[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 86 (Thursday, June 12, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H5355-H5358]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE NEW APOLLO ENERGY PROJECT: A BOLD NEW ENERGY POLICY FOR AMERICA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I have come to the House Chamber tonight to
talk about a tremendous opportunity for our great country, and it is an
opportunity that follows in the historical path that John Kennedy set
forth back on May 9, 1961. The path that I would like to talk about
tonight is a path towards a new energy future for our country, a future
that is befitting of this century and our technological progress and
achievements we have made and can make in the next decade or two.
What we are going to be introducing for the House consideration in
the next week or two is what we call the New Apollo Energy Project,
because many of my colleagues and myself believe that our country
deserves a bold, vigorous, aggressive new energy policy that is
befitting of the technological wherewithal and talents of our country.
So we are calling it the New Apollo Energy Project.
The reason we are calling it the New Apollo Energy Project is because
we think that we need to follow in the footsteps of what John F.
Kennedy did in challenging America right behind us. He came to this
Chamber on May 9, 1961 as a young President, way back before computers,
biotechnologies, solar cells, fuel cells; and he stood behind me and
looked out to America and challenged America to put a man on the Moon
within the decade, which was an extraordinary challenge to America in
1961. Computers were in their infancy, our rocketry was failing
repeatedly at that time. At that moment, people
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really scratched their heads to ask how a President could be so bold to
challenge the country to reach such an ambitious goal. But Kennedy did
make that challenge; and the Nation responded and, indeed, America put
a man on the Moon within that decade.
I think Kennedy recognized some things about America that were
perhaps unique in the world that others did not who were skeptical
about that effort. He recognized the basic can-do spirit of the culture
and the American economy; and he recognized that when challenged,
Americans can deliver technologically much more than people would
otherwise think so, and so he set forth a challenge and a promise to
Americans that we could do this.
Many of us now believe that we need to do a similar thing in the
field of energy, in our energy policy in this country. And we are very
optimistic that if we set high bars and high goals for America, we can
meet them just as we did in the original Apollo project.
So in the coming weeks, my colleagues and I will be introducing the
New Apollo Energy Project, which will basically set three goals for a
new energy policy of our Nation. Not one that is sort of captured by
the artifacts of old industries, not one that is captured by a feeling
that we just have to continue down the same old road, but one that can
really lift our eyes and see a higher plane that will solve three
challenges that America has now that we need a new policy to address. I
will briefly mention what those three are.
Number one, we need to get our economy growing again. And to do that,
America needs to seize the moment by the reins and create these new,
clean energy technologies that can create high-paying jobs in America.
So job creation is job number one for a new energy policy, and we are
optimistic that that can be done; and I will talk about that in a
moment.
Second, we set a goal in our national energy policy of reducing our
contributions to global warming gases that are now polluting our
atmosphere and causing a warming and climate change in our planet, and
this is something we can do using new technology; and it is required if
we want to avoid climactic changes to change the world as we know it.
Three, and perhaps as important, we set a goal to break addiction to
Middle Eastern oil, which has enslaved us to certain policies over the
last several decades that are now clearly not in our security
interests.
{time} 1945
It is time for America to become more self-reliant for fuel so that
we do not have to make foreign policy decisions in one shape or another
that are affected by our now current addiction for over half our fuel
from those sources.
So those are the three goals we have set for the New Apollo Energy
Project: Job creation, reduction of global climate gas emissions, and
reduction of our dependence on foreign oil, particularly Mideast oil
sources. And we believe all of them are very achievable.
Let me talk about the first goal which is job creation and getting a
new sort of horizon, a new scope of our economy. And that is to adopt
measures that will spur the development of these new high-paying jobs
in high-tech industries. Let me talk about what some of them are.
Right now we have the capacity in this country which we are not using
as much as we should, for instance, to create hundreds of thousands of
jobs in the wind turbine industry, a growing industry, very rapidly
growing industry, but one that needs to continue to increase that rate
of acceleration. And what we are now proposing as one measure out of
many is to continue the tax incentive, the investment tax credit for
wind turbine construction in the United States. And we believe and the
economics show very clearly that when we do this, when we foster the
creation of this industry, we actually create ten times as many jobs as
fostering megawatt creation instead of our old industries. For every
megawatt of energy, a new renewable energy program develops, we create
10 times more jobs than if we do so in the old 19th century fossil
fuel-based economic systems.
So now we believe we should be building wind turbines in the United
States. We should have the high-paid jobs to do that and high-sector,
high-skilled manufacturing jobs. We should be having construction jobs
putting them on line. We should be building transmission facilities,
all of which creates jobs in our country.
Now, we have the capability to do this. We are doing this in the
State of Washington. Using an existing wind tax credit, we are building
the largest wind turbine facility, farm essentially, in North America
in the southeast corner of the State of Washington. It will create
enough energy for 70,000 homes. And with the tax credit, it will do so
on a market-based rate. But without the Apollo energy project or some
other way, that tax credit will expire and we will lose the ability to
create these jobs. And these jobs come at a very beneficial moment
where the cost of wind turbine energy and a variety of other sources, I
am just picking wind turbine to start this discussion, is becoming
market based.
And, in fact, there is an interesting phenomenon that has occurred
with many of our new technologies and that is what gives us such
optimism about our new technologies. The fact of the matter is that
over the last decade or so, the cost of energy produced by new
technologies has come down dramatically. With every increase in the
units of production of wind turbine, solar power, fuel cells, you name
it, these new technologies, the cost of energy has come down
dramatically.
I have a chart here that indicates how significant that reduction
cost has been. For wind-powered energy, if you start in 1980, wind
power was costing about 35 cents a kilowatt hour. Now, because of
efficiencies caused by new production efficiencies, in 2000 that has
come down to 2\1/2\, 3 cents; a reduction of a factor of 10 in the last
20 years. And it is projected that that will continue to decline in
cost as we get efficiencies in production. And, of course, anyone who
thinks about this knows why that happens. The more of these units you
produce, we get economies of scale and the price comes down.
The same is the situation in photovoltaics and solar cells. In 1980,
just 23 years ago, the price was over $1 a kilowatt hour. That has now
come down to about 21, 22 cents, still above markets rates. But the
interesting thing about this curve is you see this very significant
reduction in cost as the rate of production has gone on up and it is
predicted to continue on the downward slope. That is true for
geothermal as well. It has had a reduction of more than half the cost
in the last 20 years. And biomass, not quite as steep a curve, but
still a reduction of cost.
What this shows us is we ought to be optimistic about, if we do
engage in the production and incentivize the production of these new
technologies, we will reduce cost, we will create jobs, and we will
bring those jobs home.
This is a very important issue of bringing these jobs home. It is
very clear for anyone who has thought about the future of the world's
energy sources, is that the world is going to adopt new technologies.
There is no question about that. The question is which countries are
going to draw the jobs that are associated with that. And right now,
unfortunately, it is not us as much as it should be.
In wind, many of these wind turbines are manufactured in Denmark. In
hybrid automobile manufacturing, the cars are being manufactured in
Japan. In photovoltaic manufacturing, a German company is leading the
way, although much of the production is in the United States. And we
are thinking about opening a Denmark-based turbine manufacturer as
well. Those jobs need to be in America. Those jobs need to be American
jobs. Just as we dominated the aeronautics industry for the last 50
years, as we created the first auto industry at the turn of the
century, we need to create an industry that is homegrown and growing
those jobs right here in America. And the New Apollo Energy Project is
signed to do exactly that. And we do it by using the whole scope of
tools that is available to the Federal Government to help to do that.
Number one is to use our tax policy in a way that will actually
create jobs in a meaningful way. We have passed a lot of tax cuts in
this Chamber recently, but virtually none of them have actually been
directed to try to create new technologically driven jobs. And we need
to use the Tax Code to create incentives for business people to create
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these new industries, to give them a little leg up to a little start,
and that is why we have created investment tax credits for a whole slew
of these new industries, both to the manufacturers, photovoltaics, wind
turbine, fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, retooling costs to the auto
industry. It is clear that our local auto industry is going to have
some retooling costs to go to either hybrid vehicles or, in the long
term, fuel-cell vehicles.
We believe we ought to give our local domestic auto industry tax
breaks to help those retooling costs to build this new generation of
vehicles to get this job done. But it should not be just for
manufacturers; we need to take care of consumers and, ultimately,
buyers as well. And that is why in the New Apollo Energy Project we
have created incentives to give tax breaks for people to buy fuel-
efficient vehicles. Significant incentives. And not only fueled
vehicles, but also other energy producing materials including air-
conditioning units, including tax credits in a new mortgage
incentivized program to help people who build energy-efficient homes.
We have a lot to do to get that done.
Now, let me just also indicate there is optimism in getting this job
done in real life today. I would like to show a picture of a home in
Virginia, and this is a home that was built about a year and a half ago
in Virginia, which is not a tropical climate. We have a picture
actually in the snow. And this is a home built for $365,000 which is
relatively close, maybe a little bit more than actual building costs of
a typical home of Virginia in this area, but this home is special. This
home, which is a very comfortable home, I have actually been in it or
actually the prototype, it was built on the Mall at one time to show us
what it was like, or a very similar home. This home, using existing
technologies today, has zero net energy consumption, zero net energy
consumption.
It does so by using photovoltaic cells incorporated in the roof in
the actual shingles to produce electricity. It has a very high degree
of insulation value. It uses an in-ground heat pump, and it has a net
energy consumption of zero because it can produce, and we one get a net
metering bill which allows homeowners who generate electricity to feed
their excess electricity back into the grid and to get a credit for
doing that. This is a model for the future that is here today. And we
need to utilize our Tax Code in a way that helps homeowners who want to
recreate homes like this across America, which can happen today in a
variety of climates, in almost every climate, to help reduce energy
costs. To do that we need to pass a bill that is similar like that.
So what we are saying is this is not pie-in-the-sky, Buck Rogers,
over the horizon, next decade. Some of these technologies may take a
decade to, in fact, become cost effective; but some are on the market
today with a very modest boost, and America ought to be doing it.
Now, I would like to turn to the second goal of the New Apollo Energy
Project and that is the goal to reduce America's contribution to global
warming gases. We unfortunately, with every other industrialized
country, are contributing an enormous load of pollutants to the
atmosphere; and what we are creating, all of us, we are putting out of
the tailpipes of our cars and out of our smokestacks of our industry
and a whole host of any fossil fuel-based system, we are putting
millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the air. And these
are invisible gases. They really do not bother our eyesight but they
will bother our climate in the long term.
To the extent that now science is irrefutable that the concentration
of these gases are going to significantly increase during our lifetime,
and I have a chart to indicate that, to indicate how significant this
problem is, I have a chart of the levels of concentrations of carbon
dioxide. And carbon dioxide is a global warming gas basically. The
levels of carbon dioxide you will see are relatively consistent for
1,000 years, starting at 800,000. Then we get to the Industrial Age of
1800. We started burning coal and other fossil fuels. And when we do
that, we create carbon dioxide and it goes out to the atmosphere. We
dump it for free. We treat the atmosphere sort of as a big garbage
dump. When that happens, those rates of concentration of carbon dioxide
started to go up dramatically, and now in the early 2000s start to rise
in almost a vertical fashion.
So for thousands of years we had levels in the 240 parts per million
range, which are now going to be skyrocketing in the next century, are
anticipated to double at least in the next century. This is doubling of
an unprecedented occurrence in the history of the world. And the reason
that is significant is that carbon dioxide acts, in a manner of
speaking, like a pane of glass or a blanket, depending on how you look
at it.
The way carbon dioxide works is that carbon dioxide allows the rays
of the sun to come in. Because the rays of the sun come in, there is
ultraviolet light. But when the energy bounces back, it bounces back at
the infrared spectrum. It is a different spectrum of light. And carbon
dioxide traps infrared light. So as a pane of glass works, it traps, if
you will, the infrared radiation from going back into space and it
warms the planet. And it is a really good thing we have some carbon
dioxide in our atmosphere because we would have a very cold planet if
we did not have it.
But the problem is if we are going to double the rate of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, it is going to, as you can imagine, trap
enormous amounts of energy. And we are already seeing the ramifications
of that. The 5 hottest years in recorded history have been in the last
10 years; 1999, I believe, probably was the hottest year in record in
the last 10,000 years. And we saw extraordinary damage associated with
the change in our climate already.
We have seen significant changes right here in America. We have seen
the glaciers in Glacier National Park disappear. It is predicted in the
next 75 years, if we keep going at the rate we are going, there will
not be any glaciers in Glacier National Park.
In the Arctic, dead Intuit Indians are popping out of the ground
because the tundra is melting and the caskets are popping out of the
ground.
{time} 2000
In the Arctic ice sheet, it could be reduced by 40 percent in the
next couple of decades and in depth reduced 40 percent, almost in half;
and it is reduced at least 10 percent already.
We are seeing huge increases in very severe hurricane thunderstorm
activity so that the insurance losses in the domestic industry have
gone up something like 40 or 50 percent in the last several years.
So we are seeing now just a little taste of very significant changes
in our climate that are going to continue to go up if we do not do
something about it.
What we have proposed, we have introduced in the new Apollo Energy
project, we can do this better than this. We have achieved really
dramatic results, improving our environment in the last 2 decades
because the Federal Government's got busy and it has done some things
to clean our air. We have got a lot cleaner air than we did 25 years
ago. In sulfur dioxide and various particulate matter, we have made
some real strides because the Federal Government has acted, but in this
situation Congress has sort of adopted the pose of an ostrich. We have
put our heads in the sand, our tails in the air, rather than the
American eagle; and it is time for us to pull our heads out of the sand
and do something about the climate, and there are some things happening
here in Congress.
We have this proposal we have suggested in the House. In the other
Chamber there will be an energy debate in the next week or two. There
will be a very important vote on trying to create a cap to try to limit
the amount of CO2 that goes into the global atmosphere, and
that is something that is in America's long-term interest. We hope that
the other Chamber will show some action in that regard.
What we have done is we have used the tools in the Federal tool box
to try to reduce the rate of global gas emissions in a way that will
preserve the way we live because Americans still want to continue to
enjoy easy, accessible transportation, safe transportation. We want to
have enjoyable homes. We do not want to change dramatically our
lifestyle, and we can do that if we will make some smart investments in
new technology.
So what we have done is to try to create incentives to use new
technology to reduce global emissions in a
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variety of ways. One, we suggested that we, in fact, improve the
efficiency, for instance, of our air conditioners which have enormous
improvements we can make of the efficiency of air conditioners to
reduce the demand of electricity and reduce the fossil fuel we burn to
create electricity.
We think people who buy autos that are efficient ought to get a tax
break to try to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions we put
into the air. We think that we ought to use the regulatory basis to
improve the efficiency of our automobiles through the government acting
as well as we have to improve the CAFE standards which we stopped in
the early 1980s.
It is interesting, we improved the mileage of our cars dramatically
in the 1970s, but we stopped in 1983; and we actually have gone
backwards in the mileage of our cars. I mean, think about that. At the
very time we have created the world's best computers, the world's most
vibrant biotech industry, we have gone backwards in what our auto
industry has given us for mileage of our cars. That is an abysmal
record, and we ought to improve this and get back on this track of
improving the fuel efficiency of our vehicles; and that is very
possible. That is part of our new Apollo Energy Project.
Now I want to say, too, it is very important to realize there are no
silver bullets to any of the challenges we have here tonight, and we
recognize that. There is no one technology that is going to solve all
of our energy challenges. We believe we have to have a very broad-based
approach to do the research and development work that it is going to
take to meet our challenges, and that means that we just do not look at
wind or solar or geothermal. We think about things outside of the box,
if you will, one of those being, for instance, clean coal technology.
There may be a way for us to burn coal and trap, or as the scientists
use it, a $24 word, sequester the carbon dioxide as it comes out of the
smokestack. If we can sequester the carbon dioxide from coal, we can
continue to use coal without, in fact, increasing our CO2
emission, and we have an enormous supply of coal in this country.
There are other environmental challenges we have to address with this
mining; but this is something we need to explore, and we need to have
sort of an all-comers approach when we are doing research and
development to look at all the potential energy efficiencies and new
technologies that we can use in this regard. So we have taken an all-
comers approach.
The third goal that we have is to break our addiction from Middle
Eastern oil, and I do not think anyone has to be a foreign policy
genius to understand that we have to act. Not just Republicans or
Democrats, multiple administrations have skewed our foreign policy by
necessity because of our addiction to oil. We certainly have not been
as aggressive in insisting on Saudi Arabia's ending the terrorist
threat to this country as we should have been, and one of the reasons
is because of our addiction to Saudi oil. It has made us lethargic in
multiple administrations in dealing with this terrorist threat which
now we are starting to actually make some improvements on. I heard
today that Saudi Arabia is going to start to take some steps finally,
way too late, to cut off financing for terrorism; but we need to get
rid of this anchor on our foreign policy.
We need to make foreign policy decisions based on the security of
Americans, rather than the security of the oil industry. To do that we
have got to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil; and what we
have suggested is to set a goal, set a goal of saving or eliminating
600,000 barrels of oil a day, oil we otherwise would buy from the
Mideast, by the year 2010; and that is an achievable goal using these
new technologies. We set the goal of eliminating 2.4 million barrels of
oil a day by the year 2015; and assessments by the Department of Energy
have indicated that if we use our smarts and use these new
technologies, we can, in fact, break that addiction to Middle Eastern
oil if, in fact, we will use our heads.
Certainly, jobs are a good reason to do this. Our environment is a
good reason to do this, but our personal security is an excellent
reason to do this; and we ought to do that for all three reasons.
Therefore, we set those effective goals that we would like to achieve.
Now we realize that we do not have all the answers starting out in
this effort. So we have also essentially given future administrations
flexibility to act; and in our bill, we have basically said that if
these goals are not being met in a timely fashion, if we are not
reducing our CO2 emissions down to 1990 levels, as is our
goal, if we are not reducing our oil by 600,000 barrels a day, as is
our goal, if we are not on a path to create those millions of jobs that
we want to create, we would give the administration further flexibility
to, in fact, act in ways that it sees fit and certain efficiency
measures to improve our productive capability to continue on the path
of jobs and improve our efficiency because it is going to be a flexible
standard in that regard.
In conclusion this evening, Mr. Speaker, we are very optimistic about
our country's energy future. We are only optimistic if the U.S.
Congress starts to act in a progressive way that really is in keeping
with the can-do spirit of America. There are some naysayers who would
say that we are just not smart enough, bright enough, creative enough,
we are just going to have to sort of stick with the technologies that
were invented in 1899, which much of our industrial energy policy we
are still using; but we are the folks who believe that America is
brilliant because we keep changing. America is successful because we
are not sort of shackled by the ideas of the past or the technologies
of the past. So we believe that we ought to adopt this new approach.
I will be working with my colleagues to pass the new Apollo Energy
Project. I do not know if it will be this year; but we believe it is
going to happen, and it must happen because this is the destiny of the
United States of America, the greatest country on Earth.
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