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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (2713)	10/19/2005 11:09:41 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24230

Rep. Bartlett's energy talk to Congress Oct 17 Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Congressional Record via personal website Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I have here an article that appeared on the front page of USA Today. It is above the fold. It is the center article. It says: Debate Brews: Has Oil Production Peaked? The undeniable facts that spawned this article were noted by a number of the leading persons in our country several months ago, Boyden Gray, McFarland, James Woolsey, and a large number of retired four-star admirals and generals when they noted the facts that are on our first chart here: That we have in our country only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil; we have 8 percent of the world's oil production. Just those two statistics together say something rather interesting. If we have only 2 percent of the oil reserves but are producing 8 percent of the world's oil, that means we are really good at pumping oil, does it not? That means that we are pumping down our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world. We represent only 5 percent of the population, they noted, and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import about two-thirds of what we use. They wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the reserves and use 25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we use is a very large national security risk. We really need to do something about that as a country. Whether you believe, as this article points out, that oil has peaked--in just a moment, Mr. Speaker, we will note how this term came into existence--or whether you believe that we need to do something about energy because of this national security concern, what you are going to do is essentially the same thing, because what you need to do, if this is just a national security concern, is to free ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. ...Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman for yielding and I thank him for organizing this session. I want to go very quickly through one item, and as we said we will continue later. I am a physicist. As a physicist, energy is tangible to me but to most people energy is intangible. You cannot touch it, see it, feel it, smell it or taste it. In other words, with our senses we cannot detect it. The only tangible aspect of energy for most people is the price at the gas pump and the utility bill at the end of the month. But I have a wish and I wish it were true but my wish would be that energy would be purple. If energy would be purple it would be tangible. We could see it. And if you drive up to your house in the middle of the winter and saw the purple oozing through the walls and coming out in rivulets around the doors and windows where they are not sealed properly, you would say, oh, that is horrible. I am wasting all that energy. It is costing me money. So we would make sure that we would get the house sealed up. ... I am wearing a purple tie for a reason. First of all, I like it. But, secondly, its keeps reminding me if energy were purple, we would certainly change our energy use habits and we would do a much better job of conserving, as the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) observed earlier about conservation. That is very important. And I have to tell everyone in this Chamber and all of my colleagues, there is no faster, cheaper way to increase our oil supply than to conserve what we use. Because we can get the use of more energy at lower cost by doing that than by any oil exploration scheme and refinery-building scheme or anything else you wish to do. It costs less to conserve energy than it does to produce more. (17 October 2005) Rep. Bartlett has many other interviews and speeches on Peak Oil, many of them available by searching on the Energy Bulletin website. The USA TODAY article to which Rep. Bartlett refers in his opening remarks is available online: "Debate brews: Has oil production peaked?". energybulletin.net