Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2006

MAKING EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30, 2006--Continued -- (Senate - April 25, 2006)

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, there is no bigger issue facing the economy of the United States of America at the current time than the high cost of energy, and it has a ripple effect throughout the entire economy. In my State of South Dakota, we have farmers who are getting ready to go into the fields to plant. Obviously, agriculture is a very energy-intensive industry.

In my State of South Dakota, we rely heavily upon the travel industry. People come to our State to see the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, so we are a very energy-intensive State. We have long distances to cover. So when gas prices come up and shoot through $3 a gallon or near that level in my State, it has a profound impact on the economy of our State and on the pocketbooks of all South Dakotans. It is important that this issue be addressed.

We have heard a lot of speechifying on the floor of the Senate today and a lot of news conferences held in front of gasoline pumps across this country, everybody attacking and pointing fingers and playing the blame game as gas prices have steadily crept upward.

I will be the first one in this Chamber to say that if, in fact, the oil companies have profiteered at the expense of hard-working consumers in this country, that they should be prosecuted to the full letter of the law. If there is manipulation, collusion, price fixing, or any other form of anticompetitive behavior for which we have laws in this country, then they need to be held accountable under those laws.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that if, in fact, they benefit from policies that are put in place, economic policies from which they can benefit, whether that be a tax incentive in the Tax Code today, that they have an accountability to us as Members of Congress to explain why, for example, they can pay out $400 million to a retiring executive or CEO.

It seems to me at least that there are some very hard questions that need to be asked and some very serious answers that need to be given by folks in that industry. They need to be accountable to the American public. As I said before, I believe we need that accountability. I believe we need to look at those policies in place today from which those companies benefit. If, in fact, they are making such enormous profits, then perhaps they don't need the support and the tax incentives that are given to them by the American taxpayers, by Congress. So I am not going to in any way defend what are the practices, I believe, of many of the big oil companies in this country.

Having said that, though, there is also a lot of hand wringing going on and self-righteous politicking going on right now about the high cost of energy and attempts again to cast aspersions, cast blame, try and blame the President, blame the Republicans, and all these efforts that are made by people who would rather have a political issue than they would have a solution.

I have to say it seems to me that at the heart of this very issue is also what I would call a decade of obstructionism. We have tried for many years--I served for three terms as a Member of the House of Representatives--to get legislation through that would allow us to lessen our dependence upon foreign sources of energy, to add to the supplies we have in this country, to allow us to take advantage of the rich resources we have in America.

Every time we have tried to do that since I have been here as a member of the majority party in the House of Representatives and now in the U.S. Senate, we have been blocked. We have been rebuffed by the folks on the other side of the aisle. In many cases, those have been tactics employed which haven't reflected the majority in the Senate. There have been steps taken to create a supermajority, a filibuster threshold over which we would have to get in order to get some of these policies put in place.

I go back to 1995 when, at that time, the Republicans had just taken control of the Congress and they passed in the budget that year legislation that would authorize exploration on the North Slope of Alaska. It passed the House and Senate, went to President Clinton's desk, and it was vetoed. We hear this still being debated in the Senate today. We get up and talk about the importance of taking advantage of the resources we have here in the United States of America, including the North Slope of Alaska; we hear the Democrats on the other side get up and say: Well, you can't do that. It could take 10 years for us to get that production on line. Well, it is 10 years later. That was 1995. It is now 2006, and we could have a million more barrels of oil in the pipeline today addressing what is a very serious supply problem in this country, had that bill been signed into law back in 1995.

We have tried repeatedly since that time, a number of times as a Member of the House of Representatives, where we voted. We voted to allow for that development to occur, for that exploration to occur, and perhaps eventually production to occur, and, of course, again it was blocked and stopped.

Most recently in December, in the Senate, before we adjourned for the Christmas holiday, we had a vote on whether we were going to do something to help ourselves in the area of energy independence and to develop that rich resource we have, somewhere between 6 billion and 16 billion barrels of oil on the North Slope of Alaska, or about a million barrels a day. We get about a million and a half barrels a day from Saudi Arabia. Can you imagine how it would lessen the supply problem if we were able to bring that energy on line in this country? Yet again it was filibustered. We had 57, 58 votes in the Senate--a clear majority for doing something about our supply problem. Yet the other side again blocked and now wants to blame, instead of doing what we ought to have been doing all along, and that is working in a bipartisan way to address what is a very serious crisis in America.

I remember when I was growing up back in the 1970s, and people who were around at that time also remember the gas lines, remember the talk at the time about we are way too dependent upon foreign energy; we have to do something to lessen our dependence on foreign sources of energy. At that time, we were 50 to 55 percent dependent upon foreign sources of energy. Here we are some 30 years later, and 60 percent of our supply comes from outside the United States. We have had opportunities throughout the course of the time that I have been here to do something about that. Every time I have voted to develop, explore, and to bring on line many of those resources which are available to us for development, it has been blocked and stopped by those on the other side who insist on having a political issue rather than a solution.

Just because I was interested in this debate, as a Member of the House--and as I said, I voted on energy exploration on the North Slope of Alaska, what we know as ANWR--I went up there last year because I wanted to find out what the debate was all about because in trying to understand these issues, when you come down here on the floor of the Senate, I believe it is important that you have a full perspective and insight into the arguments that are made by those on the other side. So we went to some of the development sites. We went to Prudhoe Bay, we went to the Alpine site, we went to Kabarak, and we went to the section 1002 area, which is the area which was proposed for development by an agreement that occurred way back in 1980, I believe between Senator Stevens and someone on the other side of the aisle at that time. We looked at that area. We took one of those little planes, and we flew out there and walked around in that particular area, and we looked at the technology that is available today at some of those sites and how they, with a very minimal footprint on the surface, are able to access enormous amounts of energy below the surface in an environmentally sound way. They use ice roads, and then during the summer months when everything melts, the roads disappear; they are gone.

It is a remarkable thing for anybody who wants to see it. You walk away from that saying: Hold on just a minute here. I don't understand what the big issue is. We have an opportunity to do something about what are the most pressing economic issues and one of the most pressing national security issues facing our country, and that is energy and energy independence, energy security, and we have this vast resource up there and we can't get at it because it is consistently filibustered here in the Senate even though there is majority support, 57, 58 votes in favor of that. Yet after it passed the House and it went through the Senate, it got to conference and it came back, and we had an opportunity to do something that would allow us finally--finally--to explore and hopefully bring on line that incredible resource on the North Slope of Alaska.

For those who are concerned about the impact on the environment, you should know that the caribou are doing fine. Caribou numbers have actually increased, and they have dramatically over the past 30 years in that area.

My point very simply is this: We as a nation have to do something to help ourselves. We cannot continue to be held over a barrel by the sheiks and

the mullahs in the Middle East or by Venezuela or any of the other countries from which we derive the majority or the vast majority of our energy supplies in this country. America needs to be energy independent.

I believe that consists of many things. I have been a big proponent of renewable fuels. As a Member of the House and now as a Member of the Senate, I was delighted that we were able last summer in the Energy bill to include in there a renewable fuel standard for the first time. As a matter of policy in this country, we have said we are going to guarantee a market for renewable fuels. Frankly, why would we not, when we have all of these things which we raise and grow, take a bushel of corn and be able to convert it into 2 1/2 gallons of fuel we can use to run our economy here in this country, do that? It makes so much sense, and it lessens our dependence upon our addiction to oil, which, as the President said in his State of the Union Address, and I give him great credit for that, is something we need to do, a direction in which we need to move. Renewable energy is an important component of that. I believe there are a number of things that we need to be doing in the area of conservation as well, but I want to see more partnerships between manufacturers and retailers and producers of ethanol and biodiesel and other renewable energy so that we can begin to get away from that enormous amount of dependence we have on oil.

Even today, we hope to produce in the very near future 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol, which is what is called for in the renewable fuel standard. I think we are going to have to increase that dramatically because we are going to be there very soon. We are already at the 4.5 billion gallon level, on our way very quickly to 7.5 billion gallons, because we have a desperate need in this country, and production is coming on line more and more all the time. But even at that level, we use about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year in this country. So ethanol represents about 3 percent of what the total demand or total consumption in America is for energy today. So it is important in this whole debate that we continue to develop those other sources, those traditional energy sources until such time as we can get where we begin that transition toward renewable energy.

But in the short term, we have a need. We have a need for oil resources. As I said, in places such as Alaska, we have an opportunity to do some things offshore in this country. We have a lot of offshore resources and reserves that are available, not only of oil but of natural gas, which is also a desperate situation which many people in my part of the country, in farm country, depend upon because that is what fertilizer is made from.

Every time we have had an opportunity to do something to address the long-term issue of supply in this country, we have met the politics of obstruction. I mentioned earlier going back to 1995 when Congress passed legislation that would authorize exploration of energy in Alaska. But if you look more recently than that, going back even to 2003--when the President took office in 2001, they created an energy task force, they made recommendations, they came up with an energy plan, and there was an energy bill that was debated up here on Capitol Hill, several different permutations of that, and ultimately one passed. In 2003, an energy bill passed. It passed the House and Senate, and it went into conference. The conference came out with a report that passed overwhelmingly in the House, came back to the Senate in November of 2003, and it was filibustered.

It failed by two votes. Fifty-eight votes to shut off a filibuster here in the Senate that would have gotten us an energy bill 2 years sooner, gotten us down the path toward a renewable fuel standard 2 years sooner, and addressed some of those supply issues 2 years sooner. But no, it was blocked. It was delayed, it was filibustered, and it was killed in 2003 by that Congress.

So to have people getting up now and many of my colleagues on the other side going out and holding news conferences and getting up on the floor of the Senate and beating their chests and making all these self-righteous speeches, to me it seems to be the very essence of hypocrisy, if you look at a decade-long practice of obstructionism when it comes to putting in place sound energy policies that would have lessened our dependence upon foreign sources of energy and put us much closer on a path toward energy independence.

So as we get into this, I have a piece of legislation which I have introduced along with Senator Obama from Illinois that would provide additional incentives for fuel retailers to begin to install pumps that would pump E-85, to build the demand and continue to create this market, this opportunity to work on the production side. On the retail side, again, we need to be working with the manufacturers when it comes to these flex fuel-type vehicles. I will continue to press forward on renewable fuels. That legislation--it is a bipartisan bill--and I hope it is something we can move through this Chamber, along with other types of initiatives, including additional supply initiatives.

Frankly, there is one other issue which I should also mention because, there again, we ran into basically party-line resistance in the Environment and Public Works Committee. We tried to pass through the Environment and Public Works Committee earlier this year legislation that would expand our refinery capacity. We have not built a refinery since 1976. We had Katrina wipe out much of our refinery capacity in the gulf and, as a consequence, we are having a difficult time not only with the supply, but we are also having a difficult time with refineries. We have what, in my view, we ought to be doing, and that is waiving a lot of these requirements on these boutique fuels because right now, at this particular time of year, the refineries have to go through this exercise of remixing and coming up with all of these different types of blends. It seems to me that at a minimum, we ought to be able to at least give them some temporary relief from that, but we also need to be building more refineries in this country.

We voted on that in the Environment and Public Works Committee, and it went down for all intents and purposes on a party-line vote. There was one Republican who voted with the Democrats. The fact is, that is true. But we had a wall of opposition from the Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee to even reporting the bill to the floor so that we could engage in a debate so that all Senators have an opportunity to participate in that debate about whether we ought to do something about the issue of refinery capacity in this country.

So my point again very simply is this: Since I have been here, in three terms in the House and during my time in the Senate, I focused on energy because it is important to my State, as I said earlier, and because I am a big proponent of increased use of renewable fuels. But every time we have had a chance to vote, whether it is ANWR, whether it is offshore production, whether it is refineries, whether it is the Energy bill in 2003, we run into the same arguments. And you will hear the same arguments that we heard in December and that we heard back in 1995 when we debated at that time the authorization of exploration in Alaska, and that is: It will take 10 years. Well, like I said, 10 years ago, if President Clinton had signed that bill into law, that 10 years would now be up. But the point is, we can't afford to wait another decade. We can't allow another decade of obstructionism to prevent us from doing what we ought to be doing to make America's energy future more secure. It is important that we focus as Senators, and I hope in a bipartisan way. But it doesn't help the issue to have all of this partisan hand-wringing and politicking. I know it is a year divisible by two. Whenever it is a year divisible by two, the rhetoric escalates a lot, and when everything gets said and done, a lot more gets said than done.

The reality is, we have an issue on which the American people want action. They should have had action 10 years ago. They should have had action 6 years ago. They should have had action 4 years ago. They should have had action in November of 2003, when that particular Energy bill was filibustered by our colleagues on the other side. But it is never too late to do the right thing.

We have an opportunity to do the right thing for the American people. If that consists of, as I said earlier, taking on the oil companies if there is any evidence whatsoever that there has been collusion or price fixing or gouging or any form of anticompetitive activity, then let's put the screws to them. Let's prosecute them to the full letter of the law. But let's also do something we should have done a long time ago, and that is begin to develop the resources that we have in this country and do something to help ourselves so 30 years from now, when my kids are my age, they are not saying the same thing that I am saying today, and that is that we have wasted 30 years and we are still as dependent on foreign sources of energy.

Frankly, I don't think we can wait that long because I do believe energy security is a matter of national security, and there is nothing that has a more profound impact and effect on the pocketbooks of working Americans. It is important that we do something about this. It is time to end the obstruction. It is time to end the block-and-blame game. It is time to get down to the business of taking care of the needs of the American people that they expect us to address.

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