[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 57 (Wednesday, April 9, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H3039-H3042]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    ENERGY CHALLENGES FACING AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is 
recognized for one-half the time remaining until midnight, or 
approximately 40 minutes.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I have come to the floor tonight to talk 
about the energy challenges facing America and the opportunities that 
we now have before America and to advise the House that this afternoon, 
along with support of about 40 Members of the U.S. House, I introduced 
an amendment to the underlying energy bill which could be on the floor 
tomorrow that would give America a new Apollo Energy Project that would 
give America an energy program that is befitting the boldness and can-
do spirit of this country. I will come back, in a moment, to explain 
why it is called the Apollo Energy Project.
  Before I do, I thought I should address what the challenges are to 
America and our energy world. They are three. They are really quite 
obvious, and I think that they are well understood by Americans and 
accepted by Americans on a consensus basis.
  Challenge number one: Our Nation has an addiction.
  We are addicted to oil from the Mideast. We are addicted to oil from 
one of the most turbulent, incendiary, dangerous parts of the planet in 
the last couple of centuries. This addiction, in all administrations, 
Democrat and Republican, has resulted in a foreign policy not to the 
security interests of America and not to the interests of spreading 
democracy in the Middle East.
  Americans understand that, both in their head and in their gut, 
because they know that the policies, for instance, in Majlis, in the 
Saudi Arabian Royal House, is they have refused to cooperate fully in 
the war on terrorism and in fact have allowed certain elements in their 
society to support terrorism without cracking down on it. Americans 
understand that the reason for that is because of our addiction to 
Middle Eastern oil, and they realize that our foreign policy has been 
tainted, has been poisoned, by this addiction. And Americans understand 
that breaking that addiction perhaps is job number one for an energy 
policy of America. That is the first challenge.
  The second challenge is to deal with the phenomena of global warming. 
Americans now have come to understand overwhelmingly that when we place 
into the atmosphere pollutants from our burning of fossil fuels, by 
necessity these pollutants have caused a huge proliferation of global 
gas emissions to increase the rate of these gasses that warm the planet 
and the atmosphere.
  Americans know if we are going to continue to burn fossil fuels 
without using new technologies to trap these pollutants, we are going 
to continue to increase the increase of carbon dioxide and methane and 
other global warming gasses in the atmosphere. Americans know if we do 
that, that these gasses are sort of like a blanket, they trap infrared 
radiation escaping the Earth and will be warming the planet for the 
next century.
  Americans are concerned when they see what has happened as a result 
of global warming already. They know that in Glacier National Park, 
where we had 150 glaciers about 100 years ago, we now have 50, and we 
are projected to have no glaciers, no glaciers, in Glacier National 
Park in the next century if trends continue. We will have to rename it 
``Puddle Natural Park'' I suppose.
  Americans have seen the melting of the polar ice caps, the reduction 
by 10 percent in breadth and 40 percent in depth of the arctic ice cap; 
the melting of tundra in Alaska, where dead Indians are popping up out 
of graveyards because the tundra has melted.

                              {time}  2230

  We have seen the extraordinary increase in dangerous weather in the 
continental United States that is associated or could be associated 
with this phenomenon. We know that we have a responsibility to our 
children to stop our proliferation and contribution of these global 
warming gases and that we can do so. That is the second challenge.
  The third challenge is an economic one, and the challenge is that we 
know that technologies always are continuing to grow, and we know that 
because of this challenge in the Mideast with oil and because of global 
warming, people are going to want new technologies for new sources of 
energy. The problem is that we have kind of a gap, we have a technology 
gap, because we are losing jobs right now in the new energy 
technologies to Germany for solar, as Germany now is the leading solar 
manufacturer of solar chips; to Japan with hybrid vehicles, as Japan is 
now leading us in the production of fuel-efficient vehicles; and to 
Denmark, a small European country that now is leading the world in the 
production of wind turbines, and these are jobs that belong right here 
in the United States, not to be lost to our economic competitors. We 
have a job loss phenomenon because we do not have an energy policy that 
is forward-thinking. We have an energy policy that looks backwards.
  Well, today, Mr. Speaker, we offered an amendment for a new, bold, 
visionary energy policy, and we call it the New Apollo Energy Project. 
We did that, inspired by a former member of the U.S. Congress who, on 
May 9, 1951, walked down this aisle right here and he walked up to the 
platform and addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress of the 
United States. That night, John F. Kennedy challenged America to go to 
the moon within 10 years and bring that man back safely to earth. At 
the time, he challenged America to exercise its can-do spirit. People 
thought that was a little bit nuts, to send, at the time they were 
thinking of a man, to the moon and bring him back within 10 years. That 
idea stunned people at the precursor of NASA thinking, how the heck are 
we going to do that?
  But John Kennedy knew something about the character of America. He 
knew that when Americans recognized a challenge and were rallied to a 
cause, they could produce like no culture in human history, and this 
American culture responded with technological innovations which led the 
world in using our can-do spirit to create new devices, new software, 
new computers, new rockets, new navigational systems, new satellites 
that were unheard of before John Kennedy asked America to accept that 
challenge.
  That is exactly the type of challenge which we need to give to 
America tomorrow when we adopt an energy policy.
  Mr. Speaker, the reason I have, along with my colleagues, offered 
this New Apollo Energy Project is because unfortunately, the underlying 
bill that we seek to amend is timid, it is slow, it is too little, it 
is too late, and it is a package deserving of some country less than 
America, because it fails to cut the mustard in dealing with the 3 
fundamental challenges of energy that this country is facing.
  Number 1, it fails to give America any hope whatsoever to break that 
addiction to middle eastern oil. Second, it fails to give America any 
hope that it is going to deal successfully with this challenge of 
global warming. Third, it fails to give America any hope that we are 
going to bring those jobs back to America that now are going across the 
waters to countries that recognize, are recognizing these new 
potentially job-creating economies.
  So we have introduced this New Apollo Energy Project to introduce 
those 3 challenges.
  I want to discuss the difference between this proposal, which we 
would be proposing at this moment by Democratic Members of the House, 
and we hope that Republicans will join us tomorrow or the next day when 
this bill

[[Page H3040]]

is voted on; I would like to talk about the differences between the New 
Apollo Energy Project and what I believe must be characterized as a 
timid, half-measure project that is in the underlying bill.
  The first thing that our New Apollo Energy Project will give America 
are goals. I guess it has been said by other folks, if you do not know 
where you are going, you will probably get there. We need to have goals 
like Kennedy set for us in 1961, because unless we set those goals, we 
will surely muddle along and not make significant progress.
  So what we have done in this bill with this amendment, which will be 
on the floor tomorrow, we hope, we have set some goals for America and 
we have set these goals so that they are both ambitious and reasonably 
achievable. And we have set these goals by looking at the existing 
technology, looking at what we have today, looking at the scientists 
and the scientific evaluations that seemingly may be possible in the 
future. Let me address some of those goals.

  Number 1, we have set a goal that by the year 2010, America will 
adopt, and the President will help implement through very flexible 
means at his discretion or her discretion, the goal of reducing 
Americans' dependence on oil in our total energy package by 600,000 
barrels of oil a day by 2010 and a little over 2 million barrels a day 
by 2015. Now, why do we pick those numbers? We do so out of an acute 
recognition of the costs of our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. The 
first figure of 2010, if we reach this target, which I believe is 
imminently achievable through ways I will talk about in a moment, we 
will replace the amount of oil that will be produced by Iraq. If we 
meet this goal by 2015, we will eliminate the need for the oil produced 
by Saudi Arabia, essentially the largest producer in the world.
  Now, why is this important? It is important because right now, we 
already are depending on 55 percent of our oil coming from foreign 
sources, and that is expected to rise over 60 percent by the end of the 
decade. Half of that comes from the Mideast. That is the addiction we 
have to break.
  So we have set this realistic goal, and if we look at the Department 
of Energy assessments, we will see that this is a realistic goal.
  The second goal. We have set forth a goal for America, which again is 
a reasonable and achievable one, to reduce our contributions to global 
warming gases that we put out from burning fossil fuel by the year 2010 
to essentially 1990 levels, of what we were putting out in 1990.
  Now, that is less ambitious than the Kyoto Treaty. It is less 
ambitious that most other civilized nations have agreed to in the Kyoto 
Treaty. But we have sought to have a goal that every single Member of 
this House ought to be able to embrace. If folks do not like the Kyoto 
Treaty, then they ought to agree with us to set some goal, and we have 
put on the table the goal, the democratic folks who have been working 
on this bill, and I hope my Republican colleagues will rise to the 
challenge and embrace this goal for America. Because if they do not, 
they are dooming our kids to a place that is different than we knew 
when we grew up.
  We are telling our kids that they can just accept 2 to 8 degree 
increases of global mean temperatures over the next decade. We can 
expect them to see the increase of infectious diseases move north: 
Malaria, encephalitis, Dengue Fever. We can expect to see droughts in 
the western United States, somewhat similar to what we have experienced 
in the last 2 or 3 years. We can expect to see a lessening of the snow 
pack in the Cascade Mountains, which can reduce the ability to irrigate 
our fields in eastern Washington. We can expect to have an America that 
is not the kind that we had when we were children. We need to set this 
goal.
  Third, we would set a goal of creating 1 million new jobs in these 
new infant industries which can be so beneficial in helping America 
reach their economic potential. Wind turbines, solar, clean coal, 
thermal incline facilities using the thermal temperatures in the 
oceans, energy efficiency systems, efficient cars. All of these, a 
whole basket full of new jobs for Americans that ought to be here 
rather than Denmark, Japan, and Germany. So we intend to set those 
goals and we have done so.
  The second feature of our plan. We know that this is an ambitious 
challenge. Let me tell my colleagues how ambitious it is. Three weeks 
ago, or 2 weeks ago, an article came out in Science Magazine that 
suggested that by the end of this century, if we were to expect to hold 
the rate of global warming to about 2 degrees over the next century, to 
just limit it to that amount, not stop it, but limit it to that amount, 
we would have to have somewhere between three-quarters and 100 percent 
of our energy produced by nonCO2-emitting industries. That is a big 
challenge. Now, it is over a century, but it is still a big challenge. 
So this is an ambitious undertaking that we have to face for a variety 
of reasons.
  So in doing that, we need to embrace a whole host of solutions. There 
are no silver bullets to our energy policy. But we have to be bold and 
visionary and break the habits of our old ways and our old industries, 
at times, in order to reach these goals of more self reliance in 
energy.
  So let me talk about some of the ways we propose doing it. First, let 
me say we want to address new sources of energy and we want to address 
old sources of energy. Let me address the new ones just first briefly, 
because they are things that are not yet seen, just like in the 1890s, 
the internal combustion motor was only a tiny part of our total energy 
consumption, our production. And if we looked at charts, we would say, 
well, is the internal combustion engine going to mean much to America? 
At the turn of the century, it was only a few percentage points of our 
production, but it changed us dramatically. The same can be said, I 
believe, of the new emerging technologies that can help produce energy. 
Wind energy and wind turbines.

  Mr. Speaker, wind turbines now are economically competitive with 
electricity produced by other means. We are building the North 
America's largest wind turbine farm in southeastern Washington, enough 
to supply energy for thousands of homes at a competitive price. And the 
Department of Energy studies have shown that the potential for wind 
energy, assuming that this becomes economically productive, as much as 
in the Midwest alone could potentially generate enough electricity for 
United States consumption needs. Now, those prices are becoming 
competitive, particularly with the modest tax breaks that the industry 
now takes advantage of.
  This is happening around the world. When I was in Denmark a couple 
years ago, I saw them producing 15 percent of all of their electricity 
with wind turbines, some of these 300 foot-long blades that are outside 
on the ocean, outside of Copenhagen. They intend to have 50 percent of 
their electric produced by wind power by the end of the decade, and 
they are going to reach that. We have that alternative to do also, if 
we will give this industry some of the modest help to get off the floor 
and get into the mass-scale production that we need. I look forward to 
that day.
  Solar power. Solar power at this moment is not economically 
competitive at this moment, except in certain circumstances. But the 
facts have shown that every time we increase the rate of production of 
solar units, the price can get cut by as much as half, and we believe, 
by ramping up, by obtaining the scales of economy of production of 
these solar units, we believe they have a realistic possibility of 
being economically productive by the end of the decade, if, if Uncle 
Sam will pull its head out of the sand on this issue and help this 
emerging technology along.
  Now, there are just a couple of new technologies, but let me talk 
about some of the old. Coal. Coal right now, we have enormous supplies 
of coal in this country as a domestic fuel supply, but a problem with 
it is that at the moment, it contributes enormous pollutants in the 
form of carbon dioxide, which is one of the global warming gases that 
we have that are so problematic for the future climate of the world.

                              {time}  2245

  The question arises, why do we not just trap the carbon dioxide? Let 
us trap it. The fancy word for that is sequestration. We in our bill 
have put research and development dollars in to study the opportunity 
of trapping or

[[Page H3041]]

doing carbon dioxide sequestration and perhaps injecting it back into 
deep mines or potentially the ocean, although there are environmental 
challenges there, to try to be able to use coal without marring the 
atmosphere.
  There are some real challenges to doing that technologically; but 
given the enormous challenge we have over the next century, it seems to 
me that it is an appropriate expenditure of research dollars to see if 
we can make progress in that regard.
  One of the simple things to say about energy is that the best way to 
produce energy is to use it efficiently. I believe a very significant 
portion of our solution to our energy needs, although not talked about, 
although not quite as romantic as wind, solar, or various other fusion 
technologies and the like, it is going to be a very significant part of 
our savings, and that is to use energy efficiently.
  Let me tell Members how important that is. Look at Seattle, 
Washington. I come from Seattle, and represent the north Seattle area. 
Seattle, Washington realized it was going to start to have an energy 
crunch in the mid-1990s. The folks in Seattle, instead of just rushing 
out and producing more CO2 emissions, they decided to see 
what they could do to use energy efficiently.
  They adopted some very commonsense measures in Seattle to have 
incentives for better building code standards, to have incentives to 
use energy-saving lighting, to have incentives to use energy in a more 
efficient way for advertising, for instance; very simple things.
  The city of Seattle saved enough energy, enough electricity, to heat 
and light 58,000 homes in about 3 to 4 years; 58,000 homes in a city of 
1,000,000 or thereabouts. That is an amazing statistic, doing something 
that did not change anyone's lifestyle in a deleterious manner. 
Everyone enjoyed the same lifestyle. Before the bubble burst, Seattle 
was a pretty chic place to live, and I still think it is a great spot, 
without any degradation of our lifestyle.
  In our bill, we have called for a number of measures, essentially, to 
get efficiencies on how we use energy.
  Look at our transportation sector. In transportation, we did some 
very farsighted things in the 1970s. We adopted measures to raise the 
fuel economy of our fleet of vehicles, and it was successful. We raised 
it almost 10 miles a gallon, probably 8 miles a gallon or the like, in 
our fleets of vehicles.
  Then, in the 1980s, that stopped. That rate of progress that America 
was making came to an absolute halt. It is interesting, because if we 
had simply continued to increase the rate of improvement of mileage in 
the cars we were driving through the 1980s and 1990s, we would have 
replaced all of the oil we buy from Saudi Arabia today.
  Just think of the opportunity we lost in not continuing those 
efficiency increases. Now we have to start again on the road to 
efficiency increases, and in our bill we have not proposed a specific 
efficiency standard, what is called the CAFE standard, the Corporate 
Average Fuel Economy standard; but we have created a goal that would 
give the President a flexible tool in one manner or another to save 
600,000 barrels a day by the end of the decade, and that is a realistic 
goal. Heaven help us if we cannot use our brains enough to increase the 
efficiency of our transportation sector.
  Since the 1980s, when America stopped because Congress stopped 
improving the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, since that time 
virtually the entire computer and Internet industries have developed, 
the biomedical industry has just essentially been created from scratch, 
and we have had these tremendous technological advances, but the cars 
we are driving get less mileage today than they did in 1984. That is 
simply wrong.
  The Republican approach has not offered, in this bill, any solution 
to that failure; we have. I am hoping some of my Republican colleagues 
will join us in fixing that problem.
  Let me address the hydrogen economy, if I can. Many of us were 
pleased to see the President in his State of the Union at least mention 
the possibility or the prospects of developing hydrogen-fueled 
vehicles. Many of us believe that is a bright future for the country to 
develop a fuel cell-driven car; but it is a ways off, of course, to 
develop the technologies, particularly for the infrastructure to fuel 
those cars.
  Unfortunately, upon reflection, we found that the President's and my 
colleagues', the Republicans' plan, has this enormous loophole, this 
bridge between here and the future that is simply down. That is the 
bridge between us and the production of hydrogen; because we could have 
everybody in America have a hydrogen-fueled car in our garages, but it 
does not do us any good if we do not have any hydrogen. The President 
totally failed to give us a way to produce hydrogen. The Republican 
bill tomorrow gives us a total failure of a way to produce hydrogen.
  What we found was this President's allusion to hydrogen was really a 
failed allusion of an energy policy. I regret to have to say that, 
because it is a biological fact hydrogen does not grow on trees; it has 
to be produced. It has to be produced through electrolysis of removing 
it from water molecules. We have to use electricity to do that. We have 
to have some way to generate the electricity, or it has to be stripped 
off from a fossil-based fuel system in some process which also takes 
energy.
  So the fact of the matter is, although a hydrogen car is a good idea 
and the research to produce it is a good idea, we have to grab the bull 
by the horns and figure out how to produce hydrogen. The Republican 
Party is not telling us how to do that. We will offer proposals in our 
bill, in the New Apollo Energy Project, how to do it.
  The reason we will do that, do all of these things, relies on a 
fundamental character belief in the ``can do'' spirit of America. If 
you believe in this new Apollo project, you are an optimist; if you do 
not, perhaps you are a pessimist.
  We are optimists because we believe in the ``can do'' spirit of this 
country. When we roll up our sleeves, we get it done technologically, 
but we do not if the U.S. Congress sits here in the posture of an 
ostrich with the head in the sand and our tailfeathers in the wind, 
rather than the American eagle. That is the posture we want the U.S. 
Congress to take, of the eagle with a can do spirit.
  Some of my colleagues earlier this evening were talking about one of 
the provisions in the Republican bill would purport to solve this 
problem by drilling in our Arctic wildlife refuge that was established 
as a wildlife refuge by Dwight David Eisenhower way back when. It was 
established to be a wildlife refuge. It has been one ever since.
  I think that there are several comments I have to make, because I 
know a little bit about this. I was up in the Arctic wildlife refuge 
the summer before last. Just to give Members who have not been there a 
brief description of it, I have been to Yellowstone, I have been to 
Glacier National Park, and my parents used to work in Mount Rainier 
National Park in Washington State. I have been to the bayous of 
Louisiana and I have been to a lot of beautiful places in this country, 
but I can warrant in the 4 days I was camped on the banks of the 
Achelik River right next to the area they want to turn into an oil 
production facility, it is one of, if not the most, spectacularly 
biologically dynamic beautiful places in America.
  The wildlife is spectacular like no place I have ever been, and for 
24 hours a day, because the sun is up 23, 24 hours a day, there are 
birds singing, there are grizzly bears walking, there is caribou 
snorting going right through your camp. That place is the most 
spectacularly exciting place I have ever been, just to be.
  For Members to come here and describe it as some sort of wasteland 
that we should toss aside like a piece of sort of litter from the 
American political structure is just wrong. It is a beautiful, 
beautiful place, and it is a special place. That is why a good 
Republican environmentalist, Dwight David Eisenhower, set it aside for 
future generations as a wildlife refuge.
  A couple of things about this. Number one, although we know 
increasing production domestically is an element of this, and we have 
in our bill proposed increasing domestic production of oil in some of 
our wells, we have some tax incentives to improve the efficiency and 
productivity of what are called marginal or stripper wells that are now 
in marginal production domestically in the United States. We have a 
variety of things to do to help technologically to increase the oil 
production

[[Page H3042]]

from wells in the continental United States now.

  But the sad fact is, we cannot rely simply on oil production as an 
only or major source of solving this problem. The reason is that while 
we consume 25 percent of the world's oil, there is only 3 percent of 
the world's oil reserves in the continental United States. We use 25 
percent, but we only have 3 percent of the world's reserves.
  The Creator did not put enough dead dinosaurs under America to solve 
this problem simply by oil production. That is why we cannot rely on 
the Arctic, which is only about somewhere between 6 months' and a 
year's worth of production, and which would not be on line for 10 to 12 
years, in any event.
  There are two pieces of this puzzle that my friends across the aisles 
left out. Number one, they talk about this, that they will only put a 
10,000-acre imprint or footprint on this beautiful area. I have been to 
Prudhoe Bay, and I can tell the Members that it looks more like New 
Jersey than it does Yellowstone National Park. We do not need that in 
the Arctic wilderness refuge.
  They say it is only 10,000 acres on this, what they call the imprint 
where the industrial sector would meet the tundra. The problem is, 
everything is built in Alaska on stilts, and the only thing they count 
in that 10,000 acres is where the stilts touch the ground. It is sort 
of like measuring how much your furniture in your office covers your 
office by where the little corner of your desk leg touches the tile. 
That is a gross distortion. This place is going to look like an 
industrial production plant if this wildlife refuge is destroyed by 
making it into an oil facility.
  I realize that not a lot of Americans are going to see the Arctic 
wilderness, wildlife refuge. It is very remote. But I think a lot of 
people think of this sort of like the Mona Lisa. A lot of Americans 
will not see it, and maybe it is only like putting a little small 
mustache on the Mona Lisa to put this 10,000 acre industrial plant; but 
it is a mustache, nonetheless, and it would not look good on the Mona 
Lisa, and it is not going to look good on the Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge.
  The best argument I heard about that is from a young environmentalist 
constituent of mine from Bainbridge Island, Washington, his name is Sam 
Zuckerman. Mr. Zuckerman told me that in his view, we ought to leave it 
for the kids and our grandkids. I think Mr. Zuckerman is right, that we 
should do so. I think that is the American sentiment.
  I also may note that the people who live in the area are divided on 
this issue. The native Americans who live in the Arctic village who 
depend on the caribou herds, which potentially could be threatened by 
this development, are adamantly opposed to this. But we ought to know 
this, this refuge belongs to all Americans, not to any one of us. All 
Americans should have something to say on this. All Americans ought to 
have the opportunity to give this spectacular place to their children 
and to their grandchildren.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I just hope that in the next 
day or two while we are talking about energy in this Chamber that our 
effort to have this new Apollo energy project will be joined by some of 
our Republican colleagues.
  We ask for their assistance in passing this, because America needs 
something more than half measures. We cannot break our addiction to oil 
with baby steps. We cannot solve the global warming problem with baby 
steps. We cannot grow the U.S. economy by these half measures that are 
now proposed in the Republican bill.

                              {time}  2300

  It is time to embrace and use the American talent for technological 
innovation. And it is time for the U.S. Congress to recognize both the 
challenge and the promise of what America can do when it comes to 
developing these new technologies.
  There is a group in Lake Union, Washington called MagnaDrive, some 
former people from Boeing run it, and they have developed an electric 
motor coupling device which can increase the efficiency of an electric 
motor of about 30 percent. A fellow came up with this technology 
literally in his garage from Port Angeles, Washington, and now they are 
selling this to various building companies for their air conditioning 
systems to improve their electric efficiency.
  We are going to solve this problem by 10,000 new inventions like 
that, by asking Americans in their garages, in their large corporate 
research and development facilities, to bring us into the next century. 
So I hope tomorrow or the next day we will indeed adopt this new Apollo 
energy project to give us, not an energy program for the last century, 
but one for the next century that is befitting the can-do talents of 
the American people.

                          ____________________