Drill Responsibly in Leased Lands Act of 2008
DRILL RESPONSIBLY IN LEASED LANDS ACT OF 2008 -- (House of Representatives - July 17, 2008)
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Mr. CARTER. I have been listening to this debate, and it has been extremely interesting. But I think that we have got a situation here where, because of the fantastic nature of the Congress, nobody understands what we are talking about. In reality, we are talking about leasing, and they are saying use the lease you paid for.
Now, I think the American people, almost every one of them out there, they know what a lease is because probably they have leased an apartment, or they have leased a home or they have leased a car. They have leased something in their life. And I doubt very seriously if they paid a lease price, a pretty good size lease price that came out of their family's pocket, and then didn't use what they leased. They parked the car in the garage and didn't use it. They rented the apartment for a year and never set foot in it, but lived someplace else. Or if they were in business, they rented a warehouse to store things, and then didn't put anything in the warehouse and wasted their money.
Now, what we are talking about here is leases that the people who are in the oil business have spent billions, with a B, of dollars to lease. Does it make sense to anyone's common sense that they would spend that kind of money and then not look to see if there is some way they could get their money back on the deal? Of course they have.
And in fact, as Kevin Brady pointed out, they have been looking and looking and looking and looking in this area to find enough resources to justify billions of dollars worth of expenditures to drill.
I will tell you, you are welcome to drill in my back yard. I have got about two, a little over 2 acres. I will lease it tomorrow, okay? But there is no oil in my back yard, and I don't expect anyone to lease it or drill there because they know in Round Rock, Texas there is not any oil.
Now, the same thing goes here. You can talk about use it or lose it, but once you know there is no production in an area, there makes no sense to spend millions of dollars to find nothing. That is what this is all about. Common sense tells you there is no oil there.
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