[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 154 (Thursday, December 14, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11773-S11774]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         AMERICAN ENERGY CRISIS

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to talk 
about a crisis that the leadership in America does not want to tell the 
American people about, and certainly the leadership does not want to 
try to solve this basic problem which is the most serious problem 
confronting us now.
  I thought it would be fair and right, since this is what I believe 
and this is what I understand and before we have a new President, for 
at least one Senator--and I hope there will be others--to remind the 
American people that we are in the midst of an American energy crisis. 
Unless and until it becomes critical to millions of Americans in their 
daily lives, it is very hard for Americans to think we have a crisis, 
but there is a growing, creeping crisis of paralysis that will occur in 
America because we do not have enough energy that is approved by the 
Environmental Protection Agency and that we can add to our inventories 
and resources.
  The crisis is coming close. Californians may be asking some 
questions. They ought to be. The media of the United States is not 
asking them yet. The great State of California, if you put that State 
alongside countries, is either the third or fourth largest economic 
unit in the world. In other words, in terms of gross domestic product, 
California is either third or fourth in the world.
  There are brownouts happening in California, USA, which means there 
is not enough distributable electricity in the power lines, in the grid 
of California, to permit people to continue operating day by day as if 
there is sufficient energy for anything and everything they choose to 
do.
  I hope some people start asking: Who did this to us? Why are we in 
this condition? I predict this will creep across America, and I only 
hope we do not blame the next President for what has occurred before 
his watch. We do not have anyone in a leadership position at the 
executive branch of America, from the President on down, who is telling 
the American people that we have a big, big energy problem and that 
there are solutions, but it will mean we have to make some tough 
decisions.
  I want to talk a moment about what energy means.
  The reason the United States is powerful, the reason we can have a 
strong military, the reason we have the best material things in our 
daily lives--more houses, more cars, more refrigerators--and people can 
continue to aspire to be materially sound in America with our economy 
growing robustly, adding people to the payrolls and giving them more 
money per unit of time, giving them a better standard of living and a 
life to lead, is because we have energy. Without energy, we cannot 
grow, and I do not mean grow from the standpoint of adding a 
subdivision; I mean grow from the standpoint of putting to work for us 
in our daily lives the kinds of things that use energy and give us 
productivity, jobs, and economic growth. Without an energy supply, that 
cannot happen.
  I want to talk a moment about our goals for the world.
  We have used some really nice words--``globalization,'' for one. The 
way I see it, America would like poor countries to get rich. We would 
like poor people in the world to have more, not fewer, material things. 
Believe me, these poor nations are beginning to look at the world and 
ask: How about us? Can't we grow? Can't we have prosperity?
  Let me give an answer as I see it. If the world is expected to grow 
and prosper using current American restraints on energy sources, it is 
impossible for us to grow and the poor to grow because they need huge 
quantities of energy to grow. Do we want to be part of that? If we do, 
how can we hide our heads and not encourage that all sources of energy 
be looked at from the standpoint of the benefits versus the costs--the 
cost to a country, to the environment.

  Because of the inability to make hard decisions, we are just about to 
make our country a natural gas environment. We have almost abandoned 
coal. We have almost abandoned cleaning up coal so we can use it.
  People are wondering what is happening to natural gas prices. When we 
say to the American people that all you can use in new powerplants is 
natural gas, all you can use for anything now because of environmental 
concerns is natural gas, and then we say we cannot produce it on 
American lands, on American property, on American public domain--I am 
looking across the aisle at a Senator who is always talking about coal, 
coal mining. Let me tell him, there is currently a study that says the 
United States of America has 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. We 
use 20 a year. That is almost 10 years of total supply. We have it 
locked up in American public domain, in American real estate that we 
own as a people, because we are frightened to make decisions about 
letting people explore for it or drill for it. In fact, we have case 
after case where almost nonsensical restraints lock it up so we cannot 
use it.
  I submit that the challenge for the new President is to be courageous 
and for his Secretary of Energy to be courageous. First, we had better 
define the problem for the American people. A Senator this morning came 
to the floor and spoke about our growth. I say to my friend from 
Colorado, we seem to be having a downward trend in our gross domestic 
product, and everybody wants to tell Alan Greenspan how to do his 
business. That is OK. That is what Senators do. Everyone claims Alan 
Greenspan in the last decade did the best job of steering us in the 
direction of sustained growth, high employment without inflation. I say 
to my friends, there can be no sustained growth at 2.7 per year or 3.3 
per year, which gives us a lot of power in our economy, if we do not 
have energy to use. We cannot do that with brownouts across America.
  That, in and of itself, and the increased price will cause America's 
economy to sputter and slow down, and somebody will be blamed. I 
submit, do not blame the new President and do not blame the new 
Secretary. They may have to tell us the truth. They may have to tell us 
we cannot as a nation get by hiding our heads from new energy sources, 
such as advanced new technology in the nuclear area.
  I think we are going to have to start talking about it realistically 
with the American people.
  Do you know in South Africa they are about to build a module--that 
means a small powerplant--with brand new nuclear technology that, 
number one, means the powerplant can never melt; it is passive; it will 
turn itself off at a certain temperature.
  Do you know that powerplant they are trying to build will not use 
light water? Their gas-cooled design may be much simpler, much safer, 
and produce less waste (but some) than light water systems.
  We here in America are working on nuclear research and the like 
related to that kind of addition, but we are doing it in such a quiet 
way because we are fearful that some will rise up and get angry about 
it. Angry they may get, but the truth is, if the American people

[[Page S11774]]

understand that we can move in that direction--carefully, slowly--
adding some diversity to our energy supply, we can also do a better job 
in cleaning up our coal and using some of it for electricity.
  We can, indeed, open up our public lands to exploration instead of 
hiding them, as if drilling a well that produces huge amounts of 
natural gas for Americans--and for whatever we need to grow and 
prosper--as if that is something terrible rather than something very 
good. It is something where we ought to hold our heads up and say: We 
own it. It is American. If we produce it, it is ours. We do not have to 
be dependent.
  And, yes, there is no question that we ought to look at the refining 
capacity of America. We have not built a new refinery in 16 years, I 
say to the occupant of the chair.
  What is that all about? It is because we have put environmental rules 
ahead of America's energy needs. We refuse to look at real cost 
benefits and reasonable mainstream protection rather than extraordinary 
protection that in many instances is meaningless but costly and many 
times stops the production of things such as refineries, pipelines, and 
the like.
  I have much more that I will talk about from time to time on the 
floor of the Senate, but I come today to say, I hope we do not have to 
turn off our Christmas trees in New Mexico during this Christmas 
season, nor in the Senator's State of Colorado. I hope we can turn them 
back on in California.
  Frankly, the only reason they cannot--and the only reason California 
suffers--is because nobody will make tough decisions. We are sitting 
back suggesting that things are really going well; that we will fix the 
American energy supply with windmills. I can deliver a specific talk on 
why that will not work for all our energy, but we ought to continue it. 
But it will never give us the kind of energy supply we need as we look 
to the future.
  Do you know that the underdeveloped countries of the world, which 
intend to grow--and we say to them: Grow, prosper--by 2020 will use as 
much energy as the United States of America? Where are they going to 
get it? What are they going to use? What are we going to suggest they 
do?
  Are we going to sit back and say America can grow but they can't? Are 
we going to say they can use some new kind of energy source but we 
won't?
  So our leadership in the world, moving towards democratization and 
growth and prosperity for the poorest of nations, will come to a 
grinding halt if, in fact, we cannot have energy supply in the world.
  Why should we have an agreement to preserve ambient air qualities and 
in that report not mention nuclear power? Why should leaders do that? I 
have had experts, physicists, who know what they are talking about, 
saying that alone is enough to put that document over here on a table 
and declare that it is not real.
  If you want clean air in the future, you cannot say we will do it by 
using only natural gas, that we will not build any more coal burning 
powerplants, even though we could develop the technology to do that, 
that we will not consider nuclear power, even though we have a nuclear 
Navy that since 1954 has gone all through the waters of the seas and 
oceans of the world with it, with one or two powerplants right inside 
the hull of the boat, with never an accident. Never has anything 
happened, and we are so frightened we will not even talk about it.
  I think we will talk about it. I think we will talk about opening up 
American public domain for production. I think we will have a real 
debate about ANWR, rather than an emotional debate, a real one about 
what we ought to do to relate our energy needs to that area of the 
world, not just putting our hands up and saying it cannot be touched, 
that you can do nothing.
  So there is much to be talked about and much leadership needed. But 
the point is, energy problems in America, without major changes, will 
get more pronounced. We will have more crises; the prices will go 
higher, not lower across the board in America for gasoline and natural 
gas.
  I am hopeful the new President will put somebody in the Department of 
Energy who will help America address this issue with its eyes open, 
ready to make some really tough decisions.
  But the biggest thing I seek is to set the record straight. When that 
occurs, as the energy crisis creeps across America, I hope we will 
remember that the seeds have been sown before the swearing in of this 
President. They are there; the lack of doing the right thing in America 
is already in place.
  This President and his Cabinet and his Secretary and his 
Environmental Protection Agency head are going to have to help solve a 
crisis they did not create. We ought to know that, and we ought to set 
the record straight that that is the case.
  I want to close by saying there is plenty of blame to go around. But 
we will not solve this problem without some leadership that is willing 
to tell us the truth and suggest that there is really no need for the 
State of California to be running out of electricity. It is because we 
have been shortsighted, misled--and they have been in their State 
because there is the potential for plenty of energy to go around out 
there. We just have to decide that America needs energy for its future, 
and that we cannot grow more dependent, that we ought to grow less 
dependent.
  So rather than proceed with details about each of the sources of 
energy which I had chosen to talk about today, I will do that on 
another day. Suffice it to say, we will not continue to grow--the 
Federal Reserve Board notwithstanding--if we cannot solve the problem 
of how much energy we need and make sure we have it.
  Some people thought that because of Silicon Valley, because it is so 
clean and because it is built around new technology and 
computerization, we would not need new energy sources. But it turns out 
that if you want that kind of growth and that kind of productivity 
increase, and if you want the future of our country to be built upon 
the technology that evolved with the Silicon Valley in California and 
other mini ``silicon valleys,'' you need a lot of energy to create the 
new productivity that that brings to America.

  I want to also add that new technology, led by computerization, is 
part of the reason we have had the sustained growth; they added a 
dimension of productivity we did not even measure for many years. They 
added growth to technology by way of productivity increases: The more 
computers you had, the more you got out of your personnel per unit of 
work. You got more because of high technology. That has added immensely 
to our productivity and has permitted us to grow without inflation. 
That is peaking out.
  Surely, if we do not add more energy to the mix of the base, we will 
have to start trading off one source of growth in America for another. 
I do not believe that is going to work, and somebody will be blamed, 
especially since it does not have to happen.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.

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