[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 100 (Thursday, July 27, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7764-S7766]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    ENERGY AND WATER APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, the energy and water bill on 
appropriations has been held up. I understand that the distinguished 
minority leader has an objection to it. I share with Senators the 
importance of that bill. I suggest, hopefully, that the minority leader 
rethink this because I do have some confidence that he is not 
exclusively interested in partisan politics, and that perhaps this very 
good bill on energy and water could be passed and sent to the 
President; although, my hopes are dwindling.
  Essentially, one looks at the energy and water appropriations bill, 
and while I would devote some time to the energy crisis, which my 
friend spoke about eloquently, I will interrupt my comments to say this 
to the Senator: Incredibly, there is a position being formulated by the 
Vice President's campaign to claim that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney 
would be bad for American energy consumers. Isn't that a joke?
  What is bad for American energy consumers, and the reason gasoline 
prices are so high, and natural gases are skyrocketing, and we are 
growing in dependence upon foreign countries for our very lifeblood, 
for without energy, we have no economy. Of late, we have decided it 
must be so clean that the only thing we are using in any increased 
abundance is natural gas. We are even shying away, in this 
administration, from clean coal technology. Did the Senator know that 
technology to clean up coal is being pushed down by this administration 
instead of up?
  Mr. BENNETT. The Senator is correct. If I may make one other comment, 
the comment has been made that they want wind as the source. I have 
heard environmental groups have complained that they do not want 
windmills out on the prairies because they will damage the birds.

  Mr. DOMENICI. Let me tell the Senator this: I asked this 
administration and I asked this Vice President to send to us what their 
great energy policy has been during the last 8 years. Every time we say 
there is none, they say they have got one, they have had one and we 
turned it down. I would love to see it. I would like to evaluate it and 
send it out to the energy people and ask them what would it have 
produced had we given more money to solar and wind than we did. How 
would that have had an impact on the consumers of America--paying this 
enormous price for gasoline, this enormous new price for natural gas?
  Frankly, I say to my friend from Utah, if Americans don't know it--
because we worry so much about Social Security and its future, Medicare 
and its future, what happens to this surplus, and what happens to the 
debt--probably the biggest challenge to the American way of life and 
our standard of living, driving automobiles and finding jobs and 
factories growing, is that we have no energy policy. And we are going 
to move slightly and slowly, because of this administration, into a 
position where we are not going to have enough energy to make America 
go, or it will be so high that Americans will wonder what in the world 
happened to us.
  Do you know when that will be? That will be when our dependence on 
foreign sources of energy grows some more. Americans should know that 
over 50

[[Page S7765]]

percent of the crude oil and crude oil products this great Nation 
consumes comes from foreign countries, from the so-called cartel. It is 
not all Saudi Arabia. We have South American and Central American 
countries in there, too. But do you know what. They are not interested 
in America. They are interested in how much their oil will bring on the 
market to them. For a few years, they can sit back and say: America, 
America, when oil prices were $10 a barrel and you were hopping along 
and we were broke and we could not pay our debts and could not borrow 
money--one of the closest things to a financial crisis for Saudi 
Arabia, whether or not you like the sheiks--financial jeopardy was when 
oil prices dropped so low. We were thrilled. What do you think they are 
going to think when the oil prices finally get up where they are making 
a lot of money and America is crying for it? They are going to say: 
Where were you when oil prices got down below 10 and hovered around 10 
while we cried?
  Frankly, I believe if the Vice President's campaign decides that our 
wonderful ticket for President, because one comes from a mass oil-
producing State, and he is proud of it--and the other one, after 
serving in the highest office in this country, is the president of a 
100,000-person corporation that happens to be involved in seeing to it 
that we continue to get oil and gas in America by working down there in 
oil patch--frankly, I don't think we ought to assume that this attack 
makes any sense or that they will do it.
  I think what we should do is we should attack Vice President Gore as 
being the mastermind, the promoter of a no energy policy for America, 
unless it is wind and solar, which all of us think is marvelous but 
clearly cannot help America through a crisis.
  I thank the Senator for his comments. I know a lot about nuclear 
power. I am embarrassed for America that we are doing what we are doing 
on nuclear power. It is so scientifically unreal and untrue, as to the 
attacks on nuclear power, and it is a shame. The greatest country on 
Earth in engineering cannot take high-level fuel rods and move them a 
little bit across the country and put them somewhere for safekeeping. 
We can't do that. But 1 out of 25 American ships sails the seas, some 
with one nuclear powerplant--as they have over there in Pennsylvania. 
Some have one, some have two. They have sailed the seas since 1954. No 
more in America--except one in New Zealand that denies these ships with 
fuel rods safely on board access to their ports. There is no risk. 
There has never been an accident. Here we sit because a few Americans 
are frightened to death of radioactivity--low, high, or indifferent; 
just the word ``radioactive''--while they live in an radioactive 
environment on average. All of us are exposed to more low-level 
radiation than most of the things we are afraid of because there is 
plenty of it around. But because of them, we sit here and cannot find a 
way to help the State of Minnesota that has fuel rods sitting there 
from nuclear power which have been as safe as can be, and we can't get 
enough votes here to move them across the country. Yet those boats with 
it move all over the world. We sit here with a President--probably 
supported by the Vice President--who says no.

  Look, if they like to talk about energy policy, I think we ought to 
just say: Mr. Vice President, the one thing you take into this campaign 
is that you have been part of an administration with as bad an energy 
policy as any because, as a matter of fact, you had none.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, will my friend yield for a brief question?
  Mr. DOMENICI. I would be delighted. I know I said something 
implicitly about his State, but I didn't mean to.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I want to ask my friend from New Mexico: 
Would George W. Bush think he would have a different policy and would 
allow the nuclear waste to go to Nevada?
  Mr. DOMENICI. I don't know about that. We will build a short-term 
nuclear waste facility within 6 to 8 months of the next President, if 
he is a Republican, because it is totally safe. Whether they put it in 
Nevada or somewhere else, I don't know.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to say again, getting back to the 
energy and water bill, that I hope we can work something out on his 
issue, an issue that bothers some States on his side of the aisle, 
while on my side of the aisle, the Missouri Senators and the 
Mississippi Senators and others, have a different view. There is an 
amendment to this energy and water bill that attempts to solve that 
problem by not letting some amendments proceed with reference to a 
Corps of Engineers manual.
  If this bill does not become law by October 1, I want to talk about a 
couple of things that will really be bad for some States, and certainly 
for my State will not be good.
  In Pantex, TX, there are 2,800 employees; there are 7,300 at the 
Sandia National Laboratory; there are 3,000 in the Kansas City nuclear 
weapons plant. Moving over to water, the Army Corps of Engineers has 
125,000 workers on 1,400 projects.
  This is an important bill. I don't want to go up to October 1 and not 
have a bill and have to say to them that because somebody would not let 
us bring up our bill--which we could have done, which we could have 
gotten passed--we are now at October 1 and can't get anything passed. 
And we are playing a game of who did what to whom. Who keeps the 
Government open? Who closes it? We could have had this completed. We 
could have been in conference this weekend and be back from the 
convention with it finished. It could then go to the President and be 
signed. I don't go beyond just asking that the problem be eliminated.
  I take Senator Daschle at his word. There is nothing to this other 
than he is concerned about protecting a couple of States. I am 
concerned about a couple of other States or more. I am concerned about 
keeping in law what has been in the law for at least two previous 
years.
  I again thank the distinguished Senator from Utah for his comments.
  I want to respond for a moment to a very good friend of mine from the 
other side of the aisle. I consider him a friend. For the most part, we 
run into each other on dairy issues. People do not know that New Mexico 
is a big dairy State. But clearly, the distinguished Senator, Mr. 
Feingold, comes from a State with a lot of dairy cows. We frequently 
are on each other's side, or against each other, principally because 
that is a farming issue. But today, in some brief remarks, Senator 
Feingold took his farming issues, and instead of being concerned about 
his State, got over into my State and into an issue that involves 
thousands of farmers in New Mexico.
  The issue is that thousands of farmers in New Mexico are on a river 
that runs short of water in dry years. We are growing into a 
confrontation as to who owns the flow of the river in a dry year, and a 
silver minnow, which has been declared an endangered species, which 
they think currently resides in the extreme southern regions of the 
river close to the Texas border. Thousands of farmers use it to 
irrigate small and medium-sized farms, and there are a few large ones.
  I hope, if the Senator's constituents, as he said, are concerned 
about this, they are concerned about the entire problem--the problem of 
cities that own water in a dry river basin, and the river basin is not 
always totally moist and running with water. What about the thousands 
of farmers who under our State law own the water? I think if he 
clearly understood that, he would say: I choose not to interfere in a 
contest between the minnows and thousands of farmers and maybe two 
cities or more. And maybe he would say: I wouldn't like Senator 
Domenici getting involved in that if that were my State situation. 
Though he is entitled to and can certainly come down here and do that, 
I hope maybe before doing it--or maybe even now--he would talk with us 
about the issue, which is a very interesting issue.

  For the last 2\1/2\ weeks, I have been constantly in touch with the 
Secretary of Interior seeing what we could do to try to work this issue 
out. I have put on this energy and water bill something so that water 
will not be governed totally by a Solicitor General's opinion.
  That is the issue. I contend it shouldn't be. We might be able to 
work that out soon because there are some very serious problems 
involved that ought to be worked out.

[[Page S7766]]

  I thank Senator Feingold for his consideration of issues that might 
affect my State. I think I have been concerned with his. I would truly 
like to talk to him about this subject because I don't believe it is as 
simple an issue as perhaps some of his endangered species constituents 
indicate in their request to him that he get involved in the issue of 
thousands of farmers in the State of New Mexico and whether they get 
water.

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