[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 109 (Tuesday, July 31, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H4969-H4976]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     ENERGY POLICIES FOR THE FUTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, tonight a group of us here 
would like to talk about energy. We have heard a lot of discussion 
about energy. In fact now that gasoline prices have kind of dropped 
off, home heating prices have declined and things have sort of settled 
down, electric shortages in the West have not been happening for a few 
weeks, people say there is no crisis, it is just a lot of hype, a lot 
of smoke.
  I am not one who believes that, and I agree with President George 
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This country needs a comprehensive 
energy policy. Let us look at the record and see the trends happening.
  Recent trends, everybody has concern that the dependency on oil was 
coming from parts of the world that do not care about us, OPEC nations. 
We are approaching the 60 percent factor. That is not a healthy thing 
for our country.
  Coal, there has been a very flat use of coal and a resistance to the 
new clean coal-use technologies. Coal use has been flat in this 
country, and maybe slightly declining.
  Then look at nuclear where the percentage is slowly dropping. There 
has been a moratorium on new nuclear uses ever since the problem that 
happened in Pennsylvania many years ago. There have been no new plants 
built or planned; and the interesting part is in a recent report from 
the Department of Energy, the problem with nuclear continuing is the 
resistance of relicensing of existing nuclear plants. If we do not 
relicense our current plants, we are going to lose a great deal of our 
electricity.
  Then we have hydro. The Department of Energy had the same mark beside 
hydro: flat, slightly declining, difficult to relicense. That is the 
view of the Department of Energy.
  Then we have renewables, and we would like to see them grow and 
expand and take up the marketplace. In renewables, we have had very 
slow growth in solar, wind, geothermal, and more recently fuel cells. I 
think fuel cells are the one with the huge promise, probably sooner 
than others. There are those who think solar and wind can solve our 
problems. Every graph I look at shows them slow, almost no growth.
  Then we have the infrastructure issue that we take for granted. We do 
not worry about how our electricity gets to us, or how our natural gas 
gets to us; but we have a gas transmission system that is not well 
connected and not large enough, and does not cover some parts of the 
country so there are parts of the country that do not have access to 
natural gas.
  Electric transmission. We do not think much about those electric 
lines going from community to community; but that is how we get our 
power, and that system is aging, inadequate to supply the needs of 
today.
  The refining capacity in this country has been slowing declining, the 
number of refiners; and yet our use of petroleum products has been 
climbing at a fast rate. Is that a healthy situation to be in?
  If we really want to have energy that is affordable and dependable, 
we have to have stable prices. To have stable prices, we have to have 
ample supplies of all kinds of energy.
  A few years ago we were sort of drunk in this country on $9 and $10 
oil, and $1.50 natural gas, and that made us very complacent about 
conservation. It made fuel costs very insignificant. But that has all 
changed, and it can continue to change.
  If we have an energy plan in this country that meets our future 
economic needs, we need to have one that increases energy efficiency 
and conservation, one that ensures adequate energy supplies in 
generation, renew and expands the energy infrastructure. We need to 
encourage investment in energy technologies, provide energy assistance 
to low-income households, and

[[Page H4970]]

ensure appropriate consideration of the impacts of all the regulatory 
policies.
  Mr. Speaker, I think there are a lot of things to do. These are all 
complicated issues. I am going to conclude my comments and then call on 
the gentlewoman from New Mexico, but just look at where we are at 
today.
  Today, petroleum is 40 percent of our energy; natural gas is 23 
percent; coal is 22 percent; nuclear is 8 percent; and renewables are 7 
percent. We look down the road 19 years to the year 2020, and there is 
really not much change on those who are estimating.

                              {time}  2030

  Our gas usage will increase because we are now using a lot of gas for 
power generation, something we did not do, will go from 23 percent to 
28 percent. Petroleum will drop from 40 percent to 39 percent. Coal 
will drop from 22 to 21 percent. Nuclear will drop from 8 to 5 percent. 
Renewables will remain at 7 percent. That is the projections of the 
Department of Energy. In my view, we have some very large issues that 
need to be dealt with. We have some mountains to climb if we are going 
to provide affordable energy to the American citizens.
  With this I will call on my good friend from New Mexico (Mrs. 
Wilson).
  Mrs. WILSON. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania. I also thank 
him for hosting this 1-hour discussion this afternoon. We are actually 
on the eve of a very important debate here in the House, the first 
debate on a comprehensive energy plan for this country that has 
occurred here for 20 years. I think the leadership in this House, on 
both sides of the aisle, deserves a lot of credit for the work that has 
gone on over the last month to bring forward a very balanced and in 
many ways bipartisan bill that sets up a long-term energy policy for 
the country. It certainly has behind it the leadership of the President 
and Vice President Cheney, and his administration that has put forward 
some ideas that were then worked on here in the House, in the Committee 
on Commerce, in the Committee on Science, in the Committee on Ways and 
Means to bring to the floor of the House tomorrow a comprehensive, 
long-term energy plan for the country.
  This plan does not just rely on increased production; it also 
emphasizes conservation. But it recognizes that you have to do both. We 
cannot conserve our way out of the energy problem, but we cannot drill 
our way out of the energy problem, either. We have to have a long-term, 
balanced approach to our energy policy. I think the bill that we are 
bringing to the floor of the House tomorrow accomplishes that, and I 
think the leadership on both sides should be commended for all of their 
work in this area.
  Most folks do not know that we are more dependent on foreign oil 
today than we were at the height of the energy crisis in the 1970s. We 
get 56 percent of our oil from abroad, mostly from the Mideast. The 
number six supplier of oil to the United States and the fastest growing 
supplier of oil to the United States is Saddam Hussein. America should 
not be that dependent on its enemies for its sources of oil. We are 
going to be even more dependent on them by 2010. Estimates are that 
two-thirds of our oil will come from abroad.
  But it is not only oil that this bill is about. We are going to be 
increasing our consumption of natural gas; yet natural gas prices have 
soared over the last year to triple what they were a year before. We 
have had no nuclear plants licensed in this country for over 10 years. 
If we do not do something to make sure that nuclear power continues to 
be a viable option, continues to be part of our energy mix, then it 
will decline over the next 20 years. Yet nuclear power is the safest, 
most reliable source of energy that we have and emits no greenhouse 
gases. If we are going to have a balanced energy policy, nuclear power 
must be part of that equation.
  We have not built any gasoline refineries in over 10 years in this 
country. We have put on these requirements, regional requirements, in 
some cases local requirements for what are called boutique fuels, 
different requirements from one city to another city about what kind of 
reformulated gas you have to use. It changes by the season, so you 
might have one formula of gas required in Milwaukee and another one in 
Chicago, and then it changes on different dates and you have filling 
stations having to drain their tanks and get the new gas. It creates 
local shortages.
  In this bill we are bringing to the floor tomorrow, to the floor of 
the House, we will address this problem of boutique fuels that are 
causing gas-price spikes across the country. We need to expand our 
refining capacity so that if we have a fire or a pipe break at a 
refinery, we do not see everybody's gas prices go up in the West, 
particularly right in the summer when we need the gas most.
  I think the bill that we will bring to the floor of the House 
tomorrow is a balanced and comprehensive bill. A lot of people, 
Democrats and Republicans here in the House, have worked very hard to 
make sure that it is so and it is a product we are all going to be able 
to be proud of when we leave here tomorrow night. I thank the gentleman 
for asking me to join him. I think this bill is very important for 
consumers in this country, to be confident that when you flick the 
switch, the lights go on and that when you go to the pump, you pay a 
reasonable price for the gas that you get, and the appliances that you 
buy are as efficient as they can be, so that people do not have to 
worry about these things because we prevent the next energy crunch from 
ever occurring.

  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentlewoman from New Mexico 
for her thoughtful comments.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), a 
physicist of the body here, a man who is used to very complicated 
issues. I am interested to hear his views tonight of where he thinks 
America is in energy.
  Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania. As he noted, I 
am a physicist, but I am going to try to keep this discussion very 
simple and not get into any complicated equations, although it would be 
fun to do that; but as you know, a physicist cannot think without a 
chalk board, and so I will not be able to do that tonight.
  Energy, energy, energy, energy. That is all we are hearing these 
days, especially on the floor of the House. Tomorrow we are going to 
hear even more, energy, energy, energy, because for the first time in 
20 years we will be talking about a new national energy policy.
  What is the big fuss? Why are we so concerned about this? What is 
energy? What is it all about? Let me put it in the simplest terms I 
can. Energy represents the ability to do work and, to put it in even 
more simple terms, you get up in the morning, you say, oh, I feel full 
of energy today. That means you have got lots of vim and vigor, you are 
eager to work. You can do things. Or if you get up and say, oh, I'm 
really dragging today, it means you do not have much energy.
  But where do we get our energy, our personal energy? From the food we 
eat. We may enjoy eating for other reasons, but the basic biological 
reason for eating is because we need the energy from the food that we 
eat.
  For millennia, the people on this planet did not have any energy 
other than the energy from the food they ate. And so the work that they 
did, they had to do themselves, and their work was converting food 
energy into useful work. Agriculture developed only after people 
discovered how to use other than human energy, namely, animal energy. 
As soon as they could use animals to pump water, to pull the plows, to 
thresh the grain, then we began agriculture, because we had learned how 
to capture the energy of something other than ourselves.
  Today throughout this world, over two-thirds of this world still 
thinks of the most basic form of energy as the most important, the 
energy in food, because they do not have enough to eat. And without 
enough to eat, they do not have enough energy to work. Without the 
energy to work, they have trouble producing enough food to feed 
themselves. But that brings us into another issue which we are not 
discussing here.
  Throughout the ages, we have tried to do work, but to get other 
things to do the work. First human energy, then animal energy; then 
when we entered the industrial era, we found ways to use fossil fuels 
as energy. Extracting the energy which is really stored solar energy 
within the earth, we found that we could use that energy, whether it is 
coal, oil, natural gas. We could use

[[Page H4971]]

that to produce energy which allowed us to do work.
  Physicists became involved in this about that time. In fact, you 
would not have had the Industrial Revolution without the work of 
physicists who developed the three laws of thermodynamics and allowed 
them to build very efficient engines, steam engines in particular, and 
that led later on to other engines. That meant we no longer depended on 
human energy; we no longer depended on animal energy. We then began to 
depend on energy recovered from artificial sources, fossil fuels in 
this case. And then later on we developed nuclear energy with 
Einstein's discovery that E=MC2, in other words, you could convert 
matter into energy which is what a nuclear reactor does. All of this 
represents the ability to do work, and that is what it is all about.
  But how does that affect us today? It affects us in so many ways we 
do not even begin to realize it. We walk in the house, we flick the 
light switch, the light goes on, where did that energy come from? Not 
from the switch, not from the wires, although that transmitted it 
there. It came from a power plant, either nuclear, gas-fired or coal-
fired that converted energy from that form into a very usable form of 
electricity.
  Suppose we want to go to the store and get some groceries. It takes 
very little energy for those groceries to get from the store to our 
home, because they are fairly light, a few pounds, 10 pounds, 15 
pounds. It does not even take that much energy for us to get to the 
store and back home. We could walk it if we had to. But we take our 
car, and it takes a lot of energy to get that car to the store and 
back. If you do not believe that, next time you go into the store, do 
not drive your car there, push it and see how much energy you use just 
moving that car around. That is where our major sources of energy are 
today, not in feeding ourselves, not in manual work but in all the many 
things we have to do work for us.
  Every one of those things cost money. But they are also totally 
essential to the economy we have. Sometimes we do not realize it, but 
it is no secret why every shortage of energy was followed by a 
recession or at least an economic slowdown. This happened in 1973 with 
the shortage then, in the early 1980s, roughly in 1990, and now today 
energy prices went up, we now are in an economic slowdown. There is a 
cause and effect there, because energy is so vital to our economy. We 
do not even recognize it, but it is and that controls our fates to a 
large extent. Why is that?

  Suppose you want to manufacture something. It could be a tin can; it 
could be a car. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. But in any 
event to start with, you have to dig a hole in the ground to get at the 
ore, the iron ore, or the aluminum ore, whatever you may have. That 
takes energy to dig that hole. It takes energy to take the ore out. It 
takes energy to transport it to the smelting plant, to purify it and 
make it into ingots. Once again it takes energy to transfer it to a 
rolling mill where it gets rolled into steel or aluminum. It takes 
energy to transport that rolled steel or aluminum to the factory. It 
takes energy to fabricate it into the tin can or to the car, and then 
it takes energy to transport the tin can or the car to your home. Every 
single step of the way requires the use of energy. That is why we are 
so totally dependent on energy.
  But why do we not recognize this? For a very simple reason: energy is 
intangible. We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, we cannot perceive 
it. It is not like a material resource. In fact, it is totally 
different from a material resource. And so we are using this energy 
that we do not understand, we cannot see, and we cannot see the effects 
of very easily. How do we know it is there? One tangible way is the 
price at the gas pump. And so we get very upset when that price goes 
up. That means energy is in shorter supply. Our utility bill is another 
tangible evidence. But we do not see it and we do not feel it; we do 
not recognize its effect in our lives.
  That is why it is so extremely important that President Bush took it 
upon himself to try to develop a national energy plan. He knows about 
energy. He has been in the oil business. He understands the importance 
of energy. I have wanted an energy plan for this Nation for a long 
time, but it has been very hard to get the attention of the people 
without a shortage of energy. We had a shortage of energy this year. We 
still have looming potential shortages of energy, as you can see from 
this chart that the gentlewoman from New Mexico used; and we have to be 
aware of that. We have to try to develop new sources of energy at 
reasonable cost. Energy is so important that we absolutely need a good 
energy policy.
  Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will debate such a policy. It 
has taken months of work, first on the part of the Vice President and 
his working group, secondly the support and work of the President, and 
now it is in the hands of the Congress. We have spent months working on 
it in different committees, conducting hearings, learning from the 
experts, trying to put together a package that has all the essential 
elements. There has been a lot of disagreement. There are a lot of 
different ideas of how to approach it. Some want to drill for more oil; 
some want to import oil from Canada and natural gas so we can make use 
of their resources and also from Mexico. Others want alternative 
sources of energy. Others say, let us conserve more. The point is, we 
have to do all of the above.
  The President's energy plan does all of the above. You may still 
quibble and say, well, there is not enough conservation, or there is 
too much of this, there is too much of that.

                              {time}  2045

  That is something we will continue to work on. The important factor 
is we have an energy plan here before us. It represents the hard work 
of the administration and the Congress. It is up to us to pass that 
energy plan, to educate the people of our Nation about the nature of 
energy and how important it is and how it should be used.
  I urge my colleagues tomorrow as we discuss this issue that we not 
lose sight of the main goal, and that is to develop an energy plan and 
policy for the United States which will benefit every single one of us.
  So I urge that we all work together and adopt this plan, and I hope 
the Senate will join us in this so that we can have a good plan for the 
future and not run into the pit that was outlined by the gentlewoman 
from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson) of becoming dependent on Saddam Hussein 
and other dictators who control oil, and that we can develop low-cost, 
dependable sources of energy of various types, both new ones and 
existing ones, so that the people of this country will once again enjoy 
a good economy.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from 
Michigan for his wise words. You can tell the gentleman is a physicist 
by his thought processes.
  We are delighted to be joined now by the gentlewoman from West 
Virginia (Mrs. Capito), who comes from what I would call coal country.
  Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. It is a 
pleasure to be here this evening to talk about the impending energy 
legislation that will be before us tomorrow.
  I was listening to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) discuss 
his definition of energy: When you wake up in the morning you feel 
energized, or sometimes you do not feel so energized.
  When I think about this energy plan, another word comes to mind to 
me, and that is balance. I think as a new Congresswoman, I am trying to 
learn myself how to balance things in my life; how to balance my work 
with my leisure, if I have any, and my family, in my new surroundings 
here in Washington. It is a matter of making choices, it is a matter of 
setting priorities, and it is a matter of being realistic about what is 
before me as a new Congresswoman. I see the new energy plan much in the 
same way.
  For the past 20 years, America has coasted blindly into the future, 
naively trusting that our sufficient resources would be ready and 
available whenever we would need them. But we know the recent blackouts 
in California and serious fluctuations in the prices of gasoline have 
shown that our well of energy has dried up a bit.
  Fortunately, we have an administration before us now with President 
Bush and Vice President Cheney who have compiled a plan that is 
balanced and comprehensive, and it provides for our energy in a safe 
and clean manner.

[[Page H4972]]

  The Bush plan calls for increased production, but it also calls for 
greater technology, greater research and development, and also has a 
large component of conservation, there again, striking a balance 
between all the elements. Not only will this help protect the American 
consumer from future blackouts and huge electricity price spikes, but, 
for me, living in West Virginia, one of the bonuses is it will create 
more jobs. That is welcome news for us as West Virginians.
  We see the depth of the diversity in the plan in the amount of 
research in funding that goes to green energy, a new resource, and 
alternate sources such as biomass. There is an expansion of the biomass 
tax credit and more funding for biopower energy programs.
  The reason I bring this up, even though coal is a great part of what 
I want to talk about, just last week a few of my constituents came in 
to see me about implementing a potential biomass energy production 
project in my district. Because our State of West Virginia also has a 
large timber industry, they proposed using the energy from the wood 
scraps and the leftover wood by-products to provide local power. Their 
proposal, I thought, was very impressive. They were creating green 
power out of what has basically been and formerly been a waste product 
from the timber industry. They have a wonderful idea of how to use 
another West Virginia resource in an environmentally clean way and to 
provide for that basic need, energy.

  Aside from being environmentally friendly, the use of this type of 
energy positively impacts our local rural economies. For instance, to 
transport the timber would be very expensive, so you place the power 
plant very close to the fuel crop of timber, and then you can use that 
raw material to generate green power. This creates a new plant and jobs 
in the community.
  The Bush energy plan directs more time and resources to exploring 
these projects and others like them. For instance, about a month ago I 
went to West Virginia State College, a college in my district, in 
Institute, West Virginia. They had just imported from another area in 
my district, Moorefield, that has quite a few chicken farms, and they 
had imported a digester. They are taking the chicken by-products and 
with the digester using them to create power, small levels of power, 
but enough to power the football field, some of the athletic 
facilities, at West Virginia State College. It is experimental, but, 
there again, a different approach to creating energy.
  In addition to producing more alternative fuels like biomass, we see 
more production in this plan for the traditional sources of power. 
Another one we have in abundance in West Virginia is natural gas. We 
are one of the largest exporters of natural gas in the whole country. 
We are digging deeper and becoming more productive in our ways of 
getting natural gas.
  This energy plan we have before us has a large component of natural 
gas. I think the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) mentioned 
in his opening statement that natural gas is still the largest fuel 
used for energy.
  I would like to turn to coal. With 35.4 billion tons of coal in 
reserve, West Virginia has a ripe opportunity to help in this time of a 
national energy crunch. The amount of coal that lays sleeping in our 
West Virginia hills amounts to $4.5 trillion in value.
  Last year in West Virginia the coal industry alone employed 21,000 
West Virginians, up almost 4 percent from a year ago. It is clear that 
increasing production of this resource would be good for economic 
development in West Virginia, a state that is always searching for more 
jobs.
  Last year in West Virginia in the transportation and public utilities 
industry we employed 37,000 people. Well, with new clean coal 
technology and an advanced way to burn and use our coal more 
efficiently, not only would we have more coal production, but we would 
also have offshoots of this, like transportation in the construction 
industry. A plan that calls for more production of energy resources, 
more construction of power plants, and more infrastructure will make 
these 70,000 employees more productive and more useful.
  I see a tremendous amount of potential in this energy plan, because 
it is balanced. We are not finding one solution to a very large 
problem; we are looking at a myriad of solutions to try to meet an 
enormous problem and to face the future of the next at least 25 to 30 
years.
  I think timing is everything in politics, they say, and I think in 
terms of facing energy needs, there could be no more timeliness than 
the present moment. America cannot walk blindly into the future and 
naively assume, I think as we have in the past, that our children's 
energy needs will be met. We must have long-term vision and must plan 
not only to produce, we must learn to conserve, and we must learn now 
to act tomorrow to implement what I think is an innovative, exciting 
energy plan for the country.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman 
from West Virginia for her very thoughtful comments, especially about 
coal.
  We are now joined by our friend the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon). 
Welcome to our discussion on energy.
  Mr. CANNON. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson). I 
thank my friend from Pennsylvania, another coal state, for his time 
here. And while I think it is very important that we produce green 
energy, I really love coal, and it is what fires America, keeps our 
lights on.
  I want to say H.R. 4 is a carefully crafted bill that balances energy 
conservation and increased production. It is the product of the work of 
the gentleman from Utah (Chairman Hansen), the gentleman from Louisiana 
(Mr. Tauzin) and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert), and it is 
one that we should all support for the good of our Nation.
  I do believe there is a need for additional work on an important 
facet of our country's energy policy, the role that American Indian and 
Native Alaska Tribal Governments can play in the development of new 
energy resources. Some tribes, like the Utes in my district in Utah, 
are ideally located on or near oil, shale, coal, petroleum or natural 
gas reserves, and others have the good fortune of being located near 
the power grid and thus could easily become energy producers.
  Indian energy also provides an opportunity for us in Congress to put 
our money where our mouths are when it comes to tribal sovereignty and 
economic independence. Many of my friends on both sides of the aisle 
are concerned about the increasing dependence on gaming as a means of 
economic development for Indian country.
  None of us in this chamber want to see Tribal governments relying on 
gaming solely for job creation and economic empowerment. Indeed, I 
think I speak for many of us in saying that we would like to broaden 
the economies of Indian Tribes so that gaming becomes less and less 
important over time.
  Energy production is the ideal opportunity to fulfill our trust 
responsibilities to these local governments and provide Tribes with the 
tools to help their members, but how do we do that? One answer is to 
establish more Federal bureaucracies that, while well-intended, often 
create more burdens than benefits. Such solutions often do more harm 
than good by furthering Federal paternalism that undermines the concept 
of sovereignty. Rather than create more bureaucracies, we must ensure 
that the President's recent order to reduce regulatory barriers to 
energy production also applies to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
  But we should consider doing more. Many proposals to date have 
overlooked key issues, and instead provide for new Federal programs and 
loan guarantees that do not address the full spectrum of energy issues.
  We should look to streamlining the process for Tribes to take lands 
into trust, specifically for energy production, so long as the local 
communities continue to have input into such acquisitions. We should 
also consider allowing Tribal governments to do their own environmental 
assessments, rather than having to rely on the Federal bureaucracy in 
Washington, D.C. Congress should consider whether, as sovereign 
governments, Tribes should have licensing and permitting authority for 
Federal production facilities.
  Most of all, Mr. Speaker, we must fully consult with Tribal 
governments to see what they feel is necessary to encourage the 
development of new energy sources on Indian lands.

[[Page H4973]]

  I look forward in the weeks and months to come to working with my 
colleagues on both sides of the aisle and our friends in the Native 
American community. Specifically I hope to move legislation in the 
Committee on Resources that will promote Tribal sovereignty and self-
sufficiency while fostering meaningful economic development.
  I would like to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his 
efforts.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, we thank the gentleman 
from Utah. We hear now an Indian perspective of energy potential also.
  We are really covering the country tonight, from one end of the 
country to the other. We are now at the far West Coast, where there 
have been real challenging, interesting energy problems.
  I yield to my good friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Radanovich).
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I think together 
we represent both the East and West Coast versions of national energy. 
I want to thank the gentleman for providing this time.
  Also I want to thank the President of the United States for putting 
together an energy policy for this country, because it has been so long 
overdue and so important. I thank him for providing the leadership on 
this issue. So much can be done when you are President of the United 
States, and yet so many presidents I think tend to look at what the 
polls are and judge their administrative actions and their job as 
president by what the polls dictate.
  We had a similar situation like that in California about a year ago, 
last May, when it looked like it began to become apparent that a law 
that was passed in 1995, a phony deregulation bill, I guess I would 
call it, began to show signs of wear and tear on energy in California. 
Consequently, the prices of energy in California began to kind of jump 
through the roof, starting in San Diego.
  Unfortunately, the leadership in California looked at the polls, and 
the polls said that if you did what was necessary, you might suffer in 
your polls, at least on a temporary basis, because the remedy for that 
was a very, very modest increase. About a year ago it would have been 
something like 20 to 25 percent in power rates would have brought 
things back in line, in addition to negotiating long-term contracts in 
California. It would have corrected the flaws in this 1995 deregulation 
bill.
  Because that leadership was not provided in California, of course, we 
began to be familiar with the terms ``rolling blackouts'' and ``price 
spikes'' and ``$3,800 power,'' these kinds of things. It was because 
the leadership was not provided at the State level.
  It makes me more appreciative of this president, the fact he has come 
up to the plate and decided to take on issues that may not be all that 
popular. But they need to be addressed in this country. Because as in 
California, and we are thankful that the temperatures have not gotten 
too hot, that we have not had the rolling blackouts, yet, that we had 
anticipated for this summer, but the threat is still there, and because 
the President is tackling I think the energy situation in the United 
States, I think it will save a lot of the rest of the country what 
California has had to go through in learning tough lessons.
  So, the President is providing the leadership, and I think it is up 
to us in the House to pass his package, which I fully support. It is a 
balanced package. It is not over reliant on any one type of energy. It 
spreads our liability through many, and also makes us more dependent on 
our own resources, which I think is really the moral thing to do in the 
United States.
  As much as we do not like a power plant perhaps in our backyard, we 
certainly do like to flip the switch and see the lights come on, and we 
certainly do like to turn the faucet and see water come out of it. That 
is the bottom line for the United States.
  So, again, I applaud the President. I think he is doing a great job 
in his policy. I support this energy plan, and I look forward to its 
passage in the House tomorrow.

                              {time}  2100

  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Pennsylvania yielding me 
time.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, 
what kind of electric cost increases are happening in California?
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Right now, because the Governor waited so long to do 
any price increases, the PUC eventually raised prices up to about 48 
percent. We have a home in California and pay generally when we are not 
there about $48 a month, and it went up to about, in our particular 
case, almost $200 a month, even when we are not there on occasion, and 
so the price increases are very steep in California.
  Californians are beginning to feel that right now. But they should 
know that had the Governor acted earlier, the price increases would 
have only been about 20 to 25 percent and would have corrected the 
problem and, frankly, saved the State billions of dollars, at least $8 
billion, probably $20 billion.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, the energy prices are important 
ones to ourselves, along with our traveling costs and our home costs. 
But we pay them again in our education costs, we pay them again in our 
health care costs. And in business, we pay them again in business; if 
one owns a business, that is a high energy user, so it hits us a lot of 
ways when energy prices spike that much.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Well, there is a good side, if we want to call it 
that, to price increases in that it does cause us to conserve energy. 
Price increases, unfortunately, are the best conservation method there 
is out there. But, there is a big difference between 20 and 25 percent 
and a 48 percent increase. It really was not necessary to raise rates 
that high had he acted earlier in order to affect the kind of savings 
that we actually could get in California.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. The other issue is, I remember rolling 
brownouts during a winter a few years ago when energy was short in 
Pennsylvania and it was zero degree weather and the problems that were 
caused when electric was off just for a few hours. Maybe the gentleman 
could share with us a little bit about what happened. I heard there 
were industries that were actually deprived power.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Oh, there are. When a rolling blackout happens, 
unless you are in a district near a hospital somewhere, then you are 
not protected. And even in that case, you are not protected from some 
medical emergencies. We had an ophthalmologist, who was doing cataract 
surgery, in the middle of cataract surgery when the lights went out and 
they struggled around for about 30 to 60 seconds before they could get 
their private generators going. The gentleman can imagine, if you are 
in the chair and you are getting cataract surgery, I assume that you 
are awake during this whole time, and all of a sudden the power goes 
out on you.
  We also have one of the largest plate glass manufacturing plants if 
the country. There are about four of them all over the place that use 
enormous amounts of energy and, of course, in order to make glass, you 
have to heat it up to where it becomes molten and then it goes through 
a lot of sophisticated equipment before it comes out as plate glass. 
When you have a power outage for 8 hours, all of that molten stuff 
freezes up inside all of that sophisticated machinery and you lose 
every bit of it.
  So these companies in California have been scrambling to make sure 
that they have an alternative energy supply to click on real fast once 
we do get a blackout. This generally makes us more reliant on power 
sources that are not necessarily energy efficient and environmentally 
efficient. So generally, what we rely on are power plants that pollute 
the air more than what we want, certainly, or should allow, and cause, 
I think, more environmental damage in California.
  So it is not a good position to be in if one is an energy user or one 
is concerned about the environment. It kind of swings both ways.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, economically, it may take 
a little while, but when a company in California or any State that has 
a prolonged energy spikes and the rest of the country does not, we have 
put that company in a noncompetitive position immediately and, in time, 
they will not be able to compete with companies that are using a lot 
more less costly power.

[[Page H4974]]

  Mr. RADANOVICH. Right. And in California, we pride ourselves as being 
the seventh largest economy in the world. We rank up there with 
nations. We are very, very proud of that. But we cannot last long like 
that if we cannot even supply the basics. This is basic infrastructure 
we are talking about at an affordable price. When it is more affordable 
in any other State in the country, business will leave. It will 
drastically affect the economy of California. So these are the concerns 
that we have, of course, because being a Californian and those of us 
that live there, we care about our State and we want to make sure that 
we get through this reasonably well. But it has vast economic impacts.

  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, just to look at a few of 
the spikes that were regional in the last few years. In 1999, the fuel 
oil, truck fuel price was, in the East, from about Pennsylvania up to 
New England and for most of the winter, trucking companies were calling 
me and going out of business because they could not compete with their 
competitors because their fuel prices had doubled. But they were 
regional problems.
  Then, in the year 2000, in Chicago and many areas that had the huge 
gasoline peaks and gasoline prices there and I think they were over $2 
a gallon. Last winter, the changes, because of the problem the 
gentleman is having in California, and 95 percent of the new generation 
for electricity is natural gas. Historically in this country, we did 
not use natural gas for power generation. Maybe a little bit of 
peaking, but not regular power generation.
  It was basically saved for home fuel and for commercial industrial, 
as the easy, clean fuel. So now that we are major into using natural 
gas for power generation, we have spiked the price. Because last 
winter, gas prices in my part of the country were up 120 percent for 
home heating. Now, that took a lot of money out of spendable income.
  A lot of people have not talked too much about it, but last November 
and December in this country were the coldest Novembers and Decembers 
in history since they have been keeping track of temperatures. So they 
were not real cold temperatures, but they were cold every day of the 
month, each month. They were very cold months, the coldest on record. 
So there was tremendous natural gas use and there was inadequate 
supplies in storage, because they put natural gas in the ground in the 
summertime in storage caverns and then they use it in the winter.
  So last winter, we had gas prices running $2 and something a thousand 
retail, they went to $8, $9, and $10 a thousand. In my district I 
actually lost businesses who depend on natural gas, who are heavy gas 
users; and we had a fallout from that. I had a company relocating to 
Louisiana, and another one went out of business because they no longer 
were competitive because of the natural gas prices.
  I think with this great consumption of natural gas now for power 
generation, until the drilling can catch up, until the gas lines, the 
transmission lines can be built, in my view, natural gas spikes a 
couple of winters in a row can really have a huge impact on seniors 
staying in their homes.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Right. Mr. Speaker, that is why I think the 
President's plan is wise, because it relies on diversifying our energy 
sources.
  We in California are far too reliant on natural gas, as the gentleman 
mentioned, and one can never put all our eggs in one basket and not 
expect to suffer at some point in time. So that is why I applaud the 
President for not just concentrating on say natural gas reserves or 
supplies, but also on some of the other Nation's resources, like coal 
reserves, renewable energy sources, nuclear energy and such. Those are 
all, I think maybe not equally dependent on all of them, but they all 
have to be a good part of our energy mix, and that is why I applaud the 
President for making sure that that is a part of this energy plan.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I think we all should be 
applauding the President for raising this issue, because it was not a 
popular political issue, but it is an issue that needs to be addressed. 
Because if America is going to grow, and our energy use is growing, but 
maybe we do not give ourselves enough credit. But while the economy in 
this country grew 126 percent, energy use grew 30 percent. So we have 
improved our efficiency, we have done that, very much so. But we need 
to continue to do so.
  Now, $10 oil and $1.50 gas a few years ago kind of took our eyes off 
the ball. It made all other forms of energy noncompetitive. We could 
not compete with cheap gas and cheap oil. Now, if the prices do not get 
too high, but stay stably high to where other energies can compete with 
them, wind and solar and geothermal and fuel cells have a chance of 
competing in areas, so they can become a bigger factor when they can 
compete pricewise.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Right. And I think that conservation and renewable 
energy sources play a big part in the President's overall energy plan. 
But if we are going to deal with things realistically, we have to 
understand that a large portion of our energy is consumed by oil, 
natural gas, and hopefully, a greater percentage of nuclear energy.
  Right now, the technology says that these are our main energy 
sources. And we can hedge those and help cut back on those by renewable 
energy sources and conservation, but it all has to work together. The 
gentleman has the graph, and a large part is oil and natural gas.

  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I will give the gentleman 
the figures here. This is the Department of Energy. This is 
interesting. I will give the gentleman the change.
  Currently, 22 percent of our energy is from coal, and they are 
predicting it will be 21 percent in the year 2020, that is 19 more 
years. Oil is currently 40 percent and will decrease only to 39 
percent. Natural gas is the growth area. It is going to go from 23 to 
28 percent. And nuclear they show dropping from 8 percent of our energy 
source to 5 percent, and they show renewable staying at 7. Now, that 
will be growth in renewables, but only as much as the growth in energy 
consumption, because the percentage is not changing.
  Now, I hope we can do better than that. I hope renewables could 
double. But if we double renewables in the next 20 years, we would 
still only be 14 percent of our overall energy use.
  One issue I wanted to mention on natural gas too; now, in oil, as we 
stop producing enough oil to run our economy, we then started to import 
from all over the world. We import from like 20 different parts of the 
world. Unfortunately, a lot of it is from unstable parts of the world 
that are not real friendly to us. But natural gas, we only import from 
two countries, Mexico and Canada, where we do it on pipeline. We do 
import a little bit of natural gas, but it has to be liquefied and I 
think there is only one port in the United States that can accept 
tankers of liquefied natural gas, liquefied natural gas from other 
parts of the world. That is the only way you can transport it is to 
turn it into liquid and then turn it back into gas again, and we only 
have one port.
  So we cannot import natural gas like we can import oil. Only from 
Canada and Mexico. We are 80-some percent self-sufficient ourselves 
currently, but with the amount of power plants we are hooking up; when 
we hook up a power plant, it takes a lot of gas wells to fill up that 
pipeline to supply that power plant. So in my view, the next year or 
two, the amount of natural gas we can have on hand is going to be very 
important to make sure we do not have spikes in natural gas prices that 
would push our seniors out of their homes and push businesses out of 
business.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, if I may use a little bit of the 
gentleman's time to comment on one thing that I think will come up in 
tomorrow's debate on the energy plan and that is on the issue of price 
caps. As the gentleman knows, we have been facing that in California 
quite often; and we have deliberated over it many, many hours when we 
were putting together this energy plan.
  As a result, FERC, the Energy Regulatory Commission, came up with 
what they call the 7-24, which is a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week price 
mitigation observation on the market to make sure that if there were 
any overcharges that they would all be susceptible to refund. After 
that imposition, it was interesting, because in California, the ISO, 
the unit that purchases the energy for California now, out of the 
Department of Water Resources, had the opportunity, or they were buying 
power at

[[Page H4975]]

$80 a megawatt from a hydro facility up in the Northwestern United 
States, I believe it was up in Washington. They could have enacted the 
price mitigation measures that were passed by FERC which would have 
dropped it down to $40 a megawatt, which was basically the cap that was 
set.
  The ISO refused to enact on that cap. Even though the leaders in 
California were wanting to make sure that they had a price cap, they 
refused to enact the price cap when they had the ability to do it, 
because the hydro facility in the Northwest would have kept the water 
behind the dam for their own use later on, or they could have gone 
somewhere and sold it at a higher price.
  This was the real fallacy, I think, behind price caps, because you 
could never have price caps in California unless you had a for sale 
agreement in the western grid, which means you would have been calling 
upon States like Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana to suffer while 
California would not suffer in price increases or energy reliability, 
and yet those States that are giving away their hydropower would be 
suffering higher prices and an increased percentage of blackouts.
  So it really was a fallacy, and I think it is showing itself to be 
proven in California now. I am saying this now because this issue is 
going to come up tomorrow in our debates; I believe that there will be 
an amendment on price caps. In a free system like what we have, it does 
not work; and unfortunately, we make other people suffer by even more 
blackouts and higher prices.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, foolish price controls 
really caused much of California's problems.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. They did, yes.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I want to go into one more 
issue that we have not talked about here and that is ANWR. And that is 
the one a lot of people are cautious about talking about, but I am not. 
With the improvements in technology, it will allow us to develop with 
very little impact on the environment, and we can drill directionally 
from gravel pads on the surface, roads to drilling sites would be 
constructed only on ice and would melt in the spring when the snow 
melts.

                              {time}  2115

  We are only going to drill on 2,000 acres of ANWR, when there is 
actually 19.6 million acres. We are only going to be drilling on 14 
percent of Alaska's coastline. So we are not going to endanger all of 
Alaska, like some people think; and we will have a minimal impact.
  The interesting thing is that because of the tremendous reserves 
there, every well we drill there, and there are two different charts of 
production in the lower 48 and in Alaska. One chart says 45 wells would 
have to be drilled in the lower 48 to replace one well in Alaska; the 
other one would be 70. I personally think the 70 figure is the most 
accurate.
  The U.S. Geological Survey did a study. It came up to 16 billion 
barrels of oil were available in ANWR. That is enough to replace oil we 
import from Iraq for 58 years. I see now they are the sixth largest 
import country.
  The opponents would argue that ANWR oil would only supply the U.S. 
for 180 days. This would only be true if we immediately stopped all 
other sources of oil, if it was our only source of oil; and we know 
that is not the case.
  Seventy-five percent of Alaskans support it. They know the issue 
best. Prudhoe Bay, everybody who has been there has said we can drill 
there safely without harming the environment. We have been drilling 
there for 25 years. Environmental groups claim it will harm the 
caribou. They have increased five-fold in Prudhoe Bay since drilling 
began there in the seventies. Nature and hunters are more of a threat 
to wildlife than drilling.
  ANWR development would create 736,000 new jobs. ANWR is the largest 
oil accumulation anywhere in the world. Only 14 percent of Alaska's 
Arctic shoreline would be open to exploration overall. Opponents say 
95, but that is not true. Opponents say 5 percent is protected, but 
actually 86 percent is protected.
  The pipeline from Prudhoe Bay is in place. We just have to extend 
from ANWR to Prudhoe Bay and the pipeline is there. There is also a 
great source of natural gas there; but again, our problem is how do we 
get it here.
  The ANWR issue is one that I think needs to be looked at very 
carefully. I personally support it. I think it is better to drill one 
well in Alaska instead of 70 someplace else. With a pipeline in place, 
the infrastructure in place, it just makes sense.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. I have to say if the North Slope were a Third World 
country, we would already be using those resources, and in a way that 
was far more harmful to the environment than under the President's plan 
right now.
  It is unfortunate, but Americans consume 25 percent of the energy 
consumed on the Earth. Yet we only provide about 2 percent from our own 
natural resources. To me it is very hypocritical when we are that 
willing to consume that much; yet we are less willing to use our own 
resources to do it.
  The fact is, if the North Slope were a Third World country, we would 
be exploiting that oil right now; and the environmental standards would 
be lower than the ones we are placing on it at this time.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I think this energy plan is going to 
diversify us. We are far too dependent. Our largest dependence is 40 
percent on oil.
  I think we need to lower that percentage, because we only have 
somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the world's oil in this country 
under our own control, when we have 45 percent of the world's coal, we 
have a lot of our own natural gas, we are producing 80-some percent of 
our own natural gas without imports.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. I think if the gentleman were to go to the coldest, 
most barren, desolate, unappealing part of the world, that would be the 
North Slope. I think because so many people have not been there, there 
is this assumption that caribou are running wild among mountains and 
there are streams and waterfalls and everything.
  This is not an appealing place. I think people need to remember that, 
that it is not representative of the beautiful State of Alaska at all. 
This is a cold, barren, desolate place that we would not want to be 
there.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. The animals are only there a few months 
of the year.
  Back to the other issues, in Penn State they have new research that 
has been very successful at making jet fuel out of coal. They also get 
a carbon product that could be used in the carbon industries. That is 
moving to refinery development this year.
  They also have some coal boilers that interest me. They have one that 
would burn gas, powdered coal, or oil. Think if a factory, hospital or 
business had the ability to burn any one of those three fuels cleanly. 
And the clean technology is with us; the scrubbers and all the 
equipment is with this boiler.
  Now if you are a business person, a hospital, or one of our 
educational facilities, we buy the fuel that is the cheapest. We are 
not in bondage to any one fuel. They also have the fluidized bed boiler 
that we are utilizing in Pennsylvania a lot for burning our old waste 
coal piles, with high sulfur and very low Btu. The waste coal was piled 
on top of the ground. We are now burning and getting rid of it because 
it was an environmental hazard.
  The fluidized bed process will allow us to burn almost anything, that 
process where we use crushed limestone with whatever we burn, and the 
limestone locks up with the pollutants. Then with the scrubbers, we 
really have a very fuel-efficient and a very clean burn.
  That is another type of burner that I think we ought to be promoting, 
because again, we could burn coal and animal waste, or oil, a blend of 
oil and coal. We could burn whatever was cost effective. In some cases 
it might be animal waste, animal fat, or different things we know are 
problematic today to dispose of, they could be burned as fuels. They 
are doing some very interesting research at our universities to help us 
diversify our energy needs.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. All due to increased technology.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. We are in the technology wave.
  It is about time to wrap this up. Let us quickly go over the chart 
down front, America's energy situation. Foreign oil dependence is now 
56, and we

[[Page H4976]]

will be 66 in 10 years. Natural gas prices soared to triple last year's 
prices, which caused home heating last year in my area to be a real 
pain and caused some businesses to go out of business.
  No new gasoline refineries built in 10 years; no new nuclear plants 
licensed in over 10 years. There is new nuclear technology today that 
is much superior to the past, not nearly as expensive to put in place.
  No new coal plants built in 10 years. There is a new one being built 
in Pennsylvania right now. It is going to be using, again, waste coal 
that is on top of the ground already.
  Gas and electric transmission capacity is overloaded.
  Those are some of the problems. Anyone who says we do not have energy 
problems in this country, we have distribution problems and access 
problems. As we said in the beginning, for energy to be affordable and 
available to people and businesses, we need strong, ample supplies of 
each and every kind of energy. And we need to develop a system that is 
not so dependent on oil, not so dependent on one fuel, but gives people 
alternatives. Then people that use a lot of fuel in a business could 
choose the fuel that is the cheapest for the day.
  We have the technology to do it cleanly. We need to, as time goes 
along, to grow the renewables. I think fuel cells are a great 
potential. There will be slight growth in wind and solar. I do not 
think they will be major players. Geothermal has some potential.
  None of those will put enough into the system to even take care of 
our growth in energy needs. Fuel efficiency, conservation and fuel 
efficiency, can only take up half of the slack of the energy-need 
growth, so we have to have more energy and a system to deliver it.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. I want to thank the President for bringing to the 
Congress his energy plan, and I hope we pass it tomorrow by wide 
margins.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I do, too. I thank the gentleman from 
California, a good friend. So from the east coast to the west coast, we 
will join hands and hopefully can bring this one home for the people of 
this country.
  I thank all who participated tonight to talk about energy, an issue 
that is number one in this country and one that I commend President 
Bush and Vice President Cheney for having the courage to tackle.
  It is our future. Energy is what runs this country; and we must have 
abundant supplies, a delivery system, and we must use it wisely.

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