July 31, 2008
Mr. President, we are about to adjourn for the August recess without having passed a single piece of legislation addressing the energy crisis or the most important issue, which is the concern over rising gasoline prices.
I attended the Fourth of July parade in my home State. In Utah, there is also a 24th of July parade celebrating the anniversary of the time when the first Pioneer settlers came into the valley. In both parades, I had things shouted at me. Politicians have that experience. Usually, we hope the things that are shouted at us are complimentary. In this case, the things I had shouted at me in the parades were: "Why aren't you drilling? Why aren't you producing more American oil? Drill now." I said: We are discussing it. We are trying to do that. We are trying to get something done.
If there were a parade scheduled now, I would have to go back and say: The Senate would not let us vote on any of the proposals to increase the supply of American oil. There are proposals coming in the form of letters from Senators to the President of the United States saying: Will you please go to Saudi Arabia and beg them to produce some more oil?
There are suggestions that somehow we should sue Saudi Arabia or members of OPEC to get them to produce more oil. But we are not even allowed the opportunity to vote on proposals to produce more oil in the United States.
A lot of my constituents are not aware that at one point, not too distant in the past, America produced more oil than any other country in the world and controlled the pricing power over oil. We could affect the world price by opening more wells in east Texas. But in the 1970s, that pricing power left our shores and was transferred from the Texas Railroad Commission to the Saudi royal family. Now we are in the posture of begging the Saudi royal family to produce more oil when we have the capacity to bring that pricing power back to the United States by producing more here.
I wish to talk specifically about oil shale because I understand there has been an exchange on the floor about oil shale earlier, with the junior Senator from Colorado saying we are not ready, the technology is not finished, and, therefore, we should maintain the congressionally ordered moratorium on the Department of the Interior from promulgating the rules under which leases could be granted on public land.
Now, let's look at that argument for a minute.
The Department of the Interior has released draft rules. We know what they want to do. They have been prepared to do this, and are prepared to do it today. They cannot turn those draft rules into firm rules as long as the Democrat moratorium is in place. So when we wanted to lift that moratorium -- we tried to in the Appropriations Committee -- we were denied on a straight party-line vote. The Republican leader tried to lift that moratorium here. We were denied in a unanimous consent request.
So let's ask ourselves: What are those rules? The best analogy to help people understand what those rules are is to talk about a fishing license. If you want to catch fish, you have to get a fishing license. You go in and you pay for it and it is for a specified period of time. Now, there is no guarantee the fish will respond to your efforts to catch them. There is only an opportunity to go forward with it.
All we are talking about, with respect to the rules of the Department of the Interior, is let's give companies a fishing license. If the technology is not ready, the companies will know that. They will find that out very rapidly.
If the technology doesn't work, the marketplace will prove that it doesn't work, and companies won't invest in it.
This is not a government subsidy for oil shale. This is not even a government support of oil shale. This is simply a fishing license to say: Go see if you can find some fish or, in this case, go see if you can find some oil. If you can, and you can produce it at an economically acceptable price and in an environmentally friendly manner, then go ahead.
But in this body we are saying: No, we won't even let you look for it. We won't even let you move forward to try to find out if it will work.
The Senator from Colorado said: We are not ready. I would say to him: We are in Utah. We have a program going forward in Utah on State land that shows every indication of producing oil by the end of this year. The reason they can't produce large amounts of oil is that we don't have enough State land produce on a larger scale. If you are going to produce large quantities, you have to allow development on public lands, but there is a moratorium in place that says: We won't even let you look at these lands.
The easiest thing we could have done this week in Congress would have been to lift the moratorium. The least we could have done would have been to let the Department of the Interior implement the rules and give companies an opportunity to look at the Federal lands to see if they want to get a fishing license to catch some fish or, in this case, oil.
That is all we are asking for, but it has been objected to repeatedly and repeatedly.
If I march in a parade again, I am going to have a hard time explaining to anybody why the Senate won't allow us to do that.