[Page: S2034]
---

   Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I thought I would come to the floor today to speak again about energy and the current energy cost crisis in which this Nation finds itself.

   Many of us have been to the floor numerous times over the last several weeks comparing our current situation and the tremendous runup in gas prices with this administration's lack of an energy policy and how they correlate--or if they relate.

   I have said, most critically, over the last several weeks, the only policy in town is the ``tin cup'' policy: Give our Secretary of Energy a tin cup, and send him to foreign oil-producing nations to beg for a little crude.

   He has been begging. He wanted a lot more. He begged for 2 million barrels a day in additional production. He got considerably less than that. I think it is now a wait-and-see: How does this level out? What do the markets say? What is the consumer going to pay at the gas pump in July? My guess is, the consumer is going to be paying near $2 a gallon for regular gasoline, depending on where they are in the country.

   The reason for this situation is what I would like to talk about this afternoon. Congress can respond in some ways. But we cannot increase oil production in the short term because, largely, we have had a policy of reducing oil production in this country for the last two decades, and it takes time to bring that production back on line. A great many people out there are opposed to increasing domestic production--all in the name of the environment or all in opposition to using hydrocarbons or some other issue that has helped shape the Clinton/Gore energy policy over the last 8 years.

   When the Clinton-Gore administration came to town in 1993, its announced intention was to drastically alter the way the Nation used energy, especially fossil fuels. The President and the Vice President determined that a broad-based Btu tax would force us away from coal and oil and natural gas to renewable energies, such as solar and wind and biomass. That objective has remained the hallmark of this administration's energy policy--until now; that is, until the day before yesterday, when the President was blaming the Congress, saying we had failed to reauthorize the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--the salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico, where we have stored about 570 million barrels of crude oil.

   The President promised his Btu tax would raise nearly $72 billion over 5 years, from 1994 to 1998, and marketed it as fair, helpful to the environment, that it would force down our dependence on foreign oil, and that it would have trivial impacts on consumers.

   Congress did not pass the Btu tax because we thought it would be damaging to the consumer. And over the years we have become increasingly more dependent upon foreign oil. I doubt the President can declare a victory because he was unable to suck $72 billion out of the back pockets of Americans while at the same time he advanced policies that slowed down crude oil production in our country.

   In fact, the Btu tax would have unfairly punished energy-intensive States and industries. Estimates by the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers predicted the tax would hurt exports, reduce GDP by $38 billion, and destroy 700,000 American jobs.

   That is why the Congress finally refused to pass the tax, over the President's and the Vice President's objection. Vice President GORE and President Clinton claimed the tax was needed to balance the budget and fund large new spending programs to offset the negative impact of the tax. They also claimed that use of crude oil imports would be reduced by 400,000 barrels a day.

   At that time, DOE's own projections predicted--this is the

   President's own Department of Energy--that the tax would shave oil import growth by less than one-tenth in 10 years. DOE also predicted that by the year 2000, Americans would depend on foreign oil for three-fifths of their total crude oil requirements.

   So quite the opposite was going on inside the administration. The President was talking politics, and his own Department of Energy was analyzing the matter and coming up with some very interesting facts.

   The American Petroleum Institute, in testimony, said:

   ..... even if imports were to fall by the full 400,000 barrels a day claimed by the Administration, the cost of $34 billion in lost GDP is excessive relative to other alternatives for improving energy security. Using the Administration's optimistic predictions, the cost of the Btu tax works out to about $230 per barrel.

   Of course, that would have been devastating to an economy that is highly dependent upon fossil fuels that not only make our cars and trucks go, but feed the whole petrochemical industry which manufactures carpeting, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, and plastics, all of those things that make up our very large, integrated economy--therefore, the 700,000 estimated jobs lost if we were to raise the price of crude oil to $230 a barrel.

   In the end, Congress did the right thing; we refused the President's and the Vice President's policy and said it would simply create havoc in our economy. Congress did agree to raise taxes on transportation fuels by 4.3 cents--the first time the Congress has actually put a tax on fuel--and then put it into the general fund of the Treasury. Of course, it was argued to be a deficit reduction tax.

   A couple of years ago, we finally pulled that tax out of the general fund and put it back in the surface transportation fund, where all highway fuels taxes have gone historically, to fund the construction of roads, highways, and bridges.

   The Clinton-Gore administration's obsession with fossil fuel use reduction has actually put us in the position we find ourselves today. The President, on March 7, 2000, at the White House said:

[Page: S2035]

   Americans should not want them [oil prices] to drop to $12 or $10 a barrel again because that.....takes our mind off our business, which should be alternative fuels, energy conservation, reducing the impact of all this on global warming.

   He is referring again to the cost of fuel. He simply said it would move us away from a desire for alternative fuels if we were to see low gasoline and fuel prices.

   Isn't that terrible? The alternative fuels were synthetics, highly subsidized by as much as $25 to $30 a barrel by tax money and, of course, alternative energy and electricity by solar voltaic cells and by wind machines.

   The only problem is, I have not yet seen a car, or a truck for that matter, going down the road with a solar cell on the top of it. I don't think they run very well that way. Somehow the President and the Vice President, in their hatred of fossil fuels, have forgotten that point.

   That is kind of an overview of 1993 to the present. What has happened during this administration? Domestic oil production is down 17 percent, and our crude oil consumption is up 14 percent. Dependence on foreign sources of crude oil has risen to 56 percent of our total crude requirements. In 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, our dependency was only 36 percent. I can remember that time.

   I am sure some listening this afternoon will remember the gas lines, the frustration and even the violence that occurred when Americans found out for the first time there wasn't an abundance of energy. There was a shortage. They couldn't get what they needed for their commuting or the running of their businesses.

   Since that time, while this country has struggled to put a policy together, other policies of our Government, largely environmental policies--some for the right reason--have progressively reduced our overall ability to produce and use domestic energy sources. That, coupled with the fixation of this administration on eliminating fossil fuels, now brings us to that point where we are now over 56-percent dependent.

   We all remember in the early 1990s we were fighting a war in the Middle East. Why? Well, to help some of our allies. Those allies were large producers of crude oil, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. We were fighting Iraq because the Iraqis had crossed the border and started the war. In the end, as they retreated and we were victorious, they set fire to many oil wells in Kuwait. We remember that phenomenal picture from the Middle East of black clouds of smoke as those oil wells burned. Many of our oil field workers went in and put the fires out for our neighbors.

   Now, what is the irony of that? Today, the very enemy we fought is selling over 700,000 barrels of crude oil each day to the United States. Something is wrong about that. Something is wrong about an absence of foreign policy that has allowed that to happen. That is the reality of where we are.

   Americans grow angry when they understand this administration only has excuses and solar cells and windmills for an energy policy. They understand that the Clinton/Gore foreign policy, working hand in glove with its non-energy policy, now tolerates that we buy Iraqi oil.

   Of course, we are not sure where that money goes and what it is used for. Is Saddam Hussein being allowed to build another war machine with the millions of dollars a day that pour out of the pockets of our consumers into the treasury of Iraq? The Clinton-Gore administration, while making much of increased appliance efficiency, greater use of renewables from biomass and other ideas, ignores a very fundamental fact. A large part of our energy use cannot be addressed by these measures.

   I am not suggesting we not pursue new technologies and alternatives. Where a solar cell fits, put one up; where wind farms work, we ought to have them. We ought to be striving to build the efficiencies of the new wind turbines. At the same time, those will not fuel a nation that produces the kind of growth we produce and builds its efficiencies based on flexible transportation and the ability to send our people and our products in an integrated way around the Nation and around the world.

   The administration's failure to encourage domestic oil production and production of coal and natural gas has led us to

   this point of near crisis. This Congress will engage in the very near future in debating the issue to see what we can do in the short term to help solve the pressure being placed on our consumers, but we also will be looking at long-term policy to see if we can't begin to produce more of our own resources again.

   For example, if we have the right tax incentives and if we were able and willing to build a floor for the small 15-barrel-or-less producer, we are not talking about the major oil companies. We are talking farmers and ranchers and private property owners spread all across the mid to lower south central part of our country and southwest that are known as stripper well producers. Their break even is about $17 a barrel. When gas oil crude prices went to $10 a barrel last year, many of those wells were shut in. If we would help encourage that production once again, we could produce well over a million barrels of oil back into our economy that is not producing today.

   I think that is tremendously good policy, if the tradeoff is putting money in Saddam Hussein's hand to build a new war machine versus helping subsidize or provide incentives for the small producer across this country to bring back on line a million barrels a day of domestic crude oil.

   The administration has refused to acknowledge the vast oil reserves and gas reserves we have offshore and in ANWR, the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. We know we can explore and produce in these areas in an environmentally sound way. ANWR is an area about the size of Dulles Airport relative to the whole State of Virginia. Those opposed to exploring ANWR would have you believe that if we drilled inside Dulles Airport that it would pollute the whole State of Virginia.

   How foolish can some of these people get who make those kinds of arguments? The President listened. The Vice President listened. They have refused to promote a policy that would allow safe and sound drilling to provide the energy for our country.

   The Clinton-Gore administration recently announced a ban on future exploration for most of the Federal Outer Continental Shelf through the year 2012. That is where the real big oil reserves are left in this country, offshore. I know we all remember the oil spills of 20 years ago on the coast of California. What no one is talking about is the tremendous new technology that has been applied to the gulf and other areas where drilling goes on, where wells don't leak today and blowouts don't happen. If they do occur accidentally, they are immediately shut down. All of those technologies are in existence. I think anyone who has looked at the record of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico recognizes that it is clean and it is sound. It is extracting the resource and is having almost a zero impact on the environment of the gulf area and its coast lines.

   In 1996, the administration resorted to the little used 1906 Antiquities Act. The President argued it was a major emergency and he had to lock up these millions of acres in Utah. What he was really locking up, for fear that it might be mined, was 23 billion tons of low-sulfur, high-value coal that could have been used to generate electricity in our country today and well into the future.

   All of these areas that would have been mined--and they were a very small part of the over 1 million acres that the President locked up in the Grand Starcase/Escalante National Monument--would have been reclaimed in a natural way because that is part of the environmental policy of our country today. If you are going to disturb the land, once you have done so, you must put it back in as near a natural way as is possible.

   The Clinton-Gore administration has vetoed legislation that would have opened the Coastal Plain of the remote Alaskan national wildlife reserve. It is estimated that there are 15 billion barrels of domestic crude oil up there.

   The administration also has ignored a report prepared by the National Petroleum Council, requested by the Energy Secretary, explaining how the Nation can increase production and use of domestic natural gas resources from about 22 trillion cubic feet per year to more than 30 trillion cubic feet per

[Page: S2036]

   That would allow the Northeast, which is tremendously dependent upon oil for space heat, to convert to a much cleaner fuel, a much more efficient fuel, a fuel of natural gas, and bring down their dependency on oil fuel for home heat and space heat.

   The Clinton-Gore administration has shown little interest in solving our domestic energy problems until now, as the foreign oil producers have forced crude up to over $30 a barrel last month. Gasoline prices, last week, were $2 a gallon in San Francisco.

   Mr. President, I argue that the Clinton-Gore administration has acted in other ways designed to force us away from the use of a reliable, available, relatively inexpensive fossil fuel, and the only argument the President had this weekend during his radio address was: Congress, you are to blame.

   Yet I have listed numerous vetoes or efforts to block our administrative and rulemaking processes that have actually blocked production in our country. That is why many of us have suggested to this President that he needs to step back and work with Congress to define a national energy policy that promotes increased domestic crude oil and natural gas production, while looking at all of the other alternatives we have and the new technologies, especially clean coal technology. Nothing should be done in isolation of the other. It ought to well be a total package that we would want to work on.

   My distinguished friend from West Virginia, Senator ROBERT BYRD, spoke eloquently last week on the subject. I want to add a few thoughts to his comments. The U.S. has the world's largest demonstrated coal reserve base and more than 90 percent of our total fossil fuel energy reserves are in coal. Yet this administration has downplayed new coal-burning and clean coal technologies--the very kind of thing we ought to want to bring online as much of our electricity is generated by coal, and as we define and refine the science of global warming and attempt to understand the cause or causes and how to respond. At present rates of consumption our coal will last for up to 270 years. In other words, we blessed with huge coal reserves. Yet this administration's lack of policy has forced us into near crisis. Coal is used to generate 56 percent of our electrical supply and about 88 percent of the Midwest's electrical needs. Coal use for electrical power has risen more than 250 percent since 1970, while sulfur dioxide emissions has decreased by 21 percent due to technology and, in part, due to some of the money we put into research sponsored here that has moved that kind of technology.

   Now, as my colleagues think about all of this, here is a quote I found by the President over the weekend. Remember, I was talking about coal. I was talking about our tremendous need for production of electricity. Here is what the President was saying over the weekend:

   I think to a much greater degree, then, we have a commitment to the notion that we can improve the environment while we grow the economy--

   None of us disagrees with that. But he goes on,

   ..... that is what the whole global warming issue is about. All over the world, there are people who just don't believe that you can get rich unless you put more stuff in the air that heats up the earth. They think you have got to burn more coal and oil in the digital economy. That is not true.

   Mr. President, what you have said isn't true. What runs the digital economy of our country? What turns on the computer? What fires up the Internet? A solar cell? A wind mill? I don't think so, Mr. President. It is the abundance of electrical power.

   Let me repeat: Coal use for electrical power has risen more than 250 percent since 1970, and the sulfur dioxide emissions during that time have actually decreased by 21 percent. Furthermore, the gas the Clinton/Gore administration blames for

   global warming, carbon dioxide, isn't a poisonous gas and isn't regulated under the Clean Air Act.

   The point I am making is simply this: An abundant economy--the kind we are experiencing today that has us at or near full employment--is a direct result of an abundance of relatively inexpensive energy. The history of our country has been based on the availability of energy. That is why we are the wealthy Nation we are today. Look at the rest of the countries of the world; as they strive to grow and provide an economy for their people, they develop their energy base.

   My wife and I and a group of business people from Idaho were in China in December. The skies were so dark there in Beijing that you could hardly see because they don't have the clean coal technology we have. Yet they are growing very rapidly and they need an abundant source of energy. They are building dams and nuclear reactors, and they are searching for a cleaner way to burn their coal because they know if they are to grow and provide their country and their citizens with opportunity, they are going to have to use coal to generate electric energy. President Clinton, I don't think you really get it. Do you think this new hi-tech, digital economy happens out there on its own? It is, in fact, a product of a nation who has an abundant energy base. In November of 1999, the EPA sued several coal-burning utilities, claiming they had made major modifications in their facilities without applying for new resource review permits. Utilities maintained that these were modifications made during routine maintenance. They were still providing high-quality energy with less emissions. Why is EPA out there suing at this moment, at a time when there is a deficiency of energy in this country and we ought to be promoting more? Certainly, we ought to be promoting it with all of the newest technology. But you don't do that by suing; you do that with policies that encourage people to do the right thing.

   Lastly--and this is the irony of this administration which likes to think it has an energy policy--this morning, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt is out looking for a dam to tear down. Eight years ago, he said he would like to knock down a really big dam while he is Secretary of Interior. Really big dams produce a lot of big power, Mr. Secretary, or haven't you figured that out? Big renewable power, hydropower. It doesn't have emissions; it is very clean. Yes, our fathers and forefathers chose to dam some rivers to generate electricity. Those were efficient ways to do it then, and they are finding out they are environmentally sound ways to do it now. Yet Mr. Babbitt wants to tear down one, two, or three dams, or I guess as many as he can get his hands on, or find a policies that make it difficult to keep these dams running.

   Why don't we simply work to improve those dams? Why don't we make them more efficient by adding new technology to the dams, putting new turbines in them that are friendly and more efficient. It is beginning to happen nationwide. Why should we deny our country 20 percent of its energy base, or bad mouth that energy source, or attempt to tear it down? No, what I am trying to say this afternoon in this collection of thoughts is, Mr. President, I don't think you get away by just pointing a finger at a single action of the Congress and saying you didn't give me emergency authority over the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, so therefore our energy crisis is your fault, Congress.

   I think I have named 15 or 20 issues on which this administration has taken a strong anti-energy, anti-production approach toward dealing with energy policy in this country. Mr. President, we can solve our energy problems. We are a marvelously creative Nation. But we don't do it by simply saying no. We do it by producing where we can produce, by creating less dependency on foreign sources, while at the same time building the kind of science and technology that allows us ever increasing

   energy efficiency and environmental improvement. I think in the coming years we are going to debate the global climate change issue. Getting rid of hydrocarbons isn't the answer. Getting rid of fossil fuels isn't the answer. It is finding better and more efficient ways to use them, and then allowing our technology to be sold and transferred to the world at large. If our clean coal technology were at use in China today, China would be a healthier, more environmentally clean place to live.

   Someday they will be able to afford that technology, and they will want it. It is our businesses and our companies that develop it that ought to be encouraged to sell it to them. That is

[Page: S2037]

END