Roscoe Bartlett: “this is the 22nd time, I believe, that I have come here to the well of the House to talk about a subject which I think…”

“this is the 22nd time, I believe, that I have come here to the well of the House to talk about a subject which I think will be the overarching concern of our world for the next decades and several decades beyond that. That subject is energy and specifically the energy that we get from oil. As an illustration of the problems we face, I have here a map of the world as it would be drawn if each country was sized relative to the amount of oil reserves that it had. So this is the world according to oil. And you see here Saudi Arabia, and it would swallow up the United States. How many times would it swallow us up, a dozen, 15 times? Notice the incredible wealth of oil in the Middle East. Venezuela looms, what, two, three times the size of the United States as far as reserves of oil are concerned. The little United Arab Emirates, you can hardly find them on a map. They are kind of a little pinpoint on a usual map, and there they are six, eight times larger than the United States with their reserves of oil. The famed reserves of Russia up there. Notice that the United Arab Emirates have more oil than Russia has. And Saudi Arabia, of course, and Iraq. And little Kuwait, a little province that Saddam Hussein thought ought to belong to Iraq when he invaded it more than a decade ago, has many times as much oil as the United States and more oil than Russia has. Remember this map when we put the next map of the world up here because this is an interesting map.…”