Maryland Congressman Continues Peak Oil Warnings

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I have here in my hands two pretty big reports that were paid for by our government and have for reasons that it is difficult for me to understand been pretty much ignored apparently by the organizations that paid for them. The first of these is a big report paid for by the Department of Energy called The Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management. This is generally known as the Hirsch Report, because the project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch from SAIC, a very prestigious scientific and engineering organization. This report is dated February, 2005.

What I would like to do for the first few minutes is to look at some of the comments and recommendations in these two reports; and I would like to keep asking the question, why have these two government agencies which paid for these reports done essentially nothing to promulgate this information across the country? Rather, it would seem that there was an intent to keep this information from the public, because the Hirsch Report was bottled up inside the Department of Energy for several months, and the Army Corps of Engineers report is dated September of 2005, and it says on the cover here, “Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.” But there was essentially no distribution of that until just about 2 months ago.

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