[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.
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