[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 100 (Wednesday, July 9, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H6459-H6462]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




BRAND NEW, BOLD VISIONARY ENERGY POLICY FOR AMERICA NEEDS TO BE ADOPTED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is 
recognized for the remaining time to midnight.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would advise the gentleman from Colorado 
(Mr. Tancredo) that there may be time left at the end of my 
presentation.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.
  Mr. TANCREDO. May I take that time?
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would yield any remaining time to the 
gentleman.
  Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of history made in this building, 
and one of the most magnificent things that happened in this building 
happened right behind me on May 9, 1961, and that decision by young 
President in 1961 I will talk about a little bit is a model that I 
think we ought to follow given the challenge our country now faces.
  On May 9, 1961, John F. Kennedy came to this Chamber to the rostrum 
behind me and challenged America in a very bold, visionary challenge to 
put an American on the Moon within that decade, and it was an 
extraordinarily ambitious challenge, and he did so because he had the 
innate understanding of the can-do attitude of Americans, of the 
tremendous technological creativity of Americans, and the recognition 
that America is not a country that ever rests on its laurels but always 
is looking over the horizon.
  Indeed, that challenge was met, and when you think about it, it was a 
relatively historic thing to meet that challenge because, at the time 
he made it, frankly many pundits thought that the challenge was wildly 
unrealistic, wildly optimistic and there was no way that America was 
going to meet the challenge. Kennedy's sense of optimism was fulfilled, 
and America indeed put a man on the Moon within the close of that 
decade and brought him and them home safely.
  That decision and that challenge and that sense of optimism of John 
F. Kennedy is something we now need to recreate this year, in the year 
2003, in adopting a brand-new bold, visionary energy policy for America 
because many of us here believe in this Chamber that the moment is ripe 
for the Congress to create a promise and a challenge of America that is 
equally bold, equally visionary, and ultimately equally achievable as 
Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the Moon in the next 10 years.
  As a result of that, I am working with a group here in the United 
States House of Representatives in an attempt to propose and pass into 
law what we call the New Apollo Energy Project, and we do so because we 
believe that we need to seize the moment of technological promise and 
the can-do spirit of America to, in fact, move forward to a new clean 
energy future for America, an energy future that will not be bound by 
the chains that are hampering us so much in our foreign policy, by the 
fact that we are now losing jobs to other countries who are moving 
ahead of us, regrettably, in new, clean energy futures and in an energy 
future that will reduce the amount that we are contributing to global 
climate change gases in our atmosphere.
  So what we are doing is working to build a consensus in the House to 
adopt not an old, previous century policy that is dependent on the 
technologies of the past, but one that leans forward to the 
technologies of the future and the industry of the future and the jobs 
of the future; and we believe this is the year to do that.
  Right now, the other Chamber is considering an energy package. The 
House has passed one which is regrettably very, very short of this 
goal; but we want to continue to work on that, and I have come to the 
floor to address the House tonight about what a New Apollo Energy 
future would look like and why it is necessary.
  This New Apollo Energy future we think needs to accomplish three 
goals, and we think goal-setting is important for a Nation as it is for 
any other group or team. So we would set three national goals in the 
New Apollo Energy Project.
  Goal number one, we believe we should set a new national goal of 
creating 3 million new jobs, well-paying jobs in the next 15 years that 
would, in fact, be dedicated to these new technologies that are on the 
cusp of coming to become market-based technologies, and we believe it 
is fundamentally important for America to say those jobs need to be 
American jobs. They need to be home grown, and the reason they need to 
be home grown is that we know, looking over the horizon just a bit, 
that there are going to be new industries built up with these new 
technologies, wind, solar, a huge number of efficiencies from cars to 
air conditioners to housing implements, to geothermal, a whole slew of 
new technologies and new industrial bases that are going to come on 
line, and we want the jobs to manufacture those goods, to build those 
transmission lines, to build those wind plants to be right here in 
America.
  Sadly, right now, that is not happening. Sadly, because of our 
retrograde policies, we are giving away those jobs. We are giving away 
the jobs for solar cell production to German companies. We are losing 
the jobs in the auto industry to energy efficient vehicles in Japan. We 
are even losing good, high-paying manufacturing jobs to the little, 
though impressive, country of Denmark which is ahead of us in wind 
turbine technology.

                              {time}  2330

  We think it is time to right that ship and say that this Nation is 
going to seize its manifest destiny of being the technological leader 
of the world and at the same time grow these 3 million jobs at home.
  This is an economic development issue, and we believe that one of the 
most prudent, highest payoff investments that America can make is to 
invest $300 billion over the next decade in the research and 
development, in the incentives, in the incentives for manufacturers to 
help them retool their industries, incentives to consumers to help them 
buy energy-efficient products, to the use of the government facilities 
to help spread this new technology. That is an extremely wise 
investment to make sure that we grow jobs at home in the new 
technologies of the future. This is an industrial development program 
for this millennium, and we need to seize that moment.
  Second goal: We need to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. We 
all know that on a bipartisan basis we have been slaves at various 
moments to the addiction of oil coming from the Persian Gulf, and it 
has tainted our foreign policy in various ways. It has made America, 
for its own economic interest, act in ways that is not in its long-term 
liberty interest or security interest. And it is high time that America 
become more energy-independent so that we can make decisions about 
foreign policy free from the chains of this addiction.
  So we believe that we need to set a national goal to reduce our oil 
consumption, and we believe there is some very realistic goals we can 
set. Again, goal-setting is important, and we need to set a national 
goal in three parts: Number one, to reduce our oil consumption by 
600,000 barrels a day by the year 2010. Now, that is roughly the amount 
of oil that we previously had gotten from Iraq. It is doable, it is 
achievable, and it is important to our foreign policy and our economic 
development.
  By the year 2015, we ought to adopt measures to reduce our oil 
imports by 1.5 million barrels a day, which is roughly the equivalent 
we have imported from Saudi Arabia historically.

[[Page H6460]]

And by the year 2010, we should have an ambitious but achievable goal 
of reducing our consumption by 2.4 million barrels a day, roughly the 
equivalent of what we have historically imported from the Persian Gulf.
  These are goals that will set us free both in our foreign policy and 
in our industrial base. As we will talk about a little later, they are 
achievable goals using the technological creativity that is so 
important in this country.
  Now, let me address the third goal as well. We need to deal with the 
issue of reducing our emissions of global climate change gases, and we 
need to do so because it is clear from the science that the 
concentration of these gases, these pollutants that are now going in 
the air when we burn oil, when we burn coal, when we burn any fossil 
fuel are radically increasing the concentrations of carbon dioxides and 
methane and other global climate change gases, which have the impact of 
essentially trapping energy in the Earth. And we will talk about that 
in a few minutes.
  So we would basically set a goal to keep our emissions of these 
pollutants at 1990 levels so they do not increase.
  Now, let me address why these are achievable goals. They are 
achievable goals for a couple of reasons. One, any historical review 
will show that our country is the most technologically creative and 
productive and forward-thinking group of human beings ever on Earth. 
That is quite a mantle, and we want to harness that energy, and we want 
to harness that genius. We have to have an attitude that recognizes 
that we are not satisfied with the technologies of today. We want to go 
forward and have the same type of creativity that we had in the 
software industry, in the biotech industry, in aerospace, and we now 
need to unleash that power of thought and intellectual capability by 
creating a new energy future for America.
  It is doable, and it is achievable, and I will show some reasons why 
we believe that is so today.
  I want to refer to a picture of a home in Virginia, the home of Alden 
and Carol Hathaway. This is a home, it is quite a nice-looking home, 
and I have been in a similar home, which is very comfortable. It has 
kind of a classic architecture style. It was built in Virginia, and you 
will notice there is some snow in this location when this picture was 
taken. It cost about $365,000 to build, roughly in the neighborhood of 
what it would cost to build essentially a standard home in the Virginia 
area.
  This home has a feature with today's technology that is pretty 
extraordinary, and that feature is that this home, using a combination 
of solar panels that take the sun's energy, that create electricity, 
and are integrated right into the shingles of the roof. It uses an in-
ground heat pump and passive solar heating in the windows, and 
essentially, at some point, having net metering, where the excess 
capacity of electricity it generates goes back into the grid, goes back 
into the utilities, and has a net energy consumption of zero using 
today's technology.

  That means that the Hathaways, to heat and cool their home, do not 
burn any fossil fuels, do not buy any Mideast oil, do not put any 
global climate change gas emissions in the air, and, perhaps most 
importantly, have created jobs for the American industrial base that 
are now involved in building homes of this type and this type of 
technology. This is a plus-job home, it is a plus-environment home, and 
it is a plus-national security home. And it is here today in a kind of 
standard climate that does include heat in Virginia, it sure is hot 
here tonight in D.C., and snow as well. This technology is possible.
  But if we can, let us look on a larger scale as to why these 
technologies have tremendous potential if, in fact, we have the wisdom 
to put them to use. Basically what has happened, because of the 
combination of intelligent design by American scientists and economies 
of scale, the renewable energies, some of which we are talking about 
tonight, have come down in price dramatically over the last couple of 
decades. What were once sort of dreamy little ideas about new 
technologies 10, even 6, or 7 years ago, are now very close to being 
market-based. Let us look at some of those examples.
  For wind power, for wind turbine prices, in 1980 it was costing about 
30 cents a kilowatt hour. This has come down dramatically over the last 
two decades. It is now at about the 3\1/2\-cent range and will continue 
to come down when economies of scale are realized, meaning when we 
build more wind turbine plants, the per-unit price comes down. We need 
to be utilizing the fact that wind is becoming more economically 
competitive, and we need to make the small tax credit that this 
industry now enjoys permanent and predictable so that this industry can 
blossom and so that we can build American jobs building those wind 
turbines and building those transmission lines to get the power where 
the wind is to the power where the people live. Those are jobs that we 
ought to have in building those transmission lines. That cost has come 
down.
  If you look at photovoltaic, basically solar energy, in 1980 it 
started at basically $1 a kilowatt hour. That has come down 
dramatically now. It is in the range of about 20 cents per kilowatt 
hour, and will continue to come down fairly significantly as we 
increase the production capability, and the unit price will continue to 
come down.
  I may note, too, that these prices actually are very conservative, 
because in distributed energy, that means energy you create at your 
home or business site, you do not have transmission costs.

                              {time}  2340

  So actually, you can pay a little more for the cost of photovoltaics 
but come out ahead because you do not have to pay the transmission 
costs.
  The same thing has been the case in thermal energy. The price has 
come down dramatically for thermal and biomass, which we have 
tremendous potential within our agricultural industry. So the fact is 
we have an economic model which has demonstrated the ability of these 
new technologies to become market based, and they just need a little 
boost and some incentives to get them off where they stand today.
  Let me turn to the environmental reason for this. We have talked 
about security. We have talked about the job reason, but there is 
another reason that calls on us to adopt these new technologies, and 
that is the phenomenon of global climate change. Global climate change 
is a phenomenon that is fairly well understood in science and basically 
involves a physical fact which essentially every scientist in the world 
agrees on, and that accepted scientific principle is that we have gases 
in our atmosphere that essentially trap energy in the Earth. The way 
this system works is that energy comes in from the sun in essentially 
ultraviolet wavelengths of light. It strikes the Earth and is reflected 
back into space except for one fact: we have a blanket of gases in our 
atmosphere which traps that energy from going back into space. The 
light comes in the ultraviolet range or spectrum, but it bounces back 
in the infrared spectrum, and these gases are a one-way door, if you 
will. It will allow the ultraviolet light in, but it will not allow the 
infrared light out. So it traps radiant energy in our planetary system. 
Every scientist who understands anything about meteorological systems 
understands that phenomenon and accepts it as a fact.
  The other uncomfortable fact is that the concentration of these gases 
that essentially are responsible for this phenomenon are going up 
dramatically. If I can demonstrate this chart here, this is a chart of 
carbon dioxide concentrations. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless 
gas. It is emitted any time we burn fossil fuels. Basically, since the 
dawn of the industrial revolution, we have had a dramatic increase in 
concentrations of carbon dioxide. As you see on this chart back in 1860 
when we really started burning fossil fuels, the levels were about 285 
parts per million in the atmosphere. If we look at the concentrations 
since 1960, they are beginning to skyrocket. And we are now at levels 
approaching 370 parts per million, radically increased compared to the 
preindustrial levels.
  The thing that is disturbing about this is what is not on this chart, 
which is that this line if projected out goes through the ceiling of 
this roof in the next 100 years or so. This line continues to go up if 
we continue to do what we have been doing for the last 100 years. As 
that line continues to go up, it is not too surprising that we are 
playing Russian roulette with our global climate systems.

[[Page H6461]]

  If we have a gas that traps energy and we double that gas, it stands 
to reason and it is an accepted fact that it is going to have an impact 
on the world's climate. Generally speaking, there will be a warming, 
but there may also be very untoward results of increased tornadoes, of 
increased dry spells, the lack of snow melt in the Pacific Northwest, 
and today the Arctic ice sheet demonstrably is smaller and thinner. The 
tundra in Alaska is melting, snow packs are being reduced. Alpine 
meadows in Mount Rainier National Park are disappearing in part because 
the tree level is rising.
  The International Meteorological Society of the United Nations issued 
a report last week pointing to the dramatic increase in very 
significant high-energy abnormal meteorological events, including 
tornadoes and hurricanes. We are experiencing significant changes in 
our climate and someone, some country, is going to make money off 
responding to this challenge, and it needs to be America. We need to 
grow the jobs in this country which will create the technologies that 
sure as the Creator made little green apples are going to be used by 
the world in responding to this problem. We in America ought to be the 
ones fulfilling our destiny to do that.
  What we have proposed in our plan is a multi-pronged approach. We 
realize that there is no silver bullet to this issue. We realize that 
we are going to have to do several things to jump start this new 
technological revolution. So what we have done is to look at various 
ways to approach this problem. We have recognized there is no one 
magical solution. There is going to be a multitude of technologies. 
There are going to be a lot of roads to get where we need to go, and we 
have not been prevented to have the genius to know which are the right 
ones.
  What we have suggested in our plan is to take a very smorgasbord 
approach. We have essentially in our plan proposed research and 
development in a whole slew of new technologies, including clean coal 
technology to try to find out if there is a way to burn coal without 
putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We think research and 
development is appropriate to find out if there is a way to do that. We 
think research and development is important to find out a way to find 
efficiencies of our heating and cooling systems. We have put in 
significant research and development dollars to do that. To address the 
cost of that investment, the number we have proposed of $300 billion, 
or in that range, is a significant sum. But to put it in context, it is 
less than each of the last two tax cuts which have passed this Chamber 
and will be signed into law.

  What we are suggesting is that the future of growing jobs in this 
Nation and the priority, the imperative to grow our economy by 
capturing these new industries in our country of retooling our 
industrial base, of making sure these high-paying manufacturing jobs 
are in our country, we think that priority is at least equal to the 
priority of passing the very significant tax cuts, two packages which 
have now passed the House.
  If Members believe in technology, if Members believe in America's 
destiny to lead the world in doing so, surely this investment in our 
future is every bit and probably more important than the tax cut 
package that passed, and we are suggesting an investment of that nature 
and that magnitude because this is not a time for baby steps.
  Our challenges to our economy, to our environment, and to our 
personal security associated with being addicted to Middle East oil 
does not permit timidity in that regard. We need to act boldly and with 
visionary thought.
  The other thing is we have used many of the tools in the Federal 
Government's tool belt to try to move this plan forward. We have 
suggested tax credits. We have suggested tax credits for our industries 
that need to retool, very generous tax credits for our automobile 
industry. We want our domestic automobile industry to lead the way in 
fuel-efficient vehicles, and we have suggested very generous tax 
credits to our automobile industry to be able to retool their plants so 
they can be the technological leaders in the world. Those tax credits 
also need to go to consumers, and so we have suggested generous tax 
credits to consumers who buy fuel-efficient vehicles, who buy fuel-
efficient refrigerating systems, who buy energy-efficient homes. We 
think there should be a better financing system for energy-efficient 
homes. We are exploring ways to improve financing of energy-efficient 
homes and vehicles.
  But we have also realized that we need to use all of the tools of the 
government, which include the abilities to have standardized regulatory 
systems to require where possible, where technology exists that we move 
forward.
  One of the things that is pretty interesting to me is that if we had 
simply continued the rate of improvement in efficiency of our 
automobiles that was occurring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, if we 
had continued to improve the efficiency of our vehicles at that rate, 
we would have been free from imports of Saudi Arabian oil by now. Think 
about that. Unfortunately, we fell off the wagon. We stopped in the 
mid-1980s making any improvements in the fuel efficiency of our 
vehicles, and as a result here we are, still stuck in the morass of the 
Middle East, addicted to oil, losing jobs to the Japanese, the Danish, 
and the Germans.

                              {time}  2350

  And if we had simply continued on the path of efficiency, we would 
have been in a much better situation today. Now it is time, we believe, 
to get back on the road to efficiency and use all of these methods that 
we can to really seize the destiny of the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to wrap up here just by a comment. 
America's history has always been forward and up, and we believe now 
that this is a pivotal moment to take a bold step in our energy future. 
Anything less shortchanges both America and the promise of America. And 
we are going to be working, we hope, on a bipartisan basis to build a 
consensus around this new Apollo Energy Project. We would like to make 
this a bipartisan plan. Unfortunately, the President's plan falls 
woefully short of the promise that we think America deserves, but we 
are going to try to continue to push this ball because America's future 
depends on it to grow these jobs in this country to make sure our 
industry leads the world. That is the American way.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo).


                     Victims of our Porous Borders

  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Just in the remaining time, I want to wrap up my remarks by once 
again referring to and recalling the fact that the problems that this 
Nation faces with the inability or the lack of determination on its 
part to actually defend its own borders creates more than problems in 
the job market. It creates more than problems for our schools and our 
hospitals in terms of the infrastructure that has to be created in 
order to support the illegal aliens who do come into the country. It 
creates other problems that are very dramatic and very real.
  And we are going to focus on those problems, and we are going to hold 
an event here in this year in September. Mr. Speaker, it will be the 
week of September 11, and we are inviting people to come to Washington, 
D.C., people who have been victims of our porous borders, and these can 
be people as the folks that I have identified here, the friends and 
relatives of the people that have been individually harmed by the fact 
that our borders are porous and that we do not defend them. And they 
can tell their story, and they can come to this Congress, and they can 
meet with their Representatives and their Senators and explain to them 
that there is a cost, a huge cost, to illegal immigration that is 
perhaps thought of relatively infrequently. It is not factored into 
much of the discussion that we have about it, but it is a very serious 
cost. It is a real one.
  And they are not people that necessarily have had just their lives 
disrupted by the loss of a loved one who may have lost their life as a 
result of someone coming across the border illegally and taking that 
life, whether on purpose or by accident, because there is story after 
story after story; as I go through them, it is of somebody who is 
killed or severely injured by people who have crashed into them, but it 
turns out they are here illegally, that they do not have insurance, and 
they take off, run back across the border. It is just amazing how many 
stories like that there are.

[[Page H6462]]

  And I want these people to be able to tell these stories. I want them 
to know that somebody does care, and they are not just numbers, they 
are not just statistics that have no real meaning in the larger sense 
of the term. And I want to allow them the opportunity to tell their 
story here.
  And it could be people who have lost their jobs as a result of the 
fact that our borders are porous, people who have come across and taken 
these jobs; maybe people who are underemployed, maybe people who work 
in the high-tech industry, but have been displaced by H1B visa workers, 
people who have come under that particular program and taken their jobs 
away from them because they will work for less.
  All of these people are victims of our porous borders, and they have 
a story to tell, and they can go to a Website, Mr. Speaker. It is 
called victimsvoice.com, and they can tell that story on that Website. 
They can register for the event in September. And I encourage people, 
as I say, to do that, Mr. Speaker.
  And I just want to say that this is a problem of, I think, a 
magnitude that we really have not understood, and that we desperately 
need to understand, and that we cannot allow cities and States 
throughout the Nation to begin developing their own immigration 
policies, begin ignoring the requirements of the Federal laws that we 
have in place, begin telling their law enforcement agencies that they 
will not cooperate with the Federal Enforcement Agency and the INS in 
the apprehension of criminal aliens. This is absolutely unconscionable, 
and something has got to happen. Some attention has got to be drawn to 
this problem.
  So I want to thank the gentleman for allowing me to wrap up my 
remarks.

                          ____________________