[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

[[Page H5356]]

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

[[Page H5357]]

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

[[Page H5358]]

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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