Dorothy Buell Memorial Visitor Center Lease Act

DOROTHY BUELL MEMORIAL VISITOR CENTER LEASE ACT -- (House of Representatives - July 08, 2008)

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Mr. WITTMAN of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, is comprised of 15,000 acres along 15 miles of shoreline. This bill authorizes the Secretary of Interior to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with Porter County Commission to lease space for the use of a visitor center. It also permits the Secretary to accept donations of lands that are located along the borders of the lakeshore but are separated by a right-of-way.

And today, as we are dealing with this particular unit of the National Park Service, I think it's fitting to remember that our constituents are dealing with high gasoline prices that are cutting into family vacations this summer, making it increasingly costly to visit our national parks.

Over the Independence Day work period back in my district, I spoke with a number of constituents who are still frustrated about high gasoline prices and also are frustrated with what they perceive as Congress' failure to do anything to adopt a comprehensive energy policy. This Congress needs to take action to put all of our available resources and technologies on the table, including increase American-made energy, conservation and efficiency to bring relief at the pumps.

I thought the best story that I heard was a lady that came to me and I asked her, I said, what do you think we ought to be doing about this energy issue that we're dealing with? And she said, Mr. Wittman, do you remember the movie Apollo 13? And I said, yes, I did. And she said, do you remember the scene there where the oxygen tank on the outside of the service capsule blew up and the engineers there had to figure out how they were going to get those astronauts back to Earth? So they moved the astronauts into the command module, but the problem with the command module is it didn't have enough capacity to take CO

2 out of the air, so eventually the astronauts would be asphyxiated if they didn't come up with a solution to that problem and still have enough oxygen to propel the spaceship back to Earth.

So what did they do? They sent the engineers to the duplicate capsule they

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had there at Mission Control in Houston. And they sent them in there and they said take everything out of there that's available to these astronauts and put it in a box. So those engineers put those materials in a box and they brought it downstairs to Mission Control and they laid those pieces out on the table. And they told those engineers, solve the problem, make sure we get those astronauts back here. Come up with a CO

2 scrubber that gets that CO

2 out of the air so those astronauts can survive and get back to Earth. And lo and behold, those engineers did just that. But they weren't crippled by saying, well, you can only use this in the box and that in the box. They were there to use everything.

Folks, if we're going to be successful in this effort for our comprehensive energy policy, we need to make sure that we use everything. And that includes looking at the energy that we have available here in the United States, being aggressive with conservation, being aggressive in developing alternative and renewable sources here. And this country has shown to have the engineering and ability and the willingness to get to work on these tough issues and to solve them. Our history has been wrought with just those efforts to make sure that we solve these problems.

The American people are looking at us now to make sure that we solve this problem. And they don't want us to take anything out of that Apollo 13 box to solve this problem. They expect us to put everything there and to make sure that we come up with a solution to this, and I believe that this country can do that.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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