Markey Addresses Oil, Gas and Home Heating Oil Crisis

Good afternoon.

As winter approaches, we are facing a potential oil crisis this year that means record home heating oil bills, record gasoline bills and record energy bills for families and small businesses across America. But American energy consumers are being left out in the cold.

Yesterday, the price of a barrel of oil spiked to $96 and is still at $94-95 today on world markets compared to just $26 per barrel when President Bush took office.
 
Gasoline rose 10 cents in just one week in many regions of the country last week. It is now averaging $2.94, up over 200 percent since October 2001.

Home heating oil prices in New England are almost $3.00 a gallon – up roughly 25 percent from a year ago.

This is breaking the back of many Americans.  While economists marvel at how our economy seems to withstand higher oil prices no matter how expensive energy becomes, the average American family heating with oil has seen its heating bill rise from about $600 a year in 2001-02 to over $1700 today.
 
That is an increase of 280 percent!

This has a direct impact on the health of poor children.  A report released by the Boston based Children's Nutrition Assessment Program found a 30 percent increase in the number of underweight infants and toddlers in hospital emergency rooms in the three key months following winter cold compared with the rest of the year.  

It should make all Americans sick to think that because we are so addicted to oil, because our dependence on foreign oil has reached 60 percent, because the administration’s energy policy has been such a colossal failure, America is now hemorrhaging funds to pay for oil imports at the rate of over
*$500,000 per minute,
*$30 million per hour and
*$5 billion per week !!
What is the Administration’s answer to this crisis?  

The President turns to OPEC and begs for more production.  Once again, this week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) administrator Guy Caruso said that if OPEC did not crank up production, markets would be short of oil early next year.

Meanwhile, OPEC, which supplies more than a third of the world's oil, rejects any talk of supply tightness and blames speculators, political tensions and a weak dollar for driving up the cost of fuel.  
If no action is taken, we could easily see oil top $100 a barrel within the next few weeks or months. 

That is simply an unacceptable risk to an economy that is already teetering on the brink of recession.

That is why today I am calling on the President to change this equation in two ways:

1.    The President should demonstrate to the world’s oil speculators that he is willing and able to release oil from our stockpiles to break runaway oil speculation such as we are now facing,  and
2.    The President should support the strong fuel economy standards that are now being considered by the House and Senate as we move to pass an energy bill that moves this country away from oil and towards alternative sources of energy.

The Congress must pass the energy bill.  It holds the promise of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by twice the amount we currently import from the Persian Gulf. The president must help this process not hinder it. He needs to hold hands with the Democratic Congress instead of holding hands with oil sheiks. It is the only way to move to a new future of clean renewable energy that is secure and not subject to speculation, profiteering and exploitation of the American consumer at the gas pump and at home when the oil truck pulls up to the side of the house.

Thank you.

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