Energy

Floor Speech

Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, clearly some very serious subjects are being discussed today. I applaud my colleague from Kentucky for bringing up the tough stuff. We cannot escape reality. Our reality is in the entitlements; that we will finally grapple with the insurmountable debt we are faced with as a nation, some very difficult issues in front of us with equally difficult solutions. As we stand and present them, try to educate one another, much less those we represent, this is a critical time for us to be talking about all the issues that need to be on the table.

One of the issues being discussed around family dinner tables is what is happening in this country as it relates to the price of oil and how that translates more personally to American families who, every time they go to fill up the tank, it is costing them more and more. Every time we pick up a newspaper, every time we turn on the TV, we see a story about the rising prices of oil. They are asking: What is going on. They look at the situation in the Middle East and the combination of international events that is driving it. It is also domestic policies that have helped to push oil above $100 a barrel.

All of us are concerned about what those higher prices mean for us as a nation. We are committed to protecting the American people and our businesses and ensuring we have an ability to deal with rising prices at the same time we are trying to emerge from this difficult recession period. This is a tough time for us.

I have come to floor to outline several steps I believe we can and should take to improve our energy policy.

First, I wish to touch on how we again find ourselves in this situation. The civil unrest we are seeing, the political instability in other nations is certainly not new. They are facts of life in many nations that provide this Nation's imports. Iran now holds OPEC's presidency. They are perfectly comfortable with $100-a-barrel oil. It is far from guaranteed that OPEC is even capable of moderating any prices in the way it claims it can with spare capacity.

With Libya's supply either offline or unreliable, any other disruption anywhere in the world can likely spike global oil prices to levels that will swamp our economic recovery and result in a genuine hardship for America's families.

It is not only the situation internationally that has brought us to this point. The costs and consequences associated with our dependence on foreign oil are largely our own fault. We have brought this upon ourselves. Over the years our lands have been locked up. Many of our most promising opportunities have been put out of reach. In this country we sit on tremendous oil reserves in the offshore, whether it is up in Alaska, in the Chukchi or Beaufort Seas, or whether it is in the Gulf of Mexico. We have onshore opportunities in my home State that are considerable. We have them in the Rocky Mountain West. We have massive shale formations that are not even accessible for research and development. We can't even begin to look.

Charles Krauthammer, the columnist, wrote last year:

We haven't run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We've been run off them.

I couldn't agree more. Today our energy policy has gone beyond frustrating. It is irresponsible. The American people expect their government to help keep energy affordable and to see to it that we can benefit from our natural resource development in a responsible way. That is what they are asking for. They expect us to take an honest look at where increased domestic production is possible, how it can protect against the higher prices we are seeing now, how it can protect against potential supply disruption, and what domestic production will do to increase our security and restore our trade balance.

That is what we are talking about today: generating government revenues, creating jobs. Right now when we import oil, we are exporting those benefits. It is our loss, and it is their gain.

We ignore the positive benefits of domestic production at our own peril. About a month ago we had a hearing in the Energy Committee where there was a statement presented by the Bipartisan Policy Center. It is a pretty sobering reminder to us all. The statement was:

A one-dollar, one-day increase in a barrel of oil takes $12 million out of the U.S. economy. If tensions in the Mideast cause oil prices to rise by $5 for even just three months, over $5 billion will leave the U.S. economy. Obviously, this is not a strategy for creating new jobs.

That was about a month ago. Think about what has happened in the course of a month and where we have seen the price go. About a month ago, it was sitting at about $82 a barrel. We are now over $100 a barrel. We are looking at a rise of 20 bucks in the past month. What that means to us in terms of dollars that have been sent outside of our economy is about $15 billion.

Last year, putting it in context of what went on at that time, we spent an estimated $337 billion on oil imports, a huge amount of money. As we are talking about how we deal with budget matters and decide which programs and services to continue, to terminate, this has an incredible impact on the discussion.

Today I am renewing my call for a realistic and aggressive approach to our energy challenges. For the sake of our national security, for the sake of our economy, and for the sake of the world's environment, America should produce as much oil as it uses as possible. It is this balance, in concert with the resulting revenues we will see, the benefits to manufacturing and transportation industries, that will allow us to take control of our energy future.

I have five concepts that will support greater domestic oil production. I will speak very briefly because we will have time to develop this.

First, look north, north to Alaska. We used to have that on our license plates. We have an incredible supply of oil waiting to be tapped for the good of the Nation. The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska is sitting there waiting. Two thousand acres of the nonwilderness portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas hold at least 40 billion barrels of recoverable oil. That is enough to replace crude imports from the Persian Gulf for over 65 years. We can do this in one State. We have those opportunities in Alaska. All three areas right now, as we speak, are effectively off-limits to new development because of decisions made by this administration or prior administrations. We have an opportunity if we just look north.

Second, end the "permitorium" and bring back production in the Gulf of Mexico. This administration has slowed permits for new deepwater development to practically a crawl. The Secretary of the Interior announced one new permit a couple days ago. That is a start, but we are just barely crawling. This could cost the United States an estimated 200,000 barrels of new supply if left in place for a year, far more if left in place longer, and tens of thousands of jobs in the meantime. Courts have also ruled repeatedly that the administration's "permitorium" is unlawful. A district court judge ruled last year that it was "arbitrary and capricious." More recently the Interior Department was actually held in contempt for its "dismissive conduct" and "determined disregard"--the words of the court--of previous orders to end this de facto moratorium.

The third item we can do is cut redtape. Let's make this work. In January the President ordered his executive agencies to review their regulations to ensure that they are cost-effective, that they are not unduly damaging economic growth and job creation. A great task. The Interior Department, though, is sitting in a situation where they have an awful lot of work to do.

In late 2008, the Interior Department stated that "the number of required plan and permit approvals is on the order of about 25 to 30" for a typical oil lease. Yet over the past 2 years, instead of reducing that, this administration has sought to add even more layers to these already significant requirements which are a major reason leaseholders need years to begin production. We just can't get to it.

Fourth, we need to look at how we as a nation consider this all-of-the-above energy policy. The alternatives to conventional oil, to natural gas, to coal should not be limited to the favored sources: wind, solar, geothermal. We have so much we can be doing. We recognize that. I have stood before this body on many occasions talking about the different ways we can build our energy portfolio, how we can work to move the transportation fleet to that next generation, whether it is electric vehicles or fleets powered by natural gas.

The final item in terms of what we can do to help address our Nation's energy policy is to shelve bad ideas. There is an awful lot of bad ideas holding us up. This is the stop-the-bleeding element of the proposal. With oil prices on the rise, the administration and many in Congress seem to have forgotten that the oil industry actually provides Americans with energy and jobs. Yet sometimes they are viewed as an untapped source of government revenues.

Proposals to take more from oil companies have included a range of tax increases, the use-it-or-lose-it proposal and similar fees, and substantially shorter lease terms. All of these antiproduction efforts deprive companies of stable operating environments and reduce their willingness to invest in America. We need to look at what we are doing. If they are bad ideas, let's set the bad ideas aside. Let's adopt a constructive approach instead of seeking to punish. Let's figure out a better way forward so we can tap into more of America's vast resources and then make good use of the resulting revenues.

We clearly do have options. I look forward to discussing them more in detail, how we can develop these goals of a national energy policy. For today, I emphasize that responsible domestic production will reduce our energy prices, create jobs, improve security, raise revenue to pay down debt, and allow America to invest in technologies for the future. We cannot afford to wait on any of these benefits.

I urge Members, as we talk about ways to reduce our budget, ways to create more jobs for the country, we need to look critically at what is happening with our energy policy.

I yield the floor.

Source