The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“REASONS FOR HIGH ENERGY PRICES” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2991-H2996 on May 3, 2011.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
REASONS FOR HIGH ENERGY PRICES
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, we just got off two weeks of working in our districts around this country. At least I held about 10 town hall meetings, and I am sure many of my colleagues held more. We talked about the debt, we talked about the deficit, but one of the things that almost every one of these town halls insisted upon talking about was the high price of gasoline.
Let's start with this first exhibit we have here. This just gives the comparison of what the gas prices were somewhere in the United States, I can't tell where. January of 2009: Unleaded, $1.32; mid-range, $1.42; super, $1.52. Here is a picture taken in April of 2011: Regular, $3.99; mid-range, $4.09; the high powered stuff, $4.19 a gallon.
Mr. Speaker, the only party that can be blamed for this, unfortunately, is the Democratic Party, through the leadership of Barack Obama, President of the United States, because a vicious combination of the Obama administration's moratorium on offshore drilling and the devaluation of the American dollar through the administration's quantitative easing have resulted in the highest seasonal gasoline prices in U.S. history.
We have reached a point where if we don't pay attention, we are going to give up our ability to produce our own natural resources and be, as the President said to Brazil when he loaned them $2 billion or more, ``We will be glad to be good customers of yours when you find some oil out in the Gulf.''
Mr. Speaker, this is a broken energy policy. In fact, this is no energy policy at all. We are quite aware now that we have found substantial reserves that were unfound in the area of natural gas. In fact, there are those who report that the production of shale gas in the United States could result in us having enough natural gas to operate in this country for at least 100 to 150 years at present or projected usages, and yet we seem to have roadblocks thrown up in front of that production at every step.
We had a deep water accident, a terrible deep water accident, in the Gulf of Mexico. The President and the Energy Department put down a moratorium on drilling in the gulf, both deep water and shallow water. Even though the shallow water, they had had no massive oil leaks in the shallow water, it was included. So the Gulf of Mexico, one of the largest potential oil and gas fields in the world, was shut down for American production. Not for Chinese production, not for Brazilian production, not for anybody else who had an ability to make a deal with Cuba to get a lease offshore to drill, but for American production.
{time} 1950
But he promised that after they got all of the cleanup done and after they examined what happened in the BP case, that they would lift the moratorium, and with a lot of outcry from the Gulf States, because for the first time, at least in the State of Texas, until the moratorium on drilling in the gulf, the State of Texas was looking pretty good on unemployment. We were still in the 6 percent range as the rest of the Nation was in the 10 percent range. But when you shut down potentially 250,000 jobs that relate to the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, I don't know how many of those jobs are actually lost, but those were the ones at risk. And as a result of that and other factors, we're now up in the 8 percent unemployment range, which is still better than the rest of the country, but still a really direct cause of the moratorium in the gulf.
When the moratorium was lifted, they refused to issue permits. But first, because the Federal court told them to lift the moratorium, they lifted that moratorium and issued a new one the next day, or maybe 2 days later, which was, I would say, fairly much in contempt of the order of the Federal court in Louisiana. That Federal judge, in turn, made several comments about contempt of court. And so, finally, after years, the moratorium was lifted and another 6 months later, or 8 months later, a few permits were issued so that drilling could begin.
Remember this: Barack Obama, when he became President of the United States, President Obama promised that he was going to open up offshore exploration and enhance nuclear energy. He's failed to do both. The only energy policy that he's dealt with is one that we certainly need to develop. And no one here doesn't want to seek alternatives that are economically viable to make this country run. This country is an energy-driven country. Just look at the lights in this room. Think of the amount of windmills it would take just to power up this room almost 24 hours a day. But we're for--and, in fact, I would say the great State of Texas has the largest wind farm in the entire United States.
So when it comes to energy, we don't shy away from any kind of energy in our State. We are an energy State. We have been producing oil and gas in the State of Texas for I guess close to a hundred years, clear back to Spindletop. We are not the experts, but we're as close to experts as you're going to run into because we've been doing it through generations of Americans.
I remember when I was 17 years old, my big desire was to go work on an oil rig because the great pay those people got paid. My daddy wanted me to keep all my fingers so he told me I couldn't do it. But I always wished I could. It is something we grow up with. We don't think oil and gas are evil products, and we don't think that they are the curse of this country. We think they are the primary clean power source in competition with other power sources of the petroleum age. We think we do a good job of producing clean energy--and energy, we think, that is the cause of the great modern expansion of American Government.
Remember, when we're talking about petroleum products, we're not just talking about power for your automobiles and power for your trucks and power for your power stations and all the other things that we use with oil and gas. We're talking about plastic, we're talking about lifesaving chemicals, we're talking about clothing. There's a list of a hundred different products--I can't even list them all--that have come from the production of petroleum. And now, for some reason, we have an administration that treats petroleum and treats petroleum products like natural gas as if they were some kind of horrible evil poison because of this issue which is unresolved of carbon dioxide.
So we are sitting here on the verge of something that will ultimately shut down our economy. I can tell you from personal experience, because my wife sent me to the grocery store three Sundays ago and one of the things on her list was avocados. And this is in Texas. We're pretty close to Mexico. We're pretty close to California. Two avocados cost a dollar and a quarter. The next week she sent me back to get two more and they were a dollar apiece. So I started watching those things, and holy cow, they have gone up three times since that first purchase of avocados. And you wonder why. Maybe it's weather; maybe it's crop failure. Maybe it's the fact that the cost of energy is going up daily to power the fleet of trucks, to power the diesel-driven trains, to power the automobiles of America. As gas prices go up or diesel prices go up, so do the prices of food. And now the two inflationary prices that we see going forward are food and energy. This is serious stuff.
I'm very pleased to have a fellow Texan join me here today, Blake Farenthold. He's a new Member from down on the Texas gulf coast in a city that grew up with petroleum surrounding it, Corpus Christi, Texas. I'm going to yield to my good friend, Mr. Farenthold, whatever time he needs to talk about his views on energy.
Mr. FARENTHOLD. Thank you very much, Judge. I grew up in the oil and gas industry. My great grandfather, Rand Morgan, came to Corpus Christi after the Great Depression and was one of the pioneers in the oil and gas industry in the Saxet field by the Corpus Christi International Airport. We've been a farming ranch and an oil and gas family since before I was born, since before my father was born, and since before my grandmother was born. Rand Morgan was actually my great grandfather.
And we can tell you as landowners, as outdoorsmen, as hunters, and as fishermen, the oil and gas industry is a clean industry. The men and women who work in the oil and gas industry are committed to the environment. The landowners whose land is used for domestic oil and gas production are committed to making sure the oil and gas companies do a good job and keep their land in great shape.
You talk about offshore, too. Corpus Christi is the home to some of the largest fabricators of offshore oil and gas equipment in the world. Port of Brownsville has several industries building and refurbishing offshore oil and gas. And our fishermen love the offshore oil and gas rigs. They're artificial reefs. They're where you go to fish--not fishing for sport, but fishing for the fish you're going to take home and fry and eat. They're clean and they're great for the environment.
And we had a horrible accident with the BP well. Our beaches in some parts of the country suffered with some contamination. I think it's the second time I remember that happening in my lifetime. The first time it happened, there was a blowout of a well in the Gulf of Mexico operated by the state-run oil and gas company of Mexico. Not a whole lot happened with that one. We had tar balls coming up on the beaches of Corpus Christi. It was an annoyance, but we took some wipes and you wiped your feet off after you got off the beach so you didn't get it on the carpet or your cars.
But what we've done now as a result of the BP blowout is we've shut down the oil and gas industry--the American oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico while the Chinese, the Brazilians, and the Mexicans continue to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. And there's not a thing in the world we can do to stop them or regulate how they do it.
Instead, we're penalizing our oil and gas companies in the United States. We're decreasing production that's available to fuel our cars, to power our electrical generating plants, and to create the hundreds of products that rely on oil and gas. Our focus is wrong. We should be looking at ways to increase production and increase safety and increase our ability to respond in the event there is another accident.
We need to be training the Coast Guard. We need to be training our industry personnel. We need to be developing the technology to contain it and to protect our beaches from oil and gas spills that may happen as a result of the activities of any country in the world. We have the opportunity to be the technological leaders in this and get our domestic oil and gas industry back on track and get the price of gasoline back down to reasonable levels.
We're getting to $4 and $5 a gallon of gasoline. That doesn't just ruin your summer vacation. It starts to ruin your life. You can cut down on driving, you can take the bus, you can take public transportation. But those avocados Judge Carter was talking about, they can't. They have got to get to your grocery store in a truck. Every good or service that you use or buy is affected by the price of oil and gas. It's going to run the price of everything up. We have got to get this under control, and we have got to exploit our domestic energy sources.
I agree with Judge Carter, Texas is the leader in wind farms. It's a beautiful sight as I drive down Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi, looking across the bay at the windmills across over by Sinton, Taft, and Portland. That's the future. But you can't put a windmill on a car. You have got to have oil and gas to run your cars.
Now, we can get into a discussion about we probably need to be focused on getting cars working on natural gas as a more cost-effective way to do it. We've got a great abundance of natural gas, but we have got to get rid of the moratorium--the de facto moratorium that is crippling the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico. It's running prices up. It's costing us jobs in Texas.
I want to talk just for a second, if you don't mind, Judge Carter, about the portrayal of the oil and gas industry as being an evil industry. It's real easy to talk about these big corporations, big oil and gas producers like Exxon and BP. I have got two things to say about that. First of all, I imagine if you have got a retirement plan or pension, you're an owner of one of these oil and gas companies. Your pension plan, your mutual fund, they're all investors in these companies. But that being said, really the bulk of the oil and gas are produced by small businesses, by independent operators who are one, two, three, five, 10, 20-man operations that take a chance, go out there and explore and drill.
{time} 2000
And every time they find a prospect, they go out there and raise some money. They put their money on the line. And they are on the line. If they drill a dry hole, they're going to have to struggle to get their next paycheck.
But this is the entrepreneurial spirit that built America. These men and women are not evil. They are our neighbors. They're concerned about the environment. They're concerned about this country. And they want the price of gasoline that you put in your car to be reasonable.
They're not profit gouging. We can show charts about how the price of gas is going up and why it's going up, but it's not that hard a question to look at. If you took a middle school government class and you studied economics and finance, you learned about something called supply and demand. And supply, especially in this country, is down because we can't drill and produce offshore. We can't drill and produce in massive areas of land that's controlled by the Federal Government. And we've got a regulatory scheme that's looking at making new technologies to produce energy that's more expensive and possibly illegal. So the supply is down.
Then you look across the globe at our competitors--China, India, Korea. All of these countries are seeing newfound wealth. The old movies where the Chinese would ride around on bicycles, that's not the way it is in Beijing anymore. The Chinese are driving cars. Their factories are using oil and gas, and they're competing in the international market for that oil and gas.
Our national security, our economic security, and our very freedom lies in exploring, finding, and producing our domestic energy resources. That's the way we're going to keep America free. That's the way we're going to keep the costs of our goods and services down. And that's the way we're going to keep the price of gasoline in check.
Thank you, Judge.
Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman.
And reclaiming my time, as an expansion of what you just said, let's talk about some of the things that the Democrats in this House and the President have talked about as the solution to the high price of gasoline. And that is they're going to cut the tax breaks for the oil producers, and they named Chevron, Exxon, BP--what they call the majors. They're going to cut those tax breaks. Therefore, they're going to make sure that those billion dollars worth of profit are not going to be there because they're going to reduce these tax breaks they have given, which they say are billions of dollars.
Well, let's just stop and look at what these tax breaks are about. All the oil and gas produced offshore in other countries is not subject to American taxation, and that's where the majors now produce somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all their production. In fact, those drilling inside the continental United States, almost all those people drilling shallow water offshore and a few of those people drilling deepwater offshore, none of those people are majors. They're all from, as you were talking about, the entrepreneurial spirit of the wildcatter and the small producer who is going out in an attempt to expand domestic production. By the way, they're the only ones that take advantage of any tax breaks that are there, and they're not billion dollar companies that we use as examples.
So the cuts, the way I understand it, are not even going to affect ExxonMobil or affect Chevron or these big producers from overseas because those tax breaks don't pertain to that production. They only pertain to production in the United States. And those are done by independents. Almost the vast majority are done by independents.
So the only people that get hurt again by the tax policies of the Barack Obama administration are the small business men. Just like everything we see coming down the pike at us seems to be targeted at the small, independent entrepreneur who is trying to make it go.
So don't be misled to think that the majors, where we see all these massive amounts of money they're making, are the targets that are really going to be hit by the shot that our colleagues on the Democrat side of the aisle have proposed that we should take in getting rid of, as they call them, subsidies, which are really tax breaks, to the producers of domestic production.
By the way, all production offshore, they've shut it down. Just recently, Shell Oil Company, after dumping a couple of billion dollars in an offshore operation off the coast of Alaska, pulled out completely because, before they could even get started, after dumping a couple of billion dollars, with a ``b,'' into that production field out there, the EPA came in with more and more stops and stop orders and other things, and they finally threw up their hands and said, We're going someplace else. We're not drilling in American waters anymore. It's not worth it.
So right now where we know we have production for oil and gas, we have an administration that is fighting that production tooth and nail. This has cost jobs in the industry, as we pointed out. This has made our dependence on foreign oil bigger.
Here's the skyrocketing price of the Obama administration since he's been in office. Here is another chart that shows you the offshore field production of crude oil, thousands of barrels per day. And look at this. This is where that production was: 250,000 barrels up to 400,000 barrels; down again, and I guess that was in 1999 during the Clinton administration that it went down; and back up in the Bush administration. The end of the Bush administration, down to 100,000 barrels of offshore production today. From 400,000 to 100,000 since the Obama administration.
Nobody can argue that the Obama administration is anything but violently opposed to the oil and gas industry. And they are doing everything they can to throw big roadblocks in front of production.
Then you wonder why the speculators are saying the price of a barrel of oil is going up. Because they're speculating. Do you know how many millions of gallons of aviation fuel a company like American Airlines or United Airlines or Continental Airlines, any of these major airlines, burn every week? Do you know what they have to do in order to stay ahead of increasing prices on fuel? They have to speculate on futures on the cost of fuel. And I'm not blaming the airlines. There are plenty of other people that are speculating because they say, Let's see, what's going on in the world? We're finishing up a war in Iraq, which is one of the major producers, but it's been out of the market for years and is barely getting back in. We're sitting here with a moratorium on all the offshore domestic production. We're not opening up any Federal lands for production anywhere in this country. The Obama administration has shut down the leasing practices on any public lands.
By the way, Texas is the only State in the Union that didn't turn their public lands over to the Federal Government. But the rest of the country, in areas like Idaho, Utah, we know there's production up there, up in Wyoming, up in Montana--all that stuff that the Canadians are now producing across the border, the fields on our side of the border are being curtailed by the administration. They just don't want to produce oil. They just want to buy it from foreign sources.
And about these foreign sources, the people who study the market say, My gosh, Libya is not available anymore; Iraq's not available, and what happens if we've got no production at home?
{time} 2010
The market looks shaky. We better buy futures on oil. And guess what, the price goes up. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to say they see a shortage coming down the pike, that competing with India and China, two of the biggest competitors we've got for any kind of energy that's out there, and then we're going to sit here and we're not going to buy the chance to buy fuel at a cheaper price now than what it might be 6 months down the road? Of course, speculators are going to do that. Of course, industry is going to do that.
So as my friend, Blake, was pointing out, the lack of production, the lack of faith in what this government is going to do to this industry, and the fear that the shutdown will be complete, it just sets up any situation for the price to go up. When the price goes up, then the price of gasoline goes up; and by the way, if you either add more taxes to the cost of the oil production or you take away the tax breaks for oil production, who do you think's going to pay that increase in cost for the oil industry? Well, I will tell you. It's going to be the guys and the gals that are filling their cars up with gasoline at the pump.
To the extent that any business has an increase in cost of their production, they do the very best they can to pass that cost on to the consumer. That's the way any company whether it's steel, whether it's widgets, whether it's buggy whips, whatever it is that you do produce, if your cost goes up, the manufacturer passes on, to the extent that he can and still stay within the price limits that are set not by the government but by the demand of the consumer, then the price goes up.
So you're not going to lower prices by taking away subsidies to the oil and gas industry. The only thing you can do is raise prices. They don't want more prices to discourage production. That's ridiculous. If you have the law of supply and demand and we've got a short supply and you are discouraging production, the price is going up. You learned that in the eighth grade, as Blake pointed out. This is not hard stuff. This is easy stuff to figure out. Sometimes I think some of these folks that don't understand the oil business, the only oil they know is what's on the end of their dipstick in the crank case.
But the facts are this product is a major product of the modern society of the American public, and I think the American publics know it, and I don't think they're going to get fooled by demagoguery on these prices.
Does my colleague wish to have more comments?
Mr. FARENTHOLD. If you don't mind, Judge. I wanted to reiterate what you were saying. You know, demonizing the speculators isn't the way to do it. The speculators are the users. They're the airlines. If you want to double what your vacation is going to cost, you take away the airline's ability to hedge their fuel prices, and you know what, if you want to stick it to the speculators, let's open the spigot and those guys betting on higher prices, they are in trouble. They're going to lose some money on that. So I just wanted to definitely reiterate that fact.
And, you know, if you take a look at what this Nation's policy is today on the oil and gas industry, if you were trying to concoct a way to run up gasoline prices, you probably couldn't come up with a better way to do it than we're doing now. It is like we are intentionally trying to raise oil prices. We're limiting production. We're making production more expensive. We're using a regulatory agency to make it more difficult to drill. We're not leasing any of our land. If somebody had come to my office and said, Blake, how can we make gasoline more expensive, I'd list out exactly what the executive branch and the Federal agencies, the regulatory agencies are doing. I can't think of a way to run the prices up that they haven't.
If, as we're hearing, the President's goal is to get prices down, the eighth grade is the answer. Increase the supply. That's all it takes. And it's easy to increase the supply. Sure, we can't flip a switch and do it overnight; but in a matter of months, as we open up Federal lands for leasing, as we open the gulf, as we get the permitting process under control, those prices will turn around, and they will go down.
Helping the oil and gas industry lower prices does not mean we abandon alternative energy. All of the above is the answer. I think some people on the other side of this aisle and in other offices in this town believe that it's either/or. Let's strangle the oil and gas companies so our friends in the alternative energy can thrive.
It's not like that. The energy demands of a modern world are such that all-of-the-above is a correct answer. wind, solar, safe nuclear, and a strong reliance on natural gas that is in the ground in supplies just 5 years ago we couldn't have imagined with the breakthroughs in technology for producing shale gas, coal.
There's no one answer. Every watt of electricity, every BTU, everything we do lowers the cost and raises the standard of living of everybody here and abroad.
I am sick and tired of less, less, less, either/or. This is the United States of America. This is the 21st century. Yes, we can, we can have it all, and we start at the pump.
Thank you, Judge.
Mr. CARTER. There are consequences to any action that you take in this town.
I wanted to point out something I said in a committee hearing one time when we were having this debate. I said those people who want to do away with oil and gas and have a wind industry as the solution better strap a sail on their Volkswagen and hope the wind is blowing towards Washington, or tomorrow morning we're going to have a severe employment shortage in the U.S. Capitol; but, seriously, it's more than that.
Look at this quote from the Heritage Foundation. How many jobs does the anti-drilling agenda of this administration cost? The cost in jobs is startling. A new analysis by Louisiana State University Professor Joseph Mason projects national job losses at 19,000 from the drilling moratorium with wage losses at $1.1 billion. About one-third of those jobs are located outside the gulf region.
So not only did the people in the gulf lose jobs and do they continue to lose jobs, but these jobs, believe me, there is somebody somewhere within a hundred-mile radius of where we are right now that is producing something that goes into the production of oil and gas because it is a nationwide and a worldwide industry. And all of the machinery, and all of the other complicated gauges and all the modernization of the production of petroleum, all of that is far beyond just the State of Texas and Louisiana and the other Gulf States. It actually circumvents the whole globe.
So jobs is another important reason why we have got to do something about this whole concept that this administration seems to have that we are evil because we produce oil and gas; and yet, guess what, States that were criticizing us for production of natural gas 2 years ago are dancing around campfires in their States now that they learned they've got shale oil in their States and some of our Midwest and eastern friends seem to all of the sudden be really excited about the fact that they've discovered they've got shale gas beneath their land and they can produce good, clean natural gas.
{time} 2020
I say, more power to them. And I hope they can, and I hope their States and this Federal Government don't throw up roadblocks to the production of that shale gas because it is safe. This fear of fracking is a hoax because we have been doing fracking in the oil industry for 50 years. It's just amazing how all of a sudden a process that is almost normal to production, to get the second round of production out of almost any oil well that was drilled in Texas is using some form of H2O fracking, water fracking, to get that second round of production out of a well. And people rework and rework and rework existing wells with all types of processes like fracking. Fracturing is what that means.
But are there solutions that can bring the price of oil and gas down? Yes, I think there are.
Here is one that my good friend Doc Hastings has proposed: reversing President Obama's offshore moratorium, establishing a national domestic oil and natural gas offshore production goal to ensure a continued development of America's offshore energy sources. That's H.R. 1231. Hopefully, we are going to have that bill on the floor of the House this week or next week. This is important. This is showing real leadership in real energy production. And you see, nothing on there says let's shut down windmill production or let's shut down solar production or let's shut down nuclear production or hydroelectric or anything else. It's saying, let's produce energy in the form of petroleum products.
Another real gas price solution, Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now, H.R. 1230, Doc Hastings again. Require the sale of specific offshore leases within set time limits instead of continued administration delays. It is proposed: central gulf leases in the Gulf of Mexico within 4 months, western gulf within 8 months, offshore Virginia within 1 year, additional central Gulf of Mexico by June 1, 2012. This bill sets out a road map to leasing for production in what we consider our Gulf of Mexico.
You know, when it comes to producing products offshore, the first place it ever happened was offshore Texas. And we have considered that gulf to be sort of our little saltwater lake out there ever since. That's not exactly true. In fact, it's not true at all. But the point is, to stop the production that's been going on in the gulf, oh, since I was a small child--and I am no young whipper snapper--well, this starts us back to doing what we do well, producing offshore.
Another Doc Hastings bill: this is one, Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work, requiring new safety permits to prevent and combat blowouts before drilling. No one in the industry--and I have talked to literally hundreds of people from the industry--everybody agrees. They were very proud of the fact that until the BP oil spill, oil spills looked like they were going to be a thing of the far ancient past because that Mexico blowout was, what, 20-something years old.
Mr. FARENTHOLD. I was a child.
Mr. CARTER. It would require the Secretary to decide on issuing a permit within 30 days of the application with two 15-day extensions possibly being allowed and provide drilling companies with speedy Fifth Circuit Court access if the government violates the law in denying or ignoring the permitting process.
Those are good solutions because not only does it set a standard that the Congress should impose upon the Secretary. In addition, it gives a recourse, the kind of recourse we're supposed to have on these issues of whether or not to drill, and that is to go to the courthouse and let the justice system prevail. So let's go to the Fifth Circuit, who has already spoken once, pretty loudly, and let them speak again.
There is one more that I don't seem to have and that is, we need to open up the leasing for our public lands in the West. The States of Utah and Idaho and Wyoming and Montana, we are well aware and are very knowledgeable about the amount of a certain kind of heavy petroleum that is available in those areas, North Dakota, probably South Dakota. We are already finding a lot in North Dakota.
But all of a sudden, it too is struggling to get permits to continue to drill on federally owned public land. And let's always remember those words ``public land.'' It's not the U.S. Government's land. The U.S. Government is holding it for the American public. And if we need to lower our prices and have efficient production, we should go where the oil is.
I had one of my colleagues one day who said, I don't know why you Texans always just want to drill anywhere. If you want to drill, why don't you just drill in your own backyard where you have a say about it? Well, if there was oil down beneath my backyard, you could bet your soul I would drill back there in a heartbeat because I am not worried about--in fact, I would be glad to cut the grass around a producing oil well all day long in my backyard. It won't hurt my feelings at all. And I don't think anybody that knows anything about the industry would feel any way other than that.
It's almost a comment on the industry. When you pull out of Dallas/
Fort Worth Airport, the DFW Airport, at the entrance, right to your right is a pumping oil and gas well that was drilled within the last 3 years. Right there, practically downtown Dallas, because they have discovered a field out their way. So we know it can be done and done safely. We have to get on it.
The New York Times--certainly not any bastion of conservative values--has a little article here: U.S. consumer prices are up 5 percent, pushed mainly by food and gas. They will reaffirm they are going to finish quantitative easing--that's this dollar thing I was talking about--but the central bank would remain concerned about the inflation expectation of consumers who would demand higher wages for businesses. And it could raise prices and perhaps cut spending.
What that's all about is, one of the price gauging things that you got that they are accusing the industry of doing is the fact that we have dumped trillions of dollars into our economy for this quantitative easing of the economy.
You know, as you've heard from this very House floor, is how much this body has spent in stimulus and in TARP and in other things in the last couple of years, trillions and trillions of dollars. More money has this organization spent, the Congress of the United States, signed by the President, than in the history of the country. And yet besides that, our Treasury has been printing money to supposedly ease the economy; and they are literally putting more dollars in circulation which, in turn, devalues the value of the American dollar.
When the value of the American dollar goes down, the price goes up because an apple has a worth. There is a worth, a cost to that apple, and there is a value to that apple on the market. And if the value before we dumped cash into the system was $2, and you dump all this, then it will be $3 or maybe $4, not because the apple's changed but because the dollar's changed, and the dollar is worth less.
Why do you think--and by the way, nobody goes to Mexico in Texas anymore. But if you did, and you went across the border, like some idiot who got shot by the terrorists over there--but if you did, you would find that they won't even take American dollars in border towns anymore in Mexico. This was written up in some of the border papers. The American dollar is not wanted in Mexico because they are concerned about it losing its value. It used to be the peso that we worried about losing its value. Something has gone haywire.
{time} 2030
But as we devalue our dollar and we create a shortage of our gas and oil, it's no surprise at all that the byproducts of those two products, which is gasoline and diesel, is going up. And it has gone up. And if we don't do something about getting back into domestic production, it's going to go up some more.
And if the world perceives that the greatest consumer of energy on this Earth is going to have a huge demand when the supply goes down, and they've bought futures on that supply, they're going to get rich. That's not the oil companies we're talking about; that's the people who speculate and the people who cover their energy needs. And by the way, these same speculators are buying futures on oil and gas from China, from Russia, from India, and from other people and from Western Europe to compete for the world market.
We have the golden opportunity to at least produce what we can produce. And I'm not in any way cutting down any other energy source. I'm saying all of the above is the solution. But drilling anywhere that it is effective, and drilling now is the important thing.
And those people who think that anywhere you stick an oil well down there's oil just don't understand oil. They think there's natural gas under any ground; they just don't understand natural gas. And by the way, when Blake was talking about these independents that drill an oil well, the average cost of an oil well that is not that deep is about a million bucks. So when you go out and gamble $1 million and come up dry, and you have to drill another well and gamble another million dollars, you know, these guys are the true entrepreneurs of this country, and they can lose their shirt and then get lucky and find an oil well and get their shirt back, but that's the world they live in.
That's the world of exploration for energy. And we're not ashamed of it. We're proud of it. We're proud that we still have people who are willing to take the risks that it takes to prosper in America. Our economy, our world of commerce in this country is built upon the risk takers. It's those who invest their capital and their labor into trying to produce a product and how they, between those two, they have some successes and they live through their failures. And, unfortunately, we've become a world that thinks anybody that slips up on any form or fashion, we need to bail them out. I've got problems with that.
Finally, another newspaper article. The Examiner says: oil imports spike as Obama oil ban decreases domestic production. This was April 29, 2011. This isn't very far past. While oil production in the gulf is down more than 10 percent from April 2010, it estimates net crude oil imports are up by 5 percent. More imported oil also means higher prices at the pumps. So direct result of the actions of the Obama administration.
We have the price of oil going up. So tomorrow morning, when you go out there and you fill up whatever you're driving, whether it's a SmartCar or a hybrid that runs on both electricity and gasoline, or whether you're filling up your Suburban, you know, we've got fleets of Suburbans in this town. This is supposed to be the conservation capital of the world. Look around Washington, D.C. There's a black Suburban on every corner. Sometimes a whole parade of black Suburbans goes by. Not picking on Suburbans. I've owned five of them. Good cars, but they burn a lot of gas. And you fill one up you'd better have a pretty good size pocket because you fill up an empty Suburban at $5 a gallon gasoline and you're going to need a bank loan because that sucker will take
$100-something to fill that thing up.
And that's the consequences of trying to curtail one industry to enhance another. And that's not the way Americans are supposed to operate. Let's take our going concern and keep it going, and let's build up these alternative energies, and when they are competitive in the world market, turn them loose, stop subsidizing everybody and let them compete. And may God bless every one of them. That's the way Americans are supposed to operate.
Until we get back to operating that way, we're going to find ourselves in this up-and-down world of shortages. And we're going to find ourselves also in a final world of unemployment because since this recession, there's only one place on Earth in the U.S. where jobs are increasing, and that's right here where we're standing. Federal employment is up 11.7 percent, and the private economy is down 6.1 percent. These are changes of employment since 2007.
So the only people creating jobs are Federal jobs. And I would argue that's not the way it's supposed to work. It's all part of a policy which is misdirected. And I would say, because they don't understand the nature of the industries they're dealing with and they really don't realize how many BTUs of energy it takes to run these lights in this building, but it's a ton of them. And I could tell you, my daddy sold natural gas for 40 years of his life, and he sold it cheap. If he was alive today, he'd crawl out of his grave. If he knew about the price today, he'd crawl out of his grave and start selling natural gas. But that price has been driven up by the demand.
We've got this resource. This resource, we can use it cleanly. We can protect our environment. We can live a good life, and we can live the American Dream. But you can't do it by trying to kill one industry to enhance another. And I would argue that that is what we've been doing under the Obama administration. And I have a fervent hope that they see the light and back off and let us go back into production of oil and gas and the other natural resources of this great Nation so that we can maintain our status as the best country on Earth and the best country that cares about the average guy and tries to keep prices affordable to the average guy.
The price gouging that they are accusing of is nothing more than a misinterpretation of the law of supply and demand. And that misinterpretation is hurting the little man in America. It's time to change the policy, and let's all hope and pray that this administration wakes up to many things, but this is one of them. And if they'll wake up to an energy policy that makes sense, we will see the future bright.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________
