Energy Action Team

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina, and the invitation still stands. Come to Oklahoma. We have been fracking since 1948, and I would encourage folks to come drink our water, see the beautiful land, breathe our beautiful air, and understand that you can do this.

Oklahoma is one of the places where we do all-of-the-above energy. We have solar. We have wind. We have coal. We have oil and gas. We understand all-of-the-above energy, and we understand all that can work together.

For viewers that are on C-SPAN and the lights in this room, we understand that energy drives our economy. We don't interact with anything in our economy, whether it is food, whether it is transportation, whether it is home heating, whatever it may be and however we operate, it operates because of energy.

If at some point this administration's policies are fully implemented, we will watch the price of energy, the price of food, the price of everything we do in America go up, simply because of preferences, not because of reality.

We can do this in an environmentally friendly way and also build a strong economy. If you want to come to Oklahoma, unemployment right now in Oklahoma is 4.5 percent. We are one of the top energy producers in the country.
If you want to go to North Dakota, the unemployment rate is 2.7 percent. In fact, technically, they have a negative unemployment rate. They actually have more job listings than they have unemployment there. Why? Because they are finding a way to be able to tap American energy to produce an American economy that can grow and thrive, and in those places where energy is thriving, the economy is also thriving.

Just look at one simple statistic here: from 2007 to 2012, private sector employment increased by 1 percent or about 1 million jobs. In oil and gas, however, they added 162,000 of those jobs and had an increase of 40 percent in employment. Just in that one sector, there was a 40 percent increase in employment.

What affect does that have on us? Obviously, that is Americans that have jobs, those are families that are taken care of, but it is also our trade deficit.

From 2012 to 2013, just in Saudi Arabia, our trade deficit declined 13 percent. That is oil and gas produced here in the United States, offsetting what we are purchasing from the Middle East. The positive effects of that are overwhelming, and we understand it full well.

We understand that, in the 1990s, our economy had a huge boom from the Web. The Internet and the expansion of the Internet created incredible entrepreneurial opportunities and an incredible expansion of our economy.

That boom in the economy right now is solely around energy, and the energy development that is happening and the revolution that is happening and the opportunity for people to be able to get good-paying jobs is happening strongly in one sector in our economy, energy.

Let's not blow it. Let's expand it. In the days ahead, we should be able to export oil and gas. That should be a prime something that we do.

You can send grain all around the world, just like you can send flour, but right now, you can't send oil all around the world. You can only send gasoline or diesel. You have to literally refine the oil before you can send it out.

Well, let's fix that. If you send grain, you should be able to send flour as well. If you can send timber, you should be able to also send lumber. It makes basic sense that you can send oil as well as you can send gasoline out.

This would help our economy. It would also reduce the price of oil globally. That price would drop because of the competition in the United States, estimated to be about 8 cents per gallon for a gallon of gas, if we get on the world market and start pushing back to bring the price down.

The same thing happens in liquefied natural gas, in natural gas. We are talking about the production, just to allow the enhanced production and export of oil and natural gas, around 1 million additional jobs in our economy.

Now, in a Nation that is looking for jobs, we literally have the jobs under our feet, and it is time we stand up and provide the opportunity to be able to explore for additional oil and gas, continue to expand our use of coal, to be able to export that worldwide and allow the United States to be the economic leader and the energy leader that she should be.

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