[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 96 (Wednesday, July 11, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H3939-H3945]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THE PRESIDENT'S PLAN FOR ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Osborne). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Radanovich) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to come on 
this floor and talk about the President's plan for energy and for the 
future of the United States of America.
  I wanted to make a couple of points in response to the speakers of 
the previous hour regarding the situation in California. I am from 
California. I represent Fresno, California, and the central part of the 
state, where we too are at ground zero of the California energy crisis.
  There were a couple of statements made earlier which spoke ill of 
deregulation and used California as an example of that, and I would 
like to clarify that in California there was never really a 
deregulation plan. It was half a deregulation plan.

[[Page H3940]]

  In California's deregulation plan, the rates and the charges that the 
utilities were able to charge consumers were frozen. They were frozen 
rates and were not allowed to be increased, whereas the wholesale 
rates, or those rates that utilities had to go out and purchase energy 
for, were unlimited and put on the spot market, so that they would 
change minute by minute, hour by hour, every 24 hours, which made them 
very susceptible to high price spikes and such.
  That was the problem in California, the problem that the price 
increases could not be passed on as signals to the consumer to start 
conserving was what created the energy crisis in California.
  It was half of a deregulation plan, and under such a situation, it 
could have been easily corrected, up to a year ago. In May of the year 
2000, when evidence started showing in San Diego that prices were 
starting to go through the roof, the Governor of California, who I 
believe was more concerned about providing leadership in a crisis than, 
frankly, his own reelection prospects and obtaining the presidency, had 
he acted earlier and imposed or allowed the PUC, the State PUC, to 
impose a 20 to 25 percent rate increase, not like the 48 percent rate 
increase that was passed because he waited so long, I think, people 
would have been able to begin conserving and he would have been able to 
get a lot of those utilities off the spot market and into some long-
term contracts that made sense, and we would never have faced a $20 
billion hit to the State of California. The minimum damage that could 
have been done would likely have been around $500 million to $1 
billion.
  It was due to lack of leadership in California that created the 
energy crisis, and it was lack of leadership from the Governor and the 
State of California that caused the problems.
  I cannot explain that more. To be blaming a President who has only 
been in office for less than 6 months for all the woes of California I 
think is just unjust and unfair, and it is a diversion of what the real 
issue is, and that is that we have got poor leadership on this issue in 
the State of California.
  If California really wants to get out of their energy crisis, they 
only need to do a couple of things. I would say three things.
  First, the Governor has to stop buying power. I think the Governor 
has been taking on this responsibility for about 6 months now, and, 
since then, he has been purchasing energy up to seven times more than 
what the utilities are able to charge for and get back.

                              {time}  2045

  That is an upside down equation that leads to billions and billions 
of dollars worth of debt that the utilities, after $9 billion in debt, 
could not manage. So the State has started incurring those losses, and 
still do. Today, California's Department of Water Resources, under the 
eye of the governor, is purchasing power right now 3 to 7 times more 
than what utilities are able to get from it. Now, granted, those prices 
are starting to come down, because a rate increase of 48 percent was 
imposed by the governor a year after he could have done it and averted 
this whole problem, has come into effect, and people are starting to 
conserve, and the future prices of energy are beginning to come down. 
This is what should have happened a year ago and did not happen until 
now. My own utility bill that I just got from my residence in 
California right now is about 4 times more than average of it. I think 
people in general are experiencing a doubling to tripling of their 
retail rates because of this. A 20 to 25 percent rate increase early 
on, with decisive leadership from the governor, would have prevented 
this entire thing and, instead, in waiting so long and in purchasing 
energy at such convoluted prices, he has led California into this 
crisis and we are still in the middle of it.
  Mr. Speaker, in addition to that, the governor has entered into long-
term contracts that do not start for about another year, but the 
average of those long-term contract prices range from about, again, 3 
to 7 times more than what the utilities are able to charge for. I had a 
company in my office the other day that talked about the inability of 
the governor to sit down with all those that are involved in the energy 
crisis in California; that would be the utilities, that would be the 
marketers, that would be public officials, everybody that cares about 
California and who has a business stake in California, not only in the 
short term, but in the long term, and to sit down and work through this 
process, really resulted in nothing; in fact, did not happen until at 
least 8 months after the crisis began. Had the governor gotten people 
into his room, he would have been able to negotiate things.
  As an example, one company that has a geothermal plant in southern 
California, close to the gentleman from California who just spoke from 
southern California, went to the governor and was willing to sell 
energy at 7 cents per kilowatt hour and was frustrated so much by the 
governor and was rebuffed, clear up until the governor finally took 21 
cents per kilowatt hour on a long-term contract when they had been 
offering 7. It is this kind of, I do not even want to say the word 
``leadership,'' in California that has caused our problems. It has not 
involved the environmentalists to a degree that has caused the shortage 
in California, it has really been a shortsightedness I think on the 
part of Californians to think that we can bury our heads in the sand 
and pretend that our rapid increases in population are somehow going to 
get their energy from some source unknown or unnamed, so let us not 
take care of our own energy needs.
  Mr. Speaker, my own congressional district in California grew by 20 
percent over the last 10 years. We are one of the faster growing parts 
of the State, but it is very obvious in all of California that our 
population was growing, our energy demands were increasing, and nobody, 
nobody was making the efforts not only to increase the capacity of the 
natural gas lines that come into the State of California from other 
areas, but also to license and permit other plants and facilities in 
the State in order to make up for it.
  It is much the same I think with Americans. We like to have the 
lights come on when we flip the switch; we love to have water come out 
of the faucet when we turn it on, but very few of us want one of those 
own facilities in our own backyard to provide that for us. As 
individuals in our local communities, we are like that, but we are also 
that way nationally, when it comes to the national energy policy that 
we have.
  The United States consumes over 25 percent of the energy produced in 
the world today, and yet we utilize and use about 2 percent of our 
natural resources to get it. It is this kind of nimbi attitude I think 
on a local level that has caused problems in California and, kind of on 
a national level, in our participation in the world's energy reserves 
that we think that we can have our cake and eat it too.
  Mr. Speaker, I am grateful that the President has taken the 
initiative on this energy policy to change that, because not only is it 
hypocritical, it is not serving in our best interests, it is a threat 
to our national security, and I think it is morally wrong to demand a 
lifestyle and yet not pay up for it to develop the resources to provide 
it. I commend the President for coming up with the energy policy that 
he has so that we can not only provide increased energy from alternate 
sources like wind and solar, but also realizing that they are never 
going to be able to take the place of natural fuels, coals, oils; they 
are not going to be a significant part of the energy mix in the United 
States, ever. I think that we can work to increase that, but the 
percentage increases that we get are not going to be that great.

  So it is wise for us to begin to look at developing our own resources 
so that we can make up the energy difference that is caused by the 
increased population in the United States, but also to begin to think 
about our national security. That is why I commend the President of the 
United States for doing what he is doing, providing the leadership. It 
may not be popular to some people; it may not be a thrill to talk about 
more nuclear plants or developing coal reserves, but I have to tell my 
colleagues, what is more important I think is keeping the lights on and 
keeping the water running and keeping our national boundaries secure.
  So that is why I want to thank the President.
  I have to tell my colleagues, today we took 2 very important steps 
forward

[[Page H3941]]

on the development of our national energy policy. One was in the 
Committee on Resources where we began hearings on the Energy Security 
Act with the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Hansen), the chairman of the 
committee. This bill focuses on increased production of diverse fields 
beneath Federal lands and the outer continental shelf. It instructs the 
Secretary of the Interior to establish an environmentally sound program 
for exploration, development and production of oil and natural gas in 
ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Again, the exploration in 
this wilderness accounts for about the size of one-fifth of Dulles 
International Airport. For those of us in America that have not flown 
into Dulles International Airport, it is about one-fifth the size of 
your own airport if you are in an urban setting. It is a very, very 
small piece of this vast, vast wilderness, about half a percent of the 
total landmass in general.
  It also adds 5 areas for increased production: hydropower, gas, 
geothermal, solar and wind energy. As my colleagues know, part of the 
problem in California was our overreliance on one single source of 
energy, and that was natural gas. Even in that situation, with the 
transmission lines in California, there was no increased technology to 
increase the capacity of the flow of natural gas within the State of 
California, which caused the high prices for those that were bringing 
natural gas into the line. It is California's fault, and it is time to 
stop blaming the bogeyman or the evil-doers for victimizing poor 
California. It was bad leadership that caused the energy crisis in 
California, and I am very thankful that we had the President come to 
the plate with this energy plan.
  Also, in the Committee on Energy and Commerce, we marked up the 
Energy Advancement and Conservation Act of 2001. It does the following: 
it leads with conservation, which is one of the most important aspects 
of the President's plan. It mandates that the Federal Government take 
the leadership role, leading by example and making conservation happen. 
It establishes a Federal energy bank to fund energy conservation 
projects. It expands LIHEAP and weatherization assistance.
  Now, LIHEAP is typically a program, a Federal program that makes up 
for the high cost of heating oil in the northeast. Typically, that is 
the history of the program, but it is being expanded so that those of 
us in California that cannot afford the increased costs because we have 
to run our air conditioners a little bit more because it got up to even 
last week 108 in some parts of the central valley, these LIHEAP funds 
are being extended to help those rising costs because our air 
conditioners are running so high. That program is being expanded in 
California. It provides assistance to schools and hospitals for energy 
conservation, and for consumers it provides new appliance standards and 
expands the energy star program to provide better consumer education.
  This is just a piece of what is beginning to happen in Washington 
today because of the initiative of the President of the United States, 
President Bush, who has seen that we have been shortsighted over the 
last 8 to 10 years and not developed a policy that leaves us vulnerable 
to foreign countries all across the world.
  With that, I would like to invite the gentleman from Utah (Mr. 
Hansen), the chairman of the Committee on Resources, to begin perhaps a 
little dialogue on the bill that was begun in his committee today, and 
that is the Energy Security Act.
  Mr. Speaker, I welcome the gentleman.
  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from California 
for inviting me to be a part of this Special Order tonight. I would 
like to explain, with the gentleman's permission, some of the things 
about the plan that we introduced today.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Please do.
  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, let me point out that for 8 years we have 
just kind of been Moses in the desert wandering, trying to find out 
where we are going on this thing. I think Mr. Richardson, who is the 
Secretary of Energy, made an interesting statement when he said, for 8 
years we have not had a policy, and now it is about time that we 
started putting one together. So for 8 years we have kind of wandered 
around wondering where we were going. In fact, if we did anything, we 
ruined a lot of areas because of monuments that were not thought out 
and things along that order.

  Vice President Cheney was given the assignment to work on the energy 
program and did a very commendable job. I read it very carefully and, 
in my opinion, if there is one word that would explain what the present 
administration has come up with, it is the word ``realistic.'' They 
came up with a realistic program on how to face some of these things.
  Now, I enjoy hearing my colleagues talk about all of these wonderful 
things that are going to happen and how it is going to come together, 
but when we get right down to it, in all honesty, what is ``going to 
happen'' is not there. We cannot drive into a gas station and go to 
this alternative energy pump because there is nothing there yet. As we 
look at where we get our energy, 2 percent comes from alternative areas 
such as wind and solar and things such as that, and I definitely feel 
we should do the technology and advance it as far and as rapidly as we 
can. However, it is not there right now.
  I would like to use the illustration of a gentleman that came into my 
office about 5 or 6 years ago and he started telling me about all of 
the interesting things that have occurred in transportation. He said, 
years ago, we used to use horses and then we went to cars and most 
people went on buses or trains, and it was really a big deal when the 2 
trains came together in Promontory, Utah, in my district, incidentally, 
and every May we celebrate the idea of driving the golden spike. Gosh, 
we could get on a train and instead of doing 4 miles an hour on a 
horse, we could breeze across the country in 3 or 4 weeks. That was a 
wonderful thing. People really thought it was a Utopian idea. Then came 
along airplanes and, of course, now we do not see too many people 
travel on trains, most of us go by air.
  Well, he made an interesting statement. He said, I am working on a 
program, and, he said, I think it will be there, where you walk into a 
thing like a phone booth and you punch in San Francisco and sap, you 
end up in a San Francisco. Well, at that point I got just a tad nervous 
talking to this gentlemen. I said, when is it going to be working? He 
said, I do not know, but I know it is going to work. I did not ask how 
you change the molecules around and all that because he loved the idea, 
but that, in a way, I say to the gentleman from California, strikes me 
with a lot of these things we are hearing about alternative sources: 2 
percent, tripled to 6 percent. When are we going to get to that area?
  In the interim period, when someone comes up with this wonderful 
invention that moves us within seconds from one place to another, we 
still have to take that airplane, we still have to drive our cars, we 
still have to heat our homes, we still have to light our homes.
  So while we are waiting, let us go back to what the Vice President 
was talking about. We are talking about a realistic program to get us 
out of this energy problem that we are in.

                              {time}  2100

  That is why this bill was introduced today in the Committee on Energy 
and Commerce today, so we could take care of these things.
  I was interested, in listening to the former speakers. When I was 
listening to them, I thought back to that gentleman who came in and 
talked to me about this wonderful idea.
  Gosh, I know there is a lot of energy from the sun. I agree with the 
gentleman from Oregon. It is too bad we cannot capture it and make it 
all work right now. If someone would step up to the plate and say, here 
is the technology we have, and doggone it, we are going to do it right 
now, I commend them, and I hope they come up with something good.
  But right now, the plan that we have introduced in both of these 
committees is around this word ``realistic,'' and realistically, where 
are we getting our energy? Our energy is basically coming from fossil 
fuels. Also, it is coming from other areas. We do get some out of 
water. We do get some out of various sources of energy. But right now, 
the one that they have come up with takes care of that.

[[Page H3942]]

  I notice the one gentleman from California talked about the idea that 
it was not California's problem, it was the problem of these big energy 
guys who would not build these things. Well, no disrespect to our good 
friend from California, and especially my friend, the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Radanovich), but let us look at what California has put 
in the way of restrictions compared to other areas.
  California has made it so difficult to build a nuclear plant, a coal-
fired plant, especially a coal-fired plant, a gas-fired plant, that it 
makes it totally impossible to do it.
  A lot of these people come and say there are too many regulations, 
too many hoops to go through, and therefore, we do not want to do it.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. If I may weigh in a little, too, California used to 
have three nuclear facilities. We only have one, now. A few years ago, 
the Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant, which was in the Sacramento area, 
the voters in the area voted to shut the thing down, so they not only 
discouraged new ones, they actually went after existing power-
generating facilities.
  So it was, unfortunately, the view that we could have increased 
population and not increase energy capacity. That is not realistic, but 
I think that is the view that the gentleman so well expounded. That 
alternative energy is great, I think it needs to be expanded, but it is 
not realistic to think that it is ever going to meet a significant 
portion of our energy needs. It is just another way of saying that we 
do not want to develop our own energy resources.
  Mr. HANSEN. That is sad, in a way. Because if America is willing to 
say, all right, we do not want to drive our cars, heat our homes, we do 
not want power or air conditioning, we will just go back to the Stone 
Age, so to speak, then let us all stand around and say, gee, this is 
wonderful. Look at this beautiful environment.
  But America is not going to do that. America is a forward, 
progressive country, always looking for that edge of the envelope where 
we can get ahead. Gosh, will that not be nice when we do develop these 
things. I hope it is in our lifetime where we can see these things come 
about, and we will not have the energy pollution and that type of 
thing.
  But I hasten to say that a lot of these things are much better. We 
just talked about nuclear. They are very, very safe. It is kind of sad, 
but a lot of politicians like to get up and talk about how terrible it 
is, we are all going to die because we have that. A lot of people do 
not realize that we have not built these new nuclear plants, but we 
have gone from 12 percent of nuclear dependency up to 20 percent just 
through efficiency.
  I think really, I would say to my friend, the gentleman from 
California, that the thing we have to realize is that we are now 57 
percent dependent on foreign sources, 57 percent, according to 
testimony today in the committee from the Department of the Interior.
  It was not too long ago, in fact I think right at the start of 
President Clinton's administration, where we were about in the 
thirties. So we have really gone in a hurry to get ourselves up to this 
amount.
  What does America want to do? Where are we getting that 57 percent? 
Some of it is from our friends from Venezuela, some of those areas. But 
let us just have the American public look at this. That is, do we want 
to depend on those we can least depend upon? Do we want to depend upon 
Iraq, with a man like Saddam Hussein having his hand on the spigot of 
the oil we get? Do we want to depend on Iran? Do we want to depend on 
Libya? Do we want to depend on countries that we can hardly depend on 
who are sworn enemies to us, who many of them practice terrorism on us? 
Do we want to depend on those people?
  People say, OPEC surely does not have the range of this thing. Who 
are we kidding? They can make this go up and down in the matter of a 
blink of an eye, and have shown that they can do that.
  What was so bad about the idea of looking at other sources? Now, a 
real great actor who considers himself a great environmentalist, who 
has probably done more to foul it up than anybody I know, wrote a 
letter to the administration criticizing them for going to ANWR, and 
made the statement in his letter, well, we are only getting 6 months' 
worth out of that.
  Come on, let us think about that a while. Where do we get this? Does 
it all come out of one big spigot? Of course not. We get some from 
Texas, some from Indiana, some from Utah, some from Venezuela, some 
from California, some from Saudi Arabia, some out of Alaska, we get 
some offshore, so it is an aggregate.
  If we just took one of those, we could say that about any source 
there is, that that is the only source. Now we look at this thing at 
ANWR up on the North Slope of Alaska. What do we have up there? It is 
east of Prudhoe Bay. The last time I was there and heard these people 
talk about it, they used a lot of figures. One that jumps out at me was 
1 million barrels a day for 100 years. That would be about 11 percent 
of what we are getting.
  Then I debated one of our Senators. He said, there is no 
infrastructure. Where has he been? It is only 74 miles over to the 
Alyeska pipeline. That is a lot better than we have in the West in a 
lot of different instances where they could pipe it to the Alyeska 
pipeline, down to Valdez, and we could use that source.
  Today in testimony it went on ad nauseum, and Secretary Norton did a 
very fine job in explaining the position of the administration about 
fouling up ANWR.
  The gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) was there, and very admirably 
talked about what ANWR is. Frankly, as we look at it, that is 
19,600,000 acres. That is the size of South Carolina. If we look at 
that, we will say, how much are we going to use? The figure now is 
about 2,000 acres, but it could even be 10,000, but they said 2,000 
today. Figure the percentages in that. That is an infinitesimal drop in 
the bucket.
  Also, they talked about the technology, where they can use that small 
area, and tentacles go in, they can go to the oil areas, and we would 
never even know it was there.
  The gentleman from Massachusetts said, yes, that is all right, who 
would be against that? But how do we get it out of there? Do we fly it 
out, balloon it out? He made light of the idea. He said no, what we do 
is put in oil lines. That is true, but they are not going all over the 
place.
  Secondly, do they recover? Years ago, we moved some natural gas from 
Wyoming to California. It came out of a beautiful area in Wyoming. It 
came through Utah. I still remember one of my colleagues from Utah 
standing on this House floor holding that picture up and saying, ``Look 
at that scar. It will never go away. We are stuck with that scar 
forever.''
  I am going to bring that same picture in today. I would defy any of 
our 435 Members, or the 100 over on the other side, to find that scar. 
Mother Nature took care of it. Even at that, they did a fairly good job 
in doing it.
  So when we say that we are going to dig a trench, every time we fix a 
road we make a little mess, but Mother Nature can reclaim it, and will 
do it. So to give up on ANWR does not make a lick of sense to me when I 
think of the mix we are looking at. We have a mix of fossil fuels, of 
natural gas, of other areas, of nuclear, of water that we have to use.
  Out in Salt Lake last Monday, I chaired a meeting with the seven 
States that use the Colorado River. The issue came up on hydropower. 
Hydropower is the cleanest and probably the best source we have, 
because once we put those turbines in, we do not see anything come out. 
It is a clean power.
  It amazes me that some people will stand on this floor and other 
areas and criticize the use of hydropower. What is better than that?
  I was talking to a gentleman. He said, let us all go to wind. Maybe 
that is good, I do not know, but I have gone through some of those 
areas with wind. Maybe they are doing it. But here are these beautiful 
green acres, and they are all filled up with propellers spinning 
around. I do not know if that is better. It bothers me maybe as much as 
an oil rig would. The Audubon Society points out they do not like all 
the birds going through and getting creamed by those things.
  Let me just say to my friend, the gentleman from California, that the 
bill we have introduced today is a good

[[Page H3943]]

mix, a good step forward. Four committees of Congress are going to have 
to be involved, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Committee on 
Resources, the Committee on Ways and Means, and the Committee on 
Science, to determine if we can come up with a package.
  I would just ask the people in America, let us get off this political 
nonsense. Let us not try to make political hay on this. Let us say we 
have a President, and we do not care if he is a Democrat or Republican, 
but this Republican President has decided he wants to cure a problem 
before it gets disastrous. Let us get behind him and get this done.
  The cheap political points some people make on this do not make much 
sense to me. It makes more sense to say, all right, everyone is going 
to have to bend a little bit.
  In my 42 years as an elected official, the thing that bothers me the 
most is the person who sees a beautiful piece of legislation, but boy, 
he cannot go along with it because it has two sentences in it that 
bother him. If he cannot get them changed, put it on a scale of one to 
ten, and if it is an eight or nine, why does he not go with it?
  Years ago, I took my young family down to the Grand Canyon. We were 
standing on one of those beautiful points on the North Rim and looking 
at one of these seven wonders of the world. It boggles your mind. It is 
awesome.
  My one little son, about 6, he says ``Hey, Dad, what about that ugly 
worm down there?'' I said, ``Paul, what is the matter with you? Here is 
the beautiful canyon, and this is the thing that you are worried 
about?'' He said, ``Dad, look at the worm.'' I looked at the worm. I 
could not get Paul off the idea of that little worm.
  Every time I hear somebody say this is a great bill, but it only goes 
90 percent, I cannot go for it, for heaven's sakes, if it is a 90 
percenter, go for it. Give it some thought.
  Maybe this bill will have something in it, it will have something 
that the gentleman does not like or I do not like, but right now it is 
the Grand Canyon. Let us not look at the worm.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Utah for 
that, and for all his work on the Committee on Resources regarding the 
national energy policy.
  Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of things that the previous speakers 
were speaking about that stick in my craw. I just have to address them.
  One was regarding the issue of price-gouging. There was a lot of talk 
about price spikes and all these out-of-State generators that were 
making incredibly large fortunes.
  FERC did a study. They came back, or at least the judge that is 
trying to resolve the dispute between all those involved in the 
California energy crisis, he came back with the numbers. The out-of-
State generators, out-of-State of California, made up or earned about 
10 percent of those monies that are alleged to be overcharged during 
these last 6 months. The other 90 percent went to in-State-qualified 
facilities and also public utilities, like SMUD, the Sacramento 
Metropolitan Utility District, and in L.A., the similar utility 
district in California.
  Ninety percent of that number that is alleged to be price-gouged went 
to utilities within the State of California. So we had just better get 
our numbers right, and better yet, they had better stop doing the blame 
game and get to solving the problem in California.
  There is another thing that was talked about. That is the price caps, 
the issue of price caps in California, keeping the price down. The FERC 
did react by providing what they call a 7-24 monitoring system, where 7 
days a week, 24 hours a day they will monitor prices, rather than just 
doing it during the time of a stage 3 alert. They will authorize the 
resubmittal of funds that were overcharged.
  The ISO, the independent system operator in California, is the one 
who has the ability to use those caps. They chose not to use them a 
couple of days ago because energy was at $84 a megawatt, and if they 
had put the cap that was provided for them by FERC on, it would have 
driven the price down to half of that, which would have been about $42 
per megawatt.
  The hydro facility that they were depending on getting energy from, 
which was up in the Northwest somewhere, and forgive me, I don't know 
which State, was going to refuse to sell California the power because 
they were going to hold the water behind the dam, in effect hold the 
energy back until the price went back up because they could get it for 
a higher price, or they could keep it in their reservoirs for their own 
use later on.
  This is what we feared about price caps in the first place. That was 
that we are in the unfortunate position of having to worry about the 
price of energy, but also the number of blackouts that are caused by 
having no energy. Those of us who did not support caps were fearful 
that blackouts would increase by half again as much in California, and 
I think we are vindicated by the fact that even the independent system 
operator will not use the ability to lower their prices in California 
when they have the ability, because the lights will go out. This is 
what we have been saying all along.
  Mr. Speaker, I really think if we want to solve the energy crisis in 
California, we need to get the Governor out of the energy purchasing 
business. We need to restore the credibility or the creditworthiness of 
the utilities, get them back in business, and worry about our State's 
infrastructure, and get that up and running just as fast as possible.
  If the Governor and leader of the State of California would focus on 
that, rather than trying to focus blame on anybody but them, I think we 
would be moving to a solution faster.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), a 
good friend who is here to talk about science and technology as related 
to the production of energy in the United States.
  I welcome the gentleman and thank him for coming down this evening.
  Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding to me, 
Mr. Speaker. I am very pleased to join him and the gentleman from Utah 
(Mr. Hansen) in a discussion of the Republican energy plan, which is 
progressing nicely through the House of Representatives, and I hope we 
will be able to enact it fairly soon.
  I will be taking a totally different tack in discussing this. This is 
because of my background as a professor, a nuclear physicist, and also 
because I have done a fair amount of research on energy over the years. 
So I am going to deal with the long-term view, but also talk about some 
basic facts of energy.
  Part of the reason is that I listened to the previous hour of debate 
here in which the other party seemed to be implying that the 
Republicans do not know anything about energy or energy policy. Well, 
we have just heard from two speakers on the Republican side who know a 
great deal about energy policy, first about the situation in 
California, and secondly, about extraction of resources.

                              {time}  2115

  I am going to talk about it from the standpoint of basic science and 
what we can learn from that and what we can and cannot do and how that 
impacts us in the future. I am also going to take a rather long-term 
view on some of these issues because we have to think long term on 
this.
  I do have to say that dealing with energy and public policy has been 
very frustrating to me because when I was first elected to the Michigan 
legislature and worked in both the House and the Senate, I tried to 
work on developing a solid energy policy for the State of Michigan. I 
could not get anyone interested either in the public or the legislature 
because we did not have a crisis at that point. Eventually I decided I 
could better spend my time elsewhere.
  When I came to the Congress, I tried to do the same, and again no 
interest. Once the crisis hits, and by a crisis I mean the price of gas 
at the pump going up and the price of utility bills going up, suddenly 
everyone is interested then. I am a little concerned now that the price 
of gas at the pump is going down that the public may lose interest 
again. But regardless of what they say or do, we must have a good 
energy policy, and I hope that will emerge from my comments.
  In the study of energy, one of the first things we encounter is the 
three laws of thermodynamics. Now, thermodynamics, that very word, 
means heat going into motion. And that was extremely important about 
150 years ago

[[Page H3944]]

when the laws of thermodynamics were developed because that helped us 
build steam engines, and not only just build steam engines but helped 
to build efficient steam engines that led to the industrial revolution 
in terms of steam engines to do work in the factories and also steam 
engines to move trains across continents.
  The laws of thermodynamics, and I do not want to get into a lot of 
detail, the first one we can ignore, it is very elementary, just 
dealing with temperature. The second is the law of conservation of 
energy, which simply says that in a closed system, energy can be 
neither created nor destroyed but can change form, from one form to 
another.
  Well, what are the forms of energy? There are many, but I will just 
mention a few. First of all, let me explain that energy represents the 
ability to do work. And so when we apply a force through a distance, we 
do work. I happen to have here a rather giant rubber band, and when I 
pull on it, I have to exert a force. I exert a force through a 
distance. I am doing work on it. I am imparting energy to this. It is 
stored as potential energy in this rubber band; or at the molecular 
level it is stored in the molecular stretching of the bonds within the 
molecules and between the molecules. When I stop exerting the force, it 
pulls my hands back in. That energy was stored there and it was used to 
pull my hands back together. But we lost some in the process.
  As I said, in a closed system we do not lose energy, but we have lost 
some to heat, that is because this is not a closed system, and that 
helps to warm the room. In fact, we could easily make a heat machine 
out of this if we wanted to use it for a heating system. Very 
inefficient, but we could have one that would just simply stretch 
rubber bands and the heat generated would result in being able to heat 
a substantial space.
  The third law of thermodynamics is even more important than the 
second, even though the second is extremely important. The third one is 
the statement that entropy and any reaction, any transfer of energy, 
always increases. Now, I am not going to get into entropy here. It is a 
very complex concept. But it basically means every time we transfer 
from one form of energy to another, the quality of the energy degrades. 
That means it is less useful. It cannot do as much work.
  Remember, energy represents the ability to do work, and that is why 
it is so important to us. We went, as human beings, from the nomadic 
existence to an agricultural existence, or the agricultural age, when 
we first learned how to tame nonhuman energy to do work. In other 
words, animal energy. Before that, humans had to do everything. They 
tried agriculture and it just did not work that well. There were 
various agricultural communities, but they all had trouble and many of 
them failed. Once we had animal energy to use, they learned how to 
harness domestic animals to do the work, the plowing, et cetera, and 
agriculture flourished and continued to grow and increase for years.
  The next big change was when we learned how to use nonanimal energy, 
that is the industrial age, where we built steam engines and other 
machines that allowed us to do more work. And the better the quality of 
the energy, the more work we can do with it. But as I said, the third 
law of thermodynamics says every time we use energy, it degrades to a 
lower level. It is not able to do as much work.
  In a modern power plant, we burn natural gas or burn coal, and that 
produces heat, which we either use to generate steam or operate a 
turbine. Out of that we get waste heat. We use cooling towers to get 
rid of it, but we could heat a lot of homes or greenhouses with that if 
we chose to. But we cannot get much more work out of it. Eventually, 
whatever we have done radiates out into space.
  Now, those are very important concepts because what we have to 
remember about energy is it is our most basic natural resource simply 
because we cannot use any of our other natural resources without using 
energy. If we decide we want to dig a mine in Utah, for example, and 
extract some materials, and there is a huge copper mine in Utah, as I 
recall, that takes a lot of energy to extract the copper, to haul it to 
the mill where it is extracted and smelted, rolled, then transferred to 
a fabric factory, fabricated, and finally transferred to the consumer. 
Every single step of the way takes energy, and that is why energy is 
our most basic natural resource. But it is also our only nonrecyclable 
resource. The copper that is pulled out of that mine, we can use it, 
and when we are finished with it in a product, we can recycle it and 
put it in a different product. But energy cannot be recycled. Once we 
use it, it is gone.
  Now, all of these principles make it very important for us to develop 
an energy policy that recognizes this, and I believe that the energy 
policy that Mr. Bush has presented recognizes these issues and begins 
us on the road for a very long-term plan. There are many different ways 
of obtaining energy. We have talked tonight about retrieving energy 
from fossil fuels, primarily oil and natural gas. Another fossil fuel 
is coal, and that is very useful to us. These involve burning these 
fossil fuels, because they are combustible, and extracting the heat 
energy from them and converting that into electrical energy or into 
energy of motion or things of that sort.
  We also know of other ways of using energy. We have Einstein's famous 
equation, E equals MC squared, which means that mass can be converted 
into energy and vice versa. But if we can learn how to convert mass 
into energy, we get huge amounts of energy out of small amounts of 
mass. And that is what we have with nuclear power and nuclear weapons. 
It is just amazing when we consider that the bomb that exploded in 
Hiroshima had just basically a handful of enriched uranium, of which 
only a part was converted into energy but was sufficient to destroy a 
major city; or that a nuclear reactor, rather small, can generate huge 
amounts of power for a long time out of small amounts of fuel.
  We also have another means of nuclear energy, and that is fusion, 
where we combine hydrogen nuclei or Lithium nuclei and extract energy 
that way, because we lose some mass in the process. And fusion, I hope 
someday, will be a very good source of energy, but it is a number of 
years away. But, again, we have to do the planning, we have to do the 
research, because we cannot recycle energy, and someday we are simply 
going to run out of the traditional sources.
  Now, there are other things we can do. People talk about conserving 
energy. I do not really like to use that term, even though I support 
it. But I think it is much better to talk about efficiency of use of 
energy. Because conservation, I find, gives the image of people 
freezing in the dark. If we are heating our homes and we want to 
conserve, we turn the thermostat down, turn the lights out, and freeze 
in the dark.
  In fact, I remember once I was at an event during the first energy 
crisis we know about, in 1973, and one of the speakers got up and he 
was very proud because they turned the heat down to 55 degrees. This is 
in Michigan, where I live. And they turned most of the lights out, and 
he told his teenaged daughters that they were not allowed to use hair 
dryers. They just had to let their hair dry naturally, and so forth. 
And he went on and on about conservation.
  I asked him afterwards what kind of house he lived in. He said, well, 
we have a cement block house. I said do you realize that for a small 
amount of money you could insulate that concrete block house and still 
live comfortably with the same fuel bills? He did not realize that. He 
did not realize, for example, that concrete is not a good insulator. In 
fact, one-inch of Styrofoam has the same insulating power as four feet 
of concrete. In other words, by putting just one-inch of Styrofoam 
around his house, he would have saved as much as having a four foot 
concrete wall. And if they added a little more insulation, they would 
have been very comfortable.
  That is what I mean about using energy efficiently. It is not a 
matter of using less, it is a matter of using it efficiently. And 
everyone, I believe, supports efficient use of resources. That is how 
businesses make more money, by being more efficient in their use of 
their material resources, human resources and machinery. So I think it 
is very important that we try to be as efficient as possible in our use 
of energy.
  We also have to look at alternative ways of using energy. As an 
example,

[[Page H3945]]

hydrogen. I think one of the better developments in automobiles that is 
coming along the path is the use of fuel cells, where we will be able 
to use hydrogen, combine it with the oxygen in the atmosphere, and with 
almost no pollution produce electricity to drive an electric motor. 
Now, this is not easy technology, but we know it works because we used 
it on space vehicles, we have used it on the shuttle and other places 
for energy purposes, and we have trial automobiles which use fuel 
cells. Right now they are still expensive because they are 
experimental. But someday, when we get the design down and manufacture 
them in bulk, I am hoping that we will be able to use fuel cells as a 
good source of energy. We can either use gasoline in them or some other 
fossil fuel and preform it, as they say, so that we extract the 
hydrogen from it and run the hydrogen through the fuel cell and get our 
power that way.
  Even better would be if we developed a hydrogen economy, where we 
develop hydrogen out of our fossil fuel resources, or by electrolyzing 
water, H2O, remember, and separating it into hydrogen and 
oxygen, and that way we could, using electrical energy from nuclear 
plants or other plants, generate hydrogen and pipe it around, sell it 
at hydrogen stations instead of gasoline stations, and power our 
automobiles that way.
  The Hybrid, incidentally, is an interesting way of improving mileage, 
and again using the energy more efficiently. A couple of manufacturers 
are doing that now. I expect a few more will be developed. But I regard 
that as an interim. It is slightly more efficient but not as good as 
the fuel cell is going to be.
  We have to look at other possibilities for alternative sources of 
energy. Solar energy is tremendously promising in terms of its 
potential. We get as much energy on this earth from the sun per day as 
we expend from all our other energy sources for quite a number of 
years. Huge amounts of energy from the sun hitting the earth. The 
problem is it is very diffuse and, therefore, very low quality, very 
hard to use. But we are making progress in photovoltaic cells, and I 
expect in not too many years we will find new homes built with solar 
shingles on the roof, shingles that will generate electricity and help 
heat the hot water in the House, help heat and cool the house, provide 
electricity for cooking, for the clothes dryer, and things of this 
sort, and with some electronics can actually provide high enough 
quality electricity to run TVs, VCRs, and so forth.
  So that is I think a promising alternative that is coming down the 
pike. I would estimate probably 10 years from now that will be 
economical. It is not going to be economically feasible to take our 
existing shingles off and put these others on. That would be costly. 
But as part of a new building or as part of a required replacement of 
shingles, it will become economically feasible.

                              {time}  2130

  We have others. Wind as power, of course, has potential. It is not a 
stable source of energy. We need an energy storage device or 
supplementary energy. The same of course is true for solar, but it 
again depends where one lives. I think it has real promise, 
particularly for less developed countries. That, incidentally, is one 
of reasons and the main reason I was opposed to the Kyoto protocol.
  I think President Bush was exactly right in saying that it is dead 
because it only put restrictions on the developed nations, not to 
developing nations. If we do not have some restriction on them or at 
least tell them at a certain date they have to meet these requirements 
just as we do, we will soon find all of them putting in highly 
polluting coal burning plants that produce a lot of CO2, 
greenhouse gases, a lot of pollutants. Then when we say, there is too 
much production. There needs to be a cutback. They will say, look, we 
have all these investments now and all of these marvelous plants. We 
cannot cut back now.
  I think if we have an international agreement, if we ever reach one 
that places restrictions on us, it also has to place restrictions on 
less developed countries because then they will make investments in 
alternative sources of energy such as solar, which is certainly the 
best answer in many places such as Africa and parts of Asia, rather 
than building these power plants which will create more problems.
  So I have talked about a whole range of different issues tonight, and 
I did not get into the specifics of some of our current problems. But I 
am simply saying that the plan that the Republicans are developing is a 
good launching pad for the things that I have been talking about that 
we have to move towards in the future. It contains the seeds of a long 
term national energy policy and certainly will provide the good short 
term energy policy that we need right now to address the problems of 
prices at the gas pump and the crisis in California.
  One last thought on that. We have to not only consider energy issues 
as we have talked about now, but we also have to consider the 
international relations or foreign policy aspects of it. We are 70 
percent dependent right now on oil from other countries. As I said 
earlier, energy is our most basic natural resource.
  We are at the mercy of other countries because if they cut off our 
supply for whatever reason, political or war or whatever, we are at 
their mercy because our industry cannot operate without energy and we 
cannot produce enough internally instantaneously. That is why it is 
very important, as the energy plan of President Bush points out, that 
we must establish our independence from the fossil fuels of other 
countries. We have to develop our own sources. We have to develop 
alternative sources so we can truly be energy independent and not 
depend on the good will of individuals who may not feel very kindly 
toward us at various times.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, in closing I would say I hope that the 
lessons that are being learned in California do not have to be learned 
in the United States to get a decent energy policy. Even though 
California is second only to Rhode Island in energy conservation, we 
have had 68 stage one power emergencies, 63 stage two power emergencies 
and 38 stage three power emergencies.
  The way it happens is when electricity begins to run out, that is a 
stage one alert. When it gets worse, that is a stage two alert. When 
that gets worse, that is a stage three alert and from there we enter 
into rolling blackouts.
  We are having to suffer through that because I think we have not been 
keen on making sure that California has had adequate energy supply and 
we will create that. We will become a great State or continue to be the 
great State that we are. But I do not want the country to have to go 
through the same problems that California is because of an unrealistic 
expectation out of energy and where the supply needs to go.
  California is getting real real fast. I think the rest of country 
needs to learn to get real about where our energy supplies need to come 
from. That is why I applaud the leadership in the House and also the 
President of the United States for putting this energy plan together, a 
realistic one that also includes alternative fuels, energies and 
conservation and puts them in their proper perspective.

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