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.
“MANAGING PUBLIC LANDS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H12001-H12008 on Oct. 24, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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MANAGING PUBLIC LANDS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. McNerney). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity you have given us to speak for awhile about public lands and about how the public lands are treated and how the future will and will not deal with those public lands.
One of the facts that we have to deal with is how a government deals with property, whether personal property or public property, is a window to the soul of that government. Personal property is tangible and civil liberties are intangible, but both of them are at the center of the historic purpose of this American government, and the preservation of one is indeed the precondition for the preservation of the other.
Sir Henry Maine once wrote a book called ``The Village Communities'' in which he said: Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled. The desire, the use of property, whether it is on land or whether it is the use of public property, that desire is what raises mankind from political slavery.
One of the things that we do not often enough around this place is to consider why we are doing what we are doing. Indeed, one of the concepts that is there is that we do what we do because we have done what we always did; and sometimes when you take a moment to look back and reflect on that, in this particular Congress we have been inundated with laws and proposals which have huge and significant impact on personal and public property in the United States.
Mr. Speaker, one of the things I would like to do is try to go through with several Members who are in the West, public land States who understand firsthand the responsibility and relationship of this, specifically what we are doing in these particular areas.
One of the people I would like to address some of these issues deals with the public property in our forests. As you know, we are having major fires in this country, and the Speaker on this floor said now is the time we need to do what is right.
I would like to yield some time to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden) and simply ask him to address that, of what can this Congress do to make it right, especially when we deal with our forests and our processes for the future of our forests to make them healthier or better.
Mr. WALDEN of Oregon. Thank you, Mr. Bishop. I appreciate your work on the issues we have worked on in the past.
The California fires are tragic in what is happening to the people who live there, the loss of life, the loss of habitat, the pollution that is going into the air. I have been told that the California wildfires have burned the equivalent of 10 times the square mileage of the District of Columbia. Ten times the size of the District of Columbia has gone up in smoke in California so far.
In my district in Oregon this year, 11 times the size of the District of Columbia has gone up in fire. Now fortunately we have not seen the loss of life and we haven't seen the loss of homes. But what we have seen is the loss of land for grazing and habitat and clean water as our watersheds have gone up in smoke.
This picture here I brought down to the floor for my colleagues to see. It is of two young children who are from Harney County, Oregon. This is the Egley fire which burned in my district 140,000 acres; 140,000 acres, the Egley fire burned in Harney County. America's forest lands going up in smoke.
There are 192 million acres of national forest system lands. According to the Forest Service, 52 million of those acres are at high risk to catastrophic wildfires. Twelve million acres in Oregon are considered high risk; 26 million acres, or just under the size of the State of Kentucky, are at risk to insect infestation.
You have to understand that our forests are not static. They continue to grow and suffer bug infestation, drought devastation, and ultimately fire. The total net national forest growth in the United States is currently about 20 billion board feet a year. Total mortality is about 10 billion board feet. So our forests are expanding at 20 billion board feet a year, America's federally owned forests, and 10 billion board feet die. We harvest less than 2 billion board feet.
That is part of our topic today, the lack of active management in our Federal forests. I want to show you what happens on a watershed. This is up in northeastern Oregon. In 1989, the Tanner Gulch fire wiped out the spring Chinook salmon run in Oregon's Upper Grand Ronde River. This used to be habitat for salmon. There was a creek that ran along here. Unfortunately, it is just mud and sludge and debris and blackened trees and ashen slopes.
Now in an extreme fire, scientists tell us that the most catastrophic fire that occurs in our forests emits about 100 tons of carbon and greenhouse gases. For those concerned about trying to do something about carbon emissions in our atmosphere and trying to reduce other pollutants in our atmosphere, we need to do something to manage our forests better to prevent these catastrophic fires. That is on the extreme, the 100 tons per acre.
A healthy green forest will sequester between 4 and 6 tons of carbon per acre. So these are the choices we are facing: How do you manage the forests for better forest health, for reduced fire and reduced fire intensity, and get them back into balance with nature. My colleague from Utah said what do you do about that.
Well, a few years ago we passed the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. It was bipartisan in its nature and scope. It was designed to allow Federal agencies, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, to more rapidly, while still involving the public, go in and do the kind of thinning and debris removal to address this issue of the overgrown forests you heard me mention, the 20 billion board feet a year that grows in our forests and the 10 billion that dies, so we can go in, especially in the wildland-urban interface, near communities where homes are, the kind of homes we see burning today, although they are not necessarily in a Federal forest, but it is a similar concept. So to be able to go in quickly and have scientifically proven plans, based on community wildfire plans, in many cases, to go in and remove that debris and reduce that fire hazard.
That legislation which I coauthored with former Representative Scott McInnis from Colorado and Senator Feinstein and Senator Wyden were both very much involved, has worked in many cases, especially the community wildfire planning piece because that piece brought diverse groups together, environmentalists, community leaders, firefighters. We have a group here from Bend who have been on the forefront of this very effort, firefighters from my own district. They came together and developed plans on how do we safeguard the communities and the things we really want to protect, our watersheds and habitat. They came together, and now they can even more quickly implement those community wildfire plans.
The problem we face in this Congress is virtually every Member of the leadership of this Congress voted ``no'' on the final conference report that passed the Senate unanimously, and that includes the Speaker, majority leader, the caucus chairman, the Resources Committee chairman, the subcommittee chairman, and the Rules Committee chairwoman all voted against the Healthy Forest Restoration Act conference report. This is what we worked out with the Senate. It passed and became law. We now have these community wildfire plans in place. We need to continue to work and expand them elsewhere. It is so important.
So far this year in America's forests and grasslands on Federal land, more than 8 million acres have burned. We are setting records. This is down a little bit from last year, but over the last few years, we are at record levels. American taxpayers have spent $1.22 billion fighting fires, and that is before these awful fires in California have broken out. So it is very expensive when we don't manage properly and have fires break out.
Let me tell you what has happened. In my district, it is 70,000 square miles of eastern Oregon. It is beautiful. We have nine national forests there. We have national grasslands. We have wilderness areas. We have Crater Lake National Park and high desert plateaus, wheat land, and we have had all these fires. They have destroyed communities and many homes in the past. They have inflicted death. They have burned, and it takes years to recover. In fact, we have cattle ranchers in central and eastern Oregon who may be off their allotments for 2 years because it will take that long for the range to recover from fires that, frankly, shouldn't have gotten so out of hand if we had done the right management to begin with.
In the meantime, the infrastructure that needs to be there for our scientists and professional forest managers to conduct this forest thinning is going away because, you see, the allowable harvest of timber off Federal land has declined in my part of the world by 80 percent, 80 percent reduction. And with it, the timber receipts to these communities.
So this chart going back to 1976 shows the various timber receipt levels. And you get out here, and you see there is virtually no revenue coming off our Federal land, revenue that used to help pay for restoration work, that used to help pay for conservation efforts, that used to help pay for parks and other things, the activities people like to do when they recreate. And, most importantly, revenues that used to be shared with the local counties to fund their schools and their roads.
In the largest county in my district, Jackson County, this year because timber receipts are virtually eliminated, and because the county replacement program was stalled in its reauthorization, which is fundamentally flawed in my opinion, they had to close all the libraries. This is not some thousand-person county. This is largest populated county in my district. Every library had to close.
Another county down on the south Oregon coast, they were looking at declaring bankruptcy. Another was going to have to lay off all their sheriff's deputies except those mandated by State law to run the jail to provide security because this Congress hasn't passed the Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization. I would hope that could be brought to the floor and passed so that those of us in the West, and the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) has a wonderful map showing Federal land ownership, but where most of the Federal lands are in the West, my district is over half Federal land. And it is important.
When Teddy Roosevelt created the national forest reserves in 1905, he said it needs to be a partnership with the communities in the management of these lands and in the revenues that are shared, and these lands need to be properly managed. I think he would roll over in his grave today if he knew what had happened in terms of the disassociation with the communities, in terms of the bug-infested nature of our forests, the droughts that have occurred that have left them distressed, and the disease that has come in, and then how they burn. And then we leave them.
In the last Congress, I wrote, and many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, including the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird), a Democrat, former Sierra Club chapter president, helped me write the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act.
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So we, like private forest landowners and State forest landowners and county forest landowners and others, could get in right after a fire, take out where appropriate, where environmentally appropriate, in sensitive ways the dead trees that still have value, create the jobs, recover the wood, and replant sooner. We passed it in this House, big bipartisan margin to pass it. It went up on the rocks in the great graveyard we call the Senate, where all good ideas go to founder and die, and it did.
The fires in California, fires in my district, the fact that forests continue to grow exponentially, global climate change means they're going to be more under threat from higher temperature and, therefore, more drought and more bug infestation, more disease and more fire. This Congress, this country needs to adopt new policies.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Oregon who's been a leader in trying to make sure that we have a healthy forest environment, and it means that we have to change some of the policies that we've had in the past, and I appreciate his leadership in those areas. I would like him to address just maybe one element.
Because of mistakes, I think, that we have made in the past on how we have decided to handle the forests in the future, those counties, those areas where citizens live next to the forest and where the forest becomes an integral part of their lifestyle, are facing a huge and significant problem, and especially their kids in secure rural schools. I wonder if the gentleman for just one second would take a moment to explain what we should be doing right now with relationship to secure rural schools, forest area schools.
Mr. WALDEN of Oregon. Well, we need to pass the legislation that's just come out of the Natural Resources Committee that would reauthorize the program that shared receipts or made up for the receipts that no longer are being generated with the county roads and schools. That legislation, and you are the ranking member on the subcommittee, worked very hard to make sure it's properly crafted, would provide for replacement revenue because, you see, that partnership shouldn't be broken, that promise shouldn't be shattered.
Communities where there are Federal lands, especially timbered communities, that have no real other ability to have an economic base in some cases, and yet, and I diverge a little here, but yet are still responsible when somebody's lost. Who's out there doing the recovery? The sheriff, out of the county. We've seen that tragically in my district, in my State, with the Kim family that was lost in southern Oregon. Family went out for a drive, got snowed in on a road, and the father died, and I believe the child and mother survived after several days. A number of climbers on Mt. Hood fell to their death. Their bodies have yet to be recovered from last year.
I was down in central Oregon and southern Oregon where sheriffs are out in the forests dealing with organized crime elements that have moved in to grow marijuana in highly sophisticated, generally Mexican, drug trafficking organizations, highly armed, very sophisticated. It's our sheriffs that are going in and trying and their deputies to deal with these issues.
So these costs of recovery, of rescue, of dealing with law enforcement issues on Federal ground are borne in large measure by the counties. And yet when you stop doing productive work on our national forests and they continue to grow and die at the same time, you don't have the revenue; yet, you still have greater and greater demand, people moving in to the wild land urban interface.
So this Congress gave us a 1-year reprieve in the emergency supplemental this spring. We need to reauthorize the county payments program for another 5 years, at a minimum, and we need to keep the Federal Government's commitment. If we're not going to do that, then we need to. And we probably need to do this anyway, frankly, get in with a new strategy on how to manage forests.
Now, I'm told in Canada where bugs have wiped out the lodgepole pine, the Canadian Government has come in and said actively get in there, take out the dead trees and let's get new forests going quickly. And they are rapidly clearing out the dead trees and starting new forests.
Our alternative here appears to be let it burn, let it rot, and 100 years from now we'll come back and take a look. I don't think that's the kind of stewardship Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he talked about the great forest reserves and their use for water, for agriculture, and wood for home building. If you go back and read his speeches when he was creating these reserves; he wanted this long-term look at management of this wonderful resource we have.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. You have long been involved in bipartisan efforts to solve this problem for your constituents, especially with their schools. I wonder if you would just take a couple more minutes before we segue into the next speaker, next area, simply talking about what we practically can do for secure rural schools right now, as well as what we should probably ask our leadership to do that we should be practically doing right now in the long term for healthy forests in the future.
Mr. WALDEN of Oregon. Well, there are two things. One on the forest side. Let me take that first, and then I'll talk about county payments.
You're right. I always figured people sent us back here not because of our party label and we're only supposed to use that; they sent us back here to solve problems. And that's how I've tried to approach this, and that's why on the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, it was bipartisan when it passed this House, although the leadership in place today, from the Speaker all the way to the subcommittee chairman, opposed that bill, the bill that passed bipartisanly, unanimously in the Senate in its final form. They voted against it. But that's law and that's worked.
We need to pass a version similar to the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act so that we can go in and clean up after these fires and use the burned, dead trees while they still have value; create jobs in our community. Then we won't need these Federal payments after all if we better manage the forests. We need to increase the allowable cut in our forests so that we can generate jobs and so that we can harvest wood here legally for our uses rather than buy our wood products manufactured overseas from illegally logged forests that are being wiped out in places like Burma and Malaysia and Indonesia and Russia and China where they may have laws on the books and they're completely unenforced.
So, as a result, we all gleefully go to the local furniture store and buy this furniture that's made from wood that was illegally harvested, while our forests burned, and we don't even recover the burned, dead trees. So we need to deal with that issue.
And we need to take into account some terrific research out of the forest service about the change in temperature that's occurring and how the forests are going to move north, but it will take them 10,000 years to catch up with the temperature that should change in about 100 years, if all their data is correct, and I know some of that still needs to be worked out.
So, finally, on the issue of county payments, first I think the first day of this session my colleague Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, and I, as we did the prior session, introduced legislation with you and others to reauthorize the county payments law. That partnership needs to be kept. That promise needs to be kept, regardless of who carries the gavels around here. And it's taken until just a week or so ago to get it out of the first committee. It still has an Ag Committee referral on it, and it's yet to come to this floor. We should be bringing that to the floor and voting it up and down and moving it to the Senate or they should be sending us a bill. But right now, it appears to be, I don't know, held up, and that's not good for our children. It's not good for our libraries, not good for our first responders. It's not good for our county roads.
These school districts in some States have to send their layout notices out in March to tell teachers whether or not they're going to have the money for the following year. As you know, this year that happened in some school districts.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the comments from the gentleman from Oregon. I especially appreciate his comments about our bipartisan bill that has been referred out of Resources. The Speaker of the House does have the ability of helping to move that bill along and can change the referral process to bring this one to the floor. And how significant this is, with these particular counties for the so-called secure rural schools, schools that are impacted by our policies in the passed-over forestlands. We need to have that on the floor now, and it has a funding source. It can be moved right now. I think I would probably join you in asking the Speaker publicly to bring that bill to the floor, let us vote on it, let us move the process forward, get it over to the Senate so we can solve that problem.
Mr. WALDEN of Oregon. As the gentleman knows, the clock is running. Time is running out, not just on our Special Order tonight but on the school kids and the counties and the services that our citizens rely upon in these forested areas, because that funding stream we got that 1-year extension on is running out, as is the time in this Congress running out.
We'll be off 2 weeks after Thanksgiving, a week. We're going to be in for a day and a half or 2 days, couple of weeks in December. Then we're into January and maybe in 1 week there. You know, it's the way Congress works, but we're running out of time, and we shouldn't run out on the promise that this Congress should uphold to the school kids and the communities in America's rural counties.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Oregon for specifically and very eloquently stating what the problems are in our national forests.
He, as well as I and many of those who will be speaking this evening, come from what are called public lands States. You see the map that I have to my left. Everything that is blue in those States is the amount of that State which is owned and controlled by the National Government, and you can obviously see that there's a unique difference between the States in the West and the States in the East.
Now, a big chunk of this blue in the West is national forests, which Representative Walden understands very definitely, very clearly, and needs to deal with that particular issue. And he's given us some directions on what we need to do to do it right.
The other part of this blue deals with land that's owned by the Bureau of Land Management, BLM land, and all of these lands, whether they be forestlands or BLM lands or parklands, have an impact on the States in which we find this particular land.
I'd ask my colleague from Utah, Mr. Cannon, if you'd maybe take a moment and talk about how we try to help these Western States that don't have control over their lands but still have the responsibility of providing services not just for the westerners but also the easterners that are coming directly on these lands with a program known as PILT, payment in lieu of taxes.
I yield to Mr. Cannon.
Mr. CANNON. I thank the gentleman from Utah, my colleague, for recognizing me and organizing this event, and you've seen his blue chart. I grew up thinking that blue meant Republicans. We had this anomaly here recently, because red normally meant the Soviets. I have here a map of the United States, and when Ronald Reagan saw this map it was in red, that is, the public lands that you see mostly in the western part of the United States were in red. He looked at that and he compared that to a Soviet state, and he said he'd never seen so much government domination as is expressed by that since the Soviet Union.
So, not being partisan about these issues, which are really in fact not partisan, let me just suggest that there is something terrifically wrong with the Federal Government owning so much of these States. You can see that in Nevada, 93 percent of the State is owned by the Federal Government. In Utah, it's over 70 percent. In California, it's about 50 percent. This is a huge amount of public ownership of our lands.
As a result, you can see also that the ownership by the Federal Government is spread around the whole United States. In fact, there are about 19,000 counties in the United States that have public lands of some sort in them, and in those counties the Federal Government pays to those counties money that substitutes for the taxes that those counties would otherwise receive. We call this payment in lieu of taxes, and it's fair.
It's fair in the East where we have small amounts of land and the payments are substantial, but it's not fair in the West where we've taken a vast amount of public lands out of the system, and therefore, States can't actually have any kind of revenue stream from those public lands.
Now, the blue map that you saw that represented how much of the Western States is owned by the Federal Government is interesting, and Mr. Bishop I think is going to come back and talk about this startling fact, but it is clear that all of the people in the Western part of the country pay more in the way of taxes per family, per capita and otherwise, than in the eastern part of the country.
It's also clear that in the western part of the country, where we have this domination of Federal lands, that we pay less per pupil for schools than people in the East do. So we tax more and we pay less, and the reason we do that is because of the ownership of public lands by the Federal Government.
This leaves us in a difficult circumstance where it's just plain harder to grow in the West. Now, I've got to count my State, which is by many measures the best place in the country to do business, and I don't want to suggest there's a problem there. In fact, we love our public lands because people can go out and recreate, and that's why people who are high-tech and others want to come to Utah. It's a great place to live and to work and be. But you have to buy into the fact that if the Federal Government owns that property, you have to pay more in the way of taxes.
I have many friends who live in the Northeast who have said to me over time, these are America's lands. And if you look at the map, you have got a little bit of New Hampshire and Maine and there's a sprinkling around here in the eastern part of the country. But when they talk about America's lands, they're talking about the public lands in the West.
I spent some time at Disneyland one day with my wife and kids, and that can be very long and painful. We finally got into the ``Honey, I Shrunk the Kids'' exhibit, and I thought as we got to the door that we were almost ready to get on the ride, but then we got through the door and we had a long, long, half-an-hour-long line to wait through to get into the exhibit.
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I was uptight, irritated. They had to pass by people like me. They had pictures of America flashing on the walls, and I noticed a picture from my district. I thought, well, that's nice. Two pictures later there is another picture from my district. Three pictures later there was another. The fact is, we have beautiful, beautiful lands in the West, and we welcome everyone to come out and join us on those lands.
But if they are America's lands, then we have a responsibility as Americans to pay the costs of those lands. If we are not going to use them productively, if we are not going to tax them for productive use, then we have an obligation in America to pay for those lands.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. One of the things I have been hearing so many times, you may have said this already earlier, that PILT, payment for all these lands, is nothing more than a handout for the poor western counties.
Is this a handout or is this a responsibility that we have for these lands?
Mr. CANNON. Is that a handout or a hand in our pockets by the Federal Government? This is, in fact, not a handout at all.
Every county in the country taxes its public lands. Every county does. Every State has a regime for taxing public lands. But we can't, because the Federal Government is sovereign, we can't tax lands that are owned by the Federal Government.
So if you want people to be there for search-and-rescue when you get lost in some of the beautiful parts of my county or my State, we expect to be paid for that. It's not an expectation that's vacuous or whiny, it's an expectation based upon what we are giving up in these western States and in Utah, in particular.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. We are talking about what these lands can do and how we can benefit the constituents that are out there in these western lands as well. One of it deals with the bounties that have been placed in there in these western lands, what we can do if we actually bring them about.
I am often amazed how we sit under this quotation from Daniel Webster saying that in actuality if we want this country to move, we need to take the resources that are here and develop them. That's where progress comes.
The gentleman represents a State in an area that has a significant amount of natural resources that have yet to be developed, and I am talking specifically about oil shale. I notice that he has been joined here on the floor by Representative Peterson of Pennsylvania, two people who understand our energy policy specifically and who realize some of the energy policies that we have been talking about passing on this floor are going to have a negative effect on people, on real people.
I wonder if he could spend some time talking about the potential of oil shale and what it can do. I guess the basic question is, is it really possible to remove ourselves from a dependency on foreign sources of energy?
Mr. CANNON. I thank the gentleman. In fact, I paid, I think, $3.09 the last time I bought gas. When I took my daughter, one of my daughters up to school about 5 years ago, there was a gas war. We had low prices. It may have been 6 years ago. I paid 75 cents a gallon for gas and of that 75 cents, 42 cents was tax. We are not paying 42 cents on a gallon of gas that is over $3.
These are amazing numbers. Why we are there? Well, we are there because we have had policies that have restricted the development of oil and gas. There are two things I want to comment on just quickly in response to that question.
The first is that we have 250 billion tons of coal in America representing about 6 or 800 billion barrels of gasoline if we did coal-
to-liquids. A lot of people know that we are the Saudi Arabia of the world for coal, but very few people understand that we have more oil in our shale that's easily recoverable in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah than exists in all of Saudi Arabia.
If you look at the more difficult or more expensive to recover from shale, it's two or three times everything that you have in the Middle East. If we could just develop the oil that's in our shale, we would do remarkably well for America.
Let me just give you a sense of this. In other words, think of all the oil that comes out of Saudi Arabia, all the oil that comes out of Venezuela, all the oil that comes out of Mexico. We could easily replace that at a teeny fraction of the oil we have available in shale in this country. By the way, you asked the question, Mr. Bishop, is it possible to actually get the oil out of that shale?
Well, the Estonians have been doing it for 60 years. They have been producing oil out of shale for 60 years. The shale that we have in Utah is better, has much more oil, and, in fact, in 60 years, we have made massive progress technologically. The answer is unequivocal. We can do it.
The Federal Government owns the bulk of this shale. We need to assure that we can do it quickly without the kind of burdens. Let me just take a moment to tell you, we have a mine in Utah, it cost $330 million to develop that mine in 1977. The first thing I did when I came to Congress was to stop the BLM from spending $50 million to shut that mine up so it would be, as they said, safe.
We have now released that mine, but it has taken almost 2 years in a mine that's already developed to get to the point of licensing that so the people that lease the mine can produce. Their production is based on a very narrow, limited set of circumstances. We are in the way. The Federal Government is in the way of energy self-sufficiency for the United States. The people of America ought to say we want to get out of the way.
By the way, for the people of America, this body is actually an interesting place. People do what Americans want us to do. If you want cheaper oil, tell your Congressman to get with it and help us change the policies so we can develop our oil, particularly the oil and gas in the shale in the United States.
I know that Mr. Peterson is going to talk about oil and gas.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate it. I hope Mr. Cannon may have a chance to join us a little bit later.
We are talking about energy policies. It has an impact on people. We all like alternative forms of energy. That's important. But for the short term, we have to make life bearable for people. We have some options without having to rely simply on foreign sources.
Mr. Cannon understands oil shale very well, and he explained how that is one of our options. Another option we have is natural gas, which is a forte of Mr. Peterson at the same time. I guess the question has to be, we understand how high natural gas prices terribly impact citizens trying to live their lives, heat their homes. They impact the job market as well. They impact farmers when it comes time for fertilizer. I guess the question is, can we make domestic natural gas reserves available so it improves the lives of people?
If I could ask Mr. Peterson to spend a few minutes, 5 minutes or so, maybe explaining how that part of the energy puzzle can be dealt.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Yes. Natural gas, I call it America's clean, green energy, no NOX, no SOX, a third of the CO2. It's almost the perfect fuel. Now, a lot of people don't realize what all we do with natural gas, but natural gas is the basic ingredient of many of our products, polymers, plastics, petrochemical. Everything we manufacture has some form of natural gas in it or we have used natural gas to do it.
Natural gas is America's hope for the future. I call it the bridge fuel.
Now, just a few years ago, in fact, 6 years ago, we had $2 natural gas, and we had $16 oil. Just 6 years later we now have $7 natural gas, but we haven't had a storm in the gulf yet, we haven't started our winter heating yet. We know those prices will skyrocket much higher.
Well, it amazes me. I am going to speak a little bit about oil.
$87.50 was the price of oil, that it just closed at. Not a crisis in this Congress. I haven't heard any rustling of activity. We have a Senate bill and a House bill not conferenced on yet. I haven't seen where the House and the Senate have agreed to have their conference committee and move forward with their bill.
Now, maybe it's a good thing they don't, because let's just look at it. With the natural gas prices we have today, highest in the world, here is what their bill does. Their bill locks up 9 trillion feet of natural gas in the Roan Plateau. The Roan Plateau is a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was once set aside as the Naval Oil Shale Reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. That means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the OCS bill that passed last Congress in the gulf, will be put off-limits.
The Roan Plateau is ready to go. It has already gone through NEPA. It's ready for lease sale. This provision was not in the original Resources Committee bill and was added without any hearings in the 11th hour. That's the kind of legislation this Congress is putting forth to cause natural gas prices to continue to increase, locks up 18 percent more by policy changes.
I had some amendments in the energy bill in 2005. This guts the categoric exclusions if we stop allowing redundant NEPAs to stop the process. We had leases in the West where they had leased the land for oil and gas production, and 5, 6 and 7 years later, they are doing redundant NEPAs.
They had to do a NEPA for the whole layout. Then they had to do a NEPA for the road construction. Then they had to do a NEPA for every location. A NEPA study takes about a year. There is no reason that an overall NEPA on the project couldn't cover all those aspects in a year's time and make sure we do it right. No, we are going to take away that, and that will lock up more natural gas. Of course, we just heard from our friend about the 2 trillion barrels of oil from western oil shale.
Well, it's similar to tar sands in Canada. Everybody thought that wasn't a good thing. Well, they are now producing 1.5 million barrels a day. Their goal is 4 million a day. They are increasing every month, because they figured out how to release the tar sand oil, and we need to be working at releasing the oil shale oil because we have trillions of barrels there.
Should we have policy? Should we have legislation going that's going to take oil and gas? Then we go on down here a little further, we are going to have a $15 billion tax increase on the production of energy and the processing of it. Does that make sense? That means it is going to cost American taxpayers $15 billion more for energy somewhere down the road. Should we be taxing the production of oil and gas? I don't think so.
There is nothing in the bills before us about coal-to-liquids. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. It's a tragedy in America that we are not moving forward with coal-to-liquid and coal-to-gas, because, you know, today we are 66 percent dependent on foreign oil, and we are growing 2 percent a year, and we have $87.50, today's closing price. We hit $90 a few days ago. And just 6 years ago, it was $16. How much can the American economy absorb without a recession?
I was told by someone from the Department of State that they thought
$75 oil for any length of time would put America in a recession. It didn't. What some figure is a figure that the American economy can no longer absorb. Now we are approaching the heating season. Sixty-two percent of Americans heat their homes with natural gas.
What do we have? We have it locked up. These are all areas that are locked up. Clean, green natural gas. A natural gas well has never contaminated a beach. It has never really done major environmental harm. But, no, America has a policy that we are not going to use the cleanest, greenest fossil fuel there is, natural gas. We're just not going to produce it.
I don't understand that, but that's where we are, folks. High gas and high oil prices are because this Congress, not just this current Congress, but historically, 26 years ago Presidents and Congress locked up the outer continental shelf. We are the only country in the world not to produce it, the only country in the world not to produce.
This is the greatest energy reserves we have. Eleven miles offshore you don't even know they are there. You don't see it. I have legislation that says the first 25 miles will not even be open for drilling. The second 25 miles would be controlled by the State. The second 50 miles would be open, but States would still have the right to pass a bill to not produce if they don't want to. That gives States rights. Then the second 100 miles would be open.
Folks, when we make these decisions to open these up, when we make the decisions to make any major coal-to-liquid, coal-to-gas, when we make decisions to reopen nuclear and get it moving again, you are talking 8 to 10 years before you have any energy.
America is in a crisis today. I think $87.50 oil is a crisis. We have
$7 gas, and we know it's going to spike as soon as we start using our winter supply. When American homeowners find out the price of home heating oil, they are going to be pretty angry at Congress, and they ought to be.
Now, the gas prices that are out today, I heard the gentleman say
$3.09. In my State it's $2.89. But gasoline prices have not caught up with $80 oil. $80 oil means $3.29, $3.39 gasoline. There is still a glut of gasoline in the marketplace. This spring we had $3 something gasoline with $60 oil because there was a shortage of gasoline in the world.
We buy 20 percent of our gasoline now from Europe. We don't produce enough in this country. Europe didn't have any to sell us because they were using more than normal. There was a world shortage and so our price was much higher than it ought to have been, because it's a separate marketplace.
Now, just wait till gasoline catches up, the summer fuel burns off. Our refineries are now making home heating oil, and those on home heating oil are going to pay a tremendous price because there is none of that in the system. Those heating with propane are going to pay a much higher price. Those heating with natural gas are going to pay 10 to 15 percent more. Home heating this winter is going to be very expensive.
Do you know who even feels the pain worse, small businesses who use a lot of energy. There are no programs to help them. There is no LIHEAP funding to help them.
{time} 1715
Small businesses in America are going to struggle to make a profit because of energy prices. And natural gas, being one of the highest prices in the world, and we have lots of countries with very cheap natural gas, we're going to continue to export petrochemical jobs, polymer and plastic jobs, fertilizer. You know, here we're using ethanol now, it's big. We have to grow a lot of corn to make ethanol. We have to use a lot of fertilizer. Seventy percent of the cost of fertilizer is natural gas. If we make a hydrogen car, it's going to use natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock for most of our manufacturing. It's what we heat our homes with.
We need energy policy here in Congress. We don't want a bill that takes energy away from Americans. This bill takes energy away from Americans. This bill makes energy more expensive. The bill before us does nothing to produce energy and to bring down gasoline prices, to bring down home heating prices and to keep American jobs here. And there's no reason that America cannot be in charge of its future destiny with natural gas.
We can't control the oil market. We can control our natural gas market. We can be self-dependent. We now import 17 percent of our natural gas. We wouldn't have to import any of it. America is rich in natural gas, the clean, green fuel.
And I impose this Congress, natural gas could actually fuel a third of the auto fleet. It would save a lot more than CAFE standards. And I'm for better CAFE standards. But it would immediately take all construction vehicles, school buses, taxicabs could all be on natural gas. That's a known technology. It's just a conversion.
Folks, clean natural gas is what America needs to be about as we build our renewable future. All the renewables are built off of natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock. Folks, we need clean, natural gas so Americans can afford to heat their homes and can afford to drive their cars.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Pennsylvania, who understands this issue.
Let me see if I can borrow that one you have in your left hand. I'm not all that hot on a lot of the details of energy and mining, but I am a school teacher, and I just noticed on the back of this chart is a chart which goes through the salaries of teachers comparing Wyoming and Montana. And you find that a step one teacher in Wyoming is significantly higher than a step four teacher in Montana. And I want to tell you, there's only one reason for that disparity. Wyoming does more with their resources to develop them and use them to help fund their education system. It has all sorts of spin-off effects.
I appreciate the gentleman from Pennsylvania who understands this concept so significantly and has spoken so eloquently about it.
I'd also like to welcome the gentleman from New Mexico who is here, who clearly understands the issue of energy significantly.
We will have a potential energy bill before us. We will have next week a potential mining bill before us, both of which could have some difficult situations especially as they deal with Americans. So I'd like to yield to the gentleman from New Mexico to have a chance to talk for a moment especially on what we are doing, once again, as to our constituents.
Mr. PEARCE. I thank the gentleman for yielding and appreciate his leadership on this.
We are discussing extremely important things. For instance, in the mining bill, which will be coming to the floor, a heated debate really arises about what does it matter. What does it matter if we add an 8 percent royalty on to the price of minerals?
At one point yesterday in the debate, the chairman of our Resources Committee, Mr. Rahall of West Virginia, said, I see no reason, no reason whatsoever why good public land law should be linked to the gross national product. Now that is, to me, a stunning statement because I think policy should always consider the jobs in America. It should consider our standard of living, and it should consider the ramifications for our communities.
Communities in the West, where mining occurs on public lands, will be affected most by this new royalty that is being suggested by the majority party.
Now, we had comments at a field hearing, and we find the comments are very similar from the Democratic witnesses to the Republican; in other words, both sides agree. There's a James Otto, ``8 percent is excessive,'' he says.
``I'm only aware of a single royalty that is as high as the royalty proposed in the bill, just one in my 20 years of practice. An 8 percent royalty would really be ruinous,'' says James Cress of Washington on 10/2/07.
``I am particularly concerned about the potential impacts of the 8 percent net smelter return royalty called for in the last legislation. All the royalty costs will be absorbed by the mining companies, and this will be a direct adverse impact on the amount of mining tax revenues that flows into the State and to the counties.''
We had testimony from one country, and I think it was British Columbia, that increased their royalties and saw a tremendous decrease in their net tax revenues because companies simply moved out.
Today, companies can move their mining assets; they can move their mining investments by simply a flick of the computer. If it's that easy, then we should be very cautious. We should be concerned about the gross domestic product before we jump into these very significant arguments.
One of the letters that I have, and I would like, Mr. Speaker, to submit this as a part of the Record.
House of Representatives,
Committee on Natural Resources,
Washington, DC, October 16, 2007.Hon. Nick J. Rahall, II,Chairman, Committee on Natural Resources, House of
Representatives, Washington, DC.
Dear Chairman Rahall: This is to request that the Committee hold additional hearings regarding our country's mineral policy as it relates to military and economic security before we convene a mark-up of H.R. 2262. Notwithstanding the amendment in the nature of a substitute discussion draft circulated late last week, we are very concerned that H.R. 2262 moves our country's mineral policy in the very opposite direction of recommendations outlined in the two recent National Research Council (``NRC'') reports:
(1) Managing Materials for a 21st Century Military and
(2) Minerals, Critical Minerals and the US. Economy.
We are entering a challenging time for our nation which is only now beginning to become clear. China and India are consuming huge amounts of energy and minerals which they are willing to secure from parts around the globe and with which they are fueling unprecedented economic growth. At current rates of relative economic growth, one or both of them will surpass the United States in economic output within two decades. We are in a race. Now is not the time to rest. We must examine closely the consequences. . . . intended and unintended . . . of our actions. We owe nothing less to our children's future.
I. Mineral Policy and America's Military Security
One of the most fundamental functions of the Federal government is to provide for the common defense and our national minerals policy is inextricably linked to providing for that defense. It was America's natural resources--and the ingenuity and strong backs of American workers--that made us
``The Arsenal of Democracy'' that supplied the tools of victory in World War II. In many ways, minerals are the foundation to a strong modern military.
Requiring our military to import the strategic and critical minerals it needs from hostile foreign nations puts our military on its knees before the battle begins. It will make the United States military the ``paper tiger'' China's Mao Zedong wished for in 1956 when he coined the phrase. Attachment 1 provides examples of strategic and critical military materials upon which our military already relies on foreign sources for. If we rush to create a minerals policy that further discourages a domestic minerals industry that is already shrinking because of the existing regulatory constraints, we will have left a grave legacy that is threatening to our long term stability.
As discussed in the NRC's report, restarting or jump-starting a U.S. mining operation in response to supply interruptions would be very time consuming, expensive and in all probability, impossible. Consequently, the mineral policy moved by this Committee must take into account military needs. To this end, we request joint hearings with the House Armed Services Committee so that this issue can be fully understood by the Committee.
II. Mineral Policy and America's Economic Security
Mineral availability is a cornerstone to robust economic activity because minerals support the broadest range of manufacturing and industrial businesses, including transportation, defense, aerospace, electronics, energy, agriculture, communication, construction, and health care. According to the NRC's report, ``current lifestyles in the United States require per capita annual consumption of over 25,000 pounds . . . of new minerals . . . to make the items that we use every day.''
While our reliance on foreign sources of minerals may be less visible than petroleum, Attachment 2 illuminates the gravity of America's exposure in this regard. Our country is rich with minerals; however, the ``political availability'' compromises our independence on foreign sources of minerals. The NRC's report describes ``political availability'' as a significant part of mineral availability. The concept of
``political availability'' encompasses (a) legislation, rules and regulations that influence investment in mineral exploration and development and (b) the risks and results of change in these policies. While God has blessed our Nation with a rich natural resource base, it appears that the common sense with which He endowed our policy makers has not been used by its recipients.
We are concerned that H.R. 2262 will adversely affect both of these ``political availability'' components. We are unaware of any witness in the three legislative hearings held by Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources thus far who testified that H.R. 2262 will increase domestic mining activity. Rather, several witnesses testified that H.R. 2262, as drafted, will be devastating to our domestic production of minerals, will be crippling our economy and will send more jobs overseas. We believe that moving H.R. 2262 out of this Committee in advance of an analysis of its impact on the overall U.S. economy is premature.
ATTACHMENT 1.--EXAMPLE STRATEGIC AND CRITICAL MILITARY MATERIALS AND
FOREIGN IMPORT RELIANCE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Import
Material metal Uses (percent)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aluminum......................... Aluminum alloys in 44
airplanes, aerospace,
marine applications,
food cans.
Arsenic.......................... Semiconductors, 100
pyrotechnics,
insecticides.
Bismuth.......................... Magnets, nuclear 96
reactors,
thermoelectrics,
ceramic glazes.
Chromium......................... Steels, catalyst, 75
magnetic tape, plating.
Cobalt........................... Specialty steels; medium 81
or high temperature
fuel cells.
Columbium........................ Specialty steels........ 100
Copper........................... Wire, electromagnets, 40
circuit boards,
switches, magnetrons.
Gallium.......................... Optoelectronics, 99
integrated circuits,
dopant, photovoltaics.
Indium........................... Semiconductors, 100
metalorganics, light-
emitting diodes.
Lithium.......................... Batteries............... >50
Magnesium........................ Airplanes, missiles, 54
autos, photography,
pharmaceuticals.
Manganese........................ Specialty steels........ 100
Nickel........................... Specialty steels; 60
superalloys for jet
engine parts.
Platinum......................... Catalytic converters.... 80
Quartz Crystals.................. Electronic and photonic 100
devices (high purity).
Rhenium.......................... Specialty steels; high 87
temperature alloys &
coatings.
Scandium......................... Refractory ceramics, 100
aluminum alloys.
Silicon.......................... Photovoltaics, <50
semiconductors,
microprocessors,
alloys, electronic and
photonic devices.
Strontium........................ Medium or high 100
temperature fuel cells.
Tantalum......................... Specialty steels; 87
electronic capacitors.
Tin.............................. Superconducting magnets, 79
solder, alloys,
electronic circuits.
Tungsten......................... Specialty steels........ 71
Yttrium.......................... Laser rods, superalloys. 100
Zinc............................. Batteries, galvanizing, 63
paints, metalorganics,
pharmaceuticals.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ National Research Council, Managing Material for a 21st Century
Military and Minerals, Table 4-3.
On page 1 we're referring to two recent National Research Council, NRC, reports. And one quote is, ``We are entering a challenging time for our Nation which is only now beginning to become clear. China and India are consuming huge amounts of energy and minerals which they are willing to secure from parts around the globe and with which they are fueling unprecedented economic growth. At current rates of relative economic growth, one or both of them will surpass the United States in economic output within 2 decades. We are in a race. Now is not the time to rest. We must examine closely the consequences, intended and unintended, of our actions. We owe nothing less to our children's future.''
In light of this worry by the National Research Council, yesterday I had an amendment which would have simply required that if we ever are passed by any country and become the second largest economy in the world, that the implications of this bill simply be done away with; that is, that we would begin to do the things that would heal our economy.
I accept the fact that we could be overestimating the impacts of this bill that is coming to the floor, the mining legislation. But what I will not accept is that we have consequences in our economy without having some way to reverse those impacts.
The Chinese economy doubled gross domestic product in 5 short years. The combined economies of China and India have tripled in size over the last decade, and some predict that, at the current rate, the U.S. could very well become the second largest economy in the world. That's what I mentioned when we very first started, that the consequences of too hasty an action here could place our children into a position where they no longer have the standard of living to where we, as Americans, begin in a steep decline economically, so that we do not have the hope and the opportunity for the future which we currently have.
The National Research Council pointed out three ways in which they are very concerned about the potential ruinous effects. They're concerned about how much of the minerals that we are going to import. And again, I would show a chart to my left, that all of these elements in this picture get minerals that are currently mined in the U.S. Some are strategic, some are not, but our daily life revolves around minerals that we get from deep inside the ground. When we acknowledge that and when we understand where these minerals come from, we might have a different opinion than just trying to regulate the companies out of existence. We're going to use these elements whether or not they come from U.S. mines or not.
My recommendation is that we continue to mine these minerals inside the United States. Don't transport our jobs. Don't transport our national security to firms outside. Don't make us subject to another country to get the minerals which are required for national security considerations. Please, let's take time before we pass this legislation. Let's send it back to committee. Let's contemplate the effects of it.
And I would yield back to the gentleman and thank him greatly.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from New Mexico coming and talking about these issues, and I think people can realize we feel very strong and deeply about these particular issues. This is what happens in our States. We live with this issue all together.
You've heard today about the nature of our forests and what we must do to have healthy forests in the future. You heard about the impact it has on school children in those forest counties. But there is a proposal; it needs to come to the floor that we can debate about that as well.
You've heard about the significance of payment in lieu of taxes and what it means to Western States, about oil shale development, natural gas development, mining development, all of these which have an impact.
Now, I said earlier on, but once again I'm just an old school teacher. And it does have impacts beyond what we naturally think about. And I'm thinking specifically about my kids, about my salary, my retirement as a school teacher and what we do in the future in our Western States.
We noticed before, this is the chart, the amount of blue is how many, how much land is owned by the Federal Government in each State. I'd like you to contrast that, if you would, with this chart. The States in red are the States that have the most difficult time increasing the amount of money and paying for their education. The States that are red have the growth in education but they also have the most difficult time in adjusting for that growth. And if you look at that and then compare it once again with the public land States, you'll find an amazing correlation. The public land States are having the most difficult time funding their education, and I think there is a relationship to it which we have yet to fully investigate, and we ought to. It's a subject for a future time, but it's also one of those things that are important because there are collateral impacts that are extremely important on how we actually follow the advice of Daniel Webster up there, which told us to develop our resources so that we can move this Nation forward. And this is the time we have to do it. And there are right ways of doing it and there are probably imprudent ways of doing it. It's important that we do it the right ways, and we in the West clearly understand the significance of that.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your patience.
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