Gas Prices

Floor Speech

Mr. LEE. Madam President, the American people need help because they are suffering at the gas pump. With the national average price for gasoline up at around $3.75 per gallon, representing an increase of about 40 cents from a year ago and about 20 cents from just 1 month ago, citizens are suffering and they need relief.

It is important to point out in this context that when President Obama took office, gas prices were at about $1.85 per gallon. Now that they are up to about $3.75 per gallon we can see a steady increase. Over this 38-month period of time of his Presidency so far, gasoline prices have risen an average of about 5 cents per gallon per month. This is staggering when we think about the fact that if he is reelected--if he serves out the rest of this term and if he is reelected--that is a total of an additional 58 months. With that increase, gas prices will be up at around $6.60 per gallon.

This is a lot of money. It is staggering. It affects everything we do--from the miles we drive to the products we buy at the grocery store. Everything gets more expensive when the fuel we use to transport ourselves and our products becomes more expensive.

Now, to some extent, one could suggest this was not only foreseeable, but it was actually foreseen. To some, it was considered a desired outcome. Let's consider, for example, that in 2008, Dr. Steven Chu, who now serves as President Obama's Energy Secretary, said:

Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.

Well, Mr. Chu, it looks as though we are headed in that direction, and if we continue to follow this administration's energy policies, we may get there.
As a member of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I was somewhat surprised when a suggestion was made just a few days ago that there are some who believe there is no relationship between U.S. production of petroleum and the price of gasoline in the United States. That simply is not true, and it cannot be true. With oil being the input ingredient into gasoline, it is the precursor for gasoline. Anytime we do anything that cuts off or restricts or limits the supply, that is necessarily going to have an impact on the price, and it does.

The fact that it is indisputable that there are other factors which also influence the price of gasoline makes it no less true that we have to produce petroleum at home in addition to buying it from other places. In order to keep gasoline prices at reasonable levels, we have to produce more.

There are some things we can do in order to help improve that trend. For example, we could open ANWR for drilling. We could open our country's vast Federal public lands to development of oil shale. It is a little known fact that in three Rocky Mountain States, a small segment of Rocky Mountain States--Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming--we have an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of proven recoverable oil reserves locked up in oil shale. Now, 1.2 trillion barrels is a lot of oil. That is comparable to the combined petroleum reserves of the top 10 petroleum-producing countries of the world combined--just in one segment of three Rocky Mountain States.

Yet we are not producing it commercially, in part to a very significant degree because that oil shale--especially in my State, the State of Utah--is overwhelmingly on Federal public land, and it is almost impossible to get to it, to produce it commercially on federally owned public land. We need to change that.

We need to create a sensible environmental review process for oil and gas production generally. We need to improve the permitting process for offshore development in the Gulf of Mexico and in other areas. We need to allow the

States to regulate hydraulic fracturing without the fear of suffocating and duplicative Federal regulations. We need to keep all the Federal lands in the West open to all kinds of energy development. And, of course, we need the President to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. This will contribute substantially to America's energy security and will provide an estimated 20,000 shovel-ready jobs right off the bat.

There are things we can do to help Americans with this difficult problem--one that will affect almost every aspect of the day-to-day lives of Americans. We need government to get out of the way. We need the government to become part of what the President laudably outlined as an all-of-the-above strategy in his State of the Union Address just recently. We need to get there. We cannot afford gas at $6.60 per gallon, which is exactly where we are headed if we continue to do things as this administration has done, which has lead to an increase in the price of gasoline at a staggering rate of 5 cents per gallon every single month.

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