Roscoe Bartlett: “when one is going to make a decision and embark on a course of action, it is always nice to have the facts straight.…”

“when one is going to make a decision and embark on a course of action, it is always nice to have the facts straight. This is especially important in our debate on energy. Let us look at some of those facts. The United States uses about one-fourth of all the world's oil use, about 20 million barrels a day. Now, we have only about 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, but we are pumping that 2 percent pretty fast, because out of that, we are getting about 44 percent of all of our oil needs. That means we are importing about 56 percent of our oil, up from 34 percent at the Arab oil embargo, much of that from countries like Iraq. Every year since 1970, with only a tiny blip from Prudhoe Bay, oil production in this country has gone down. How much oil remains in the world? About 1,000 gigabarrels remain in the world. Pretty simple arithmetic will show that at present use rates, that is about 40 years of oil in the world. We will find more, but we will also use more. What these facts mean is that those portions of our bill that deal with conservation, that deal with efficiency, that deal with alternatives and renewables are very important portions of the bill.”