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“UNITED STATES INCREASING DEPENDENCY ON IMPORTED PETROLEUM” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H7707-H7709 on Nov. 1, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
UNITED STATES INCREASING DEPENDENCY ON IMPORTED PETROLEUM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, as we complete our commemoration this evening of our dear colleague Congressman Jerry Solomon of New York, I am reminded that his patriotism and his devotion to duty inspired us all, and as we confront this latest test of America's will and position in the world and what is just for all people, I am reminded of a book that I have been rereading called Sacred Rage that puts in context some of the forces that are arrayed against the United States and our interests now and the entire issue of terrorism and its roots.
In that book by Robin Wright, much is discussed, including some of the religious fervor that has been promoted and directed against the people of the United States, some of the hatred of U.S. policies in the Middle East that are at the basis of some of the antipathy toward our country and our people, but also the economic underpinnings of the unrest in the Middle East and Central Asia and how directly it is tied to petroleum and oil.
This evening I am going to spend a little bit of time talking about that because, as the American people understand better some of the underpinnings of the terror, we can get a clearer sense of new directions to set in order to build a more peaceful world for the future.
This evening I wanted to talk about the United States' increasing dependency on imported fuel and petroleum, and I have two charts here that describe it very clearly.
This is a chart dating back to the mid-1980s and each year showing an increase in the amount of imported oil that comes into our country, and in spite of conservation efforts, in spite of other things that we have done, more miles per gallons and so forth, we have become more and more dependent on imports of petroleum to drive this economy.
We imported 1.2 billion barrels of oil in 1982, but last year, 3.3 billion barrels, and so we have nearly tripled in the last 20 years our dependency on imported petroleum. Serious work on alternative fuels has been largely ignored, while billions of dollars in tax subsidies and profits have accrued to the oil industry.
The second chart that I have gives a sense of our entire petroleum usage in this country, which is the red set of bars here, and this is just the last decade from 1992 to the present showing that the number has been rising slowly, the usage has been rising slowly in total petroleum consumption, but the yellow bar underneath shows how much is imported of that total, and my colleagues can see that our total consumption is going up but the amount of imported fuel is going up as a larger share of that. In each single year of the 1990s and last year, it has gone up to now almost half of total usage in this country, and over half of what is imported comes from the Middle East.
Last year, the United States imported more than 3.3 billion barrels of crude oil, and our largest supplier, Saudi Arabia, actually sold us over 557 million barrels. America's addiction to imported oil threatens our freedom of action. It saps the lifeblood from our economy, and truly, it distorts our foreign policy goals.
What an irony of modern history that while our country's bombs fall on Iraq's no fly zone, our Nation continues to purchase an estimated
$15 billion worth of Iraqi crude annually. That is really something to think about.
America's addiction to imported oil threatens our freedom of action without question. A couple of decades ago when President Jimmy Carter warned about America's growing energy dependence on the outside world, our Nation responded by creating the Department of Energy with the goal of putting America on a course to be more self-sufficient.
Conservation saved millions of barrels per day, and more fuel efficient cars stemmed the growing usage of oil, but truly, Americans were never really committed to being energy independent, and we fell asleep as to the risks, again as these charts attest. We are more dependent now on imported oil than at any time in our history.
Half the oil, as I mentioned, that we consume is imported, and half of that comes from OPEC, from the OPEC cartel. We spend $86 billion on our oil habit every year, and in the meantime, those dollars are foregone for domestic investment opportunities in alternative fuels for America's independence such as biodiesel, ethanol, clean coal, the range of alternatives that exists if we but had the will to apply them.
The United States Department of Energy itself has warned us that dependence on foreign oil has cost our economy deeply. Price manipulation, if you think about it, by the OPEC cartel from 1979 to 1991 cost our economy over $4 trillion. One of the earlier speakers this evening talked about September 11, and in some places in our country the price per gallon going up to over $4 a gallon. Think about the price manipulation that my colleagues might have seen in their own communities, in their own towns and think about all those dollars and how much wiser it would have been had we invested those here at home in domestic production.
America's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, has been heavily influenced by the extraction and removal of oil, and in fact, oil has become a distorting proxy for our foreign policy. It clouds it. It creates a situation where we cannot see politically clearly enough in that region of the world. We ought to remove it as a proxy for our foreign policy, and we ought to make a commitment to do it.
Becoming energy self-sufficient here at home makes global economic sense, too, because over the next 15 years the world oil reserves will begin diminishing. They have reached their peak in terms of availability on the face of the globe, and prices will rise even higher with each barrel pumped. There is no more opportune time for our Nation to get serious.
Putting America on a sound energy footing will require national leadership, and it will require the active involvement of our Federal Government and our State governments. The goal should be to make each State in our Union energy independent to the greatest extent possible and eliminate Federal requirements that discourage alternative fuels.
If you look at our defense budget, just the cost of maintaining the oil supply lines from the Middle East at a minimum costs us over $50 billion a year, $50 billion a year. That has to do with military emplacements that have been stationed in that part of the world, ships that patrol, planes that fly, et cetera. Imagine if we could be investing that kind of money here at home to make ourselves energy self-sufficient.
The State of Minnesota, and I just returned from there, is leading the way in new ethanol producing plants that are also creating new value added for our depressed world countryside. The Federal Government really needs to take a look at Minnesota, and every other governor should take a look at Minnesota. They are doing so much to encourage the use of renewable fuels, and I sort of felt as I went through Minnesota and I looked at these various farmer co-ops that were producing this ethanol, I thought I was seeing a modern day incarnation of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison. They are tinkering around and finding an answer and applying it in that great State.
In addition to those kind of efforts, I have introduced other legislation that will deal with America's long-term energy dependence. One piece of legislation would expand and rename what we call the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and rename it the Strategic Fuels Reserve to allow that reserve to also access ethanol and biodiesel, not just crude oil and petroleum. The biofuels initiative would authorize the Secretary of Agriculture to provide loans for production distribution, development and storage of biofuels beyond the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
These fuels provide the American farmer with new market opportunities, and their mass production could provide the rural areas of this Nation with the economic infusion of jobs and investment that has been dreamed about but has not occurred for generations. With a bill that has been introduced in the other body by Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, it is my great hope that for the first time we can look at this biofuels initiative and make it a central pillar in new agriculture legislation that will clear this year for our great Nation.
If you think about commodity crises and their levels today, it is clear that more can and should be done to utilize those domestic surpluses to produce new fuels for this economy. Economic security is provided by the increased utilization of renewable biofuels and would provide significant economic benefits.
According to our own Department of Agriculture, a sustained annual market of 100 million gallons of just biodiesel would result in a $170 million increase in income to farmers, and that is a very small increase.
Ethanol, biodiesel and other alternative fuels also provide us with environmental security. Biodiesel contains no sulfur or aromatics associated with air pollution, and the use of biodiesel provides a 78.5 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions compared to petroleum diesel, and when burned in a conventional engine, provides substantial reduction in unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.
For too long we have been uncreative and cynical about the opportunities that alternative energy sources provide us. Some day, not so far from now, the oil reserves will be tapped dry. Alternative energy sources like ethanol, biodiesel, solar energy, wind power, geothermal, fuel cells, clean coal and hybrids will provide us with new opportunities to become more energy independent and to determine our own destiny, not be forced to shape the foreign policy and economic domestic policy of this Nation based on imported petroleum.
I have been active on this issue for quite a while. Last year, as I mentioned, during the appropriations committee markup, we had an amendment which would have increased the appropriated amount for renewable energy programs by $106 million. It failed in committee, but an amendment I cosponsored with former Congressman Matt Salmon increased that funding by an additional $40 million.
We just have to be vigilant, and if one looks at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which I referenced a little bit earlier in my remarks tonight, if we think about that reserve, it should hold about 700 million barrels of crude. It only has 545 million barrels today, sufficient to push the United States from wild price swings for a period of approximately 53 days. None of the fuel in that reserve is biobased. In fact, 92 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been purchased from foreign sources; 41.9 percent from Mexico; 24 percent from the United Kingdom; and over a fifth from the Middle East, the OPEC-producing Nations.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve should also include the development of alternatives to our Nation's reliance on petroleum.
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Every single part of our government should be asking the question, how can we move America toward a more independent future? How can we make our economy more secure in the years ahead?
This is a primary source of instability. Since the economically damaging Arab oil embargoes of 1973 and 1974 and 1979, to the current recession which was precipitated by rising oil prices that began in 1999, the economic stability of the United States has too often in modern history been shaken by economic forces outside our borders. How long is it going to take us to wise up?
Legislation here should shift our dependence away from foreign petroleum as our primary energy source to alternative renewable domestic fuels. Currently the United States annually consumes about 164 billion gallons of vehicle fuels and 5.6 billion gallons of heating oil. In 2000, 52.9 percent of these fuels were imported. That means every time you go to the gas station and you fill your tank with gasoline, half of what you pay goes offshore to one of those oil cartel interests. Does that make you feel good? Would you not rather be investing those dollars in this country?
Since 1983, the United States importation of petroleum and its derivatives has nearly tripled, rising from 1.25 billion barrels in 1983 to a level of 3.3 billion barrels in the Year 2000.
If we think about the benefits of continued development and utilization of ethanol and biodiesel, they involve energy security for our country, economic security based on independence that we grow and process here at home, and environmental security.
In terms of the Middle East and the situation we are now facing with Enduring Freedom, there is absolutely no question that every single one of those Gulf oil states, their economies are propped up by the dollars that come from inside this economy. Now, we cannot cut them off tomorrow, it would create a terribly disruptive situation in that part of the world. But it is high time that the United States thought very hard about how it is going to live up to the promise of our founders, and that is our own new Declaration of Independence, recognizing how our independence is being subscribed by forces that perhaps because of inertia we have let overwhelm us, but now, particularly at this time in our history, to be wise enough and to have enough foresight and enough determination to wean ourselves off of this dangerous dependence on imported petroleum.
To think that we have major military presence in the Middle East, not because of Enduring Freedom, that has come on recently, but major military presence to patrol those oil lanes and to make sure that that product gets to our shores, should cause every single American to think very hard. What does that mean to our children's future? What does it mean to the independence of this country?
Think about the fact that $50 billion to $100 billion of taxes paid every year by the people of this country go directly into our defense budget to support the petroleum industry, which is largely now every year more and more an imported product into this market. Would it not be wiser to spend those dollars here at home, using our ingenuity, using our promise, using our hopes for a better future, and investing every single dime here at home where it would create ripple effects into our economy and cut our very dangerous dependence on imported petroleum?
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank those who have listened this evening. I think that this is absolutely the most important economic issue that faces us as we try to move toward peace and resolution of the very serious threat that is facing our country from the Middle East. But unless one understands this piece of the equation, one will never be able to understand how to lead us to a more secure and independent future.
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