Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008--Continued

Floor Speech

TOM LANTOS AND HENRY J. HYDE UNITED STATES GLOBAL LEADERSHIP AGAINST HIV/AIDS, TUBERCULOSIS, AND MALARIA REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2008--Continued -- (Senate - July 16, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. MURRAY. Will the majority leader yield?

Mr. REID. I will be happy to.

Mrs. MURRAY. As the majority leader knows, I travel home a long distance every week to Washington State and get in my car and drive for several hours to get to my home. I have been paying these increased gas prices like my constituents. It is shocking. Last weekend I paid $4.45 a gallon to fill up my tank in my car. This is impacting absolutely everybody in my State, my region, just as it is the rest of the Nation.

My constituents say to me: I have been hearing all this talk about drilling. Please tell me that will bring my gas prices down.

I have told my constituents, as we all know--in fact, not just me but the Bush administration's Energy Information Office, this is the Bush administration: The impact on wellhead prices from opening the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the gulf waters to drilling ``is expected to be insignificant.'' I have not said that. This administration, the Bush administration's Energy Information Administration Office, has said that.

I say to my constituents, the drill, drill, drill or, as the Senator from North Dakota called it, ``the forever yesterday policy of drill, drill, drill,'' is not going to have a significant impact at all on their gas prices.

I thank the majority leader for coming forward with a package that we do believe will have an impact on gas prices and deal with the excessive speculation that is in the market today.

We met last week with a number of experts in this field. We have listened to our Republican counterparts as well who agree that speculation is an issue that we can all come together on and on which we can have an immediate impact in passing a bill.

I come to the Senate floor today to thank the majority leader and to ask him, as he puts this bill together, to deal with excessive speculation with the hope that it will, as the experts have told us, begin to reduce gas prices, that we as a caucus, and I hope as a Senate, will begin to look also at the longer term issues affecting energy and investing in alternative energy so we do not continue to be so dependent on oil.

I ask the majority leader his comments on that.

Mr. REID. I say through the Chair to my friend from Washington, I have been to Washington. I have driven a lot of the State of Washington. It is absolutely a beautiful State. Part of it reminds me of Nevada. People think that Washington is a State where the ocean is everyplace, and it is not. Washington is a State where there is desert. So I love the State of Washington.

But the Senator from Washington is in a very good position to understand how I am sure her constituents feel about what we are trying to do; that is, do something to affect this increase in price, to try to tamp down speculation. To have the people of Washington be told this doesn't matter, speculation doesn't matter, let's drill some more off the coast of Washington and not only drill some more, in effect--no one questions the Federal Government owns 200 miles off our coast. That is the Outer Continental Shelf, and that is recognized by international law.

To think that the Federal Government would just give up on that and say: OK, States, do whatever you want--how do the people of Washington feel about that?

Mrs. MURRAY. I say to the majority leader that the people of my State are a very generous people. If there were a real national crisis that we could solve from my home State by drilling off our coast, my constituents would be willing to sacrifice that. But we know that drilling off the Outer Continental Shelf will have a huge economic impact in my State with no result of reducing gas prices. So that is a sacrifice they should not be asked to give at this time.

As a matter of fact, what I see happening is that the oil companies in this country that hold 68 million acres of land they can drill today, that they are not drilling, are just looking at this crisis we have today as a land grab, that they can reach out, scare all of us, and have this Congress give them more land, including the pristine shores off my State of Washington, never intending to use them.

I was on the Senate floor with Senator Biden yesterday as we discussed this issue. He made a very cogent argument. The fact that if we all decided this was it, this was it and we absolutely had to drill everything, and we gave the oil companies the Outer Continental Shelf off the coast of Washington and Oregon and California and his State of Delaware, that a minimal amount of oil in 20 or 30 years may be drilled, but who among us thinks that OPEC--which actually controls the price of gas--if a 3-percent increase in oil came about as an effect of that drilling, wouldn't reduce their capacity by 3 percent in order to keep their prices high and their profits at maximum level?

Let's not sell the American people a bill of goods. Let's not promise them something that cannot be delivered. No one wants to hear empty rhetoric or to give up something that is extremely important to them if the facts are not there to back it and only, by the way, to give oil companies more excessive profits.

Let's do something that is real--and that is what the bill the majority leader and others have introduced does--to deal with the issue of excessive speculation; to do what many experts have told us to bring the price of gas down. Then, for the long term, we, as a body, have to say: What are we going to invest in in this country for the long-term future so we are not so dependent on oil, so that the next generation behind us doesn't come back and hear yesterday forever, drill, drill, drill, as Senator Dorgan has said time and time again is the solution that doesn't work.

We need to get off our dependence on oil. We need to do that in the long run. But in the short term let's deal with the speculation issue and let's pass responsible legislation in a bipartisan way, not as a silver bullet. No one thinks that is the ultimate answer to bring gas prices to what they were a year ago, but it is a step in the right direction. It is a responsible step to meet the important crisis that we face today, coupled with looking at what we will do long term.

The Senator from North Dakota has been a leader on this issue. I know he is the chair on the Energy appropriations bill, where he is looking at the investments we can make in alternative energy so we can get off of the same argument of yesterday forever and really begin to be responsible leaders at a critical time in our Nation's history.

It is so easy to come out here and say drill on the Outer Continental Shelf. But I will tell you, in a State such as mine, Washington State, that has an economy that is dependent upon our waters, whether it is our fisheries or our environment or tourism but a place that our Nation should say is absolutely one of critical importance--not just my coast but the rest of the coastal States--we should not jeopardize it to get nothing--to get nothing because, as the Bush administration itself said: The impact on wellhead prices from opening the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the gulf waters to drilling ``is expected to be insignificant.''

Let's focus on doing something that is responsible, that is not just empty rhetoric, that obviously is not a silver bullet to the energy crisis in total but is sincerely a step in the right direction.

I am proud to join my colleague as we move this legislation forward. I look forward to working, I hope, with Members on both sides of the aisle to move forward on this critical piece of legislation.

I yield the floor.

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