[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 116 (Tuesday, September 26, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9242-S9243]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             ENERGY POLICY

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I spoke yesterday for a bit and in the 
Energy Committee today for a bit about energy policy. I guess I believe 
so strongly about this issue that I want to speak again perhaps from a 
little different vantage point.
  I would like to talk today about the ``invisible priority'' that has 
existed in the United States for practically the last 8 years. The 
``invisible priority'' has been the supply of reliable affordable 
energy for the American people.
  Let me say unequivocally that we have no energy policy because the 
Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 
Energy Department all have ideological priorities that leave the 
American consumer of energy out in the cold.
  Making sure that Americans have a supply of reliable and affordable 
energy, and taking actions to move us in that direction, is the 
``invisible priority.'' And that is giving the administration the 
benefit of the doubt.
  ``Not my job'' is the response that the Interior Department of the 
United States gives to the energy crisis and to America's ever-growing 
dependence upon foreign oil and, yes, I might say ever-growing 
dependence upon natural gas. The other alternatives, such as coal, 
nuclear, or other--``not my job.''
  It is also the response that the Environmental Protection Agency 
gives when it takes actions, promulgates rules, and regulations. Their 
overall record suggests--let me repeat-- ``not my job,'' says the 
Environmental Protection Agency.
  The Interior Department, making drilling for oil and natural gas as 
difficult as possible, says, ``Don't bother us.''
  ``It is not my job'', says the Department of Interior. The 
Environmental Protection Agency's job is to get a good environmental 
policy based on sound science and be the enemy of an ideologically pure 
environmental policy at the expense of providing energy that we need.

  My last observation: In summary, the ``Energy Department'' is an 
oxymoron. It is anti-nuclear but pro-windmills. I know many Americans 
ask: what is the Senator talking about? Nuclear power is 20 percent of 
America's electricity. At least it was about 6 months ago. We have an 
Energy Department for this great land with the greatest technology 
people, scientists and engineers, that is pro-windmills and anti-
nuclear.
  I will say, parenthetically, as the chairman of the Energy and Water 
Subcommittee on Appropriations, the last 3 years we put in a tiny bit 
of money for nuclear energy research and have signed it into law as 
part of the entire appropriation, and we do have a tiny piece of money 
to look into the future in terms of nuclear power. It is no longer 
nothing going on, but it is a little bit.
  Boy, do we produce windmills in the United States. The Department of 
Energy likes renewables. All of us like them. The question is, How will 
they relieve the United States from the problem we have today? I guess 
even this administration and even the Vice President, who is running 
for President, says maybe we have a crisis. Of course we have a crisis. 
The Federal Government spent $102 million on solar energy, $33 million 
on wind, but only $36.5 million on nuclear research, which obviously is 
the cleanest of any approach to producing large quantities of 
electricity.
  Sooner or later, even though we have been kept from doing this by a 
small vocal minority, even America will look back to its early days of 
scientific prowess in this area as we wonder how France is doing it 
with 87 percent of their energy produced by nuclear powerplants.
  With all we hear about nuclear power from those opposed, who wouldn't 
concede that France exists with 87 percent or 85 percent of its energy 
coming from nuclear powerplants? They do, and their atmosphere is 
clean. Their ambient air is demonstrably the best of all developed 
countries because it produces no pollution.
  We have an administration that, so long as we had cheap oil, said 
everything was OK, and we couldn't even seek a place to put the residue 
from our nuclear powerplants, the waste product. We couldn't even find 
a place to put it. We got vetoes and objections from the 
administration. Yet there are countries such as France, Japan, and 
others that have no difficulty with this problem; it is not a major 
problem to store spent fuel.
  Let me move on to wind versus nuclear. Nuclear produced 200 times 
more electricity than wind and 2,000 times more than solar. As I 
indicated, solar research gets three times more funding than nuclear 
research and development.
  The wind towers--we have seen them by the thousands in parts of 
California and other States, awfully strange looking things. They are 
not the old windmills that used to grace the western prairie. They have 
only two prongs. They look strange.
  We are finding wind towers kill birds, based on current bird kill 
rates. Replacing the electric market with wind would kill 4.4 million 
birds. I am sure nobody expects either of those to happen. However, 
more eagles were killed in California wind farms than were killed in 
the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

  The Energy Department calls wind a renewable energy policy, and the 
Sierra Club calls wind towers the Cuisinart of the air.
  I will discuss the SPR selloff. For almost 8 years, energy has been 
the ``invisible priority'' for the U.S. Government led by Bill Clinton 
and the current Vice President.
  Incidentally, the Vice President, who is running for President, had 
much to do with this ``invisible priority;'' he was the 
administration's gatekeeper on almost all matters that dealt with the 
Environmental Protection Agency and almost all matters that dealt with 
the Department of the Interior in terms of the production of energy on 
public land.
  Let me talk about the SPR selloff for a minute. Treasury Secretary 
Summers warned President Clinton that the administration's proposal--
now decision--to drive down energy prices by opening the energy reserve 
would be ``a major and substantial policy mistake.'' He wrote the 
President, and Chairman

[[Page S9243]]

Greenspan agreed, that using the SPR to manipulate prices, rather than 
adhering to its original purpose of responding to a supply disruption, 
is a dangerous precedent. Summers added that the move would expose us 
to valid charges of naivete, using a very blunt tool to address heating 
oil prices.
  American refineries today have to make so many different kinds of 
fuel because of environmental protection rules that no one would 
believe they would be capable of doing. They were running at 95 percent 
of capacity last week. We have not built a new refinery in almost 20 
years.
  What has happened: America builds no energy, no refining capacity, 
because it is too tough environmentally to do that and live up to our 
rules and regulations. Yet you can build them in many other countries, 
and people are surviving and glad to have them--at least, new ones--
because they are doing a great job for their economy and producing the 
various kinds of products that come from crude oil. Yet America, the 
biggest user in this area, has built none.
  If we take the supply of SPR out of SPR, it will still need to be 
refined into heating oil. I have just indicated there is hardly any 
room because there is hardly any capacity.
  The invisible policies wait ominously on the horizon, boding serious 
problems. We have found that natural gas produced in America, drilled 
for by Americans, offshore and onshore, is the fuel of choice. Now we 
are not even building any powerplants that use coal as the energy that 
drives them because it is too expensive, too environmentally rigorous, 
and nobody dares build them. They build them elsewhere in the world but 
not in America.
  We use natural gas, the purest of all, and say fill your energy needs 
for electricity using natural gas. Guess what happened. The price has 
gone to $3.35 per cubic feet; 6 months ago it was $2.16. And the next 
price increase is when the consumers of America get the bills in 
October, November, and December for the natural gas that heats their 
house and runs their gas stove because we have chosen not to use any 
other source but natural gas to build our electric generating tower 
when hardly any other country in the world chooses that resource. They 
choose coal or some other product rather than this rarity of natural 
gas.
  Now 50 percent of the homes in America are dependent upon natural 
gas. The companies that deliver it are already putting articles in the 
newspaper: Don't blame us; the price is going up.
  Who do you blame? I think you blame an administration that had no 
energy policy and for whom energy was an ``invisible priority.'' It was 
an ``invisible priority'' because the solutions lay within EPA, the 
Interior Department, and an Energy Department that was paralyzed by an 
attitude of anti-production of real energy. That is the way they were 
left by Hazel O'Leary, the first Secretary of Energy under this 
President, and Mr. Pena; and Bill Richardson is left with that residue.
  Fifty percent of homes are heated by natural gas. I predict the bills 
will be skyrocketing because we are using more and more of it because 
we have no energy policy, and American homeowners are the ones who will 
see that in their bills. When they start writing the checks with those 
increases, they are going to be mighty mad at someone.
  Don't get fooled. The candidate on the Democratic side, if the 
election is not over by the time that happens, will blame those who 
produce natural gas for they are related to oil and gas production. 
Would you believe, as we stand here today, 18 percent of the 
electricity generated in America is produced by natural gas? Oh, what a 
predicament we have gotten ourselves into because we have an invisible 
energy policy ruled over by an Environmental Protection Agency that 
never asked a question about energy and an Interior Department that 
takes property and land of the United States out of production.
  I want to tell you a couple of facts. As compared to 1983, 60 percent 
more Federal land is now off limits to drilling. On October 22, 1999, 
Vice President Gore, in Rye, NH, said:

       I will do everything in my power to make sure there is no 
     new drilling.

  Then we have ANWR. It is off limits.
  Offshore drilling is off limits. We could double our domestic oil 
supply if we opened offshore drilling. Yet we will have more and more 
transports hauling in refined and crude oil products, creating more and 
more risk for our ports where they are bringing it in. Yet we maintain 
we cannot do any more drilling because it is too dangerous.
  The multiple-use concept in our public domain is, for all intents and 
purposes, practically dead. We have 15 sets of new EPA regulations. Not 
one new refinery has been built since 1976. Now we have soaring 
gasoline prices. I understand my time is up.
  Would Senator Kennedy mind if I take 1 more minute? I will wrap it 
up.
  I will close with one more fact, and I will put the others in the 
Record. Californians usually spend about $7 billion a year in 
electricity. The price spikes were so dramatic that they spent $3.6 
billion in 1 month, the month of July--half of what they annually spend 
was spent in 1 month.
  Why? California is a big electricity importer. There is growing 
demand. Silicon Valley companies are big energy users. Demand is up 20 
percent in the San Francisco area over last year but no new capacity 
has been built.
  Environmental regulations make building a new plant nearly impossible 
in California. I predicted exorbitant home heating bills this coming 
winter even while we were experiencing the gasoline price spikes in the 
Midwest.
  It used to be that one type of gasoline was suitable for the entire 
country. There are now at least 62 different products. One eastern 
pipeline handles 38 different grades of gasoline, 7 grades of kerosene, 
16 grades of home heating oil and diesel. Four different gasoline 
mixtures are required between Chicago and St. Louis--a 300 mile 
distance. As a result of these Federal/local requirements, the industry 
has less flexibility to respond to local or regional shortages.
  We have 15 sets of new environmental regulations: Tier II gasoline 
sulfur, California MTBE phaseout; blue ribbon panel recommendations; 
regional haze regs; on-road diesel; off road diesel; gasoline air 
toxics; refinery MACT II; section 126 petitions; gasoline air toxics; 
new source review enforcement initiative; climate change; urban air 
toxics; residual risk.
  The MTBE groundwater contamination issue is going to make the 
gasoline supply issue even more complicated and reduce industry's 
flexibility to meet demand.
  S. 2962 includes a wide array of new gasoline requirements that are 
both irrelevant and detrimental to millions of American motorists. 
Legislation mandates the use of ethanol in motor fuel. This would cut 
revenues to the highway trust fund by more than $2 billion a year.
  The U.S. Department of Energy has projected that S. 2962 would 
increase the consumption of ethanol in the Northeast from zero to 
approximately 565 million gallons annually.
  Frankly, Mr. President, no energy policy is better than this 
administration's energy policy.

                          ____________________