Thomas Mott Osborne: “I rise to oppose the Markey amendment. A week or so ago I was sitting in the Committee on Resources and someone made the…”

“I rise to oppose the Markey amendment. A week or so ago I was sitting in the Committee on Resources and someone made the statement that the United States has only 3 percent of the world's petroleum reserves. I thought about that and I thought, How do we know? We really do not know, because for 20 years, we have not explored. And so we do not know whether we have got 1 percent or 5 percent or 10 percent or 15 percent. Currently, we import 60 percent of our oil. Most of that oil is from OPEC. Currently, OPEC sets the market in the United States. Currently that is an irritant. They can cause the price to fluctuate. But let us take this hypothetical. Let us say we have a major war in the Middle East sometime in the next 3 or 4 years. Let us say that OPEC all of a sudden decides to cut off the spigot at some point or let us say OPEC decides to double the price. At that point, what do we do? We do not have an irritant at that point; we have got a national crisis. And where do we go? What do we do? The first thing that we are going to do is we are going to start scrambling, and we are going to try to figure out what we do have. Right now we do not know. I am not saying we have to drill, I am not saying that we have to extract oil, but we need to know what our resources are, in the gulf, in the 1002 area, we need to know precisely. Because this is something that can very likely happen in the near future.”