. I completely disagree. I think it is one of the most important ways to start building a national energy policy, and I was happy Mr. Bartlett earlier was talking about energy efficiency. It is time all of us on both sides of the aisle did that and put our money where those words are.

I see these pet peeves of mine as I go through every day life. For instance, walking down the aisle of the supermarket, in the Northeast, I can walk through Hanford's A&P or Stop & Shop, and there are aisle after aisle of cold cases with yogurt or beer or cheese that is being kept cold by a refrigerator and a compressor running all of the time, and an open top so it is convenient. I can just reach in. But there is no door or plastic sheet to keep the cold air in and the warm air out. Meanwhile, because we live in the northern part of the country, half of the year there is a furnace going to keep the shoppers warm and the furnace and the compressor are working at cross purposes. That is the kind of blindness we have gotten used to, that energy is something we can throw away.

Mr. INSLEE. There is so much good work going in to stop those things that you are talking about. To mention two instances of success on energy efficiency, I was talking to the Vice President of Dow Chemical yesterday. Dow Chemical historically has not been looked at as a company on the forefront on environmental issues, but they got a star last year for their energy efficiency program.

They have saved 42 percent of their energy since 1990. They have reduced their energy since 2000 by 22 percent by just adopting commonsense measures, some of which you might have talked about, by having energy efficient appliances and lighting, by looking at how they monitor the energy in their building. So a 42 percent reduction of their energy usage, and they did that because it is good business, not because it is some granola-crunching idea. They did it because it is good business. And we will create a fund tomorrow to help businesses and individuals go down that road.

Second accomplishment, California. California has essentially, while the average American uses 50 percent more electricity than they did 10 years ago, 50 percent, California has been stable for the last 10 years. They have not gone up one kilowatt hour. And the way they did that was to help people invest in energy efficient light bulbs, energy efficient windows and appliances. As a result, they use 8,000 kilowatt hours per person per year, and the average person uses 14,000 kilowatts.

Does that mean people in California are living in the stone age? They are still taking hot tubs in Marin County and still putting out movies in Hollywood. They are living a good life there, and their economy is booming. But they are doing some commonsense things with energy. That is what we are going to start tomorrow.

Mr. HALL of New York. I wanted to mention something that should be another part of our energy mix and that is low head hydroelectric power. There are dams and waterfalls throughout this country where in some instances they used to generate power and no [Page: H664]longer do. But our own Idaho National Laboratory from the Department of Energy did a study a couple of years ago that showed, and it is on their Website, it shows how much State By State latent hydroelectric power is waiting to be harvested.

In New York State, there are some 4,000 dams and waterfalls that could, just by having turbines placed where the water is already falling, yield greater than 1,200 megawatts of power, which is about 60 percent of the peak output of the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in my district.

It is that kind of using everything. We have to leave no stone unturned and to try every opportunity for clean, renewable domestic sources of power for national security purposes, as Mr. Klein mentioned, for environmental purposes, as we all know, and for global warming. Anybody in my part of the country knows that the weather is not normal this year. And, indeed, the records for last year showed that it is the warmest year on record and there has been a string of years getting warmer.

We had a seminar at one of our freshman orientation sessions on global warming that shows as the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising, the temperature average is rising with it. It has risen out of what they call the background noise, where it is no longer something that can be written off to the normal ups and downs of climate. We are experiencing a change, a man-made change in our climate here on earth, and it is our duty to our children and grandchildren not to leave them that problem or to leave them mountains of debt because we refused to deal with this problem and keep borrowing money from one country so we can import oil from another country and lose our own sovereignty in the process.

Mr. KLEIN of Florida. One of the beauties of what we are talking about, and what Americans are talking about, is there is a lot of technology and a lot of science and businesses that are already out there doing these things. That is a very exciting thing. If you listen to the national picture that 60 percent of our oil is imported, and that is a major source. And we obviously have lots of other fossil fuels being burned at this point, but there is solar power.

I am from Florida, and we call ourselves the Sunshine State. And we constantly hear in Florida you can't use solar effectively because the panels are too big and they can't store the energy.

My personal feeling, and I think you believe this, if we put our mind and science to this, we could probably have a solar panel the size of this 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper on every house that powers that house. Individual power plants, and it will happen. It is going to happen. There is wave power. There is wind power and corn-based ethanol and sugar-based ethanol like they use in Brazil.

Again, they may not be perfect in their present form. That is the point. Let's further them and use our innovation agenda that we are pushing in this Congress to get all of the economic incentives in place to encourage the businesses, to encourage our science and university academics as well as business leaders to come together. [Time: 22:15]

Mr. INSLEE. We had a meeting with Hank Paulson today, Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration, and he had made an interesting comment. I am very impressed with him, though I have been pretty critical of the Bush administration, because he has been a pretty outspoken advocate that we need to do something about global warning.

He said everything he has learned since taking the job as Secretary of the Treasury, he comes from a very successful Wall Street career, has been worse than he thought. The deficit, the situation in Iraq, everything he has learned has been worse than he thought, except energy, because he has learned about the new innovations going on around the country.

What we want to do is help businesses, like the Iogen Corporation, which is ready to build the first commercial cellulosic plant in America in Idaho. They are ready to go, as long as they can get their loan guaranty. They have 300 farmers that are going to give them their straw left over after wheat. They are going to chop it up, put an enzyme in it, and then free the carbohydrates and distill that into ethanol, and, boom, you have a product that is three to four times more productive per acre than the current type of ethanol we get from our farms.

Ocean Wave Technologies has the first permit for wave power in the United States off the coast of Oregon, a 50 megawatt plant. They are using a technology now that is in the water in Hawaii, generating technology with this buoy that is anchored below the water. It goes up and down and creates a force thoromatically that runs a generator. They are generating electricity today for the Navy. They are ready to make this a commercial operation. They need a little help to get started.

The Nanosolar Company, a company that was started, and the fellows who wrote the first two checks were the two guys who started Google. They have done pretty well for themselves, and they wrote a check to a couple of entrepreneurs in California, and now they are ready to do 450 megawatts of thin cell solar, where you use a solar panel that has one-fiftieth the width, using a selenium, iridium, gallium and caesium type of technology that they think can be 30 or 40 percent cheaper.

Another company trying something like this is called Miasole.

These are the companies that need help, not the big oil companies. And what we are doing tomorrow is shifting the subsidies that have been given away to the oil industry, an 18th century technology, and helping these new-generation technologies come on.

By the way, in this debate we are the optimists. We should identify who is on what side of this. We are the optimists who believe global warming can be dealt with. The pessimists say we can't.

Now, they are giving up. The debate about global warming is over. And I know it is over because yesterday the Exxon Corporation, which has fought tooth and nail the science on global warming, basically withdrew their support from the political organization that has tried to create doubt about global warming.

So when the Exxon Corporation agrees it is time to start getting serious about global warming, I think the debate is over. And now the question is, how can we join on a bipartisan basis to find solutions, and we are starting this tomorrow. I hope we draw some votes from some of our colleagues across the aisle.

I yield to Mr. Hall.

Mr. HALL of New York. Thank you, Mr. Inslee. I am pretty confident there will be votes from both sides of the aisle tomorrow. And it is interesting thinking about the history of ExxonMobil in terms of their corporate advertising, going back to the days of Herbert Schmertz and the op-ed in The New York Times, and how they have spent probably more money, and other oil companies as well have spent more money. Or I should say they have spent good money on advertising to try to stop people from changing the approach that they could have spent instead on research and development on these new forms of energy.

I wanted to mention one you had not mentioned yet, and that is tidal power. Wave power, of course, is obvious. My dad taught me to sail when I was a kid, and many is the time I have sailed by a buoy that had one of those wave-driven generators in it and keeping the light powered, and/or a solar panel on it keeping the light powered and a battery storing the energy.

But tidal power in my neck of the woods, in the Hudson River, which splits my district in half, is tidal all the way to Troy, all the way past Albany, and navigable all the way that far north. The current runs a couple knots and a half south on the ebb and about two knots north on the flood in New York Harbor. And in the East River and in Hellgate, what they call the juncture of the East River and the Harlem River, where it opens into Long Island Sound to the east, the tidal current there runs five to six knots, depending on the phase of the moon.

We have inlets, rivers, harbors, coastline all throughout this country where tide comes and goes, millions of tons, millions of tons of pressure of water moving in and out of these bodies of water twice a day every day. And that is, well, it is solar and lunar, because it is driven by, I guess primarily by the [Page: H665]moon, but nonetheless it is natural, free energy that can be harvested and should be explored. And, indeed, there have been experiments going on in the East River with tidal generators within the last year that I am looking forward to seeing the results of. But that is one more available source.

Mr. INSLEE. I want to comment that some people have argued this is sort of peripheral or tangential sources of energy, niche types of energy. I think it is important to realize the scale of energy that we have available domestically. It is enormous.

When you talk to the scientists about this, the wave power in a 10-mile-by-10-mile stretch of the California coastline, that is 100 square miles, if you can imagine 10-by-10, there is enough wave power using this existing technology to generate all of the electricity used in the State of California. That is not hypothetical. That is actual wave power that is available. That is not a niche technology.

In Montana, if we can a find way to burn coal cleanly, and I say if because we are a long ways from being able to do that, to segregate and store the carbon dioxide below ground, but there is enough coal in Montana, just Montana, if we can find a way to do that, to power the electricity needs of the entire Nation for decades.

Just to give people a sense of the scale of this, with solar energy, in a few hundred square miles, there is enough to light the entire Nation, if we get solar power down to a market-based price. It is more expensive than electricity right now from a coal plant or a gas-powered plant.

But what we are learning is that for all the technologies we have talked about today, solar, wind, wave, efficiencies, where some day plug-in hybrids, plug our cars in and run on clean electricity, every single one of those technologies has come down in price dramatically as the technologies have improved and as we have scales of economy.

Wind power has come down in price 80 percent in the

last decade. Solar is coming down. There is a factor basically every time, if I get this right, every time it goes up, and I am going to have to check to make sure. In fact, I will not use it because I can't remember what it was, but there is a ratio that has been clear with solar power that has come down. Every time you ramp up production by a factor of X, you get a Y percentage decrease in price, and that has been a constant.

What we have learned is that we know there are two curves. Fossil fuels are going up because China is coming on gangbusters and demand is going to go up. We might reach peak oil. We don't know. But we know fossil fuels are going up long term, and these are coming down, and we want to be on the downward sloping path.

So one of the things we want to do eventually, in our new Apollo project, is to have a renewable portfolio standard to say that a percentage of our electricity will be generated by clean energy sources by the year 2020. We just did this in Washington by popular vote.

I yield to Mr. Kline.

Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman, and I think that is exactly the point. The point is, there is not necessarily one source of energy alternative that is going to be for everyone. We have a big country, with lots of existing resources that have been mentioned by the gentlemen on the floor this evening, and the choices and the competitive ways that we as a country can competitively grant resources to companies, to scientists to come together and say, listen, we think there is enough coal in this country to power the country for 300 years, but we have a high sulfur and carbon dioxide problem. Is there a solution? If there is a solution, that can be a wonderful thing. So there is coal in certain parts of the country and maybe that works there.

Wave power, wind power, all the things we are talking about, it is this competitive way of approaching this. Not one solution necessarily to fit all. There is still going to be oil out there to some extent, but the point of all this is, it is there. And the most exciting part about this is that there is a solution, and Americans need to engage this.

The Congress is way behind the American public, and the administration is even further behind. And the part where we, I think, are coming together tonight and tomorrow, as you and many others are going to be leading this fight for energy independence in the first step we are taking now, which will continue with additional steps, is, we want to ask the American public to come forward to their Members of Congress, to their business leaders, and to their Chambers of Commerce and start talking about the technologies that they have. What can we do to collaborate with each other to take some of these ideas and make them commercially viable? The more competition out there, the more resources in, the lower the price will be.

It is almost like the discussion we have had for so many years, public transportation versus road building. People have said, well, you have to subsidize public transportation. Well, absolutely you do. But guess what road building is? Who pays for the roads? It is your gas taxes in every State of the country and the Federal Government that pays for that. So it is a question of reordering our priorities.

In this case, it is the reordering of priorities from more oil drilling and giving those types of resources and support to putting that into places and with people that can create the new generation of energy alternatives, and it is very exciting.

Mr. INSLEE. I want to comment on two really exciting transportation alternatives. One is public transportation.

The city of Portland, Oregon, has demonstrated the ability of America to reduce our CO

2 emissions to deal with global warming. They are the first city in the Nation to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels, which would be consistent with the Kyoto Treaty, which may be a treaty we do or do not eventually adopt, but they have been the first city in the Nation to reach these 1990 levels, to roll back their carbon dioxide emissions.

One of the principal ways they did it was they embraced an incredibly popular light rail system to move people. Rather than sitting on freeways for hours at a time, you go down to Portland on a convenient, much-loved system that has now been voted on five times successfully in Portland because people love this system. It is convenient, it is safe, it is cheap, and it saves us from global warming.

So if we have a transportation policy in this country that helps communities work in that regard, we will make some strides.

The second thing I want to bring up is a technology called plug-in hybrids, which I think could be maybe the ultimate vision for us in the next decade, and that is to develop our cars so we go home at night and we plug them in. You take power off the grid, electricity generated by clean wind, clean solar, clean wave, clean coal, or a variety of technologies. These are cars that today are running, that can run 20 or 30 miles just on electricity. And then when you run out of juice, you start running on your motor.

If we have a flex-fuel hybrid plug-in car, we are going to be in really great shape in this country, because we can plug it in and get clean electricity. We have the pipes to deliver it, which is the electricity grid. You plug it in at night, you run your first 20 or 30 miles, then you use ethanol that you bought from our local farmer in the Northeast, or in Iowa, or eastern Washington. And if you don't like that, you can burn gasoline as well.

General Motors just announced their first sort of proposed car, called the Volt. They ran it out at their show just 2 weeks ago in Detroit at the auto show. Now, we have to improve the batteries to really make them commercialized, but that is where our money should be going, to improving the batteries so we can have plug-in vehicles, rather than going to the oil and gas industry.

So tomorrow we are going to make a decision to take money we gave to the oil and gas industry and give it to these companies, to the extent we can, to help develop these new technologies for batteries and a whole host of other things. These are lithium iod batteries, and they are close to being commercialized. There are a few security issues they have to work with to make sure they are stable and workable, but that is a good shift for the country. [Page: H666]

Mr. KLEIN of Florida. If the gentleman will yield for a second, the next level of this, just like any start-up business in this country and the success of the capitalistic system that we have is, business entrepreneurs realize value. What we are talking about here is start-up capital for many of these businesses. We are not talking necessarily the United States taxpayer funding these things indefinitely.

The great part about this is that many of them are already in place. They just need a little additional push or a little additional resource, and then you will see venture capital and lots of business entrepreneurs, and probably even oil companies who will see a good opportunity, who will even invest. But whoever it is, we want to see the direction of this jump-started, and that is what the gentleman is talking about.

Mr. INSLEE. Sure. And we can do things essentially at no cost to the Federal Government. For instance, loan guarantees. If we guarantee a company that wants to start a plant, like this Iogen cellulosic ethanol plant, if we do a loan guarantee for them, there is a high level of confidence it is going to work, and it never costs us a dime, assuming that it works. But it helps them get the capital to give security for the investors to do that.

That is a good investment for the country, if we choose wisely. But these companies will tell you they have to cross the valley of death, to get from development, where they have their prototype, until they can really commercialize it. And that is where Uncle Sam can happen.

And we will get a lot more bang for our buck helping a battery company that will help us drive plug-in hybrids a few years from now than we will just giving it to a company that made $22 billion last year in the oil and gas markets. [Time: 22:30]

That is a better deal for America. Mr. Hall.

Mr. HALL of New York. Yes, if the gentleman would yield for another minute. I wanted to mention a couple of other ways we can help, that the government can help jump start these industries. One of them is indemnification of risk. We have unbeknownst to most Americans been the underwriters for the nuclear industry since its beginning via the Price-Anderson Act. In fact, there would never have been a nuclear plant, electrical generating plant built in this country if the taxpayer didn't underwrite the possible cost of a catastrophic accident.

Now, if we took that same approach where we were willing to subsidize or underwrite alternative fuels or low head hydro plants, many of which are being held up, by the way, because of liability issues, that would be one way that we could help.

Another way would be preferential purchasing, because the government, at all levels, buys a lot of vehicles. And if we put out a request for proposals saying that we want American companies to build vehicles that will either be plug-in hybrids or plug-in biodiesel hybrids, or just high efficiency vehicles that can be used in our fleets that the different departments of our government used, that would start the economy of scale working. The same way the wrist watches, digital wrist watches that used to cost $200 when they first came out came down to the point where they are $2 now, and computer chips that were bought in quantity by the Defense Department, or by the aerospace industry and NASA, drove down the cost to the point where now anybody can afford a laptop. It is that economy of scale that we can help get started.

And as you said, it is not going to be something that we will have to underwrite or subsidize forever. But when you look at the number of years that we have been subsidizing the old technologies that may be 19th or 20th century technology, we certainly now, in the 21st century can look at these renewables, domestic clean safe renewables and think about the same helping hand to get them off the ground.

Mr. INSLEE. And I think it is important to point out the tremendous payback to our economy of relatively small Federal investments. Look at the computer industry. It grew by leaps and bounds because of the Apollo project. There is more computing power now on a wrist watch than there was in the original Apollo space vehicle because we developed computer based software systems as part of the Apollo project.

Our medical device industry with these exotic materials largely came from the American space program, and these were relatively small investments.

By the way, we spend less today on research and energy than we do in a month in Iraq by a factor of about 10, just to put this in perspective. We are talking about for a family's budget a lot of money, but for the Federal budget fairly small amounts of money that can have absolutely tremendous payoffs.

I want to talk about one other thing that we think we need to help these companies too, though. If you want to start a company that will generate clean electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions today, you don't have a huge advantage because of a loophole in the law that a coal company has right now that is putting their carbon dioxide up the stack. That coal company that has what we call dirty coal, where you just burn it and you put your carbon dioxide, you dump it into the atmosphere, they have a huge loophole in the law because they can put as much CO

2 into the air as they want the tape. They can't put as much sulfur dioxide, they can't put as much nitrogen oxide, they can't put as much particulate matter, but they can put as much CO

2 into our atmosphere that you and I own jointly, with no charge. And the company that is going to make a clean industry, they don't get any benefit like that. We have to close that loophole. There has to be a way that there is some charge imposed on polluters who use our atmosphere to dump their carbon dioxide. And that is a loophole that needs to be closed to help these innovators as well to level the playing field.

Now it is really interesting. We are getting some support for this idea from some unusual sources. Duke Energy, I think, the third or fourth largest electrical utility in the United States, they burn massive amounts of coal, I think 40 or 50 percent or more of their electricity is produced by coal. But they recognize the need to have what they call a cap and trade system that caps the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. And in part they realize that, I think, because when you impose some cost on this pollution it inspires these new companies to be able to create new technologies that are clean. So we hope ultimately the U.S. Congress will adopt a measure that will level the playing field and not allow these dirty plants to continue to pollute our atmosphere for nothing. You know, when you and I go to the dump it costs us 25 bucks to dump our pickup load of junk at the dump. But a company that burns coal can put their carbon dioxide and just dump it into our atmosphere, gigatons for nothing. That needs to change

Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Well, exactly. And the incentive that is being used to encourage a company to make the investment in some type of scrubber or some type of way of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide should be just that. It should be an incentive to do that and make that capital investment in that technology, versus not having to pay for it. There is no economic incentive to change. Obviously there is a huge environmental impact for all of us who are breathing the air and the entire impact on the climate and the environment. But those companies that continue to burn coal don't have an incentive. So if we flip it around and say, all right, there is going to be a charge, in order for you to do this there is going to be an expense associated with it, whereas if you invest, if you are going to have to pay something in, if you are going to invest in something that is good, good for the environment, good for you. You get some type of benefit out of it then it is a good swap for the company, and it is a particularly, it is exactly what we need in terms of our encouraging private investment in technology that will clean our air.

Mr. INSLEE. And what we are finding is that more and more companies are actually accepting this idea, thinking it is a good idea because one, it will drive innovation. It will help us invent new technologies. But second, they realize this works. What we are talking about is a thing called a cap and trade [Page: H667]system. We cap the amount of carbon dioxide that can go into the air and we allow polluting companies to bid and trade for the right to put that pollution in. It is the most economically efficient way to do it. And what the companies have discovered is that when we do this, it works. When we did with sulfur dioxide in the 1980s it cleaned up the air and it actually ended up helping the economy.

Mr. HALL of New York. It created jobs.

Mr. INSLEE. It created jobs in creating these scrubbers. It helped our health and it actually, if anything, increased the gross domestic product. So what we are seeing is that some of these visionary companies are embracing this idea and it makes sense.

Today when I was talking to the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Paulson, I said, you know if we don't do this we are

going to be wasting a lot of money. The Bush administration has supported a program, basically, it is a combined cycle way of using coal that you can make into hydrogen and sequester the carbon dioxide. It is called ``future gen.'' We are going to have a future way of generating coal based electricity. And I think it is a good idea to invest in that type of research to see if we can burn coal, take the carbon dioxide, stick it in the ground forever and we will have clean electricity. But the Bush administration is spending $750 million of taxpayer money to do that. But the plant will never, ever, ever be used or built if the Bush administration's policies succeed because they don't want to have any charge for carbon dioxide, any regulation on the amount of carbon dioxide going into the air. Well, if you are a coal company and you have got to invest money in this future gen program but you can put your carbon dioxide in the air for free, are you ever going to build this kind of machine that President Bush wants to build? It doesn't make any sense. So if we are going to do research in this new technology, it only makes sense also to have some regulation in the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere. Otherwise these technologies will be developed and never used. And that is not our goal, Mr. Hall.

Mr. HALL of New York. I wanted to say that you prompted this thought. I am not against big corporations. I am not against corporations making a profit. In fact, a couple of the companies that are making the most innovation and putting the most investment into wind energy in our country right now are GE and Siemens. General Electric built the wind turbines that are in the Atlantic City wind farm that I mentioned earlier. Whether it is small start up companies working on alternative energy or whether it is existing oil companies or other utilities or big energy companies, the important thing to say, and this is the important thing, I think, to say to individuals also, and it is what I believe leadership should be doing, whether it is our President, whether it is Senators or whether it is us here on the floor of the House of Representatives, we need to tell our corporations and our citizens that it is patriotic to save energy, that it is patriotic, when you have a choice, to use the most domestic, clean, renewable form of energy that you can. It is patriotic to try to support, if you have a choice on the back of your utility bill, as I do in New York State, to check off that I want wind power, or to check off that I want hydro electric. You could choose the source of where your power comes from if you can afford to do it. And not everybody can, but those of us who are able to spend a couple of cents more per gallon for home heating fuel can get biodiesel. Well, right now it is no difference where I live. It is the same price for bio as it is for oil. But we need to think of this in terms of patriotism and national security and our national interest, and that you can't separate it from our foreign policy. You can't separate it from our economic well-being. You certainly can't separate it from our health. And I don't think you can separate it from our job future either. We need to have these industries start up and be developed here so we can compete. We can't afford to be in a situation we are in right now with hybrids, where I, who want to support, I got elected with union support, I am proud to say. Now I want to buy an American hybrid car that gets top mileage, and right now, the best mileage cars being sold in the United States are made in Japan. I don't believe, for a minute, that we can't compete and make a car that will get as good mileage or better as any other country in the world as their companies can. I think it is the choices that have been made, and the incentives that have been offered or the direction that has been given by government has been lacking. And I am proud to be a part of this 110th Congress, when we, tomorrow, will start down that road where we transfer the emphasis from the old to the new in terms of energy.

Mr. INSLEE. I really appreciate your comment. A couple of comments, first off, about the value of business, big, little, medium, small, all sizes. There are so many companies today that are leading this revolution that we want to assist them. DuPont has done tremendous work on energy efficiency. 3M has done tremendous work on energy efficiency. British Petroleum, an oil and gas company, internally, because of their great leadership, reduced their own carbon dioxide emissions down to 1990 levels. They thought it was going to take them 5 years. It took them 3 years. And they saved $300 million in energy because of doing just exactly what Mr. Hall is talking about of energy conservation. This is a green policy in two ways. Green environmentally and green for profit, and red, white and blue for America. So we have a lot of colors working for this policy.

I want to mention one other thing about our auto industry. We need our auto industry to give consumers cars that we can drive to use multiple fuels. Right now we are all kind of slaves to gasoline. We don't really have a choice. We need cars that will burn gasoline or ethanol, like they have in Brazil. The cars in Brazil drive, almost all of them burn either gasoline or ethanol. And because of that Brazil is energy independent today because they are growing their own ethanol, which we can do in this country. But we need the auto industry to give us this choice, to give us cars that can burn gasoline or ethanol. Now you can make a car for about $85 that does that. That is all it costs. Almost nothing. That is what is costs to put tint in your glass. But we need the industry to do that. And you know, Congress may need to act, and I think it does need to act to get the industry to agree to do that rapidly. The second thing we need is these oil and gas companies to agree to put pumps in that will be ethanol pumps or biodiesel pumps. [Time: 22:45]

That is not happening, because, unfortunately, those companies kind of only are selling gas right now, not biofuels. So we need to act to give consumers that ability to have at least a small percentage in the number of service stations that are going to give us that choice.

Mr. KLEIN of Florida. To follow up, if, the whole idea of gas, miles per gallon, which people have a tendency to look at cars today and look at the miles per gallon, there have been a lot of games that have been played with that over the years, sport utility vehicles being viewed as trucks, therefore, not having the same limitations that most automobiles in the United States have.

As the gentleman from New York mentioned, there are many cars made in other places around the world that have figured out how to make 40, 50 miles per gallon, base car and some hybrids as well. I don't believe there is any inhibiting factor in the United States for our car companies to do the same.

Now, do we need to give a little incentive? Maybe. I think we have all seen the statistics. For every couple of miles per gallon you increase in efficiency, we are dropping some amount of oils per barrel, gas that has to be imported from the Middle East or wherever every day. So there is a trade-off here.

There is also this issue of importing, which is a current issue which we need to reduce. The technology is going to take a little bit of time. We need to do exactly what we are doing tomorrow and over the next number of weeks and months. But there are some immediate things we can do.

I certainly would suggest to Americans on a patriotism basis, on a smart basis on the thinking of your children [Page: H668]and your grandchildren and what's right, we will sacrifice. We are all in this together here. Let's make the right decisions, do what you can. It's not the right thing for everybody. But to the extent that you can buy a car that gets better gas mileage and focus on that cars that maybe use regular instead of premium. Those are all choices that people make. Everybody is in this together. Let us make some smart decisions.

Mr. INSLEE. We know this can be done because in the 1970s and early 1980s we increased our gas mileage by 60 percent in 8 years. If we had simply continued on that path with the same rate of improvement, we would be free of Saudi Arabian oil today. We need to get back on that path of energy efficiency. We can do that. We can start tomorrow. It will be a good day for energy revolution tomorrow. I am looking forward to it.

Mr. Hall do you have any closing comments here? We are about ready to wrap it up.

Mr. HALL of New York. I think you have said it all, Congressman. I am happy to be here and proud to be here as part of this 110th. This is part of our taking our own future back, we as a country, I am talking about all the citizens of this country.

I think the same way Congressman Klein mentioned the moon shot, I do remember that, I am a couple years older than you are, and there was a huge lift in the psyche of this country, because even though President Kennedy didn't live to see the day that we landed a man on the moon, it was done in 9 years when he said we could do it in 10.

So our ingenuity and our industry and our creativity took hold, and we accomplished the goal. You could just sense this palpable lifting of the weight off the shoulders of Americans on the street. I mean, people you knew, that we had done this.

The day that we harness all these alternatives, and harness the power of conservation and efficiency so that we can say no thanks, turn that tanker around, send it back to the Middle East, we don't need that oil, that day, when that day arrives, you will see the same feeling of weight lifting off the shoulders of the American people and a feeling of self-sufficiency and of pride and of being in control of our own destiny again. That is really something to look forward to.

Mr. INSLEE. When that day arrives they will write a sequel to Tom Wolfe's book about the Mercury 7 program, and he called it ``The Right Stuff.'' Tomorrow Congress is going to have the right stuff. We are going to do a good energy policy.

PEAK OIL -- (House of Representatives - January 18, 2007)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Murphy of Connecticut). Under the Speaker's announced policy of today, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, last evening we were here just about this time talking about this same subject, the subject we have been talking about for the last hour. We had been discussing the phenomenon known as peak oil. That is the term given to a prediction that a geologist made, M. King Hubbert, working for the Shell Oil Company in 1956. He gave a speech in San Antonio, Texas, which I believe within a decade will be recognized as the most significant, most important speech given in the last century.

What he predicted was that the United States, which at that time was king of oil, we were producing more oil than any other country. We were using more oil than any other country, and we were exporting more oil than any other country. M. King Hubbert had the audacity in San Antonio, Texas, in 1956 to predict that in just a bit less than a decade-and-a-half, by about 1970, he said that the United States would reach its maximum oil production, and after that, inevitably, no matter what we did, oil production would tail off.

That prediction came true. Surprisingly, in 1970, some may say 1971, we peaked in oil production. In 1969, using this same analysis technique, he predicted that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. So last night we had come in our discussion to the point that we were looking at the potential for the alternatives that we and the world would need to turn to as we slide down the other side of what is referred to as Hubbert's peak. We noted that there were some finite resources, some nuclear resources and then the true renewables.

There are three justifications one might use for moving to alternatives. One is peak oil, and we will transition from fossil fuels to alternatives. Oil, gas and coal obviously will not last forever, and as the earth at some point runs down the other side of what we call Hubbert's peak and there is not enough oil, gas and coal to meet our [Page: H752]energy needs in the world, we will transition to alternatives. The only question is whether we do that on a time scale that we control so that it is a pretty easy ride, or whether we do it as dictated by geology, where it may be a very difficult ride.

Two other reasons for moving to alternatives. One is our dependence on foreign oil. Today, we have only about 2 percent of the known reserves of the oil in our country. We use about one-fourth of all the oil in the world, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. Obviously, if M. King Hubbert was right about the world, and there is every reason to believe he will be right about the world, we will need to transition to alternatives.

From a national security perspective, we ought to have been doing this a long while ago. A couple of years ago, 30 prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, wrote a letter to the President saying, Mr. President, and they used the statistics I just used, the fact that the United States has only 2 percent of the known reserves and uses 25 percent of the world's oil and imports almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security risk. Mr. President, we really need to do something about that. So even if you think that there is a whole lot of oil and gas out there, you still may be very incentivized to look for alternatives if you are concerned about our national security.

There is another reason to look for alternatives, and that is, if you believe that we have global warming, and I think there is an increasing body of evidence that suggests that that is probably true, and that we are probably contributing to that, although in the past the earth has been very much warmer, this is in a very distant past. Ordinarily, the past that we are talking about is from the last ice age, which is like some 10,000 years back. It is now the warmest we have ever been since that last ice age, but sometime way in the past the earth has been very much warmer because there were apparently subtropical seas in what is now the north slope of Alaska and the North Sea because we are finding oil and gas there.

The general belief is that this oil and gas was produced by organic material that grew in these subtropical seas, that every season it matured and fell to the bottom and was covered and mixed with sediment that was washed off of the adjacent hills, and then that built up for a very long time. Finally, with moving, the tectonic plates was submersed down with enough pressure and enough heat from the molten core of the earth and enough time that this finally was processed into gas and oil, and then if there was a rock dome over it which would hold the gas, now you have a very fertile place in which to drill. It took a very long time to grow all of that organic material and to turn it into gas and oil.

We are now in a relatively few years releasing all of the carbon dioxide that was sequestered in this organic material over quite a long time, until we are driving up the CO2 of the world, which in the last century or so is nearly twice now what it was a century or so ago. This is what we call a greenhouse gas.

You can get some idea as to the greenhouse effect. If tomorrow is a sunny day and a cold day, and if your car is parked outside with the sun shining on the windshield, you may find quite a warm car when you go out there. That is because of what we call the greenhouse effect. The light that comes in from the sun, call it white light, it comes in over a long spectrum of wave lengths, and it goes through the glass of your car. Then it warms up the material of your car and it reradiates only in the infrared. Well, the glass of your car is pretty much opaque to the infrared. It keeps the heat inside. It reflects it back, and that is why your car gets so warm.

The greenhouse gases out there, you may remember being in an airplane, you are 44,000 feet, and the pilot tells you it is 70 degrees below zero, when down just below you may be flying over south Florida where it is very warm, and this is because of the greenhouse effect. The energy coming in from the sun heats up things in the earth, and when that heat is reflected back out, emanated back out, it is reflected by what we call the greenhouse gases and CO2 as one of those.

So there is increasing evidence that we have global warming, and there may be a need to move to the alternatives because many of these alternatives, although they will produce CO2 when you burn them like ethanol, that CO2 was taken out of the atmosphere by the corn plant when it grew. So you are not contributing any more CO2 to the atmosphere if you are using a product that just last year or so took the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Now, what you would want to do in these last 2 cases is a little different in moving to alternatives. We have a essentially run out of time and run out of energy to invest in alternatives. We absolutely knew by 1980 that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We had peaked in 1970. We have done nothing in the ensuing years. If M. King Hubbert is right about the world, we have no excess energy to invest or oil would not be $50, $60 barrel, which means we have essentially run out of time and have no energy to invest.

Now, we could buy some time and free up some energy with a very aggressive conservation program.

Now, if your concern is foreign oil, then you could also get some additional energy from such things as tar sands and oil shales and coal. But if your concern is global warming, this will be a very bad place to get energy to invest in the alternatives that we will ultimately have to transition to because it take a lot of energy to get energy out of tar sands, and that energy is fossil fuel energy and that releases CO2 into the atmosphere.

So you are making a bad situation worse if your concern is global warming and you think CO2 is the cause of that and you want to transition to renewables, and you are going to get the energy to transition to renewables from tar sands and oil shales and particularly in coal somewhat. You will simply be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But let's look at these, because if the other two incentives are your incentives, then these are good bets.

If you are simply concerned that we have got to transition to renewables, then you will use whatever energy is available, and there is potentially enormous amounts of energy available in these tar sands and oil shales. And if you are concerned about dependence on foreign oil, then this is a good place to begin.

The tar sands. Some may call them oil sands; they are tar, thank you. It doesn't flow; it is really very much like tar. It is, I guess, a bit better than the asphalt parking lot out here, but not much better. If you put a blow torch on the parking lot, that will flow, too, which is pretty much what we have to do with the tar sands. They exist in Canada around Alberta, Canada. There is an incredible amount of potential energy there. There is more energy in these tar sands than in all the known reserves of oil in the world.

But why aren't we resting easy, then, that we have got an easy transition, a big source of energy? Because this energy is not all that easy to get out of the tar sands. The Canadians are now getting about a million barrels of oil a day. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is a lot. It is a little less than 5 percent of what we use in our country and just a bit more than 1 percent of the 84 million, 85 million barrels a day that the world uses; but they are using an incredible amount of energy to get this.

They are mining this, if you will. They have a shovel there that lifts 100 tons at a time, they dump it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and then they take it and they cook it, and they are cooking it at the present with natural gas. They have what is called stranded natural gas there. There are not very many people in Alberta, Canada, that use it and gas is very difficult to move long distances; and so they are using this gas to produce oil from the tar sands.

I am told, and you can be told a lot of things that aren't true, but I am told that they may be using more energy from the natural gas than they are getting out of the oil that they produce. But from an economy perspective, that is okay, because the gas is very cheap and the oil is very expensive. And I understand it costs them $18 to $25 a barrel to produce the oil; and if it is selling for $50, $60 a barrel, obviously there [Page: H753]is a big profit there. But this natural gas will not last forever.

And where will the next energy come from? They are talking about building a nuclear power plant there so they will have additional energy for cooking this oil.

And they have another problem. The vein I understand, if you think of this as a vein, it now ducks under a big overlay of rock and soil, so that they will not be able to continue to develop this by mining it which is what they are doing now. They will have to develop it in situ, and I don't know that they have any economically feasible way of developing it in situ.

So although there is an incredibly large amount of potential energy available there, it will take a lot of energy to get it out, so what you really need to be thinking about is the net energy or the energy-profit ratio that you get out of this.

Who knows what new technologies we may come up with, what the engineers may be able to do, but one should not be too sanguine that this will be a savior, that we will get enormous amounts of energy from this, because of the difficulty of getting the oil out.

The oil shales. The name might better be called tar shales, but we refer to oil shales, and they are found in our western United States, in Utah and Colorado and so forth. And, again, there is absolutely an incredible potential amount of oil that could be extracted from these oil shales, or tar shales. Probably more than all of the known reserves of oil in the world, if we could get it all out. There have been a couple of attempts to do that. The most recent one was by the Shell Oil Company, and there was some glowing reports in the papers about what they did there. But there are aquifers associated with this shale that they need to protect, and so what they do to develop this is to go in and drill a bunch of holes around the perimeter and then freeze it.

So they in effect have a frozen vessel, and the oil will not move through that frozen vessel. And then they drill wells in the middle of it and they cook it, and they cook it for a year. And then they drill a third set of wells, and then when they get to the bottom, they go horizontally. They are very good at doing that now. So the oil that they cooked, loosened up by the second set of wells they drilled, now flows down through the shale, into the well that they drilled that finally went horizontal, and then they pump it out of those wells, and then they pump it for several years and they get a really meaningful amount of oil out.

A couple of years ago I was out in Denver, Colorado, speaking to a peak oil conference there, and the engineer, the scientist who did this little experiment cautioned that it would be several years before Shell Oil Company decided whether it was even economically feasible to get any oil out of the oil shales using that technique. Now, there may be other techniques, but at present to my knowledge nobody has any big exploitation

of the oil shales. The one that got the most publicity was this experiment by the Shell Oil Company, and they have indicated it would be several years before they can determine whether $60 a barrel is even feasible to get that oil.

The next one here is coal, and we will put another chart up in front of this one, because we hear a lot about coal. And you may hear it said that we have 250 years, 500 years of coal. We don't have 500 years, but we do have 250 years of coal at current use rates. Be very careful when people are telling you how much we have of some resource. If it is at current use rates, you have to factor in how long it will last you if you have an increased use rate.

After the development of atomic energy, and the world was amazed by that, Dr. Albert Einstein was asked: What will be the next great energy source in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the world was the power of compound interest.

And when you look at exponential growth, if you increase the use of coal just 2 percent, and I submit that we will have to dig into coal much more than just 2 percent increase per year over what we now use, but if it is only 2 percent, that 250 years immediately shrinks to about 85 years; and then you can't fill your trunk with coal and go down the roads. You have to convert it to a gas or liquid. And, by the way, we have been doing this for decades. Hitler ran his whole military and his whole country on oil from coal. When I was a little kid, the lamps that you now call a kerosene lamp we called coal oil lamp because it was coal oil that replaced whale oil in the lamps, and long after we were using kerosene I still called it coal oil.

But if you use some of the energy from the coal to convert the rest of the coal into a gas or a liquid, now you are down to 50 years with just 2 percent growth rate. And there is something else to look at. Because oil is fungible and moves on a world market, and it really doesn't matter in today's world who owns the oil, the guy who bids the highest gets the oil. It all moves on a global marketplace. And since we use one-fourth of the world's oil, our 50-year supply at only 2 percent growth rate will last the world just one-fourth of 50, or 12 1/2 years.

So the coal is there. It is the most readily developed, unconventional fossil fuel energy source, and we need to husband it. But it is dirty. You will pay an environmental penalty if you use it without cleaning it up, or you will pay a big economic penalty if you clean it up.

Let's go back to the original chart we were looking at. And the previous speakers talked about nuclear, and indeed today we produce about 20 percent of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy from nuclear. We could and maybe should do more. There is no energy source that is without its drawbacks. When you burn any fossil fuel, you release CO

2 into the atmosphere and that produces greenhouse effects, which might very well produce global warming. There are potential drawbacks to nuclear, but so are there drawbacks to not having enough energy for your civilization.

There are three ways in which we can get energy from nuclear materials. One of them is the lightwater reactor, which is the only kind of reactor that we have in our country that uses fissionable uranium, and there is not an inexhaustible amount of fissionable uranium in the world.

And one of the big problems in this whole dialogue is agreement on what the facts are. When I ask how much fissionable uranium remains in the world, and I guess you have to say at current use rates, I get numbers that range from 15 years to 100 years. We desperately need an honest broker to help us agree as to what the facts are so that we can have a meaningful dialogue.

I have thought a lot about this, and perhaps the National Academy of Sciences, which is highly respected and very knowledgeable, would be this honest broker. Because when we sit at the table discussing where we are and where we need to go, you can't have a rational discussion without agreeing on the facts. But nobody disagrees that there is an inexhaustible supply of fissionable uranium. So obviously at some point in a few years, or a few more years with building more nuclear power plants, and China wants to build a lot more nuclear power plants, we will run out of fissionable uranium.

And then we will have to move to the second type of energy released with nuclear fission, and that is the breeder reactor. The only breeder reactors we ever had were those that were used for producing nuclear weapons. France produces about 80 percent, 85 percent of its electricity from nuclears, and they have some breeder reactors. The breeder reactor does what its name implies, it breeds fuel, so you now will have essentially a replaceable and therefore inexhaustible amount of fuel.

But there are problems that go with the breeder reactor. It has waste products that you have to somehow store away for maybe one-quarter of a million years. Now, we have only 5,000 years of recorded history. It is hard for us to imagine one-quarter of a million years. Something that is so hot that I have to store it away somewhere for one-quarter of a million years I think ought to have enough energy in it that we ought to be able to do something productive with that energy. As a matter of fact, the usual nuclear power plant gets only a tiny percentage of all the potential energy out of the nucleus.

So I would like to challenge our engineers to look at a way to make something good out of