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Remarks of the President at the Dedication of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum [Ford Speech or Statement]
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7340875
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Remarks of the President at the Dedication of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum [Ford Speech or Statement]
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White House Press Releases (Ford Administration)
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1975-09-13
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1975
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Digitized from Box 15 of the White House Press Releases at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 13, 1975
OFFICE OF THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY
(Midland, Texas)
THE WHITE HOUSE
REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT
AT THE DEDICATION OF
THE PERMIAN BASIN PETROLEUM MUSEUM
5:50 P.M. CDT
Senator John Tower, my former colleagues in the House,
Harold Runnels and Dick White, my former colleague in the
House of Representatives, and now Mr. Ambassador, George
Bush, our two mayors, Mayor Angelo and Mayor Hemphill,
Mr. Ramsland, and others:
It is a great privilege and a very high honor
for me to have the opportunity of being here and
participating in this wonderful ceremony today.
This is a great, great crowd, and I appreciate
your warmth and your cordiality, but I could not have
been more thrilled and more grateful for the tremendous
turnout of wonderful West Texans than were at the airport
in untypical Texas weather. (Laughter)
It was a thrill, and I tried to express to them
my gratitude. It was a great opportunity to come to a
wonderful part of this country.
George, you mentioned in passing that under
certain very limited and prescribed circumstances, you
might have voted for me for Speaker. Well, I appreciate
that willingness and under those circumstances -- but you
even went further than that -- you voted for me for Vice
President. (Laughter)
I am delighted to be here in West Texas, an
area that is so obviously rich in natural resources--
oil, natural gas, cattle, good land--but more importantly
than anything else, good people.
I am particularly pleased to take part in the
dedication of this very fascinating petroleum museum. I
just wish that the ceremony could have been held outdoors
because I was honestly looking for that shower of rose
petals from the top of the rig. (Laughter)
MORE
Page 2
Believe me, in the last year, when it comes
to oil from the Congress, I have had very little roses
coming up. (Laughter)
But I think it is very significant that that.
drilling rig outside is named, Santa Rita, the patron
saint of the impossible. When it comes to the good of
the country, Americans have always joined together and
worked together to achieve the seemingly impossible.
I am certain that in the weeks ahead, the
Congress and I will be able to do so, to give our Nation
an energy program that will cut us from the dependence
on interruptible foreign sources of oil.
America's energy independence must be decided
by us. It cannot be entrusted to the policies or to the
passions of others in far-off lands. I want to thank
very deeply the man who invited me, not once, but many
times to come out here, my long-time and very close personal
friend, George Mahon.
George indicated during the 12 years that I
was privileged to serve on the House Committee on Appro-
priations I worked up from the real bottom and finally I
got to the top, but in the process of that 12 years'
experience, we spent literally four to five hours a day,
five days a week, six or seven or eight or nine months a
year trying to help develop a strong national defense
program, trying to help implement a strong foreign
policy, and in the process of those many hours, we
became close, intimate friends, despite the fact that
there was a partisan dividing line theoretically, at
least, between us.
I honestly count George Mahon one of my closest
friends in my period of time in the Congress of the United
States, and I appreciate that friendship, George, and
believe me, if I lived in this district, it would be
awfully easy for me to be out in the spotlight, in the
headlines for George Mahon.
First, the principal reason I would be doing that is
because of Helen, not George, (Laughter) but it is nice to
be here also with John Tower, who I know comes from a great
part of Texas and who has been such a wonderful Senator on
behalf of all of you.
John, of course, has been a close friend of mine
in working together on energy matters and other important
defense and foreign policy problems. John, I thank you
for your help and assistance, both in the Congress, as
well as since I have been President of the United States.
MORE
Page 3
I might say something about George, but since
he is now a striped pants diplomat (Laughter) I don't dare say
anything political or non-political about him, but it
is good to see him as well as Harold Runnels and Dick
White.
You know his story in saying we closed the
American frontier back in 1890, but Midland in 1975 still
has the adventurous frontier and is obviously still
thriving. The enterprise and the spirit of hard-
working people in West Texas shows to me the great
productivity of this region, the land, the people,
the mind, the physical effort this area furnishes the
Nation -- cattle and cotton, oil, natural gas, but
also the genius of people, both in effort and in mind.
You have also demonstrated how much Americans
can accomplish with the right incentives -- incentives
are the fuel of the free market system and the energy
West Texas helps to supply is the fuel of our Nation's
economy. The Permian Basin produces 25 percent of the
Nation's domestic oil and 20 percent of the United
States' natural gas production. How fortunate the rest
of us are that this great region is a part of our
country.
To keep this oil and to keep this natural
gas flowing from this region, the Nation must make it
economically feasible to search for new production and to
develop new methods. This is one of the major reasons
that I believe decontrol of domestic oil prices is so
essential to our national security.
The vote in the United States Senate this
week sustaining my veto of an extension of the oil
price controls has paved the way for decontrol. I
hope I must concede I have been disappointed in the
last eight or nine months on several occasions -- but
I hope we are finally on the road to energy independence
in America.
We have got a long way to go but between
January of this year, and even this past week, we had
made virtually no progress whatsoever, but we got 39
staunch and strong people in the United States Senate
to stand up and say something had to be done. If we had
lost that vote I doubt if we could have gotten off dead
center for the next year and a half.
So the 39 who stood up and were strong and
wise probably did a great, great service to this country
and our energy independence. I think we have maybe
turned the corner but we have got a long way to go.
MORE
Page 4
Since 1971 America's bill for imported oil
has been -- well, it has climbed from just over $3 billion
annually to $25 billion in the last calendar year --
a 700 percent increase in American money going overseas
to buy a product that we should be producing in greater
and greater quantities right here in the United States.
But the ill-advised policies go back
some time and have kept us from freeing our energy, our
natural resources, our ingenuity, and the net result is
we have imported a lot more oil than we should and it is
getting worse and worse every day and we are paying more
and more overseas and we are sending that money over
for overseas jobs instead of having that money for
jobs right here in the United States.
For example, that $25 billion could provide
more than one million jobs right in America. That would
cut our unemployment, for example, from roughly eight
million down to seven million. That would be a good
investment if we had the right oil and natural gas
policies.
Although the 4.5 percent unemployment rate
in the Midland area in August is below the national
average, I understand it is higher than usual. Unemploy-
ment is a problem that is worrying many, many Americans,
and I travel and I hear. It is a problem that must
be solved by a healthy, thriving economy.
With foreign producers supplying 40 percent
of our oil needs today and growing every day and American
jobs and dollars are being held hostage by other
countries because we are vulnerable to this foreign
oil influence, we are unable to control the price or
the supply of imported oil and that makes us, of course,
extremely vulnerable to economic disruptions here at
home -- disruptions which we can ill-afford if we are
to continue to expand our great economic potential
in America.
If we don't give America's oil industry the
incentives to search for new sources and new production
techniques through decontrol, and if we present the wrong
policies, we will, within 10 years, import more than
half of the oil that we need for our economy.
Energy keeps this country going. Energy is
the heartbeat of our economic system. Unless we make
some tough decisions about energy now, the Nation is
in danger of suffering a serious energy emergency which
could come at any time because they have the capability
overseas of turning that spigot off and in a relatively
short period of time.
Many of you know far better than I our
capability of keeping our economic machine moving
would be slowed down and ended.
MORE
Page 5
It just seems to me that decontrolling oil
prices at home will move us toward the absolute essential
policy of energy independence. Energy independence will
require that we find new energy sources and develop new
methods, but those solutions will not come overnight, and
you are far more knowledgeable in those areas than
myself.
Action must be taken now to spur the search
for new sources. Research and development are critical
elements in any proposed national energy program. We
are spending, as George Mahon knows, in a variety of ways
in so-called exotic fuel areas, better than $2 billion a
year -- solar, geothermal, et cetera
But in the next few years, we will have to rely
on our most readily obtainable domestic energy sources --
and what are they? Oil, natural gas and coal -- if we
are going to meet our energy needs.
Natural gas is one of the most environmentally
acceptable forms of energy, but despite the many pluses
of natural gas -- and they are wonderful by any standard --
the history of the Federal Government's policy toward
this valuable asset has been a very sorry one.
Over the past 20 years, the Federal Power
Commission, as required by Congressional legislation, has
kept interstate prices at an artificially low level, and
that has seriously hampered exploration and development.
I think -- and I say this quietly, but with
firmness and determination -- we must stop Federal
regulation of prices on new gas for interstate use.
There are approximately 16 States in the Union
that are potentially going to have a serious economic
disruption this winter. You can take New Jersey, North
Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, et cetera.
Because of the shortsighted policies of the
Congress over the last 20 years, we could have not only
a shortage in natural gas in those areas, but the economic
consequences in jobs will be extremely serious, and the
negligence of the Congress over the last few years in
not recognizing that problem is inexcusable.
I hope we can move on some emergency legislation,
but we cannot ignore the need and necessity for a
permanent solution. Natural gas deregulation, it is
obvious, is a high priority goal with myself, and the
Administration.
MORE
Page 6
I think solving the energy problem goes back
to some of our basic American principles. We must put
back into our economic system some of our old-fashioned
incentives that took us from 13 poor struggling colonies
to a Nation of 50 States with unbelievable economic
power and progress.
The profit incentive -- the search for a better
life -- populated this Continent. It brought thousands
of : pioneers to West Texas, men and women willing to
risk all to find a livelihood on the land or in the
land.
We should ask ourselves, what has made America
unique? The explanations are as varied as the Nation
itself, but I am convinced that one key to America's
uniqueness is that we wrote into our first great document
the inalienable right of the pursuit of happiness.
In that pursuit, Americans have dreamed big
dreams, taken great risks -- sometimes failed miserably
and sometimes succeeded magnificently. But always,
whether successful or otherwise, they took it with
courage and determination.
The men and women to whom this museum is
dedicated lived and enjoyed that freedom to the fullest.
The spirit of enterprise and daring this museum records
in the petroleum industry must be kept alive all across
the United States.
So, in memory of those who dared to follow
their dreams, I respectfully dedicate this great museum.
Thank you.
END
(AT 6:10 P.M. CDT)